The Apex Book of World SF

by Mahvesh Murad

  “N-no, but…”

  “I’m all right,” Silver said. “She looks much more interested in being hurt, rather than hurting people, anyway.”

  Hase nodded eagerly.

  Silver said, “All the beautiful things sent from her are mine, then.”

  Hase slowly lifted the helmet, the mirror in front of her eyes.

  Gold couldn’t see what her sister-in-law saw, but she saw Silver’s incomprehension as she took in whatever lay beyond the girl’s helmet, and began to scream. Silver screamed on, and on, until she lost all her breath, until her throat started to bleed.

  Until her sanity was lost.

  Apathy seized Sai after Pot Head disappeared, people concluded. As for the two young wives, no one could determine what caused their sad turn of situation. The older one kept her eyes open unseeing, her lips slightly parted but always unspeaking—and when she saw something beautiful, anything remotely beautiful, she’d start to scream anew. The family decided to keep her in a white-walled room with plain white doors, where she was always dressed in coarse linen robes without design, color, or pattern. The younger wife fared a little better than her sister-in-law, but not by much. She wouldn’t leave Silver’s side, sometimes crying loudly like a small girl, sometimes giggling hysterically, especially when anyone ever tried to detach her from her sister. But she took care of Silver and of herself without problem, so people decided to keep her in the white room, too.

  People laughed at Sai and despised him for his laziness. They treated the women as if they didn’t exist, and the first and the second brothers of the house remarried. The white room became a small fish bone stuck in the household’s throat; it hurts and you want to get rid of it, but it might hurt even worse if you try to force it out.

  There are things people don’t forget. Things like the way the people of the house mistreated the strange woman from the Island with her heavy, potted head. Things like how, eventually, the hired woman disappeared, and all those close to her were driven to madness. No one wanted to go near the family after that.

  Slowly, the once prosperous house decayed.

  It happened on a crisp autumn day, the clouds high, the air thin, the cold enfolding the quiet, decaying house. It arrived, alone, bearing nothing. It walked through the people who gazed, who gaped. Without searching or asking or even hesitating, it walked into the house, toward the white room. And it opened the white doors.

  It was a child.

  Its hair was indigo, its eyes the color of young leaves. Its face—every surface of its skin—bore intricate patterns, woven with silver, gold, and every shade of indigo. It was a thing of beauty framed in the whiteness of the room.

  No one had to ask; the two women recognized it as soon as they saw it. It was Hase’s creation.

  “I have come, to be yours,” the child said.

  The women started to scream.

  The Farm

  Elana Gomel

  Elana Gomel lives in Tel Aviv and is the author of six academic books and multiple fantasy stories that have appeared in New Horizons, People of the Book, and elsewhere. Her fantasy novel, A Tale of Three Cities, was published in 2013.

  WHEN HE SAW the cherry blossoms, he reached for his gun.

  The wind threw a handful of pink petals into his face. He rubbed them away but they stuck to his kinky hair. His leather jacket was so worn that some patches became fuzzy and these, too, accumulated pink ornaments. It looked as if his red-star badge was spawning.

  The farm lay below him, in the hollow between the hills. Everything about it was tidy: the whitewashed main house with the tiled roof, the sturdy barns, and the clean-swept yard, empty in the predawn light. Beyond it, the fields were shadowy with a heavy harvest. And the cherry trees cradling the hollow, the treacherous trees with their unseasonable blossoms.

  His horse shied and trembled, and he struggled to keep it calm. He was not good with animals. The milky smell of cattle wafting from the barn doors made him want to puke. He was a town boy, wary and contemptuous of the countryside. It was in cities that the new world would be born. But now he had learned the hard lesson of hunger: if the battle for food is lost, all the other battles don’t count. The Eaters had taught him the value of the land.

  His stomach rumbled. He thought of tightening his belt but there was no time to drill an additional hole, even though his khaki trousers threatened to slide down his skinny hips.

  An indistinct figure separated itself from the shadows at the main house’s porch and ran up the dandelion-fringed path toward him. He waited, trying to calm the horse, to calm himself, and failing at both.

  The figure was small and slight, nimbly scurrying up the slope.

  His finger caressed the trigger of his Mauser.

  It looked like a girl.

  He fired.

  The heavy bullet slummed into the girl and made her stumble backwards, almost lifting her off the path. The second shot spun her like a dreidel. And then she flopped down and was still, a rivulet of blood snaking away from the crumpled heap of embroidered clothes and tangled braids.

  Yakov cursed himself in the coarse words he had learned from his peasant comrades-in-arms and tried to use frequently. His fear got the better of him. He did not come here to shoot Eaters: they bred faster than bullets could fly. He came for victory.

  The horse neighed and pranced, foam dropping from its nostrils. It was not a trained cavalry steed—most of those had been eaten. It was a scraggy yearling, unused to the sight of blood.

  Blood?

  Yakov’s frown deepened as he looked down at the prostrate body. The girl’s embroidered shirt was stained the colour of his badge. This was unexpected. In his previous encounters with the Enemy he had seen all kinds of unclean ichor, but never this bright, honest red.

  He dismounted and the horse bolted. It did not matter; whether successful or not, he would not need it to retreat. Retreat was not an option.

  He bent over the girl, who seemed to challenge him with her glazed eyes and slackened features. The shot had gone through her heart, killing her instantly, which was not supposed to happen. And yet here she was, dead. He had seen enough corpses on various battlefields to be an expert on mortality. But these had been human corpses…

  Could he have made a mistake? He had heard rumours about a new strategy whereby the Enemy tried stealth and sabotage, seducing those who could not stand the hunger away from their communities with promises of bread. Of course, one would need to be half-witted to succumb to the blandishments of the Eaters, but Yakov had no illusions about the intelligence of his cadres.

  Small but buxom, she lay on her back, spread-eagled like a starfish: in addition to her flung-out arms, her ribbon-tied braids also fanned out on both sides of her body. They were very long, probably falling down to her knees when she stood up. Peasants went into raptures over these ropes of hair that unmarried girls wound around their heads and decorated with paper flowers. Yakov found them repellent, redolent of lice and sweat. He kept his tastes to himself, vaguely ashamed of his fastidiousness. On the other hand, the fact that he did not share their appetites made shooting rapists, looters, and drinkers so much easier.

  Not that it mattered nowadays. Hunger tended to obviate other needs

  Her face was in keeping with her folk-song image: a rosebud mouth, silky black eyebrows under the sallow forehead, brown-nut eyes, now staring emptily at her killer.

  She looked entirely human.

  So he had killed a peasant girl. She was probably a collaborator, a servant of the Enemy. And yet it made him uneasy. He tried hard to avoid killing women and children unless it was absolutely necessary.

  On the other hand, this mistake may have ultimately been to his advantage. He wanted to penetrate as far as possible into the nest before the commencement of his mission. Killing an Eater would bring the entire colony out in force. Killing a human probably would not.

  He cast a wary glance at the farm. There was no movement there.

  He s
ighed and looked at the girl again. If she had been from a poor family, she might have deserved life, after all.

  “Forgive me, comrade,” he said and started down the slope.

  Something looped around his ankle and yanked him off his feet. He was thrown onto the dusty path and dragged back, kicking and flailing, toward the dead girl.

  He expected her to stand up like the Vourdalak of old-wives’ tales, but the body was as lifeless as before. The only part of her that was alive was her hair.

  The braids slithered and coiled in the grass like the tentacles of a squid. One caught his ankle in a noose and was contracting, squeezing it in a vice until he felt the bone crack. Another stood up, a hairy serpent, and lashed him across the face with the force of a Cossack’s whip. He tasted blood from his broken lip.

  He reached for his Mauser but the vertical braid snatched it from his hand and tossed it into the bushes. He was dragged almost on top of the girl whose flaccid inertness contrasted horribly with the frantic activity of her braids that danced and swished through the air, coming down upon him like a cat-o’-nine-tails, pummelling and blinding. He tried to catch one of them, but it was like trying to hold onto greased lightning. Dripping with rancid hair-oil, they slipped through his fingers.

  The second braid managed to wind itself around his throat and started squeezing. His vision dimmed with blue spots. The other braid crawled up his body, pinning him down.

  ‘Shma…’ something mysteriously whispered in his head, an echo of the discarded past.

  With a superhuman effort he managed to loosen the coils around his body and release one arm. Instead of tugging futilely at the hairy noose, he reached down to his worn belt and pulled out his knife. He stabbed the braid but the knife went harmlessly through the plaited strands of hair. The pressure on his windpipe increased until he was about to pass out.

  He stabbed again, desperately, and this time the sharp edge of the knife caught the soiled white ribbon that held the braid together and ripped through it. And the pressure relaxed.

  Coughing and sputtering, Yakov shook off the loosening coils and jumped to his feet. One braid puddled in the grass, a puffy mass of hair; the other still twitched and flailed. He raised his knife and slashed through the second ribbon. It was gristly and tough, not like fabric at all.

  The dead body shuddered and came undone.

  First the hands broke away and skittered daintily on their fingertips into the undergrowth. Legs humped away like giant inchworms. The pale belly-beast hissed at him from its hairy mouth, its single eye blinking furiously, but hopped into the bushes when he raised his knife again. The head, its human features disappearing into undifferentiated, swelling flesh, rolled and bounced down the slope like a ball. The only things left were the empty blood-stained clothes and the braids that had fallen apart into hunks of lifeless honey-blonde hair, probably the remnant of some Eater meal.

  Massaging his bruised throat, Yakov considered his options. One glance toward the farm showed it as peaceful and deserted as before.

  A trap?

  But how could they entrap a prey that wanted to be trapped?

  He took a long, deep breath and walked down the path toward the farm compound.

  The smell of chicken bones in the pot, his mother, pale and scrawny and hugely pregnant, scurrying around to finish cooking before Shabbat… The sounds of a harsh jargon, forgotten but not forgiven, overlaid with the wailing of his baby brother…

  He was eight when he was taken by the authorities to the military school, a community tax in the shape of a frightened child. He was sixteen when the war made him a soldier instead of a sacrifice. He was nineteen when the Revolution washed away the stain of his origin. He was twenty-five when the Eaters came. A handful of red-coloured dates that defined his life.

  Strangely, though, he was not thinking of the night when he first confronted the Enemy, an unheard-of menace that he, the only survivor, stumbled through the night to report to the incredulous headquarters. They did not believe him; he was almost executed for fear-mongering. The firing squad was only halted when other reports started pouring in. But he was the first, and it put him under a special obligation to the Revolution. He had been a passive witness to the beginning of the assault; he would be an active agent in trying to bring about its end.

  But his perverse memory refused to focus on the struggle and instead brought up a mélange of counter-revolutionary dross.

  A woman lying in the congealing pool of blood, her belly slashed open by a bayonet…

  He had seen the aftermath of a pogrom in his shtetl. He did not look too closely at the faces of the dead. But there was little chance he would recognise anybody. By this time he had lost touch with his family. He believed they had moved away but did not know where. He did not care. He had never forgiven them for handing him over. The fact that they had no choice only enhanced his contempt for their cowardice.

  Fat moustachioed faces paling in fear when his squadron rode into town, their crude muzhik voices falling silent as he commanded that the perpetrators be brought to justice…

  There were no Jews in the eyes of the Revolution. There were only comrades and enemies.

  And now there were also Eaters.

  He stood in the middle of the courtyard, listening. The farm was eerily silent. Had they eaten the livestock already? This would be terrible: the nascent commune he was organizing in the nearby village depended on the spoils of this operation for its survival. The winter was coming and the grain and meat requisitions had to be filled. They would be, but unless he found stores here, there would be few people alive in the spring to keep the commune going and to send more food to the hungry city.

  Finally he heard the moo of a cow coming from the barn and breathed a sigh of relief.

  Still, there was no sign of life in the house. Its door was ajar, opening into the darkness of the hallway like a parted mouth.

  Slowly, he inched toward the door. There was a strange smell wafting from the hallway: a thin, sour reek that reminded him of the moonshine his peasants were brewing out of rotten straw and composted leaves. He would have to shoot Ivan to stop this shocking waste of resources.

  He sidled through the doorway. The interior was very dim as the carved shutters in the main room were closed, admitting only a scatter of dusty rays. He glimpsed the shining ranks of icons in the corner and the white cloth on the table.

  There was a loaf of bread in the middle of the cloth.

  His mouth flooded with saliva, and he was distantly surprised that there was enough moisture left in his wasted body. The sour reek had disappeared, overpowered by the yeasty aroma of freshly baked bread, as unmistakable and enticing as the scent of a woman. He moved toward the table, tugged on the leash of hunger. He could almost see the thick crust with its pale freckles of flour and taste the brown tang of the rye…

  He stopped. He had not come here to eat.

  He came to be eaten.

  Yakov lifted his hand to his mouth and bit deeply, drawing blood. The pain and the salty burn on his tongue centred him. He turned away from the table and walked out of the living room, back into the hallway where other rooms of the house waited behind closed doors. The short distance he traversed from the table to the hallway felt like the longest walk of his life.

  Abe gezunt!

  His mother’s reedy voice, shrilling this incomprehensible phrase every time a new disaster fell upon the shtetl with the inevitability of bad weather. He had forgotten what it meant, had forgotten the language of his infancy altogether, deliberately expunged it from his memory. But sometimes falling asleep in the cold mud of the trenches, he would hear it again: as annoying and compelling as the buzz of a mosquito.

  The military campaigns were also receding into the past. The civil war, with its familiar enemies, appeared in retrospect to have been a mere light rehearsal for the war with the Eaters. What were those haughty landlords, perfidious capitalists, and rapacious kulaks compared to the nauseating evil of the
Enemy? Mere humans, easily comprehended and handily killed. It afforded him grim amusement to think about all the propaganda clichés he had once come up with to motivate his troops. The opposition were bloodsuckers, cannibals, shape-shifters, beasts in men’s clothing. Strange how these inflated metaphors were sober truths when applied to the Eaters!

  Abe gezunt!

  He shook his head, trying to get rid of the almost-audible voice. He had to focus on the task at hand. And the task was becoming more puzzling by the minute.

  The farm was empty. He had searched the main house. It must have belonged to a kulak, a prosperous peasant whose fate had been sealed long before the Eaters appeared. Whether serving as their meal was preferable to starving in exile was something Yakov did not speculate upon.

  The new masters had not made many changes in the house and this was puzzling, too. Previously, in clearing out Eater nests, Yakov and his soldiers had encountered living nightmares: granaries filled with bloody gnawed heads, children’s limbs on chopping blocks, rats the size of a sheep dog. But this house was unnaturally clean—cleaner than most poor peasants’ hovels, truth be told—and silent. The beds were made with fresh linen, there was water in a wash-bucket, and the wooden floors were scrubbed. The large stove was empty and cold: in the human lands, the winter was coming, but here the summer was lingering still. It was not only the blooming cherries and yellow dandelions that defied human seasons: Yakov was beginning to sweat in the still, warm air of the hollow. He did not think to take off his leather jacket, however. It was the uniform of the Revolution, and he would not part with it until his service to the Revolution was done. Then he would be dead and he did not care how he was buried.