The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

He was a big man; she hadn’t noticed that last night. Tall and rangy enough that his feet stuck out over the edge of the double bed, his forearms pale but ropy and strong. It made the hollows under his cheekbones stand out even sharper. His shoulders hunched around his chin as if he wished himself disappeared. His nod was a ghost.

“So what do I call you?” she asked, trying to keep her voice normal.

“Aidan,” he said. He sounded hoarse, quiet; like someone half out of the habit of talking.

“I’m Cora.” She forced herself to hand him the waxed-paper package. He stared at it for a second, cupped in his two hands, before picking it open with a dirty fingernail.

“You were here last night,” he said suddenly, and Cora realized he was watching her from behind that fall of mussed-up hair. She rubbed her jaw, little circles like Johnny Red cleaning his counter.

“I was,” she said careful.

He rolled bread into a tiny ball between thumb and forefinger. He wasn’t eating.

The sound of wood chopping was closer now, in the room, and heater or not, her breath steamed. She stepped backwards once, twice.

“You feeling better, then?” she asked to cover it, and he looked up at her full for the first time. He talked like a shut-in, but he stared like a resting lynx.

“Yeah,” he said, soft and creaking, and the chill sound of trees falling, wood splintering in rhythm—heartbeat rhythm—almost drowned it out.

Her ears were ringing. Her tongue didn’t want to move, and his eyes were so big, nighttime-big, dark as raven’s-feather and sharp as a polar bear’s, waiting. Waiting. “Well, we’ll take good care of you,” she blurted.

He stopped. Everything stopped.

The dizzying cold shattered.

“I… pardon?” he choked out. His face was dirty pale, hands shaking. The sandwich was squashed flat between his fingers.

What did I say?

Cora sucked in a breath. Her hip was burning with cold, wedged hard against the motel’s plaster wall. She was shivering. She couldn’t get warm. “They ain’t coming to get you for a week. I just didn’t want you to worry, that we wouldn’t take good care of you—”

She was babbling. She was panicking.

She hadn’t thought he could look any sicker.

“A week?” he asked, and there were funerals in his brown, big, human eyes.

The toilet flushed, and Daisy banged out of the washroom, Jane’s bathroom towel trailing from her hand. “Thanks, Cor. Tell Mikey I’m here if you see him?”

“Yeah,” she said unsteady, and Daisy Blondin, only six years younger than her but about twenty more invincible, flicked up an eyebrow and looked each to each.

“Everything all right?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Cora said, automatic, regretting it a split-second after. “I gotta run.” She had three smokes left in the pack. She’d counted them last night.

The skies were clear on the walk from the Treeline Motel to the Sunrise Restaurant. She scanned the skies and rooflines as she walked, and smoked them all.

There were things in the back of the produce truck that Cora had never seen: mangoes, persimmons, fine nubbly oranges, not to mention the vegetables she couldn’t name. She and Johnny loaded a good third of the Northbest crates onto service station wagons after the lunch crowd trickled away, and then helped Magda Tutcho wrestle the rest into the General Store. It wouldn’t last long — a week and a half at most, Magda said — but there was always Gertie’s canning apparatus, and besides, it’d be a hell of a week.

Cora hand-lettered a sign for the Sunrise Restaurant’s door—Tropical Party 7pm Tonite: $15 Full Meal—and tacked it firmly down by all four corners. Sunrise was a small town. Word would get around.

They sorted the oddest fruits on the countertop, next to the spine-cracked chef school cookbook left behind, mouldering, by the last owner of the Sunrise Restaurant. “What’s this one?” she asked, balancing a red, round weight in one hand.

“Pomegranate,” Johnny Red said. He’d worked as a cook down in Calgary for three years before he took over the Sunrise Restaurant. By the second year up north he’d mostly stopped complaining about how everything came in tins, but when he took the pomegranate from her hand, the look on his face was like the first day of spring. “All the rage out in BC. White ladies in workout pants beat down your door for them.”

He waggled his eyebrows, and she laughed. It came out bad; forced. There was something cold stuck inside her. The sound of a chopped-down tree, creaking, falling.

“Cor?” he asked, and his eyebrows drew down. She shook her head. “It’s the trucker, isn’t it?”

“Johnny—” she started.

“You didn’t have to go out there.”

“Pomegranate,” she said, firm, and crossed her arms.