The Best of the Best Horror of the Year Page 4

  When news came that three Sudanese had been found dead in Calabria, their skins crusted with a cracked glaze of blood, Victor had his six rented Mercedes loaded up with petrol and provisions. They drove out of Cannes before the next dawn. It had been hot on the Mediterranean shore. Inland was worse. Stubby planes droned across the sky trailing plumes of retardant and water that they dropped on fires in the hills.

  Victor stood in the sunny courtyard of La Bastide and told everyone how lucky they were to have gotten away to this refuge before the road from Cannes became clogged with people fleeing the unnerving proximity of the Red Sweat.

  “There’s room for all of us here,” he said (Miriam snapped pictures of his confident stance and broad, chiefly gestures). “Better yet, we’re prepared and we’re safe. These walls are thick and strong. I’ve got a rack of guns downstairs, and we know how to use them. We have plenty of food, and all the water we could want: a spring in the bedrock underneath us feeds sweet, clean water into a well right here inside the walls. And since I didn’t have to store water, we have lots more of everything else!”

  Oh, the drama; already, Miriam told Krista, he was making the movie of all this in his head.

  Nor was he the only one. As the others went off to the quarters B. Bob assigned them, trailing an excited hubbub through the cool, shadowed spaces of the house, those who had brought their camcorders dug them out and began filming on the spot. Victor encouraged them, saying that this adventure must be recorded, that it would be a triumph of photojournalism for the future.

  Privately he told Miriam, “It’s just to keep them busy. I depend on your stills to capture the reality of all this. We’ll have an exhibition later, maybe even a book. You’ve got a good eye, Miriam; and you’ve had experience with crisis in your part of the world, right?”

  “La Bastide” meant “the country house” but the place seemed more imposing than that, standing tall, pale, and alone on a crag above the valley. The outer walls were thick, with stout wooden doors and window-shutters as Victor had pointed out. He had had a wing added on to the back in matching stone. A small courtyard, the one containing the well, was enclosed by walls between the old and new buildings. Upstairs rooms had tall windows and sturdy iron balconies; those on the south side overlooked a French village three kilometers away down the valley.

  Everyone had work to do—scripts to read, write, or revise, phone calls to make and take, deals to work out—but inevitably they drifted into the ground floor salon, the room with the biggest flat-screen TV. The TV stayed on. It showed raging wildfires. Any place could burn in summer, and it was summer most of the year now in southern Europe.

  But most of the news was about the Red Sweat. Agitated people pointed and shouted, their expressions taut with urgency: “Looters came yesterday. Where are the police, the authorities?”

  “We scour buildings for batteries, matches, canned goods.”

  “What can we do? They left us behind because we are old.”

  “We hear cats and dogs crying, shut in with no food or water. We let the cats out, but we are afraid of the dogs; packs already roam the streets.”

  Pictures showed bodies covered with crumpled sheets, curtains, bedspreads in many colors, laid out on sidewalks and in improvised morgues—the floors of school gyms, of churches, of automobile showrooms.

  My God, they said, staring at the screen with wide eyes. Northern Italy now! So close!

  Men carrying guns walked through deserted streets wearing bulky, outlandish protective clothing and face masks. Trucks loaded with relief supplies waited for roads to become passable; survivors mobbed the trucks when they arrived. Dead creatures washed up on shorelines, some human, some not. Men in robes, suits, turbans, military uniforms, talked and talked and talked into microphones, reassuring, begging, accusing, weeping.

  All this had been building for months, of course, but everyone in Cannes had been too busy to pay much attention. Even now at La Bastide they seldom talked about the news. They talked about movies. It was easier.

  Miriam watched TV a lot. Sometimes she took pictures of the screen images. The only thing that could make her look away was a shot of an uncovered body, dead or soon to be so, with a film of blood dulling the skin.

  On Victor’s orders, they all ate in the smaller salon, without a TV.

  On the third night, Krista asked, “What will we eat when this is all gone?”

  “I got boxes of that paté months ago.” Bulgarian Bob smiled and stood back with his arms folded, like a waiter in a posh restaurant. “Don’t worry, there’s plenty more.”

  “My man,” said Victor, digging into his smoked Norwegian salmon.

  Next day, taking their breakfast coffee out on the terrace, they saw military vehicles grinding past on the roadway below. Relief convoys were being intercepted now, the news had said, attacked and looted.

  “Don’t worry, little Mi,” B. Bob said, as she took snaps of the camouflage-painted trucks from the terrace. “Victor bought this place and fixed it up in the Iranian crisis. He thought we had more war coming. We’re set for a year, two years.”

  Miriam grimaced. “Where food was stored in my country, that is where gunmen came to steal,” she said.

  B. Bob took her on a tour of the marvelous security at La Bastide, all controlled from a complicated computer console in the master suite: the heavy steel-mesh gates that could be slammed down, the metal window shutters, the ventilation ducts with their electrified outside grills.

  “But if the electricity goes off?” she asked.

  He smiled. “We have our own generators here.”

  After dinner that night Walter entertained them. Hired as Victor’s Tae Kwan Do coach, he turned out to be a conservatory-trained baritone.

  “No more opera,” Victor said, waving away an aria. “Old country songs for an old country house. Give us some ballads, Walter!”

  Walter sang “Parsley Sage”, “Barbara Ellen”, and “The Golden Vanity”.

  This last made Miriam’s eyes smart. It told of a young cabin boy who volunteered to swim from an outgunned warship to the enemy vessel and sink it, single-handed, with an augur; but his Captain would not let him back on board afterward. Rather than hole that ship too and so drown not just the evil Captain but his own innocent shipmates, the cabin boy drowned himself: “he sank into the lowland, low and lonesome, sank into the lowland sea.”

  Victor applauded. “Great, Walter, thanks! You’re off the hook now, that’s enough gloom and doom. Tragedy tomorrow—comedy tonight!”

  They followed him into the library, which had been fitted out with a big movie screen and computers with game consoles. They settled down to watch Marx Brothers movies and old romantic comedies from the extensive film library of La Bastide. The bodyguards stayed up late, playing computer games full of mayhem. They grinned for Miriam’s camera lens.

  In the hot and hazy afternoon next day, a green mini-Hummer appeared on the highway. Miriam and Krista, bored by a general discussion about which gangster movie had the most swear words, were sitting on the terrace painting each other’s toenails. The Hummer turned off the roadway, came up the hill, and stopped at La Bastide’s front gates. A man in jeans, sandals, and a white shirt stepped out on the driver’s side.

  It was Paul, a writer hired to ghost Victor’s autobiography. The hot, cindery wind billowed his sleeve as he raised a hand to shade his eyes.

  “Hi, girls!” he called. “We made it! We actually had to go off-road, you wouldn’t believe the traffic around the larger towns! Where’s Victor?”

  Bulgarian Bob came up beside them and stood looking down.

  “Hey, Paul,” he said. “Victor’s sleeping; big party last night. What can we do for you?”

  “Open the gates, of course! We’ve been driving for hours!”

  “From Cannes?”

  “Of course from Cannes!” cried Paul heartily. “Some Peruvian genius won the Palme D’Or, can you believe it? But maybe you haven’t heard—the jury made
a special prize for Hearts of Light. We have the trophy with us—Cammie’s been holding it all the way from Cannes.”

  Cameron jumped out of the car and held up something bulky wrapped in a towel. She wore party clothes: a sparkly green dress and chunky sandals that laced high on her plump calves. Miriam’s own thin, straight legs shook a little with the relief of being up here, on the terrace, and not down there at the gates.

  Bulgarian Bob put his big hand gently over the lens of her camera. “Not this,” he murmured.

  Cameron waved energetically and called B. Bob’s name, and Miriam’s, and even Krista’s (everyone knew that she hated Krista).

  Paul stood quietly, staring up. Miriam had to look away.

  B. Bob called, “Victor will be very happy about the prize.”

  Krista whispered, “He looks for blood on their skin; it’s too far to see, though, from up here.” To Bob she said, “I should go tell Victor?”

  B. Bob shook his head. “He won’t want to know.”

  He turned and went back inside without another word. Miriam and Krista took their bottles of polish and their tissues and followed.

  Victor (and, therefore, everyone else) turned a deaf ear to the pleas, threats, and wails from out front for the next two days. A designated “security team” made up of bodyguards and mechanics went around making sure that La Bastide was locked up tight.

  Victor sat rocking on a couch, eyes puffy. “My God, I hate this; but they were too slow. They could be carrying the disease. We have a responsibility to protect ourselves.”

  Next morning the Hummer and its two occupants had gone.

  Television channels went to only a few hours a day, carrying reports of the Red Sweat in Paris, Istanbul, Barcelona. Nato troops herded people into make-shift “emergency” camps: schools, government buildings, and of course that trusty standby of imprisonment and death, sports arenas.

  The radio and news sites on the web said more: refugees were on the move everywhere. The initial panicky convulsion of flight was over, but smaller groups were reported rushing this way and that all over the continent. In Eastern Europe, officials were holed up in mountain monasteries and castles, trying to subsist on wild game. Urbanites huddled in the underground malls of Canadian cities. When the Red Sweat made its lurid appearance in Montreal, it set off a stampede for the countryside.

  They said monkeys carried it; marmots; stray dogs; stray people. Ravens, those eager devourers of corpses, must carry the disease on their claws and beaks, or they spread it in their droppings. So people shot at birds, dogs, rodents, and other people.

  Krista prayed regularly to two little wooden icons she kept with her. Miriam had been raised pagan with a Christian gloss. She did not pray. God had never seemed further away.

  After a screaming fight over the disappearance of somebody’s stash of E, a sweep by the security squad netted a hoard of drugs. These were locked up, to be dispensed only by Bulgarian Bob at set times.

  “We have plenty of food and water,” Victor explained, “but not an endless supply of drugs. We don’t want to run through it all before this ends, do we?” In compensation he was generous with alcohol, with which La Bastide’s cellar was plentifully stocked. When his masseuse (she was diabetic) and one of the drivers insisted on leaving to fend for themselves and their personal requirements outside, Victor did not object.

  Miriam had not expected a man who had only ever had to act like a leader onscreen to exercise authority so naturally in real life.

  It helped that his people were not in a rebellious mood. They stayed in their rooms playing cards, sleeping, some even reading old novels from the shelves under the window seats downstairs. A running game of trivia went on in the games room (“Which actors have played which major roles in green body make-up?”). People used their cell phones to call each other in different parts of the building, since calls to the outside tended not to connect (when they did, conversations were not encouraging).

  Nothing appeared on the television now except muay thai matches from Thailand, but the radio still worked: “Fires destroyed the main hospital in Marseilles; fire brigades did not respond. Refugees from the countryside who were sheltering inside are believed dead.”

  “Students and teachers at the university at Bologna broke into the city offices but found none of the food and supplies rumored to be stored there.”

  Electricity was failing now over many areas. Victor decreed that they must only turn on the modern security system at night. During daylight hours they used the heavy old locks and bolts on the thick outer doors. B. Bob posted armed lookouts on the terrace and on the roof of the back wing. Cell phones were collected, to stop them being recharged to no good purpose.

  But the diesel fuel for Victor’s vastly expensive, vastly efficient German generators suddenly ran out (it appeared that the caretaker of La Bastide had sold off much of it during the previous winter). The ground floor metal shutters that had been locked in place by electronic order at nightfall could not be reopened.

  Unexpectedly, Victor’s crew seemed glad to be shut in more securely. They moved most activities to the upper floor of the front wing, avoiding the shuttered darkness downstairs. They went to bed earlier to conserve candles. They partied in the dark.

  The electric pumps had stopped, but an old hand-pump at the basement laundry tubs was rigged to draw water from the well into the pipes in the house. They tore up part of the well yard in the process, getting dust everywhere, but in the end they even got a battered old boiler working over a wood-fire in the basement. A bath rota was eagerly subscribed to, although Alicia, the wig-girl, was forbidden to use hot water to bathe her Yorkie any more.

  Victor rallied his troops that evening. He was not a tall man but he was energetic and his big, handsome face radiated confidence and determination. “Look at us—we’re movie people, spinners of dreams that ordinary people pay money to share! Who needs a screening room, computers, TV? We can entertain ourselves, or we shouldn’t be here!”

  Sickly grins all around, but they rose at once to his challenge.

  They put on skits, plays, take-offs of popular TV shows. They even had concerts, since several people could play piano or guitar well and Walter was not the only one with a good singing voice. Someone found a violin in a display case downstairs, but no one knew how to play that. Krista and the youngest of the cooks told fortunes, using tea leaves and playing cards from the game room. The fortunes were all fabulous.

  Miriam did not think about the future. She occupied herself taking pictures. One of the camera men reminded her that there would be no more recharging of batteries now; if she turned off the LCD screen on the Canon G9 its picture-taking capacity would last longer. Most of the camcorders were already dead from profligate over-use.

  It was always noisy after sunset now; people fought back this way against the darkness outside the walls of La Bastide. Miriam made ear plugs out of candle wax and locked her bedroom door at night. On an evening of lively revels (it was Walter’s birthday party) she quietly got hold of all the keys to her room that she knew of, including one from Bulgarian Bob’s set. B. Bob was busy at the time with one of the drivers, as they groped each other urgently on the second floor landing.

  There was more sex now, and more tension. Fistfights erupted over a card game, an edgy joke, the misplacement of someone’s plastic water bottle. Victor had Security drag one pair of scuffling men apart and hustle them into the courtyard.

  “What’s this about?” he demanded.

  Skip Reiker panted, “He was boasting about some Rachman al Haj concert he went to! That guy is a goddamn A-rab, a crazy damn Muslim!”

  “Bullshit!” Sam Landry muttered, rubbing at a red patch on his cheek. “Music is music.”

  “Where did the god damned Sweat start, jerk? Africa!” Skip yelled. “The ragheads passed it around among themselves for years, and then they decided to share it. How do you think it spread to Europe? They brought it here on purpose, poisoning the food a
nd water with their contaminated spit and blood. Who could do that better than musicians ‘on tour’?”

  “Asshole!” hissed Sam. “That’s what they said about the Jews during the Black Plague, that they’d poisoned village wells! What are you, a Nazi?”

  “Fucker!” Skip screamed.

  Miriam guessed it was withdrawal that had him so raw; coke supplies were running low, and many people were having a bad time of it.

  Victor ordered Bulgarian Bob to open the front gates.

  “Quit it, right now, both of you,” Victor said, “or take it outside.”

  Everyone stared out at the dusty row of cars, the rough lawn, and the trees shading the weedy driveway as it corkscrewed downhill toward the paved road below. The combatants slunk off, one to his bed and the other to the kitchen to get his bruises seen to.

  Jill, Cameron’s hair stylist, pouted as B. Bob pushed the heavy front gates shut again. “Bummer! We could have watched from the roof, like at a joust.”

  B. Bob said, “They wouldn’t have gone out. They know Victor won’t let them back in.”

  “Why not?” said the girl. “Who’s even alive out there to catch the Sweat from anymore?”

  “You never know.” B. Bob slammed the big bolts home. Then he caught Jill around her pale midriff, made mock-growling noises, and swept her back into the house. B. Bob was good at smoothing ruffled feathers. He needed to be. Tensions escalated. It occurred to Miriam that someone at La Bastide might attack her, just for being from the continent on which the disease had first appeared. Mike Bellows, a black script doctor from Chicago, had vanished the weekend before; climbed the wall and ran away, they said.

  Miriam saw how Skip Reiker, a film editor with no film to edit now, stared at her when he thought she wasn’t looking. She had never liked Mike Bellows, who was an arrogant and impatient man; perhaps Skip had liked him even less, and had made him disappear.