She knelt up on the couch and smacked him in the face with a throw pillow.
Anhell woke up. “Oh, fuck, though, baby,” he said, shaking his head. “You seent that? Devil had me like tweaking!”
“Yeah, I saw,” she said. “Now gimme that fucking bottle. You spilling shit everywhere…”
4.6 state funeral, November
4.7 police massacre, October
She’d once seen his long curly hair blown out bone-straight, a black curtain hanging to his ass. Now, auburn, it sat heavily upon his shoulders—huge and soaking wet. She reached into his hair and wrung a handful like some sponge that had sopped deep spill off the slaughterhouse floor. The squishing mass gushed police blood. She pulled his salty mouth down to hers and they kissed.
Spots lit the night out front to anachronous noon, splashing blue ’n’ red emergency lights, a cordon of NYPD ESU with machine guns at every surrounding intersection, snipers on every overlooking rooftop. From “three” a SWAT team was counting down to storm the place. They made fools of the whole kingdom arrayed against them, and walked out through deep hell, across the burning floor of Gehenna.
To avoid the curfew they took the subway downtown at rush hour every third or fourth days. They’d walk in some other borough until happening upon today’s luckless whiteboys in blue. Afterwards, they’d come on back uptown. Once, they went all the way out to Staten Island on the ferry, and it was like a date, the sunlight on the water, Statue of Liberty, a whale breaching in the harbor. Incredibly romantic—though probably not for that pair of transit cops at the terminal, whose last vision of this world was of two shadows swaggering up through heat shimmer, a teenage lankiness and the width and curves and thickness of a woman, barely glimpsed against a whole continent of fire. But the City under martial law was boring as fuck, and so she called Mama and got her talking again on that BLM tip. Kind of slipped the question to her sideways. Hey, what’s the worst police department in America?
“Chicago,” Mama answered. “Or maybe the LAPD. Why you asking?”
“No reason,” she said. “Oh, by the way, me and Anhell been talking about getting outta town for a while. Maybe just taking the bus somewhere, a road trip.”
“Cali?” he said, getting excited when she’d made up her mind. Nobody likes wintertime in New York. The same day their cash allowance came through, they packed some underwear, machète and gun, their pills. A backpack each, just the necessary.
“What we gonna do, though,” he asked, “when the prescriptions run out?”
“Walk up in any pharmacy,” she said, “and be like, I want another month’s worf, or every motherfucker up in here getting they head chopped off.”
“Oh, yup yup,” said Anhell, seeing the sense, nodding. “That’d work!”
And so down to Port Authority, and on a Greyhound going west.
About the Authors
Simon Avery’s fiction has been published in a variety of magazines and anthologies including Black Static, Crimewave, The Third Alternative, The Best British Mysteries IV, Beneath the Ground, The Black Room Manuscripts: Volume 4, Birmingham Noir, Terror Tales of Yorkshire, Something Remains, and Occult Detective Quarterly. A novella, The Teardrop Method, was published in 2017. He lives and works in Birmingham, UK.
Laird Barron, an expat Alaskan, is the author of several books—including The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, Swift to Chase, and Blood Standard—and many short stories some of which have been reprinted in numerous year’s best anthologies and nominated for multiple awards. He is a three-time winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. Currently, Barron lives in the Rondout Valley of New York State and is at work on tales about the evil that men do.
Ashley Blooms was born and raised in Cutshin, Kentucky. She received her MFA as a John and Renee Grisham Fellow at the University of Mississippi. She’s been awarded scholarships from the Clarion Writer’s Workshop and Appalachian Writer’s Workshop, served as fiction editor for the Yalobusha Review, and worked as an editorial intern and first reader for Tor.com. Her stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Shimmer, among others. Her nonfiction has appeared in the Oxford American. She currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with her husband and their dog, Alfie.
Aliette de Bodard lives (with her husband and children) and works (as a System Engineer) in Paris. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Obsidian and Blood trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies, as well as numerous short stories, which garnered her two Nebula Awards, a Locus Award, and two British Science Fiction Association Awards. Her space opera books include The Tea Master and the Detective. Recent works include the Dominion of the Fallen series, set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, which comprises the British Science Fiction Association Award-winning The House of Shattered Wings and its standalone sequel, The House of Binding Thorns.
Rebecca Campbell is a Canadian writer and an academic with a PhD in English (specifically Canadian literature) from the University of Western Ontario. Her speculative fiction has been published in Shimmer, Beneath Ceasless Skies, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Tor.com, and other venues. Her story “The Glad Hosts,” published by Lackington’s, was nominated for a Sunburst Award. The Paradise Engine, her first novel, was published in 2013.
Jeffrey Ford lives in central Ohio and teaches at Ohio Wesleyan University. He has contributed over 130 short stories to numerous magazines and anthologies including The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, Conjunctions, Puerto Del Sol, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, MAD Magazine, Weird Tales, Clarkesworld, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Subterranean, Fantasy, New Jersey Noir, Stories, The Living Dead,The Faery Reel, After, The Dark, The Doll Collection, many “year’s best” venues, and more. He is the recipient of four World Fantasy Awards and two Shirley Jackson Awards as well as the Nebula, Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, and Edgar Allan Poe Awards.
Robin Furth’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in numerous magazines and journals including The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Cemetery Dance, Gramarye, Orbis, The Beloit Poetry Journal, and Interpreter’s House. Her book, Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: The Complete Concordance (originally created for King’s personal use), has been translated into five languages. Furth is the co-author of Marvel’s bestselling Dark Tower comic book series and has contributed to numerous other Marvel publications.