In Laymon's Terms

It just so happens that I have some empty shackles between Cassandra Bittaker and Gina Norris. I guess the time is right for Lissa Hindley. Elvin Avenue, wasn’t it?

John Urbancik

CAME LATE TO the game. I first met Dick (albeit, briefly) in Atlanta in ’99. He struck me as obscenely normal, not at all what a Horror Writer should be. Indeed, in the first moment it became apparent that the man with whom I spoke was supernaturally kind and passionate about what he loved (the horror genre inclusive).

Shortly after that, I read my first Laymon novel. Where was I hiding all the years before that? No clue. But I’d been freed, and slowly began to play the job of Catch Up.

I was part of a group he labeled The Future of Horror. It was a catch-all, meant to encompass almost everyone in the room. Might have been Denver this time. The title wasn’t meant for me, or for any of my friends (Dick’s friends), but for everyone—even those not fortunate enough to be there. Strange, that. But he wasn’t passing anything on, or revealing some hidden secret. Rather, he was expressing his own state of fandom, his belief in the genre—the emotion and vitality—and, as concisely as possible, challenging everyone in the room, at that hotel, and in the field, to fulfill his proclamation.

John Urbancik

HE WIND COULD be friend or foe.

At the moment, Jack perched downwind from his prey. He had two of them in his sight, pounding away at each other like animals. Doggie-style.

Their stench turned Jack’s stomach. But with the wind in this direction, the hunter was safe and undetectable. When the angle was right, he could pop them both with one shot. Coitus interruptus in the worst degree.

As far as he knew, no one had ever bagged one of these...it was best to call them wolves. His father had talked about it once, an expedition a generation old, when they had set out to find the creatures. They’d expected three, four, as many as six. The way dad told it, he was the only survivor. He wore the scar across his chest and shoulder like a damned trophy.

But Jack wasn’t interested in taking out all of them. He only wanted one. The double shot would just be a bonus. He planned to mount the head in the living room of his new house, soon as he bought one, to show his dad he could do something right. Anything. Especially something dear old dad failed to get done.

“C’mon,” Jack muttered, willing the creatures to get in line together. He wouldn’t have time to get off a second shot, and he couldn’t risk gathering the carcass if the second got away.

The male rode on top. He’d scratched her back to hell, and had reduced her clothes to bloodied tatters.

She screeched with a sudden orgasm. Jack’s finger tightened on the trigger. The wind shifted; it was now or never. Another moment, they’d detect his scent.

But the rotten, sex-riddled odor had permeated Jack’s nose. Stuck there. Forced itself even further into his brain. Too late, he realized it wasn’t his target he was smelling.

The wind had masked Jack, the hunter, and his own hunter as well. He turned just in time to see the creature leap.

The male in his sight howled in his orgasmic rush even as Jack’s throat was torn from his neck. He never had a chance to bring the rifle round to defend himself.

Dirk Hunter cursed as he pulled his truck to the side of the road, and again as he threw the gearshift into park. The snow, a minute ago floating all pretty-like and soft, had decided to clump into inch wide flakes and smack the windshield both wetly and relentlessly, doubling in strength and then doubling again.

The headlights barely reached ten feet ahead before dissipating into a wall of white.

Dirk waited ten, twenty minutes, before deciding to give up and head back. There’d been a motel on the side of Route 9, its lonely neon light a dim reminder that he hadn’t quite reached Montreal, or even Canada, but he was close. Close enough that he didn’t need to spend the night in a cheap, dirty room within a hundred miles of his destination.

He would still be early. Better to arrive just four hours ahead of schedule than to slide off the side of the road in the middle of nowhere and find himself in need of a decent hospital. Not that they weren’t around here, wherever the hell here actually was; he just didn’t want to find out.

The snow drove down so heavily now, it took ten minutes to maneuver the one mile back. He left the truck running—too much risk of it not starting up again if he found no vacancy—and walked straight and tall through the damned snow.

It didn’t even let up as he walked the five feet to the lobby. A tiny bell signaled his arrival as he pushed the heavy door open. He had to shove it tight behind him.

“Evenin’,” an elderly man said from behind the counter, looking up from his chair. He held a steaming mug of coffee between two mittens and wore a wool cap, even inside with heat blasting out of two space heaters on either side of the counter window. “Awful late to be needing a room,” the man said.