Scary Out There (39 page)

“No,” he said. “Never. I think this was probably an accident. She must have tried to get them to stop, and they panicked and flipped the car. She tries to talk to people on their phones—maybe that freaked them out.”

“It freaks
me
out,” Zen's mom said. “Are we talking about a
ghost
? Really?”

Mateo shrugged. He switched off the headlights, and the night seemed incredibly black now. “Stay close. I'm not sure what we're going to find, if we find anything at all.” He got out of the truck and grabbed his pack from behind the seat, then the shotgun.

Zenobia started to get out, but her mother grabbed her and held her back. “Zen. Wait. This is crazy. You know that.”

“I
saw
her,” Zenobia said. “So did you. Crazy or not, this is what we need to do.”

“I don't believe in monsters.” But out here, in the vast, empty desert, that sounded like a lie.

Zen silently broke free and got out of the truck, and her mother followed.

“So what are we looking for?” Mateo asked her.

“If Corazón wants to be found, then she's going to try to lead us to her,” she said. “Right?”

“Right.”

“So, look for scorpions,” she said. “Here. Use the black light.”

It probably didn't even qualify as a long shot, but it was all
Zen could think of, and when Mateo activated the app, a sick purple glow bathed the ground by the side of the road.

A scorpion lit up like a neon sign. It was the size of Zenobia's hand, pale, and it arched its tail and scuttled quickly off.

“Could be nothing at all,” said her mom. “It's the desert. Scorpions live all over the place.”

“It's worth a try,” Mateo said, and followed the scorpion's trail.

It didn't seem to mind being followed, which seemed weird; it kept a steady pace and ignored them as it scuttled along over a sand dune and down the other side around a spiky explosion of mesquite bush. As Zenobia looked around, though, she caught more faint glows around them—more moving shapes, pincers, and barbed tails. It was like a . . . migration. Did scorpions migrate? She didn't know.

They kept walking, dodging around bushes and rusty pieces of junk left out in the wilderness; one piece was the remains of a classic car abandoned at least fifty years ago, all the fabric and rubber long rotted away. Snakes slithered away as they passed, and Zenobia realized she hadn't even thought of the danger of walking around out here. What if they got bitten by rattlesnakes? What if . . .

“Hold up,” Mateo said. He sounded shaken and tense. “Man, there are a
lot
of them. See?”

Zenobia looked over his shoulder. Down in the sandy hollow below, the whole ground
moved
, and where the black
light bathed the sand, it showed scorpions crawling over each other, so many of them they tangled and squirmed like a poisonous blanket.

“That isn't normal,” he said. “Right?”

It didn't feel normal. Not at all.

And then Mateo's phone rang, a loud musical jangle that made all three of them flinch. The scorpions below didn't react at all.

Mateo pushed the button to accept the call and said, “
Diga me
.”

Just a static hiss at first, and then a whisper. Slow and weirdly metallic. “
Heeeeeeeerrrrrrre
.”

It was like a long, electronic sigh, and then the call ended. The black light app kicked on again, bathing the scorpions in the weird neon glow.

“Oh sweet Lord, she's under there,” Zenobia's mother said. “That girl's
underneath.
”

“So what do we do?” Zen asked. She was asking Mateo, but he wasn't answering. He just stared down at the hollow, with its carpet of scorpions, without moving.

Zenobia's mother said, “Give me your phone.”

Mateo handed it to her, and she stepped past him, down the slope toward the crawling nightmare below.

“Wait, Mom! What are you
doing
?”

“If she wants us to find her, then the things won't stop me.” And her mother, Dr. Mariana Gomez, pushed her foot into the
nest of scorpions, and nudged the first of them aside.

It was as if she'd sent some signal, and they began to scatter in all directions, a scuttling wave that streamed straight up the sides of the hollow. Mother scorpions loaded with crawling babies scrambled past Zenobia, who gagged and found herself pressed tight against Mateo's side. “Don't move,” he told her. The scorpions weren't coming at them, just near them, and none of them made any move to strike.

Her mom crouched down in the sand as the last of the scorpions withdrew, and began to brush the dirt away.

She exposed fabric underneath. Tattered, bleached by time.

There wasn't much of Corazón left except bones, shoes, and the clothes she'd worn when she'd died, but she was still there, and there was compassion in the way Zenobia's mother brushed the sand from the white skull. More scorpions writhed free of the rotting shirt and fought their way clear from the old, stiff blue jeans.

They'd made a nest here. A nest in her body.

“She's dead,” Mateo said. He sounded weirdly relieved. “Now she can rest.”

“She was stabbed,” Zen's mother said. “There's one wound through her shirt, but the whole shirt is soaked with blood, so she was alive for a while. How far are we from the house?”

“Why?” he asked.

“Maybe a mile,” Zen said. “I mean, in a straight line. On the road, maybe two?”

Her mother sat back on her heels and looked at Mateo. “The other girls—you said they were buried behind the house. No one buried her—this is just drifting sand. I think she ran away and died out here, all alone.”

Mateo kept staring at the body. He didn't seem relieved anymore. He seemed angry.

Zenobia's phone rang. Caller ID said it was 911, and she lifted it to her ear. She had three bars now, remarkably, and this time, the voice came through as clearly as if the girl were standing right beside her.

“My cousin's going to kill you,” she said. “I'm sorry. But at least I won't be alone anymore.”

Zen pulled in her breath in a gasp, and Mateo turned to look at her. In the strange purple glow of the black light, his eyes looked darker than the night. She saw him realize that she knew.

And she realized that he had the shotgun.

He raised it, but not at her. At her mother, who was still bent over the corpse of Corazón.

“No!” Zen screamed. She didn't have the handgun, her mom had it, and her mom's back was turned, so she did the only thing she could; she lunged hard at Mateo and knocked him off balance. The shotgun blast ripped into the sand two feet away from her mother, who threw herself to one side and clawed for the gun in the back of her pants, but Zen barely registered that because she was slamming into Mateo again, harder, and this
time, he lost his footing and tumbled into the sand.

He raised the shotgun and pointed it right at her face, and behind it she saw his eyes, crazy eyes,
deadly
eyes, and she knew she didn't have time to dodge.

Her mother fired first. She didn't kill him, but she caught him in the arm, and he fumbled the shotgun. It went off and blew part of his foot away, and Zenobia lunged forward and grabbed the searing hot barrel, yanked it free of his hands, and turned it back on him. She backed away, and her mother rushed up the sandy hill to stand beside her.

Mateo was screaming and flailing, and blood was pumping out of what remained of his boot, but the desert greedily soaked it up.

“Try again,” her mother said, with remarkable calm once again. “Call 911.”

This time the call went through, and the response was reassuringly normal. “Nine one one. What is your emergency?”

“Uh, there's a wreck on Highway 18, between I-20 and 302,” Zenobia said. She felt weirdly disconnected now, and Mateo was yelling and cursing at them and flailing around in the sand, and she was afraid he was going to get up. “There are a couple of people dead. Please send the police.”

The operator assured her that help was on the way. Zenobia hung up the call.

“I'm going to kill you, bitches!” Mateo screamed.

“Like you did Corazón? And all those other girls? You
were living with them, weren't you, with your uncle and his family. He didn't kill anybody.
You
did. And he took the blame for it. What happened, Mateo? You thought Corazón was dead, but she wasn't? She got away and you couldn't find her?” Zenobia had somehow taken on her mother's calm now, and it felt good. It felt powerful. So did the shotgun in her hands. “The one that got away. And she kept coming back, trying to get help. Haunting you.”

“I'm going to
gut you! 
”

“No you won't,” Zen said. “Because she's coming for you.” She lowered the shotgun and stepped back, because something was coming out of the darkness behind Mateo now, a hiss of bodies over sand, a neon bright wave in the fallen black light of claws and joined tails and barbs.

She grabbed her mother and pulled her back as the scorpions reached Mateo.

He didn't scream for long, not because he didn't want to, but because they went in his open mouth and choked him silent. Covered him in a moving blanket of black, and their tails rose and fell, poison drops on their barbs. Thousands of scorpions, clinging to him with their pincers as they mercilessly stung him to death.

Zenobia's phone rang again. It was the 911 operator, assuring her that everything would be all right. She heard the distant wails of the police car, still far away.

“We should go,” Zenobia said to her mother, and put down
the shotgun. She pulled the pack that Mateo had brought with him over and checked inside.

Knives. Rope. Duct tape. A video camera. His killing supplies.

He'd meant to bury them out here with Corazón, after all.

She left it all with him.

They went back to the road, and the police came. Zenobia and her mother told the officer about Mateo and the dead girl in the desert, and just before dawn, as more and more police arrived to crowd the empty road, Zenobia's phone rang one last time.

She looked at the screen, and this time she didn't answer it. She just let it ring and ring and ring.

Because sometimes, it was just better not to know who was on the other end.

“We're all right,” her mother said, and hugged her close. “We're going to be all right, Zenobia. From now on.”

They were. But sometimes—just sometimes—when her phone rang, something told Zenobia not to answer it.

Dark hearts never died.

Rachel Caine
is the
New York Times
bestselling author of almost fifty novels and even more short stories. Her most recent releases include
Dark Secrets: A Paranormal Noir Anthology
, the Morganville Vampires short story collection
Midnight Bites
, and
Paper and Fire
, the second book of her Great Library series.

Website:
rachelcaine.com

Twitter:
@rachelcaine

Facebook:
facebook.com/rachelcainefanpage

STEVE RASNIC TEM

A
ria's mother was about to have her third baby, fourth if you counted the miscarriage. Aria loved babies, even when they screamed and were impossible, which was a lot of the time. She'd been a good babysitter for her little brother, and even now when he was older and not as much fun, she loved him so fiercely that sometimes it was almost scary. She couldn't help it—when you spent a lot of time taking care of a baby, you just naturally became superprotective. It was like a Law of Nature or something. She would never let anyone hurt her brother. That just could not happen, as far as she was concerned. Aria was ready to do whatever had to be done to protect that kid. It didn't matter what it was.

Aria had been Mom's first baby—she was born long before Joey. Because her dad was never in the picture, she had Mom pretty much all to herself for years, and that made her Mom's most important person in the world. Even when Mom had a boyfriend, and there were a lot of boyfriends, Aria had always come first. Aria didn't care what anybody said—as far as she
was concerned, that was proof Mom was a good mother.

“Aria, make me a sandwich?”

Joey was yanking on her jeans. He was only five. “What are you supposed to say, Joey, when you want something?”

He looked at her like he couldn't understand English anymore. Then suddenly his face got bright. “Please!” he shouted.

“Good job!” she said. “Go sit at the table and I'll bring it to you.” She felt a little silly, always telling him “Good job!” as if he'd just done the greatest thing in the world, but when you took care of little kids, sometimes goofiness was required.

He was adorable sitting there trying to be patient, waiting for his sandwich. (Peanut butter and jelly—that's what “sandwich” meant to Joey.) Kids could be cute without even trying—that was probably the best thing about them. That's why you wanted to love and protect them. She'd read somewhere that “cuteness” was part of evolution—if humans and animals had ugly kids they might not try so hard to keep them safe. That seemed pretty harsh, pretty judgmental, but the world was a harsh place. Mom used to say that a lot to Aria when she was growing up, and now that Aria was a teenager she said it even more. “It's a harsh, harsh place, and you have to be ready for it!” Sometimes, when you were a kid, you forgot that—you expected everything to turn out okay like it did in the storybooks. Now Aria was old enough to understand that was rarely true.

She put his plate down in front of him. Joey started eating
his sandwich, really going at it, tearing it apart like he was some kind of wild animal. It was pretty amazing, actually. Aria should have stopped him and made him eat it right, teach him some good manners, but it was too much fun watching him. That's when the clown came in.