The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  “If I can cut to the chase,” the Lieutenant said. “You’re saying we need to find a way to open up this fucker and keep him open so that we can wreak merry havoc on his insides.”

  Davis nodded. “To cut to the chase, yes, exactly.”

  “How do you propose we do this?”

  “With these.” Davis reached into the duffel bag to his left and withdrew what appeared to be a three foot piece of white wood, tapered to a point sharp enough to prick your eye looking at it. He passed the first one to the Lieutenant, brought out one for Lee and one for Han.

  “A baseball bat?” Lee said, gripping near the point and swinging his like a Louisville Slugger. “We gonna club it to death?”

  Neither Davis nor the Lieutenant replied; they were busy watching Han, who’d located the grips at the other end of his and was jabbing it, first underhand, then overhand.

  “The people you meet working at Home Depot,” Davis said. “They’re made out of an industrial resin, inch-for-inch, stronger than steel. Each one has a high-explosive core.”

  “Whoa,” Lee said, setting his on the ground with exaggerated care.

  “The detonators are linked to this,” Davis said, fishing a cell phone from his shirt pocket. “Turn it on.” Pointing to the Lieutenant, Han, Lee, and himself, he counted, “One-two-three-four. Send. That’s it.”

  “I was mistaken,” the Lieutenant said. “It appears we will be using stakes, after all.”

  IV

  2004

  At Landstuhl, briefly, and then at Walter Reed, at length, an impressive array of doctors, nurses, chaplains, and other soldiers whose job it was encouraged Davis to discuss Fallujah. He was reasonably sure that, while under the influence of one of the meds that kept his body at a safe distance, he had let slip some detail, maybe more. How else to account for the change in his nurse’s demeanor? Likely, she judged he was a psych case, a diagnosis he half-inclined to accept. Even when the Lieutenant forced his way into Davis’s room, banging around in the wheelchair he claimed he could use well enough, Goddamnit, Davis was reluctant to speak of anything except the conditions of the other survivors. Of whom he had been shocked—truly shocked, profoundly shocked, almost more so than by what had torn through them—to learn there were only two, Lee and Han, Manfred bled out on the way to be evac’d, everyone else long gone by the time the reinforcements had stormed into the courtyard. According to the Lieutenant, Han was clinging to life by a thread so fine you couldn’t see it. He’d lost his helmet in the fracas, and the bones in his skull had been crushed like an eggshell. Davis, who had witnessed that crushing, nodded. Lee had suffered his own head trauma, although, compared to Han’s, it wasn’t anything a steel plate couldn’t fix. The real problem with Lee was that, if he wasn’t flooded with some heavy-duty happy pills, he went fetal, thumb in his mouth, the works.

  “What about you?” the Lieutenant said, indicating the armature of casts, wires, weights, and counterweights that kept Davis suspended like some overly-ambitious kid’s science project.

  “Believe it or not, sir,” Davis said, “it really is worse than it looks. My pack and my helmet absorbed most of the impact. Still left me with a broken back, scapula, and ribs—but my spinal cord’s basically intact. Not that it doesn’t hurt like a motherfucker, sir. Yourself?”

  “The taxpayers of the United States of America have seen fit to gift me with a new right leg, since I so carelessly misplaced the original.” He knocked on his pajama leg, which gave a hollow, plastic sound.

  “Sir, I am so sorry—”

  “Shut it,” the Lieutenant said. “It’s a paper cut.” Using his left foot, he rolled himself back to the door, which he eased almost shut. Through the gap, he surveilled the hallway outside long enough for Davis to start counting, One Mississippi, Two Mississippi, then wheeled himself to Davis’s head. He leaned close and said, “Davis.”

  “Sir?”

  “Let’s leave out the rank thing for five minutes, okay? Can we do that?”

  “Sir—yes, yes we can.”

  “Because ever since the docs have reduced my drugs to the point I could string one sentence after another, I’ve been having these memories—dreams—I don’t know what the fuck to call them. Nightmares. And I can’t decide if I’m losing it, or if this is why Lee needs a palm full of M&Ms to leave his bed. So I need you to talk to me straight, no bullshit, no telling the officer what you think he wants to hear. I would genuinely fucking appreciate it if we could do that.”

  Davis looked away when he saw the Lieutenant’s eyes shimmering. Keeping his own focused on the ceiling, he said, “It came out of the sky. That’s where it went, after Han stuck it, so I figure it must have dropped out of there, too. It explains why, one minute we’re across the courtyard from a bunch of hostiles, the next, that thing’s standing between us.”

  “Did you see it take off?”

  “I did. After it had stepped on Han’s head, it spread its arms—it kind of staggered back from Han, caught itself, then opened its arms and these huge wings snapped open. They were like a bat’s, skin stretched over bone—they appeared so fast I’m not sure, but they shot out of its body. It tilted its head, jumped up, high, ten feet easy, flapped the wings, which raised it another ten feet, and turned—the way a swimmer turns in the water, you know? Another flap, two, and it was gone.”

  “Huh.”

  Davis glanced at the Lieutenant, whose face was smooth, his eyes gazing across some interior distance. He said, “Do you—”

  “Back up,” the Lieutenant said. “The ten of us are in the courtyard. How big’s the place?”

  “I’m not very good with—”

  “At a guess.”

  “Twenty-five feet wide, maybe fifty long. With all of those jars in the way—what were they?”

  “Planters.”

  “Three-foot-tall stone planters?”

  “For trees. They were full of dirt. Haven’t you ever seen those little decorative trees inside office buildings?”

  “Oh. All right. What I was going to say was, With the row of planters at either end, the place might have been larger.”

  “Noted. How tall were the walls?”

  “Taller than any of us—eight feet, easy. They were thick, too, a foot and a half, two feet.” Davis said, “It really was a good spot to attack from. Open fire from the walls, then drop behind them when they can’t maintain that position. The tall buildings are behind it, and we don’t hold any of them, so they don’t have to worry about anyone firing down on them. I’m guessing they figured we didn’t know where we were well enough to call in any artillery on them. No, if we want them, we have to run a hundred feet of open space to a doorway that’s an easy trap. They’ve got the planters for cover near and far, not to mention the doorway in the opposite wall as an exit.”

  “Agreed.”

  “To be honest, now that we’re talking about it, I can’t imagine how we made it into the place without losing anyone. By all rights, they should have tagged a couple of us crossing from our position to theirs. And that doorway: they should have massacred us.”

  “We were lucky. When we returned fire, they must have panicked. Could be they didn’t see all of us behind the wall, thought they were ambushing three or four targets, instead of ten. Charging them may have given the impression there were even more of us. It took them until they were across the courtyard to get a grip and regroup.”

  “By which time we were at the doorway.”

  “So it was Lee all the way on the left—”

  “With Han beside him.”

  “Right, and Bay and Remsnyder. Then you and Petit—”

  “No—it was me and Lugo, then Petit, then you.”

  “Yes, yes. Manfred was to my right, and Weymouth was all the way on the other end.”

  “I’m not sure how many—”

  “Six. There may have been a seventh in the opposite doorway, but he wasn’t around very long. Either he went down, or he decided to season his valor with a li
ttle discretion.”

  “It was loud—everybody firing in a confined space. I had powder all over me from their shots hitting the wall behind us. I want to say we traded bullets for about five minutes, but it was what? Half that?”

  “Less. A minute.”

  “And . . . ”

  “Our guest arrived.”

  “At first—at first it was like, I couldn’t figure out what I was seeing. I’m trying to line up the guy who’s directly across from me—all I need is for him to stick up his head again—and all of a sudden, there’s a shadow in the way. That was my first thought: It’s a shadow. Only, who’s casting it? And why is it hanging in the air like that? And why is it fucking eight feet tall?”

  “None of us understood what was in front of us. I thought it was a woman in a burka, someone I’d missed when we’d entered the courtyard. As you say, though, you don’t meet a lot of eight-foot-tall women, in or out of Iraq.”

  “Next thing . . . no, that isn’t what happened.”

  “What?”

  “I was going to say the thing—the Shadow—was in among the hostiles, which is true, it went for them first, but before it did, there was a moment . . . ”

  “You saw something—something else.”

  “Yeah,” Davis said. “This pain shot straight through my head. We’re talking instant migraine, so intense I practically puked. That wasn’t all: this chill . . . I was freezing, colder than I’ve ever been, like you read about in Polar expeditions. I couldn’t—the courtyard—”

  “What?”

  “The courtyard wasn’t—I was somewhere high, like, a hundred miles high, so far up I could see the curve of the Earth below me. Clouds, continents, the ocean: what you see in the pictures they take from orbit. Stars, space, all around me. Directly, overhead, a little farther away than you are from me, there was this thing. I don’t know what the fuck it was. Big—long, maybe long as a house. It bulged in the middle, tapered at the ends. The surface was dark, shiny—does that make any sense? The thing was covered in—it looked like some kind of lacquer. Maybe it was made out of the lacquer.

  “Anyway, one moment, my head’s about to crack open, my teeth are chattering and my skin’s blue, and I’m in outer space. The next, all of that’s gone, I’m back in the courtyard, and the Shadow—the thing is ripping the hostiles to shreds.”

  “And then,” the Lieutenant said, “it was our turn.”

  V

  November 11, 2004, 11:13 am

  In the six hundred twenty-five days since that afternoon in the hospital, how many times had Davis recited the order of events in the courtyard, whether with the Lieutenant, or with Lee once his meds had been stabilized, or with Han once he’d regained the ability to speak (though not especially well)? At some point a couple of months on, he’d realized he’d been keeping count—That’s the thirty-eighth time; that’s the forty-third—and then, a couple of months after that, he’d realized that he’d lost track. The narrative of their encounter with what Davis continued to think of as the Shadow had become daily catechism, to be reviewed morning, noon, and night, and whenever else he happened to think of it.

  None of them had even tried to run, which there were times Davis judged a sign of courage, and times he deemed an index of their collective shock at the speed and ferocity of the thing’s assault on the insurgents. Heads, arms, legs were separated from bodies as if by a pair of razored blades, and wherever a wound opened red, there was the thing’s splintered maw, drinking the blood like a kid stooping to a water fountain. The smells of blood, piss, and shit mixed with those of gunpowder and hot metal. While Davis knew they had been the next course on the Shadow’s menu, he found it difficult not to wonder how the situation might have played out had Lee—followed immediately by Lugo and Weymouth—not opened up on the thing. Of course, the instant that narrow head with its spotlight eyes, its scarlet mouth, turned in their direction, everyone else’s guns erupted, and the scene concluded the way it had to. But if Lee had been able to restrain himself . . .

  Lugo was first to die. In a single leap, the Shadow closed the distance between them and drove one of its sharpened hands into his throat, venting his carotid over Davis, whom it caught with its other hand and flung into one of the side walls with such force his spine and ribs lit up like the Fourth of July. As he was dropping onto his back, turtling on his pack, the thing was raising its head from Lugo’s neck, spearing Petit through his armor and hauling him towards it. Remsnyder ran at it from behind; the thing’s hand lashed out and struck his head from his shoulders. It was done with Petit in time to catch Remsnyder’s body on the fall and jam its mouth onto the bubbling neck. It had shoved Petit’s body against the Lieutenant, whose feet tangled with Petit’s and sent the pair of them down. This put him out of the way of Manfred and Weymouth, who screamed for everyone to get clear and fired full automatic. Impossible as it seemed, they missed, and for their troubles, the Shadow lopped Manfred’s right arm off at the elbow and opened Weymouth like a Christmas present. From the ground, the Lieutenant shot at it; the thing sliced through his weapon and the leg underneath it. Now Bay, Han, and Lee tried full auto, which brought the thing to Bay, whose face it bit off. It swatted Han to the ground, but Lee somehow ducked the swipe it aimed at him and tagged it at close range. The Shadow threw Bay’s body across the courtyard, yanked Lee’s rifle from his hands, and swung it against his head like a ballplayer aiming for the stands. He crumpled, the thing reaching out for him, and Han leapt up, his bayonet ridiculously small in his hand. He drove it into the thing’s side—what would be the floating ribs on a man—to the hilt. The Shadow, whose only sound thus far had been its feeding, opened its jaws and shrieked, a high scream more like the cry of a bat, or a hawk, than anything human. It caught Han with an elbow to the temple that tumbled him to the dirt, set its foot on his head, and pressed down. Han’s scream competed with the sound of his skull cracking in multiple spots. Davis was certain the thing meant to grind Han’s head to paste, but it staggered off him, one claw reaching for the weapon buried in its skin. Blood so dark it was purple was oozing around the hilt. The Shadow spread its arms, its wings cracked open, and it was gone, fled into the blue sky that Davis would spend the next quarter-hour staring at, as the Lieutenant called for help and tried to tourniquet first his leg then Manfred’s arm.

  Davis had stared at the sky before—who has not?—but, helpless on his back, his spine a length of molten steel, his ears full of Manfred whimpering that he was gonna die, oh sweet Jesus, he was gonna fucking die, the Lieutenant talking over him, insisting no he wasn’t, he was gonna be fine, it was just a little paper cut, the washed blue bowl overhead seemed less sheltering canopy and more endless depth, a gullet over which he had the sickening sensation of dangling. As Manfred’s cries diminished and the Lieutenant told—ordered him to stay with him, Davis flailed his arms at the ground to either side of him in an effort to grip onto an anchor, something that would keep him from hurtling into that blue abyss.

  The weeks and months to come would bring the inevitable nightmares, the majority of them the Shadow’s attack replayed at half-, full-, or double-speed, with a gruesome fate for himself edited in. Sometimes repeating the events on his own or with a combination of the others led to a less-disturbed sleep; sometimes it did not. There was one dream, though, that no amount of discussion could help, and that was the one in which Davis was plummeting through the sky, lost in an appetite that would never be sated.

  VI

  12:26 am

  Once he was done setting the next log on the fire, Davis leaned back and said, “I figure it’s some kind of stun effect.”

  “How so?” Lee said.

  “The thing lands in between two groups of heavily-armed men: it has to do something to even the odds. It hits us with a psychic blast, shorts out our brains so that we’re easier prey.”

  “Didn’t seem to do much to Lee,” the Lieutenant said.

  “No brain!” Han shouted.

  “Ha-fucking
-ha,” Lee said.

  “Maybe there were too many of us,” Davis said. “Maybe it miscalculated. Maybe Lee’s a mutant and this is his special gift. Had the thing zigged instead of zagged, gone for us instead of the insurgents, I don’t think any of us would be sitting here, regardless of our super powers.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Lee said.

  “For a theory,” the Lieutenant said, “it’s not bad. But there’s a sizable hole in it. You,” he pointed at Davis, “saw the thing’s coffin or whatever. Lee,” a nod to him, “was privy to a bat’s-eye view of the thing’s approach to one of its hunts in—did we ever decide if it was Laos or Cambodia?”

  “No sir,” Lee said. “It looked an awful lot like some of the scenery from the first Tomb Raider movie, which I’m pretty sure was filmed in Cambodia, but I’m not positive.”

  “You didn’t see Angelina Jolie running around?” Davis said.

  “If only,” Lee said.

  “So with Lee, we’re in Southeast Asia,” the Lieutenant said, “with or without the lovely Ms. Jolie. From what Han’s been able to tell me, he was standing on the moon or someplace very similar to it. I don’t believe he could see the Earth from where he was, but I’m not enough of an astronomer to know what that means.

  “As for myself, I had a confused glimpse of the thing tearing its way through the interior of an airplane—what I’m reasonably certain was a B-17, probably during the Second World War.

  “You see what I mean? None of us witnessed the same scene—none of us witnessed the same time, which you would imagine we would have if we’d been subject to a deliberate attack. You would expect the thing to hit us all with the same image. It’s more efficient.”

  “Maybe that isn’t how this works,” Davis said. “Suppose what it does is more like a cluster bomb, a host of memories it packs around a psychic charge? If each of us thinks he’s someplace different from everybody else, doesn’t that maximize confusion, create optimal conditions for an attack?”

  The Lieutenant frowned. Lee said, “What’s your theory, sir?”