Borderlands 5 Read online

  BORDERLANDS 5

  Edited By Elizabeth E. Monteleone & Thomas F. Monteleone

  A Macabre Ink Production

  Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition Copyright 2014 by Elizabeth E. Monteleone & Thomas F. Monteleone

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Editors

  Elizabeth Monteleone has been the guiding force behind Borderlands Press since 1990. It is her sincerest wish that you enjoy the many books we have produced during that time.

  Tom Monteleone has been a professional writer since 1972, and four-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award. He has published more than 100 short stories in numerous magazines and anthologies. His stories have been nominated for many awards, and have appeared in lots of best-of-the-year compilations. He is the editor of seven anthologies, including the highly acclaimed Borderlands series edited with his wife, Elizabeth. Borderlands 5 won a Bram Stoker Award in 2003.

  He has written for the stage and television, having scripts produced for American Playhouse (which won him the Bronze Award at the International TV and Film Festival of New York and the Gabriel Award), George A. Romero’s Tales from the Darkside, and a series on Fox TV entitled Night Visions.

  Of his thirty-six books, his novel, The Blood of the Lamb received the 1993 Bram Stoker Award, and The New York Times Notable Book of the Year Award. His four collections of selected short fiction are Dark Stars and Other Illuminations, Rough Beasts and Other Mutations, The Little Brown Book of Bizarre Stories, and Fearful Symmetries (2004), which won the 2004 Bram Stoker Award. His novels, The Resurrectionist and Night of Broken Souls, global thrillers from Warner Books, received rave reviews and have been optioned for films. His omnibus volume of essays about the book and film industries entitled The Mothers And Fathers Italian Association was published by Borderlands Press (www.borderlandspress.com) and won the 2003 Bram Stoker Award for Non-Fiction. He is also the author of the bestseller, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing a Novel. His books and stories have been translated into fourteen foreign languages.

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A project of this magnitude cannot happen without the belief, support, patience, and plain old American hard work of many people. In that spirit, then, we would like to shine an appreciative light on those who have helped to make this book not only a reality, but the success we believe it is.

  And so, in no particular order: James A. Mellow, Uncle Frank, Matt Schwartz, Keith Schaffner, Matt Bialer, Rich Chizmar, Michael Wilby, Jaime Levine, Kathy Ptacek, Kelly Laymon, Judy Rohrig, Jann Eckler, and finally, the more than six hundred determined and talented writers who submitted their stories to us, and who reinforced our belief this anthology is indeed a good place in which to be published.

  This one is for

  OLIVIA,

  our daughter, who just happens to be the most intelligent, the most beautiful, the most athletic, and most all-around talented girl we’ve ever known.

  BORDERLANDS 5

  CONTENTS

  Introduction—Elizabeth E. & Thomas F. Monteleone

  Rami Temporalis—Gary Braunbeck

  All Hands—John R. Platt

  Faith Will Make You Free—Holly Newstein

  N0072-JK1—Adam Corbin Fusco

  Time for Me—Barry Hoffman

  The Growth of Alan Ashley—Bill Gauthier

  The Goat—Whitt Pond

  Prison 392—Jon F. Merz

  The Food Processor—Michael Canfield

  Story Time with the Bluefield Strangler—John Farris

  Answering the Call—Brian Freeman

  Smooth Operator—Dominick Cancilla

  Father Bob and Bobby—Whitley Strieber

  A Thing—Barbara Malenky

  The Planting—Bentley Little

  Infliction—John McIlveen

  Dysfunction—Darren O. Godfrey

  The Thing Too Hideous to Describe—David J. Schow

  Slipknot—Brett Alexander Savory

  Magic Numbers—Gene O’Neill

  Head Music—Lon Prater

  Around It Still the Sumac Grows—Tom Piccirilli

  Annabell—L. Lynn Young

  One of Those Weeks—Bev Vincent

  Introduction

  Hard to believe it, but the time between the publication of Borderlands 5 and the previous volume is nine years.

  Lots of changes in just about everything during that span. To name but a few: bricks finally weigh more than cell phones; cigarettes cost as much as a six-pack; dot.commers no longer name football stadiums; and eighty-year-old grandmas get checked for shoe-bombs when they want to fly to Cedar Rapids.

  But there is at least one constant: the stories you find in a Borderlands anthology will be the best imaginative fiction being written.

  Period.

  We say that with confidence because we’ve worked hard to find the absolute best dark fantasy, suspense, and even a few real horror stories. For those of you who’ve never read earlier volumes of this series, we should hip you to some of the “ground rules”: (1) Borderlands is a nonthemed anthology, which means writers are free to explore any topic they choose; however (2) we are usually not very excited to see stories which are basically retreads of familiar genre symbols, staples, and icons. (We’re not looking for stories about vampires or ghosts or serial killers or witches or were-creatures or anything else you’ve already read somewhere else.) (3) This anthology is not restricted or “invitation-only,” which means you’ll always find plenty of new writers right alongside some of the most familiar and popular “names” in the business.

  Okay, onward: we’d been planning get back to the editing business for a while now, and when we announced we were reading for Borderlands 5, we didn’t realize what that would really mean.

  For one thing, we’d been told there was a whole new generation of readers out there who’d been chewing through Goosebumps when last we published an anthology, and we’d be as foreign and unknown to them as The Alan Parson Project. We honestly wondered what kind of response we’d get to our initial calls for submissions.

  What kind indeed …

 
The last time we were reading, we may have received a handful of stories in digital format (i.e. on a floppy disk), but none by e-mail. However, earlier this year, within a week of our first announcement, we received more than two hundred stories to the borderlandspress.com inbox. Now, that was impressive on one level, but disappointing on another—one, we were surprised how many people wanted to be part of this project, but two, we were fairly certain all those stories hadn’t been written especially for Borderlands in just a week’s time.

  We were right.

  A large majority of the earliest stories we received proved to be inferior work that had been making the rounds, or worse, had been retired to a subdirectory for stories-rejected-by-just-about-everybody. Many of these submissions were from writers who most likely had never read any previous Borderlands anthologies, or hadn’t bothered to read the guidelines closely enough to discern what we were not looking for. It’s mind-numbing to see so many writers stuck in such a creative rut that they can think of nothing more challenging than another serial killer, or (even worse) a lowlife who goes around hurting people just so the writer can describe all the victims’ gaping wounds.

  We also received far too many stories, which were obvious rejects from other “theme” anthologies looking for material around the same time as we. Hence the preponderance of stories where cockroaches made odd and sometimes totally nonsensical appearances. But our personal favorites were all the stories featuring that ethereal libation, absinthe—these tales usually followed a relentless plot that went something like this: drank some absinthe, had some sex, killed somebody. Can you say stunted imagination? We thought you could.

  But as the weeks became months, and we worked our way through all the hastily-sent “trunk” stories, we began to see better fiction. Most of it arrived by e-mail, with a very small percentage through regular mail, and practically no one requiring the entire manuscript be returned. It seemed like we would sit down every evening to read ten or twelve stories, and every morning, there would be twenty new ones taking their place. It was incredible. We believed we were keeping up by reading submissions every day, but in reality, we began to get buried.

  When we were approaching seven hundred submissions, we still had more than two hundred to read, and we had maybe room for five more stories. We had to push up the submission deadline … or we would never finish close to our original schedule. The plain fact was we’d been overwhelmed by the response. We were reading nothing in our lives other than stories for Borderlands 5, and we were holding up as well as a thatched roof in a monsoon.

  The major reason this became an increasingly more challenging problem? We’d made a commitment to give every submission a fair reading, and make an attempt to provide honest criticism and real reasons why we were rejecting or accepting the story. In case you didn’t realize it, that takes a lot more time than just saying: “sorry, not quite right for us.” (Actually, we did say that in a very small percentage of the cases—only when a story was so completely not right, and we had nothing constructive to say.) Most of the time, we provided our writers with personalized responses, which is more feedback than they usually get.

  Most writers seemed to recognize and appreciate our effort; we received lots of e-mails telling us our rejection notes were some of the most informative and helpful they’d ever received. Of course, we also got some snide responses (usually from veteran writers who assumed all they needed to do was send us anything and we’d accept it [we didn’t]), expressing their disagreement with our editorial opinion. Hey, that’s why America’s a great country .…

  And while we’re doing such a bang-up job of complimenting ourselves, we should also tell you we made it a policy to not read when we were too tired or too distracted; every story deserved our best because we believed every writer had sent us their best. The quality of the writing was, in general, very high. It was the content which usually sank them. We had no idea how many writers would insist on sending us ghost stories … so many we could have easily gathered together a great anthology of nothing but apparitional tales. Maybe we will someday (no, just kidding about that one).

  That’s about it. It’s almost time for the enclosed stories to start speaking for themselves. The essence of all this is pretty simple: the stories in this volume are stories we liked—for whatever reason. We’d like to think we’ve picked up and ran with the rallying cry of earlier volumes that Borderlands is pushing the boundaries of imaginative fiction.

  It’s glad to be back. We hope you feel the same way.

  —Elizabeth Monteleone

  —Tom Monteleone

  Grantham, New Hampshire

  October 31, 2003

  Rami Temporalis

  GARY A. BRAUNBECK

  During the Nineties, Gary A. Braunbeck had quietly become one of the field’s finest writers. His previous appearance in the Borderlands series, “Union Dues,” was a showcase for his talent—especially his ability to capture the range of human emotions so perfectly. In the story which follows, he offers us a gentle tale of wonder and originality.

  “When I face myself I’m surprised to see

  That the man I knew don’t look nothing like me …”

  —John Nitzinger, “Motherlode”

  It started with the woman in the restaurant and her hysterectomy story.

  I was alone in my favorite booth at the Sparta, enjoying the last of my cheeseburger, when I happened to glance up.

  “… and like I said before, she never listens to me—hell, she never listens to anyone when they try to tell her something for her own good. She’s been that way all her life and look what it’s got her.”

  She was at a booth toward the back of the restaurant, while mine was up front on the same side; I sat facing the rear, she facing the front, so she was looking right at me and there was no place to hide.

  “I kept telling her, ‘Sandy, your frame is too small to chance having another baby. You almost didn’t squeeze out little Tyler the first time, there’s no way you can have another one.’ I think she knew I was right but she wasn’t about to have an abortion, not with her Ronnie being the way he is—you know, all manly and pro-life: ‘No wife of mine is going to kill our baby. I’ll not have people gossiping about me like that.’”

  Her tone suggested that the two of us had just resumed a previously-interrupted conversation. For a moment I thought she might be talking to someone seated across from her in the booth, a short person, or even a child—though why anyone would want to speak to a child about abortion was beyond me. I then thought she might be wearing one of those new cell phones, the type which you hang off your ear and have a small fiber-optic microphone, but, no: she was looking at and talking to me.

  “I know she thinks I’m a dip-shit, but that girl has no idea how terrible he treats her. Or maybe she does and figures she ain’t gonna find a better man so she puts up with it for the kids.” She was on the verge of tears. “I mean, Ronnie forced her to have that second baby, even though he knew there was a chance it was going to … y’know, mess up her insides. She almost died. They had to do an emergency Caesarian, and by then she was so tore up there wasn’t no choice but to do a hysterectomy. She’s only twenty-three and now she’ll never be able to have more children—and Sandy loves children. She spoils that Tyler rotten, and she’ll do the same for little Katherine. But she …” The woman leaned forward; secret time. I found myself leaning toward her, as well.

  “… she bleeds a lot sometimes,” she whispered. “Not her period—she don’t have those no more. It’s on account of her still being raw in there from everything. And sex—forget that. She don’t even want to look at Ronnie, let alone share her bed and body with him. But that doesn’t stop him, no sir. If he wants it, he takes it, and who cares if she’s doubled over with cramps and bleeding for two days after. She ain’t a wife to him, she’s just a possession, so to him it ain’t rape. Them kids don’t hardly exist for him at home—oh, if there’s an office party or picnic or something like t
hat, he’s Robert Young on Father Knows Best, but the rest of the time …” She shook her head. “You know, I seen him just today. Walking into the Natoma restaurant with a woman from his office. Had his hand on her ass. ‘Working late on the new contract proposals’ my ass! And after all he’s done to her.”

  “He …” I couldn’t believe I was asking this. “… forces her to … ?”

  “All the time.”

  “My God.” The whole of Sandy’s life suddenly played out in my mind and I felt soul-sick and ineffectual as I witnessed it; Sandy: underto uneducated (as so many young women in this city are), no dreams left, working nine hours a day in some bakery or laundry or grocery store, then coming home to a husband who didn’t much like her and children who—though she might love them and spoil them rotten now—would grow up following Daddy’s example to not much respect her, and before twenty-five she’d be wearing a scarf around her head to cover the prematurely gray hair, read only the saddest stories in the newspaper, and spend any free time she might have watching primetime soap operas and getting twelve pounds heavier with each passing year. I think I’d’ve known her on-sight, no introductions necessary.

  “That poor girl,” I said.

  “Sometimes,” the woman said, “I got half a nerve to just go over there with my truck and tell her to pack herself and the kids up and come stay with me. Maybe I should.”

  “That sounds like a splendid idea.”

  “Does it?” Look at how alive her eyes became when she heard this; goodness me, somebody actually thinks I had a splendid idea.

  She finished her coffee, took the last bite of her apple pie, then gathered up her purse and resolve and walked up to me, her hand extended. “Thank you for listening to me.”