The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror Read online

  “I met a scientist once,” the sergeant said. “He had some guy’s guts stuck to his face, and he was down on his knees in a lab chewing on a dead janitor’s leg. I put a bullet in his head.”

  Laughter went around the circle. I took one last drink and passed the bottle along with it.

  “But, you know what?” the private said. “Who gives a shit, anyway? I mean, really?”

  “Well,” another kid said. “Some people say you can’t fight something you can’t understand. And maybe it’s that way with these things. I mean, we don’t know where they came from. Not really. We don’t even know what they are.”

  “Shit, Mendez. Whatever they are, I’ve cleaned their guts off my boots. That’s all I need to know.”

  “That works today, Q, but I’m talking long term. As in: What about tomorrow, when we go nose-to-nose with their daddy?”

  None of the soldiers said anything for a minute. They were too busy trading uncertain glances.

  Then the sergeant smiled and shook his head. “You want to be a philosopher, Private Mendez, you can take the point. You’ll have lots of time to figure out the answers to any questions you might have while you’re up there, and you can share them with the rest of the class if you don’t get eaten before nightfall.”

  The men laughed, rummaging in their gear for MREs. The private handed over my shotgun, then shook my hand. “Jamal Quinlan,” he said. “I’m from Detroit.”

  “John Dalton. I’m the sheriff around here.”

  It was the first time I’d said my own name in five months.

  It gave me a funny feeling. I wasn’t sure what it felt like.

  Maybe it felt like turning a page.

  The sergeant and his men did some mop-up. Mendez took pictures of the lodge, and the bloody words pasted to the living room wall, and that dead thing on the floor. Another private set up some communication equipment and they bounced everything off a satellite so some lieutenant in DC could look at it. I slipped on a headset and talked to him. He wanted to know if I remembered any strangers coming through town back in May, or anything out of the ordinary they might have had with them. Saying yes would mean more questions, so I said, “No, sir. I don’t.”

  The soldiers moved north that afternoon. When they were gone, I boxed up food from the pantry and some medical supplies. Then I got a gas can out of the boathouse and dumped it in the living room. I sparked a road flare and tossed it through the doorway on my way out.

  The place went up quicker than my house in town. It was older. I carried the box over to the truck, then grabbed that bottle the soldiers had passed around. There were a few swallows left. I carried it down to the dock and looked back just in time to see those birds dart from their nest in the chimney, but I didn’t pay them any mind.

  I took the boat out on the lake, and I finished the whiskey, and after a while I came back.

  Things are getting better now. It’s quieter than ever around here since the soldiers came through, and I’ve got some time to myself. Sometimes I sit and think about the things that might have happened instead of the things that did. Like that very first day, when I spotted that monster in the Chrysler’s trunk out on County Road 14 and blasted it with the shotgun—the gas tank might have exploded and splattered me all over the road. Or that day down in the dark under the high school football stadium—those rat-spiders could have trapped me in their web and spent a couple months sucking me dry. Or with Roy Barnes—if he’d never seen those books in the backseat of that old sedan, and if he’d never read a word about lesser demons, where would he be right now?

  But there’s no sense wondering about things like that, any more than looking for explanations about what happened to Barnes, or me, or anyone else. I might as well ask myself why the thing that crawled out of Barnes looked the way it did or knew what it knew. I could do that and drive myself crazy chasing my own tail, the same way Barnes did with all those maybe’s and what if ’s.

  So I try to look forward. The rules are changing. Soon they’ll be back to the way they used to be. Take that soldier. Private Quinlan. A year from now he’ll be somewhere else, in a place where he won’t do the things he’s doing now. He might even have a hard time believing he ever did them. It won’t be much different with me.

  Maybe I’ll have a new house by then. Maybe I’ll take off work early on Friday and push around a shopping cart, toss steaks and a couple of six packs into it. Maybe I’ll even do the things I used to do. Wear a badge. Find a new deputy. Sort things out and take care of trouble. People always need someone who can do that.

  To tell the truth, that would be okay with me.

  That would be just fine.

  Countless people with no chance, no future; everyone failing at everything. Mass despair. “Collective emotional downwaves” is the latest psychology buzz; sociobiological impulses to self-destruction in an overpopulated world. And then Whim feels that bad beat coming in the numbers . . .

  RAISE YOUR HAND IF YOU’RE DEAD

  JOHN SHIRLEY

  Sometimes I think I’m dead. Sometimes I think I’m not dead. So far, I can’t figure it out, not definitely.

  I should tell you who’s sending this message to you. It’s me, Mercedes’ older brother, Whim. At least I think it’s me. And I’m sending this to you, Syke, so maybe you can figure out if I’m dead, and you can do something about it. If you can fix that—you’re my hodey. If you can’t, you can’t, and you’re still my hodey.

  Maybe I can figure it all out. This message, if that’s what it is, will take a while to get to you, if it gets to you at all. I’m still working out what the rules are in here. If I think it all through, maybe I’ll work out if I’m dead or not.

  Mercedes was the one I was with you know, harvesting suicides, the night we looked the Empties in the eyes . . .

  I was nervous, on my knees in the padded prow of the twelve-foot aluminum boat, as Mercedes piloted us up under the big supports for the Golden Gate Bridge. Dangerous out there anytime, sure, even when the seas aren’t running rough, because you can get a black wind, that toxin laden fog, just sweeps down on you quick, no time to get to shore—or you can ship too much water and you might dump over, find yourself thrashing in that cold, dirty water, with the bay leeches fastening on your ankles and the waves smacking you on jagged rocks around the support towers.

  But it was sheer superstition, really, making me nervous. I get superstitious about numbers. It has to do with my dad having been a gambler, between his subbing gigs; Dad rattling on about odds and numbers and how number patterns crop up in the cards. “You can feel that bad beat coming in the numbers,” he’d say. “If you pay attention. If you don’t feel the odds, the beat’ll smack you upside the head.”

  He was an old school guy, born in Atlanta in 1970; he said things like “smack you upside the head.” And “old school.”

  The thing is, Syke, as we ran the boat out there, the engine chugging in the moonlight, it just hit me that today was 3-5-35. March fifth, 2035. Now, three and five is eight plus three is eleven, plus five is sixteen. You write sixteen, 1 and 6; add them, it makes seven. My unlucky number. Nine’s my lucky number, seven’s unlucky. Maybe because my old man died when I was fourteen, twice seven, on the fourteenth of June.

  On the night of 3-5-35 I looked up at the bridge, and thought: Each cable is made of 27,572 strands of wire. 80,000 miles of wire in the main cables. The bridge has more than 1,200,000 rivets . . . Now if you add two and seven to five and seven and two . . .

  “We shouldn’t be out here,” I said to Mercedes. My sis was back by the little engine, working the tiller. I was out front with the grabbers and the sniffer. She wore her long brown leather jacket, gloves, boots; I had my oversized army jacket, without the insignia, army boots, waterproof pants. You’ve never seen me in physical person, Syke. In the social space I wear some nicer shit—seeing as how CG clothing is gratis with the access fee. I muttered once more, “Really shouldn’t be out here.”

  “Wha
t?” she called. “Why? You cold? Told you to put on a slicker.”

  “It’s not that,” I said, though I was shivering, scanning the gray water with the sniffer. “It’s the numbers . . . ” I had the sniffer—that’s for picking up human DNA fragments in the air—in my left hand. The mechanical grabber in my right.

  I figure I gotta explain this stuff to you, Syke, since it’s way, way far from your thing. You were always so indoors—you were the indoors of the indoors. Wandering around like an out of body experience in the social space and the subworlds with the likes of Pizzly and creeps like Mr. Dead Eyes hounding about in the background. Remember Mr. Dead Eyes, hodey, he’ll come up again. You recall that perv, Mr. DE, dogging Mercedes in the subworlds?

  There’s my future girl, he’d say to my sister. All good things come to them who wait.

  That night under the bridge I was thinking about Mr. Dead Eyes, and not knowing why and that spooked me too. I was just about to explain to little sis about the numbers, the date, and how we should go back, but then the sniffer tripped and I saw the first floater. He was floating face up in a patch of light from the lamp on the bridge support. His eyes were colorless—looked just like cocktail onions. So that told me he’d been dead a while, but not long as all that. Longer, and the gulls, or some adventurous crab would have gotten his eyes out.

  He wasn’t very waterlogged or bloated either. Which was good. It sucks when you got to handle them, even with a grabber and rubber gloves, when they’re, you know, coming apart from being out there awhile.

  “Got one,” I called out to her. “At two o’clock. Not too soggy. But come up slow . . . ”

  She cut the engine and we coasted toward the floater. He might’ve been about fifty when he took the plunge, with long brown hair like seaweed washing around his pudgy, onion-eyed face. We hadn’t found him soon enough to harvest his organs. A messy, nauseating job, anyhow, harvesting organs. I was always sort of relieved when I knew I wouldn’t have to do it.

  The guy in the suit might have some good pocket fruit. He had a decent suit on, and the one remaining shoe was pretty good quality leather. So maybe he had money, jewelry, stuff like that. The uneven light picked out a gold glint from a wristwatch; I hoped it was waterproof. (I remember when we found an elderly black guy one time had one of those old fashioned grills on his teeth, installed in the first decade of the century—diamonds and gold all over it. Nasty, prying that grill off him. Paid good though.)

  I used the grabber on onion-eyes, then got the watch off with a quick movement of my rubber-gloved hand. Always afraid the body’s going to grab my wrist as I do it. I saw too many zombie movies as a kid. But they never do move. It’s almost disappointing.

  I tucked the gold watch in the scavenge duffel, then grabbed his tie and pulled his body up against the boat. He had a nice oxblood tie, seemed like silk.

  I’m always really careful when I pull the bodies close to the boat. It sucks ugly to fall in with them, hodey. You tend to grab the body to keep from sinking. They can fall apart when you grab them. It’s better not to fall in.

  I glanced back at Mercedes. Her curly black hair seemed like it was shining with an orange halo, in the light from the tower support behind her. Her big black eyes, her pale skin, her round face, those sound-wave face tattoos on her cheeks—you know how her face can come together and she seems so iconic. You’d know that better than anyone, Syke. She came to your little world in her real semblance. At twenty-one she’s a year younger, but she seems like she’s from a whole different race than me, not just a different family. Me being so dark-skinned and lean.

  “You want to take him to shore?” I asked. “Looks too spongy for organ harvesting.”

  “Then just do the pockets, Whim,” she said, like, It’s so obvious.

  I went through his pockets, came up with a wild-dog wallet which turned out to have a usable unicredit tab in it—and his ID, which we pitched, not being into identity theft.

  I checked this floater for a gold necklace; nope, so I clipped off his wedding ring finger. He was too sponged up to just pull the ring off. Had to use the clipper to cut right through his finger. Just a crunch, a little ooze of blackened blood, releasing the rankness of dead man. He was good and cold.

  He had a suicide note in a plastic sack in his pocket, as they often do. I took that too, in case it gave out any information I could sell to the family.

  I glanced at it in with my pen light. Didn’t see anything useful. Looked like the usual maudlin stuff. I caught the lines, My wife got the treatment, now it’s like she’s dead to me, she’s all empty, and I went to see my dad, he was empty too, and they’re going to do it to me.

  I gave up on all this ranting and tossed the note away. Guy’d been losing his mind at the end, I figured.

  I let him slide back into the water, and we went on toward the Marin side of the bridge, in case there was another floater. You might be surprised to hear we’ve found as many as four in one night, Syke. But now that the suicide nets are down again—and no, I wasn’t the one who vandalized them this time, or any of the other times—we get three or four jumpers a week, sometimes several a day. It’s been good and steady like that, since the Desperation came into its own. The climate change thing peaking, all that shoreland sucked up, all those people misplaced, all that desertification, tropical pests and diseases swarming north, crops either drowned or charred or eaten away. Population of the world doubling. More and more jobs outsourced, automated. Two hundred million people who used to have food in North America, used to just assume food would be there—barely eating now, many of them starving. Countless people with no chance, no future; everyone failing at everything. Mass despair. “Collective emotional downwaves” is the latest psychology buzz; sociobiological impulses to self-destruction in an overpopulated world. The Desperation . . .

  You’re so insular, in your little world, Syke. You never talked about this stuff. Maybe you took it for granted. Or maybe you were hardly aware of it—hell you were ten years living mostly in the virtual model, tripping your mind to the subworlds, sending your body on remote to exercise, all that stuff. The curse of being born with all those silver spoon annuities. And a touch of agoraphobia, I’d guess.

  So, after harvesting onion-eyes, me and Mercedes weren’t surprised to see another body come flying down off the bridge, within minutes. People travel from around the country, around the world to jump off the Big Orange Arc now, and the bridge crew makes a lot of extra money taking bribes from suicide jumpers. Truth is, though, about a fourth of the “suicides” are murders. That’s what I hear. Lot of women from the sex slave brothels get pitched off for trying to escape. A lesson to the others.

  It was Mercedes who first spotted the woman coming down. We both heard the yell, getting higher pitched as the woman came down turning end over end, close to the northern tower.

  I thought I caught of a flash of diamonds and I thought, That’s a good harvest, right there.

  And then she hit the water. Whack. We waited for her dead body to bob up, Mercedes piloting the boat a bit closer to the impact point, shipping some water in the rising waves from a barge passing five hundred yards away.

  I shivered with the cold as we waited. Daydreamed about hot toddies in front of the holo, in a snug corner of Siggy’s Allnighter.

  Then the woman came thrashing up and I heard Mercedes cussing. I was only thinking it: Shit—she’s alive.

  Now and then it happens. Sure it’s a long ways down from the deck of the Golden Gate Bridge, and people almost invariably die right off, because when they hit that water at that speed, with that much momentum, it’s almost like hitting solid ground.

  But a few live. They’re always busted up; most tend to die in a few minutes. Once in a while a jumper gets pulled out of the water alive, tells his weepy story about how he knew he wanted to live the moment he let go, and how people should hang in there—though of course, with the Coast Guard no longer doing rescue, anywhere, survivors don’t get
pulled out much.

  I remember the only other survivor we found. That guy, he was a short chunky Asian guy—maybe his fat saved him from being busted up too much. He begged us to help him. But he had a lot of jewelry on him and I could tell he wasn’t going to make it to the shore alive no matter what we did. Mercedes said, “You want to help him on his way, or me?” I didn’t want her to have to do it. I held his head under the water for awhile—he hardly thrashed at all.

  I imagine you being all judgmental about that, Syke. Easy for you to raise your eyebrows. You inherited your mom’s software income, never had to live off the streets. Anyway, I’d have pulled him out if I thought he’d live. I guess.

  This woman, now, bobbing up, all sputtering, she was muscular, wearing some kind of tights. I could see she had a broken right arm, blood bubbling from her mouth. But something about her—maybe those high cheekbones, those cutting blue eyes, the really short-cut brown hair—made me think she was tough. She just might live.

  I couldn’t bring myself to drown her. I thought we ought to shove on out of there and let the broken woman do her dying, and then come back for the harvest. Just leave before she started asking for help.

  She didn’t ask for help, though—she ordered some up. She had us sized up pretty good.

  “I’ll pay you,” she rasped. “You get me to shore.”

  I was figuring she was maybe not a suicide. Didn’t seem the type. More likely someone thought they’d done her in.

  “How much?” Mercedes asked her. “And how do we get it?”

  “Ten thousand WD,” the woman said, sputtering. “Transfer soon as we get to a hospital.” She coughed up more blood, paddling a little with her good arm. “But you better hurry . . . ”

  Mercedes was against it. “We don’t have any way to make her pay, Whim, once we get her there.”

  But I was kind of fascinated by this woman. And maybe drowning that fat Asian guy bothered me more than I like to admit.