Norman Partridge
Bloody Mary
The boy never goes out in daylight.
Oh, he could, and some do… but he doesn’t. Maybe that’s why he is still alive. He holes up in crawlspaces during the day. There are five houses he uses in rotation, all abandoned, none occupied by the dead or the living. As the world spins and sunlight and shadows travel the rooftops of his little town, he listens for a floorboard creak that doesn’t belong, hoping he won’t be discovered by the familiar boogeymen that have made this world their own since the dawning of 10/31—werewolves and witches, mummies and zombies, and other nameless things the boy would rather never see.
The boy isn’t very large. The way things are these days, he figures that’s a plus. He is less of a target at night, and for this reason he has come to trust the darkness. Strange to trust darkness in a world overrun with nightmares… but that’s the way it is.
It is not an exciting life. At night, the boy forages. He clings to the black spaces, shunning lightning flash and Jack o’ Lantern glow. During the day, he matches his silence with stillness. Occasionally, he dozes. Mostly, he spends his time with a flashlight and books, or sometimes a magazine. He likes the old ones with gory covers and pictorial articles about monsters, because they teach him secrets about the things he wants to avoid. On cold days he waits among wall studs and insulation, and on hot days he tucks himself next to cool concrete foundation. He lurks between sour earth and floorboards that rarely creak with tread inhuman or human, and he moves little or not at all, and he reads and learns, and he waits for night.
He waits until the pumpkins start to scream.
The pumpkins sit on porches. They sit there night and day. Some of them for years now. The ones that survived grew and thrived in ways that most pumpkins don’t, while the others rotted long ago. After the first calendar page was left unturned in the wake of 10/31, those ordinary pumpkins began the fast slide from orange to black. Within days their mouths were choked with cobwebs of mold. Within weeks their eyes collapsed into noses and their grins sagged into rotten frowns, as if with some strange withering disease. The ones that didn’t sluice away in the first rains petrified long ago. Those that remain are dry mummified memories of a world that no longer exists, as much a part of ancient history as candy, and costumes, and the idea of trick or treat itself.
But those other pumpkins, the ones that thrived—
They also sit on porches, but like sentinels. Survivors call them Jacks. They gleam, as if freshly waxed at the pumpkin patch. Razor teeth bear the dewy shine of pumpkin-sap, giving the illusion that a carving knife had touched them only seconds before. And they scream just as twilight disappears, a signal to the new masters of this bleak world as surely as a cockcrow once marked time for those who trod an older and brighter one.
But the Jacks are quiet in the daylight, unless something gives them cause not to be. Something like a cat. The Jacks like cats. And this particular Jack, waiting unnoticed on a porch, is no different.
But this particular cat is wary. It knows things have changed. This suburban block, its entire world. The family that cared for it is gone, and the place that was once its home is now a hovel for a brutish monster that (long ago) bashed out doors along with the frames which held them in order to accommodate its bulk. Just down the block, that creature sleeps (in daylight) on a pile of mattresses heaped on the sagging living room floor. Were the cat to scent those mattresses, it could still identify a faint trace of its owners. But then again, it would also scent them on a pile of gnawed bones long forgotten in one corner of the kitchen.
But the cat has survived, though there is much that has disappeared from its world and its memory. It has forgotten its own name, and other once-familiar behavioral triggers are buried so deeply they might as well be forgotten — the vacuum snap of a cat-food can opening, the heady scent of a catnip mouse, the rhythmic music of its own purr.
But some memories and some triggers — the enduring kind — have kept the cat alive, and one of those is still familiar, even in this new world.
That is the scent of a rat.
A hard fist of hunger swells in the cat’s belly as it creeps toward a fat knothole in the sagging porch. Its green eyes spy rat droppings along the railing that borders the hole, along with threads of gray-black hair around the splintered edges of the hole itself.
Close enough now, and still crouching, the cat waits for a meal to appear. It will wait a long time if it has to, but the watcher behind it will not wait. The Jack is ready for a meal, too. The cat has not even noticed it, for the huge pumpkin seems nothing more than an inanimate object. The Jack’s jaws gape silently, stretching into a spiked cavern of a maw. And it is only when that spiked cavern yawns wide that the cat becomes aware. Not of danger. For the cat is only aware of a meaty smell more enticing than a rat, a sudden scent that makes its stomach rumble in a way even the largest rat never could. Yes. This is a scent that stirs very old memories. It’s a T-bone fresh out of the butcher paper kind of scent, and it triggers a hardwired feline response.
The animal turns, just a little dizzily, ready to pounce on the prize. Already half-hypnotized as so many other animals have been by the Jacks, the cat is just about to spring directly into the mouth of the creature which has lured it when—
A young woman shouts: “Bad kitty! SCAT!”
The cat springs from the porch, not even seeing the shadowy figure sitting on a garden swing a dozen yards away. The Jack sees that figure clearly, eyes brightening to fiery red in seconds, gaping jaws ready to scream an alarm. But in this moment seconds might as well be hours, because this game is played much, much faster.
“Jack be nimble, Jack be quick,” the young woman says. “Or not.”
She fires a sawed-off shotgun.
The Jack disappears along with a fat circle of wall.
The Remington’s recoil bucks the swing backwards, and the young woman laughs as she takes a little ride. Back and forth, back and forth. Meaty orange guts drip down the ventilated wall, and the swing rocks some more as the Jack expires. And the chain creaks for a while, and the woman laughs for a while, and then both sounds are gone at the same time.
A few final splats on the porch, and all is quiet. The young woman sets the sawed-off shotgun on the swing, within easy reach. There’s room for two here on the old-fashioned glider, but she’s a solo rider. At least she has been until now. Just her and her pal Remington. That’s the way this ride goes, and every ride she’s taken for the last year, since the dawn of 10/31.
It used to be different, of course. Used to be… for a lot of people. And lately she’s been thinking. Just lately she can’t stop wondering if maybe, just maybe it would be easier if she wasn’t alone. Not the way she used to play it in that other world before this one. But different this time. Different, like—
No. The woman shakes the thought away. She doesn’t like to think. Not too much. That causes trouble, stirs things up. Old things and new things. So she looks around instead. There’s no sign of movement. The cat is gone. All that’s left is her wheelbarrow parked next to the swing. It’s heaped with her belongings, and she rises long enough to burrow into a canvas sack and dig out a can of Friskies.
The young woman figures the cat will return if she gives it a reason. Pop. Whisper. There’s a faded fluorescent green Frisbee hiding in the dead weeds of what used to be the front lawn, and she snags it without getting scratched by prickles. She fishes a clasp knife out of her pocket and opens the blade. By the time she’s emptied half the cat food onto the Frisbee, the scrawny black furball is poking its head around the weather-beaten front gate.