E is for evil, p.1
E is for Evil, page 1
part #5 of Alphabet Anthologies Series
RHONDA PARRISH ANTHOLOGIES
Available Now
A IS FOR APOCALYPSE
B IS FOR BROKEN
C IS FOR CHIMERA
D IS FOR DINOSAUR
E IS FOR EVIL
F IS FOR FAIRY
FAE
CORVIDAE
SCARECROW
SIRENS
EQUUS
MRS. CLAUS: NOT THE FAIRY TALE THEY SAY
TESSERACTS TWENTY-ONE: NEVERTHELESS
METASTASIS
NITEBLADE MAGAZINE
FIRE: DEMONS, DRAGONS AND DJINNS
EARTH: GIANTS, GOLEMS AND GARGOYLES
GRIMM, GRIT AND GASOLINE
Coming Soon
HEAR ME ROAR
SWASHBUCKLING CATS: NINE LIVES ON THE SEVEN SEAS
E IS FOR EVIL
Book 5 of the Alphabet Anthologies
Edited by Rhonda Parrish
Poise and Pen Publishing
EDMONTON, ALBERTA
All copyright for individual stories remains with original authors
Anthology Copyright © 2018 by Rhonda Parrish
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.
www.poiseandpen.com
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Book Layout based on one © 2014 BookDesignTemplates.com
Edited by Rhonda Parrish
Cover design by Jonathan C. Parrish
Cover art licensed from DepositPhotos.com
E is for Evil / Rhonda Parrish.—1st ed.
ISBN 978-1-988233-33-8 (Physical)
ISBN 978-1-988233-34-5 (Electronic)
CONTENTS
A — Michael Fosburg
B — Lynn Hardaker
C — Stephanie A. Cain
D — Andrew Bourelle
E — Suzanne J. Willis
F — Samantha Kymmell-Harvey
G — Hal J. Friesen
H — C.S. MacCath
I — Michael B. Tager
J — Jonathan C. Parrish
K — Amanda C. Davis
L — Lilah Wild
M — Sara Cleto
N — Alexandra Seidel
O — Mary Alexandra Agner
P — Cory Cone
Q — Jeanne Kramer-Smyth
R — Beth Cato
S — Laura VanArendonk Baugh
T — Megan Engelhardt
U — Danielle Davis
V — Brittany Warman
W — BD Wilson
X — L.S. Johnson
Y — Pete Aldin
Z — Michael M. Jones
Michael Fosburg
Dix tried to run.
Vin Barton aimed down the sights of the old Remington, breathed in a lungful of cold air, hissed it out through his teeth, and squeezed the trigger. The report rolled across the mountain, startling crows from the trees and Dix went down, legs folding beneath him, a scream bitten off as he hit the ground.
Barton pocketed the shell casing and ambled over.
Blood gushed from the kid’s thigh like oil from a busted pipe as he squirmed and mewled into the dirt. He’d be going into shock soon, and would be meat not long after.
He’d been on Case’s old crew, came down from Ontario to put some distance between him and some bad shit he didn’t talk about. He started using what he was supposed to be selling. Went dark for days, hassled Barton’s other guys, and generally made business more difficult. But he’d given the kid another ounce for Case’s sake, sending him to canvass the trailer parks and cheap hotels off Route 45. Dix returned once again with no cash and no product, just some story about being rolled by a couple of tweakers. He’d practically chomped for another ounce, that junkie gleam bright in his eyes.
So Barton gave it to him—along with a GPS tracker.
The terrified look on Dix’s face when Barton kicked opened the door to the doublewide was worth the long drive up into the mountains. But Barton had stopped short when he saw Case was also there. His lieutenant’s eyes were wounds. He made wet, slobbering sounds, wept and muttered and scratched—clawing at the floor like a dog trying to bury a bone. Die Hard played on a plasma TV against which some unidentifiable organic matter had spattered and dried. A miasma slunk through the trailer, a strange and low-down smell that stood his hackles on end. Cloying, like rotten meat with a coat of green fuzz. Like dead things left in the dark. A terminal cancer patient’s stink—only worse.
A snowy field, freezing metal in his hands, the sky an unblinking white eye…
That’s when Dix had bolted. He didn’t get far.
A nimbus of dark blood now surrounded the kid, and Barton had the unpleasant sensation that they were poised at the lip of some deep well; that at any moment they would tumble down into the depths together, the pusher and the pushed, snapped up by the hungry dark under the Appalachian mountains.
And he felt, for the briefest moment, like eyes were watching him from the blood.
Dix was trying to speak. One shaky hand tried to rise and weakly gesture toward the trees. His color had drained away, leaving his lips pale as moonlight. His unblinking eyes stared up into the sky.
“Shut up,” Barton said. He didn’t like to admit it, but he felt rattled. Seeing Case like that had been a nasty shock, and that smell.
Dix insisted. He croaked a breathless syllable, lips rasping. He was dead but too dumb to realize it.
“Damn but you don’t know how to die peaceful,” Barton said, and brought his heel down on Dix’s throat, feeling bones snap and crunch all the way up through his thigh. The kid’s back arched. The body shuddered for a few moments before the life finally left it, a gurgling rattle fading while night sounds washed back over them.
Barton breathed in the cold air, reigning in his thoughts. He avoided introspection like something dead in the middle of the road. There was an emptiness at his core into which all the horror he’d seen, all the shit he’d done, drained into, and thus was gone from him. But sometimes his mind disobeyed and tried to dwell on the lives he had taken, all those living, breathing people gone to meat. But there was no remorse there; no spiritual fear of a reckoning. Their faces blurred into one face, their wounds into one wound. Into meat.
Case was still scrabbling at the floor of the trailer when Barton walked back in.
“Case,” Barton said, snapping his fingers under his lieutenant’s eyes. But Case continued his single-minded excavation of the floor, the tips of his fingers torn into red ruins.
That’s when Barton began to feel it. The night had bent somehow. Maybe it was the smell of dead meat suppurating in the trailer, or the sight of a hard man reduced to little more than a rabid dog, but something turned in his mind as neatly as if a switch had been flicked, and he knew, with a certainty he felt in his flesh, that something was coming.
The glint of sun on snow as his stepbrothers closed in from all sides, faces cracked into grins, livid with the anticipation of violence.
Barton let the memory slide off. Just paranoia from a minor contact high from all this shit still in the air. He moved throughout the trailer with a familiarity that came with having lived in one all his life, checked the cabinets and dresser and under the bed, thinking that there was a cat or something that had died in here that they had forgotten about. But there was nothing. Case slobbered and moaned as explosions lit the TV.
That smell was beginning to drive him crazy. It was in his nose and down his throat. It clung to his clothes like burrs and it was all he could taste on his tongue.
He stopped cold, shoulders hunched as if he’d been struck across the back.
There it was again. That sack-shriveling feeling of being watched.
Eyes in the blood.
It was this trailer. It had to be. It had soaked up a dozen pounds of crank and the shit was in the walls like mold, breathing into him, snaking its tendrils beneath his skin. And he knew that wasn’t possible, knew it with authority, but his mind was veering away from the knowledge because that fucking smell was coating his brain, settling into each wrinkle and fold and fogging his thoughts.
“What the hell is that, Case?” Barton asked. But Case didn’t answer him, only went on digging wetly at the floor, the occasional moan punctuating the scratching.
Barton had lost count of how many people Case had killed. He’d looked on as his lieutenant had sawed a man in half—lengthwise; had watched him drown a junkie in his own shit-filled toilet. Had even seen him cut the throat of a woman who had claimed, weeping, to be pregnant. The level of violence to which Case was willing to rise was matched only by his skill in carrying that violence out, and he took to the work with the detached calm of a surgeon. Even with hands wrapped in blood and screams in his ears, there had always been serenity in Case’s eyes.
But that man was gone. Barton glanced at the foil-lined bowl askew on the couch. Crank wasn’t to blame for this. It was too easy an explanation, and Case could ride out a high like a champ.
The smell was coming from everywhere now. Barton gagged, mouth flooding with spit as bile t ouched his tongue, and stumbled outside for air.
Dix’s body was gone.
Barton brought the Remington’s stock to his shoulder so hard he banged a bruise into his flesh. This was the Mexicans’ doing—they were fucking with him, sending a message. They must’ve dosed Case with some south-of-the-border shit—Peyote and LSD or something—and then took to the woods when they heard Barton’s truck approach.
But his mind screamed through the scrim of black stink to think smart, to think straight—if anyone had wanted to screw with him, they would have simply killed Case and Dix and festooned the trailer with their guts.
But what happened to the body?
Barton advanced to where Dix had died, rifle swiveling in a wide arc. Long blood-smeared striations in the dirt. Barton followed the blood smeared to the lip of the woods.
Dragged away.
He stared into the dark for a long moment. Dix had weighed one-ninety, easily. What kind of animal could drag away so much weight so quickly, and without making a sound?
“Fuck this,” he heard himself say. This situation was officially out of his control. He’d come back with more guys tomorrow, when there was light to see by. He’d sort out whatever was wrong with Case and they’d look for Dix’s remains and Barton would put an end to whatever this had been by burning down that trailer.
“I’m outta here, Case,” he said, walking into the trailer to retrieve his keys. “Get your head clear—”
But Case was gone.
The stench redoubled. It was like being downwind of a pile of corpses that had putrefied in the sun, of meat corrupted and debased—the stink of flesh before it became something else.
It followed Barton as he stumbled back to his truck, hijacking his nostrils and burning in his nasal passages. Cold sweat plastered the shirt to his body. He’d been in shootouts, and had taken a bullet to the shoulder when he was twenty-two. He’d been sliced open with switchblades and stabbed with the jagged necks of broken bottles. He’d killed men slowly, intimately; close enough to read the final thoughts in their eyes. And while fear had always been there, Barton had dismissed it as an inconvenient side effect of the life he led. Fear tempered risk, but risk separated those who got ahead from those who stayed behind.
Barton always got ahead.
But here, with the cancer stink oozing into his nostrils, he acknowledged the fear. He understood it. And when he saw that the tires of his truck had been slashed to ribbons, and the tires on Case’s car as well, he felt the fear take root and grow. It coiled around his guts and puckered his asshole and pulled his balls into his stomach, and soon he was tearing down the dirt road, a hundred thousand stars staring impassively down as he ran. Barton had never run from anything in his life; not from his wolfish stepbrothers, not from the Mexicans, not from the street itself. But all those things had rules—patterns you learned to read.
Here, the rules had been obscured with blood.
It took a moment for Barton to realize he was running, the dark woods flying by on either side, the stars a thousand pale eyes impassively watching his flight.
But he hadn’t run in forever, and it showed—his breath burned and his legs seized with cramps. He slowed, gasping foul-smelling air into his lungs. Something thin and grey shivered at the edge of his sight. A glimpse of impossibly long limbs; the blanketing aroma of decayed meat.
His head snapped around, but there was nothing on the road in either direction.
Everything bleeds, he thought, trying to reign in the panic he felt stirring in his guts.
Everything’s meat.
He forced a few deep breaths into his burning lungs and tried to think. This dirt road ran into State Road 6 in three miles. If he could make it there...
So he threw his body back into a run. If he could make it there looped endlessly through his mind, a fevered mantra, the words rearranging and coming back together in a background hiss. He maintained the run for the first mile, sometimes stumbling over sticks or dips in the road. By the second mile shin splints were shooting agony through his legs, and his nipples were chaffed raw from rubbing against his shirt. He couldn’t keep up this pace. His lungs felt torn and he tasted iron. A hot stitch skewered his side.
Light footsteps close behind him. A wake of rancid air.
Barton brought the rifle around and fired blindly. But there was nothing on the road—just the shadows of trees thrown down by a million stars. The smell of diseased meat hung cloyingly, and for a mad moment Barton wanted nothing more than to shoot off his own goddamned nose to stop from smelling it. He was trying to shut down the fear, but the smell was in him now, and the smell was fear. He was starting to wonder if he’d ever smelled anything other than this.
He had a mile and a half left to run. But his legs were cramping so badly he was having a hard time walking. There was no way he was going to make it, and whatever was tailing him knew that, smelled the uncertainty and exhaustion on his sweat.
A frozen lake covered in sunlit snow. The old tree fort. His stepbrothers closing in from all sides, goading each other on while a cold white wind blew snow into Barton’s eyes. They meant to kill him this time. Years of beatings had been preparing them for this moment. He could practically smell their malice on the crackling air. So he climbed, the skin of his clammy palms sticking to the icy wooden struts hammered into the tree, and the cigar box was where he’d left it, hidden in a plastic bag.
He would never be weak again. Would never be meat again.
Yet here he was.
If he could make it there
If he could make it there
If he could make it there
More movement behind him. Barton dug his boots into the dirt, muscles screaming with each stride, the Remington growing heavier with each jarring step. He overrode his body, overruled its suffering. And when he slowed he could hear something keeping pace on his heels, the rapid pattering of its footsteps, peeking in and out of the edge of his vision like a thin crescent moon scurrying from cloud to cloud. The smell—its smell—forced its graveworm way through the heady punch of the looming pines. When he threw a glance over his shoulder he thought he glimpsed a vague gray shape slipping into the trees along the road.
A cramp locked up his thigh. He stumbled to a halt. Sweat ran from him in rivulets. His arms felt weighed down with lead, and his rifle was almost unbearably heavy.
Should’ve brought the glock—
That’s when Case exploded from the trees, his face livid, eyes scored and feral. His crew-cut hair had fallen out in patches, and Christ, the sound he made—it was a guttering, caterwauling howl, as though an animal screamed through him. Barton stared dumbly for half a second too long before lining up a shot, but it went wild as Case crashed into him, lips peeling away from his snapping teeth. Barton fell but managed to wedge the rifle between them, holding the heavier man at bay.
His teeth. They jutted from bloody gums, and Jesus they looked sharp. Case was struggling for Barton’s neck, chomping and snarling, runnels of drool falling into Barton’s eyes and mouth. Case’s skin was stretched tight across his skull, and even in the dark Barton could tell that his color was all wrong, a sickly grayish hue.
Barton snapped his head forward and cracked into Case’s nose, but the heavier man wasn’t fazed, and Barton was blinded by the sudden gush of blood. He sputtered and gagged—the blood stank—and brought his knee up hard into Case’s groin. The bigger man whuffed in pain and went rigid. Barton seized the moment and shoved Case off using the rifle as leverage, scrambling to his feet while Case staggered upright. His eyes never left Barton. They were luminous mirrors filled with starlight, lighter than he remembered. Barton took an involuntary step back. No, not just lighter—they’d gone as white as exposed bone in Case’s ruined face.
It hit him then—Dix hadn’t been running away from him. He’d been running away from Case.
He advanced on Barton, body coiling to strike, howling in a voice that seemed to contain many voices, and as Case leapt for him Barton brought up the Remington and shot off the top of his head. Chunks of brain and skull blew back, and for an instant Barton was a kid again, the snot frozen on his face, an empty gun clicking in his hand as the bodies steamed and bled into the snow.
