The Best Horror of the Year Volume Eleven

by Ellen Datlow

  “I don’t know why I’m crying. I haven’t been there in ten years. It’s not like I have any friends there.”

  Waters considers several possible reassuring statements, and discards each in turn. There is no kindness in telling her it might not be as bad as she thinks, when, in fact, it is likely to be far worse.

  There’s a rap at the door. Bronson hops up, wipes her cheeks with the back of her hand, glances through the peephole, turns the bolts.

  It’s Vorstenbosch, the senior flight attendant, a plump, effete man with wavy blond hair, a fussy manner, and small eyes behind his thick gold-framed glasses. He’s calm, professional, and pedantic when sober, and a potty-mouthed swishy delight when drunk.

  “Did someone nuke Guam?” he asks, without preamble.

  “I don’t have anything from the ground except we’ve lost contact,” Waters says.

  “What’s that mean, specifically?” Vorstenbosch asks. “I’ve got a planeload of very frightened people and nothing to tell them.”

  Bronson thumps her head, ducking behind the controls to sit back down. Waters pretends not to see. He pretends not to notice her hands are shaking.

  “It means—” Waters begins, but there’s an alert tone, and then the controller is on with a message for everyone in ZMP airspace. The voice from Minnesota is sandy, smooth, untroubled. He might be talking about nothing more important than a region of high pressure. They’re taught to sound that way.

  “This is Minneapolis Center with high priority instructions for all aircraft on this frequency, be advised we have received instructions from U.S. Strategic Command to clear this airspace for operations from Ellsworth. We will begin directing all flights to the closest appropriate airport. Repeat, we are grounding all commercial and recreational aircraft in the ZMP. Please remain alert and ready to respond promptly to our instructions.” There is a momentary hiss and then, with what sounds like real regret, Minneapolis adds, “Sorry about this, ladies and gents. Uncle Sam needs the sky this afternoon for an unscheduled world war.”

  “Ellsworth Airport?” Vorstenbosch says. “What do they have at Ellsworth Airport?”

  “The 28th Bomb Wing,” Bronson says, rubbing her head.

  VERONICA D’ARCY IN BUSINESS

  The plane banks steeply and Veronica D’Arcy looks straight down at the rumpled duvet of cloud beneath. Shafts of blinding sunshine stab through the windows on the other side of the cabin. The good-looking drunk beside her—he has a loose lock of dark hair on his brow that makes her think of Cary Grant, of Clark Kent—unconsciously squeezes his armrests. She wonders if he’s a white-knuckle flier, or just a boozer. He had his first Scotch as soon as they reached cruising altitude, three hours ago, just after 10 a.m.

  The screens go black and another Veronica shuts her eyes to listen, focusing the way she might at a table read as another actor reads lines for the first time.

  CAPTAIN WATERS (V.O.)

  Hello, passengers, Captain Waters again. I’m afraid we’ve had an unexpected request from air traffic control to reroute to Fargo and put down at Hector International Airport. We’ve been asked to clear this airspace, effective immediately—

  (uneasy beat)

  —for military maneuvers. Obviously the situation in Guam has created, um, complications for everyone in the sky today. There’s no reason for alarm, but we are going to have to put down. We expect to be on the ground in Fargo in forty minutes. I’ll have more information for you as it comes in.

  (beat)

  My apologies, folks. This isn’t the afternoon any of us was hoping for.

  If it were a movie, the captain wouldn’t sound like a teenage boy going through the worst of adolescence. They would’ve cast someone gruff and authoritative. Hugh Jackman maybe. Or a Brit, if they wanted to suggest erudition, a hint of Oxford-acquired wisdom. Derek Jacobi perhaps.

  Veronica has acted alongside Derek off and on for almost thirty years. He held her backstage the night her mother died and talked her through it in a gentle, reassuring murmur. An hour later they were both dressed as Romans in front of four hundred and eighty people and God he was good that night, and she was good too, and that was the evening she learned she could act her way through anything, and she can act her way through this, too. Inside, she is already growing calmer, letting go of all cares, all concern. It has been years since she felt anything she didn’t decide to feel first.

  “I thought you were drinking too early,” she says to the man beside her. “It turns out I started drinking too late.” She lifts the little plastic cup of wine she was served with her lunch, and says “chin-chin” before draining it.

  He turns a lovely, easy smile upon her. “I’ve never been to Fargo although I did watch the TV show.” He narrows his eyes. “Were you in Fargo? I feel like you were. You did something with forensics and then Ewan McGregor strangled you to death.”

  “No, darling. You’re thinking of Contract: Murder, and it was James McAvoy with a garrote.”

  “So it was. I knew I saw you die once. Do you die a lot?”

  “Oh, all the time. I did a picture with Richard Harris, it took him all day to bludgeon me to death with a candlestick. Five set-ups, forty takes. Poor man was exhausted by the end of it.”

  Her seatmate’s eyes bulge and she knows he’s seen the picture and remembers her role. She was twenty-two at the time and naked in every scene, no exaggeration. Veronica’s daughter once asked, “Mom, when exactly did you discover clothing?” Veronica had replied, “Right after you were born, darling.”

  Veronica’s daughter is beautiful enough to be in movies herself but she makes hats instead. When Veronica thinks of her, her chest aches with pleasure. She never deserved to have such a sane, happy, grounded daughter. When Veronica considers herself—when she reckons with her own selfishness and narcissism, her indifference to mothering, her preoccupation with her career—it seems impossible that she should have such a good person in her life.

  “I’m Gregg,” says her neighbor. “Gregg Holder.”

  “Veronica D’Arcy.”

  “What brought you to L.A.? A part? Or do you live there?”

  “I had to be there for the apocalypse. I play a wise old woman of the wasteland. I assume it will be a wasteland. All I saw was a green screen. I hope the real apocalypse will hold off long enough for the film to come out. Do you think it will?”

  Gregg looks out at the landscape of cloud. “Sure. It’s North Korea, not China. What can they hit us with? No apocalypse for us. For them maybe.”

  “How many people live in North Korea?” This from the girl on the other side of the aisle, the one with the comically huge glasses. She has been listening to them intently and is leaning toward them now in a very adult way.

  Her mother gives Gregg and Veronica a tight smile, and pats her daughter’s arm. “Don’t disturb the other passengers, dear.”

  “She’s not disturbing me,” Gregg says. “I don’t know, kid. But a lot of them live on farms, scattered across the countryside. There’s only the one big city I think. Whatever happens, I’m sure most of them will be okay.”

  The girl sits back and considers this, then twists in her seat to whisper to her mother. Her mother squeezes her eyes shut and shakes her head. Veronica wonders if she even knows she is still patting her daughter’s arm.

  “I have a girl about her age,” Gregg says.

  “I have a girl about your age,” Veronica tells him. “She’s my favorite thing in the world.”

  “Yep. Me too. My daughter, I mean, not yours. I’m sure yours is great as well.”

  “Are you headed home to her?”

  “Yes. My wife called to ask if I would cut a business trip short. My wife is in love with a man she met on Facebook and she wants me to come take care of the kid so she can drive up to Toronto to meet him.”

  “Oh my God. You’re not serious. Did you have any warning?”

  “I thought she was spending too much time online, but to be fair, she thought I was spe
nding too much time being drunk. I guess I’m an alcoholic. I guess I might have to do something about that now. I think I’ll start by finishing this.” And he swallows the last of his Scotch.

  Veronica has been divorced—twice—and has always been keenly aware that she herself was the primary agent of domestic ruin. When she thinks about how badly she behaved, how badly she used Robert and François, she feels ashamed and angry at herself, and so she is naturally glad to offer sympathy and solidarity to the wronged man beside her. Any opportunity to atone, no matter how small.

  “I’m so sorry. What a terrible bomb to have dropped on you.”

  “What did you say?” asks the girl across the aisle, leaning toward them again. The deep brown eyes behind those glasses never seem to blink. “Are we going to drop a nuclear bomb on them?”

  She sounds more curious than afraid, but at this, her mother exhales a sharp, panicked breath.

  Gregg leans toward the child again, smiling in a way that is both kindly and wry, and Veronica suddenly wishes she were twenty years younger. She might’ve been good for a fellow like him. “I don’t know what the military options are, so I couldn’t say for sure. But—”

  Before he can finish the cabin fills with a nerve-shredding sonic howl.

  An airplane slashes past, then two more flying in tandem. One is so near off the port wing that Veronica catches a glimpse of the man in the cockpit, helmeted, face cupped in some kind of breathing apparatus. These aircraft bear scant resemblance to the 777 carrying them east . . . these are immense iron falcons, the gray hue of bullet-tips, of lead. The force of their passing causes the whole airliner to shudder. Passengers scream, grab each other. The punishing sound of the bombers crossing their path can be felt intestinally, in the bowels. Then they’re gone, having raked long contrails across the bright blue.

  A shocked, shaken silence follows.

  Veronica D’Arcy looks at Gregg Holder and sees he has smashed his plastic cup, made a fist and broken it into flinders. He notices what he’s done at the same time and laughs and puts the wreckage on the armrest.

  Then he turns back to the little girl and finishes his sentence as if there had been no interruption. “But I’d say all signs point to ‘yes.’”

  JENNY SLATE IN COACH

  “B-1s,” her love says to her, in a relaxed, almost pleased tone of voice. “Lancers. They used to carry a fully nuclear payload, but black Jesus did away with them. There’s still enough firepower onboard to cook every dog in Pyongyang. Which is funny, because usually if you want cooked dog in North Korea, you have to make reservations.”

  “They should’ve risen up,” Jenny says. “Why didn’t they rise up when they had a chance? Did they want work camps? Did they want to starve?”

  “That’s the difference between the Western mindset and the Oriental world view,” Bobby says. “There, individualism is viewed as aberrant.” In a murmur, he adds, “There’s a certain ant-colony quality to their thinking.”

  “Excuse me,” says the Jew in the middle aisle, sitting next to the Oriental girl. He couldn’t be any more Jewish if he had the beard and his hair in ringlets and the prayer shawl over his shoulders. “Could you lower your voice, please? My seatmate is upset.”

  Bobby had lowered his voice, but even when he’s trying to be quiet, he has a tendency to boom. This wouldn’t be the first time it’s got them in trouble.

  Bobby says, “She shouldn’t be. Come tomorrow morning, South Korea will finally be able to stop worrying about the psychopaths on the other side of the DMZ. Families will be reunited. Well. Some families. Cookie Cutter bombs don’t discriminate between military and civilian populations.”

  Bobby speaks with the casual certainty of a man who has spent twenty years producing news segments for a broadcasting company that owns something like seventy local TV stations and specializes in distributing content free of mainstream media bias. He’s been to Iraq, to Afghanistan. He went to Liberia during the Ebola outbreak to do a piece investigating an ISIS plot to weaponize the virus. Nothing scares Bobby. Nothing rattles him.

  Jenny was an unwed pregnant mother who had been cast out by her parents, and sleeping in the supply room of a gas station between shifts, on the day Bobby bought her an Extra Value Meal and told her he didn’t care who the father was. He said he would love the baby as much as if it were his own. Jenny had already scheduled the abortion. Bobby told her, calmly, quietly, that if she came with him, he would give her and the child a good, happy life, but if she drove to the clinic, she would murder a child, and lose her own soul. She had gone with him and it had been just as he said, all of it. He had loved her well, had adored her from the first; he was her miracle. She did not need the loaves and fishes to believe. Bobby was enough. Jenny fantasized, sometimes, that a liberal—a Code Pinker, maybe, or one of the Bernie people—would try to assassinate him, and she would manage to step between Bobby and the gun to take the bullet herself. She had always wanted to die for him. To kiss him with the taste of her own blood in her mouth.

  “I wish we had phones,” the pretty Oriental girl says suddenly. “Some of these planes have phones. I wish there was a way to call—someone. How long before the bombers get there?”

  “Even if we could make calls from this aircraft,” Bobby says, “it would be hard to get a call through. One of the first things the U.S. will do is wipe out communications in the region, and they might not limit themselves to just the DPRK. They won’t want to risk agents in the South—a sleeper government—coordinating a counterstrike. Plus, everyone with family in the Korean peninsula will be calling right now. It would be like trying to call Manhattan on 9/11, only this time it’s their turn.”

  “Their turn?” says the Jew. “Their turn? I must’ve missed the report that said North Korea was responsible for bringing down the World Trade Towers. I thought that was al-Qaeda.”

  “North Korea sold them weapons and intel for years,” Bobby lets him know. “It’s all connected. North Korea has been the number one exporter of Destroy America Fever for decades.”

  Jenny butts her shoulder against Bobby and says, “Or they used to be. I think they’ve been replaced by the Black Lives Matter people.” She is actually repeating something Bobby said to friends only a few nights before. She thought it was a witty line and she knows he likes hearing his own best material repeated back to him.

  “Wow. Wow!” says the Jew. “That’s the most racist thing I’ve ever heard in real life. If millions of people are about to die, it’s because millions of people like you put unqualified, hate-filled morons in charge of our government.”

  The girl closes her eyes and sits back in her chair.

  “My wife is what kind of people?” Bobby asks, lifting one eyebrow.

  “Bobby,” Jenny cautions him. “I’m fine. I’m not bothered.”

  “I didn’t ask if you were bothered. I asked this gentleman what kind of people he thinks he’s talking about.”

  The Jew has hectic red blotches in his cheek. “People who are cruel, smug—and ignorant.”

  He turns away, trembling.

  Bobby kisses his wife’s temple and then unbuckles his seatbelt.

  MARK VORSTENBOSCH IN THE COCKPIT

  Vorstenbosch is ten minutes calming people down in coach and another five wiping beer off Arnold Fidelman’s head and helping him change his sweater. He tells Fidelman and Robert Slate that if he sees either of them out of their seats again before they land, they will both be arrested in the airport. The man Slate accepts this placidly, tightening his seat belt and placing his hands in his lap, staring serenely forward. Fidelman looks like he wants to protest. Fidelman is shaking helplessly and his color is bad and he calms down only when Vorstenbosch tucks a blanket in around his legs. As he’s leaning toward Fidelman’s seat, Vorstenbosch whispers that when the plane lands, they’ll make a report together, and that Slate will be written up for verbal and physical assault. Fidelman gives him a glance of surprise and appreciation, one gay to another, look
ing out for each other in a world full of Robert Slates.

  The senior flight attendant himself feels nauseated and steps into the head long enough to steady himself. The cabin smells of vomit and fear, fore and aft. Children weep inconsolably. Vorstenbosch has seen two women praying.

  He touches his hair, washes his hands, draws one deep breath after another. Vorstenbosch’s role model has always been the Anthony Hopkins character from The Remains of the Day, a film he has never seen as a tragedy, but rather as an encomium to a life of disciplined service. Vorstenbosch sometimes wishes he was British. He recognized Veronica D’Arcy in business right away, but his professionalism requires him to resist acknowledging her celebrity in any overt way.

  When he has composed himself, he exits the head, and begins making his way to the cockpit to tell Captain Waters they will require airport security upon landing. He pauses in business to tend to a woman who is hyperventilating. When Vorstenbosch takes her hand, he is reminded of the last time he held his grandmother’s hand; at the time she was in her coffin, and her fingers were just as cold and lifeless. Vorstenbosch feels a quavering indignation when he thinks about the bombers—those idiotic hot dogs—blasting by so close to the plane. The lack of simple human consideration sickens him. He practices deep breathing with the woman, assures her they’ll be on the ground soon.

  The cockpit is filled with sunshine and calm. He isn’t surprised. Everything about the work is designed to make even a crisis—and this is a crisis, albeit one they never practiced in the flight simulators—a matter of routine, of checklists and proper procedure.

  The first officer is a scamp of a girl who brought a brown-bag lunch onto the plane with her. When her left sleeve was hiked up, Vorstenbosch glimpsed part of a tattoo, a white lion, just above the wrist. He looks at her and sees in her past a trailer park, a brother hooked on opioids, divorced parents, a first job in Walmart, a desperate escape to the military. He likes her immensely—how can he not? His own childhood was much the same, only instead of escaping to the army, he went to New York to be queer. When she let him into the cockpit last time she was trying to hide tears, a fact that twists Vorstenbosch’s heart. Nothing distresses him quite like the distress of others.