The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  “Annalisa!” Wincing, Clyde stood, balancing on one foot and the sofa arm, in too much discomfort to worry about clearheadedness. “I need a pill.”

  “Let’s go back down.” Pet’s voice held a note of panic.

  “You’re not opening that door,” said Batista, blocking his way. “They’re bound to be in the lab by now . . . and on the stairs. Give me the keys.”

  Clyde let the pill Annalisa handed him begin to dissolve under his tongue.

  Batista motioned to Annalisa. “Help me turn the sofa over. Pet . . . get under a chair or something.”

  Ignoring Pet’s dissent, Batista and Annalisa got the sofa turned and they crowded beneath it, Clyde first, Annalisa in the middle, facing him, and then Batista, the cushions muffling their bodies. Clyde put a fist through the cloth back of the sofa and grabbed onto a wooden support strut. He could hear Pet muttering and then it was quiet, except for the three of them breathing. He’d had no time to be afraid and now it was so unreal. . . . He thought people on an airplane in trouble might feel this way, that somehow it was going to blow over, that nothing was really wrong, that the hand of God would intervene or the pilot would discover a miraculous solution, all in the moment before the plane began its final plunge and hope was transformed into terror. Annalisa buried her face in his shoulder and whispered, “I love you.” If she had spoken earlier he would have questioned the words, he would have asked how could she love him and be involved with a sickness like Pet Nylund? How could she be distracted from love by a petty hatred, even the greatest hatred being a petty indulgence when compared to love? Things being what they were, however, he repeated the words inaudibly into her hair and, as if saying made it so, he felt love expand in him like an explosion taking the place of his heart, an overwhelming burst of tenderness and desire and regret that dissolved his doubts and recriminations, a sentimental rush that united with the rush of the morphine and eroded his sensibilities until he was only aware of her warmth and the pressure of her breasts and the fragrance of her hair. . . . A shriek of metal, the room jolted downward once more and then came free of its brackets entirely and fell, slamming edge-on into the roof of the Mutagenics lab. It rolled off the roof, smashed into the ground sideways, rolled again. They managed to maintain the integrity of their shelter somewhat through the first crash, but when the room began to roll, the sofa levitated, leaving them clutching the cushions, and Clyde went airborne during the second crash and lost consciousness. The next he knew, Batista was shouting, pulling him from beneath a chair and some heavy brown fabric that he thought might be the carpet backing. He was disoriented, his vision not right. Sunlight spilled into the room, which was tilted, the furniture jumbled against what once had been a wall, half-submerged in water. Annalisa kneeled in the water, fluttering her hands above Pet, who lay partly beneath some bulky object. Her hands were red and her down jacket was smeared with redness as well. Clyde blacked out again and was shaken awake by Batista, who jammed a pool cue into his hand and yelled once again. He glanced up at the sun, the cliffs, and recognized that he was outside. Befuddled, he gazed at the pool cue. Batista, bleeding from a cut on his scalp, asked if he could deal with it. Clyde wasn’t clear on the precise nature of “it,” but thought it best to go along with the program. His vision still wasn’t right, but he gripped the cue purposefully and nodded.

  “I’ll go get her,” Batista said, and moved off down the slope, disappearing through a gash in the black metal surface the size and approximate shape of a child’s wading pool.

  Clyde realized he was sitting about a third of the way up the side wall of the room, and realized further that the room was in the river, sticking out of the sun-dazzled green water like a giant domino with no dots. What did they call blank dominoes? He couldn’t remember. His head ached, the glare hurt his eyes, and his leg was badly swollen—he could feel a fevered pulse in it, separate from the beat of his heart. He started to drift, but a scream from below, from within the room, brought him back. Annalisa. He reacted toward the gash, but movement was not a viable option. Even morphine couldn’t mask the pain that a slight change of position caused. He tightened his grip on the cue and, when Annalisa screamed again, he tuned it out.

  Cats seethed along the shore in front of the Mutagenics lab; their faint cries came to him. They appeared interested in something on the opposite side of the Mossbach, but Clyde could see nothing that would attract such concentrated interest, just granite and ferns, swarming gnats and. . . . His chest went cold with shock. Twenty, twenty-five feet above was an overhanging ledge and a dozen or so lurruloo were inching along it, some of their hooks latching onto the cliff wall, some onto the ledge, unable to secure a firm hold on either. The extreme end of the ledge was positioned over the uppermost portion of the half-sunken room and, should this be their intent, would allow them to drop onto the metal surface one or two at a time. Gritting his teeth, Clyde turned in order to face those that dropped. More lurruloo were plastered to the cliff above the ledge, looking at that angle like an audience of greenish black sombreros with misshapen crowns and exceptionally wide, not-quite-symmetrical brims. Thirty or forty of them. Goofy-looking buggers, but deadly, said an inner voice with a British Colonial accent. Saw one take old MacTavish back in ’98. ’Orrible, it was! He made a concerted effort to straighten out, focusing on the end of the ledge, and became entranced by the patterns of the moss growing beneath it.

  A tinkly piano melody began playing in his mind, something his grandmother had entertained him with when he was a kid, and it was playing still when the first lurruloo slipped off the ledge, spreading its fleshy skirts (for balance?) and landed thirty feet upslope with a wet, sloppy thump. Its hooks scrabbled for purchase on the metal as it slid, doing a three-quarter turn in the process, trying to push itself upright, yet incapable of controlling its approach. Holding the cue like a baseball bat, he timed his swing perfectly, cracking the back of its bulbous head, served up to him like a whiffle ball on a post three feet high. He heard a crunch and caught a whiff of foulness before it spilled into the water. His feeling of satisfaction was short-lived—two more dropped from the ledge, but collided in mid-air, knocking one into the river. The other landed on its side, injuring itself. As it slid past, its skirts flared at the edges, exposing dozens of yellowish hooks, perhaps a muscular reflex in response to trauma, and one tore a chunk from Clyde’s right thigh. Not serious, but it pissed him off.

  “Batista!” he shouted, and a warbling, hooting response came from overhead, as if the lurruloo were cheering . . . or they might be debating alternative strategies, discussing the finer points of inter-species relations.

  Two more skidded toward him, one in advance of the other. Clyde balanced on a knee, his bad leg stuck out to the side like a rudder, and bashed the lead lurruloo in the head, then punched at the other with the tip of the cue—to his surprise, it penetrated the lurruloo’s skull to a depth of five or six inches. Before its body slipped from the cue, its bulk dragged him off balance, causing him to put all his weight on his bad leg. Dizzy, with opaque blotches dancing in his vision, he slumped onto the sun-heated metal. His leg was on fire, but he felt disconnected from it, as if it were a phantom pain. Human voices sounded nearby. He braced up on his elbows. Batista was boosting himself up through the gash and Annalisa sat beside it—she shook her head in vehement denial and talked to her outspread, reddened hands. Clyde couldn’t unscramble the words. Batista rushed up the slope, pool cue at the ready, and, reminded of duty, Clyde fumbled for his cue, grabbed the tip, sticky with a dark fluid, and made ready to join the fray. But Batista was doing fine on his own, laying waste to the lurruloo as they landed, before they could marshal a semblance of poise, knocking the pulpy bodies, dead and alive, into the river. In his sleeveless T-shirt and shorts, Batista the Barbarian. Clyde chortled at the image—a string of drool eeled between his lips.

  The lurruloo on the ledge broke off their attack and began a withdrawal, flowing up the cliff face, while those above offered
commiseration (this according to Clyde’s characterization of their lugubrious tones). Wise move, he said to himself. Better to retreat, to live and multiply and create the legend of the demon Batista, his Blue-Tipped Stick of Doom. Annalisa stared at him emptily and then, making an indefinite noise, she crawled up beside him. He caressed her cheek and she leaned into the touch. Her mouth opened, but she didn’t speak. He cradled her head, puzzled by her silence. They weren’t out of the woods yet, but they had survived this much and he thought she should be happier. He should be happier, excited by the victory, however trivial. But her silence, her vacant manner, impelled him to confront questions he couldn’t cope with at present. Their future, for one. She seemed nearly lifeless, not like previously, her energies channeled into some dread purpose, but more as though a light had guttered out inside her, reducing her to this inert figure.

  “Oh, wow,” said Batista.

  Hundreds of lurruloo had joined those on the cliff wall and they were wheeling as one, united in a great circular movement as though in flight from a predator, like a herd of wildebeest or a school of fish; but instead of fleeing, they continued to circle, creating a pattern that grew increasingly intricate—a great spiral that divided into two interlocking spirals, and this, too, divided, becoming a dozen patterns that fed into one another, each having a variant rhythm, yet they were rhythms in harmony with one another, the whole thing evolving and changing, a greenish black inconstancy that drew the eye to follow its shifting currents. It was a beautiful, mesmerizing thing and Clyde derived from it a sense of peace, of intellect sublimated to the principles of dance. He understood that the lurruloo were talking, attempting to communicate their desires, and the longer he watched them flow across the cliff face, the more convinced he became of their good intentions, their intrinsic gentleness. He imagined the pattern to be an apology, an invitation to negotiate, a statement of their relative innocence. . . . Shots rang out, sporadic at first, a spatter of pops, then a virtual fusillade. The pattern broke apart, the lurruloo scattering high and low into the south, twenty or thirty of their dead sinking into the Mossbach, the leakage from their riddled corpses darkening the green water. Clyde had been so immersed in contemplation, he felt wrenched out of his element and not a little distressed—he believed he had been on the cusp of a more refined comprehension, and he looked to see who had committed this act of mayhem. Two skiffs had rounded the bend in the river and were making for the wreckage of the metal room. Three men with rifles stood in the first and Clyde’s heart sank on recognizing Spooz among them; but his spirits lifted when he spotted a tanned figure clad in sweat pants and a bulky sweater in the second skiff: Milly. They pulled alongside and made their lines fast to what remained of a bracket. Batista, appearing hesitant, as if he, too, had been shocked by the slaughter, helped Milly out of the skiff and gave her the digest version of what had happened, concluding with Pet’s death, the battle, and its unusual resolution.

  “The last bunch who were exposed to that hypnotic thing—I think it was about seven years ago—only one survived. You’re lucky we came along when we did.” Milly cocked an eye toward Annalisa. “How’s she doing?”

  Batista made a negative noise. “She’s not communicating too well.”

  Milly nodded sadly. “I always thought she’d be what killed Pet.”

  Batista’s eyes dropped to her breasts. “She gave it the old college try.”

  The river bumped the skiffs against the side of the room, causing a faint gonging; clouds passed across the sun, partially obscuring it; with the dimming of the light, as if to disprove his theories, Clyde felt suddenly sharper of mind.

  Milly rubbed Batista’s shoulder, letting her fingers dawdle. “Why don’t you ride back with me? It’ll give us a chance to talk about your situation.”

  She summoned Spooz and the other men. They hopped onto the half-submerged room and two of them peeled Annalisa away from Clyde. She went without a word, without a backward look, and that made another kind of pain in his chest, the kind morphine couldn’t touch. Milly squatted beside him, Spooz at her shoulder, and asked how he was.

  “Real good,” he said. “For someone who doesn’t know what the hell’s going on. When were you people going to tell me about the lurruloo?”

  “I’m sure Annalisa wanted to tell you. It’s supposed to be on a need-to-know basis.”

  “It’s obvious Helene didn’t need to know.”

  Milly shrugged, but said nothing.

  “Seems irresponsible to me,” Clyde said. “Maybe even criminal.”

  “Things in Halloween are going to run differently, now.”

  “And you’re going to be running them?”

  “For a while.”

  He jerked his head at Spooz. “Is he part of the new order?”

  “If he toes the line.”

  “What about Brad?”

  “Brad’s not part of anything anymore.”

  In her serene face he read a long history of cunning and ruthlessness—it was like looking off the end of a pier in Halloween and seeing all the grotesque life swarming beneath the surface.

  “The king is dead, long live the queen,” said Clyde. “Is that it? I’m getting the idea this whole thing fit right in with your plans. I mean, it couldn’t have worked out any better, huh?”

  “I’m not going to have trouble with you, am I?” she asked mildly.

  “Me? No way. Soon as I’m able, me and Annalisa are putting this place in the rear view.”

  Milly mulled this over. “That might be a good idea.”

  With a sincere expression, Spooz extended a hand, as if to help him up. “Square business, guy. I was just doing my job. No hard feelings?”

  “Get your damn hand out of my face,” Clyde said. “I can manage my own self.”

  “Just below the fifty-seventh parallel . . . ” included a lot of frozen territory: parts of Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bellarus, Sweden, Denmark, Canada, and Alaska. Ridiculous, to hang onto a fragment, a hallucinated phrase, a misfiring of neurons, out of all that had occurred, but he couldn’t shake the idea that it was important. Clyde had yet not founded, or found, a kingdom, but he had fitted a new purpose to his life, and it was for that reason he had parked his pickup in front of the neighborhood Buy-Rite on a cold December Saturday morning in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, waiting for the pharmacy to open so he could refill Annalisa’s migraine prescription. The migraines turned her into a zombie. She would lie in bed for a day, sometimes two days at a time, unable to eat, too weak to sit up, capable of speaking no more than a couple of words. Between the migraines and the anti-psychotics, they’d had maybe three good weeks out of the six months since they left Halloween. Those weeks had been pretty splendid, though, providing him hope that a new Annalisa was being born. Her psychologist was optimistic, but Clyde doubted she would ever again be the woman he originally met, and perhaps that woman had never truly existed. The knots that Pet Nylund tied in her had come unraveled with his death and they seemed to have been what was holding her together. Life in their apartment was so oppressive, so deadly quiet and gloomy, he had taken a job driving heavy equipment just to have a place to go. The guys on site thought him aloof and strange, but chalked that up to the fact that his wife was sick, and they defended him to their friends by saying, “The man is going through some shit, okay?”

  His breath fogged the windshield and, tired of wiping it clear, he climbed down from the truck and leaned against the cold fender. The sun was muted to a tinny white glare by a mackerel sky, delicate altocumulus clouds laid out against a sapphire backdrop. A stiff wind blew along the traffic-less street, chasing paper trash in the gutters, flattening a red, white, and blue relic of the recent presidential election against the Buy-Rite’s door for a fraction of a second, too quickly for him to determine which candidate it trumpeted. Not that it much mattered, The glass storefronts gave back perfect reflections of the glass storefronts on the opposite, sunnier side of the street. Quiznos. Ace Hardware. Toys ‘R’ Us w
as having a pre-Christmas sale. The post-apocalyptic vacancy of the place was spoiled by a black panel van that turned the corner and cruised slowly along and then pulled into the space next to Clyde’s pickup. An orange jack-o’-lantern with a particularly jolly grin was spray-painted on the side of the van—it formed the O in dripping-blood horror movie lettering that spelled out halloween. The window slid down to reveal Carmine’s sallow, vulpine face. He didn’t speak, so Clyde said, “What a shocker. Milly sent you to check up on us, did she?”

  Carmine climbed out and came around the front of the van. “I had some business in town. She wanted me look you up. See if you need more money and like that.”

  “As long as the checks from the estate keep coming, we’re cool,” said Clyde. “How’d you find me?”

  “I went over to your place. This woman told me you’d be here.”

  “Annalisa’s nurse.”

  “Whatever.” Carmine examined the bottom of his shoe. “How’s she making it . . . Annalisa?”

  “It’s slow, but she’ll be fine.” Clyde waved at the van. “This is new, huh?”

  Carmine looked askance at the jack-o’-lantern. “Milly’s trying to encourage tourism. She’s putting on a Halloween festival and all kinds of shit.”

  “You think that’s wise? All you need is for a couple of tourists to get picked off by the lurruloo.”

  “They aren’t a problem anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’re not a problem. Milly handled it.”

  “What are you talking? She wiped them out?”

  “That’s not your business.”

  Despite having less than fond memories of the lurruloo, Clyde found the notion that they had been exterminated more than horrifying, but was unable to think of an alternative way by which Milly could have handle it.

  “Jesus, it’s fucking cold!” Carmine jammed his hands into his pockets and shuffled his feet. “So what’s life like in the republic?”