The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  “I haven’t finished taking pictures,” she said. She aimed the lens up at him. He quickly stepped back out of sight. Through the viewfinder she saw only the parapet of the terrace and the empty sky.

  She flung the camera into the ravine, panting with rage and terror as she watched it spin on its way down, compact and clever and useless.

  Then she sat down and thought.

  Even if she found a way back in, if they thought she was infected they would drive her out again, maybe just shoot her. She imagined Skip Reiker throwing a carpet over her dead body, rolling her up in it, and heaving her outside the walls like rubbish. The rest of them would not approve, but anger and fear would enable their worst impulses (“See what you made us do!”).

  She should have thought more before, about how she was a supernumerary here, acquired but not really needed, not talented as these people reckoned such things; not important to the tribe.

  “Have I have stopped being a survivor?” she asked Krista’s withered back.

  In the house Walter was singing. “Some Enchanted Evening!” Applause. Then, “The Golden Vanity.”

  Miriam sat with her back against the outside wall, burning with fear, confusion, and scalding self-reproach.

  When the sun rose again she saw a rash of dark blisters on the backs of her hands. She felt more of them rising at her hairline, around her face. Her joints ached. She was stunned: Victor was right. It was the Red Sweat. But how had she caught it? Through something she had touched—a doorknob, a book, a slicing shard of glass? By merely breathing the infected air?

  Maybe—the chocolate? The idea made her sob with laughter.

  They wouldn’t care one way or the other. She was already dead to them. She knew they would not even venture out to take her backpack, full of scavenged treasures, when she was dead (she threw its contents down the ravine after the camera, to make sure). She’d been foolish to have trusted Bulgarian Bob, or Victor either.

  They had never intended to let the dove back into the ark.

  She knelt beside Krista’s corpse and made herself search the folds of reeking, sticky clothing until she found Krista’s key to the rubbish gate, the key they had used to throw out the ashes. She sat on the ground beside Krista and rubbed the key bright on her own pant-leg.

  Let them try to keep her out. Let them try.

  Krista was my shipmate. Now I have no shipmates.

  At moonrise she shrugged her aching arms through the straps of the empty pack and walked slowly around to the side alley gate. Krista’s key clicked minutely in the lock. The door sprang outward, releasing more garbage that had been piled up inside. No one seemed to hear. They were roaring with song in the front wing and drumming on the furniture, to drown out the cries and pleadings they expected to hear from her.

  Miriam stepped inside the well yard, swallowing bloody mucus. She felt the paving lurch a little under her.

  A man was talking in the kitchen passageway, set into the ground floor of the back wing at an oblique angle across the well yard. She thought it was Edouard, a camera tech, pretending to speak on his cell as he sometimes did to keep himself company when he was on his own. Edouard, as part of Security, carried a gun.

  Her head cleared suddenly. She found that she had shut the gate behind her, and had slid down against the inside wall, for she was sitting on the cool pavement. Perhaps she had passed out for a little. By the moon’s light she saw the well’s raised stone lip, only a short way along the wall to her left. She was thirsty, although she did not think she could force water down her swollen throat now.

  The paving stones the men had pried up in their work on the plumbing had not been reset. They were still piled up out of the way, very near where she sat.

  Stones, water. Her brain was so clogged with hot heaviness that she could barely hold her head up.

  “Non, non!” Edouard shouted. “Ce n’est pas vrai, ils sont menteurs, tous!”

  Yes, all of them; menteurs. She sympathized, briefly.

  Her mind kept tilting and spilling all its thoughts into a turgid jumble, but there were constants: stones. Water. The exiled dove, the brave cabin boy. Krista and little Kevin. She made herself move, trusting to the existence of an actual plan somewhere in her mind. She crawled over to the stacked pavers. Slowly and with difficulty she took off her backpack and stuffed it with some of the smaller stones, one by one. Blood beaded black around her fingernails. She had no strength to pull the loaded pack onto her back again, so she hung it from her shoulder by one broad strap, and began making her painful way toward the well itself.

  Edouard was deep in his imaginary quarrel. As she crept along the wall she heard his voice echo angrily in the vaulted passageway.

  The thick wooden well cover had been replaced with a lightweight metal sheet, back when they had had to haul water by hand before the old laundry pump was reconnected. She lifted the light metal sheet and set it aside. Dragging herself up, she leaned over the low parapet and peered down.

  She could not make out the stone steps that descended into the water on the inside wall, left over from a time when the well had been used to hide contraband. Now . . . something. Her thoughts swam.

  Focus.

  Even without her camera there was a way to bring home to Victor all the reality he had sent her out to capture for him in pictures.

  She could barely shift her legs over the edge, but at last she felt the cold roughness of the top step under her feet. She descended toward the water, using the friction of her spread hands, turning her torso flat against the curved wall like a figure in an Egyptian tomb painting. The water winked up at her, glossy with reflected moonlight. The backpack, painful with hard stone edges, dragged at her aching shoulder. She paused to raise one strap and put her head through it; she must not lose her anchor now.

  The water’s chill lapped at her skin, sucking away her last bit of strength. She sagged out from the wall and slipped under the surface. Her hands and feet scrabbled dreamily at the slippery wall and the steps, but down she sank anyway, pulled by the bag of stones strapped to her body.

  Her chest was shot through with agony, but her mind clung with bitter pleasure to the fact that in the morning all of Victor’s tribe would wash themselves and brush their teeth and swallow their pills down with the water Victor was so proud of, water pumped by willing hands from his own wonderful well.

  Head craned back, she saw that dawn pallor had begun to flush the small circle of sky receding above her. Against that light, black curls of the blood that her body wept from every seam and pore feathered out in secret silence, into the cool, delicious water.

  About the Author

  Suzy McKee Charnas is the author of over a dozen works of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Her novels include the The Vampire Tapestry, the Holdfast series, and the Sorcery Hall series of books for young adults. A selection of her short fiction was collected in Stagestruck Vampires and Other Phantasms. She has been awarded a Hugo, a Nebula, and has won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award twice. Charnas took a joint major at Barnard College—Economic History–because she “wanted tools to build convincing societies to set fantastic stories in.” She lives in New Mexico with her lawyer-husband.

  Story Notes

  This finely crafted, beautifully executed story is one example of why “horror” is in the title of this book. There’s no fantasy here. Not a whit of the supernatural. It may have been inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, but it steps into a speculative day-after-tomorrow that could most certainly happen.

  COPPING SQUID

  MICHAEL SHEA

  Ricky Deuce, twenty-eight and three years sober, was the night clerk at Mahmoud’s Mom and Pop Market. He was a small, leanly muscled guy, and as he sat there, the darkness outside deepening toward midnight, his tight little Irish face looked pleased with where he was. Behind Ricky on his stool, the whole wall was bottles of every kind of Hard known to man.

  This job was easy money—a sit-down after his day forklifting at the ware-h
ouse. He already owned an awesomely restored sixty-four Mustang, and had near ten K saved, and by rights he ought to be casting around for where he might take off to next. But the fact was, he got a kick out of clerking here till two am each night.

  A kick that was not powder nor pill nor smoke nor booze, that was not needing any of them, especially not booze, which could shine and glint in its bottles and surround him all night long, and he not give a shit. He never got tired of sitting here immune, savoring the unadorned adventure of being alive.

  Not that the job lacked irritants. There were obnoxious clientele, and these preponderated toward the deep of night.

  Ricky thought he heard one even now.

  Single cars shushed past outside, long silences falling between, and a scuffy tread advanced along the sidewalk. A purposeful tread that nonetheless staggered now and then. It reminded Ricky that he was It, the only island of comfort and light for a half a mile in all directions, in a big city, in the dead of night.

  Then, there in Mahmoud’s Mom and Pop Market’s entryway, stood a big gaunt black guy. Youngish, but with a strange, outdated look, his hair growing weedily out towards a ’fro. His torso and half his legs were engulfed in an oversize nylon athletic jacket that looked like it might have slept in an alley or two, and which revealed the chest of a dark T-shirt that said something indecipherable RULES. The man had a drugged look, but he also had wide-arched, inquiring brows. His glossy black eyes checked you out, as if maybe the real him was somewhere back in there, smarter than he looked.

  But then, as he lurched inside the store, and into the light, he just looked drunk.

  “Evening,” Ricky said smiling. He always opened by giving all his clientele the benefit of the doubt.

  The man came and planted his hands of the counter, not aggressively, it seemed, but in the manner of someone tipsily presenting a formal proposition.

  “Hi. I’m Andre. I need your money, man.”

  Ricky couldn’t help laughing. “What a coincidence! So do I!”

  “Okay, Bro,” Andre said calmly, agreeably. As if he was shaping a counter-proposal, he straightened and stepped back from the counter. “Then I’ma cut your fuckin ass to ribbons till you give me your fuckin money!”

  The odd picture this plan of action presented almost made Ricky laugh again, but then the guy whipped out and flipped open—with great expertise—a very large gravity knife, which he then swept around by way of threat, though still out of striking range. Ricky was so startled that he half fell off his stool.

  Getting his legs under him, furious at having been galvanized like that, Ricky shrieked, “A knife? You’re gonna to rob me with a fucking knife? I’ve got a fucking knife!”

  And he unpocketed his lock-back Buck knife, and snapped it open. All this while he found himself once again trying to decipher the big, uncouthly lettered word on the guy’s T-shirt above the word RULES.

  Andre didn’t seem drunk at all now. He swept a slash over the counter at Ricky’s head, which Ricky had to recoil from right smartly.

  “You shit! You do that again and I’m gonna slice your—”

  Here came the gravity knife again, as quick as a shark, and, snapping his head back out of the way, Ricky counter-slashed at the sweeping arm, and felt the rubbery tug of flesh unzipped by the tip of his Buck’s steel.

  Andre abruptly stepped back and relaxed. He put his knife away, and held up his arm. It had a nice bloody slash across the inner forearm. He stood there letting it bleed for Ricky. Ricky had seen himself and others bleed, but not a black man. On black skin, he found, blood looked more opulent, a richer red, and so did the meat underneath the skin. That cut would take at least a dozen stitches. They both watched the blood soak the elastic cuff of Andre’s jacket.

  “So here’s what it is,” said Andre, and dipped his free hand in the jacket and pulled out a teensy, elegant little silver cellphone. “Ima call the oinkers, and say I need an ambulance because this mad whacked white shrimp—that’s you—slashed me when I just axed him for some spare change, and then Ima ditch the shit outta this knife before they show up, and it won’t matter if they believe me or not, when they see me bleedin like this they gonna take us both down for questioning and statements. How’s your rap sheet, Chief, hey? So look. Just give me a little money and I’m totally outta your face. It don’t have to be much. Ten dollars would do it!”

  This took Ricky aback. “Ten dollars? You make me cut you for ten dollars?”

  “You wanna give me a hundred, give me a hundred! Ten’s all you gotta give me—and a ride. A short ride, over to the Hood.”

  “You want money and a ride! You think I’m outta my mind? You wanna ride to your connection to score, and when we get there, you’re gonna try an get more money out of me. And that’s the best case scenario.” Ricky was dismayed to hear a hint of negotiation in his own words. It was true, he’d had a number of contacts with the San Francisco Police Department, as the result of alcohol-enhanced conflicts here and there. But also, he felt intrigued by the guy. Something fascinating burned in this Andre whack. Intensity came off him in waves, along with his faint scent of street-funk. The man was consumed by a passion. In the deformed letters on his T-shirt, Ricky thought he could make out a T-H-U.

  “What could I be coppin for ten bucks?” crowed Andre. “I’m not out to harm you! This just has to do with me. See, it’s required. I have to get these two things from someone else, the money and the ride.”

  “Explain that. Explain why you have to get these two things from someone else.”

  Andre didn’t answer for a moment. He stared and stared, not exactly at Ricky, but at something he seemed to see in Ricky. He seemed to be weighing this thing he detected. He had eyes like black opals, and strange slow thoughts seemed to move within their shiny hemispheres . . .

  “The reason is,” he said at last, “that’s the procedure. There are these particular rules for seeing the one I want to see.”

  “And who is that?”

  “I can’t tell you. I’m not allowed.”

  It was almost time to close up anyway. Ricky became aware of a powerful tug of curiosity, and aware of the fact that Andre saw it in his eyes. This put Ricky’s back up.

  “No. You gotta give me something. You gotta tell me at least—“

  “Thassit! Fuck you!” And Andre flipped open the cellphone. His big spatulate fingertips made quick dainty movements on the minute keys. Ricky heard the bleep, minuscule but crystal clear, of the digits, and then a micro-voice saying, “Nine-one-one emergency.”

  “I been stabbed by a punk in a liquor store! I been stabbed!”

  Ricky violently shook his head, and held up his hands in surrender. With a bleep, Andre clicked off. “Believe me! You’re not makin a mistake. It’s something I can’t talk about, but you can see it. You can see it yourself. But the thing is, it’s got to be now. We can’t hem an haw. And Ima tell you now, now that you’re in, that there’s something in it for you, something good as gold. Trust me, you’ll see. Help me with this knot,” he said, pulling a surprisingly clean looking handkerchief from his jacket pocket. He folded it—rather expertly, Ricky thought—into a bandage. Ricky wrapped it round the wound, and tied the ends in a neat, tight squareknot, feeling as his fingers pressed against flesh that he was forming a bond with this whack by stanching his blood. He was accepting a dangerous complicity with his whack aims, whatever they might be . . .

  Bandaged, Andre held out his hand. Ricky put a ten in it.

  “Thanks,” said Andre. “So. Where’s your ride?”

  The blue Mustang boomed down Sixteenth through the Mission. All the signals were on blink. Here and there under the streetlights, there was a wino or two, or someone walking fast, shoulders hunched against the emptiness, but mostly the Mustang rolled through pure naked City, a vacant concrete stage.

  Ricky liked driving around at this hour, and often did it on his own for fun. When he was a kid, he’d always felt sorcery in the midnight streets, in the m
osaic of their lights, and he’d never lost the sense of unearthly shapes stirring beneath their web, stirring till they almost cohered, as the stars did for the ancients into constellations. Tonight, with mad, bleeding Andre riding shotgun, the lights glittered wilder possibilities, and a sinister grandeur seemed to lurk in them.

  They passed under the freeway, and down to the Bayside, hanging south on Third. After long blocks of big blank buildings, Third took a snaky turn, and they were rolling through the Hood.

  Pawn shops and thrift stores and liquor stores. A whiff of Mad Dog hung over it, Mad Dog with every other drug laced through it. The Hood was lit, was like a long jewel. The signals were working here.

  The signals stretched out of sight ahead, like a python with scales of red and green, their radiance haloed in a light fog that was drifting in off the Bay. And people were out, little knots of them near the corners. They formed isolated clots of gaudy life, like tide pools, all of them dressed in baggy clothes of bright-colored nylon, paneled and logo-ed with surreal pastels under the emerald-and-ruby signal glare. And as they stood and talked together, they moved in a way both fitful and languid, like sealife bannering in a restless sea.

  The signals changed in pattern to a slow tidal rhythm. It seemed a rhythm meant to accommodate rush-hour traffic. You got a green for two blocks max, and then you got a red. A long, long red. Ricky’s blue Mustang was almost the only car on the road in this phantom rush-hour, creeping down the long bright python two blocks at a time, and then idling, idling interminably, while the sealife on the corners seemed astir with interest and attention.

  Ricky had no qualms about running red lights on deserted streets, but here it seemed dangerous, a declaration of unease.

  “Fuck this!” he said at their fourth red light, and slipped the brake, and rolled forward. At a stroll though, under twenty. The Mustang lounged along, taking green and red alike, as if upon a scenic country road. The bright languid people on the corners threw laughter at them now, a shout or two, and it seemed as if the whole great submarine python stirred to quicker currents. Ricky felt a ripple of hallucination, and saw here, for just a moment, a vast inked mural, the ink not dry, themselves and all around them still half-liquid entities billowing in an aqueous universe . . .