Free The Apocalypse Reader by Justin Taylor (Editor) Page B

behind him. "That's not-look, you're going to hurt yourself."
    He felt something surge up in him, something heavy and luminescent. It rose up in his chest cage, topping off at the back of his throat. It was a feeling he remembered not in his conscious memory but in the larger memory everybody shared, the memory of the flattened, husky humanoids who knocked around in squat forests in the years before time mattered, making a dim impression in their respective tribes by killing up whole herds with insensate panache. The feeling made sense-he was aware, fully, maybe for the first time, of the extent of his body's capabilities. There were no more illusions-he knew he was not a superhero-he knew he could not burst through a brick wall or kick a man's balls up through his chest. It was a sober, rational summary of what he could do with his body.
    Burtson lined up the fin with Alan's figure and squeezed the trigger impulsively. The rifle was surprisingly quiet. The figure turned, startled, as a congregate of broad leaves exploded in the air over his head. "They're here," his son shouted into the microphone. "This is it. I'm not going to make it out of here. They won't leave until I'm taken out. Don't let the recipe die-keep it going. Keep it-"
    Burtson fired again, and a third time. The figure jerked backward. "Holy crap," he said. "Holy crap." He wished Toshikazu had stayed; he felt a queer pride click into place somewhere inside, but quickly he thought better of it. Shooting your son: it was a private thing, composed of a sweet, crushing sense of impossibility. You didn't want to share it, in the end.
    Burtson dropped the rifle and sat at his desk, where Toshikazu had left a Post-it note with his billing address. He took his cell phone from the top drawer and tried his wife. Somehow, he got a ringtone. A woman answered the phone in another language. "Hello? Marion?" he said, and the voice replied in a fluttery, unrecognizable tongue. Realizing it was a stranger, he whispered, "I just shot my son," feeling each word turn in his dry, dirty mouth like rocks in a tumbler. "I took aim and I shot him. Has that ever happened to you?" The voice erupted again, and then died off sharply. He thought the woman might have hung up. "It's a thing you remember," he said. "It might be the only thing you really remember. You take back what you've given. It goes against-it's a powerful thing, what you've done when you do that." He stopped when he heard the silence of the disconnected call. He wasn't sure if the woman hanging up had hurt him more than the sight of his son slowly folding up into a compact hump on the horizon. He was sure he'd know later, on the plane, speeding ridiculously over a charcoal-dark, midsize, failing industrial hub. When he got farther away from the jungle, he thought, he'd be able to measure the two events, hold them, one in each palm, and divine to himself the thing he felt worst about.
     

THE HOOK

Shelley Jackson

    TRAVIS BROUGHT IN a dog's leg that he said fell out of the sky. One end was ragged and chewed-looking, its bloody bits gone hard and dark. It was still enrobed in short brown fur. I was glad about that. Betsy had been redder. The leg had landed right beside him, cracking a sheet of plywood, and bounced. It could have brained him, I thought, with a familiar wooze of panic. He was laughing, waving it around, touching things with it. "Give paw," he cried, and extended it to me.
    Then he hurled it down (I heard the nails click against the floor) and his face caved in. I held out my arms and he buried his head in my stomach. As his jaw worked it felt like he was trying to eat me.
    "Come on," I said. "We'll go look at the fire."
    He sniffed and choked. "Really?"

    THE FIRE WAS kept burning all the time. It was in the fenced-in lot behind the former supermarket, where they used to take in deliveries. The supermarket was used as a morgue, now, and the dead were wheeled out back in shopping carts. At the loading dock