The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2016 Edition

by Paula Guran

  Lanyan hunched closer to the wheel.

  They crept along, pausing now and again to inch around an abandoned vehicle.

  “We should have stayed where we were,” Natalie said, and the silence that followed seemed like assent.

  But it was too late to turn back now.

  Finally the road widened into a four-lane highway, clogged with vehicles. They plowed onward anyway, weaving drunkenly among the cars. By the time they reached the outskirts of Boulder, the headlights stabbed maybe fifteen feet into the swirling snow.

  “I can’t see a thing,” Lanyan said. They turned aside into surface streets, finding their way at last into the decaying subdivision. They picked a house at random, a rancher with a brick façade in an empty cul-de-sac. The conventions of civilization held. Lanyan and Kerans scouted it out, while the women waited in the Yukon. They knocked, shouting, but no one came. Finally, they tested the door. It had been left unlocked; the owners had departed in a hurry, Kerans figured, fleeing the contagion. He wondered if they’d passed them dead somewhere on the highway, or if they’d made it into the higher altitudes in time. The house itself was empty. Maybe they’d gotten lucky. Maybe the frigid air would kill the virus before it could kill them. Maybe, Kerans thought. Maybe.

  They settled Felicia on the sectional sofa in the great room, before the unblinking eye of the oversized flatscreen. Afterward, they searched the place more thoroughly, dosing Felicia with the amoxicillin and oxycodone they found in the medicine cabinet. Then the food in the pantry, tools neatly racked in the empty garage, a loaded pistol in a bedside table. Natalie tucked it in the belt of her jeans. Kerans flipped light switches, adjusted the thermostat, flicked on the television. Nothing. How quickly it all fell apart. They hunched around a portable radio instead: white noise all across the dial.

  Welcome to the end of the world, it said.

  Not with a bang, but a whimper.

  The snow kept coming, gusts of it, obscuring everything a dozen feet beyond the windows, then unveiling it in quick flashes: the blurred limb of a naked tree, the shadow of the Yukon at the curb. Kerans stood at the window as night fell, wondering what he’d expected to find. A hospital? A doctor? The hospitals must have been overwhelmed from the start, the doctors first to go.

  The streetlights snapped alight—solar-charged batteries, the death throes of the world he’d grown up in. They illuminated clouds of billowing white that in other circumstances Kerans would have found beautiful. Cold groped at the window. He turned away.

  Lanyan and Natalie had scrounged a handful of tealight candles. By their flickering luminescence, the great room took on a cathedral air. Darkness encroached from the corners and gathered in shrouds at the ceiling. They ate pork and beans warmed over the camp stove, spread their sleeping bags on the carpet, and talked. The same goddamn conversation they’d had for days now: surely we’re not the only ones and how many? and where? and what if?

  “We’re probably already dying,” Natalie said, turning a baleful eye on Kerans. “Well, we’re down here now,” she said. “What’s your plan, Einstein?”

  “I don’t have a plan. I didn’t figure on the snow.”

  “You didn’t figure on a lot of things.”

  “Cut it out,” Lanyan said.

  “We didn’t have to do this, Cliff,” Natalie said.

  “What did you expect me to do? I’ve known Felicia for years. I’ve known Dave longer. It’s not like we had access to weather reports.”

  No, Kerans thought, that was another thing gone with the old world. Just like that. Everything evaporated.

  By then the cold had become black, physical.

  Kerans got to his feet. He tucked Felicia’s sleeping bag into the crevices of the sofa. She moaned. Her eyes fluttered. She reached for his hand.

  Kerans shook two oxycodone out of the bottle.

  “These’ll help you sleep.”

  “Will you stay with me, Dave?”

  All the way to the end, he thought, and he knew then that at some level, if only half-consciously, he had accepted what he had known in his heart back at the cabin. She was gone. She’d been gone the moment she’d slipped on that bed of scree. And he’d laughed, he remembered that, too. Whoops, he’d said, and she’d said, I’m hurt, Dave, her voice plaintive, frightened, tight with agony. He’d never heard her use that voice in seventeen years of marriage, and he knew then that she was beyond help. There was no help to be had. Yet Lanyan had surrendered the Yukon all the same, and they had knocked on the door before barging into this house, just as they had knocked on the door of the summer cabin in the mountains before that. How long, he wondered, before they reverted to savagery?

  “Will you stay with me, Dave?” she said.

  “Of course.”

  He slid into his sleeping bag. They held hands by candlelight until the oxycodone hit her and her fingers went limp. He tucked her arm under her sleeping bag—he could smell the wound, already suppurating with infection—and lay back.

  The last of the tealights burned out.

  Kerans glanced at the luminescent dial of his watch. Nine-thirty.

  The streetlight’s spectral blue glow suffused the air.

  He closed his eyes, but sleep eluded him. An endless loop unspooled against the dark screens of his eyelids: Felicia’s expression as the earth slipped out from under her feet. His helpless whoop of laughter. I’m hurt, Dave.

  He opened his eyes.

  “You awake, Cliff?” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You think Natalie’s right? We’re all going to wind up coughing up blood in twenty-four hours or so?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe the snow,” Kerans said. “Maybe the cold has killed the virus.”

  “Maybe.”

  They were silent.

  “One way or the other, we’ll find out, I guess,” Lanyan said.

  Snow ticked at the windows like fingernails. Let me in. Let me in.

  “About the Yukon—” Kerans said.

  “It doesn’t matter, Dave. You’d have done the same for me.”

  Would he? Kerans wondered. He liked to think so.

  “I’m sorry I was an asshole,” Lanyan said.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Felicia’s going to be okay.”

  “Sure she is. I know.”

  Kerans gazed across the room at the shadowy mound of the other man in his sleeping bag.

  “What do you figure happened?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. You heard the radio as well as I did. Something got loose from a military lab. Terrorists. Maybe just a mutation. Ebola, something like that.”

  Another conversation they’d had a dozen times. It was like picking a scab.

  A long time passed. Kerans didn’t know how long it was.

  “It doesn’t matter, I guess,” he said, adrift between sleep and waking.

  “Not anymore,” Lanyan said, and the words chased Kerans down a dark hole into sleep.

  Lanyan woke him into that same unearthly blue light, and for a moment Kerans didn’t know where he was. Only that strange undersea radiance, his sense of time and place out of joint, a chill undertow of anxiety. Then it all came flooding back, the plague, Felicia’s fall, the blizzard.

  Lanyan’s expression echoed his unease.

  “Get up,” he said.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Just get up.”

  Kerans followed him to the window. Natalie crouched there, gazing out into the sheets of blowing snow. She held the pistol in one hand.

  “What is it?” he whispered.

  “There’s something in the snow,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I heard it. It woke me up.”

  “You hear anything, Cliff?”

  Lanyan shrugged.

  Wind tore at the house, rattling gutters. Kerans peered into the snow, but if there was anything out there, he couldn’t see it. He couldn’t see anything but a world gone w
hite. The streetlamp loomed above them, a bulb of fuzzy blue light untethered from the earth.

  “Heard what?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. It woke me. Something in the snow.”

  “The wind,” Kerans said.

  “It sounded like it was alive.”

  “Listen to it blow out there. You could hear anything in that. The brain, it”—he hesitated—

  “What?” Natalie said.

  “All I’m saying is, it’s easy enough to imagine something like that. Voices in the wind. Shapes in the snow.”

  Natalie’s breath fogged the window. “I didn’t imagine anything.”

  “Look,” he said. “It’s late. We’re all tired. You could have imagined something, that’s all I’m saying.”

  “I said I didn’t imagine it.”

  And then, as though the very words had summoned it into being, a thin shriek carved the wind—alien, predatory, unearthly as the cry of a hunting raptor. The snow muffled it, made it hard to track how far away it was, but it was closer than Kerans wanted it be. It held for a moment, wavering, and dropped away. A heartbeat passed, then two, and then came an answering cry, farther away. Kerans swallowed hard, put his back to the wall, and slid to the floor. He pulled his knees up, dropped his head between them. He could feel the cold radiating from the window, shivering erect the tiny hairs on his neck. He looked up. His breath unfurled in the gloom. They were both watching him, Lanyan and Natalie.

  “It’s the wind,” he said. Hating himself as he said it, hating this new weakness he’d discovered in himself, this inability to face what in his heart he knew to be true.

  Came a third cry then, still farther away.

  “Jesus,” Lanyan said.

  “They’re surrounding us,” Natalie said.

  “They’re?” Kerans said. “They’re? Who the hell do you think could be out there in that?”

  Natalie turned and met his gaze. “I don’t know,” she said.

  They checked the house, throwing deadbolts, locking interior doors and windows. Kerans didn’t get the windows. You wanted to get inside bad enough, you just broke the glass. Yet there was something comforting in sliding the little tongue into its groove all the same. Symbolic barriers. Like cavemen, drawing circles of fire against the night.

  As for sleep, forget it.

  He leaned against the sofa, draped in his sleeping bag, envying Felicia the oblivion of the oxycodone. Her skin was hot to the touch, greasy with perspiration. He could smell, or imagined he could smell, the putrescent wound, the inadequate dressing soaked with gore.

  Across the room sat Lanyan, the Benelli flat across his legs. At the window, her back propped against the wall, Natalie, cradling the pistol in her lap. Kerans felt naked with just the hunting knife at his belt.

  The snow kept coming, slanting down past the streetlamp, painting the room with that strange, swimming light. Lanyan’s face looked blue and cold, like the face of a dead man. Natalie’s, too. And he didn’t even want to think about Felicia, burning up under the covers, sweating out the fever of the infection.

  “We should look at her leg,” he said.

  “And do what?” Natalie responded, and what could he say to that because there was nothing to do, Kerans knew that as well as anyone, yet he felt compelled in his impotence to do something, anything, even if it was just stripping back the sleeping bag and staring at the wound, stinking and inflamed, imperfectly splinted, oozing blood and yellow pus.

  “Just keep doling out those drugs,” Lanyan said, and Kerans knew he meant the oxycodone, not the amoxicillin, which couldn’t touch an infection of this magnitude, however much he prayed—and he was not a praying man. He couldn’t help recalling his mother, dying in agony from bone cancer: the narrow hospital room, stinking of antiseptic, with its single forlorn window; the doctor, a hulking Greek, quick to anger, who spoke in heavily accented English. We’re into pain management now, he’d said.

  “How much is left?” Natalie said, and Kerans realized that he’d been turning the prescription bottle in his hands.

  “Ten, maybe fifteen pills.”

  “Not enough,” she said. “I don’t think it’s enough,” and a bright fuse of hatred for her burned through him for giving voice to thoughts he could barely acknowledge as his own.

  After that, silence.

  Kerans’s eyes were grainy with exhaustion, yet he could not sleep.

  None of them could sleep.

  Unspeaking, they listened for voices in the storm.

  At two, they came: one, two, three metallic screeches in the wind.

  Lanyan took one window, Natalie the other, lifting her pistol.

  Kerans stayed with Felicia. She was stirring now, coming out of her oxycodone haze. “What is it?” she said.

  “Nothing. It’s nothing.”

  But it was something.

  “There,” Natalie said, but she needn’t have said it at all.

  Even from his place by the sofa, Kerans saw it: a blue shadow darting past the window, little more than a blur, seven feet long or longer, horizontal to the earth, tail lashing, faster than anything that size had any right to be, faster than anything human. There and gone again, obscured by a veil of blowing snow.

  Kerans’s own words mocked him. Imagination. Shapes in the snow.

  He thought of that icy tapping, like fingernails at the window.

  Let me in.

  Felicia said, “Dave? What is it, Dave?”

  “It’s nothing,” he said.

  Silence prevailed. Shifting veils of snow.

  “What the hell was that thing?” Lanyan said.

  And Natalie from her window. “Let’s play a game.”

  Nobody said a word.

  “The game is called ‘What if?’ ” she said.

  “What are you talking about?” Kerans said.

  “What if you were an alien species?”

  “Oh, come on,” Kerans said, but Lanyan was grim and silent.

  “Way ahead of us technologically, capable of travel between stars.”

  “This is crazy, Dave,” Felicia said. “What is she talking about?”

  “Nothing. It’s nothing.”

  “And what if you wanted to clear a planet for colonization?”

  “You read too much science fiction.”

  “Shut the hell up, Dave,” Lanyan said.

  “We’re intelligent. They would try to—”

  “We’re vermin,” Natalie said. “And what I would do, I would engineer some kind of virus and wipe out ninety-nine-percent of the vermin. Like fumigating a fucking house.”

  “And then?” Lanyan said.

  “Then I’d send in the ground troops to mop up.”

  Kerans snorted.

  “Dave—”

  “It’s craziness, that’s all,” he said. He said, “Here, these’ll help you sleep.”

  Nothing then. Nothing but wind and snow and the sound of silence in the room.

  After a time, they resumed their posts on the floor.

  Felicia, weeping, lapsed back into drugged sleep.

  “We’re going to have to get to the Yukon,” Natalie said.

  “We can’t see a fucking thing out there,” Kerans said.

  “At first light. Maybe the snow will stop by then.”

  “And if it doesn’t?” Lanyan said.

  “We make a run for it.”

  “What about Felicia?” Kerans said.

  “What about her?”

  Kerans looked at his watch. It was almost three o’clock.

  He must have dozed, for he came awake abruptly, jarred from sleep by a distant thud. A dream, he thought, his pulse hammering. It must have been a dream—a nightmare inside this nightmare of dark and endless snow, of a plague-ravished world and Felicia dying in agony. But it was no dream. Lanyan and Natalie had heard it, too. They were already up, their weapons raised, and even as he stumbled to his feet, shedding like water the sleeping bag across his shoulders, it came again: a thump aga
inst the back of the house, muffled by snow and the intervening rooms.

  “What is it?” Felicia said, her voice drowsy with oxycodone.

  “Nothing,” he said. “It was nothing. A branch must have fallen.”

  “That was no branch,” Natalie said. “Not unless it fell twice.”

  And twice more after that, two quick blows, and a third, and then silence, a submarine hush so deep and pervasive that Kerans could hear the boom of his heart.

  “Maybe a tree came down.”

  “You know better,” Lanyan said.

  “Dave, I’m scared,” Felicia whispered.

  “We’re all scared,” Natalie said.

  Felicia began softly to weep.

  “Shut her the fuck up,” Natalie said.

  “Natalie—”

  “I said shut her up.”

  “It hurts,” Felicia said. “I’m afraid.” Kerans knelt by the sectional and kissed her chill lips. Her breath bloomed in the cold air, sweet with the stink of infection, and he didn’t think he’d ever loved her more in his life than he did at that moment. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he whispered, wiping away her tears with the ball of his thumb. “It’s just the wind.” But even she was past believing him, for the wind had died. The snow fell soft and straight through the air. The streetlamp was a blue halo against the infinite blackness of space. Natalie’s game came back to Kerans—what if—and a dark surf broke and receded across the shingles of his heart. Felicia took his hand and squeezed his fingers weakly. “Just don’t leave me here,” she said. “Don’t leave me here to die.”

  “Never.”

  The glitter of shattering glass splintered the air. Felicia screamed, a short, sharp bark of terror—

  “Shut her up,” Natalie snapped.

  —and in the silence that followed, in the shifting purple shadow of the great room with its sectional sofa and the grey rectangle of the flatscreen and their sleeping bags like the shucked skins of enormous snakes upon the floor, Kerans heard someone—something—

  —let’s play a game the game is called what if—