Carniepunk Page 15

  He stabbed the tip of the shovel into the earth. “Would you like to do it?”

  “No.” Annie raised her gaze and met his stare. “I just want you to do it properly.”

  Something popped inside Brad’s chest. His hands tightened around the wooden handle and he imagined the satisfying crunch of metal on skull.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” Annie shied back. “Stop it.”

  Brad shook himself and let the shovel fall to the ground. “You stop,” he whispered. “Just stop.”

  “You’re wasting time. Bury the bitch so we can go home.”

  “Do it yourself.” The shovel hit the ground with a thud. “I’m done digging for you, Annie. Do you hear me? I’m done!”

  She rose from her seat and crossed her arms. “If you hadn’t brought me here in the first place, there wouldn’t be a grave to dig, you idiot.”

  Brad realized with sudden clarity that Annie was like one of those fun-house mirrors. When he looked at her, she reflected back a distorted version of him. One that was weak and helpless without her.

  “Valentina couldn’t give you what you wanted,” he said, almost to himself. “So I will.”

  With that, Brad turned and walked away.

  “Brad! What are you doing? Get back here and finish this job! Brad?”

  With each step he took away from Annie, his posture straightened a little more, each breath came a little easier, his smile grew a little wider.

  “Goddammit, Brad, you get back here or I’ll . . . I’ll . . . Brad!”

  When he reached the front of the tent, the audience had all disappeared. He found Drude by a line of motorized gypsy wagons.

  “No one remembers a thing,” the hunchback said. “Some even demanded their money back because the show was canceled.”

  Brad smiled and nodded. In the distance he could just hear Annie’s shrill shrieks coming from behind the tent. “What are you all going to do?”

  All the former freaks had formed a loose circle around the pair. Their faces were somber, but there was also palpable excitement in the air.

  “Carnival life is all we know,” Drude said with a shrug. “We’ll carry on with a new name.” He smiled and winked. “And all new acts, of course.”

  Brad nodded. “You got room for one more?”

  A murmur rose up from the other performers. Nicole, the former mermaid, smiled shyly at him, and Brad felt a stirring in his center.

  Drude held up a hand to silence the group. “You got any skills?”

  Brad thought about it for a moment. “Don’t mind getting my hands dirty.” He held up his callused hands. “I’m not the fastest learner, but as long as you don’t make me clean up after any animals, I’ll do any job you give me.”

  Drude smiled. “Hop in.”

  Five minutes later, the caravan rolled out. Brad looked out the back of the last wagon in the line and watched the dirt-smeared, pissed-off woman come around the tent. She dragged the shovel behind her. When she looked up and saw her husband in the back of the van, she screamed, “Brad!”

  He smiled and blew a kiss at the woman he used to worship. “Good-bye, Werewife,” he whispered.

  Annie raised her face and howled her rage at the waning moon.

  “The Cold Girl”

  Rachel Caine

  It took me two days to die. On the first night, I met Madame Laida, and on the second night, I met the Cold Girl.

  And this is how it happened.

  This is me. I’m Kiley. I’m sixteen, and I have good taste in clothes and mostly crap taste in boys; I’m kinda pretty, I guess, but that never mattered really, because I’ve been in love since I was about eight with Jamie Pierson.

  Oh, Jamie’s pretty, too, in that boy kind of way: glossy black hair, really blue eyes, perfect skin. When he first smiled at me, I fell head over heels in love. It took me about two years to convince him to even hold hands with me, but by twelve we were kissing, and by fourteen we were officially In Love, with all the doves and bells ringing and sparkles from heaven. Cue the music, bring up the credits, the story’s over and we all live happily ever after.

  Or at least, I thought that was the story. I mean, not that my friends didn’t try to tell me. Marina, she was my best friend until I was fifteen, but we had a blowup slap fight about Jamie and how he was treating me. I thought she just didn’t understand him. I thought she was a liar when she said he was a douchebag. By then, Marina was my last friend; everybody else had already shrugged, moved on, figured me for a lost cause.

  Smithfield isn’t exactly a metropolis; it’s stuck in the middle of nowhere, and any kind of diversion is welcome. Still, the arrival of a creaky, ancient carnival was something new. I’d thought Smithfield had long been scratched off all the traveling-show lists, but this one looked to be just barely surviving anyway. Even the flyers for it posted around town looked old, not just in design, but even the paper they were printed on.

  Still, some of us didn’t care about quality; when word went around school that day that a carnival was setting up outside of town, the quality of the entertainment was the last thing on our minds. We just wanted a good time: some cotton candy, some rides, some screams, some cheesy fun.

  At least, I did. And I texted Jamie instantly from my last class of the day. CRNVL 2NITE?

  And Jamie texted back thirty seconds later: Y.

  So. It was a date.

  I called my mom to tell her that I wouldn’t be home until late because I was going to the movies with Marina. (She never checked; she just assumed that once a friend, always a friend, and I was careful to never use Marina for anything that would bring on awkward parental phone calls.) Mom didn’t worry. You didn’t much in Smithfield. Little town, comfortable, boring, nothing ever going on here, right? Why do you care if your sixteen-year-old goes to the movies with a friend?

  You don’t.

  But I’m here to tell you . . . maybe you should.

  School let out at 3:30, but I had band practice after, so it wasn’t until 5:00 when I was at the curb, and the late fall afternoon was getting crisply cool by the time Jamie rolled up in his car. It was black, and shiny, but it wasn’t new—he just loved it more than anything else in his life, except (I supposed) me. I put my clarinet in the backseat, on the floorboard, because he’d yelled at me before when I’d put it on the seat (“You’ll scuff up the leather, what’s wrong with you?”) and ducked into the passenger side.

  “Hey,” I said, and he bent over for a quick, almost nonexistent kiss.

  “Hey,” he said. “Let’s go, the guys are already there.”

  I didn’t know it then, but Jamie was already bored stupid with me, his dumb grade-school crush, and I was too in love to notice. He hardly even looked at me; his attention was on the road as he roared out of the parking lot and onto the street before I’d even had a chance to buckle my seat belt. I did it quick, because I knew the local cops would be on the lookout for anything Jamie did wrong; they didn’t like him. I didn’t understand why—he was such a good guy!

  Stupid, I know, right?

  Smithfield was a six-stoplight town in any direction from the school, which was more or less in the center. At each stoplight, instead of talking to me or even glancing at me, Jamie pulled out his cell phone and would watch . . . something. I couldn’t see what it was because he had some kind of privacy screen filter over the screen, so you had to be looking straight on to see what was displayed. He was smiling, though, and it wasn’t a nice smile. It was tight, hard, and a little disturbing.

  I tried, though. “Hey, how was your biology class? Did you pass the test?”

  “You could say that,” he said, and the smirk got deeper. “Even though Mr. Harrison doesn’t think so. Dumbass.”

  “So . . . you didn’t pass?”

  “I got a D. Good enough.”

  A grade of D wasn’t passing, and he knew it, but he just shrugged as if it didn’t matter. And he kept on smiling.

  Dropping the phone on the
seat between us (it was one of those long bench seats, the way old cars sometimes have), he gunned it when the light shifted to green. I had taken my phone out too. We had matching ones—isn’t that sweet?—except mine had a little crystal dangle on it. Suddenly he hit the brakes hard and I yelped, dropped my phone, and grabbed for the dashboard as the seat belt slammed hard against my chest. His phone slid off the seat and fell, too, bouncing on the floorboard.

  “Shit!” Jamie spat, and tried to fish around for it beneath the wheel. “Get it, Kiley!”

  He’d braked for some old grandma who was going twenty in a thirty that he’d been blasting through at fifty, so now he whipped the wheel hard over and roared past the other car. He didn’t flip her off, but I could see he thought about it.

  I unlocked my seat belt and crawled under the dash. Two phones. I grabbed them both and backed out, settled back in the seat, and buckled up.

  Oh, no.

  “Um . . .” I showed Jamie his phone. A giant crack ran across it, like lightning. He cussed—a lot—and slammed his hand into the dashboard; his face got very red, and then, suddenly, he got real quiet. He took the phone and put it in his jacket pocket.

  “I’ll sync it up when I get home,” he said. “No problem.”

  “Okay.” My voice sounded small. He scared me when he was angry, but this was almost as bad. All of a sudden switching from fury to utter calm? Weird, and wrong. I fumbled for something to make it sound better.

  “You know, they can get stuff off your phone at the store, import your contacts and transfer—”

  “I just need my photos and vids,” he said. “All the rest of it is bullshit anyway. Contacts?” Jamie laughed, and it sounded bitter. “Jesus, Kiley. How many people do we know, anyway? How hard is it to keep track in this ass crack of a town?”

  Well, he was kind of right about that. I only had maybe five people in my contacts these days, since I’d deleted Marina. I’d thought he had lots, though. Jamie was popular, right? He seemed to be, anyway, but I guessed over the last year maybe not as much.

  Like me.

  I shut up, because Jamie clearly wasn’t in any mood to hear me try to make things better. I hastily shoved my own phone into my pocket and sat quietly for the next few blocks and stoplights.

  Finally, we were out of town, into empty flatlands. The carnival was in the empty parking lot of a long-shut-down superstore, and in the falling night you could see the glow of the flashing lights a long ways off. Traffic wasn’t much to speak of in Smithfield, but there were more cars on the road than I’d expected, and they were all heading to the same place we were.

  Jamie turned the car into the parking lot and found a spot near the back, in the dark. He always parked out of the way. No door dings that way. I unbuckled and scrambled out of the car, but by the time I’d emerged he was already six steps ahead of me, walking toward the registration booth.

  The flashing multicolored lights (some were burned out) distracted from the overall crappy look of the booth; the red-and-yellow canvas was dirty, the countertop was cracked and ancient, the plastic shield was scratched, and the middle-aged woman sitting on the other side really needed to lay off the red hair dye. That, and the way-too-heavy makeup, made her look desperate.

  So did the way she eyed my boyfriend—like she knew him, or at least had expected him. She got this strange little smile . . . and then she turned her head and looked at me, and her eyes—I could have sworn they changed color. Just for a second.

  I stepped closer to him and took his hand, but he shook me off impatiently and reached for his wallet. He asked how much and the woman pointed at the sign pasted on the plastic as if she was way too exhausted to answer that stupid question one more time. Jamie peeled off bills and passed them over and got a couple of strings of generic tear-off tickets in return. He handed me some, turned, and walked into the carnival. I could tell he was still pissed off about the phone, but honestly, it hadn’t been my fault, it hadn’t.

  It only took about half an hour before we ran out of tickets, because the prices on the skeevy games were ridiculous, and I’d wanted to ride the Ferris wheel so Jamie would have a chance to kiss me (he didn’t). After that, Jamie went off to buy more tickets. He was gone a long time, long enough that I bought myself a hot chocolate and sat down at one of the splintered wooden tables set up next to the concession stand.

  “Hey,” said a tentative voice.

  I looked up. There was a boy standing there. I knew him, I guess; he looked familiar, anyway, but there wasn’t really much to recognize about him. A round, bland sort of face, nothing to make you pay much attention.

  “Hey,” I replied, and got out my phone, just in case I was going to need to look busy.

  “Um, I’m Matt. I’m in your English class,” he said. “You’re Kiley, right? Just wanted to say hi.”

  “Hi.” I felt strange about this, and worried—not about the boy, about Jamie coming back and finding him here. “Sorry, um, I have to get this.”

  I pretended to get a call and held the phone up to my ear. The kid probably knew it was a lie, and rude, but he just nodded, put his hands in his pockets, and walked off, head down.

  I felt a little bad about it, but truthfully, he shouldn’t be talking to me. Jamie didn’t like it when boys came around, even if they were harmless.

  Since I had the phone out anyway, I figured I’d better check my messages. I turned it on and felt a weird, almost world-shifting shock.

  This wasn’t my phone.

  I didn’t realize it at first . . . I expected to see my apps and background, but instead I got sports scores and game apps and a pinup-girl background.

  This was Jamie’s phone.

  I understood then: somehow the dangle that should have been there had snapped off my phone when it fell in the car. My phone had been the one that had broken, and I’d picked up Jamie’s by accident.

  Well, he would be happy, I thought, that his phone was okay after all. Mine was no big loss.

  I waited for him to come back, but he didn’t. I knew his swipe code. He hadn’t shared it with me, but I’d seen him put it in often enough on the keypad.

  As I entered the numbers slowly, I still wasn’t sure I wanted to do this.

  His phone accepted the passcode. I waited some more.

  Eventually, though I knew it was wrong, I couldn’t resist looking through his call lists—you know, to see who else might have been calling and texting him.

  Boring. His besties, mostly. Nothing drama-worthy.

  He did have a lot of pictures and video on there, which was what he’d been so worried about losing. I thought at first the pictures were of me, and some were—but not all of them.

  Some were of girls I didn’t know.

  I hesitated over the first video, my heart pounding now, the aftertaste of hot chocolate turning sour in my mouth.

  I shouldn’t, I thought. He’ll kill me.

  But I had to do it. I had to know if he was cheating on me.

  The girl in the video looked like me, kind of—dirty-blond hair caught up in a messy knot at the back of her neck. The video showed her laughing and teasing whoever was holding the camera, and then the phone got put down, angled, and Jamie slipped onto the screen with her.

  Kissing her.

  I felt sick and dizzy, and almost shut off the phone.

  Maybe I should have. Maybe if I had, none of this would have happened . . . but maybe that would have actually been worse, in the end.

  I sat there with my cooling hot cocoa on the table in front of me, rooted to the spot, holding his phone with both hands as I watched him kiss this nameless blond whore, and I wanted to kill her for trying to take him away from me because I needed Jamie, I needed him. . . .

  And then Jamie put his hands around her neck and started to squeeze.

  I honestly thought it was a joke, or something kinky, I really did. I thought: maybe it was some amateur movie or something, and it was all just acting, and at the end they’d laug
h and it would all be okay.

  But I couldn’t believe that, not really. For one thing, the camera stayed on the girl’s face, and she was scared. Really scared. Her skin turned redder, redder; her eyes got bigger and bloodshot; and she clawed at Jamie’s hands and wrists, slapped at him weakly, and her eyes rolled up in her head so they were all white, and he kept on choking her—tighter, tighter, and her mouth was open and her tongue was swollen and purple. . . .

  And then, right when I knew she was dead, he let her fall back. And he laughed. And started stripping off her clothes.

  Like undressing a doll. Like posing one too.

  And then he unzipped his jeans and knelt down.

  And I couldn’t help it. I watched all the way to the end, and when it finished, I felt empty. It was like I’d died, too, like I’d had all the life squeezed out of me. All I felt was dizzy, and all I heard was a vast, ringing silence.

  I couldn’t think what I was going to do. I couldn’t think at all.

  I put his phone away with shaking hands. The bright, cheap carnival lights around me whirled and blinked, and the dirty, chipped rides spun, and people screamed and screamed, and I wanted to run but I didn’t know how, and I didn’t know where to go.

  I found myself staring at a banner that flapped in the cold night breeze overhead. On it was a girl as white as ice, apparently frozen, except that her eyes were open and bright silver. It said, SEE THE COLD GIRL! DEAD AND YET SHE LIVES!

  I stared hard at it, until my eyes started to water, because it was almost like it was alive, that face. Almost like it was looking at me out of that banner.

  I was still focused on it when Jamie crept up behind me, grabbed me around the waist, and swung me—and I screamed and he laughed, and laughed, and it sounded just like the laughter in the cell phone, cruel and lazy and awful.

  I pushed Jamie away and screamed again. Loud. It didn’t matter; my cry was lost in all the noise from the roller coaster rocketing by, trailing the eerie yells of those trapped on it.

  He hadn’t come alone. There were a bunch of boys with him.

  I pushed him back again when he tried to take hold of me, and he stumbled back, tripped over his buddy Alan’s feet, and fell down.