The End Is Now

“So what kind of crazy am I?”

He wets his lips. Reaches up, cups my cheek and gently rubs a streak of eyeliner away with his thumb.

“I’m not sure,” he says. “But I like it.”

Tell him, I say to myself. Tell him now. The rain will be back tomorrow, who knows when you’ll get another chance.

“Stay off the pills tonight,” I say. “Can you do that? Just tonight. No drugs, just you.”

“I can try,” he says. “Just me.”

I kiss him. One arm around his back, catching some of his weight, the other wiping my cheek. He tastes like tears, clean and sweet.

“Good,” I say. “That’s all I’m looking for.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Megan Arkenberg lives and writes in California. Her short stories have appeared in Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, and dozens of other places. She procrastinates by editing the fantasy e-zine Mirror Dance.

SUNSET HOLLOW Jonathan Maberry

A Rot & Ruin Story

-1-

The kid kept crying.

Crying.

Crying.

Blood all over him. Their blood. Not his.

Not Benny’s.

Theirs.

He stood on the lawn and stared at the house.

Watching as the fallen lamp inside the room threw goblin shadows on the curtains. Listening to the screams as they filled the night. Filled the room. Spilled out onto the lawn. Punched him in the face and belly and over the heart. Screams that sounded less and less like her. Like Mom.

Less like her.

More like Dad.

Like whatever he was. Whatever this was.

Tom Imura stood there, holding the kid. Benny was eighteen months. He could say a few words. Mom. Dog. Foot.

Now all he could do was wail. One long, inarticulate wail that tore into Tom’s head. It hit him as hard as Mom’s screams.

As hard. But differently.

The front door was open, standing ajar. The back door was unlocked. He’d left through the window, though. The downstairs bedroom on the side of the house. Mom had pushed him out. She’d shoved Benny into his hands and pushed him out.

Into the night.

Into the sound of sirens, of screams, of weeping and praying people, of gunfire and helicopters.

Out here on the lawn.

While she stayed inside.

He tried to fight her on it.

He was bigger. Stronger. All those years of jujutsu and karate. She was a middle-aged housewife. He could have forced her out. Could have gone to face the horror that was beating on the bedroom door. The thing that wore Dad’s face but had such a hungry, bloody mouth.

Tom could have pulled Mom out of there.

But Mom had one kind of strength, one bit of power that neither black belts nor biceps could hope to fight. It was there on her arm, hidden in that last moment by her white sleeve.

No.

That was a lie he wanted to tell himself.

Not white.

The sleeve was red, and getting redder with every beat of his heart.

That sleeve was her power and he could not defeat it.

That sleeve and what it hid.

The mark. The wound.

The bite.

It amazed Tom that Dad’s teeth could fit that shape. That it was so perfect a match in an otherwise imperfect tumble of events. That it was possible at all.

Benny struggled in his arms. Wailing for Mom.

Tom clutched his little brother to his chest and bathed his face with tears. They stood like that until the last of the screams from inside had faded, faded, and . . .

Even now Tom could not finish that sentence. There was no dictionary in his head that contained the words that would make sense of this.

The screams faded.

Not into silence.

Into moans.

Such hungry, hungry moans.

He had lingered there because it seemed a true sin to leave Mom to this without even a witness. Without mourners.

Mom and Dad.

Inside the house now.

Moaning. Both of them.

Tom Imura staggered to the front door and nearly committed the sin of entry. But Benny was a squirming reminder of all the ways this would kill them both. Body and soul.

Truly. Body and soul.

So Tom reached out and pulled the door closed.

He fumbled in his pocket for the key. He didn’t know why. The TV and the Internet said that they can’t think, that something as simple and ordinary as a doorknob could stop them. Locks weren’t necessary.

He locked it anyway.

And put the key safely in his pocket. It jangled against his own.

He backed away onto the lawn to watch the window again. The curtains moved. Shapes stirred on the other side, but the movements made the wrong kind of sense.

The shapes, though.

God, the shapes.

Dad and Mom.

Tom’s knees gave all at once, and he fell to the grass so hard that it shot pain into his groin and up his spine. He almost lost his grip on his brother. Almost. But didn’t.