The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019

by John Joseph Adams

  At the end of the hall you find him. He sits slumped on a marble throne in a chamber with more dust than air. He is as old as any human being you have ever seen, even older than the damned woman upstairs; his skin is a thin veneer of nigh-transparent tissue barely covering his crackled and brittle bones. His eyes are filmy yellow globes, so dry from years of blindness that they don’t even glisten the way living eyes should. When he inhales, it’s with the resentful wheeze of lungs that have had more than their share of dust and ashes; when he exhales, his breath bears the stench of organs gone rotten inside. When you draw close, the withered cords of his neck draw that mummified face up to greet yours, and his parchment cheeks tighten, revealing a full set of teeth not white but black from rot. It’s a smile every bit as corrupt as yours, and now that you’re upon him you greet it with a skeletal grin of your very own. Were he able to see you, he would lose his mind. But he is blind, and when he speaks, his voice is not even a whisper. “You came. I defied you so long that you came. You ignored all the warnings and you came. You walked past all the warning signs, and you came. You ignored the temptations I offered, and you came. You are the Reaper and you are inevitable. So take me.”

  You oblige. You lay hands on his shoulders and you breathe in, swallowing the intangible vapors that separate dead meat from living tissue. It tastes horrible, like any meat gone bad: a lot like it always tastes when you should have come sooner, only worse, because your arrival has never been this much past due. Inhaling, you know at once how many years he’s been decrepit, how many years his withered pump has kept beating only because you were never there to stop it—how many years since he felt joy, or hope, or anything that would have given his stupid, finite existence a point. You know that only his bitterness and his hatred for you have sustained him, and that it has never been enough, that though historically few mortal lives have ever been worth living, his, in its single-minded wait for your arrival, has been even more empty than most. Considering how much inconvenience he’s caused you, you should feel a little satisfaction at that. But as you take the last of him and his empty shell sags, you feel only the ghost of a feeling that those who live and breathe would have no difficulty recognizing as unease. Because the one emotion that dominates the architect’s mind, in this the last moment of his life, is triumph. He thinks he’s won. But it isn’t until he slumps, revealing the object that sits on the table behind him, that you understand why.

  It’s a pitcher plant: a living lure of sweet and sickly smell designed to attract flies, which once inside cannot make their way back to the exit. You look inside and see a dozen separate flies trapped at the bottom. They’re all as ancient as the ancient man you just claimed, but they’re all alive, all damned, because until this moment you were never here to take them; and if you left at this moment, without doing what it has always been your duty to do, they would remain here, forever twitching as the years became centuries and the centuries became eons, withholding that one moment of merciful release that only you can provide. They are not capable of thought, and they cannot spend their eternal imprisonment remembering how easily they were baited. They can only buzz with impotent fury. You tap the plant with the edge of a fingertip, and all the days of its extended lifetime return in a rush: it curls at the edges, dries, turns black, crumbles to dust. The flies inside stop buzzing, stop moving, rot, fall apart, and disappear. In an instant there is no plant, no flies. There is just an empty tabletop, bearing nothing but the empty space where the plant had stood: an empty space that resonates with a message as clear to you as any words could ever be.

  The fear that engulfs you then is volcanic, all-encompassing: the kind of dread you have caused in so many. Your breath cannot catch in your throat, because you have no breath. Your heart cannot race in your chest, because you have no heart. Your spine cannot curdle with terror, because you have no spine. But you feel the fear anyway: the sudden realization that you have spent this day like any other dumb animal, lured by the illusion of prey into cramped and fatal places.

  You race back down the hall, in a single graceful swoop uncontaminated by any actual footsteps. You burst into the black room at the bottom of the shaft you descended not long ago. A dark place then, it’s already growing darker. The mechanisms that kept this house in motion, that rearranged walls and kept corridors and rooms illuminated when necessary, have begun to shut down, stopping every gear, closing every door, turning off every machine, extinguishing every light. It is already too dark for men to see, which inconveniences you not at all, as you are not a man. But barriers have slid into place, in the shaft above, blocking the path back to the rooms above. And though you have always been talented at slipping past solid walls, you already sense that if you started to climb this shaft and made your way past the first of the obstructions that stand between you and the outer world, then all you would have to expect from now on is a series of additional barriers and obstacles and tricks intent on no goal more noble than standing between you and everything that still lives. It’s enough to stagger even a presence who has never been lost, who has never needed instruction, who has always been able to find his way.

  You might very well figure out an escape route sometime before the world above recognizes the disaster of your absence, but you might never. You might spend forever staring up at the darkness, unable to fathom the way out. You might try and fail. And you might succumb to a despair greater than any ever felt by merely mortal prisoners: because even those have always known that escape, of a kind, was inevitable, and never beneath the stars has such a merciful end ever been planned for you.

  Seanan McGuire

  What Everyone Knows

  from Kaiju Rising 2: Reign of Monsters

  It came out of the sea; it destroyed a city; it died. That’s the story. That’s what everyone knows. It was tall and terrible and incomprehensible and biological and beautiful, and it breathed out gouts of acid like it was nothing, and it tore down our towers with its terrible claws, and its skin was armor against almost everything we had to throw—everything but small-scale nuclear weapons. It melted in the face of our atomic might; it burned and howled and screamed and fled and fell and rotted in the slag that had been the beach. Scientists in hazmat suits picked it apart, squirreling every precious scrap away in secret laboratories, coaxing its secrets from the melted marrow of its bones.

  That’s the story. That’s what everyone knows.

  I was a child when the creature stepped out of the sea, defying everything we thought we knew about our place in the world. I can remember the sight of it on the morning news, before my mother screamed and turned the monitor off, saying that it was nothing a child should be looking at. She hadn’t understood how ubiquitous it would become. No one had. There had never been anything like it before, tall as a skyscraper, ancient as the moon. It had remade our understanding of, well, everything, and it had done it as easily as it killed 2.5 million people, as easily as it left Seattle and the surrounding area in ruins.

  It came; it killed; it died, and we pulled it apart to see what we could see. That’s the other thing I remember about the arrival. Crying because there was this huge, beautiful, dead creature sprawled on the sand after three days of destruction—by that point my mother had stopped trying to cover my eyes, had somehow managed to grasp that everything was changing—and we weren’t going to bury it the way we’d buried my dog when he died. We were going to hurt it, and keep hurting it, until it wasn’t anymore. That was how we’d punish it for daring to hurt us. We’d hurt it so badly that it no longer existed.

  Biologists looked at the crenulations of its brain and the structure of its neurons and declared it nothing more than an oversized, biologically complex animal, no more complicit in its own actions than a rabid dog.

  Physicists and material engineers looked at the composition of its bones and the shape of its skeleton and declared it a miracle of form and function, something we could use to make our damaged towers taller and stronger, immune to future mon
sters.

  Everyone had something to say about the creature, which by that point was known around the world as The Beast. Parts of it went on display in natural history museums, once the radiation had died down. Cute plush toys were sold, considered tasteless until the manufacturer loudly announced that a portion of each sale was being donated to the trusts dedicated to helping the survivors of Seattle. Movies were made. Genres of science fiction were revitalized.

  Time passed.

  The nuclear weapons used to kill the creature had been selected because they wouldn’t leave the coastline uninhabitable forever. A decade, yes, and residents would need to filter their water and avoid growing vegetables for a decade after that, but those were things that could be worked around. Those were hurdles to be overcome. Seattle began to rebuild. The Beast loomed large in the public consciousness, but the creature, the real animal, was chipped away, worn into nothing one forgotten moment at a time.

  We were killing it all over again, feeding it into the great machine of human history, where we always had to be the victors, and anything that challenged the narrative of our own superiority had to be destroyed. We were hurting it.

  It came out of the sea; it destroyed a city; it died. That’s the story. That’s the narrative.

  This is the truth.

  Fifteen years is a long time. Long enough to clean the radiation from a ruined city; long enough to render an impossible creature into its component parts; long enough for a child too young to understand why everyone is crying to become a marine biologist and be loosed, in her own time, upon the world.

  Plane tickets were easy. Explaining why I wanted to go to Washington was hard. I wasn’t a resident of the state, had no relatives who had either died or relocated when the creature came, and the maps I had so carefully drawn, so carefully considered, weren’t the sort of things I wanted to share. But my thesis had been on the impact of radiation on tide-pool invertebrates, and my adviser wrote me a glowing letter of recommendation. After fifteen years of nightmares, I was finally on my way to where they’d started. Not with a wave of destruction that rose from the sea and slaughtered everything in front of it. With a creature that fell, never understanding what it had done wrong, and with the look it had cast down the coast as it died.

  The scientists had been so quick to say that the creature was only an animal, that it didn’t know, didn’t understand, couldn’t possibly have had any motivation beyond instinct. They had never paused to ask themselves whether it might have been intelligent in its own way, or whether that intelligence might have had a purpose when it came for Seattle. They had seen the same thing I had, the flail, the fall, the last, frantic look along the coast, and they had come to different conclusions.

  Fifteen years and six weeks after the creature came out of the sea, I parked my rental car on the overgrown slope of a road that hadn’t been maintained in far too long, shielding my eyes as I peered into the towering, mossy forest between me and the ocean. Even before the attack, Washington State had some of the most protected beaches in the country, barricaded by evergreen forests, hidden by the curvature of the coast. Now, after a decade and a half of neglect, those beaches might as well be on another planet. No human had set foot on them since the bombs fell.

  Everything happens in its own time. I checked my boots, ran a finger along the line of tape dividing them from my jeans—always tape where there might be ticks; it’s only common sense—and started into the trees.

  Mosquitoes buzzed among the branches, and deer and rabbits watched me with no sign of fear, so unaccustomed to the presence of humans that they no longer understood that I might be a threat. I wasn’t, not yet: it would be another decade, at least, before it was safe to hunt here. Another decade of lazy days and silent hunting seasons, of starvation when the herd wasn’t thinned before the end of the growing season. Everything has its dark side, even a cessation of gunfire.

  I pushed my way through the woods, fighting for every step against the tangled green that threatened to shove me back out to the road, where I belonged. When the tree line ended, it was abrupt and unexpected: I pushed through a veil of blackberry creepers and was suddenly standing at the top of a sloping hill leading down to a narrow, rocky strip of shore. It would widen as the tide went out, but not much, no, not nearly enough to make this place appealing to developers or vacation-goers or even local families. There had always been better beaches, more accessible beaches, places where they could spread out their towels and enjoy the faltering Pacific sun.

  The water here was deceptively deep, dropping from shallows into the abyss with surprising speed, and the undertow was correspondingly strong, sucking swimmers in, pulling them down. It was perfect. From a biological standpoint, it was perfect.

  I slid down the hillside on the sides of my shoes, banking against my own momentum, until I reached the bottom and the stones turned under my feet, making my footing uncertain. I windmilled my arms, getting my balance back, and stopped, listening.

  Nothing.

  No boats, no cars, no distant sound of voices; no seabirds calling or dogs barking. The world was silent, save for the sound of the sea. I nodded. This fit my assessment of the area, and more, the assumptions I’d made about the environment I was looking for. Someplace that was open and secluded at the same time. Someplace with certain unique geographic features. Unique enough to lure a creature as huge and inexplicable and important as the one the world had watched die fifteen years ago out of the depths and onto the land.

  The beach was long and empty, flanked by hills and rocky granite spikes that jutted like bones where the water had worn the earth away. I started walking.

  Fifteen years is a long time. Long enough to make a few hours’ walk seem like nothing in comparison, although my legs ached and knees burned by the time I rounded the curve of the cove and saw what I’d been looking for: a cave, not natural, although it could certainly pass for such to the untrained eye, hewn from the rock wall that encircled the small, isolated slice of the sea. Something had reached out with a terrible claw, perhaps coated with the kind of biological acid that developed for a reason, a reason bigger and better than destroying cities, and had sliced an opening out of the rock. Something that needed a safe, secure, isolated place.

  I pulled the flashlight from my bag and started inside, the pain in my legs forgotten in the face of the moment I’d been seeking for so impossibly, incredibly long, since I was a child who had somehow been able to recognize despair when she saw it in the eyes of a creature the size of a city.

  At the back of the cave I found them, rolled gently into their cradles of melted, stabilizing sand. There had been three once, each the size of a basketball—so small for what they would eventually become, but not unreasonably so, given what I knew about the life cycles of sea turtles and sharks.

  One of them was a deflated husk, its leathery skin cracked and pitted, its contents diffused into the sand around it.

  One of them had hardened, undergoing a strange, terrible alchemy that might be as common and necessary for this species as the hibernation of cicadas, the slow incubation of alligators. Maybe when there were multiple healthy eggs, one of them would always turn into a sphere of what looked like solid obsidian, preserving its contents for a time when it would be alone, free of competition, free to grow.

  The third . . .

  It was the pale, inviting green of a healthy eel’s skin, mottled with paler yellow and deeper olive, a biological tapestry of possibilities. It was slightly larger than either of its flawed siblings, pulsing with its own internal bioluminescence. I moved closer. There was a heavy shadow at the center of the egg, moving slightly, preparing to be born. I hadn’t missed it.

  “Hi,” I whispered, and my voice was a shout in the confines of the cave. “I, um. I knew your mother. I’ve come to take you someplace safe.”

  The egg didn’t respond. I lifted it from its cradle, and it was heavy and warm and soft in my hands. I nestled it in the bottom of my backpack, maki
ng sure it was secure, before picking up the second egg. It felt solid from side to side, and I hoped, however irrationally, that that would mean one day it could soften and swell and hatch. For now . . .

  For now, people were returning to the state, to the coast, and this cave would be found soon enough, by scientists who should have started looking years ago, who should have been asking themselves from the start why something so big, so powerful, so perfect, would come ashore at all. Maybe some of them had been. I liked the thought. I liked the idea that some people had looked at the arc of her steps, the way she went for the closest, most dangerous population center, and said to themselves, I’ll give them time, I won’t attract attention, I’ll wait. It would mean I wasn’t in this alone.

  My backpack felt heavier than the world as I made my way back up the coast to the slope where I’d made my descent. I squinted at it. The idea of climbing it made my thighs ache in anticipated weariness. The thought of spending the night on this rocky, exposed coast, with the Pacific winds doing their best to flay the skin from my body, was worse. With a sigh, I gripped the nearest exposed root and began pulling myself up.

  I had a long way to go before I—before we—would be safe.

  The house I’d rented was one of hundreds left empty and barely maintained in the wake of the Seattle disaster, the sole remaining asset of a family that might never choose to return to Washington. They had seen the world turn against them, and they were seeking level ground.

  The maintenance that had been performed had been handled by the state, squads of nervous, underpaid contractors visiting each municipality for one week a quarter, patching the obvious leaks and repairing the worst of the damage. Nothing they did could have prevented the slow decay of an unoccupied home, but they’d tried, right up until the moment when the region was declared fit for habitation and the responsibility was passed back to the homeowner. A lot of neighborhoods like the one that was temporarily mine had looting problems now, desperate residents pulling down fences and stealing shingles from the unoccupied homes. They tried to justify it to the media, claiming that they were reclaiming materials that would otherwise have been wasted, blaming the state for its lackadaisical standards and the climate for destroying their precious homes, but most people regarded them as dangerous thieves, and it had slowed down the rate of residents returning to Washington. Empty neighborhoods were still more common than the state liked.