Year's Best Weird Fiction: 1 by Barron Laird & Kelly Michael

Author:Barron, Laird & Kelly, Michael
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780981317762
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2014-08-25T16:00:00+00:00

Anderson was frying two steaks for himself—wanting to use up whatever he had in his fridge before a power loss descended, rather than have to throw food away later—when peripherally he thought he saw a face surface through the shifting pool of interference framed in his computer monitor. He snapped his attention in that direction.

He had shut off his TV, but not his computer, though its volume had remained muted. After some more attempts to go online, he had left a window open. A feed of restless nothingness. As he stared directly at the monitor now, he saw nothing changed. For all its crackling and popping activity, it was as inactive as a gravestone slate blown up to the highest magnification, its molecules electrified yet bound.

Just his imagination, he decided, superimposing structure on chaos. Meaning on the meaningless.

And then he heard a woman scream.

It was out in the hallway. It had made Anderson jump. This time he rushed to his kitchen door and flung it open before he could consider that he might be exposing himself to some danger . . . or at the very least, to a problem that had nothing to do with him. But the wild, panicky crying that followed the initial cry drew him into the hallway and toward its source: the vestibule of the apartment building’s front entrance.

On either side of him, the hallway’s walls were plastered with broad trowel strokes, giving them the look of being covered in dirty cake frosting. A number of brown doors interrupted the hall throughout its length. They tended to seal certain odors in the spaces between them. One section might smell enticingly of hamburger cooking for some Mexican dish or other. Another section might smell of incense. This one stank of trapped cigarette smoke, even though smoking was supposed to be against the rules for tenants. At least it beat the chemical fumes that wafted down from the apartment upstairs sometimes. Another tenant had confided to Anderson he believed the young couple up there had a meth lab going.

Anderson pushed through the door before the short set of steps that took one up to ground level and the front vestibule. This was like a little airlock, a cramped telephone-booth space between two glass doors. Within it, on either side, were the apartments’ tiny mailboxes. And standing in this tight space, her hands pressed to the glass of the outermost door like suction cups, was one of the female tenants who had tested Anderson on his Spanish. She was still sobbing, staring out into the night.

“Hey,” he asked her, “are you okay?”

The short, stocky woman whipped around to face him. Her eyes were ballooned with frenzy, and she started babbling in Spanish, pointing through the glass. “Mi marido desaparecido!”

“Slow down,” Anderson told her, “I don’t understand you . . . uh, no lo entiendo.”

The woman took hold of Anderson’s forearm, still pointing behind her at the outer glass door. “My friends . . . my friends from Apartment 18, upstairs, they went outside to see what was going on.

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