Fiction Vortex - October 2014 Horror Issue Read online

  No, that isn’t right. I remembered there was one unoccupied cubby near the top.

  ~~~~~

  I’m still not sure where Evangeline got the axe from.

  Wait. Let me start over.

  When the between came that year, I bundled Evangeline into my arms and we retreated to my tent. I told her to keep quiet. If she was hungry, she must reach as slowly as possible for the food and eat without smacking her lips against her gums. If she was restless, she must breathe in and out, slowly, and not make any sudden movements, and not jump up and run out to see how our shelf of villagers was faring. If she heard screams, she must not be afraid, but must stay put.

  The twilight came.

  It bleached all the color from the open tent and the land around us. The trees were gray. The sky was some shade of white. My skin was black. I would say that Evangeline’s skin was black, too, but that does not even come close to the color. It was a purple so deep it wasn’t purple. It swallowed all light.

  Very slowly, I pressed my finger to my lips. I had survived many betweens before. This one was no different. An unseen beast howled outside, a hurricane tore at the trees, and yet nothing touched our skins, not even, it seemed, the air. We remained in that nothing-place, surrounded by the thrashing death throes of the season. Presently I became aware of Evangeline staring at me intently.

  For perhaps the first time in her young life, I met her gaze. I felt nothing in that time. All of my fears, my trepidations for the future, my sweet and bitter memories—everything fell away, left with an emptiness so refreshing that I thought, for half a moment, I would very willingly do whatever Evangeline told me to do, like a prodded cow pushed to more fertile land. There is comfort in having your fate decided by another.

  I’m still not sure where Evangeline got the axe from. It was in her hand before I remember her reaching for it. She must have moved quickly to grab it, yet I thought I would have noticed and chastised her if she had.

  “What are you doing?” I said, alarmed, before I could stop myself.

  Her teeth flashed with glee. “Mama was right,” she said, and her voice rang clearly through the noise. No, it was the noise. There were monsoons in her throat and hail in her fists and tornadoes in her hair. “It isn’t fair.” She moved too quickly for me to see. Her cool nothing-skin traced the folds of my deep wrinkles. Hairs rose all over my body. Her fingers trailed down to the age-waddle of my throat. “My collection is almost done.”

  I don’t remember pain. Isn’t that odd? I remember suddenly being sideways on the ground, unable to move, blinking as my granddaughter used my thin shirt to clean my blood from her axe. “There we go,” she said, and picked my head up, and kissed my forehead, just above my persistent headache. “You are my revered grandfather. Your place is at the head of our village.”

  She tucked me gently under her arm, climbed up the shelf I had built and placed me lovingly into the empty cubby in the top row. The between ended abruptly as it had begun, leaving the world perhaps a little rumpled but no less bright than it had been before the silent storm. As is right and good. “My girl,” Maya cooed. “My brilliant baby girl.” Evangeline began to sing: Szerelem, szerelem, and stroked a comb lovingly through her mother’s hair.

  ~~~~~

  ~~~~~

  Rebecca Ann Jordan is a speculative fiction author and artist. She has published poetry and fiction in Infinite Science Fiction One, Fiction Vortex, FLAPPERHOUSE, Strangelet, Swamp Biscuits & Tea, Yemassee Journal and more. Becca regularly columns for DIYMFA.com, and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing from California Institute of the Arts. See more of her work at rebeccaannjordan.com.

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  The Things We Carry

  by Amanda Crum; published October 21, 2014

  Third Place Winner, 2014 Fiction Vortex Horror Contest

  When the storm rolled through, Jason Krauss was still sitting in the ambulance, safe and dry. The bubble lights threw strobes of red and white across the passing landscape, illuminating the pines in brief flashes. Their shadows were still too deep for the lights to puncture, and so all he got was a momentary glimpse of branches before the night stole them away again.

  He was out with Bobby tonight, his least favorite coworker. Brenda was his usual partner but she was out with the flu. Brenda was a nice older lady. She never made Jason uncomfortable, unlike Bobby, who told the most disgusting jokes about having sex with dead bodies. It was disrespectful, Jason felt, and unprofessional. He hadn’t gone to school for as long as he did and gone into debt to pay for it just to listen to an ignorant ass make off-color jokes about the dead. And they weren’t even funny. Somehow that was just as insulting. Jason had a great sense of humor and it really pissed him off when people thought they were funny but weren’t. Also — and Jason tried really hard to overlook this fact, since it was unkind to think such things — Bobby was really overweight and had body odor. Sometimes, when they were working closely together, Jason had to hold his breath to keep from gagging.

  The ambulance headlights cut through the darkness, leading them away from town and into more dangerous territory. Here the roads were so curvy that Bobby, who was driving, had to come to an almost complete stop to take the turns. Jason hated to think of the county fire engine trundling through here, taking hairpin curves with its bulk swaying back and forth on the narrow blacktop, but it had done just that only ten minutes earlier. The fire department was always first to respond to car accidents; Jason and his fellow EMT’s mostly picked up the bodies. Knowing what was waiting for them made the night suddenly cold and Jason turned up the heat on the dash.

  One would have thought he would be used to the deaths by now. In six months he’d seen his fair share already. Plymouth, Tennessee was by no means a big city — or even a large town — but the winding roads of the countryside claimed their share of the population at all times of the year. Jason had lived there his entire life and was familiar enough with every square inch of the land to know where to take it easy on four wheels, and assumed everyone else did, too. But it was almost as if the roads themselves changed, bending their curves ever so slightly so as to throw off the drivers.

  But death wasn’t something a person could ever really get used to, Jason thought. And maybe it wasn’t supposed to be. Maybe once you stopped being affected by it, you started to lose a little of your humanity.

  Wind buffeted the ambulance, rocking it slightly as they took one last curve before the accident site. Jason could see the action up ahead. The reflective yellow coats the firefighters wore were blurred in the heavy rain, making it appear as though they were moving much more quickly than they actually were.

  There was no need to move quickly. The driver of the little red Toyota Camry sitting on the side of the road could not have survived. It looked…squashed, somehow, as though a giant hand had come down upon the roof and caved it in like a cheap toy.

  “Bad one,” Bobby murmured, bringing the ambulance to a stop several feet from the fire truck in order to give it space to maneuver.

  “They’re all bad,” Jason said curtly. He flipped up the hood of his rain gear and jumped down from the cab, splashing cold rain water onto the cuffs of his pants.

  “Lost control coming around that last curve there,” Joshua Higgins, the Sheriff Deputy, said as Jason approached. He could see the Sheriff’s car now, on the other side of Engine 1. The strobe lights from all three vehicles merged at a particular point in the trees on the side of the road, creating a starburst of red and blue. “Car flipped over about three times, from the looks of the marks on the road. Happened before the rain even started. She must be an out-of-towner. Plates are from Libertyville.”

  As if that accounted for anything, Jason thought but didn’t say.

  “Just one victim?” he asked gravely. He could see Bobby in his peripheral, chuckling with one of the fire jockeys. It was always this way when they worked together. Jason did the talking, Bobby did the lifting. An un
spoken agreement.

  “Just the one. She’s over there.”

  He pointed vaguely into the pines on their right, where Jason could just make out the county coroner, Lucinda Grey, kneeling over a prone body. The rain pelted down, spattering off the shoulders of his coat and stinging his eyes like sweat.

  “Wasn’t wearing a seatbelt,” Josh said. “Damn shame. She might’ve made it.”

  Ignoring him, Jason made his way over to Lucinda. She had set up an umbrella, staked to the ground so as to keep the body relatively dry and contamination-free.

  “Evening,” she said without looking up. Jason watched as she carefully examined the victim’s hands before making a note on her legal pad.

  “Hello, Lucinda.”

  Lucinda was pretty in a severe way, Jason thought. Her hair was always pulled tightly back on top of her head and he had never seen her wear any makeup other than a slash of pale lipstick every once in a while. But her eyes were large and pale blue and her skin was the color of milk. He liked that she looked severe. It made her seem more professional. Once he’d asked her to be his date to the company Christmas party and she had looked at him so strangely that he’d gone home later and sat in the dark for a while. Sometimes rejection was easier to take than confusion.

  “D.O.A.?” he asked.

  “Yes. She hit that tree there in one of the revolutions and was thrown through the windshield. Massive head trauma would be my guess, but of course I can’t be sure until I conduct the autopsy.”

  Jason turned to look at the tree. It seemed innocent enough, standing alone on the side of the road away from the cluster of pines. But knowing what it had been responsible for, Jason couldn’t look at it the same way ever again. His mind was funny like that. He had responded to many car accidents on this road — a particularly bad stretch — and he remembered all of them when he was driving his own car and happened to pass a site.

  A plastic sheet covered the girl, protecting her from the rain, and added a certain amount of respect. The only part of her Jason could see was her forearm and hand, which Lucinda was still holding. It was placed palm-up. He could see that she had been a nail-biter. Nasty habit.

  Something about that hand reminded him of someone else, and it took him a moment to figure out who it was.

  “Say, isn’t this near the spot where we found that college student a few months ago? The girl who was hitchhiking?”

  Lucinda glanced around briefly. “Yes, I think so.”

  He contemplated the trees for a moment, the slickness of the road, the clouds which obscured the moon. Bobby had gone with one of the firefighters to set up reflective cones on the road, although it was probably unnecessary. For as many accidents as it had seen, it wasn’t a very busy thruway at night.

  “So many lives lost,” he said softly.

  “Sorry?” Lucinda asked. She was still scribbling in her notebook and sounded impatient.

  “Nothing,” Jason said. “I’ll leave you to it.”

  “It’s okay, I’m done,” she sighed, standing up with a groan. “I need to start bringing a folding chair with me. My back can’t take all this kneeling and stooping.”

  Jason frowned at that visual. “You wouldn’t really do that, would you?”

  “Jeez, I was joking,” she snapped, flipping her legal pad closed and stalking off. He watched her return to her truck, where the Sheriff was waiting for her. They spoke briefly and he saw Josh crane his neck to look at him around Lucinda. They were talking about him, then. He felt his cheeks burn.

  Suddenly he wanted to be at home, in the shower. Sometimes he showered in the dark. It was comforting.

  After a moment, Bobby came back and they loaded the dead girl into the back of the wagon.

  ~~~~~

  A strange thing happened after Jason and Bobby dropped her off at the morgue.

  They were almost to the parking lot of the hospital, ready to end their shift and turn in their keys, when Bobby suddenly noticed something on the floorboard. It was pushed into the shadows on the passenger side, almost invisible until his foot brushed it.

  “Crap!” he cried. Jason, who had been daydreaming about relaxing in his favorite chair and watching a horror movie, started and turned to him in alarm.

  “What?”

  “That girl’s purse! Lucinda put it in here and I forgot to put it with the body.”

  Jason rolled his eyes. “How did you sign her in without I.D.?”

  “Her driver’s license was in a little change purse on her key ring. I totally forgot about this. Dammit! Pull in here and I’ll take it back. You can go on home.”

  And Jason, who felt a strong dislike for Bobby, did a most unusual thing. He did it without thinking. The words just popped right out of his mouth.

  “I’ll take it back.”

  Bobby looked at him curiously. “You don’t have to do that, man, it was my bad.”

  “Yeah, and you’ll owe me one. Go on, you know if you get overtime again Curtis will pissed.”

  Bobby considered this. “Yeah, he will. Alright, if you’re sure…”

  Jason pulled into the parking lot and left the engine running. “I’m sure. See you tomorrow.”

  “Off tomorrow. Won’t be back ‘til Wednesday.”

  “Wednesday, then.”

  He watched as Bobby jumped down from the cab and ran in the rain to the sliding doors of the Emergency Room, and even then he didn’t know why he had volunteered to do a favor for one of his least favorite people in the world.

  But when he looked down at the purse, he remembered.

  ~~~~~

  At home, he sat freshly showered at his kitchen table. The horror movie was forgotten.

  The purse sat in front of him, a cavern of secrets to be told and held.

  His palms were slick and his heart a crazy jackrabbit in his chest. What he was about to do was highly unethical and unprofessional. He knew this in the back of his brain, but something had awakened in him at the thought of going through the dead girl’s things. Part of it was voyeurism, part of it was curiosity, and part of it was the thrill of doing something so wrong that he himself would shun another for doing the same thing.

  But it couldn’t be helped.

  He took a deep breath and opened the purse.

  It was black leather, with lots of chains and zippers. He looked inside for a moment first without touching anything, and then decided he would need to dump everything out to examine it all. He tipped it up and a jumble of papers, coins, makeup, pens, and various detritus tumbled out onto the polished surface of his dining table.

  He took his time, sorting everything into piles: paper, writing instruments, and a small black address book went into one pile. Gum and candy went into another. Makeup and Chapstick went into a third. Soon he had seven small piles arranged before him, and he began with the one closest to him.

  Her name was Kristin Haverty. She had twenty-seven checks in a plastic checkbook adorned with butterflies. Behind the checks were photos in plastic sleeves: two were of a young blonde girl, one was of a German Shepard, and two were of Kristin herself. Jason recognized her easily enough, even though her face had taken a lot of damage in the accident. These last two photos showed her on the beach with a man. They looked sunburned but happy.

  She had been pretty, much prettier than Lucinda Grey. Her eyes were dark but she had blonde hair, an interesting combination. She had a nice smile.

  He laid the checkbook aside and read through every scrap of paper. Some were receipts; she had gone shopping at the mall the day before. There was a wadded-up piece of foil that appeared to have held chocolate at one point. There were Post-It notes, filled with cryptic sentences.

  D. M. Tuesday. Check? Reports? read one.

  The makeup was simple; one tube of red lipstick and a compact filled with pale powder. She’d had fair skin. There was also a tube of Wintergreen Chapstick, which Jason pocketed on impulse. It had been mostly used up, but he didn’t want to use it. The little tube of w
ax was so personal to her. He didn’t want to throw it out.

  He sat for two hours, looking through Kristin’s belongings and reading her handwriting. For a little while, he felt as though he’d known her. It was a nice feeling. He burned the purse and all of Kristin’s belongings — except for the Chapstick — in the fireplace and then went to bed. He slept soundly and without anxiety for the first time in months.

  ~~~~~

  Over the next two weeks, Jason was called to three more fatal car accidents. A stroke of luck ensured he didn’t have to work with Bobby again. Bobby had taken ill with the flu, presumably caught from Brenda. Jason was glad for the break. Bobby was a talker and he didn’t want the issue of the purse to come up again.

  One of the accidents — the first — involved a man and his elderly mother. The old lady survived, but her son wasn’t so lucky. Jason wasn’t interested in his belongings. He went home that night disappointed and the old anxiety crept back in as he lay awake in bed, looking up at the ceiling.

  Four days later, a woman in her thirties tried to outrun an oncoming train and was killed instantly when it slammed into the driver’s side of her BMW. Jason snuck her purse out of the morgue’s Personal Affects locker and took it home, where he took three hours to go through its contents. His heart shook with anticipation as he picked up each item, running his fingers over them as if he could discover secrets they held.

  Angela Harvey’s purse was much like Kristin’s: paper, makeup, a checkbook and wallet. Mints instead of gum. But while putting everything back inside, Jason discovered a small zippered compartment. With shaky hands, he opened it to find a black velvet jewelry box. Inside was a silver heart-shaped locket.

  It was old and the hinges were rusted, so he was unable to open it. He didn’t care. He held it up to his nose and smelled the ghost of her perfume, something sweet and citrusy. It was too strong for his taste, but not terrible. This would be the thing he kept, he decided, and burned the rest. He slept with the necklace on, beneath his shirt, resting against his bare skin.