Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters by Clive Barker, Robert McCammon, China Miéville, Joe R. Lansdale, Cherie Priest, Christopher Golden, Al Sarrantonio, David Schow, John Langan, Paul Tremblay Page A

could see those awful teeth again. “There are a lot of us who know the truth. More than the government would like, for sure.” He pulled his beer towards him, and knocked my cell phone off the bar. I ducked down to retrieve it.
    After I came back up and took another sip of beer, my memories get all wobbly.
    Yeah, not the smartest night of my life.
    I woke up, sort of, with streetlights flashing over my face. The side of my head hurt where it was pressed against the cold window glass, and I’d drooled on my sleeve.
    “I’m thirsty,” I said, pulling myself upright.
    “That’s to be expected.” It was Doyle. I’d known it would be. Ginger doesn’t even own a car. “There’s a bottle of water in the cup holder. It’s still sealed.”
    “Too late now.”
    He chuckled. “You really had me going, you know. Whoever covered up your ties to the government did a good job. And I thought you might honestly not know what I was talking about for a little while there. “
    “There’s a reason for that.”
    “Drop the act. You’re the only person who wasn’t eaten in that office. You know how to survive. That kind of thing doesn’t happen by accident.”
    “No one was eaten!”
    “I said drop it. You gave yourself away when you tried to get names out of me.”
    We were going about eighty miles an hour, thought the road didn’t seem built for it. I wasn’t sure if I could survive jumping out of the car or not. If I’d really been a government agent, I would know things like that.
    “Would you mind telling me which branch you were in? We’ve never been quite sure whose bailiwick the air tigers are—I’ve always felt it would be Air Force, but some of my friends think it’s more the C.I.A.’s type of thing. Or even the N.S.A.”
    I opened the water bottle and took a slurp.
    “Of course, it’s just idle curiosity on my part. It’s all the same in the end.”
    “Why,” I said slowly, trying to sound non-confrontational, “allowing that these air tigers exist at all, why would the government want to cover them up? They don’t cover up real tigers.”
    He looked over at me. His expression was unclear behind the beard but I felt safe assuming it was a smirk. “I suppose I might as well admit that we don’t know. It’s the subject of a lot of speculation in our groups. Probably at first it was to prevent panic that would discourage aeronautic exploration, and later because secrecy is self-perpetuating in the halls of power. Am I close?”
    I slurped again. If I told him I had to pee, would he let me out long enough to make a break for it? Probably not.
    “Now it’s my turn to ask a question, and of course you won’t answer, but it doesn’t matter because I’ve learned to read your face. Why let any through? Is it some kind of green nonsense, like those idiots who put the wolves back in Yellowstone? Is it to keep people panicked? Has the government decided to bankrupt the airlines so it can nationalize them?”
    I realized after a few seconds that if I didn’t say something, he was going to keep watching me instead of the road.
    “Well, when I was talking to the police after the attack on my office, they did keep asking about bioterrorism.”
    He nodded. “That’s what I thought. It all makes sense. Frightened people are sheep.”
    Baaah, I thought, and didn’t jump out of the car.
    Doyle shut up and I tried to puzzle out where the hell we were. Clearly outside of the city. The streetlights had ended abruptly and now we were driving uphill with trees closer than I liked on either side and large areas of unnerving emptiness that I guessed must be meadows, or marshes, or glimpses of the Hudson. Or maybe off the edge of world. You’d think there would be something. Deer, owls, then, if this is the country. A light from a window in the distance. But no.
    I was nauseous from just the water by the time we stopped, and my head was pounding again. Doyle could obviously tell that I was doing bad. He let me