The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Second Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  She releases him. He’s frightened, but the fear’s manifesting as anger, and she’s going to have to do something drastic to convince him.

  “Okay.” She puts her left arm on the bar, and rolls up the sleeve, letting him see the bloody contusions from Josef’s boot, and the splinter of bone,like a shard of broken china, sticking up through the skin.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Shush.” She takes hold of her wrist, forces the arm flat against the zinc counter, and twists. There’s an audible click, and the two halves of broken bone snap back into place. When her eyes have stopped watering, she plucks out the loose shard and drops it with a clink into the ash tray. With it out of the way, the skin around the tear starts to heal. In less than a minute, only a red mark remains.

  Ferderico takes a step back, eyes wide, hand pointing.

  “That’s not natural.”

  Paige lifts the half-empty bottle of cognac with her right hand, pulls the plastic-coated cork with her teeth, and spits it across the bar.

  “Josef heals even faster than I do,” she says. “You blew a hole in his chest, but he’ll be as good as new in an hour, maybe less.”

  “W-what are you?”

  Paige takes a solid nip of the brandy.

  “I’m as human as you are,” she says, and gets to her feet. The stiffness is fading from her limbs, the hurt evaporating from her ribs and arm.”But Josef’s something quite different. And trust me, you really don’t want to be here when he comes back.”

  “But the police—”

  “Forget the police. You shot him, that makes it personal.”

  Federico puts his fists on his hips.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Paige jerks a thumb at the back door. “Then believe what you saw out there.” She stands and pats down her coat, making sure she still has everything she needs. Federico looks from her to the door, and then back again.

  “Is he really that dangerous?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Then, what do you suggest?”

  Paige rubs her face. She doesn’t want to be saddled with a civilian, doesn’t want to be responsible for anybody else’s well being; but this young man saved her life, and she owes him for that.

  She sighs.”Your best bet’s to come with me, right now. I’m the only one who knows what we’re up against, the only one with even half a chance of being able to protect you.”

  “How do I know I can trust you?”

  She looks him square in the eye.

  “Because I’m not the one who’s going to come back here and rip your throat out.”

  * * *

  Paige lets Federico pull on a battered leather biker jacket two sizes too large, and they leave the pub and splash their way down the cobbled streets in the direction of the Red Light District, and her hotel. As they walk, she keeps her eye on the canal.

  Federico says, “Is he really a, you know?”

  “A vampire?” Paige shakes her head. “No. At least, not in the sense you’re thinking. There’s nothing supernatural or romantic about him. He’s not afraid of crosses or garlic, or any of that bullshit.”

  “But I saw his teeth.”

  “Ceramic implants.”

  They cut across a square in the shadow of a medieval church. Federico has the shotgun under his jacket, and it makes him walk stiffly. The rain’s still falling, and there’s music from the bars and coffeehouses; but few people are out on the street.

  “Then what is he? Some sort of psycho?”

  Paige slows for a second, and turns to him. “She’s a guerrilla.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  She starts walking again. “I don’t expect you to.” Her right hand’s in her coat pocket, gripping the coil gun. She leads him out of the square, across a footbridge, and then they’re into the Red Light District, with its pink neon shop fronts and narrow alleys. Her hotel’s close to Centraal Station. By the time they get there, they’re both soaked and stand dripping together in the elevator that takes them up to her floor.

  “In a thousand years’ time, there’s going to be a war,” she says, watching the floor numbers count off. “And it’s going to be a particularly nasty one, with atrocities on all sides.”

  The lift doors open and she leads him along the carpeted corridor to her room.Inside, the air smells stale. This has been her base of operations for nearly a month, and she hasn’t let the cleaner touch it in all that time. She hasn’t even opened the curtains.

  “The vampires were bred to fight in the war,” she says. “They were designed to operate behind enemy lines, terrorising civilians, sowing fear and confusion.” She shrugs off her coat and drops it over the back of a chair.”They’re trained to go to ground, blend in as best they can, then start killing people. They’re strong and fast, and optimised for night combat.”

  Federico’s standing in the doorway, shivering. She ushers him in and sits him on the bed. Gingerly, she takes the shotgun from his hands, and places it on the sheet beside him; she then drapes a blanket around his shoulders.

  “After the war, some of them escaped, and they’ve been spreading backwards through time ever since.” She crosses to the wardrobe, and pulls out a bottle. It’s a litre of vodka. She takes two teacups off the side and pours a large measure for him, a smaller one for herself.”They’re designed to survive for long durations without support. They can eat just about anything organic, and they’re hard to kill. You can hurt them, but as long as their hearts are beating and their brains are intact, there’s a chance they’ll be able to repair themselves, given enough time.”

  She puts the bottle aside and flexes the fingers of her left hand—there’s still an ache, deep in the bone.

  “That’s important,” she says. She kneels down in front of Federico, and takes his hands in hers. “The next time we see Josef, we’ve got to kill him before he kills us. And the only way to do that is to do as much damage as possible. Stop his heart, destroy his brain, and he’s dead.”

  She takes one of the teacups and presses it into Federico’s hands.

  “Sorry,” He says, accepting the drink, “did you say that this war is going to take place?”

  “A thousand years downstream, yes.”

  “So it hasn’t happened yet?”

  “No.”

  He frowns.

  “Who are you?”

  Paige reaches for her coat, and pulls out the coil gun. “I’m a fangbanger, a vampire killer.”

  “And you’re from the future too?”

  Paige stands.

  “Look,” she says. “All you need to know tonight is this: When you see Josef, shoot out his legs. That’ll immobilise him, and give us time to kill him.” She stops talking then. Federico’s clearly had enough for one night. She slips a pill into his next drink and, within minutes, he’s asleep, wrapped in the blanket, with the shotgun clasped protectively across his chest.

  Alone with her thoughts, Paige moves quietly. She turns out the bedside light and crosses to the window, pulling aside the heavy curtain. It’s after twelve now, and the trams have stopped for the night. The streets are quiet. She feels she should congratulate Josef on his choice of hiding place. Amsterdam is an easy city in which to be a stranger; there are so many tourists, so many distractions, that it’s a simple matter to lose yourself in the crowd. If she hadn’t known what to look for she might never have found him. But then, she’s been a fangbanger for a long time, and she’s learned to piece together seemingly unrelated deaths and unexplained crimes; to filter out the background noise of modern urban life in order to reveal the unmistakable M.O. of an active vampire. She leans her forehead against the window glass; heart pumping in her chest, knowing it won’t take Josef long to track her down. She’s been doing this job for enough years, waded through enough shit, to know how dangerous a wounded vampire can be.

  * * *

  At 4am, the sky starts to grey in the east. Federico’s still asleep, and Paige gives up her vigil. Sh
e tucks the coil gun into the back of her belt, pulls on a sweater to cover it, and wanders down to the hotel restaurant. She finds the place empty, although cooking sounds reach her from the kitchen as the staff gear up for the breakfast rush. She helps herself to a cup of coffee from the pot, and a large handful of sugar sachets, and takes it all over to a table by the window, where she stirs the contents of the little packets into her coffee. There are sixteen altogether, and she uses them all.Then, leaving the sticky mess to cool, she rests her left arm on the table and clenches and unclenches her fist. Everything seems in order. The tendons move as they should, and there’s no trace of the break. It doesn’t even ache now. Satisfied, she takes a sip of the lip-curlingly sweet coffee. It tastes disgusting, but she needs the sugar to refuel the tweaked macrophages and artificial fibroblasts that have enabled her to heal so quickly.

  Outside the window, it’s still raining. She watches the drops slither on the glass. It makes her think of Josef in better times, before he had his fangs implanted. She remembers him as bright and swift and clever; a sociopath, yes, but still her best student. And there it is, her dirty little secret, the inconvenient truth she’s been hiding from Federico: the reason she makes such a good vampire hunter is that during the war, before the vampires were deployed against the enemy, it was she who trained them. She was a military psychologist at the time, an expert in guerrilla warfare. While combat instructors taught the vampires how to kill, she showed them a range of nasty tricks culled from a thousand hard-fought insurgencies; from the Scythians of Central Asia to the soldiers of the Viet Kong, and beyond.

  She remembers her penultimate briefing in particular.

  “The vampire’s a powerful archetype,” she said to the cadets. “It’s an expression of our darker side, playing to our most primal anxieties, from the threat of rape to the fear of being eaten.” It was a hot day, and the sun had blazed through the classroom windows. She walked up and down in front of her students, hands clasped behind her back. At the rear of the room, the surgeons waited with their trolleys, ready to wheel the young men and women down to the operating theatre, one-by-one, in order to implant their fangs and night-adapted eyes. “To complete your mission, you must be prepared to kill. You must become assassins—anonymous killers in the night, spreading panic and mistrust.” She stopped pacing and turned to Josef. He sat in the front row of the classroom, chin on fist, eyes blazing, and she knew it would be the last time she’d see him before his transformation.” If you do your jobs correctly,” she said, “each of you will be worth a hundred troops. You’ll demoralise the enemy, eat out his fighting spirit from the inside. You’ll have the soldiers worried about their families, the families suspicious of their neighbours. But in order to achieve this, you’ll have to move like shadows, and show no mercy. Do anything that needs to be done, be ruthless, and be prepared to strike anywhere, at any time.”

  She had taught them every psychological trick she knew, and shown them how to exploit the power of myth, how to generate fear and horror from darkness and blood. From their test scores, she’d known they were intelligent. In fact, she’d personally overseen the original selection process, picking only those recruits with the right balance of brains and insanity—those clever enough to survive the mission, but also psychotic enough to become the monsters they’d need to be in order to succeed.

  And then later, when the war went temporal, spilling into the surrounding decades, they came back and she briefed them again, only this time on the peculiarities of each of the time zones in which they were to operate, giving them the background they’d need in order to blend into each zone’s civilian population.

  Sometimes, she wonders if her history lessons inspired their eventual escape into this dim and distant past, far from even the outermost fringes of the conflict. One thing’s for certain: since they mutinied and fled to these primitive times, she’s had to travel all over the place to hunt them down. She’s tracked individual vampires across half a dozen decades, in Los Angeles, Cairo, Warsaw, and London.

  Now she’s here, in Amsterdam.

  And suddenly, there’s Josef.

  He’s standing in the shadow of a doorway on the other side of the street, watching her through the glass. He has his hands in the pockets of his black raincoat. Their eyes meet for a second and Paige can’t breathe. Then he’s gone, moving fast. Between parked cars, she catches a glimpse of him crossing the street, heading for the back of the hotel. With a curse, she pushes herself to her feet. Josef will know which room she’s staying in—a simple phone call will have furnished him with that information—and now he’s after Federico, hoping to kill the boy before tackling her.

  Paige bursts out into the foyer. Her room’s on the fourth floor, so there’s no time to take the stairs. However, luck’s on her side; this early in the morning the elevators all stand ready, their doors open. She slams into the nearest and slaps the button for the fourth floor. Then, even as the doors are closing, she’s pulling the coil gun from her belt and checking its magazine.

  * * *

  Paige kicks her shoes off in the elevator and pads along the corridor in her socks. As she nears her room, she hears the door splinter: Josef’s kicked his way in.

  “Damn.”

  She lifts the coil gun to her shoulder and risks a peek around the frame. The room’s dark. She can see a faint glow from the curtains. There are shadows all over the place: chairs, desks, and suitcases. Any one of them could be a crouched vampire.

  “Fuck.”

  She ducks back into the corridor and takes a few quick breaths. If Josef’s still in there, he’ll have heard her already—and there’s a good possibility Federico’s already dead. She flicks off the coil gun’s safety catch. There’s nothing beyond this room but window; the chances of civilian casualties are slight. Stepping back, she gives the trigger a squeeze. The gun whines. Holes appear in the door. Splinters flick out. The TV sparks. A chair blows apart.

  And there, in the maelstrom: a shadow moves.

  She tries to hose him down but he’s moving too fast. He hits the wall and pushes off; hits the floor and rolls; and then he’s running on all fours, leaping at her throat before she can draw a bead.

  Paige rolls with the impact, still pressing the trigger. Scraps of material fly from Josef’s overcoat. An overhead light explodes. Blood sprays. His ceramic teeth scrape her neck, grazing the skin. Then his momentum carries him over her head, and she uses a Judo throw to heave him into the corridor wall. He hits like an upside down starfish, arms and legs splayed, and then falls to the floor.

  They both lie panting.

  The carpet’s soft. She rolls onto her side. Josef’s lying on his front, looking sideways at her. His eyes are as blue as a gas flame. This is the first good look she’s had at him since he left her class, and he looks older and harder than she remembers. His fangs are white and clean. Blood soaks into the carpet from a hole in his side.

  He doesn’t move as she elbows herself up into a sitting position; but, as soon as she lifts the coil gun, he twists. His wrist flicks out, and a pair of shiny throwing stars bite Paige’s arm. She cries out and the gun drops from her fingers. Instinctively, she reaches for it with her left hand, but Josef’s anticipated the move. He pushes himself towards her, delivering a kick to her cheek that shatters the bone.

  Paige falls into the open doorway of her room. Black spots dapple her vision. She feels Josef grip her leg. His hands work their way up. He’s climbing her, using his weight to keep her pinned down. She tries to fight back, but she’s still dazed. He swats her hands away from his face.

  Then he’s on her, his thighs clamped across her hips, his knees pinning her arms. He wraps his fingers in her hair, and yanks her head back, exposing her throat. His fangs are fully deployed. She sees them through the hair hanging down over his face, and cringes, expecting him to lunge for her artery.

  Instead, Josef clears his throat

  “I don’t want to kill you,” he says around his teeth.
He pulls away, and his incisors slip back into their sheaths. He lets go of her hair and sits up, straddling her. Paige blinks up at him as he smooths back his wet hair. “I just want to talk.”

  * * *

  They end up slumped against opposite walls of the corridor. Josef’s bleeding onto the carpet; Paige feels as if she’s been hit by a fire truck. One side of her face throbs with pain, and the eye above her broken cheekbone won’t focus properly.

  “You’ve got me all wrong,” Josef says.

  She gives him a look.

  “You’re a killer.”

  “Not anymore.” He lets his shoulders relax, but keeps one hand pressed to the bullet hole in his side.

  “But Federico—”

  “I haven’t touched him.”

  “He’s still alive?”

  Josef shrugs. “I can’t say for sure. You sprayed a lot of bullets in there.”

  And suddenly, they’re falling back into their old pattern: teacher and student—and she knows there’s something he’s not telling her.

  “What’s going on, Josef? Why am I still alive?”

  He tips his head back, resting it against the wall.

  “Because things are different now. I’m different.” He reaches into his coat and pulls out a photograph, which he Frisbees across to her.

  “I wasn’t trying to hurt you, you know? Not here, and not at the pub.” He dips his chin and looks at her. “Just acting in self-defence, trying to stop you from killing me.”

  The picture shows Josef holding a child, maybe four or five years old.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s my daughter.”

  The girl has Josef’s blue eyes and blonde hair. She’s wearing a red dress.

  “Your daughter?”

  Josef closes his eyes.

  “Yes.”

  Paige glances at the coil gun, lying on the carpet between them. She wonders if she can reach it before he can reach her.

  Josef says, “I don’t want any more trouble.”

  Paige lifts a hand to her ruined cheek, and her lip curls.

  “So what? You think it matters what you want? So you’ve gone and got yourself a family, and you think that wipes away all the shit you’ve done, all the people you’ve killed?”