The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

over his mouth. He shook her away and lifted his father again.

Kate raised the shotgun and squinted into the fog, trying to catch a sign of movement in those fleeting patches of transparent air. Her head turned in response to noises he couldn’t make out over the din. “It’s nearby. I can hear it. I can… smell it.”

“What do we do?” he asked, trying to make his voice as soft as hers.

She turned to him coldly. “We put your father out front. I’ll guide him, but he’ll walk ahead of us.”

Paul balked. “You can’t do that. How are you going to keep him on course? Keep him on his feet? How do you know it won’t just attack him anyway?”

She pushed Paul away with the barrel of the shotgun. “Better him than us,” was all she said before grabbing the frail man, pushing him forward and nudging him in the back with the gun every few seconds.

The old man seemed to respond to her treatment, falling down less than he had on the lower, steeper ground, but Paul knew it was no use. He watched the tilts of her head, her prods to his father’s shoulders to change his direction. She wasn’t trying to avoid the beast; she was leading them to it.

He groped for the blade hanging from his belt, measuring how easy it would be to just step forward and stab her in the back. If he killed her, what would he do then? Go on, just the two of them, or take his father back down the hill, back within the sanctuary of the Mites?

But Kate’s instincts were less than sure, and when it finally attacked, it was from behind Paul. He smelled it before he heard it, and didn’t see the beast until it was almost too late to dodge the sideswiping blow of its thick, thorn-fringed arm. He let out a scream as he rolled away and couldn’t look up until he heard the first shots.

He could barely make out the three weak silhouettes in the fog: the beast—its outline distorted by jagged horns and crests, the woman firing at it and the thin, frail man with the crown of encrusted flesh—on his knees between them, crawling aimlessly, oblivious to it all. The shells seemed to do little more than slow the creature’s advance, though it staggered a little more with each impact. It kicked his father away as though the man were no more than a scrap of garbage, then lunged at Kate as she screamed and jumped away.

Paul ran to his father and pulled the dazed man to his feet. His father’s eyes fluttered as the pupils spun crazily through the red-veined whites. A stream of meaningless sounds escaped his mouth on a malodorous cloud. The man had just enough energy left to shake off his son’s help and fall back into the wormgrass, sitting with his head slumped forward so that Paul could Clearly see the panic of the thousand Mites that scurried about from hole to hole on top of his father’s misshapen head.

He heard a scream and two more shots.

Paul ran in the direction of the sounds, stopping short when he saw the creature, its back thorns fanning wildly like the wings of a trapped bird, staggering about and finally collapsing on hands and knees as it gave a howl that seemed to fill the countryside.

Paul stepped around the creature carefully, never taking his eyes from it as he approached a winded, wildeyed Kate. She pointed the gun at him to hold him off.

“Kate, you’re not going to shoot me, are you?”

“I can’t kill it! I’ve got to go before it builds up enough strength to stand and come after me—”

“Does that mean I can’t come with you?”

“I can’t lug around some bald, scabby-headed kid and his bug-farmed zombie of a father, Paul!”

Paul gazed into the fog; he could no longer hear or even see his father. I’m not going to leave him here like this. He pushed the barrel of the gun aside. “Wait for me a second, will you? Don’t leave, okay?”

She nodded reluctantly and he ran back to his father, who raised his head and smiled at Paul, then tipped it backward to expose his throat as he collapsed into the wormgrass.

There was blood, but less than Paul would have expected.

They found the Straggler’s truck near sunset, but it was useless. The ground around it was dug up in a series of narrow, criss-crossing paths, as though an army of small but vicious animals had passed through, destroying everything in their wake, including the truck’s front end. The metal had been torn and chewed, and everything under the hood twisted and broken and thrown out into the grass. When Kate realized that the truck was beyond hope, she threw her shotgun on the ground and began screaming, her fury building until her knuckles left red smears on the scratched white of the truck.

Paul walked around to where the army had torn through the truck’s rear doors. Now there was only wreckage, scattered into piles of nearly indistinguishable rubble. There were edible strands and clumps and puddles in there somewhere; the smell of it made his mouth water.

But as he crawled into the back of the truck, the failing light revealed something else. Hanging above him were bleached human bones and sheets of dried skin stretched tight over skulls that stared with sunken sockets and generous smiles.

As his fingers poked at the papery strands within one of those eyesockets, he thought of the obese Straggler, his hungry eyes and his desperate offer.

Paul jumped from the truck and dipped his fingers into the jagged tear at the top of a crushed can of nectarine wedges. They tasted of metal and mold, but he had no idea what a nectarine was supposed to taste like and had a lifetime’s experience with the tastes of mold and metal.

He found Kate, looking dumbfounded into her upturned palm and then staring at the sky.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“It stopped. The angelhair. It’s gone.”

“Maybe it… I don’t know.” He tried to make eye-contact with her, show her his attempt at a hopeful smile. “Maybe that’s a good sign.”

She looked at him, perplexed and unsteady, as though she wasn’t quite sure whether or not to be frightened. “I won’t know where I’m going. Or where I’m coming from. It always… covered my paths at both ends… following me, leading me—”

Paul looked at his own palm. Hadn’t there been a smear of his father’s blood there just a short time ago? There was no trace of it now, lost amid the rust and bitter nectarine syrup. He thought of the brittle flesh on the hanging skull he’d touched in the back of the truck. It had been no colder or drier than his own father’s cheeks the moment he’d slit the man’s throat.

He held out a gray wedge of nectarine and Kate leaned forward and sucked it from between his fingers. She made a sour face as she chewed it and looked at him suspiciously. His own face was calm and cold and unperturbed. There was anger in there somewhere… at her, at his father, at the world; there was fear, too, but it was buried too deep to be much of a problem. For now.

They cleaned out the back of the truck and managed to salvage some of the edibles for the next day’s trip. He wouldn’t let her take down the Straggler’s hanging trophies. That night they made love beneath the gently swaying bones and teeth.

The next morning was hot, wet, and milky white.

It had begun as an insignificant pain, an abscess that nagged when he chewed and when he tried exposing or retracting his eyes too quickly; still, nothing that wouldn’t go away eventually. It had been the stab wound by the female human that had ruptured the abscess and driven the pain deep into his head and down into his gut, where it remained, throbbing and spreading through him. How long had the pain blinded him? How many days and nights had he wandered uselessly, his sense of smell so weakened that he couldn’t even sniff his way home?

He’d finally resorted to lying in the wormgrasses, no longer caring if he was so far down into the valley that the Mites attacked and colonized him. He thought back to the times he’d followed a scent to find it belonged to an animal, alone and apparently uninjured—just lying in the grass, waiting patiently for death.

But the discomfort of his wriggling bed eventually began to overshadow the now diminishing pain. He tossed and turned and finally sat up. He was weak with hunger, and gripped by fear and guilt about the family he’d left behind. He could smell those aching distances and the impenetrable gray in his head cleared into the richly textured daylight fog. He sat for quite some time, admiring the dense hieroglyphic texture of his armored flesh. Then he smelled her.

He stayed close to the trio, eyes focused on the shotgun at her side, the rest of him focused on the smell of