They kept walking, dodging around bushes and rusty pieces of junk left out in the wilderness; one piece was the remains of a classic car abandoned at least fifty years ago, all the fabric and rubber long rotted away. Snakes slithered away as they passed, and Zenobia realized she hadn’t even thought of the danger of walking around out here. What if they got bitten by rattlesnakes? What if . . .
“Hold up,” Mateo said. He sounded shaken and tense. “Man, there are a lot of them. See?”
Zenobia looked over his shoulder. Down in the sandy hollow below, the whole ground moved, and where the black light bathed the sand, it showed scorpions crawling over each other, so many of them they tangled and squirmed like a poisonous blanket.
“That isn’t normal,” he said. “Right?”
It didn’t feel normal. Not at all.
And then Mateo’s phone rang, a loud musical jangle that made all three of them flinch. The scorpions below didn’t react at all.
Mateo pushed the button to accept the call and said, “Diga me.”
Just a static hiss at first, and then a whisper. Slow and weirdly metallic. “Heeeeeeeerrrrrrre.”
It was like a long, electronic sigh, and then the call ended. The black light app kicked on again, bathing the scorpions in the weird neon glow.
“Oh sweet Lord, she’s under there,” Zenobia’s mother said. “That girl’s underneath.”
“So what do we do?” Zen asked. She was asking Mateo, but he wasn’t answering. He just stared down at the hollow, with its carpet of scorpions, without moving.
Zenobia’s mother said, “Give me your phone.”
Mateo handed it to her, and she stepped past him, down the slope toward the crawling nightmare below.
“Wait, Mom! What are you doing?”
“If she wants us to find her, then the things won’t stop me.” And her mother, Dr. Mariana Gomez, pushed her foot into the nest of scorpions, and nudged the first of them aside.
It was as if she’d sent some signal, and they began to scatter in all directions, a scuttling wave that streamed straight up the sides of the hollow. Mother scorpions loaded with crawling babies scrambled past Zenobia, who gagged and found herself pressed tight against Mateo’s side. “Don’t move,” he told her. The scorpions weren’t coming at them, just near them, and none of them made any move to strike.
Her mom crouched down in the sand as the last of the scorpions withdrew, and began to brush the dirt away.
She exposed fabric underneath. Tattered, bleached by time.
There wasn’t much of Corazón left except bones, shoes, and the clothes she’d worn when she’d died, but she was still there, and there was compassion in the way Zenobia’s mother brushed the sand from the white skull. More scorpions writhed free of the rotting shirt and fought their way clear from the old, stiff blue jeans.
They’d made a nest here. A nest in her body.
“She’s dead,” Mateo said. He sounded weirdly relieved. “Now she can rest.”
“She was stabbed,” Zen’s mother said. “There’s one wound through her shirt, but the whole shirt is soaked with blood, so she was alive for a while. How far are we from the house?”
“Why?” he asked.
“Maybe a mile,” Zen said. “I mean, in a straight line. On the road, maybe two?”
Her mother sat back on her heels and looked at Mateo. “The other girls—you said they were buried behind the house. No one buried her—this is just drifting sand. I think she ran away and died out here, all alone.”
Mateo kept staring at the body. He didn’t seem relieved anymore. He seemed angry.
Zenobia’s phone rang. Caller ID said it was 911, and she lifted it to her ear. She had three bars now, remarkably, and this time, the voice came through as clearly as if the girl were standing right beside her.
“My cousin’s going to kill you,” she said. “I’m sorry. But at least I won’t be alone anymore.”
Zen pulled in her breath in a gasp, and Mateo turned to look at her. In the strange purple glow of the black light, his eyes looked darker than the night. She saw him realize that she knew.
And she realized that he had the shotgun.
He raised it, but not at her. At her mother, who was still bent over the corpse of Corazón.
“No!” Zen screamed. She didn’t have the handgun, her mom had it, and her mom’s back was turned, so she did the only thing she could; she lunged hard at Mateo and knocked him off balance. The shotgun blast ripped into the sand two feet away from her mother, who threw herself to one side and clawed for the gun in the back of her pants, but Zen barely registered that because she was slamming into Mateo again, harder, and this time, he lost his footing and tumbled into the sand.
He raised the shotgun and pointed it right at her face, and behind it she saw his eyes, crazy eyes, deadly eyes, and she knew she didn’t have time to dodge.
Her mother fired first. She didn’t kill him, but she caught him in the arm, and he fumbled the shotgun. It went off and blew part of his foot away, and Zenobia lunged forward and grabbed the searing hot barrel, yanked it free of his hands, and turned it back on him. She backed away, and her mother rushed up the sandy hill to stand beside her.
Mateo was screaming and flailing, and blood was pumping out of what remained of his boot, but the desert greedily soaked it up.
“Try again,” her mother said, with remarkable calm once again. “Call 911.”
This time the call went through, and the response was reassuringly normal. “Nine one one. What is your emergency?”
“Uh, there’s a wreck on Highway 18, between I-20 and 302,” Zenobia said. She felt weirdly disconnected now, and Mateo was yelling and cursing at them and flailing around in the sand, and she was afraid he was going to get up. “There are a couple of people dead. Please send the police.”
The operator assured her that help was on the way. Zenobia hung up the call.
“I’m going to kill you, bitches!” Mateo screamed.
“Like you did Corazón? And all those other girls? You were living with them, weren’t you, with your uncle and his family. He didn’t kill anybody. You did. And he took the blame for it. What happened, Mateo? You thought Corazón was dead, but she wasn’t? She got away and you couldn’t find her?” Zenobia had somehow taken on her mother’s calm now, and it felt good. It felt powerful. So did the shotgun in her hands. “The one that got away. And she kept coming back, trying to get help. Haunting you.”
“I’m going to gut you! ”
“No you won’t,” Zen said. “Because she’s coming for you.” She lowered the shotgun and stepped back, because something was coming out of the darkness behind Mateo now, a hiss of bodies over sand, a neon bright wave in the fallen black light of claws and joined tails and barbs.
She grabbed her mother and pulled her back as the scorpions reached Mateo.
He didn’t scream for long, not because he didn’t want to, but because they went in his open mouth and choked him silent. Covered him in a moving blanket of black, and their tails rose and fell, poison drops on their barbs. Thousands of scorpions, clinging to him with their pincers as they mercilessly stung him to death.
Zenobia’s phone rang again. It was the 911 operator, assuring her that everything would be all right. She heard the distant wails of the police car, still far away.
“We should go,” Zenobia said to her mother, and put down the shotgun. She pulled the pack that Mateo had brought with him over and checked inside.
Knives. Rope. Duct tape. A video camera. His killing supplies.
He’d meant to bury them out here with Corazón, after all.
She left it all with him.
They went back to the road, and the police came. Zenobia and her mother told the officer about Mateo and the dead girl in the desert, and just before dawn, as more and more police arrived to crowd the empty road, Zenobia’s phone rang one last time.
She looked at the screen, and this time she didn’t answer it. She just let it
ring and ring and ring.
Because sometimes, it was just better not to know who was on the other end.
“We’re all right,” her mother said, and hugged her close. “We’re going to be all right, Zenobia. From now on.”
They were. But sometimes—just sometimes—when her phone rang, something told Zenobia not to answer it.
Dark hearts never died.
Rachel Caine is the New York Times bestselling author of almost fifty novels and even more short stories. Her most recent releases include Dark Secrets: A Paranormal Noir Anthology, the Morganville Vampires short story collection Midnight Bites, and Paper and Fire, the second book of her Great Library series.
Website: rachelcaine.com
Twitter: @rachelcaine
Facebook: facebook.com/rachelcainefanpage
* * *
The Boyfriend
STEVE RASNIC TEM
* * *
Aria’s mother was about to have her third baby, fourth if you counted the miscarriage. Aria loved babies, even when they screamed and were impossible, which was a lot of the time. She’d been a good babysitter for her little brother, and even now when he was older and not as much fun, she loved him so fiercely that sometimes it was almost scary. She couldn’t help it—when you spent a lot of time taking care of a baby, you just naturally became superprotective. It was like a Law of Nature or something. She would never let anyone hurt her brother. That just could not happen, as far as she was concerned. Aria was ready to do whatever had to be done to protect that kid. It didn’t matter what it was.
Aria had been Mom’s first baby—she was born long before Joey. Because her dad was never in the picture, she had Mom pretty much all to herself for years, and that made her Mom’s most important person in the world. Even when Mom had a boyfriend, and there were a lot of boyfriends, Aria had always come first. Aria didn’t care what anybody said—as far as she was concerned, that was proof Mom was a good mother.
“Aria, make me a sandwich?”
Joey was yanking on her jeans. He was only five. “What are you supposed to say, Joey, when you want something?”
He looked at her like he couldn’t understand English anymore. Then suddenly his face got bright. “Please!” he shouted.
“Good job!” she said. “Go sit at the table and I’ll bring it to you.” She felt a little silly, always telling him “Good job!” as if he’d just done the greatest thing in the world, but when you took care of little kids, sometimes goofiness was required.
He was adorable sitting there trying to be patient, waiting for his sandwich. (Peanut butter and jelly—that’s what “sandwich” meant to Joey.) Kids could be cute without even trying—that was probably the best thing about them. That’s why you wanted to love and protect them. She’d read somewhere that “cuteness” was part of evolution—if humans and animals had ugly kids they might not try so hard to keep them safe. That seemed pretty harsh, pretty judgmental, but the world was a harsh place. Mom used to say that a lot to Aria when she was growing up, and now that Aria was a teenager she said it even more. “It’s a harsh, harsh place, and you have to be ready for it!” Sometimes, when you were a kid, you forgot that—you expected everything to turn out okay like it did in the storybooks. Now Aria was old enough to understand that was rarely true.
She put his plate down in front of him. Joey started eating his sandwich, really going at it, tearing it apart like he was some kind of wild animal. It was pretty amazing, actually. Aria should have stopped him and made him eat it right, teach him some good manners, but it was too much fun watching him. That’s when the clown came in.
That’s what Aria called the new boyfriend. She wasn’t being disrespectful, not really, because that’s what the boyfriend did for a living, part-time at least. The rest of the time he didn’t do much of anything, as far as she knew. He dressed up like a clown for kids’ parties, acting all crazy and performing stupid magic tricks. Clown stuff. She guessed he was good at being goofy, and the kids all seemed to like him, but it creeped her out. Clowns creeped her out. She couldn’t believe her mother was dating a stupid clown when she knew how much Aria hated them.
They lied for a living—that’s what they did. They pretended to be happy when they weren’t. They pretended everything was a joke, but some things were too sad and scary to joke about.
The boyfriend had just gotten out of bed, and he still had some of his clown face on. That was typical. Sometimes after a clowning job he’d drink, and he’d rub his face with a towel, not enough to remove all the makeup, just smear it around some, and then he’d just flop down in bed and get his face paint all over Mom’s pillows, so it looked like his face had melted, or maybe he was a person magically turning into a clown, or maybe he was a clown trying to turn into a person. Aria had no idea. But either way he never finished his transformation, so he just looked like this trashy thing that was all dirt and grease and a big, scary mouth.
“What are you looking at?” he was saying to Joey, growling like he was some kind of bear.
“Noth . . . nothing,” Joey said, looking away.
“Don’t lie to my face!” the angry clown shouted.
“Don’t yell at him!” Aria pulled Joey out of his chair and sent him and his sandwich off into his bedroom. Joey ate in his bedroom a lot when the clown was around.
The clown watched Joey go into the bedroom and close the door. Then he turned to look at Aria. Except it wasn’t like he turned his head in any normal way. His painted features just slid around his head so that his bruised clown nose and his big, ugly clown mouth were just below his ear, and his eyes were peeking out of the side of his head. And the right eye was almost swallowed up by his long, greasy hair.
Then, as if he’d just realized he’d done something wrong, he moved his head around so that his real eyes and nose and mouth and his clown eyes and nose and mouth all matched. Or almost. His clown mouth wriggled a little below his real mouth, like he was fighting between a smile and a frown.
“Don’t . . . ever . . . do . . . that . . . again!” his struggling mouths growled. “You . . . don’t know . . . what I . . . what I . . . can do.”
But Aria could imagine. She could imagine very well what that angry clown could do. And then Mom’s boyfriend’s face settled down, and he was just this sleepy, lazy guy, slurring his words. “It’s my house. You’re living in my house now.”
Which wasn’t even true, because Aria’s mom was paying most of the rent. But she didn’t bring it up because it wouldn’t matter anyway. She went into her room and locked the door.
Most days the boyfriend spent the morning in bed, coming out of the room he shared with Mom around noon. So at least Aria didn’t have to see him at breakfast or before she went off to school each day. The clown was just this thing living in their apartment that came out every now and then to annoy and frighten them. Aria worked hard not to resent Mom for it. Her mother was a smart lady, in everything but this one area. She just had this weird thing about men. She was always picking out the broken ones, the ones that women with good sense didn’t want. Aria kind of understood this. When she was little, her favorite dolls were the messed up ones, and who didn’t like an ugly puppy? But those were things that were just broken in their looks. And nobody was perfect in their looks. What Mom didn’t seem to understand was that not everyone was good on the inside. Sometimes a guy who was all weird on the outside was even weirder on the inside.
Every afternoon Aria would meet Joey at his school and they would walk home together. Joey was always a little sillier the closer they got to their apartment building. It annoyed her, maybe because it reminded her too much of the clown. But Joey couldn’t help himself—they never knew what they’d find when they got home. The boyfriend might be up, playing video games, or in some crazy mood. Mom wouldn’t be home from work for at least a couple of hours.
“Black Hawk down!” Right when they got in the door. A black remote control helicopter buzzed right by their faces. She saw Joey’s
hair move—the idiot flew his toy that close to her little brother’s face! The first time it happened, Aria had freaked, thinking it was a giant insect or a bird or a bat or something. At least now that it happened all the time, she knew what it was. The boyfriend had these remote control toy helicopters, three of them, and he liked to fly them at you. Just never when Mom was around. So when Aria complained about it, he could always say she was just making stuff up, or exaggerating. She could tell her mother was suspicious, but Mom seemed to believe the boyfriend anyway, or at least pretended to. Aria understood that, even though she didn’t like it. If you had a boyfriend, you took his side if you wanted to keep him. So maybe she’d never have a boyfriend. She never wanted to do that. She thought it was a crazy thing to do, actually, but she would never call her mother crazy.
“Kaboom!” the boyfriend shouted. The helicopter crash-landed on the coffee table in front of Joey. Joey screamed with laughter. He couldn’t help himself. Aria could see that it was a growing problem—Joey was a kid, and boys especially could like things and be scared of them at the same time. It was exciting for them. They were mixed up like that. But you tried to help them get un–mixed up.
“Here. You try it, Joey!” The boyfriend hunkered over and shoved the remote control into Joey’s hands. Joey cheered with pleasure. Aria walked toward her room, but before she got there, Joey flew the helicopter into the back of her head, with some steering help from the boyfriend. Joey howled with laughter and the boyfriend hooted like a loon. She turned around angrily and stared at the helicopter lying there on the floor. She wanted to stomp on it. But who knew what might happen if she did that?