The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition

by Rich Horton

  Huh. I had never been asked to hang out before. Certainly not by girls who looked as though they used leave-in conditioner. I had been using Johnson & Johnson’s No More Tears since childhood as it kept its promises. I was distrustful; I had never been popular. At school my greatest leap had been from weirdo to perceived goth. Girls abhorred oddity, but quantifiable gothness they could accept. Some had even warmly talked to me of Nightwish albums. I dyed my hair black to complete the effect and was nevermore bullied.

  I feared no contempt of Rainbow Kipley’s. I feared wasting my time. But the lure was too great. “I’ll come back tomorrow,” I said, “to see if the shark’s gone. You can keep the cereal as collateral.”

  “Cool,” she said, like she understood collateral, and smiled with very white teeth. “Cool, cool.”

  Driver’s licenses and kissing boys could wait indefinitely, for preference. My heart sang all the way home, for you see: I’d discovered the bride.

  The next day I found myself back at Rainbow’s shabby suburban house. We both took the time to admire her abandoned shark by the light of day, and I compared it to pictures on my iPhone and confirmed it as Mitsukurina owstoni: goblin shark. I noted dead grass in a broad brown ring around the tree, the star-spoked webs left empty by their spiders, each a proclamation a monster dwells. Somehow we ended up going to the park and Rainbow jiggled her jelly bracelets the whole way.

  I bought a newspaper and pored over local news: the headline read GLOBAL WARMING OR GLOBAL WARNING? It queried alkaline content in the rain, or something, then advertised that no fewer than one scientist was fascinated with what had happened on Main Street. “Scientists,” said my companion, like a slur, and she laughed gutturally.

  “Science has its place,” I said and rolled up the newspaper. “Just not at present. Science does not cause salt blizzards or impalement of bathydemersal fish.”

  “You think this is cool, don’t you?” she said slyly. “You’re on it like a bonnet.”

  There was an unseemly curiosity to her, as though the town huddling in on itself waiting to die was like a celebrity scandal. Was this the way I’d been acting? “No,” I lied, “and nobody under sixty says on it like a bonnet.”

  “Shut up! You know what I mean—”

  “Think of me as a reporter. Someone who’s going to watch what happens. I already know what’s going on, I just want a closer look.”

  Her eyes were wide and very dark. When she leaned in she smelled like Speed Stick. “How do you know?”

  There was no particular family jurisprudence about telling. Don’t appeared to be the rule of thumb as Blakes knew that, Cassandra-like, they defied belief. For me it was simply that nobody had ever asked. “I can read the future, and what I read always comes true,” I said.

  “Oh my God. Show me.”

  I decided to exhibit myself in what paltry way a Blake can. I looked at the sun. I looked at the scudding clouds. I looked at an oily stain on our park bench, and the way the thin young stalks of plants were huddled in the ground. I looked at the shadows people made as they hurried, and at how many sparrows rose startled from the water fountain.

  “The old man in the hat is going to burn down his house on Saturday,” I said. “That jogger will drop her Gatorade in the next five minutes. The police will catch up with that red-jacket man in the first week of October.” I gathered some saliva and, with no great ceremony, hocked it out on the grass. I examined the result. “They’ll unearth a gigantic ruin in . . . southwestern Australia. In the sand plains. Seven archaeologists. In the winter sometime. Forgive me inexactitude, my mouth wasn’t very wet.”

  Rainbow’s mouth was a round O. In front of us the jogger dropped her Gatorade, and it splattered on the ground in a shower of blue. I said, “You won’t find out if the rest is true for months yet. And you could put it down to coincidences. But you’d be wrong.”

  “You’re a gypsy,” she accused.

  I had expected “liar,” and “nutjob,” but not “gypsy.” “No, and by the way, that’s racist. If you’d like to know our future, then very soon—I don’t know when—a great evil will make itself known in this town, claim a mortal, and lay waste to us all in celebration. I will record all that happens for my descendants and their descendants, and as is the agreement between my bloodline and the unknown, I’ll be spared.”

  I expected her to get up and leave, or laugh again. She said: “Is there anything I can do?”

  For the first time I pitied this pretty girl with her bright hair and her Chucks, her long-limbed soda-coloured legs, her ingenuous smile. She would be taken to a place in the deep, dark below where lay unnamed monstrosity, where the devouring hunger lurked far beyond light and there was no Katy Perry. “It’s not for you to do anything but cower in his abyssal wake,” I said, “though you don’t look into cowering.”

  “No, I mean—can I help you out?” she repeated, like I was a stupid child. “I’ve run out of Punk’d episodes on my machine, I don’t have anyone here, and I go home July anyway.”

  “What about those other girls?”

  “What, them?” Rainbow flapped a dismissive hand. “Who cares? You’re the one I want to like me.”

  Thankfully, whatever spluttering gaucherie I might have made in reply was interrupted by a scream. Jets of sticky arterial blood were spurting out the water fountain, and tentacles waved delicately from the drain. Tiny octopus creatures emerged in the gouts of blood flooding down the sides and the air stalled around us like it was having a heart attack.

  It took me forever to approach the fountain, wreathed with frondy little tentacle things. It buckled as though beneath a tremendous weight. I thrust my hands into the blood and screamed: it was ice-cold, and my teeth chattered. With a splatter of red I tore my hands away and they steamed in the air.

  In the blood on my palms I saw the future. I read the position of the dead moon that no longer orbited Earth. I saw the blessing of the tyrant who hid in a far-off swirl of stars. I thought I could forecast to midsummer, and when I closed my eyes I saw people drown. Everyone else in the park had fled.

  I whipped out my notebook, though my fingers smeared the pages and were so cold I could hardly hold the pen, but this was Blake duty. It took me three abortive starts to write in English.

  “You done?” said Rainbow, squatting next to me. I hadn’t realized I was muttering aloud, and she flicked a clot of blood off my collar. “Let’s go get McNuggets.”

  “Miss Kipley,” I said, and my tongue did not speak the music of mortal tongues, “you are a fucking lunatic.”

  We left the fountain gurgling like a wound and did not look back. Then we got McNuggets.

  I had never met anyone like Rainbow before. I didn’t think anybody else had, either. She was interested in all the things I wasn’t—Sephora hauls, New Girl, Nicki Minaj—but had a strangely magnetic way of not giving a damn, and not in the normal fashion of beautiful girls. She just appeared to have no idea that the general populace did anything but clog up her scenery. There was something in her that set her apart—an absence of being like other people—and in a weak moment I compared her to myself.

  We spent the rest of the day eating McNuggets and wandering around town and looking at things. I recorded the appearance of naked fish bones dangling from the telephone wires. She wanted to prod everything with the toe of her sneaker. And she talked.

  “Favourite color,” she demanded.

  I was peering at anemone-pocked boulders behind the gas station. “Black.”

  “Favourite subject,” she said later, licking dubious McNugget oils off her fingers as we examined flayed fish in a clearing.

  “Physics and literature.”

  “Ideal celebrity boyfriend?”

  “Did you get this out of Cosmo? Pass.”

  She asked incessantly what my teachers were like; were the girls at my school lame; what my thoughts were on Ebola, CSI and Lonely Island. When we had exhausted the town’s supply of dried-up sponges arranged in unkno
wable names, we ended up hanging out in the movie theatre lobby. We watched previews. Neither of us had seen any of the movies advertised, and neither of us wanted to see them, either.

  I found myself telling her about Mar, and even alluded to my mother. When I asked her the same, she just said offhandedly, “Four plus me.” Considering my own filial reticence, I didn’t press.

  When evening fell, she said, See you tomorrow, as a foregone conclusion. Like ten-ish, breakfast takes forever.

  I went home not knowing what to think. She had a bunny manicure. She laughed at everything. She’d stolen orange soda from the movie theater drinks machine, even if everyone stole orange soda from the movie theater drinks machine. She had an unseemly interest in mummy movies. But what irritated me most was that I found her liking me compelling, that she appeared to have never met anyone like Hester Blake.

  Her interest in me was most likely boredom, which was fine, because my interest in her was that she was the bride. That night I thought about what I’d end up writing: the despot of the Breathless Depths took a local girl to wife, one with a bedazzled Samsung. I sniggered alone, and slept uneasy.

  In the days to come, doom throttled the brittle, increasingly desiccated town, and I catalogued it as my companion caught me up on the plot of every soap opera she’d ever watched. She appeared to have abandoned most of them midway, furnishing unfinished tales of many a shock pregnancy. Mar had been sarcastic ever since I’d broken her rosemary ward so I spent as much time out of the house as possible; that was the main reason I hung around Rainbow.

  I didn’t want to like her because her doom was upon us all, and I didn’t want to like her because she was other girls, and I wasn’t. And I didn’t want to like her because she always knew when I’d made a joke. I was so angry, and I didn’t know why.

  We went to the woods and consolidated my notes. I laid my research flat on the grass or propped it on a bough, and Rainbow played music noisily on her Samsung. We rolled up our jeans—or I did, as she had no shorts that went past mid-thigh—and half-assedly sunbathed. It felt like the hours were days and the days endless.

  She wanted to know what I thought would happen when we all got “laid waste to.” For a moment I was terribly afraid I’d feel guilty.

  “I don’t know.” The forest floor smelled cold, somehow. “I’ve never seen waste laid en masse. The Drownlord will make his presence known. People will go mad. People will die.”

  Rainbow rolled over toward me, bits of twig caught in her hair. Today she had done her eyeliner in two thick, overdramatic rings, like a sleep-deprived panda. “Do you ever wonder what dying’s like, dude?”

  I thought about Mar and never seeing fifty. “No,” I said. “My family dies young. I figure anticipating it is unnecessary.”

  “Maybe you’re going to die when the end of this hits,” she said thoughtfully. “We could die tragically together. How’s that shake you?”

  I said, “My family has a pact with the All-Devouring so we don’t get killed carelessly in their affairs. You’re dying alone, Kipley.”

  She didn’t get upset. She tangled her arms in the undergrowth and stretched her legs out, skinny hips arched, and wriggled pleasurably in the thin and unaffectionate sunlight. “I hope you’ll be super sad,” she said. “I hope you’ll cry for a year.”

  “Aren’t you scared to die?”

  “Never been scared.”

  I said, “Due to your brain damage,” and Rainbow laughed uproariously. Then she found a dried-up jellyfish amid the leaves and dropped it down my shirt.

  That night I thought again about what I’d have to write: the many-limbed horror who lies beneath the waves stole a local girl to wife, and she wore the world’s skankiest short-shorts and laughed at my jokes. I slept, but there were nightmares.

  Sometimes the coming rain was nothing but a fine mist that hurt to breathe, but sometimes it was like shrapnel. The sun shone hot and choked the air with a stench of damp concrete. I carried an umbrella and Rainbow wore black rain boots that squeaked.

  Mar ladled out tortilla soup one night as a peace offering. We ate companionably, with the radio on. There were no stories about salt rain or plagues of fish even on the local news. I’d been taught better than to expect it. Fear rendered us rigidly silent, and anyone who went against instinct ended up in a straitjacket.

  “Why is our personal philosophy that fate always wins?” I said.

  My aunt didn’t miss a beat. “Self-preservation,” she said. “You don’t last long in our line of work fighting facts. Christ, you don’t last long in our line of work, period. Hey—Ted at the gas station said he’d seen you going around with some girl.”

  “Ted at the gas station is a grudge informer,” I said. “Back on subject. Has nobody tried to use the Blake sight to effect change?”

  “They would’ve been a moron branch of the family, because like I’ve said a million times: it doesn’t work that way.” Mar swirled a spoon around her bowl. “Not trying to make it a federal issue, kid, just saying I’m happy you’re making friends instead of swishing around listening to The Cure.”

  “Mar, I have never listened to The Cure.”

  “You find that bride?”

  Taken aback, I nodded. Mar cocked her dark head in thought. There were sprigs of grey at each temple, and not for the first time I was melancholy, clogged up with an inscrutable grief. But all she said was, “Okay. There were octopuses in the goddamned laundry again. When this is over, you’ll learn what picking up the pieces looks like. Lemon pie in the icebox.”

  It was octopodes, but never mind. I cleared the dishes. Afterward we ate two large wedges of lemon pie apiece. The house was comfortably quiet and the sideboard candles bravely chewed on the dark.

  “Mar,” I said, “what would happen if someone were to cross the deepwater demons who have slavery of wave and underwave? Hypothetically.”

  “No Blake has ever been stupid or saintly enough to try and find out,” said Mar. “Not qualities you’re suited to, Hester.”

  I wondered if this was meant to sting, because it didn’t. I felt no pain. “Your next question’s going to be, How do we let other people die?” she said and pulled her evening cigarette from the packet. “Because I’m me, I’ll understand you want a coping mechanism, not a Sunday School lecture. My advice to you is: it becomes easier the less you get involved. And Hester—”

  I looked at her with perfect nonchalance.

  “I’m not outrunning my fate,” said Aunt Mar. She lit the cigarette at the table. “Don’t try to outrun other people’s. You don’t have the right. You’re a Blake, not God.”

  “I didn’t choose to be a Blake,” I snapped and dropped the pie plate on the sideboard before storming from the room. I took each stair as noisily as possible, but not noisily enough to drown out her holler: “If you ever get a choice in this life, kiddo, treasure it!”

  Rainbow noticed my foul mood. She did not tell me to cheer up or ask me what the matter was, thankfully. She wasn’t that type of girl. Fog boiled low in the valley and the townspeople stumbled through the streets and talked about atmospheric pressure. Stores closed. Buses came late. Someone from the northeast suburbs had given in and shot himself.

  I felt numb and untouched, and worse—when chill winds wrapped around my neck and let me breathe clear air, smelling like the beach and things that grow on the beach—I was happy. I nipped this in its emotional bud. Rainbow, of course, was as cheerful and unaffected as a stump.

  Midsummer boiled closer and I thought about telling her. I would say outright, Miss Kipley. (“Rainbow” had never left my lips, the correct method with anyone who was je m’appelle Rainbow.) When the ocean lurker comes to take his victim, his victim will be you. Do whatever you wish with this information. Perhaps she’d finally scream. Or plead. Anything.

  But when I got my courage up, she leaned in close and combed her fingers through my hair, right down to the undyed roots. Her hands were very delicate, and I clammed up. My su
llen silence was no barrier to Rainbow. She just cranked up Taylor Swift.

  We were sitting in a greasy bus shelter opposite Walmart when the man committed suicide. There was no showboating hesitation in the way he appeared on the roof, then stepped off at thirty feet. He landed on the spines of a wrought-iron fence. The sound was like a cocktail weenie going through a hole punch.

  There was nobody around but us. I froze and did not look away. Next to me, Rainbow was equally transfixed. I felt terrible shame when she was the one to drag us over to him. She already had her phone out. I had seen corpses before, but this was very fresh. There was a terrible amount of blood. He was irreparably dead. I turned my head to inform Rainbow, in case she tried to help him or something equally demented, and then I saw she was taking his picture.

  “Got your notebook?” she said.

  There was no fear in her. No concern. Rainbow reached out to prod at one mangled, outflung leg. Two spots of colour bloomed high on her cheeks; she was luminously pleased.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” My voice sounded embarrassingly shrill. “This man just killed himself!”

  “The fence helped,” said Rainbow helplessly.

  “You think this is a joke—what reason could you have for thinking this is okay—”

  “Excuse you, we look at dead shit all the time. I thought we’d hit jackpot, we’ve never found a dead guy . . . ”

  Her distress was sulky and real. I took her by the shoulders of her stupid cropped jacket and gripped tight, fear a tinder to my misery. The rain whipped around us and stung my face. “Christ, you think this is some kind of game, or . . . or a YouTube stunt! You really can’t imagine—you have no comprehension—you mindless jackass—”

  She was trying to calm me, feebly patting my hands. “Stop being mad at me, it sucks! What gives, Hester—”

  “You’re the bride, Kipley. It’s coming for you.”

  Rainbow stepped out of my shaking, febrile grip. For a moment her lips pressed very tightly together and I wondered if she would cry. Then her mouth quirked into an uncomprehending, furtive little smile.