The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  B. Bob was like that: he noticed things, and he attended to them.

  Miriam felt blessed. She knew herself to be plain next to the diet-sculpted, spa-pampered, surgery-perfected women in Victor’s household, so she could hardly count on beauty to secure protection; nor had she any outstanding talent of the kind that these people valued. But with a camera like this Canon G9, you needed no special gift to take attractive family snapshots. It was certainly better than, say, becoming someone’s lowly third wife, or being bonded for life to a wrinkled shrine-priest back home.

  Krista said that B. Bob had been a gangster in Prague. This was certainly possible. Some men had a magic that could change them from any one thing into anything else: the magic was money. Victor’s money had changed Miriam’s status from that of an illegal slave to, of all wonderful things, that of a naturalized citizen of the U.S.A. (although whether her new papers could stand serious scrutiny she hoped never to have to find out). Thus she was cut off from her roots, floating in Victor’s world.

  Better not to think of that, though; better not to think painful thoughts.

  Krista understood this (she understood a great deal without a lot of palaver). Yet Krista obstinately maintained a little shrine made of old photos, letters, and trinkets that she set up in a private corner wherever Victor’s household went. Despite a grim period in Dutch and Belgian brothels, she retained a sweet naiveté. Miriam hoped that no bad luck would rub off on Krista from attending to the twins. Krista was an East European, which seemed to render a female person more than normally vulnerable to ill fortune.

  Miriam had helped Krista to fit in with the others who surrounded Victor—the coaches, personal shoppers, arrangers, designers, bodyguards, publicists, therapists, drivers, cooks, secretaries, and hangers-on of all kinds. He was like a paramount chief with a great crowd of praise singers paid to flatter him, out-shouting similar mobs attending everyone significant in the film world. This world was little different from the worlds of Africa and Arabia that Miriam had known, although at first it had seemed frighteningly strange—so shiny, so fast-moving and raucous! But when you came right down to it here were the same swaggering, self-indulgent older men fighting off their younger competitors, and the same pretty girls they all sniffed after; and the lesser court folk, of course, including almost-invisible functionaries like Krista and Miriam.

  One day, Miriam planned to leave. Her carefully tended savings were nothing compared to the fortunes these shiny people hoarded, wasted, and squabbled over; but she had almost enough for a quiet, comfortable life in some quiet, comfortable place. She knew how to live modestly and thought she might even sell some of her photographs once she left Victor’s orbit.

  It wasn’t as if she yearned to run to one of the handsome African men she saw selling knock-off designer handbags and watches on the sidewalks of great European cities. Sometimes, at the sound of a familiar language from home, she imagined joining them—but those were poor men, always on the run from the local law. She could not give such a man power over her and her savings.

  Not that having money made the world perfect: Miriam was a realist, like any survivor. She found it funny that, even for Victor’s followers with their light minds and heavy pockets, contentment was not to be bought. Success itself eluded them, since they continually redefined it as that which they had not yet achieved.

  Victor, for instance: the one thing he longed for but could not attain was praise for his film—his first effort as an actor-director.

  “They hate me!” he cried, crushing another bad review and flinging it across the front room of their hotel suite, “because I have the balls to tackle grim reality! All they want is sex, explosions, and the new Brad Pitt! Anything but truth, they can’t stand truth!”

  Of course they couldn’t stand it. No one could. Truth was the desperate lives of most ordinary people, lives often too hard to be borne; mere images on a screen could not make that an attractive spectacle. Miriam had known boys back home who thought they were “Rambo.” Some had become killers, some had been become the killed: doped-up boys, slung about with guns and bullet-belts like carved fetish figures draped in strings of shells. Their short lives were not in the movies or like the movies.

  On this subject as many others, however, Miriam kept her opinions to herself.

  Hearts of Light was scorned at Cannes. Victor’s current wife, Cameron, fled in tears from his sulks and rages. She stayed away for days, drowning her unhappiness at parties and pools and receptions.

  Wealth, however, did have certain indispensable uses. Some years before Miriam had joined his household, Victor had bought the one thing that turned out to be essential: a white-walled mansion called La Bastide, set high on the side of a French valley only a day’s drive from Cannes. This was to be his retreat from the chaos and crushing boredom of the cinema world, a place where he could recharge his creative energies (so said B. Bob).

  When news came that three Sudanese had been found dead in Calabria, their skins crusted with a cracked glaze of blood, Victor had his six rented Mercedes loaded up with petrol and provisions. They drove out of Cannes before the next dawn. It had been hot on the Mediterranean shore. Inland was worse. Stubby planes droned across the sky trailing plumes of retardant and water that they dropped on fires in the hills.

  Victor stood in the sunny courtyard of La Bastide and told everyone how lucky they were to have gotten away to this refuge before the road from Cannes became clogged with people fleeing the unnerving proximity of the Red Sweat.

  “There’s room for all of us here,” he said (Miriam snapped pictures of his confident stance and broad, chiefly gestures). “Better yet, we’re prepared and we’re safe. These walls are thick and strong. I’ve got a rack of guns downstairs, and we know how to use them. We have plenty of food, and all the water we could want: a spring in the bedrock underneath us feeds sweet, clean water into a well right here inside the walls. And since I didn’t have to store water, we have lots more of everything else!”

  Oh, the drama; already, Miriam told Krista, he was making the movie of all this in his head.

  Nor was he the only one. As the others went off to the quarters B. Bob assigned them, trailing an excited hubbub through the cool, shadowed spaces of the house, those who had brought their camcorders dug them out and began filming on the spot. Victor encouraged them, saying that this adventure must be recorded, that it would be a triumph of photojournalism for the future.

  Privately he told Miriam, “It’s just to keep them busy. I depend on your stills to capture the reality of all this. We’ll have an exhibition later, maybe even a book. You’ve got a good eye, Miriam; and you’ve had experience with crisis in your part of the world, right?”

  “La Bastide” meant “the country house” but the place seemed more imposing than that, standing tall, pale, and alone on a crag above the valley. The outer walls were thick, with stout wooden doors and window-shutters as Victor had pointed out. He had had a wing added on to the back in matching stone. A small courtyard, the one containing the well, was enclosed by walls between the old and new buildings. Upstairs rooms had tall windows and sturdy iron balconies; those on the south side overlooked a French village three kilometers away down the valley.

  Everyone had work to do—scripts to read, write, or revise, phone calls to make and take, deals to work out—but inevitably they drifted into the ground floor salon, the room with the biggest flat-screen TV. The TV stayed on. It showed raging wildfires. Any place could burn in summer, and it was summer most of the year now in southern Europe.

  But most of the news was about the Red Sweat. Agitated people pointed and shouted, their expressions taut with urgency: “Looters came yesterday. Where are the police, the authorities?”

  “We scour buildings for batteries, matches, canned goods.”

  “What can we do? They left us behind because we are old.”

  “We hear cats and dogs crying, shut in with no food or water. We let the cats out, but we are a
fraid of the dogs; packs already roam the streets.”

  Pictures showed bodies covered with crumpled sheets, curtains, bedspreads in many colors, laid out on sidewalks and in improvised morgues—the floors of school gyms, of churches, of automobile showrooms.

  My God, they said, staring at the screen with wide eyes. Northern Italy now! So close!

  Men carrying guns walked through deserted streets wearing bulky, outlandish protective clothing and facemasks. Trucks loaded with relief supplies waited for roads to become passable; survivors mobbed the trucks when they arrived. Dead creatures washed up on shorelines, some human, some not. Men in robes, suits, turbans, military uniforms, talked and talked and talked into microphones, reassuring, begging, accusing, weeping.

  All this had been building for months, of course, but everyone in Cannes had been too busy to pay much attention. Even now at La Bastide they seldom talked about the news. They talked about movies. It was easier.

  Miriam watched TV a lot. Sometimes she took pictures of the screen images. The only thing that could make her look away was a shot of an uncovered body, dead or soon to be so, with a film of blood dulling the skin.

  On Victor’s orders, they all ate in the smaller salon, without a TV.

  On the third night, Krista asked, “What will we eat when this is all gone?”

  “I got boxes of that paté months go.” Bulgarian Bob smiled and stood back with his arms folded, like a waiter in a posh restaurant. “Don’t worry, there’s plenty more.”

  “My man,” said Victor, digging into his smoked Norwegian salmon.

  Next day, taking their breakfast coffee out on the terrace, they saw military vehicles grinding past on the roadway below. Relief convoys were being intercepted now, the news had said, attacked and looted.

  “Don’t worry, little Mi,” B. Bob said, as she took snaps of the camouflage-painted trucks from the terrace. “Victor bought this place and fixed it up in the Iranian crisis. He thought we had more war coming. We’re set for a year, two years.”

  Miriam grimaced. “Where food was stored in my country, that is where gunmen came to steal,” she said.

  B. Bob took her on a tour of the marvelous security at La Bastide, all controlled from a complicated computer console in the master suite: the heavy steel-mesh gates that could be slammed down, the metal window shutters, the ventilation ducts with their electrified outside grills.

  “But if the electricity goes off?” she asked.

  He smiled. “We have our own generators here.”

  After dinner that night Walter entertained them. Hired as Victor’s Tae Kwan Do coach, he turned out to be a conservatory-trained baritone.

  “No more opera,” Victor said, waving away an aria. “Old country songs for an old country house. Give us some ballads, Walter!”

  Walter sang “Parsley Sage,” “Barbara Ellen,” and “The Golden Vanity.”

  This last made Miriam’s eyes smart. It told of a young cabin boy who volun-teered to swim from an outgunned warship to the enemy vessel and sink it, single-handed, with an augur; but his Captain would not to let him back on board afterward. Rather than hole that ship too and so drown not just the evil Captain but his own innocent shipmates, the cabin boy drowned himself: “He sank into the lowland, low and lonesome, sank into the lowland sea.”

  Victor applauded. “Great, Walter, thanks! You’re off the hook now, that’s enough gloom and doom. Tragedy tomorrow—comedy tonight!”

  They followed him into the library, which had been fitted out with a big movie screen and computers with game consoles. They settled down to watch Marx Brothers movies and old romantic comedies from the extensive film library of La Bastide. The bodyguards stayed up late, playing computer games full of mayhem. They grinned for Miriam’s camera lens.

  In the hot and hazy afternoon next day, a green mini-Hummer appeared on the highway. Miriam and Krista, bored by a general discussion about which gangster movie had the most swear words, were sitting on the terrace painting each other’s toenails. The Hummer turned off the roadway, came up the hill, and stopped at La Bastide’s front gates. A man in jeans, sandals, and a white shirt stepped out on the driver’s side.

  It was Paul, a writer hired to ghost Victor’s autobiography. The hot, cindery wind billowed his sleeve as he raised a hand to shade his eyes.

  “Hi, girls!” he called. “We made it! We actually had to go off-road, you wouldn’t believe the traffic around the larger towns! Where’s Victor?”

  Bulgarian Bob came up beside them and stood looking down.

  “Hey, Paul,” he said. “Victor’s sleeping; big party last night. What can we do for you?”

  “Open the gates, of course! We’ve been driving for hours!”

  “From Cannes?”

  “Of course from Cannes!” cried Paul heartily. “Some Peruvian genius won the Palme D’Or, can you believe it? But maybe you haven’t heard—the jury made a special prize for Hearts of Light. We have the trophy with us—Cammie’s been holding it all the way from Cannes.”

  Cameron jumped out of the car and held up something bulky wrapped in a towel. She wore party clothes: a sparkly green dress and chunky sandals that laced high on her plump calves. Miriam’s own thin, straight legs shook a little with the relief of being up here, on the terrace, and not down there at the gates.

  Bulgarian Bob put his big hand gently over the lens of her camera. “Not this,” he murmured.

  Cameron waved energetically and called B. Bob’s name, and Miriam’s, and even Krista’s (everyone knew that she hated Krista).

  Paul stood quietly, staring up. Miriam had to look away.

  B. Bob called, “Victor will be very happy about the prize.”

  Krista whispered, “He looks for blood on their skin; it’s too far to see, though, from up here.” To Bob she said, “I should go tell Victor?”

  B. Bob shook his head. “He won’t want to know.”

  He turned and went back inside without another word. Miriam and Krista took their bottles of polish and their tissues and followed.

  Victor (and, therefore, everyone else) turned a deaf ear to the pleas, threats, and wails from out front for the next two days. A designated “security team” made up of bodyguards and mechanics went around making sure that La Bastide was locked up tight.

  Victor sat rocking on a couch, eyes puffy. “My God, I hate this; but they were too slow. They could be carrying the disease. We have a responsibility to protect ourselves.”

  Next morning the Hummer and its two occupants had gone.

  Television channels went to only a few hours a day, carrying reports of the Red Sweat in Paris, Istanbul, Barcelona. Nato troops herded people into make-shift “emergency” camps: schools, government buildings, and of course that trusty standby of imprisonment and death, sports arenas.

  The radio and news sites on the Web said more: refugees were on the move everywhere. The initial panicky convulsion of flight was over, but smaller groups were reported rushing this way and that all over the continent. In Eastern Europe, officials were holed up in mountain monasteries and castles, trying to subsist on wild game. Urbanites huddled in the underground malls of Canadian cities. When the Red Sweat made its lurid appearance in Montreal, it set off a stampede for the countryside.

  They said monkeys carried it; marmots; stray dogs; stray people. Ravens, those eager devourers of corpses, must carry the disease on their claws and beaks, or they spread it in their droppings. So people shot at birds, dogs, rodents, and other people.

  Krista prayed regularly to two little wooden icons she kept with her. Miriam had been raised pagan with a Christian gloss. She did not pray. God had never seemed further away.

  After a screaming fight over the disappearance of somebody’s stash of E, a sweep by the security squad netted a hoard of drugs. These were locked up, to be dispensed only by Bulgarian Bob at set times.

  “We have plenty of food and water,” Victor explained, “but not an endless supply of drugs. We don’t want to ru
n through it all before this ends, do we?” In compensation he was generous with alcohol, with which La Bastide’s cellar was plentifully stocked. When his masseuse (she was diabetic) and one of the drivers insisted on leaving to fend for themselves and their personal requirements outside, Victor did not object.

  Miriam had not expected a man who had only ever had to act like a leader onscreen to exercise authority so naturally in real life.

  It helped that his people were not in a rebellious mood. They stayed in their rooms playing cards, sleeping, some even reading old novels from the shelves under the window seats downstairs. A running game of trivia went on in the games room (“Which actors have played which major roles in green body make-up?”). People used their cell phones to call each other in different parts of the building, since calls to the outside tended not to connect (when they did, conversations were not encouraging).

  Nothing appeared on the television now except muay thai matches from Thailand, but the radio still worked: “Fires destroyed the main hospital in Marseilles; fire brigades did not respond. Refugees from the countryside who were sheltering inside are believed dead.”

  “Students and teachers at the university at Bologna broke into the city offices but found none of the food and supplies rumored to be stored there.”

  Electricity was failing now over many areas. Victor decreed that they must only turn on the modern security system at night. During daylight hours they used the heavy old locks and bolts on the thick outer doors. B. Bob posted armed lookouts on the terrace and on the roof of the back wing. Cell phones were collected, to stop them being recharged to no good purpose.

  But the diesel fuel for Victor’s vastly expensive, vastly efficient German generators suddenly ran out (it appeared that the caretaker of La Bastide had sold off much of it during the previous winter). The ground floor metal shutters that had been locked in place by electronic order at nightfall could not be reopened.