The Year's Best Horror Stories 7 (21 page)

The facts were almost too stark to question. She wondered only why she, out of them all, had been permitted to awaken.

Her mind searched restlessly, almost without her volition, for a prayer that would mean something.

Friends lived downstairs. She could go to them. The latch on the front door was stubborn, as always, but tonight it seemed a sinister stubbornness, locking her in deliberately in a room where everything once familiar had been changed to evil. The door finally, groaning querulously, opened to her, and she ran down stairs which tore with splintery mouths at her bare feet.

"Annie! George!" She pounded at their door. Her voice bounced from wall to wall in the ill-lit corridor and came back to her ears, thin and strange, frightening her so that she shut her mouth and used only her fists to call for help.

Nothing. Eula Mae was afraid to go out into the unnatural night, lit by the make-believe moon-this building was, at least, a known shelter-but she could not stay here among the dead. Her sister Rose Marie lived just up the street, in an identical tenement house, in a nearly identical two-room apartment. Her sister Rose Marie would take her in.

Eula Mae heard a scuttling sound. Roaches. Oddly, the sound was reassuring. It was familiar; it meant life here in this deathly still place.

She went into the street, not looking up. Her head was beginning to ache. She put her hand to her forehead, where the pain seemed to be centered, and felt the familiar imprint of the six-pointed star. She pulled her fingers away hastily, for their touch seemed to acerbate her headache. She remembered a radio program she'd heard once, about a woman who had fallen and bumped her head and then forgotten everything-who she was and where she lived. Could something like that have happened to her? But what could she possibly have forgotten that would make sense of all these changes in her world?

The door of Rose Marie's building always hung open, and Eula Mae entered the narrow little hallway nervously. The mailboxes on the right wall had been smashed into useless metal, and she was afraid every time she came here that someday whoever had smashed those boxes would be waiting to smash
her.
 

As always, reprieved once more from a smashing, Eula Mae scurried up the creaking stairs as rapidly as she could without stumbling.

No one answered her calls or her poundings. No one in her sister's apartment, and no one up and down the hallway, although the sound must have been heard throughout the thin-walled building. Were they all gone? Frightened? Deaf? Could everyone be dead?

Finally, Eula Mae broke in the door of her sister's apartment. It was not difficult: Eula Mae was a powerfully built woman, although she did not think of herself as physically strong.

The front room was littered with children. One narrow cot held two, and the rest were on pallets on the floor. Eula Mae picked her way among them. She could hear no breathing, but did not want to investigate more closely.

A curtain separated the front room from Rose Marie and Jimmy's bedroom. Eula Mae pushed through the curtain and heard the welcome sound of soft snoring.

Her heart leaped with gratitude. "Rose Marie? Jimmy? Wake up!"

The slight, sibilant snore continued undisturbed. Eula Mae approached the bed. "Hey, get up!" she said loudly, and bent over her sister.

But no breath came from Rose Marie's nostrils, and no heartbeat disturbed the pink nylon ruffles of her negligee. Jimmy was snoring: he slept beside his dead wife. Eula Mae was outraged by this, and she leaned across the body of her sister and shook Jimmy's arm vigorously.

"You! Wake up! Quit that snoring and listen to me! Hear me? Wake up!"

Not even the rhythm of his snores altered. He slept on, as unreachable as Rose Marie.

Eula Mae straightened up and let her arms fall to her sides, realizing that she was quite alone. She was accustomed to making decisions, to running both her own life and the lives of other people, but she'd never been alone, and in a situation she flatly did not know how to handle.

She went back down the hall that reeked of long-forgotten meals, and down the treacherous stairs, and back into the deserted street. She would try to find someone, anyone, any friend or stranger to assure her that she was not the last person left alive; then they would decide what to do.

As she walked silent streets she remembered something her youngest brother had said. It might have been just another of the stories he loved to make up-just another of his innumerable horror stories about the omnipresent Whitney-or it might have been true.

"They've got a gas," he said. "They pipe it into rooms and kill everyone there. They tell us something like, 'this way to the showers' or, "wait in this room till the doctor gets here' and then," his eyes glittered, "then they slip a tube under the door, or pump gas in through pipes in the vents and… a few little coughs, a choke or two you hardly notice and… zap… everybody's wiped out. Snuffed."

Eula Mae had been a little bit afraid of him when he told her that: he'd enjoyed the telling so much; he had looked gloating and sly, not much at all like her beloved little brother.

"That's the way the Man solves the nigger problem," he'd said cheerfully. "He just puts 'em all to sleep, like dogs with rabies."

When she came out of her reverie, Eula Mae saw that she had walked much farther than she would have thought possible. She had walked straight out of the city and into the countryside. She stepped from concrete onto a dirt road, and looked around in wonder. The sudden transition was mysterious; Eula Mae
knew
she could not have come so far in such a short time-true, she had been preoccupied, but she doubted she had walked even a mile yet. By all that was logical, she should still be in the heart of the city. Yet she looked around, and her eyes gave her evidence of a cotton field, a watermelon patch just across the road, and some tumbledown wooden shanties a bit farther away.

She walked on toward the shanties, and went right up to one. But then she hesitated before mounting the steps to the dilapidated porch. A dog slept there, nose between his paws. Or did he sleep? The dog did not stir, nor give any sign that it knew she was there, staring at it. Had it indeed been a gas? Some mysterious gas, sprayed over all the areas where blacks lived? But if that were true, why had she lived on?

She walked past the shanty, continuing down the road, although her head hurt more with every step and she wanted to lie down somewhere, to rest, to be free of the pain that was knocking about inside her skull, burning a hole in her forehead. But she feared that if she rested she would never rise again.

So she walked on, she walked on-she walked quite suddenly into an invisible wall.

She backed off, staring stupidly at the horizon, at the moonlit dusty road which stretched before her. Then she tentatively stretched out a hand, and the hand went right through everything-the sky, the grass, the road, the distant shacks-and touched a hard, flat, smooth, invisible wall.

Eula Mae began to walk slowly alongside the wall, one hand outstretched and touching it to assure herself of its presence. She walked that way, following it, for some distance. It was eerie, seeing her hand pass through the landscape and touch something solid she could not see. But she did not have strength to spare for wondering. Her headache was almost overwhelming, and she had to fix all her attention upon moving, just moving. Reasons and answers would have to come later, if they ever came, just as rest would come later. For now she would have to move, because she was afraid to stop or turn back.

Once, Eula Mae looked to her right, away from the wall, and was startled to see that she was walking along a street only four blocks from where she lived. Why had she never tried to walk through the wall, toward the buildings that seemed to be there? Or had she? She could not remember. Perhaps it was not important to know if her universe had always been circumscribed by this wall, or if this was a recent change.

Abruptly the wall ended, projection merging with reality ia a solid building. It was just another broken, dying tenement, like so many others in the neighborhood. This one was scarred with "Condemned" signs, and a door gaped blackly open.

Eula Mae hesitated a moment, the pain in her head holding her back like a brutal fist. She gasped slightly, and pushed herself through the doorway.

The hall it opened on was short and dark with a door closed at the opposite end. Eula Mae fumbled with the knob, and. the door opened onto a blaze of light.

When she opened her eyes-slowly, against the pain of the headache and the glaring brightness-Eula Mae saw that she had opened a door leading into a wide, white-walled corridor lit by fluorescent ceiling panels. It was nothing from her world.

Eula Mae looked up and down the hall. White walls, punctuated by doors, stretched in either direction. She saw no one, heard no one, and hesitantly entered the hall. She looked back at her door and saw, In stark black letters at the top of the doorframe, one word: NIGGERTOWN.

The pain in her head, which had become so persistent that she could almost ignore it, suddenly seared and stabbed with a new intensity. Eula Mae gnawed her lip to keep from whimpering. It was foolish to go on; foolish not to go home where she could lie down… but she thought of lying next to her dead husband, and knew she could not go back with nothing accomplished. If she was a fool, well, then, she was a fool. She would go on.

She walked away from Niggertown. She came to a door labeled "Little Israel" and hesitated… and then walked on. Eula Mae saw that the corridor had a turning just ahead and her pace quickened.

At the turn, the hall opened into a large, circular gallery. It was empty of people. All around the walls projected booths or stalls, similar to those found at fairs and amusement parks of all sizes-the sort where tickets are sold and goods dispensed. And, as at a fair (and seeming to Eula Mae to be very much out of place in this clean, large, empty, well-lit hall) each booth was decorated with garish signs and posters, each proclaiming the particular attraction to be purchased at that booth.

"Niggertown"-the word garish in red and black-caught her eye, and she let herself be drawn to that booth.

Clowns in black-face. It was a depiction Eula Mae was accustomed to. Thick-lipped, pop-eyed, fuzzy-headed darkies. Mammies with their babies, little pickaninnies, young bucks in overalls strumming banjos.

"See," shouted the caption above one picture, "customs held since tribal days in darkest Africa!" Above a cartoon of soulful darkies looking heavenward was the suggestion: "Join the happy darkies in heartwarming 'spirituals' and sing your blues away!"

Centered amid all the garish drawings was a box set in a bold typeface. Eula Mae read it, her lips moving slightly as she grappled with each word.

"Guaranteed Satisfaction! Observe first-hand a vanished way of life. See them tremble before you, the hated 'honky'-or, for the thrill of a lifetime, never to be forgotten, see life through black eyes! Yes! Our surrogate people are so real, so lifelike, that only a trained expert can tell the difference. Plug right in and instantly you see, hear, smell, taste and feel just as you can in your own body. Walk among them undetected in an android nigger body-they'll accept you as one of the 'tribe,' never suspecting, while you-"

Voices. They cut through her confusion and the pain in her head. Eula Mae was frozen like a rabbit before headlights. Which way to run? People-she had been looking for people, but what if-

Caution won. She stumbled behind the poster-bedecked booth, crouched, and waited.

Clicking footsteps: boot heels. Eula Mae peered around the side of the booth, and terror flowed over her as she saw who was there.

Two white men, fine, blond, strong, Aryan types. The pride of the world. One wore coveralls and carried a tool kit; the other was a guard of some kind, in a gray and black uniform, swastikas shining discretely from his shoulders.

The worker was complaining; the guard listening with a slight smile curling his lips.

"It's just that it's so damn unnecessary. It's an unnecessary expense to maintain real people-the public wouldn't know the difference if we replaced 'em all with androids. It'll have to be done eventually, when they die out, so why not replace 'em all right now? The surrogates wouldn't give us this kind of trouble."

"You're probably right," said the guard. "The public wouldn't know-the public is very gullible. But the Old Man himself sometimes comes around here… he'd know… he likes…"

"He
comes
here?"
asked the other in awe.

The guard frowned at being interrupted. He had stopped walking in order to speak his piece, and he expected the other to be properly respectful of his words.

"Yes. This is one of the last places you can see such things… most other arcades are composed entirely of surrogates. Some of them very fine, true, but not the real thing. And to some, like the Old Man, having the real thing is very important. It makes him very proud, to be able to come here, to see a way of life he's wiped from the earth…" The guard began to walk again, and the other fell into step beside him.

As they turned the corner out of sight, Eula Mae could still hear the guard's fine, resonant tones going on: "But, of course, even the Old Man will not last forever… when he finally goes then you can have all your replacements, and you'll only have to maintain your surrogate people."

Voice and footsteps faded out. Eula Mae got to her feet, slowly and painfully. Her head hurt too much to think, almost too much to move. She could only wish she'd never awoken, never noticed that there was something wrong with the moon… It took her minutes to gain the strength and the will to take a few steps forward, and she was so engrossed in this simple action that she did not hear the returning footsteps until it was much too late.

She heard one voice say quietly, "Ah, there it is." And then the pain in her head blazed up, she went blank, and she crumpled in a heap in the center of the big arcade.

12: David Drake - Nemesis Plage