Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) by Caitlin R. Kiernan Read Free Book Online Page A

down on the chair she sees the single word carved small into his hip. SORRY.
    Twila sits in the chair, jumping off point, she thinks and raises the knife above her head, drives it to the hilt into the soft place below his breastbone. Through skin and muscle and soft, dead organs. She yanks it free, and now her hands are stained slippery black, and the blood makes the air stink like a jar of old pennies. 
    The wailing starts way down inside her, core shatter, swelling and looping on itself, feedbacking into something that has sickle claws and shreds the still darkness as the blade plunges in again and again and again.
     
    Afterwards, she watches to be sure. She crouches in the chair and rests her head on knees drawn close, hums Hendrix, hey joe, hey joe, and the knife hangs slack in her left hand. To be sure she understands the hornets, that she’s read between all the lines and has the whole skinny. That whatever brought her through the fever will keep her brother down. But Blondie’s a good dead boy; there’ll be no Lazarus games tonight.
    buzzbuzzbuzZBUZZBUZZ, the hornets babble and an emptiness as wide as the gangrene sky above the dead pit opens up inside her; perfect pretty nothing ballooning from her guts like a suckling universe, devouring regret and fear and loss. Shitting out crystal certainty and black and keening appetite.
     
    “Arlene?” she whispers. Twila has pushed away the sofa and the table and all the other shit blockading the bathroom, and she presses her face and palms to the tortured door. The silence on the other side is solid and cold. Palpable.
    “Hey, Arlene. You pissed on my floor, you stupid zombie bitch.” And she thinks that that’s the first time since it began that she’s said the Z-word out loud.
    The stench is dizzying, and she knows that when she turns the brass knob and pushes the door the trapped air will roll out like an invisible, septic fog. She opens her mouth to say something else and the words drown in the thick spill of saliva. Twila wipes her chin dry with the back of her hand, wipes her hand on her T-shirt. And the door scrapes softly across age-buckled linoleum and the hinges murmur. 
    Nothing could have ever prepared her for this, this tangible thing that floods her head in waves of smothering acid sweetness, the air soupy fermentation of rancid pork and worm-ripe windfall peaches and cheesy musk. This is not simple scent or taste or anything else hemmed in by mere sensation. The hornets are a howling locust cacophony and Twila gasps, reaching through the blackness for support. She blinks back vertigo and squints. 
    A single rectangle of weaker darkness, night filtered dim through filthy curtains high above the tub.
    “Arlene?”
    Somewhere ahead, a liquid whimper and weight hauled by broken hands; glistening fear stitched against the murk in shades of colors Twila’s never seen before. She takes another step and her foot brushes soft and leaking Arlene, and the dead girl moans and pulls herself thunk into the bathtub. A fading part of Twila’s mind, sealed deep inside the maze of waxy hexagons, bothers to wonder how much got left behind on the floor, because whatever she touched is still there.
    Twila’s stomach growls as she bends over the tub, and her newfound hunger is almost as monstrous as the sounds rattling up from the zombie’s ruined throat.
    In the final gunmetal velvet moments before dawn, she walks alone through the silent streets of the city, past smoking tenement embers and abandoned cars and a hundred other cliché spectacles of spent apocalypse. The dead know her, smell the discrepant blend of warm meat and the green-black decay that stains her face and hands and clothing. They are never more than hesitant shadows, cowering shamblers, fleeting butcheries. And the living are only a rumor on the drowsy lips of the night.
    Behind her eyes, the hornets have gone, and her mind is as still and silent as the morning. Her nose drips honey. 
    She