The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2015 Edition

by Paula Guran

  The first living thing I saw startled me so much I nearly snapped out of the water.

  It was at first glance only a shadow over the water. A barren tree, leafless branches, that was all I could see from my underwater vantage, but it moved. Long spindly legs unfolded and thin arms reached, and I saw its head, round as a seed, and two large unblinking eyes. It reminded me of the stick insects I had seen in distant forests, but it was as tall as a man, and when it rose to its feet, it ran upright on two legs, swift and surprisingly graceful.

  Now that I knew what to look for, I saw others like it in every corner of the city. Odd crouching bodies and unblinking eyes perched atop stone walls, in blighted trees, in broken windows. Most did not react to my presence even when I studied them. The few who did startled and clattered away on long stick legs.

  The fourth or fifth time this happened, I followed, and that was how I found the tower.

  It stood at the center of the city, a crooked black slash of metal, slanted like a blade driven into the ground or an arrowhead punched from within. Around its base was a deep, dirty moat spanned by a dozen failing bridges. I gathered myself from all corners of the city and circled the tower curiously, slowly, skating just beneath the surface. The structure was crooked and split; it had been breaking apart for a very long time. It was marked all along its length by windows smeared with soot and oil to prevent those outside from seeing in, or those inside from looking out.

  Around the lowest of those blacked-out windows, where the edges dipped into the filthy lapping water, a scattering of pale blue sparks clung to the frames, snaking through seams in the metal and circling each sunken bolt. They pulsed, those shimmering veins of light, and I felt it; they trembled, and I trembled with them. They pushed and squeezed into the cracks at the base of the tower, and I felt the same pressure and grind they felt.

  I had never known before what I looked like from the outside.

  One of the stick-creatures ran across a bridge and scrambled along the tower’s scarred surface. It climbed toward the top but changed its course midway and turned, scurried down the warped gray metal. It lowered its face to the water and I knew, knew it as surely as I felt the gritty water and the rough metal, as sharply as I tasted the blight-rust, that its flat pale eyes were looking right at me.

  I flinched, and blinked, and retreated from the city.

  I withdrew my feet from the stream. My heart slowed and my breath quieted. My skin felt bruised all over, tender to the touch. The dizziness passed, but my head was a heavy block on an aching neck.

  “It’s nearly summer,” my mother said.

  She was sitting on a stone on the other side of the water. She held the swarm in the palm of her hand; the blue dust danced around her fingers. Fragile pink flowers blossomed along the creek, and in the swaying grass green blades shone among the yellow and red. A breeze tugged at my hair and rustled the leaves in gentle chimes.

  “Did it rain last night?” I asked. My voice was rough, grating as the drag of footsteps in mud. I licked my lips, but my tongue offered scant moisture. I wanted to soothe my throat but dared not touch the water.

  “It rained four days ago. Did you go to the city?”

  “Four days?” I had never stayed away so long. My stomach clenched with hunger.

  “Did you go to the city?”

  The questions I wanted to ask tangled and tumbled in my mind, like a knot of snakes after first thaw. “How long have they been there?”

  “You know what the old women say,” said my mother. “Longer than memory. Longer than time. They’ve been invading the world since there was a world to invade, if the stories can be believed. They—”

  “Not them,” I said. “Not those things.”

  My mother’s fingers twitched. The swarm hummed.

  “My sisters. How long have they been there?”

  “Nearly as long,” said my mother. She would not meet my eyes. Her voice was fragile with hope. “I did not know if they had survived. You saw them?”

  “I found a tower.”

  “How does it look?”

  “Old,” I said. “Weak. It’s falling over.”

  “Ah.” My mother closed her eyes and I imagined, for a moment, that she had spent the past four days sitting exactly where she was now, never moving, never stirring, doing nothing but waiting. “That’s something, at least. At least they’ve managed that.”

  We sat in silence for a time. I listened to the bell-like music of the blighted bushes.

  “How do you know it will make any difference?” I asked.

  There were men in the northern swamplands who would treat a snakebite by first killing the snake, then amputating the hand, then the forearm, the elbow, all the flesh up to the shoulder as the dying boy screamed around a leather strap. I had seen them do it. I had been hiding behind my hands, too horrified to watch, and mother had scowled at their blades and blood-splattered faces before telling them it was too late.

  “Mother? How do you know?”

  She stood slowly, unsteadily, joints snapping and legs unfolding beneath her as though she had forgotten how they worked. She said, “You must be hungry. I’ll check the traps.”

  She disappeared into the forest. I laid down on the rock again, feet tucked safely away from the water. Wisps of clouds drifted overhead. I felt I was floating above the land, but at any moment I might fall and splash to the ground like a dropped bucket of water, scatter into rivulets before seeping into the earth.

  My mother had taken my knife while I was in the city. She kept it as we descended into the rolling foothills. I settled into my body again, that frail prison of skin and bone, so clumsy and slow and hungry. The nights had lost their chill while I was away. Each day was hotter than the last, the hours of sunlight harder to endure.

  After noon on the second day we came to a meadow. The river spilled from the trees and into broad open bowl. Without thinking I brushed my hand over the swaying grass and withdrew with a gasp of pain. The meadow grass was sharp enough to open a fan of tiny cuts across my fingers and palm.

  “Alis, wait.”

  I looked over my shoulder. My mother stood at the edge of the forest, safely in the shadows.

  “I’m only going for water,” I said.

  “Not here,” said my mother. She stepped forward, hesitated. “Come back to the shade. Please.”

  I had never heard my mother plead before.

  I turned away from the meadow and followed her into the forest again. A few paces from the trail she brushed orange leaves from a log and sat down. The sunlight dappled her shoulders and the crown of her head. I sat beside her.

  “We’ll wait for evening,” my mother said.

  I took the water skin from my pack and tilted the last drops into my mouth. Sunset seemed an age in the future. I imagined my lips and tongue drying like summer mud, pink flesh splitting along cracks, all the spit and blood evaporating away. I shifted into a firmer patch of shade, but it did nothing to alleviate the heat. My mother passed her water to me.

  “What were their names?” I asked.

  I expected her to tell me not to ask questions, not to be stupid. I did not expect an answer.

  “I never gave them names,” said my mother. “I never named you either. You chose your name for yourself. Do you remember? We were in one of the desert forts. There was an old woman leading a caravan. You tried to run away with her. She said she wouldn’t take you unless you had a name. You made one up, and she brought you back to me.” My mother looked at me. “You don’t remember?”

  I remembered hiding in a pile of blankets that stank of camel and falling asleep to the grind of cartwheels on sand.

  “All old women are the same to me,” I said, and my mother laughed.

  The sunlight deepened the lines around her eyes and sharpened the angles of her face. She would not pass for a mountain clanswoman now, nor a desert wanderer, nor an island adventuress. Should we cross the mountains again, my mother wearing that thin face and thos
e golden eyes, she would be a stranger everywhere. Children would dare each other to slip frosthand blossoms into her tea and hide behind tent flaps to watch her choke.

  “We still have a chance,” she said. My mother plucked a handful of grass from the ground near her feet, crushed the brittle blades in her palm. Blood rose in beads across her skin. The swarm flowed from her fingertips, ate through the grass and stitched the wounds closed. “If most of them are still hiding away in the ark, we still have a chance.”

  She stood and strode into the forest. I listened until her footsteps faded, then slid to the ground and closed my eyes. There was nothing to hunt and we had not eaten in days. I drifted into a restless slumber.

  When evening came and the heat released its chokehold on the day, I returned to the meadow of knife-sharp grass. The mountains still shone with light, but the river was in shadow. I found my mother kneeling in a fresh clearing. The swarm hummed around her in, cutting the grass blade by blade. It slowed when I approached, quivered uncertainly, sped along.

  There was a pile of dirt on the ground before her, oblong, the length of her forearm. She dribbled water from the skin and stirred it with her hands. Beside her lay the bundle she had carried from the nomad’s camp: clean white bones in a tattered shawl.

  My mother drew my knife from its sheath and drove it into the ground, jerked it free and stabbed again, and again, churning up dirt, grass, sand. She mixed in more water and worked it with both hands until it she had a sticky, gritty mud. She unwrapped the bundle, and one by one she picked the bones from the pile. The skull first, the knobs of the spine, the shoulders and ribs, arms and legs, the twin curves of the pelvis, the impossibly tiny fingers and toes. The swarm gathered to watch. The last daylight vanished from the highest peaks and the first stars emerged.

  With my knife, my mother opened a long cut down her forearm. She smeared blood onto every bone and scooped handfuls of mud to shape two legs, two stubby arms, a small head and a round body. She smoothed the shawl over the child-to-be.

  “You have more water in you than your sisters did,” my mother said. She was looking at the lump on the ground. The swarm spiraled and danced, twining through her fingers, and disappeared beneath the bloody cloth. “I used to think it was a mistake. They never tried join a caravan or sneak aboard a trading ship.”

  The shroud shifted as though caught in a breeze.

  My mother held up my knife. I stepped forward to claim it.

  “I won’t tell you what to do,” she said. “You can go back over the mountains if you want. You’ll have to decide. I’ll let you go now.”

  Something like a laugh teased the back of my throat, but the sound I made was closer to a sob. She wanted me to decide. She had woken me from a warm sleep in the nomads’ camp, led me through the ancient battlefield and the winter forest, spilled my blood into a wild river. She had brought me over the mountains to this dying land, and she wanted me to decide. Here, where the grass cut like knives and trees rattled in the wind and we hadn’t spotted a bird or a squirrel for days. Here, beside this lonely river that tasted of iron and fed into the heart of a grotesque city, and there was nothing to see out to every horizon but what would become of the forests and farms and cities and swamps, to the entire world, if the blight spread unchecked.

  Here, where she had made me from sand and bones and blood, she was letting me go.

  “Will you give her a name?” I asked.

  My mother tugged at a corner of the shawl, touched her hand to the round belly of mud. I turned away and pushed through the biting grass until I found the trail again.

  “Alis,” said my mother.

  I stopped, and my heart thudded with faint hope, but I did not turn.

  “I’ll choose a good name for her,” she said.

  Her voice was so low it breathed with the murmur of the river. When she fell silent the night swallowed her whole.

  I walked to the edge of the river. Perhaps it was the same beach where my sisters had once stood, trusting and docile, before my mother asked for their knives and led them into the water. The river ran swift and smooth. I unlaced my boots. I waded into the water and squeezed the shifting sand between my toes. Beneath the stars, the meadow and the forest might almost be mistaken for alive.

  I pressed my knife to the inside of my arm.

  There was a chance, my mother had said.

  The first drop fell. I ran with the current out of the foothills and onto the plain. The shifting riverbank beneath my feet, the water lapping my legs, the night air teasing the hair around my face, the burn of thirst and dull ache of hunger, the rattle of wind through dying grass, all of it slipped away, and there was nothing left but rust and silt and the cool dark river.

  Kali Wallace studied geology and geophysics before she realized she enjoyed inventing imaginary worlds more than she liked researching the real one. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Lightspeed, and Tor.com. Her first novel, a young adult horror story titled Shallow Graves, will be published by Katherine Tegen Books in 2016.

  Even though Giang worked in a shoe factory, she preferred to go barefoot as much as she could . . .

  Running Shoes

  Ken Liu

  “You’re under quota again!” Foreman Vuong shouted. “Why are you so slow?”

  Fourteen-year-old Giang’s face flushed with shame. She stared at the angry veins on the foreman’s sweaty neck, pulsing like fat slugs on a ripe tomato. She hated Vuong even more than she hated the shoe factory’s Taiwanese owners and managers. One expected the foreigners to treat the Vietnamese badly, but Vuong was from right here in Yên Châu District.

  “Sixteen hours is a long shift,” Giang mumbled. She lowered her eyes. “I get tired.”

  “You’re lazy!” Vuong went on to spew a stream of curses.

  Giang flinched, anticipating a flurry of strikes and blows. She tried desperately to look contrite.

  Vuong considered her, his lips curling up in a cruel smile. “I’ll have to make you stronger through punishment. Run five laps around the factory, right now, and you’ll stay as long as you have to tonight to make up your quota.”

  Giang was thankful. It was a hot and humid day, but running was a mild punishment compared to being beaten. Besides, it allowed her to stay out of the factory a bit longer, where the buffeting noise never ceased, and the big machines frightened her with their brutal and careless strength.

  The first lap around the compound was easy. Her bare feet pounded lightly, rhythmically against the packed dirt. Vuong shouted as she passed. “Faster!”

  Even though Giang worked in a shoe factory, she preferred to go barefoot as much as she could, like she used to when her family still lived in the countryside. Back then she had loved to run along the soft muddy trails next to the rice paddies, wiggling her toes in the earth, and looked forward to a sweet fried bánh rán sticky rice ball that her father might buy for her at the end of the month.

  But then her father had decided to move to the city, where he thought he could make more money as a laborer and give his family a better life. Here, the air was thick, the rooms were crowded, and the streets were full of broken glass and nails so that she had to wear cheap plastic sandals.

  Halfway through the second lap, she started to feel lightheaded. It was now like breathing under water. Her shirt stuck to her skin, and black spots danced before her eyes. Her calves and lungs burned.

  “Faster! Pick up your pace or you’ll have to do an extra lap.”

  Giang wished that she could run away from Vuong and the factory. She imagined herself wearing the shoes that she made: sneakers that felt as light as air but were as strong as steel boots. She often admired them, thought they would protect her feet against the roughest ground, but of course she couldn’t afford such shoes.

  Running in them probably feels like flying, she thought. Wouldn’t it be nice to run all the way into the sky and become friends with birds?


  But Vuong’s foul curses brought her back to earth, back to the present.

  It was getting harder and harder to lift her legs. Her feet hurt as they struck against the ground. She couldn’t catch her breath. The sun was so hot and bright.

  “If you don’t run faster, you can leave right now and never come back. And don’t ever expect to find any work in any other factory in this town either. I know all the foremen.”

  Giang was ready to give up. She wanted to stop and just walk away. She wanted to go home, where she would be able to cry in the warm embrace of her mother and fall asleep against her shoulders.

  But then she imagined the scene around the bedroom after she would have fallen asleep. There would be her father, confined to his bed after he lost the use of his legs because of that construction accident. He would stare hopelessly at the ceiling, biting his lips and trying not to moan from the pain. Next to him would be her mother, who would have to get up before the sun was out to walk to the shirt factory on the other side of the city. The money she earned there paid for her father’s medicine. It was Giang’s wages that paid for their food, and allowed her brother to continue in high school at the provincial capital. But now, with Giang fired, what would they do?

  Her mother would only hug her tighter, of course, but Giang remembered that she was no longer a little girl.

  She forced herself to run faster.

  A few girls looked up as an exhausted Giang stumbled back into the factory, but most ignored her because they were too busy. Vuong impressed the owners by running the machines so fast that the girls could barely keep up.

  The cavernous hall was filled with noise: the constant staccato dik-dik-dik from the stitching stations, the whoosh-slam of the stamping and die cutting machines, the hissing from the workbenches with the rubber molds and hot glue.

  Giang made her way back to the die cutter, and tried to keep up with the frantic routine of feeding sheets of plastic to the hungry blades of the machine. She was thirsty and hot. The dust and fumes—chemicals, glue, plastic—made her cough and gag. Tears blurred her eyes. She wiped them away roughly, angrily.