The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Ten

by Jonathan Strahan

  I crouched next to the kitchen door and laced up my boots. I had my back to her, but she said, “You’ve been crying.”

  My jacket wouldn’t button. I was all thumbs. “More tears will come yet.”

  “Jesus, Hester. You sound like a fortune cookie.”

  I realized with a start that she’d been drinking. The dirt in the bucket would be Blake family grave dirt; we kept it in a Hefty sack in the attic.

  “Did you know,” she said conversationally, “that I was there when you were born?” (Yes, as I’d heard this story approximately nine million times.) “Nana put you in my arms first. You screamed like I was killing you.”

  My grief was too acute for me to not be a dick.

  “Is this where you tell me about the omen you saw the night of my birth? A grisly fate? The destruction of Troy?”

  “First of all, you know damn well you were born in the morning – your mom made me go get her a McGriddle,” said Mar. “Second, I never saw a thing.” The rain came down on the roof like buckshot. “Not one mortal thing,” she repeated. “And that’s killed me my whole life, loving you... not knowing.”

  I fled into the downpour. The town was alien. Each doorway was a cold black portal and curtains twitched in abandoned rooms. Sometimes the sidewalk felt squishy underfoot. It was bad when the streets were empty as bones in an ossuary, but worse when I heard a crowd around the corner from the 7-Eleven. I crouched behind a garbage can as misshapen strangers passed and threw up a little, retching water. When there was only awful silence, I bolted for my life through the woods.

  The goblin shark in Rainbow’s backyard had peeled open, the muscle and fascia now on display. It looked oddly and shamefully naked; but it did not invoke the puke-inducing fear of the people on the street. There was nothing in that shark but dead shark.

  I’d arranged to be picked last for every softball team in my life, but adrenaline let me heave a rock through Rainbow’s window. Glass tinkled musically. Her lights came on and she threw the window open; the rest of the pane fell into glitter on the lawn. “Holy shit, Hester!” she said in alarm.

  “Miss Kipley, I’d like to save you,” I said. “This is on the understanding that I still think you’re absolutely fucking crazy, but I should’ve tried to save you from the start. If you get dressed, I know where Ted at the gas station keeps the keys to his truck, and I don’t have my learner’s permit, but we’ll make it to Denny’s by midnight.”

  Rainbow put her head in her hands. Her hair fell over her face like a veil, and when she smiled there was a regretful dimple. “Dude,” she said softly, “I thought when you saw the future, you couldn’t outrun it.”

  “If we cannot outrun it, then I’ll drive.”

  “You badass,” she said, and before I could retort she leaned out past the windowsill. She made a soft white blotch in the darkness.

  “I think you’re the coolest person I’ve ever met,” said Rainbow. “I think you’re really funny, and you’re interesting, and your fingernails are all different lengths. You’re not like other girls. And you only think things are worthwhile if they’ve been proved ten times by a book, and I like how you hate not coming first.”

  “Listen,” I said. My throat felt tight and fussy and rain was leaking into my hood. “The Drowned Lord who dwells in dark water will claim you. The moon won’t rise tonight, and you’ll never update your Tumblr again.”

  “And how you care about everything! You care super hard. And you talk like a dork. I think you’re disgusting. I think you’re super cute. Is that weird? No homo? If I put no homo there, that means I can say things and pretend I don’t mean them?”

  “Rainbow,” I said, “don’t make fun of me.”

  “Why is it so bad for me to be the bride, anyway?” she said, petulant now. “What’s wrong with it? If it’s meant to happen, it’s meant to happen, right? Cool. Why aren’t you okay with it?”

  There was no lightning or thunder in that storm. There were monstrous shadows, shiny on the matt black of night, and I thought I heard things flop around in the woods. “Because I don’t want you to die.”

  Her smile was lovely and there was no fear in it. Rainbow didn’t know how to be afraid. In her was a curious exultation and I could see it, it was in her mouth and eyes and hair. The heedless ecstasy of the bride. “Die? Is that what happens?”

  My stomach churned. “If you change your mind, come to West North Street,” I said. “The house standing alone at the top of the road. Go to the graveyard at the corner of Main and Spinney and take a handful of dirt off any child’s grave, then come to me. Otherwise, this is goodbye.”

  I turned. Something sang through the air and landed next to me, soggy and forlorn. My packet of Cruncheroos. When I turned back, Rainbow was wide-eyed and her face was uncharacteristically puckered, and we must have mirrored each other in our upset. I felt like we were on the brink of something as great as it was awful, something I’d snuck around all summer like a thief.

  “You’re a prize dumbass trying to save me from myself, Hester Blake.”

  I said, “You’re the only one I wanted to like me.”

  My hands shook as I hiked home. There were blasphemous, slippery things in each clearing that endless night. I knew what would happen if they were to approach. The rain grew oily and warm as blood was oily and warm, and I alternately wept and laughed, and none of them even touched me.

  My aunt had fallen asleep amid the candles like some untidy Renaissance saint. She lay there with her shoes still on and her cigarette half-smoked, and I left my clothes in a sopping heap on the laundry floor to take her flannel pj’s out the dryer. Their sleeves came over my fingertips. I wouldn’t write down Rainbow in the Blake book, I thought. I would not trap her in the pages. Nobody would ever know her but me. I’d outrun fate, and blaspheme Blake duty.

  I fell asleep tucked up next to Mar.

  IN THE MORNING I woke to the smell of toaster waffles. Mar’s coat was draped over my legs. First of July: the Deepwater God was here. I rolled up my pajama pants and tiptoed through molten drips of candlewax to claim my waffle. My aunt wordlessly squirted them with syrup faces and we stood on the porch to eat.

  The morning was crisp and gray and pretty. Salt drifted from the clouds and clumped in the grass. The wind discomfited the trees. Not a bird sang. Beneath us, the town was laid out like a spill: flooded right up to the gas station, and the western suburbs drowned entirely. Where the dark, unreflective waters had not risen, you could see movement in the streets, but it was not human movement. And there roared a great revel near the Walmart.

  There was thrashing in the water and a roiling mass in the streets. A tentacle rose from the depths by the high school, big enough to see each sucker, and it brushed open a building with no effort. Another tentacle joined it, then another, until the town center was alive with coiling lappets and feelers. I was surprised by their jungle sheen of oranges and purples and tropical blues. I had expected somber greens and funeral grays. Teeth broke from the water. Tall, harlequin-striped fronds lifted, questing and transparent in the sun. My chest felt very full, and I stayed to look when Mar turned and went inside. I watched like I could never watch enough.

  The water lapped gently at the bottom of our driveway. I wanted my waffle to be ash on my tongue, but I was frantically hungry and it was delicious. I was chomping avidly, flannels rolled to my knees, when a figure emerged at the end of the drive. It had wet short-shorts and perfectly hairsprayed hair.

  “Hi,” said Rainbow bashfully.

  My heart sang, unbidden.

  “God, Kipley! Come here, get inside –”

  “I kind’ve don’t want to, dude,” she said. “No offense.”

  I didn’t understand when she made an exaggerated oops! shrug. I followed her gesture to the porch candles with idiot fixation. Behind Rainbow, brightly coloured appendages writhed in the water of her wedding day.

  “Hester,” she said, “you don’t have to run. You’ll never die or be alone,
neither of us will; not even the light will have permission to touch you. I’ll bring you down into the water and the water under that, where the spires of my palace fill the lost mortal country, and you will be made even more beautiful and funny and splendiferous than you are now.”

  The candles cringed from her damp Chucks. When she approached, half of them exploded in a chrysanthemum blast of wax. Leviathans crunched up people busily by the Rite Aid. Algal bloom strangled the telephone lines. My aunt returned to the porch and promptly dropped her coffee mug, which shattered into a perfect Unforgivable Shape.

  “I’ve come for my bride,” said Rainbow, the abyssal king. “Yo, Hester. Marry me.”

  THIS IS THE Blake testimony of Hester, twenty-third generation in her sixteenth year.

  In the time of our crawling Night Lord’s ascendancy, foretold by exodus of starlight into his sucking astral wounds, the God of the drowned country came ashore. The many-limbed horror of the depths chose to take a local girl to wife. Main Street was made over into a salt bower. Water-creatures adorned it as jewels do. Mortals gave themselves for wedding feast and the Walmart utterly destroyed. The Deepwater Lord returned triumphant to the tentacle throne and will dwell there, in splendour, forever.

  My account here as a Blake is perfect and accurate, because when the leviathan prince went, I went with her.

  DANCY VS. THE PTEROSAUR

  Caitlín R. Kiernan

  CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN (www.caitlinrkiernan.com) is a two-time recipient of both the World Fantasy and Bram Stoker awards, and the New York Times has declared her ‘one of our essential writers of dark fiction.’ Her recent novels include The Red Tree and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, and, to date, her short stories have been collected in thirteen volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder, A is for Alien, The Ammonite Violin & Others, World Fantasy Award winner The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories, and Beneath an Oil Dark Sea: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan [Volume 2]. Coming up is her fourteenth collection, Houses Under the Sea: Mythos Tales. She has written three volumes of Alabaster, her award-winning, three-volume graphic novel for Dark Horse Comics, and the first instalments of a fourth, The Good, the Bad, and the Bird came out earlier this year. Kiernan is working on her next novel, Interstate Love Song, which is based on the story that appeared in last year’s volume. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

  DANCY FLAMMARION SITS out the storm in the ruins of a Western Railway of Alabama boxcar, hauled years and years ago off rusting steel rails and summarily left for dead. Left for kudzu vines and possums, copperheads and wandering albino girls looking for shelter against sudden summer rains, shelter from thunder and lightning and wind. It’s sweltering inside the boxcar, despite the downpour, and, indeed, she imagines it might be hotter now than before the rain began. That happens sometimes, in the long Dog Day South Alabama broil. The floor of the boxcar is covered in dead kudzu leaves and rotting plywood, except a few places where she can see the metal floor rusted straight through. The rain against the roof sizzles loudly, singing like frying meat; she sits with her back to one wall, gazing out the open sliding doors at the sheeting rain.

  Dancy fishes a can of Libby’s Vienna sausages from her duffel bag, a few mouthfuls of protein shoplifted from a Piggly Wiggly on the outskirts of Enterprise, three days back the way she’s come. She pops the lid and drinks the salty, oily juice before digging the pasty little sausages out with her fingers. Dancy hates Vienna sausages, but beggars can’t be choosers, that’s what her grandmother always said. Neither can thieves, she thinks. Thieves can’t be choosers, either.

  When she’s done, she uses a few paper napkins – also lifted from the Piggly Wiggly – to wipe her fingers as clean as she can get them. She catches a little rainwater in the empty can. It’s warm and tastes like grease, but it helps her thirst a little. Starving has never scared her as much as the possibility of dying of thirst, and she’s drunk from worse than an empty Vienna sausage can.

  She closes her eyes and manages half an hour’s sleep, a half hour at most. But she dreams of another life she might have lived. She dreams of a talking blackbird – a red-winged blackbird – and the ghost of a girl who was a werewolf before she died. Before Dancy had to kill her. It isn’t a good dream. When she wakes up, the rain has stopped, the clouds have gone, and the world outside the boxcar is wet and steaming in the brilliant August sun. It can’t be very long past noon. She pisses through one of the holes in the floor of the boxcar, already thirsty and wishing she had a few more cans full of the oily sausage-flavored rainwater. She gathers up her green Army surplus duffel bag, worn and patched, patches sewn over patches, and she finds her sunglasses. She stole those, too, from a convenience store somewhere down in Florida. The seraph has never said anything about her thefts. Necessary evils and all, tiny transgressions in the service of the greater good. And she’s made it a rule never to take anything worth more than ten dollars. She keeps a tally, written in pencil on the back of a tourism pamphlet advertising Tarpon Springs. As of today, she owes seventy-three dollars and fifteen cents. She knows she’ll never pay any of it back, but she keeps the tally, anyway.

  Dancy climbs down out of the boxcar and opens the black umbrella, almost as patched as the duffel bag; two of the spokes poke out through the nylon fabric.

  “Where am I going this time?” she asks, but no one and nothing answers. It’s been days now since the angel appeared, all wrath and fire and terrible swift swords. She’s on her own, until it shows up and shoves her this way or that way. So, she wandered north to Enterprise, then east to this abandoned and left for dead boxcar not far from the banks of the muddy Choctawhatchee River. She makes her way back to the road, rural route something or something else, another anonymous county highway. She parts waist high goldenrod and stinging nettles like Moses dividing the Red Sea. Her T-shirt, jeans, and boots are close to soaked through by the time she reaches the road, which makes her wonder why she bothered taking shelter in the boxcar.

  The road is wet and dark and shiny as cottonmouth scales.

  Without direction, without instruction, left to her own devices, there’s nothing to do but walk, and so she resumes the march eastward, towards Georgia, still a good thirty or forty miles away. But that’s just as a crow flies, not as she has to walk down this road. And there’s no particular reason to aim for Georgia, except she has no idea where else she’d go.

  Dancy walks and sings to herself to take her mind off the heat.

  “I’m just a poor wayfaring stranger.

  I’m traveling through this world of woe.

  Yet there’s no sickness, no toil nor danger

  In that bright land to which I go.

  I’m going home to see my mother...”

  She’s walked no more than half a mile when she sees the dragon.

  At first, she thinks she’s seeing nothing but a very large turkey vulture, soaring on the thermals rising up off the blacktop. But then it wheels nearer, far up and silhouetted black against the blue, blue sky, and she can see that whatever it is, it isn’t a turkey vulture. She doesn’t think it’s even a bird, because, for one thing, it doesn’t seem to have feathers. For another, it’s huge. She’s seen big pelicans, but they were, at most, only half as big as the thing in the sky, wing tip to wing tip. She’s seen egrets and herons and eagles, but nothing like this. She stands in the middle of the road and watches, transfixed, not thinking, yet, that maybe this is something to be afraid of, something that could do her harm.

  It’s a dragon, she thinks. I’m seeing a dragon, and the angel didn’t warn me. I didn’t even know dragons were real.

  The thing in the sky screams. Or it sounds like a scream to Dancy, and the cry sends chill bumps up and down her arms, makes the hairs at the base of her neck stand on end. It’s almost directly overhead now, the creature. She shields her eyes, trying to shut out the glare of the sun, hoping for a better view. It’s sort of like a giant bat, the dragon, because its wings look leathery, taut membranes stretched between bony struts,
and the creature might be covered with short, velvety hair like a bat’s. But it’s hard to be sure about these details, it’s so far overhead. The strangest part of all is the dragon’s head. There’s a bony crest on the back of its narrow skull, a crest almost as long as its beak, and the crest makes it’s head look sort of like a boomerang.

  The dragon flaps its enormous wings, seven yards across if they’re an inch, and screams again. And that’s when Dancy hears a voice somewhere to her left, calling out from the thicket of beech and pine and creeper vines at the edge of the road. For just a second, she thinks maybe it’s her angel, come, belatedly, to warn her about the dragon and to tell her what she’s supposed to do. Come to reveal this wrinkle in its grand skein – its holy plan for her, whatever comes next. But this isn’t the angel at all. It’s only the voice of a girl who sounds impatient and, maybe, a little frightened.

  “Get outta the road,” the girl tells her, somehow managing to whisper and raise her voice at the same time, cautiously raising her voice only as much as she dares. “It’s gonna see you if you don’t get outta the middle of the damn road.”

  “But maybe it’s supposed to see me,” Dancy says aloud, though she’d only meant to think that to herself. Already she’s reaching for the Bowie knife tucked into the waistband of her jeans.

  “Get outta the road,” the girl shouts, actually shouting this time, no longer trying not to be heard by the hairy black thing in the sky.

  Dancy draws her knife, and the sun flashes off the stainless steel blade. Her hand is sweaty around the handle, that stout hilt carved from the antler of a white-tailed buck.

  The dragon soars and banks, and then it dives for her.

  Why wasn’t I warned? Why didn’t you tell me there are dragons?