Aftertaste Read online

  These tales are easy to digest. . . .

  BLOOD LITE III: AFTERTASTE

  features

  CHRIS ABBEY • KELLEY ARMSTRONG • L. A. BANKS • MIKE BARON • JIM BUTCHER • DON D’AMMASSA • STEPHEN DORATO • J. G. FAHERTY • CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN • HEATHER GRAHAM • BRAD C. HODSON • NINA KIRIKI HOFFMAN • SHERRILYN KENYON • KEN LILLIE-PAETZ • ADRIAN LUDENS • WILL LUDWIGSEN • E. S. MAGILL • LISA MORTON • MARK ONSPAUGH • NORMAN PRENTISS • DANIEL PYLE • MIKE RESNICK & LEZLI ROBYN • JEFF RYAN • DAVID SAKMYSTER • D. L. SNELL • LUCIEN SOULBAN • ERIC JAMES STONE • JEFF STRAND • JOEL A. SUTHERLAND • JOHN ALFRED TAYLOR

  Publishers Weekly praises the national bestseller Blood Lite

  “This toothsome anthology of twenty-one funny-scary stories from members of the Horror Writers Association arrives just in time for Halloween. On the humorous end, Matt Venne’s ‘Elvis Presley and the Bloodsucker Blues’ re-creates Presley’s voice with pitch-perfect swagger and sets the record straight on how he really died, while Charlaine Harris’s ‘An Evening with Al Gore’ depicts a novel way to deal with environmental criminals; both tales are truly outstanding. In a creepier vein, Steven Savile’s ‘Dear Prudence’ finds a conflicted man repeatedly revising a note where he details gory plans for his significant other, and Nancy Holder’s ‘I Know Who You Ate Last Summer’ features stomach-churning ‘rock star cannibals.’ Big names like Jim Butcher and Sherrilyn Kenyon will have comic horror fans grabbing this anthology off the shelves.”

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Volume copyright © 2012 by Horror Writers Association, Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Pocket Books paperback edition June 2012

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  ISBN 978-1-4516-3624-6

  ISBN 978-1-4516-3625-3 (eBook)

  Copyright Notices

  “I Was a Teenage Bigfoot” copyright © 2011 by Jim Butcher

  “Blood-Red Greens” copyright © 2011 by Joel Sutherland

  “V Plates” copyright © 2011 by Kelley Armstrong

  “Put On a Happy Face” copyright © 2011 by Christopher Golden

  “Devil’s Contract” copyright © 2011 by E.S. Magill

  “Nine-Tenths of the Law” copyright © 2011 by Eric James Stone

  “Scrumptious Bone Bread” copyright © 2011 by Jeff Strand

  “Let That Be a Lesson to You” copyright © 2011 by Mark Onspaugh

  “Mint in Box” copyright © 2011 by Mike Baron

  “The Great Zombie Invasion of 1979” copyright © 2011 by JG Faherty

  “Dating After the Apocalypse” copyright © 2011 by Stephen Dorato

  “Typecast” copyright © 2011 by Jeff Ryan

  “Making the Cut” copyright © 2011 by Mike Resnick & Lezli Robyn

  “Acknowledgments” copyright © 2011 by Will Ludwigsen

  “Mannequin” copyright © 2011 by Heather Graham

  “Short Term” copyright © 2011 by Daniel Pyle

  “Distressed Travelers” copyright © 2011 by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  “Bayou Brawl” copyright © 2011 by L.A. Banks

  “The Steeple People” copyright © 2011 by John Alfred Taylor

  “For Sale” copyright © 2011 by David Sakmyster

  “The Man Who Could Not Be Bothered to Die” copyright © 2011 by Norman Prentiss

  “The Last Demon” copyright © 2011 by Don D’Ammassa

  “A Misadventure to Call Your Own” copyright © 2011 by Adrian Ludens

  “Smoke and Mirrorballs” copyright © 2011 by Chris Abbey

  “BRIANS!!!” copyright © 2011 by D.L. Snell

  “Still Life” copyright © 2011 by Ken Lillie-Paetz

  “A Day in the Life” copyright © 2011 by Sherrilyn Kenyon

  “Old MacDonald Had an Animal Farm” copyright © 2011 by Lisa Morton

  “Two for Transylvania” copyright © 2011 by Brad C. Hodson

  “The Four Horsemen Reunion Tour: An Apocumentary” copyright © 2011 by Lucien Soulban

  Contents

  I Was a Teenage Bigfoot • JIM BUTCHER

  Blood-Red Greens • JOEL A. SUTHERLAND

  V Plates • KELLEY ARMSTRONG

  Put On a Happy Face • CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN

  Devil’s Contract • E. S. MAGILL

  Nine-Tenths of the Law • ERIC JAMES STONE

  Scrumptious Bone Bread • JEFF STRAND

  Let That Be a Lesson to You • MARK ONSPAUGH

  Mint in Box • MIKE BARON

  The Great Zombie Invasion of 1979 • J. G. FAHERTY

  Dating After the Apocalypse • STEPHEN DORATO

  Typecast • JEFF RYAN

  Making the Cut • MIKE RESNICK AND LEZLI ROBYN

  Acknowledgments • WILL LUDWIGSEN

  Mannequin • HEATHER GRAHAM

  Short Term • DANIEL PYLE

  Distressed Travelers • NINA KIRIKI HOFFMAN

  Bayou Brawl • L. A. BANKS

  The Steeple People • JOHN ALFRED TAYLOR

  For Sale • DAVID SAKMYSTER

  The Man Who Could Not Be Bothered to Die • NORMAN PRENTISS

  The Last Demon • DON D’AMMASSA

  A Misadventure to Call Your Own • ADRIAN LUDENS

  Smoke and Mirrorballs • CHRIS ABBEY

  BRIANS!!! • D. L. SNELL

  Still Life • KEN LILLIE-PAETZ

  A Day in the Life • SHERRILYN KENYON

  Old MacDonald Had an Animal Farm • LISA MORTON

  Two for Transylvania • BRAD C. HODSON

  The Four Horsemen Reunion Tour: An Apocumentary • LUCIEN SOULBAN

  About the Authors

  BLOOD LITE III: AFTERTASTE

  I Was a Teenage Bigfoot

  JIM BUTCHER

  There are times when, as a professional wizard, my vocation calls me to the great outdoors, and that night I was in the northwoods of Wisconsin with a mixed pack of researchers, enthusiasts and . . . well. Nerds.

  “I don’t know, man,” said a skinny kid named Nash. “What’s his name again?”

  I poked the small campfire I’d set up earlier with a stick and pretended that they weren’t standing less than ten feet away from me. The forest made forest sounds like it was supposed to. Full dark had fallen less than half an hour before.

  “Harry Dresden,” said Gary, a plump kid with a cell phone, a GPS unit, and some kind of video game device on his belt. “Supposed to be a psychic or something.” He was twiddling deft fingers over the surface of what they call a “smart” phone, these days. Hell, the damned things are probably smarter than me. “Supposed to have helpe
d Chicago PD a bunch of times. I’d pull up the Internet references, but I can’t get reception out here.”

  “A psychic?” Nash said. “How is anyone ever supposed to take our research seriously if we keep showing up with fruitcakes like that?”

  Gary shrugged. “Doctor Sinor knows him or something.”

  Doctor Sinor had nearly been devoured by an ogre in a suburban park one fine summer evening, and I’d gotten her out in one piece. Like most people who have a brush with the supernatural, she’d rationalized the truth away as rapidly as possible—which had led her to participate in such fine activities as tonight’s Bigfoot expedition in her spare time.

  “Gentlemen,” Sinor said, impatiently. She was a blocky, no-nonsense type, grey-haired and straight-backed. “If you could help me with these speakers, we might actually manage to blast a call or two before dawn.”

  Gary and Nash both hustled over to the edge of the firelight to start messing about with the equipment the troop of researchers had packed in. There were half a dozen of them, altogether, all of them busy with trail cameras and call blasting speakers and scent markers and audio recorders.

  I pulled a sandwich out of my pocket and started eating it. I took my time about it. I was in no hurry.

  For those of you who don’t know it, a forest at night is dark. Sometimes pitch-black. There was no moon to speak of in the sky, and the light of the stars doesn’t make it more than a few inches into a mixed canopy of deciduous trees and evergreens. The light from my little campfire and the hand-held flashlights of the researchers soon gave the woods all the light there was.

  Their equipment wasn’t working very well—my bad, probably. Modern technology doesn’t get on well with the magically gifted. For about an hour, nothing much happened beyond the slapping of mosquitoes and a lot of electronic noises squawking from the loudspeakers.

  Then the researchers got everything online and went through their routine. They played primate calls over the speakers and then dutifully recorded the forest afterward. Everything broke down again. The researchers soldiered on, repairing things, and eventually Gary tried wood-knocking, which meant banging on trees with fallen limbs and waiting to hear if there was a response.

  I liked Doctor Sinor, but I had asked to come strictly as a ride-along and I didn’t pitch in with her team’s efforts.

  The whole “let’s find Bigfoot” thing seems a little ill-planned to me, personally. Granted, my perspective is different from that of non-wizards, but marching out into the woods looking for a very large and very powerful creature by blasting out what you’re pretty sure are territorial challenges to fight (or else mating calls) seems . . . somewhat unwise.

  I mean, if there’s no Bigfoot, no problem. But what if you’re standing there, screaming “Bring it on!” and find a Bigfoot?

  Worse yet, what if he finds you?

  Even worse, what if you were screaming, “Do me, baby!” and he finds you then?

  Is it me? Am I crazy? Or does the whole thing just seem like a recipe for trouble?

  So anyway, while I kept my little fire going, the Questionably Wise Research Variety Act continued until after midnight. That’s when I looked up to see a massive form standing at the edge of the trees, in the very outskirts of the light of my dying fire.

  I’m in the ninety-ninth percentile for height, myself, but this guy was tall. My head might have come up to his collarbone, barely, assuming I had correctly estimated where his collarbone was under the long, shaggy, dark brown hair covering him. It wasn’t long enough to hide the massive weight of muscle he carried on that enormous frame or the simple, disturbing, very slightly inhuman proportions of his body. His face was broad, blunt, with a heavy brow ridge that turned his eyes into mere gleams of reflected light.

  Most of all, there was a sense of awesome power granted to his presence by his size alone, chilling even to someone who had seen big things in action before. There’s a reaction to something that much bigger than you, an automatic assumption of menace that is built into the human brain: Big equals dangerous.

  It took about fifteen seconds before the first researcher, Gary I think, noticed and let out a short gasp. In my peripheral vision, I saw the entire group turn toward the massive form by the fire and freeze into place. The silence was brittle crystal.

  I broke it by bolting up from my seat and letting out a high-pitched shriek.

  Half a dozen other screams joined it, and I whirled as if to flee, only to see Doctor Sinor and crew hotfooting it down the path we’d followed into the woods, back toward the cars.

  I held it in for as long as I could, and only after I was sure that they wouldn’t hear it did I let loose the laughter bubbling in my chest. I sank back onto my log by the fire, laughing, and beckoning the large form forward.

  “Harry,” rumbled the figure in a very, very deep voice, the words marked with the almost indefinable clippings of a Native American accent. “You have an unsophisticated sense of humor.”

  “I can’t help it,” I said, wiping at tears of laughter. “It never gets old.” I waved to the open ground across the fire from me. “Sit, sit, be welcome, big brother.”

  “Appreciate it,” rumbled the giant and squatted down across the fire from me, touching fingers the size of cucumbers to his heart in greeting. His broad, blunt face was amused. “So. Got any smokes?”

  It wasn’t the first time I’d done business with the Forest People. They’re old school. There’s a certain way one goes about business with someone considered a peer, and Strength of a River in His Shoulders was an old school kind of guy. There were proprieties to be observed.

  So we shared a thirty-dollar cigar, which I’d brought, had some S’mores, which I made, and sipped from identical plastic bottles of Coca-Cola, which I had purchased. By the time we were done, the fire had burned down to glowing embers, which suited me fine—and I knew that River Shoulders would be more comfortable in the near-dark, too. I didn’t mind being the one to provide everything. It would have been a hassle for River Shoulders to do it, and we’d probably be smoking, eating, and drinking raw and unpleasant things if he had.

  Besides, it was worth it. The Forest People had been around long before the great gold rushes of the nineteenth century, and they were loaded. River Shoulders had paid my retainer with a gold nugget the size of a golf ball, the last time I’d done business with him.

  “Your friends,” he said, nodding toward the disappeared researchers. “They going to come back?”

  “Not before dawn,” I said. “For all they know, you got me.”

  River Shoulders’ chest rumbled with a sound that was both amused and not entirely pleased. “Like my people don’t have enough stigmas already.”

  “You want to clear things up, I can get you on the Larry Fowler show any time you want.”

  River Shoulders shuddered—given his size, it was a lot of shuddering. “TV rots the brains of people who see it. Don’t even want to know what it does to the people who make it.”

  I snorted. “I got your message,” I said. “I am here.”

  “And so you are,” he said. He frowned, an expression that was really sort of terrifying on his features. I didn’t say anything. You just don’t rush the Forest People. They’re patient on an almost alien level, compared to human beings, and I knew that our meeting was already being conducted with unseemly haste, by River Shoulders’ standards. Finally, he swigged a bit more Coke, the bottle looking tiny in his vast hands, and sighed. “There is a problem with my son. Again.”

  I sipped some Coke and nodded, letting a little time pass before I answered. “Irwin was a fine, strong boy when I last saw him.”

  The conversation continued with contemplative pauses between each bit of speech. “He is sick.”

  “Children sometimes grow sick.”

  “Not children of the Forest People.”

  “What, never?”

  “No, never. And I will not quote Gilbert and Sullivan.”

  “Their music w
as silly and fine.”

  River Shoulders nodded agreement. “Indeed.”

  “What can you tell me of your son’s sickness?”

  “His mother tells me the school’s doctor says he has something called mah-no.”

  “Mono,” I said. “It is a common illness. It is not dangerous.”

  “An illness could not touch one born of the Forest People,” River Shoulders rumbled.

  “Not even one with only one parent of your folk?” I asked.

  “Indeed,” he said. “Something else must therefore be happening. I am concerned for Irwin’s safety.”

  The fire let out a last crackle and a brief, gentle flare of light, showing me River Shoulders clearly. His rough features were touched with the same quiet worry I’d seen on dozens and dozens of my clients’ faces.

  “He still doesn’t know who you are, does he.”

  The giant shifted his weight slightly as if uncomfortable. “Your society is, to me, irrational and bewildering. Which is good. Can’t have everyone the same, or the earth would get boring.”

  I thought about it for a moment and then said, “You feel he has problems enough to deal with already.”

  River Shoulders spread his hands, as if my own words had spotlighted the truth.

  I nodded, thought about it, and said, “We aren’t that different. Even among my people, a boy misses his father.”

  “A voice on a telephone is not a father,” he said.

  “But it is more than nothing,” I said. “I have lived with a father and without a father. With one was better.”

  The silence stretched extra-long.

  “In time,” the giant responded, very quietly. “For now, my concern is his physical safety. I cannot go to him. I spoke to his mother. We ask someone we trust to help us learn what is happening.”

  I didn’t agree with River Shoulders about talking to his kid, but that didn’t matter. He wasn’t hiring me to get parenting advice, about which I had no experience to call upon anyway. He needed help looking out for the kid. So I’d do what I could to help him. “Where can I find Irwin?”