Year's Best Body Horror 2017 Anthology Read online

  I wait a second, wait for her.

  She’s stopped at the foot of her bed.

  She’s looking towards me.

  The door—the open door—still visible behind me.

  Will she notice?

  Will she tell me to close it?

  No.

  Instead, she says, “come on. Now.”

  And just like that she seals her fate.

  She’s quick, too, this girl.

  I look down at my feet, steadying myself, readying myself for what is to come . . . and by the time I look back up she’s completely naked.

  She’s sat up on the bed, pointing towards me.

  “Come here,” she says.

  Foolishly still thinking she’s in control.

  I walk over to the bed, place my hands on her shoulders.

  She starts sucking at the fingers of one hand. Looking up directly into my eyes as she does so. But never once seeing the true intention behind them.

  “Honey,” I say.

  And pull her roughly off the bed, dropping her to her knees on the carpet.

  I see the outrage in her eyes, the sudden fire. But I’ve played scenes like this many times before, and I know just what to say, telling her, “I thought we could work our way up to the bed.”

  It’s the right thing to say, the words driving the fury from her gaze.

  She reaches for me, kneads my pectoral muscles through my shirt, repaying the favour I did for her earlier.

  “I like the sound of that,” she says, and raises herself up to kiss me.

  And finally, the moment is here.

  She thinks, at first, that everything is fine. That I am just a passionate kisser. But then she realises what is happening, and her eyes go wide, and she tries to pull away.

  But can’t.

  “Gmmph!” she cries. “Glmph!”

  It’s at this point that I could almost feel sorry for them.

  But it’s too late for that now.

  The thing inside me forces its way up through my body, emerging from the place near my stomach where it lives. Following the long trail of its tongue which has already come out of my mouth and into hers.

  And now it spews its full black discharge into her.

  She falls back onto the floor, free now, no longer of any use to me.

  “Oh my God,” she says, placing her hands on her hips, already feeling them change from within, the skin stretching and widening. Eyes huge with panic, she looks up at me. “What have you done to me?”

  I back off, wiping my mouth, feeling the thing inside retreat to its usual hiding place. For now.

  “Afraid I lied to you earlier, honey,” I tell her. “Real reason I didn’t want to use the bed is I didn’t want it to break . . .”

  And she balloons in size, becoming a huge, doughy mess of flesh upon the floor.

  “When this happened,” I conclude.

  I step over her, walk towards the door.

  “Sorry, honey,” I say over my shoulder.

  But I’m not.

  Not anymore.

  See, I was her way once.

  Well, not the way she was at the start of the night, when we first met. No, the way she looked when I left her . . . that used to be me.

  I ate everything. More than I could afford. So, when money ran out and I was still hungry, that was when I started raiding bins.

  That was where I found it.

  The thing.

  Looking up from beneath a pile of mouldy food and dirty nappies. Eyes small and beady, set back on a face that looked a little like a crow’s beak. It saw me reaching in to grab a half-eaten hot dog and it said, “what in the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Startled, I could only come up with the truth. “Um . . . looking for something to eat?”

  It looked me over. Which took a while—back then, remember, there was a lot of me to see.

  “Something more to eat, you mean,” it said.

  “Hey,” I said back, prepared to get angry with it.

  But then, all of a sudden, I started to cry.

  I don’t know why. I mean, I’d been doing this for months, and never once had I felt bad about it, accepting my bin-raking activities merely as the way things had to be. But somehow, looking into the thing’s eyes, I saw myself as it saw me, as I guess the whole world saw me. And it hurt a hell of a lot.

  “I’m sorry,” the thing said, sounding sincere.

  I looked at the half of a hotdog in my hand.

  Still full of disgust for what I had become. But also still hungry.

  “What if I showed you a way you didn’t have to eat that?” it said, eyeing the remains of the hotdog. “A way I could control your appetite and give you a normal body?” It paused, and I sensed a strange sort of smile upon its face. “Fuck no, a great body!”

  I looked at the thing.

  And honestly, I was doubtful.

  This sounded like the kind of garbage they spouted non-stop on the Diet Channel. The sort of thing I have believed in before, and been disappointed every time.

  But, you know, what did I really have to lose?

  “Well,” I said, and I think it sensed from the tone of my voice that I was already in, no matter what the thing asked. “I mean, what would I have to do?”

  “Simple,” it said. “Just eat me instead.”

  So I did.

  Only “eat” is not quite the right word.

  In fact, it leapt into my mouth and scurried down my throat and settled in my stomach.

  I was so shocked that I dropped the hotdog.

  Then I puked.

  And puked.

  And puked.

  Next, I staggered back home, wobbling through the streets drunkenly. But I could already feel my body changing, and by the time I got home. . . .

  “Holy shitting shit,” I said, looking at myself in the mirror. “I’m thinner!”

  Sure you are, the thing said, now speaking directly into my mind. Tell you something else – you don’t feel hungry anymore, do you?

  Truth to tell, I had not noticed that.

  But it was true.

  Don’t get me wrong—I wasn’t about to starve myself or anything. What the thing meant was that my appetite was now a normal one . . . that my days of having to rake through bins for extras were at an end.

  That’s right, it told me. But I’m afraid there’s a price to pay. . . .

  And there was.

  I got even more thin, and then I started working out, got buff. But to keep myself that way, every couple of months I had to infect others with the way I once was.

  Didn’t have to be women I infected, of course. But since it took lip-to-lip contact, there was no way I was going to do that with a guy. That’s why I had held myself back earlier tonight, when the girl tried to kiss me—didn’t want her sprouting fat in the middle of the road, where everyone could see it.

  But it’s all taken care of for another few months.

  No need to worry.

  So homewards bound it is.

  Except. . . .

  The door hangs open when I get there.

  That’s not what sets my mental alarms off, though. I mean, for all I know, I left it open, myself, too caught up in the need of finding a new girl to infect to worry much about the security of my home. No, what disturbs me are the shadows I see moving in there—the shadows of people.

  Big people.

  I’m about to retreat when I feel something cold slide into my ribs.

  I look down and see a gun.

  One held by a pudgy hand.

  Each fingernail painted a different colour.

  I remember fingers like that. Though they’d been a lot thinner back then, as they’d slid down my abs to unzip my jeans.

  “Move,” says the owner of the fingernails and the gun. “Inside.”

  I do as I’m told.

  Only now realising that I’m in real trouble.

  It should have been the lights that tipped me off, you see.


  I’d lost track of time—I often do, when I’m out on the hunt. I’d forgotten that it had been daytime when I’d set out. There should have been no lights on inside the house. But they are. And now that I enter, I see that they illuminate several nightmares.

  Women from my past.

  Their names still a mystery—either I never learnt them, like tonight’s victim, or I’ve forgotten them over time. Still, though, I know their faces. Oh, yes. Their bodies, too. Bodies I’ve corrupted. Bodies I’ve made fat.

  Two of them in the room before me.

  “Ladies,” I say, looking between them. “You haven’t changed since we last saw each other.”

  “We can’t,” says one of them, a dark-skinned woman. Once possessing the lithe legs of a pole dancer, she now seems to have no legs at all beneath the blubber. “Whatever you’ve done to us, we’re stuck with it.”

  Just like I used to be.

  “How’d you find me?” I say.

  “I knew you’d ask that,” replies the dancing girl. “I knew you’d think you were smart, moving around the city, picking us all up at separate bars.”

  “Yeah,” agrees the rainbow-nailed one. Frustratingly, she still stands behind me, giving me no chance to go for the gun. “But you can’t hide the things you’ve done.”

  “Yes,” says the third one, a well-spoken, bobbed-haired woman I’d picked up in a university bar, a real posh type who’d unleashed a barrage of gutter talk on the way back to the bedroom floor of her student accommodation. “We found each other online. Then we all staked out bars until we found you.”

  How the hell did I miss people this big?

  “A few other people helped us out,” the student says, as if sensing my thoughts. “So you wouldn’t spot us too early.”

  “We found you in a bar a few weeks ago.” Gun Girl again. “You mustn’t have been successful that night. We followed you here when you left, found out where you lived.”

  “So why the wait?” I ask. Then, twisting the knife a little, point out, “I’ve done a girl tonight. You could have stopped that.”

  This seems to bother the student, who grimaces a little.

  But not the former dancer, who says, “we had to get a couple of things ready for you.”

  “Right,” I say. And I laugh harshly, hating them, hating all three reminders of the me I once was. “So, what you come here for? A cure? Ain’t no cure, girls. There’s just me.” I pat my stomach. “And a little friend of mine.”

  “Good thing that’s not what we’re here for, then,” the voice behind me says.

  Then the gun cracks down across my head and I sink into black.

  I wake up in. . . .

  I don’t know where.

  Some building.

  A sports building, I think.

  There are rows of seating facing me, where an audience can sit. But my three captors can’t use them. Things won’t take their weight. Instead, they stand in front of the first row of seats, watching me.

  I laugh.

  “Do your worst, girls,” I tell them. Then, looking around, realise I am in some sort of ring, a circle of hardened straw surrounding me.

  They say nothing.

  And somehow that angers me most of all.

  “This a wrestling ring?” I say. “Ha! Go ahead! Send in a wrestler! I’ll kiss “em! I don’t like guys but I don’t mind! I’ll turn ‘em all into tubs of guts—just like you!”

  “Like you,” says the student.

  “We found all the old photos,” the dancer adds.

  “Shut up!” I say, screaming it, not wanting to hear them, wanting instead to blot the truth out with my anger. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

  Then I hear footsteps.

  Huge footsteps.

  I think we might be in trouble here, the thing tells me. Or at least you are. When there’s nothing left of you, I’ll just find another body to share. Like I did with all the people that came before you.

  “What?” I say, looking down at my stomach, at its hiding place.

  But it speaks no more.

  And when I look back up, I see that Rainbow Fingers is smirking.

  “Remember I said a couple of people helped us find you?” she says. “Well, one of them is the guy that owns this place. He owed me a favour. And the guys that come here to train . . . well, when I told them what you did—what you are—they really wanted to meet you.”

  “Guys?” I say. “This place?”

  “Ike’s Sumo Ring,” she says.

  And I realise that even if it wanted to, the thing inside me would not be much help here.

  As a dozen Sumo warriors come charging towards me.

  ERUPTION

  By Charlotte Baker

  I run to the bathroom and throw up the remnants of my roast dinner; the carrot was not as digested as I’d have liked. I’d been sick into the basin and I peeled one of my hands free from the cold porcelain to wipe my mouth, covered in liquid sick. The food was contained: no overspill, which was one thing to be thankful for, I suppose. Then, I used my other hand to wipe the sweat from my face.

  God, I hated being sick.

  My body felt on fire and I was getting pain from the blood merely flowing through my veins. I must have been coming down with something, surely. I pulled myself closer to the bathroom mirror, noticing a bloodshot left eye. I pulled my eyelids open, peering into the mirror as a reflection I didn't recognise looked back.

  That’s when it happened.

  The bloodshot moved. The red worm unravelled itself and moved. But when it moved, the one in my eye, so did the fifty or so in my face, rising to the surface like the first tremor of the start of a volcanic eruption.

  I fell backwards, hitting my head on the red-hot towel rail. Falling to the floor, I noticed the hundreds of red worms wriggling under my skin over my entire body. My breathing was loud and raspy. Then, they disappeared as quickly as they came.

  I threw myself to the basin once again and retched repeatedly, from shock. The same sick/sweat wiping ritual began and as I turned my head to the left, Mellissa stood there; her nightie covered in sick, her pupils beaming red and her eyeballs protruding from their sockets. Her skin was all veiny, but instead of the normal blue colours, it was bright red.

  The veins moved. Then stopped, as if they were singing.

  DEVIL’S TEARS

  By Shadrick Beechem

  It was ten minutes after midnight when Freddy saw the headlights of a car turning into the old lot. That was ten minutes too late, Al was never late. Hell, he was always early. This made Freddy uncomfortable. Something was off. But he shook off the weirdness as the El Camino pulled up next to him and both men got out of their vehicles immediately, both engines still running.

  “Jesus man, why the fuck did we have to meet all the way out here? What’s wrong with the back of J’s restaurant like we always do it? And you’re late. I don’t think I’ve ever seen your ass be more than a cunt hair past the hour on getting somewhere,” Freddy said.

  Al instructed him over the phone that the scheduled meet up for this shipment was going to take place out past the old Mayfield airstrip, which was an hour drive on a rough desert road from Freddy’s base of operations in Winona. Albert was in a hurry though, and spoke quickly as he pulled out the boxes from the back of his car.

  “I know, I know, I’m sorry. I’ll explain it to you later, man, but for right now I just need these fuckin things gone. They are hot right now, man, this is some top secret crazy shit right here. Military grade, literally. The shipment got hijacked from a facility in Phoenix just yesterday and this is CIA property, brother. They don’t like having their toys taken from them, not one bit.” As he said this, he pulled out two cases the size of cereal boxes and placed them on the hood of Freddy’s pickup.

  Freddy walked around the front to get a better look, and the headlights of the vehicles briefly illuminated the man’s ruined body. Al caught site of the tightened lumpy scars and pink crevices of old healed
burns that stretched across every exposed inch of Freddy’s body, which included the left side of his face. Al knew about the meth lab explosion that was responsible for this disfigurement, and he also knew about the running joke going on between the small circle of associates he and Freddy had. They had given him the nickname Mr. Krueger, in honor of the infamous dream-invading blade-fingered villain from the eighties. Usually Freddy wore long sleeve T’s, and baseball hats a lot of the time to hide what he could of his disfigurement, but he must’ve not given a shit about appearances tonight, because he was wearing an old white wife beater and letting his long greasy hair down. Al saw more than he wanted. Pretending not to be phased by the gross sight, he got down to business, time was of the essence here.

  “Is that it?” Freddy asked, a hint of disapproval in his voice. He looked at the two small cases, not believing that this could be all he was getting after all this unnecessary precautionary bullshit Al had put him through. Al looked at him and smiled. Then he snapped open both cases. The inside of each case was lined with dense protective foam, and sitting on top of the foam was four vials of a dark purple fluid. There was a small glass dropper next to each vial, along with several orange CAUTION stickers, each bearing the BIOHAZARD logo.

  Freddy picked up one vile and studied it closely with the light of his phone.

  “Carefullllll with that. I know it doesn’t look like much, but trust me, there are over five hundred doses in each vial. It doesn’t take much. This stuff is absolutely insane, man.”

  Freddy looked at Al, then at the vial again, suspicious. “What is it? Does it have a name?”

  “You’re not gonna believe this, man, but this used to be a drug the CIA used as a truth serum in their interrogations. You know, fighting the war on terror and all that shit. They developed a couple different types of hallucinogens to try and get people to fess up about whatever information they were prying out of them when the waterboarding and car battery nipple games didn’t do the trick. Well, this shit right here was discontinued after ten ‘unsuccessful trials’ or some shit like that. Everyone who dosed on it ended up going out of their minds. Almost all of them ended up cutting off a part of their body or doing some kind of fucked up shit to themselves. Six of the ten died from self-inflicted injuries, the other four ended up getting schizophrenia or some shit.”