The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Four

by Jonathan Strahan

  There were other mutterings suggesting that Ambrose had come into his own earlier than he had let on. He was a straight-A student and who wouldn't be with a trait like his? Just jealousy, I knew; Ambrose had always been brainy, especially in math. He was three years older than I was and I had been going to him for help with my homework since third grade.

  Still, I was tempted to ask. If he really had hidden his trait, maybe I could pick up some pointers.

  I came into my own in the school library on a Thursday afternoon in early April, when I was thirteen.

  After knowing for so long in advance, I had expected to feel different on the day it finally happened, something physical or emotional or even just a thought popping into my head, like all those years ago under my aunt's table. But I didn't. As I sat at a table in the nearly-empty library after the last class of the day, the only thing on my mind was the make-up assignment my math teacher Ms. Chang had given me. I had just been out a week with strep throat so I was behind with everything anyway but this was the worst. X's and y's and a's and b's, pluses and minuses, parentheses with tiny twos floating up high—my eyes were crossing.

  I looked up and saw Mr. Bodette, the head librarian, standing at the front desk. Our eyes met and I knew, as matter-of-factly as anything else I knew just by looking at him—there was a spot on his tie, he wore his wedding ring on his right hand, his hair was starting to thin—that in a little over twenty-eight years, he was going to fracture his skull and die.

  Mr. Bodette gave me a little smile. I looked down quickly, waiting to get a splitting headache or have to run to the bathroom or just feel like crying. But nothing happened.

  I must be an awful person. I stared at the equations without seeing them. A nice man was going to die of a fractured skull and I didn't feel sick about it.

  I curled my index finger around the mechanical pencil I was holding and squeezed until my hand cramped. Was it because twenty-eight years was such a long, long time away? For me, anyway. It was twice as long as I had been alive—

  "Takes a little extra thought."

  I jumped, startled; Mr. Bodette was standing over me, smiling.

  "Algebra was a killer for me, too." He took the pencil out of my hand and wrote busily on a sheet of scrap paper. "See? Here, I'll do another one."

  I sat like a lump; he might have been writing hieroglyphics.

  "There." He drew a circle around something that equaled something else. "See? Never do anything to one side of the equation without doing the exact same thing to the other. That's good algebra. Got it?"

  I didn't but I nodded and took my pencil back from him anyway.

  "If you need more help, just ask," he said. "I needed plenty myself. Fortunately my mother was a statistician."

  I stared after him as he went back to the front desk. Twenty-eight years; if I hadn't been so hopeless in math, I'd have known if that was equal to x in his equation.

  A student volunteer came in and went to work re-shelving books. She had red hair and freckles and she was going to live for another seventy-nine years until a blood vessel broke in her brain. I had to force myself not to keep staring at her. I didn't know her name or what grade she was in or anything about her as a person. Only how and when she was going to die.

  Perversely, the equations began to make sense. I worked slowly, hoping the building would be empty by the time I finished. Then I could slip out and hope that I didn't meet anyone I knew on my way home—

  —where my mother and Benny and Tim would be waiting for me.

  A cold, hard lump formed in my stomach. OK, then I'd go hide somewhere and try to figure out how I was supposed to look at my mother and my brothers every day knowing what I knew.

  Is that really worse than knowing the same thing about yourself? asked a small voice in my mind.

  That was an easy one: Yes. Absolutely.

  Knowing about myself wasn't a horrific blaze of realization, more like remembering something commonplace. In ninety years, two months, seven weeks, and three days, my body would quit and my life would go out like a candle. If twenty-eight years seemed like a long time, ninety was unimaginable.

  I slipped out of the library unnoticed and got all the way up to Ms. Chang's classroom on the third floor without meeting anyone. I left the worksheet on her desk, started to leave and then froze, struck by the sight of the rows of empty seats staring at me. Today they had been filled with kids. Tomorrow they'd be filled with heart attacks, cancers, strokes . . . what else?

  More fractured skulls? Drownings? Accidents?

  Murders?

  My skin tried to crawl off my body. Would I be able to tell if people were going to be murdered by the way they were going to die? Was Mr. Bodette's fractured skull going to be an accident or—

  What if someone close to me was going to be murdered?

  What if it was going to happen the next day?

  I would have to try to stop it. Wouldn't I? Wasn't that why I knew?

  It had to be. My mother knew what was wrong with a machine so she could fix it; I knew about someone's death so I could prevent it. Right?

  No. Close, but not quite. Even I could see that was bad algebra.

  Just as I went back out into the shadowy hallway, I heard a metallic squeak and rattle. Down at the far end of the corridor, one of the janitors was pushing a wheeled bucket with a mop handle. I braced myself, waiting as he ran the mop-head through the rollers on the side of the bucket to squeeze out excess water.

  Nothing.

  He started washing the floor; still I felt nothing. Because, I realized, he was too far away.

  I dashed down the nearest staircase before he got any closer and ran out the front door.

  Now that was very interesting, I thought as I stood outside on Prince Street looking back at the school: people had to be within a certain distance before I picked anything up from them. So the news wasn't all bad. I could have a career as a forest ranger or a lighthouse keeper. Did they still have lighthouse keepers?

  Should've walked toward the janitor, you wuss, said a little voice in my mind; then you'd know how close you had to be to pick up something. No, only a very general idea; I wasn't good with distances—math strikes again. Too bad Ambrose's sister Rita hadn't been there. She knew space. All she had to do was look at something: a building, a room, a box, and she could give you the dimensions. Rita had capitalized on this and become an interior decorator. Sadly, she didn't have very good taste so she worked in partnership with a designer who, Ambrose said, probably had to tell her several times a week that knotty pine paneling wasn't the Next Big Thing.

  I crossed the mercifully empty street but just as I reached the other side, I knew that eleven years and two months from now, a woman was going to die of cancer.

  There was no one near me, not on the sidewalk nor in any of the cars parked at the curb. Up at the corner where Prince met Summer there was plenty of traffic but that was farther away from me than the janitor had been.

  I didn't get it until the curtains in the front window of the nearest house parted and a woman's face looked out at me. She glanced left and right, and disappeared again. Another useful thing to know, I thought, walking quickly—people had to be within a certain distance but they didn't have to be visible to me.

  In the house next door, there was a head injury, forty years; a stroke, thirty-eight years in the one after that. Nothing in the next two—no one home. Internal bleeding, twenty-six years in the next one. A car passed me going the other way: AIDS, ten years behind the wheel and heart failure, twenty-two years in the passenger seat. More AIDS, six years in the house on the corner.

  Waiting for a break in the traffic so I could cross, I learned another useful fact—most of the cars on Summer Street passed too quickly for me to pick up on anything about the people in them. Only if one had to slow down or stop to make a turn would something come to me.

  Eventually the traffic thinned out enough to let me cross. But by the time I reached the middle of the r
oad, cars had accumulated on every side. My head filled with cancers, heart attacks, infections, organ failures, bleeding brains, diseases, conditions I didn't know the names of. I hefted my backpack, put my head down and watched my feet until I reached the other side.

  Baron's Food and Drug was just ahead. I spotted an old payphone at the edge of the parking lot and hurried toward it, digging in my pockets for change (I was the last thirteen-year-old on the planet without a cell phone). It was stupid to hide that I'd come into my own. I would call my mother right now and come clean about everything, how I'd known for years and how I was afraid to tell anyone because I didn't want to end up like Loomis, leaving home with nobody begging me to stay.

  I was in the middle of dialing when a great big football player type materialized next to the phone.

  "Hey, girlie," he said with all the authority of a bully who'd been running his part of the world since kindergarten. "Who said you could use this phone?"

  I glanced at the coin slot. "New England Bell?"

  "'Zat so? Funny, Nobody told me. Hey, you guys!" he called over his shoulder to his friends who were just coming out of Baron's with cans of soda. "Any a you remember anything saying little girlie here could use our phone?"

  My mouth went dry. I had to get the hell out of there, go home, and tell my mother why I now needed a cell. Instead, I heard myself say, "Should've checked your email."

  He threw back his head and laughed as three of his pals came over and surrounded me. They were big guys, too, but he was the biggest—wide, fleshy face, neck like a bull, shoulders so massive he probably could have played without pads.

  "Sorry, little girlie. You got no phone privileges here."

  His friends agreed, sniggering. I tried to see them as bad back-up singers or clowns, anything to keep from thinking about what I knew.

  "Come on, what are you, deaf?" The mean playfulness in his face took on a lot more mean than playful. "Step away from the phone and there won't be any trouble."

  More sniggering from the back-up chorus; someone yanked hard on my backpack, trying to pull me off-balance. "I need to call home—"

  "No, you need to go home." He pushed his face closer to mine. "Hear me? Go. The fuck. Home."

  I should have been a block away already, running as fast as I could. But the devil had gotten into me, along with the knowledge that three days from now on Sunday night, the steering column of a car was going to go through his chest.

  "If you'd let me alone," I said, "I'd be done already. Nobody's using this phone—"

  "I'm waitin' on an important call," he said loudly. "Right, guys?"

  The guys all agreed he sure was, fuckin' A.

  "From who?" said the devil in me. "Your parole officer or your mommy?"

  Now his pals were all going Woo woo! and She gotcha! He grabbed the receiver out of my hand and slammed it into the cradle. My change rattled into the coin return; I reached for it and he slapped my hand away, hard enough to leave a mark.

  "Smart-ass tax, paid by bad little girlies who don't do as they're told," he said, fishing the coins out with his big fingers. "Now get the fuck outa here before something really bad happens to you."

  The devil in me still hadn't had enough. "Like what?"

  He pushed his face up close to mine again. "You don't want to find out."

  The guys around me moved away slightly as I took a step back. "Yeah? Well, it couldn't be anywhere near as bad as what's coming up for you," the devil went on. "Yuk it up while you can, because this Sunday you're gonna d—" I stumbled slightly on a bit of uneven pavement and finally managed to shut myself up.

  He tilted his head to one side, eyes bright with curiosity. "Don't stop now, it's just gettin' good. I'm gonna what?"

  Now I had no voice at all.

  "Come on, girlie." He gave a nasty laugh. "I'm gonna what?"

  I swallowed hard and took another step back and then another. He moved toward me.

  "Come on, I'm gonna what?"

  "You—you're—" I all but choked. "You're gonna have a really bad night!"

  I turned and ran until I couldn't hear them jeering any more.

  You're not just a bad person, you're the worst person in the world. No, you're the worst person who ever lived.

  Sitting at the back of the bus, I said it over and over, trying to fill my brain with it so I couldn't think about anything else. I actually managed to distract myself enough so that I didn't notice as many deaths as I might have otherwise.

  Or maybe I was just full of my thug's imminent death. That and what I had told him.

  Except he couldn't have understood. When that steering column went through his chest, he wasn't going to think, OMGWTFBBQ, she knew! in the last second before he died.

  Was he?

  The public library was my usual hideout when I felt overwhelmed or needed somewhere quiet to get my head together. Today, however, I was out of luck—the place was closed due to some problem with the plumbing. Figured, I thought. No hiding place for the worst person in the world.

  By this time, my mother would be teetering on the threshold between annoyed and genuinely worried. I called her from the payphone by the front door of the library.

  "This had better be good," she said, a cheery edge in her voice.

  I gave her a rambling story about having to finish a math assignment and then going to the library to get a head start on a project only to find it was closed.

  "Just get your butt home," she said when I paused for breath. To my relief, she sounded more affectionate than mad now. I told her I'd be there as soon as I could and hung up.

  If I were going to live a long time, I thought as I walked two and a half blocks to a bus stop, then wouldn't the chances be really good that my mother and brothers would, too?

  And if any of them were going to die in an accident, then I had to tell them so we could stop it from happening. I shouldn't have been afraid to go home. I should have rushed home.

  I had to tell my mother everything, especially what I had said. She would know what to do.

  Was this the kind of problem Loomis had made for himself, I wondered? Was this why no one had begged him to stay?

  At least being home wasn't an ordeal. My mother would fade away in her sleep at ninety-two, Benny would suffer a massive stroke at eighty-nine, and Tim would achieve a hundred-and-five before his heart failed, making him the grand old man of the house. We were quite the long-lived bunch. I wondered what Mr. Bodette's mother the statistician would have made of that. Maybe nothing.

  And it was nothing next to the fact that I didn't tell my mother anything after all.

  But I had a good reason. It was Benny's night; he'd gotten a perfect score on a history test at school and my mother had decided to celebrate by taking us all to Wiggins, which had the best ice cream in the county, if not the world. We didn't get Wiggins very often and never on a school night. I just couldn't bring myself to spoil the evening with the curse of Loomis.

  My thug's name, I discovered, was Phil Lattimore. He was sixteen, a linebacker on the varsity football team. There were lots of team photos in the school trophy case, which was the first thing you saw when you came up the stairs from the front door. I had never paid much attention to it. Sports didn't interest me much, especially sports I couldn't play.

  When I went to school on Friday, however, the trophy case that had once barely existed for me seemed to draw me like a magnet—any time I had to go from one place to another, I'd find myself walking past it and I couldn't pass without looking at my thug's grinning face.

  Worse was that I was suddenly noticing photos of the team everywhere, adorned with small pennants in the school colors reading !PRIDE!, !STRENGTH!, and !!!CHAMPIONS!!! and it wasn't even football season any more. You'd have thought they'd cured cancer or something.

  Unbidden, it came to me: this could be a sign. Maybe if I saved my thug's life, he would cure cancer—or AIDS, or Ebola. Or maybe he'd stop global warming or world hunger. Plenty of people t
urned their lives around after a close brush with death. It was extremely hard to imagine my thug doing anything like that, but what did I know?

  Unless I really was supposed to leave him to his fate.

  That was like a whack upside my head. Was I supposed to fix this the way my mother fixed broken machines? Or just live with what I knew, like my Aunt Donna?

  I couldn't do anything about what I didn't know, I decided. I had to do something about what I did know.

  I was thirteen.

  Ambrose made a pained face and shoved my math book back at me. "Liar."

  "What do you mean?" I said, uneasily. "This stuff's driving me crazy."

  "You're a liar. You make me come all the way over here when you don't need any help. Not with that, anyway. You just need your head examined." He started to get up from my desk and I caught his arm.

  "Gimme a break—"

  "Give me a break." My cousin gave me a sour, sarcastic smile. "Let me remind you of something you've forgotten: I know what you've forgotten." He tapped my math book with two fingers. "You haven't forgotten this. Ergo, you actually understand it. Congratulations, you're not a moron, just crazy. It's Saturday, it's spring, and there are a gazillion other things I'd rather do."

  "Do you know Phil Lattimore?" I blurted just as he reached the doorway of my room.

  He turned, the expression on his face a mix of surprise and revulsion. "Are you kidding? Everybody knows Phil the Fuckhead. According to him, anyway. What about him and why should I care?"

  I took a deep, uncomfortable breath and let it out slowly. "I, uh . . . "

  Ambrose stuck his fists on his narrow hips and tilted his head to one side. "You what?"

  I swallowed and tried again. "There's something . . . " I cleared my throat. "Close the door."

  He frowned as if this were something no one had ever asked him to do before.

  "And come back over here and sit down," I added, "so I can tell you what I know."

  He did so, looking wary. "You mean . . . Know?"