by Anthology
“I'm sorry,” Nick said.
“I'm not looking for your sympathy. I've had time enough to work things through. The bad times are over. I like my life.
Only ... my parents were pacifists. I'm not.” She balled a and rapped him on the chest with it, just a little too hard.
“Keep that in mind.”
“So this Joshua—he's been bothering you?”
“He—”
A sudden baying rose up in the distance. Selene shot to her feet, listening. The baying was answered by a second, a third, until all the dogs were howling.
Selene quickly donned her goggles. “Isn't that a lovely sound?”
“Yes.” It was.
“It's a recording. The breed that bayed like that died out during the plague decades. Lost, like so many things that lacked the people to keep them going.” She scanned the horizon, matching mountains to her goggles’ mapping graphics. Then she pointed. “That way. That's where they'll drive him. Come on—run!”
* * * *
“Down this way!”
Selene had tied her jacket around her waist. It made a tail that leaped like a flag as she bounded down the slope of the ravine. Nick followed clumsily.
At the bottom, she showed him where to stand, between two trees. “The ‘dogs will run him right past you. Be careful not to get in his way! Those antlers are sharp. The hooves can do real damage. Over here, the lead will present to him.
He'll shy and rear. That leaves his throat vulnerable. I'll be aiming for his carotid artery.” She showed him where it was on her own throat.
“Is that all you're using? That knife?”
“When I'm running ‘dogs, yes. Otherwise, I use a bow.”
Nick barely had time to catch his breath when the woods erupted with baying ‘dogs. Something large crashed noisily through the brush, coming straight toward him. Then the stag burst from the bushes, wild-eyed and enormous. The ‘dogs were baying and snapping at its flank.
He stepped back automatically. The hunt swept right past him. Selene laughed, and stepped in its path.
She was magnificent.
A ‘dog slipped around front of the stag and, bracing its legs, cried a challenge. As predicted, the beast reared back.
Selene leaped at the animal, seizing its antlers. One hand went to her belt. The other pulled back, so that the stag's long neck arched. The gundogs were snarling and leaping.
Her hunting knife slashed and slashed again.
Blood sprayed everywhere. Warm flecks of it spattered his shirt and stung his face.
When the stag died, the gundogs all fell silent at once. It was eerie. Selene stepped backed from the beast, taking a deep breath. “Look at that—a six-pointer.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you all right?” she asked. “You're trembling.”
I think I'm in love, he wanted to say. And, no, it's not all right, it's not all right at all. But instead, “No, really. I'm fine.”
Selene laughed. “It's always like that—your first time.”
* * * *
Selene gutted the beast, then slung it over her shoulders.
When Nick offered to help, she laughed at him.
Back home, she hung up the carcass to cure on a frame behind the house. “Come on inside,” she said, “and we'll get cleaned up.”
When Selene came out of the bathroom, toweling her hair, she wore a baby-blue bathrobe, loosely cinched. Just looking at how her body moved within it made him hard.
“Well,” Nick said. “I guess it's my turn at the tub.”
She looked at him steadily, wordlessly. Without warning, she hooked an ankle behind him and gave him a two-handed shove. He fell back onto the couch.
Then she was on top of him, pushing up his shirt, tugging at his belt, shoving his trousers down to his knees. Before he knew what was going on, she had him inside of her and was humping him, humping him, humping him.
It was almost rape. He wasn't at all sure he liked it at first.
Then he was, and wanted it to last forever. And then it was over.
Then she took him into the bedroom and they made love again. More slowly this time.
“Don't expect much,” she said afterward. “I don't like entanglements.”
“Entanglements?”
“Men, then. I don't much like men.”
“Do you want me to leave?” Nick asked.
“Oh, stay till morning. I'll make you breakfast.” She rolled over and went to sleep.
The ‘dogs padded quietly, alertly, in and out of the room, on constant patrol.
* * * *
Nick got up in the middle of the night. Selene was still asleep. Moonlight flooded the room.
Silently, he put his clothes on.
The central command unit for the gundogs emitted a hum in the 330-hertz range. He was sensitive to things like that.
He used the sound to find the unit, disguised as a lingerie chest, and flicked the kill switch, deactivating everything. The hum died.
She had never bothered to ask him what he did for a living. This was what he did. He sold and installed security systems.
He picked up her hunting knife.
There was a slight rustling noise. He turned and saw Selene looking at him.
Quietly, she asked, “Is there something wrong?”
Nick could feel her fear. He wanted to put down the knife and reassure her. Instead, he said, “Get out of bed.”
Selene pushed the covers aside and stood, naked and vulnerable. She knew who he was now. “Joshua...”
“It's Nick now. I changed my name when I was released. I wanted to put the past behind me.”
“Nick. The plagues are over.”
“That's what I used to think. But diseases mutate. They can adapt too fast for man's technology to keep up with.” He found that talking gave him confidence. He felt that he was on the right track at last. “That's what brought on the great die-back: arrogance, pride, and broad-spectrum antibiotics.
For a century, every disease was fought back to insignificance with drugs so widely prescribed that people thought epidemics weren't supposed to happen. Then the diseases adapted, resisted, and returned.
“Now you think that because we've suppressed the germs and viruses again, we've got the evil under control. But it's only come back with another name. Look at you! You're infected with the great dark thing called fear. You're so rotten with it you're shaking. My family was right. It never goes away. You can hide out here in the woods, you can surround yourself with gundogs. But it knows where you live. It knows when you're helpless. Sooner or later, it comes for you.” Nick gestured with the knife. “Let's go outside.”
He walked her out to where the deer carcass hung curing.
The ground beneath it was dark with blood. “That's far enough. Stay there, with your back to me.”
She obeyed. This was what fear did to you. She was stronger than he was, and faster too. But she obeyed.
“I suppose you're going to kill me.” Her voice almost broke on the penultimate word, but otherwise betrayed no emotion whatsoever.
“No.” Nick drew in a long breath, exhaled. “I'm going to kill myself. I thought you'd want to see it.”
Astonished, she spun around. He had the knife to his throat by then. The carotid artery. He'd seen how well that worked.
“They said I was cured, and released me. I got a job. I even had a girlfriend for a while. But then I started sending you those letters. The disease had returned.” The knife tickled his throat unpleasantly. “I've been thinking about this for a long time.”
“Why involve me? What are you doing here, goddammit?”
“It took me years to understand what my parents were trying to do. It's called the ceremony of triage: Inoculate the healthy. Leave the dying to their fate. Shoot the infected.
Okay, it's loony. If you think of it as a way of minimizing pain, it makes a lot of—”
“Pain! What do you know about pain?” She splayed her hands
across the flesh under her ribs and twisted around so he could see the scar between them. It was puckered and deep. Somehow, he hadn't noticed it when they'd screwed. “I was gored by a buck. He shoved his fucking antler right through me. Do you have any idea how much that hurt?”
“You—”
“It hurt a lot. I almost died then. I was lucky to make it back to the road. I was lucky that somebody came along in a car. I was lucky he stopped. I was so god-damned lucky I had no business complaining when it got infected and almost killed me a second time. But I did. Because—you know what?—it hurt like hell. And you've got the nerve to talk about pain!”
Nick didn't know what to say.
“When I got out of the hospital, I was afraid to hunt. The pain had been that bad. Afraid to hunt! So you know what I did?”
He shook his head.
“I went out and tracked down that exact same buck, and I killed it. I was terrified, but I faced up to my fear. I faced up to it, and I conquered it.”
She was ablaze with anger. “You've got a problem. You're afraid. Well, join the club! I didn't give in to my fear. I faced it down. Why can't you?”
Nick took the knife down from his throat. He looked down at it, heavy and useless in his hand, for a long moment. Then he tossed it away, into darkness.
“I'm sorry,” he said at last. “I'll leave now.”
* * * *
On the road from the house, Nick felt a strange sensation seize him. He had no name for it. But, though the woods were dark and silent about him, they didn't oppress him.
A sense of futility still clung to him, and he knew he had a long way to go. But suddenly he knew what that nameless thing was called.
Hope.
The lights came on behind him. He heard the whine of gundogs powering up, and then the frantic sound of the machines running for their appointed guardposts.
He thought how easily the devices could tear him apart.
They'd do that on command. But he didn't look back. He wouldn't give in to the fear.
Never again.
Nick took a deep breath, and for the first time in his life felt free. He wanted to laugh and caper. He wanted to turn right around and make love with Selene again. The night was no longer threatening, but dark and filled with promise.
Selene was right! He could face down his fears. Someday he might even master them.
Metal paws sped through the night. A gundog sped past and, wheeling, sat waiting for him in the road.
It was Otto; he knew by the markings. The ‘dog opened his mouth. What emerged was not the gruff mechanical voice Nick expected, but Selene's clear, calm soprano.
“Turn around, Nick.”
He turned.
Selene stood in the yard before her house. In the light that spilled from the windows, her face was white as bone, her eye sockets black as ink. She'd thrown on a blouse, but hadn't bothered to button it. He could see pale flesh all the way from her neck to her crotch.
She held a bow in her hand.
Shadows swarmed about her feet—gundogs, eager for her command.
“Selene—”
“You can't give in to what you fear,” she said. “You have to face it down. And kill it.”
There was a strange noise, like cloth tearing, and an arrow appeared in the dirt at his feet.
“I'll give you a head start. If you start running now, you just might make it back to the spa.”
She nocked another arrow into her bow.
Nick took a step, another, found himself running. The road was flat and empty before him. He turned, and plunged into the brush at its side. Twigs slashed his face and grabbed at his clothes. He paid them no mind. He thought only of escape.
Behind him, one by one, the ‘dogs began to bay.
DIFFERENT KINDS OF DARKNESS
David Langford
It was always dark outside the windows. Parents and teachers sometimes said vaguely that this was all because of Deep Green terrorists, but Jonathan thought there was more to the story. The other members of the Shudder Club agreed.
The dark beyond the window-glass at home, at school and on the school bus was the second kind of darkness. You could often see a little bit in the first kind, the ordinary kind, and of course you could slice through it with a torch. The second sort of darkness was utter black, and not even the brightest electric torch showed a visible beam or lit anything up. Whenever Jonathan watched his friends walk out through the school door ahead of him, it was as though they stepped into a solid black wall. But when he followed them and felt blindly along the handrail to where the homeward bus would be waiting, there was nothing around him but empty air. Black air.
Sometimes you found these super-dark places indoors. Right now Jonathan was edging his way down a black corridor, one of the school's no-go areas. Officially he was supposed to be outside, mucking around for a break period in the high-walled playground where (oddly enough) it wasn't dark at all and you could see the sky overhead. Of course, outdoors was no place for the dread secret initiations of the Shudder Club.
Jonathan stepped out on the far side of the corridor's inky-dark section, and quietly opened the door of the little storeroom they'd found two terms ago. Inside, the air was warm, dusty and stale. A bare light-bulb hung from the ceiling. The others were already there, sitting on boxes of paper and stacks of battered textbooks.
`You're late,' chorused Gary, Julie and Khalid. The new candidate Heather just pushed back long blonde hair and smiled, a slightly strained smile.
`Someone has to be last,' said Jonathan. The words had become part of the ritual, like a secret password that proved that the last one to arrive wasn't an outsider or a spy. Of course they all knew each other, but imagine a spy who was a master of disguise....
Khalid solemnly held up an innocent-looking ring-binder. That was his privilege. The Club had been his idea, after he'd found the bogey picture that someone had left behind in the school photocopier. Maybe he'd read too many stories about ordeals and secret initiations. When you'd stumbled on such a splendid ordeal, you simply had to invent a secret society to use it.
`We are the Shudder Club,' Khalid intoned. `We are the ones who can take it. Twenty seconds.'
Jonathan's eyebrows went up. Twenty seconds was serious. Gary, the fat boy of the gang, just nodded and concentrated on his watch. Khalid opened the binder and stared at the thing inside. `One ... two ... three ...'
He almost made it. It was past the seventeen-second mark when Khalid's hands started to twitch and shudder, and then his arms. He dropped the book, and Gary gave him a final count of eighteen. There was a pause while Khalid overcame the shakes and pulled himself together, and then they congratulated him on a new record.
Julie and Gary weren't feeling so ambitious, and opted for ten-second ordeals. They both got through, though by the count of ten she was terribly white in the face and he was sweating great drops. So Jonathan felt he had to say ten as well.
`You sure, Jon?' said Gary. `Last time you were on eight. No need to push it today.'
Jonathan quoted the ritual words, `We are the ones who can take it,' and took the ring-binder from Gary. `Ten.'
In between times, you always forgot exactly what the bogey picture looked like. It always seemed new. It was an abstract black-and-white pattern, swirly and flickery like one of those old Op Art designs. The shape was almost pretty until the whole thing got into your head with a shock of connection like touching a high-voltage wire. It messed with your eyesight. It messed with your brain. Jonathan felt violent static behind his eyes ... an electrical storm raging somewhere in there ... instant fever singing through the blood ... muscles locking and unlocking ... and oh dear God had Gary only counted four?
He held on somehow, forcing himself to keep still when every part of him wanted to twitch in different directions. The dazzle of the bogey picture was fading behind a new kind of darkness, a shadow inside his eyes, and he knew with dreadful certainty that he was going to faint or be sick or
both. He gave in and shut his eyes just as, unbelievably and after what had seemed like years, the count reached ten.
Jonathan felt too limp and drained to pay much attention as Heather came close -- but not close enough -- to the five seconds you needed to be a full member of the Club. She blotted her eyes with a violently trembling hand. She was sure she'd make it next time. And then Khalid closed the meeting with the quotation he'd found somewhere: `That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.'
*****
School was a place where mostly they taught you stuff that had nothing to do with the real world. Jonathan secretly reckoned that quadratic equations just didn't ever happen outside the classroom. So it came as a surprise to the Club when things started getting interesting in, of all places, a maths class.
Mr Whitcutt was quite old, somewhere between grandfather and retirement age, and didn't mind straying away from the official maths course once in a while. You had to lure him with the right kind of question. Little Harry Steen -- the chess and wargames fanatic of the class, and under consideration for the Club -- scored a brilliant success by asking about a news item he'd heard at home. It was something to do with `mathwar', and terrorists using things called blits.
`I actually knew Vernon Berryman slightly,' said Mr Whitcutt, which didn't seem at all promising. But it got better. `He's the B in blit, you know: B-L-I-T, the Berryman Logical Imaging Technique, as he called it. Very advanced mathematics. Over your heads, probably. Back in the first half of the twentieth century, two great mathematicians called Gödel and Turing proved theorems which ... um. Well, one way of looking at it is that mathematics is booby-trapped. For any computer at all, there are certain problems that will crash it and stop it dead.'
Half the class nodded knowingly. Their home-made computer programs so often did exactly that.
`Berryman was another brilliant man, and an incredible idiot. Right at the end of the twentieth century, he said to himself, "What if there are problems that crash the human brain?" And he went out and found one, and came up with his wretched "imaging technique" that makes it a problem you can't ignore. Just looking at a BLIT pattern, letting in through your optic nerves, can stop your brain.' A click of old, knotty fingers. `Like that.'