There was a stairwell near the elevators and I climbed it to the third floor. I hadn’t thought to bring a flashlight with me, so I stayed close to the wall, feeling my way through the gloom, stumbling more than once when my feet encountered chunks of rubble that had fallen from somewhere overhead.
On the third floor, the child was waiting for me.
“What do you want here?” he barked and blinked at me with the golden eyes of a predatory bird. He was naked, his skin hidden beneath a coat of fine yellow-brown fur.
“Who are you?” I asked him.
“The manticore said you were coming. She saw you on the bridge. What do you want?”
“I’m looking for a girl named Jet.”
The child laughed, a strange, hitching laugh, and rolled his eyes. He leaned forward, staring at me intently, expectantly, and the vertical pupils of those big golden eyes dilated slightly.
“Ain’t no girls here, Mister,” he chuckled. “Not anymore. You skizzled or what?”
“Is there anyone here named Jet? I’ve come a long way to talk to her.”
“You got a gun, maybe?” he asked. “You got a knife?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t. I just want to talk.”
“You come out to Stitchtown without a gun or a knife? Then you must have some bangers, Mister. You must have whennymegs big as my fist,” and he held up one clenched fist so I could see exactly what he meant. “Or you don’t want to live so much longer, maybe.”
“Maybe,” I replied.
“Meat’s scarce this time of year,” the boy chuckled and then licked his thin, ebony lips.
Down at the other end of the hallway, something growled softly and the boy glanced over his shoulder, then back up at me. He was smiling, a hard smile that was neither cruel nor kind, revealing the sharp tips of his long canines and incisors. He looked disappointed.
“All in good time,” he said and took my hand. “All in good time,” and I let him lead me toward the eager shadows crouched at the other end of the hallway.
Near the end of his book, Emmanuel Weatherby-Jones writes, “The calamities following, and following from, the return of the IcePIC probe may stand as mankind’s gravest defeat. For long millennia, we had asked ourselves if we were alone in the cosmos. Indeed, that question has surely formed much of the fundamental matter of the world’s religions. But when finally answered, once and for all, we were forced to accept that there had been greater comfort in our former, vanished ignorance.”
We are more alone than ever. Ronnie got that part right.
When. I’d backed out of the contact and the techs had a solid lockdown on the critter’s signal, when the containment waves were pinging crystal mad off the putrescent walls of the bedroom on Columbus and one of the medics had administered a stimulant to clear my head and bring me the rest of the way home, I sat down on the floor and cried.
Nothing unusual about that. I’ve cried almost every single time. At least I didn’t puke.
“Good job,” Templeton said and rested a heavy gloved hand on my shoulder.
“Fuck you. I could hear them. I could hear both of them, you asshole.”
“We did what we could, Deet. I couldn’t have you so tanked on morphine you’d end up flatlining.”
“Oh my god. Oh Jesus god,” I sobbed like an old woman, gasping, my heart racing itself round smaller and smaller circles, fried to a crisp on the big syringe full of synthetadrine the medic had pumped into my left arm. “Kill it, Temp. You kill it right this fucking instant.”
“We have to stick to protocol,” he said calmly, staring down at the writhing mass of bone and meat and protoplasm on the bed. A blood-red tendril slithered from the place where the man’s mouth had been and began burrowing urgently into the sagging mattress. “Just as soon as we have you debriefed and we’re sure stasis is holding, then we’ll terminate life signs.”
“Fuck it,” I said and reached for his Beretta, tearing the pistol from the velcro straps of the holster with enough force that Temp almost fell over on top of me. I shoved him aside and aimed at the thing on the bed.
“Deet, don’t you even fucking think about pulling that trigger!”
“You can go straight to hell,” I whispered, to Templeton, to the whole goddamn Agency, to the spooch and that single hurting blue eye still watching me. I squeezed the trigger, emptying the whole clip into what little was left of the man and woman’s swollen skulls, hoping it would be enough.
Then someone grabbed for the gun and I let them take it from me.
“You stupid motherfucker,” Temp growled. “You goddamn stupid bastard. As soon as this job is finished, you are out. Do you fucking understand me, Deet? You are history!”
“Yeah,” I replied and sat back down on the floor. In the silence left after the roar of the gun, the containment waves pinged and my ears rang and the yellow fog settled over me like a shroud.
At least, that’s the way I like to pretend it all went down. Late at night, when I can’t sleep, when the pills and booze aren’t enough, I like to imagine there was one moment in my wasted, chicken-shit life when I did what I should have done.
Whatever really happened, I’m sure someone’s already written it down somewhere. I don’t have to do it again.
In the cluttered little room at the end of the third-floor hallway, the woman with a cat’s face and nervous, twitching ears sat near a hole that had been a window before the mortars. There was no light but the dim winter sun. The boy sat at her feet and never took his eyes off me. The woman—if she had a name, I never learned it — only looked at me once, when I first entered the room. The fire in her eyes made short work of whatever resolve I had left and I was glad when she turned back to the hole in the wall and stared north across the river toward the Astoria refineries.
She told me the girl had left a week earlier. She didn’t have any idea where Jet Miyake might have gone.
“She brings food and medicine, sometimes,” the woman said, confirming what I’d already suspected. Back then, there were a lot of people willing to risk prison or death to get supplies to Roosevelt Island. Maybe there still are. I couldn’t say.
“I’m sorry to hear about her parents.”
“It was quick,” I lied. “They didn’t suffer.”
“You smell like death, Mr. Paine,” the woman said, flaring her nostrils slightly. The boy at her feet laughed and hugged himself, rocking from side to side. “I think it follows you. I believe you herald death.”
“Yeah, I think the same thing myself sometimes,” I replied.
“You hunt the aliens?” she purred.
“That’s one way of looking at it.”
“There’s a certain irony, don’t you think? Our world was dying. We poisoned our world and then went looking for life somewhere else. Do you think we found what we were looking for, Mr. Paine?”
“No,” I told her. “I don’t think we ever will.”
“Go back to the city, Mr. Paine. Go now. You won’t be safe after sunset. Some of us are starving. Some of our children are starving.”
I thanked her and left the room. The boy followed me as far as the stairs, then he stopped and sat chuckling to himself, his laughter echoing through the stairwell, as I moved slowly, step by blind step, through the uncertain darkness. I retraced my path to the street, following Main to East, past the wild places, through the canyons, and didn’t look back until I was standing on the bridge again.
I found Jet Miyake in Chinatown two days later, hiding out in the basement of the Buddhist Society of Wonderful Enlightenment on Madison Street. The Agency had files on a priest there, demonstrating a long history of prostitch sentiment. Jet Miyake ran, because they always run if they can, and I chased her, down Mechanics Alley, across Henry, and finally caught up with her in a fish market on East Broadway, beneath the old Manhattan Bridge. She tried to lose me in the maze of kiosks, the glistening mounds of octopus and squid, eel and tuna and cod laid out on mountains of crushed ice. She headed for a b
ack door and almost made it, but slipped on the wet concrete floor and went sprawling ass over tits into a big display of dried soba and canned chicken broth. I don’t actually remember all those details, just the girl and the stink of fish, the clatter of the cans on the cement, the angry, frightened shouts from the merchants and customers. But the details, the octopus and soba noodles, I don’t know. I think I’m trying to forget this isn’t fiction, that it happened, that I’m not making it up as I go along. That I played any part in it.
Sometimes.
Sometimes I’m a savage.
I held the muzzle of my pistol to her right temple while I ran the scan. She gritted her teeth and stared silently up at me. The machine read her dirty as the gray New York snow, though I didn’t need the blinking red light on the genetigraph to tell me that. She was hurting, the way only long-term carriers can hurt. I could see it in her eyes, in the sweat streaming down her face, in the faintly bluish tinge of her lips. She’d probably been contaminated for months. I knew it’d be a miracle if she’d infected no one but her parents. I showed her the display screen on the genetigraph and told her what it meant, and I told her what I had to do next.
“You can’t stop it, you know,” she said, smiling a bitter, sickly smile. “No matter how many people you kill, it’s too late. It’s been too late from the start.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, whether I actually was or not, and squeezed the trigger. The 9mm boomed like thunder in a bottle and suddenly she wasn’t my problem anymore. Suddenly she was just another carcass for the sweepers.
I have become an unreliable narrator. Maybe I’ve been an unreliable narrator all along. Just like I’ve been a coward and a hypocrite all along. The things we would rather remember, the things we choose to forget. As the old saying goes, it’s only a movie.
I didn’t kill Jet Miyake.
“You can’t stop it, you know,” she said. That part’s the truth. “No matter how many people you kill, it’s too late. It’s been too late from the start.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“We brought it here. We invited it in, and it likes what it sees. It means to stay.” She did smile, but it was a satisfied, secret smile. I stepped back and lowered the muzzle of the gun. The bore had left a shallow, circular impression on her skin.
“Please step aside, Mr. Paine,” Sarah said and when I turned around she was standing just a few feet behind me, pointing a ridiculously small carbon-black Glock at the girl. Sarah fired twice and waited until the body stopped convulsing, then put a third bullet in Jet Miyake’s head, just to be sure. Sarah had always been thorough.
“Templeton thought you might get cold feet,” she said and stepped past me, kneeling to inspect the body. “You know this means that you’ll probably be suspended.”
“She was right, wasn’t she?” I muttered. “Sooner or later, we’re going to lose this thing,” and for a moment I considered putting a few rounds into Sarah’s skull, pulling the trigger and spraying brains and blood and silicon across the floor of the fish market. It might have been a mercy killing. But I suppose I didn’t love her quite as much as I’d always thought. Besides, the Agency would have probably just picked up the pieces and stuck her back together again.
“One day at a time, Mr. Paine,” she said. “That’s the only way to stay sane. One day at a time.”
“No past, no future.”
“If that’s the way you want to look at it.”
She stood up and held out a hand. I popped the clip from my pistol and gave her the gun and the ammo. I removed the genetigraph from my belt and she took that, too.
“We’ll send someone to the hotel for the rest of your equipment. Please have everything in order. You have your ticket back to Los Angeles.”
“Yes,” I said. “I have my ticket back to Los Angeles.”
“You lasted a lot longer than I thought you would,” she said.
And I left her there, standing over the girl’s body, calling in the kill, ordering the sweeper crew. The next day I flew back to LA and found a bar where I was reasonably sure no one would recognize me. I started with tequila, moved on to scotch, and woke up two days later, facedown in the sand at Malibu, sick as a dog. The sun was setting, brewing a firestorm on the horizon, and I watched the stars come out above the sea. A meteor streaked across the sky and was gone. It only took me a moment to find Jupiter, Lord of the Heavens, Gatherer of Clouds, hardly more than a bright pinprick near the moon.
falling star
BRENDAN DUBOIS
We like to compliment ourselves on the bright, tidy rationality of our technological civilization, but the fact is, as the powerful story that follows demonstrates, that technological civilization is fragile, easy to break—and, once broken, the Old Days and the Old Ways, with all of their bigotry, intolerance, and fear are waiting to sweep in again … miring and dragging down even those who’ve always had their eyes on the stars.
Brendan DuBois has twice received the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, and has been nominated three times for the Edgar Allan Poe Award given by the Mystery Writers of America. He’s made sales to Playboy, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Space Stations, Civil War Fantastic, Pharaoh Fantastic, Knight Fantastic, The Mutant Files, and Alternate Gerrysburgs, among other markets. His mystery novels include the “Lewis Cole” series, Dead Sand, Black Tide, Shattered Shell, Killer Waves, and Buried Dreams. His SF novels include Resurrection Day and Six Days. His most recent novel is the suspense thriller Betrayed. He lives in Exeter, New Hampshire, with his family, and maintains a Web site at www.brendandubois.com.
On a late July day in Boston Falls, New Hampshire, Rick Monroe, the oldest resident of the town, sat on a park bench in the town common, waiting for the grocery and mail wagon to appear from Greenwich. The damn thing was supposed to arrive at two PM, but the Congregational Church clock had just chimed three times and the road from Greenwich remained empty. Four horses and a wagon were hitched up to the post in front of the Boston Falls General Store, some bare-chested kids were playing in the dirt road, and flies were buzzing around his face.
He stretched out his legs, saw the dirt stains at the bottom of the old overalls. Mrs. Chandler, his once-a-week house cleaner, was again doing a lousy job with the laundry, and he knew he should say something to her, but he was reluctant to do it. Having a cleaning woman was a luxury and a bad cleaning woman was better than no cleaning woman at all. Even if she was a snoop and sometimes raided his icebox and frowned whenever she reminded him of the weekly church services.
Some of the kids shouted and started running up the dirt road. He sat up, shaded his eyes with a shaking hand. There, coming down slowly, two tired horses pulling the wagon that had high wooden sides and a canvas top. He waited as the wagon pulled into the store, waited still until it was unloaded. There was really no rush, no rush at all. Let the kids have their excitement, crawling in and around the wagon. When the wagon finally pulled out, heading to the next town over, Jericho, he slowly got up, wincing as his hips screamed at him. He went across the cool grass and then the dirt road, and up to the wooden porch. The children moved away from him, except for young Tom Cooper, who stood there, eyes wide open. Glen Roundell, the owner of the General Store and one of the town’s three selectmen, came up to him with a paper sack and a small packet of envelopes, tied together with an piece of twine.
“Here you go, Mister Monroe,” he said, his voice formal, wearing a starched white shirt, black tie, and white store apron that reached the floor. “Best we can do this week. No beef, but there is some bacon there. Should keep if you get home quick enough.”
“Thanks, Glen,” he said. “On account, all right?”
Glen nodded. “That’s fine.”
He turned to step off the porch, when a man appeared out of the shadows. Henry Cooper, Tom’s father, wearing a checked flannel shirt and blue jeans, his thick black beard down to midchest. “Would you care for a ride back to
your place, Mister Monroe?”
He shifted the bag in his hands, smiled. “Why, that would be grand.” And he was glad that Henry had not come into town with his wife, Marcia, for even though she was quite active in the church, she had some very un-Christian thoughts toward her neighbors, especially an old man like Rick Monroe, who kept to himself and wasn’t a churchgoer.
Rick followed Henry and his boy outside, and he clambered up on the rear, against a couple of wooden boxes and a barrel. Henry said, “You can sit up front, if you’d like,” and Rick said, “No, that’s your boy’s place. He can stay up there with you.”
Henry unhitched his two-horse team, and in a few minutes, they were heading out on the Town Road, also known as New Hampshire Route 12. The rear of the wagon jostled and was bumpy, but he was glad he didn’t have to walk it. It sometimes took him nearly an hour to walk from home to the center of town, and he remembered again—like he had done so many times—how once in his life it only took him ninety minutes to travel thousands of miles.
He looked again at the town common, at the stone monuments clustered there, commemorating the war dead from Boston Falls, those who had fallen in the Civil War, Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam, and even the first and second Gulf Wars. Then, the town common was out of view, as the horse and wagon made its way out of a small New Hampshire village, hanging on in the sixth decade of the twenty-first century.
When the wagon reached his home, Henry and his boy came down to help him, and Henry said, “Can I bring some water out for the horses? It’s a dreadfully hot day,” and Rick said, “Of course, go right ahead.” Henry nodded and said, “Tom, you help Mister Monroe in with his groceries. You do that.”
The Year's Best SF 22 # 2004 Page 77