Year's Best Horror Stories XVIII Part 28

In a long, complex frame of metal tubing, suspended on four tractor wheels, are cradled: an engine wrapped round with copper pipes and sheaves of old electrical wiring; cl.u.s.ters of what seem to be household butane gas bottles; and, well to the rear, the padded seat of some old-fashioned military jet, into which is strapped a man. Gouts of earth and water spray up from its enormous wheels. From time to time this whole machine seems to be consumed by a kind of radiant discharge, through which its driver or pilot can be seen helplessly or furiously waving his arms.

Is he a prisoner of his vehicle? Or does he prefer to drive on the edge of disaster like this? He is a wasted old man. When it can be seen, his face runs the gamut of expression, wild with fear one moment, laughing with excitement the next. His long gray hair blows back in the slipstream. His lips contort. He has fastened himself into a tight brown leather suit along the arms and legs of which run cl.u.s.ters of neoprene tubing. Out of these at intervals erupt thick colored fluids, which splatter over his chest or into his eyes. Though he blinks furiously, he suffers the indignity without harm: but wherever the machine is touched it blackens and smokes briefly, and lightning writhes along its cha.s.sis members.

One huge wheel flies off suddenly into the air. The old man claps his hands to his face. At that moment the train enters a tunnel, and the Ephebe can see only himself, reflected in the window.

If the appearance of the machine has filled him with astonishment, its disappearance leaves him with a curious mixture of elation and anger he can neither understand nor resolve. By the time he is able to unclench his hands and wipe his forehead, the train has left the tunnel for open ploughland across which spills a tranquil evening light. Wrestling desperately with one another, the old man and his machine have pa.s.sed back into the dimension from which they came, where they leap and bucket and belly their way forever through rural England, scattering clods of earth, steam, small bushes and dead animals. But in the palm of the Ephebe's hand remains a small intricately machined metal item, melted at one end to slag.

This he brings home with him. For months it remains warm to the touch, as if it had only lately been thrown out of the hearth of the heart.

6: THE TWO OF DISCS, representing Change.

Some journeys encourage a different kind of fantasy.

In his journal the Ephebe records: "For some time I was enchanted by a tiny station called Long Eaton on the main line between Derby and Loughborough. Here, two slatted wooden platforms surrounded by larch, pine and variegated holly gave the air of a rural halt at once bijou and mysterious: the last place you would expect an Inter City turbine to stop.

Sitting in the train, you had no idea what sort of landscape lay behind the woods.

The wind rushed through them, so that you thought of yourself as being on some sandy eminence away from which spread an intimately folded arrangement of orchards and lanes, of broad heathland stretching off to other hills. Afternoon light enameled the leaves of the holly. Owls and wood pigeons moved amid the branches. Everything was possible in the country -- or garden -- beyond.

"Then the light pa.s.sed, the wind dropped and the train began to move again: you saw that the trees were dusty and birdlimed, and that they had hidden only housing estates, allotments, and a light engineering plant. A fat woman with a hyperactive child came into the carriage, sneezed in your face. "Just sit down," she warned the child. Instead it stared defiantly into her eyes for a moment then wandered off to make noises with the automatic door.

"Despite this I always looked forward to Long Eaton, as if I hoped each time that the enchantment would be maintained. Then one day I glimpsed, fleetingly, through the windows of a train speeding in the opposite direction, a station called Haywards Heath (it was on the line between London and Brighton), and realized immediately that both it and Long Eaton were references to a lost type, that intimate little station of middle cla.s.s children's fiction forty years ago. Conifers and sandy soil; foxes and owls and stolen ponies; gorse and gypsy caravans in a rough field: then some mystery about a pile of railway sleepers near the tracks, shiny with rain in the green light at the edge of the woods."

The Ephebe has recognized his mistake. But is he cured of it? Or does he still hope that one day he will abandon his life as it now is, some freak fall of the cards throwing him into another one in which he gets down from a train at just such a fictional station without even a suitcase and walks towards some granite tor steeped in evening light? Whatever the answer to this question, he brings back from a subsequent journey a children's novel called "Island of Adventure" -- though to give him credit he does not actually read it.

7: THE QUEEN OF SWORDS. "We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself."

Long journeys encourage the Ephebe to read and write: but they also outline the great gap between the lived and the written. Under a railway bridge at night, in Glasgow perhaps, he finds himself staring into the window of "Apollo Video Supplies." There on a large screen, the following video clip repeats itself endlessly and silently to the drunks who stagger past: In front of an Asian boy who watches captivated, a sword is beaten into existence out of the sparks of the anvil. The boy's father lies dead. The boy will grow up to be a Ninja fighter, and avenge him. His eyes are huge now as he discerns his uncertain yet triumphant future in the steel. The sparks stream past.

Exactly what you would expect, thinks the Ephebe, and indeed this boy is only a cliche: but look up from the screen and you can see the orange sparks fly out of it and down the road, where amid the dancing hailstones they light up in other dreary shop-fronts something more than "Winter Woolens -- Reduced".

Language is a scandal because it can make connections like these. Stories pa.s.s the experienced world back and forth between them as a metaphor, until it is worn out. Only then do we realize that meaning is an act. We must repossess it, instant to instant in our lives.

8: DEATH. Everything opens to contain its opposite.

Whenever the Ephebe looks up there is something new in the landscape -- gorse spilling down the side of a steep little hill with a farm on top; factory chimneys dissolving in a blaze of sun he can't bear to look at; a clear night somewhere up north, with contrails drawn across Orion and the Dog -- but eventually journeys like this must become tiring. The clean yellow front of an Inter City train, rushing toward the platform in the sunlight, no longer fills him with excitement. He's slept in too many overheated rooms, under thick continental quilts; eaten in too many station cafes; awaited too many connections. He is losing faith in the insights he had, the relationships he formed.

All he remembers about the city he's in is a display of popular wedding stationery -- 20% off -- which, as he walked past it, seemed for a moment to merge indistinguishably with the cigarette ends, burger cartons and supermarket receipts on the pavement: so that for a moment everything became illegible to him, because the floor of the display window and the street, the inside and the outside, were only extensions of each other. He yawns and stares in the mirror. Behind him his bag is packed. Later, repair works along the line delays the 5.18 Sheffield/St. Pancras, then again by a fault in one of its power cars. It's Sunday. The Ephebe dozes and then wakes up abruptly. The train isn't moving and he has no idea where he is. He looks for lights or signs in the night: only dark fields. He has no watch -- it was broken in Edinburgh -- and the only one he can see belongs to a woman sitting across the aisle. Made of plastic, this has a dial transparent to its own works, greenish flickering cogs in the complexity of which your eye loses the position of the hands.

The Ephebe falls asleep again for a moment, dreams briefly of the old man and his strange energetic machine, racing alongside the train but this time looking in, then wakes suddenly in the horrified knowledge that he has cried out in his sleep and the whole carriage has heard him. He has become someone who makes noises in his sleep on the London express: a worn-out middle aged man with bad teeth and a cloth briefcase, his head resting uncomfortably in the corner between the seat-back and the window.

From this journey, though, he brings back a memory of his childhood in Warwickshire.

One July morning, sitting hypnotized by the sound and weight of the river in Stoneleigh Park, he watched the hot sunlight spilling and foaming off the weird until he could no longer separate the look of the water from its strange, powerful, almost yeasty smell. Most of the objects of his childhood, he remembers, were transfigured in this way for him; and he notes in his journal that night: "Little earthy lanes and banks become secret entry-ways into the warm fields and bemused emotional states of childhood, when in a kind of excited fatigue you watch your own hand come closer and closer to the dry gray wood of an old gate, and find yourself unable for a second to context the one by the other or find a single context -- unless it is something as huge and general as 'the world' -- which will accept both. In the end you are able to understand only the intense existence, the photographic actuality of such objects. In that kind of childhood everything is fused into the light like flowers fused into a gla.s.s paperweight. At first I thought this light was in itself a fusing-together of other states or qualities which I could only vaguely label -- "self awareness" "growing s.e.xual curiosity" "the unconditional trances of narcissism." Now I see that the child is contrived wholly of the things he has already experienced: a spider web in the gra.s.s, a jet flying overhead; a coc.o.o.n of cuckoo-spit, the flare of light off the windscreen of a designer car. These elements are rea.s.sembled as a way of looking at other things. It was this continual fusing and re-fusing -- this infolding -- of experience which I perceived as a light bathing the landscape. "What we call 'meaning' is not what the light discovers, because what it discovers is itself. Now cast by the adult on new objects, it is valuable only for its very act of illumination. Perception is meaning. Meaning is an act."

9: THE MOON, representing "the state of impure horror"; human faculties reach their limit and collapse before the Inward Light.

As soon as the journeys are over, the cards can be laid to rest.

The Ephebe waits in the taxi rank outside Charing Cross Station after his last trip. A short, badly-dressed woman of about twenty five or thirty is walking up and down the station forecourt shouting "You b.l.o.o.d.y piece of paper, you b.l.o.o.d.y piece of paper," at a letter she holds in her right hand. Her face is red with effort; her hair straggles down around it. A maroon wool coat like a carpet compresses her fat b.r.e.a.s.t.s. "You b.l.o.o.d.y piece of paper!" Eventually she varies the emphasis on this accusation until it has illuminated briefly every word; as if trying for the feel of some final, indisputable delivery. Her sense of drama, the transparency of her emotion (whether it is unaffected misery or something more complex and theatrical declaring itself) leaves him unnerved.

No one else seems bothered. Out on the Strand the taxis continue to drive homicidally at one another. The people waiting for them laugh and talk about the price of things. But as his cab arrives, and he sees the light dancing in the raindrops on its bonnet, the Ephebe cannot repress a shudder. Later, when he tries to recall the incident, he will be able to fasten only on the minor details -- the minicab touts, for instance, mooching up and down the queue pleading in soft voices, "Any long jobs?" while the woman stares down at her bit of paper like Ellen Terry as Joan of Arc and rubs her free hand in the food stains down the front of her coat.

"You b.l.o.o.d.y piece of paper!"

That afternoon he sits by the downstairs front window of his small house, looking out into the street. Rain drops steadily on the windowsill. "This drip, which is sometimes doubled, sometimes trebled, syncopated," he once wrote to a friend, "is all that is most monotonous about London residential streets."

In fact it is a street he rather likes: in summer all rain and sunshine and every minute the most surprising and confusing changes of light.

Over the road from the Ephebe's window two beautifully trimmed bushes stand out against a brick wall. He has no idea what they are. The true word "buddliea" comes to mind when he looks at them; but they are evidently conifers.

Under certain lights, especially in the morning -- "When the world looks promising again despite what we know about it" -- the brick takes on an old warm red color.

The wall itself seems to recede a little, as if the street had widened, and at the same time it becomes taller and longer. At that, the bushes no longer seem like bushes at all. Rather than being in front of the wall, they define two arch-like s.p.a.ces in it. It is an illusion: but suddenly the Ephebe seems to be looking through two arches at a hedge some way behind the wall. The effect of this is of a glimpse into the well- matured garden of some great house near Warwick or Leamington, and it always delights him.

Tired out now by his journeys, unable to convince himself of the need to unpack his case, unsure of the success of his experiment, he makes himself a cup of coffee, then another. The room behind him is dim and quiet, full of secondhand furniture.

On a little veneered table he has arranged the incomplete Tarot, THE FOOL which represents himself, and the objects of his search -- a flattened cigarette end stained with nicotine and spittle; an item of personalized jewelry in the form of the name SOPHIA; the vulnerable but determined whisper of a woman approaching her climax in the middle of the night; a small, intricately machined metal object, melted at one end; the children's novel "Island of Adventure"; particles of sleet billowing down an empty pavement; a page from his journal -- though he cannot yet bring himself to do anything with them. Instead, he finds himself watching the school children running up and down the street. At half past four there is an increase in traffic. The rush hour has begun.

About fifteen minutes later the woman he watched this morning outside Charing Cross Station waddles into view from the junction with Harrow Road, crosses on to the opposite pavement, and, going through one of the "arches" in the wall, disappears from view. Sunlight splashes the pavement. Rain falls through it like a shower of parks. Without thinking, the Ephebe leaves his house and rushes after her. The "arch" is closing again even as he pa.s.ses it. He has the sense of penetrating some material halfway between wood and stone, then something which is neither, something membranous which clings for a moment round his face.

Now he is in the garden. Paths race out everywhere in front of him, across great lawns, between high topiary hedges, over patios paved black and white like chessboards surrounded by gray stone urns and leaden statuary. In this confused, ideal moment, the Ephebe believes he may go anywhere. With a shout of elation he attempts to fall forward instantly and endlessly in all possible directions; only to find to his dismay that in the very exercise of this privilege he has selected one of them.

The house, in all respects the same as his own, is empty.

Though the carpets have been removed, odd items of furniture remain -- a small inlaid table, an old-fashioned bra.s.s fender with grotesque moldings, an ironing board folded up in a corner -- as if some tenant is still in transit.

He sees the woman he has been pursuing, standing quite still in her maroon coat staring out of a bay window in an upstairs room; he sees her through the open door, lumpen and heavy, from the landing at the top of the stairs. Light pours round her thickened, monolithic silhouette, transfiguring the bare floor of the room, illuminating where it spills out on to the landing rolls of dust beneath cream painted skirting boards. He knows that if he were able to enter the room and look over her shoulder now, he would not see North London or his own house. The light fixes him, photographic, frozen; it is the same hot, silvery light which falls on the dense trees on the other side of the valley, giving them the look of giant mosses, thick clumps and curtains of moss of the sort that drips down the ornamental waterfalls in old gardens.

"All the things it might be," a voice says clearly. "The one thing it is."

At this a white bird flies past the three panes of the bay window, its shadow flickering between elongated bars of light over the walls of the room: entering the first pane from the left and leaving from the right, it crosses the third in the same direction, only then flying across the central pane from right to left, after which it vanishes.

"The one thing it is."

The Ephebe knows that he must cross the doorway of this room. He must pa.s.s through the moment he finds himself in. Before he can do this, though, the woman must turn toward him, so that he sees balanced on her shoulders the skull of a horse. It is not a horse's head, but a skull, which looks nothing like a horse at all; and out of this enormous curved shears, this wicked bone beak whose two halves meet only at the tip, will come words. "You b.l.o.o.d.y piece of paper," she must admonish him. Only then will he be able to pa.s.s.

"You b.l.o.o.d.y written thing."

10: THE HIEROPHANT, representing "occult force, voluntarily evoked"

The journeys are over.

The Ephebe, having returned to the front room of his own house and made himself another cup of coffee, has arranged on the veneered table -- alongside the incomplete Tarot, THE FOOL which represents himself, and the objects of his search already noted -- a further nine cards. For each card of the original-spread, we discover, he drew an alternative, which has remained unconsulted until now.

These blind or uncommunicating cards provoke completely different interpretations of his journeys, and of their "meaning" for him and for us. For instance, as an alternative card to THE CHARIOT he drew THE AEON ("G.o.d has deconstructed the Old Universe and has learned too much to be able to build another"). Had he looked out of the opposite window of the railway carriage that day, he would have seen only a toddler with a string of snot at its nose, pedaling its plastic tricycle through the weeds, the heaps of dried mud and discarded plasterboard in the back garden of a newly-completed council house in the Midlands. To simulate speed, the child kicks out violently with its little legs, while from its open mouth comes a constant high-pitched imitation of the roar of a jet fighter overhead -- "Nnnnneeaaaa!"

Here are the alternative cards he drew, in order: The Nine of Discs; the Six of Wands; the Four of Swords; THE AEON; the Ten of Discs; the Ace of Swords; THE DEVIL; the Princess of Wands; FORTUNE. He is left only with the card he chose to represent himself. This was the Knight of Swords. As he turns it up, THE FOOL, which it replaces, charred and curled as if by some great heat or light, vanishes in incense smoke! He hears the horse repeat gently, "All the things it might have been."

Initiated now, the Ephebe smiles thoughtfully. Next to THE LOVERS he places the Four of Swords. He remembers the young woman whispering, "f.u.c.k me, f.u.c.k me," in the night. What would he have seen if he had turned his head away from her then and looked into the quiet darkness of their upstairs room? The journeys are over. They have just begun.

Jerry's Kids Meet Wormboy.

by David J. Schow.

One of the fun things about editing The Year's Best Horror Stories over the years is watching new writers emerge from obscurity to renown. And so it is with David J. Schow, once an obscure punk kid and now a well known punk kid.

Schow, a German orphan adopted by American parents, was born in Marburg, West Germany on July 13, 1955. Settling in Los Angeles, his short horror fiction began appearing in the early 1980s, while he kept himself alive by writing movie/tv tie-in novels under various pseudonyms. Under his own name, Schow soon became notorious as the instigator of splatterpunk. Despite this, his first novel, The Kill Riff, has done well, and is to be followed by The Shaft this year.

Earlier this year two collections of Schow's short stories were published: Seeing Red and Lost Angels. The Spring 1990 issue of Weird Tales was a special David J. Schow issue, and his anthology of film-related horror stories, Silver Scream, proved extremely popular. Further, his first film script, Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Ma.s.sacre III, and his first TV script, "Safe s.e.x" for Freddy's Nightmares, both got bought and produced -- and ran into censorship problems.

"Jerry's Kids Meet Wormboy" was written for Book of the Dead, John Skipp and Craig Spector's shared-world anthology based on the world of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead film series. For those who have avoided this, it seems that the world has been overrun by flesh-eating zombies, see -- and then...

Eating 'em was more fun than blowing their gnarly green heads off. But why d.i.c.ker when you could do both?

The fresher ones were blue. That was important if you wanted to avoid cramps, salmonella. Eat a green one and you'd be yodeling down the big porcelain megaphone in no time.

Wormboy used wire cutters to snip the nose off the last bullet in the foam block. He snugged the truncated cartridge into the cylinder of his short-barrel .44.

When fired, the flattened slugs pancaked on impact and would disintegrate any geek's head into hash. The green guys weren't really zombies, because no voodoo had played a part. They were all geeks, all slow as syrup and stupid as h.e.l.l, and Wormboy loved it that way. It meant he would not starve in this cowardly new world. He was eating; millions weren't. Wormboy's burden was great.

It hung from his b.u.t.thole Surfers T-shirt. He had scavenged dozens of such shirts from a burned-out rock shop, all Extra Extra Large, all screaming about bands he had never heard of -- Dayglo Abortions, Rudimentary Penii, Shower of s.m.e.g.m.a, Fat & f.u.c.ked Up. Wormboy's big personal in-joke was one that championed a long-gone alb.u.m t.i.tled Giving Head to the Living Dead.

The gravid flab of his teats distorted the logo, and his surplus flesh quivered and swam, shoving around his clothing as though some subcutaneous revolution was aboil. Pasty and pocked, his belly depended earthward, a vast sandbag held at bay by a wide weight lifter's belt, notched low. The faintest motion caused his hectares of skin to bobble like mercury.

Wormboy was more than fat. He was a crowd of fat people. A single mirror was insufficient to the task of containing his image.

The explosion buzzed the floor beneath his hi-tops. Vibrations slithered from one thick stratum of dermis to the next, bringing him the news.

The sound of a Bouncing Betty's boom-boom always worked like a Pavlovian dinner song. It could smear a smile across his jowls and start his tummy to percolating. He s.n.a.t.c.hed up binoculars and stampeded out into the graveyard.

Valley View Memorial Park was a cla.s.sic cemetery; of a venerable lineage far preceding the ordinances that required flat monument stones to note the dearly departed. The granite and marble jutting from its acreage was the most ostentatious and artfully hewn this side of a Universal Studios monster movie bone-yard. Stone- cold angels reached toward heaven. Stilted verse, deathlessly chiseled, eulogized the departees -- vanity plates in suburbia for the lifeless. It cloyed.

Most of the graves were unoccupied. They had prevailed without the fertilization of human decay and were now choked with loam and healthy green gra.s.s. The tenants had clawed out and waltzed off several seasons back.

A modest road formed a spiral ascent path up the hill and terminated in a cul-de-sac fronting Wormboy's current living quarters. Midway up, it was interrupted by a trench ten feet across. Wormboy had excavated this "moat" using the cemetery's scoop-loader, and seeded it with lengths of two-inch pipe sawn at angles to form funnel-knife style pungi sticks. Tripwires knotted gate struts to tombstones to b.o.o.by traps, and three hundred antipersonnel mines lived in the earth. Every longitude and lat.i.tude of Valley View had been lovingly nurtured into a Gordian knot of kill-power that Wormboy had christened his spiderweb. The Bouncing Bettys had been a G.o.dsend. Anything that wandered in unbidden would get its legs blown off or become immovably gaffed in the moat.

Not long after the geeks woke up, shucked dirt, and ambled off with their yaps drooping open, Wormboy had claimed Valley View for his very own. He knew the dead tended to "home" toward places that had been important to them back when they weren't green. Ergo, never would they come trotting home to a graveyard.

Wormboy's previous hideout had been a National Guard armory. Too much traffic in walking dead weekend warriors, there. Blowing them into unwalking lasagna cost too much time and powder. After seven Land-Rover-loads of military rock and roll, Wormy's redecoration of Valley View was complete. The graveyard was one big mechanized ambush. The reception building and nondenominational chapel were ideally suited to his needs... and breadth. Outfitting the prep room was more stainless steel than a French kitchen in Beverly Hills; where stiffs were once dressed for interment, Wormboy now dressed them out for din-din. There was even a refrigerated morgue locker. Independent generators chugged out wattage. His only real lament was that there never seemed to be enough videotapes to keep him jolly. On the non-fiction front he favored Julia Child.

The binocs were overpriced army jobs with an illuminated reticle. Wormboy thumbed up his bottle-bottom fish-eye specs, focused, and swept the base of the hill. Smoke was still rising from the breach point. Fewer geeks blundered in these days, but now and again he could still snag one.

That was peculiar. As far as Wormboy could reckon, geeks functioned on the level of pure motor response with a single directive -- seek food -- and legs that made their appet.i.tes mobile. Past year one the locals began to shun Valley View altogether, almost as though the geek grapevine had warned them the place was poison. Could be that Valley View's primo kill rate had made it the crucible of the first bona fide zombie superst.i.tion.

G.o.d only knew what they were munching in the cities by now. As the legions of ambulatory expirees had swelled, their preferred food -- live citizens -- had gone underground. Survivors of what Wormboy called Zombie Apocalypse had gotten canny or gotten eaten. Geek society itself was like a gator pit; he'd seen them get p.i.s.sed off and chomp hunks out of one another.

Though their irradiated brains kept their limbs supple and greased with oxygenated blood, they were still dead... and dead people still rotted. Their structural integrity (not to mention their freshness) was less than a sure bet past the second or third Halloween. Most geeks Wormy spotted nowadays were minus a major limb. They digested, but did not seem to eliminate. Sometimes the older ones simply exploded. They clogged up with gas and decaying food until they hit critical ma.s.s, then kerblooey -- steaming gobbets of brown c.r.a.p all over the perimeter. It was enough to put you off your dinner.

Life was so weird. Wormboy felt like the only normal person left.

This movable feast, this walking smorgasbord, could last another year or two at max, and Wormboy knew it. His fortifications insured that he would be ready for whatever followed, when the world changed again. For now, it was a matchless chow-down, and grand sport.

The ATV groaned and squeaked its usual protests when he settled into its saddle. A rack welded to the cha.s.sis secured geek tools -- pinch bar, fire ax, scattergun sheaths, and a Louisville Slugger with a lot of chips, nicks, and dried blood. The all-terrain bike's balloon tires did not burst. Wormboy kick-started and puttered down to meet his catch of the day.

Geeks could sniff human meat from a fair distance. Some had actually gotten around to elementary tool use. But their maze sense was zero-zero. They always tried to proceed in straight lines. Even for a non-geek it took a load of deductive logic just to pick a path toward Valley View's chapel without getting divorced from your vitals, and much more time than generally elapsed between Wormboy's feedings. Up on this hilltop, his security was a.s.sured.

He piloted the ATV down his special escape path, twisting and turning, pausing at several junctures to gingerly reconnect tripwires behind him. He dropped his folding metal army fording bridge over the moat and tootled across.

Some of the meat hung up in the heat flash of explosion was still sizzling on the ground in charred clumps. Dragging itself doggedly up the slope was half a geek, still aimed at the chapel and the repast that was Wormboy. Everything from its navel down had been blown off.

Wormboy unracked the pinch bar. One end had been modified to take a ten- pound harpoon head of machined steel. A swath of newly muddied earth quickly became a trail of strewn organs resembling smashed fruit. The geek's brand-new p.r.o.ne carriage had permitted it to evade some of the Bounding Betty trips.

Wormboy frowned. His announcement was pointed -- and piqued -- enough to arrest the geek's uphill crawl.

"Welcome to h.e.l.l, dork breath." It humped around on its palms with all the grace of a beached haddock.

Broken rib struts punched through at jigsaw angles and mangled innards swung from the mostly empty chest cavity like pendant jewels. One ear had been sheared off; the side of its head was caked in thick blood, dirt, and pulverized tissue that reminded Wormboy of a scoop of dog food. It sought Wormboy with bleary drunkard's eyes, virulently jaundiced and discharging gluey fluid like those of a sick animal.

It was wearing a besmirched Red Cross armband.