The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

her meat and how far that meal might be spread among his cubs. He had withstood the explosions from the shotgun, as painful as they might have been, and he could withstand them again. He would dispatch her quickly this time, cut her and her companions down and not bother to let them marinate in pain and fear before he squeezed their hearts away. He was old, his armor frayed and brittle, and the abscesses were only going to spread and become more obvious with the passage of time. Nothing would ever get close enough to rupture him again.

But this time the shells did hurt and she did not stop firing until he was down and could not stand again. There was a male with her, a young one with even fresher meat on its bones, but he would have neither of them now. They had left one behind, however, a rickety old man who barely gave off a scent at all. When he finally stood and approached the man, he realized why. He was dead and infested with Mites. He was inedible… probably.

He knelt at the man’s side and clawed a neat slit from breastbone to crotch, reaching inside to palm the last glowing moments of warmth from the cooling heart. But the heart was already cold and dry and it seemed as though it had stopped living a long time ago. He held the heart tightly in his hand for awhile longer, then ran caressing fingers down the rest of the dried, useless organs, pulling apart the foreign, gelatinous infrastructure that had succeeded them all.

He looked into the dead man’s eyes. They were open and staring intently at him. Something inside—the Mites—pulled the cheekflesh away from the mouth, revealing a part of the skullsmile beneath. The head rolled for a moment, then collapsed back into the wormgrass.

When he pulled his hand from the man’s chest, it was covered in transparent jelly and a thousand scurrying Mites. He howled as he shook them away and wiped his hand across the ground, crushing and smearing the wormgrasses with every swipe.

He was still scratching at the memory of them as he followed the scents home. He had no food and was no longer even sure how long he’d been gone—how long had the cubs gone without food? Had his mate needed to hunt in his absence? But there was a familiar trace floating on the air, and it took him only a moment to remember what it was. The fat man—he’d killed a fat human and prepared it exquisitely. He had been at the entrance to the burrow when the female human had found him the first time. So he’d brought back food after all. The traces were minute— the meat had all been eaten days ago.

But other scents began to intrude on him now. As his eyes examined the violently torn paths through the grasses—as though an army of small, voracious carnivores had passed over this terrain—panic swelled within him, washing away all the hunger and traces of the poison that had flooded his system.

They were the wrong scents. He broke into a run when he caught sight of the black slit in the earth—the entrance to their burrow—but he stopped cold when he saw the tiny spine, curled like a tail and resting half-obscured beneath its thick, soft armor shell. There was no meat between the spine and the shell, no blood—just fog and ciliating grasses.

Farther on, another, this one with a few chewed bones attached, its inedible shell shredded and strung out like a tangled web of wire. He felt something crumble beneath his foot: a tiny skull. And there, at the lip of the burrow, a larger skull, broken into half a dozen pieces, its thin, thorned armor spread around it. There were meager strands of meat snaked through the grass. He fell to his knees and pulled the tiny skull toward him, his mournful howl piercing the fog.

He heard a response in the distance. An almost perfect impersonation of his cry. He rose and followed the scentless sound through the fog.

The dead man, dried viscera flopping about the lip of the vertical incision, stumbled toward him, the Mites within working their wonders. The high ground was not killing the Mites at all; it was making them stronger.

The look on the dead man’s face was purposeful, threatening when it stepped up to him. It made one last mocking cry. With a swipe of rage, he separated the man’s head from his body. The body continued to stagger about, not much less agile than it had been with a head attached.

He went back to the burrow, collected the remains of his family, and placed them in a half-circle around him as he curled into the darkness to sleep, hoping that the diminishing traces of their scents might soften the bleak edges of his dreams.

But he could not sleep right away, only ponder the shape and disposition of this new army of predators sweeping across his terrain and telling himself over and over again…

I am not the last. I cannot be the last.

THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE by Andrew C. Ferguson

There is a particular atmosphere about the Jekyll & Hyde early on a Friday evening: the first few drinkers through the double doors order up quietly and talk in a murmur, as if waiting for something to happen.

To a certain extent this is something the place shares with almost every other pub in Scotland, and for that matter perhaps in England and further abroad; for despite changes in working hours in certain occupations, early Friday evening still signals the start of the weekend for the vast majority of us, and this is reflected in the feeling of quiet anticipation in a newly opened pub at this time.

However, in this particular Edinburgh pub that quietness, that anticipation seems sharper, more heightened: perhaps this is because, as may have become apparent to you already, anything can happen in the Jekyll & Hyde.

Another possible reason is Ettie, the Friday night barmaid and one of the toughest old hags you’re ever likely to have serve you a pint of heavy in this world or the next.

To say age has not withered Ettie would be wrong in the physical sense; indeed, one’s first reaction on entering and seeing her wizened form behind the bar might be that you’ll be lucky to get served this side of Christmas. But although her arthritic hands may not pull a pint as quickly as, say, Edward or Ake, two of the Hyde’s more regular barmen, you would do well not to make a smart remark on the subject in her hearing. She has a look that has been known to silence a barful of noisy drunks with a single poisonous stare, and a tongue that could shatter glass in less thickly-windowed establishments than the Jekyll & Hyde.

She is also a shrewd judge of character, and I’ve heard it said that she could tell you your age, your parentage, and your most frequent vices in the (admittedly extended) time it takes her to serve you that first pint.

It was this ability (whether by occult means or otherwise, such as her extreme age) which allowed her to size up Jackie Ballingall when she walked into the bar, on an early Friday evening like this one.

“A double vodka and Coke,” she said, sitting on one of the stools that bordered the scored bar. Ettie served her and she drained it in two instalments, setting the glass back down on the bar. “Same again,” she said, and the hushed bar became even quieter as the regulars sensed that their evening’s entertainment might be about to begin. She was an attractive girl, smartly dressed in a split skirt and white blouse; her blonde hair was cut short, almost severely.

“I hear this is a place for stories,” she said to Ettie’s back. The silence became deafening and the bar lost its usual reserve as heads turned. Ettie turned round from the optics with a half smile, half grimace on her face.

“Aye, lassie, it is. There’s a table up in thon corner there—d’ye see it?—go on up and I’ll bring your drink tae ye. The place is quiet at this time o’ nicht,”—here she glanced sarcastically round the bar and the regulars suddenly renewed their interest in their own conversations—“so we’ll no’ be disturbed.”

The table was in the furthest nook of the top level of the Hyde, but Ettie could still see the doors from it should any customers come through and, braving her stare, not carry on through to the nether bar.

As she put the vodka bottle and the two glasses on the table, Jackie reached for her purse. Ettie shook her head.

“We’ll come tae payment later, after your story.”