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

by Jonathan Strahan

  “I ain’t no runaway. I didn’t have nothin’ to run away from.”

  Which, she knows, isn’t exactly true.

  “So, where you headed?”

  Dancy doesn’t answer that. Instead, she asks, “If you don’t think all those other people are right about what the dragon is, and you think it’s one of them pterosaurs, then you must have an opinion about how it’s here.”

  Jezzie fidgets with the laces of her sneakers.

  “I got this notion,” she says, “but it doesn’t make much sense. I mean, I don’t think it’s very scientific. I try to be scientific, when I believe something.”

  The cicadas are so loud, Dancy wants to cover her ears.

  “Okay, so,” Jezzie says, the book in her lap, the waffle-weave dishrag on the rug next to her, “I’ll tell you what I think. But we ain’t gonna argue about it. I ain’t asking you to believe any of it. I know you won’t, but if I tell you, you don’t get to tell me I’m goin’ to Hell just for thinking it.”

  “You don’t even believe in Hell.”

  “You don’t know that, Dancy Flammarion. You don’t know me.”

  “Fine,” Dancy mutters and takes her eyes off the open door. Orange-white after images dance like ghosts about the inside of the packing crate.

  “At the end of the Cretaceous Period, something really bad happened. An asteroid – which is like a meteorite, only a lot bigger – it smashed into the Earth, came down right in the Gulf of Mexico, not even so far from here. And it was a gigantic asteroid, maybe big as New York City –”

  “You ever been to New York City?”

  “No, but that ain’t the point. This asteroid was enormous, and when it hit, the energy released by the explosion was something like two million times more than the largest atomic bomb ever built. You just think of that much energy. You can’t even, not really. But it almost wiped out everything alive, killed off all those sea monsters and the dinosaurs – and the pterosaurs. And maybe it did something else.”

  “Did something else like what?”

  “Maybe it was so big an explosion, down there in Yucatan –”

  “Where?”

  “Yucatan, Mexico.”

  “But you just said this happened in the Gulf of Mexico.”

  “You know why it’s called the Gulf of Mexico?” Jezzie asks, and Dancy doesn’t know, so she shuts up. “But here’s what I think,” Jezzie goes on. “Maybe that explosion was so big it ripped a hole in time. A wormhole or tesseract. And that’s how the pterosaur gets through. It’s interdimensional or something. It ain’t supposed to be here, and it’s probably confused as all get out, but here it is anyway, because it flew right through that rip in time, maybe at the very instant of the impact, before the blast wave and firestorms and tsunamis got it.

  “And, shit, maybe it ain’t nothin’ more than an echo, a ghost.”

  For an almost a full minute, neither of them says anything. Finally, Dancy breaks the awkward silence hanging between them.

  “You’re really just making all this up,” she says.

  Jezzie frowns again. “I warned you it wasn’t very scientific.”

  And then the throbbing cicada shriek is pierced by the scream Dancy heard back on the road, the cry of the dragon that Jezzie insists isn’t a dragon at all. Instinctively, Dancy ducks her head and reaches for her knife; she notices that Jezzie ducks, as well. They both sit staring at the ceiling of the packing crate, tense as barbed wire.

  “That was right overhead,” Dancy whispers. “Does it do that? Does it follow you back here?”

  Jezzie slowly shakes her head. “Never has before.”

  It didn’t follow her, Dancy thinks. It followed me.

  And then she sees what’s in Jezzie’s right hand, an old Colt revolver like the one her grandmother kept around to shoot rattlesnakes.

  “You know how to use that?” Dancy asks her, as Jezzie thumbs back the hammer. And the sound of the hammer locking into place is so loud that Dancy realizes the bugs in the trees have gone quiet.

  “Wouldn’t be holding it like this if I didn’t.”

  “Well, how about put it away,” Dancy tells her. “I don’t like guns.”

  Again, Jezzie shakes her head, and she keeps her finger on the trigger of the cocked revolver.

  “You never did answer my question,” she says. “What you doin’ out here, if you ain’t a runaway and you ain’t a hobo?”

  The day has grown so still and silent that Dancy thinks she can almost hear the blood flowing through her veins, can almost hear the grubs and earthworms plowing through the soil beneath the crate. She hasn’t yet drawn her knife, but her hand’s still on the handle, the carved antler cool and smooth against her perspiring palm. She’s been meaning to find some leather to wrap around the handle, because sweat and blood make it slippery, but she hasn’t gotten around to it.

  “I’m goin’ someplace,” she tells the girl.

  “Yeah, and just where might that be, Dancy Flammarion?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Dancy replies. She didn’t even have to think about the answer. Unlike most things, it’s simple and true.

  “I sorta had a feeling you were gonna say something like that.”

  “I guess I’ll know when I get there,” Dancy says. “You reckon that thing’s still out there? You reckon it’s flying around right over our heads?”

  “How the hell am I supposed to know?” Jezzie asks and frowns.

  “Well, you say you know it ain’t no dragon, so I thought maybe –”

  “Then you thought wrong.”

  The silence is broken then by the sound of enormous wings, slowly rising and falling, beating at the sky, and both girls hold their breath as the flapping grows farther and farther away, finally fading into the distance.

  Softened almost into melody, Dancy thinks, remembering a line from a book her mother once read her about monsters from Mars trying to take over the world. But God sent germs to stop them.

  ... slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.

  And what’s the pterosaur, if she’s right, but another sort of invader, maybe not from another planet, but from another time, and what’s the difference? Something evil that should have died in the Flood, when God – in his wisdom – wiped so much evil off the face of Creation.

  “Thanks for the water,” Dancy says, and she gets to her feet, finally releasing her hold on the handle of the big Bowie knife.

  “You ain’t goin’ back out there,” Jezzie says, still whispering. It’s not a question.

  “You said it ain’t never come out here before. That’s cause it’s here for me, Jezebel, not for you. It’s my dragon to fight, not yours.”

  “You’re really crazy as a damn betsy bug, you know that?”

  All men are mad in some way or the other, and inasmuch as you deal discreetly with your madmen, so deal with God’s madmen...

  ... so deal with God’s madmen...

  Dancy’s mother read her so many books, before the demons finally came for Julia Flammarion, and so many of the books had monsters in them. She sometimes imagines that her mother knew the seraph was coming, so she was preparing her daughter.

  “I ain’t lettin’ you go out there,” Jezzie says again, a little louder than before.

  “This is what I do, Jezebel,” Dancy replies. “I fight dragons.”

  Jezebel very slowly eases her thumb off the hammer, decocking the gun.

  “It ain’t a dragon. It’s just an animal.”

  “Thank you for the water,” Dancys says again, shouldering her duffel bag.

  “If you’ll just wait a few hours, it goes away at night. You could wait here with me, and I could read to you, or I could tell you about the big ol’ alligator snapper I found last summer down at Chatham Bend. Or I could tell you more about the ch
alk seas. I’ve hardly told you anything about the animals. Did you know, they found a dinosaur up at Selma, back in the 1940s? An actual dinosaur. It was a new kind of duck bill. Then they found another one, related to Tyrannosaurus, at –”

  “I’ve already stayed too long,” Dancy says, interrupting her. “You never should have brought me here. All that’s done is put you in danger.”

  “Jesus,” Jezzie whispers, staring at the gun in her hands. “You really goin’ out there, ain’t you?”

  “Don’t you blaspheme,” Dancy says. “Bad enough you believe all this evolution claptrap, without you gotta also take the Lord’s name in vain.

  But, truth be told, all Dancy wants to do is sit in the packing crate with this strange, Godless girl, sipping warm water that tastes like a plastic jug and maybe eating some of those graham crackers and pork and beans. She can’t even remember the last time she had a graham cracker. She remembers how they taste smeared with muscadine and blackberry preserves, and her mouth fills with saliva.

  “Then here,” says Jezzie, “you take this,” and she offers Dancy the water jug. Dancy doesn’t turn it down. She almost asks for some of the crackers, too, but that would be rude, asking more when you’ve just been given such a gift. “You won’t need it?” she asks.

  “Nah, it ain’t that far back home. And here,” says Jezzie, “you take this, too. You need it more’n me.” And she holds the revolver out to Dancy. The barrel and the cylinder glint faintly in the dim light inside the packing crate.

  “How old is that thing anyway?” Dancy asks. “Looks like it could’a been used in the Civil War, it looks so old. Gun that old, it’s liable to blow up in your hands.”

  Jezzie shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says. “It was my uncle’s. But I don’t know how old it is. But here, you take it. It’s loaded. Six shots, but I ain’t got no extra bullets.”

  “I don’t like guns,” Dancy says again. “You keep it. I got my knife.”

  And ain’t that how you slay dragons, with sharp blades? Ain’t my knife as good as any sword ever was?

  “Dancy, if you’ll just wait until nightfall –”

  “Thank you for the water,” Dancy says for the third time. “That’s what I most need, it’s so hot today.”

  “What you most need is some goddamn common sense.”

  Dancy almost tells her, again, not to take the Lord’s name in vain, but what’s the point. Ain’t no saving this girl, seduced as she is by atheists and evolutionists.

  Just be wasting my breath, that’s all.

  “It was nice meeting you, Jezebel Lilligraven,” Dancy says, even if she’s not quite sure that’s true.

  “Just be careful,” Jezzie says.

  And then Dancy steps out into the sunlight, hardly any less bright or scorching than when she stepped inside the crate, at least an hour before. She looks up at the indifferent sky above the clearing, half expecting to see the dragon, but there’s only the white eye of Heaven gazing back down at her. It can’t be later than three o’clock, she thinks. Still hours and hours left until dusk.

  The cicadas are singing again.

  When she reaches the edge of the clearing, she looks back just once, and there’s the girl’s face peering out through a part in the calico curtain. She looks frightened; she waves at Dancy, and Dancy waves back.

  I’m never gonna see you again, and I kinda wish that wasn’t true.

  She walks back into the short stretch of forest dividing the clearing from the road. The going seems a little more difficult than when Jezzie was dragging her along, pell-mell, and once she gets turned around in a kudzu patch, has to retrace her steps, and find a clearer path. She’s drenched in sweat by the time she reaches the gravel shoulder of the highway, and she opens the jug and takes a long swallow. Then she looks again at the blue, blue sky, all the morning’s thunderheads come and gone. There’s no sign of the dragon, so maybe the girl in the crate was right, and maybe it’s flown away back through a hole in time to a world of serpent haunted seas, before Adam and Eve were driven out and cherubim with flaming swords were placed at the gates of Eden that no man or woman would ever again get in. Maybe that’s how it is.

  And maybe that girl named after a whore and an idolater is right about all of it, and maybe you don’t know nothin’ about how things really are.

  Dancy pushes the thought away, because self doubt’s as dangerous as books that say people evolved from monkeys and slime. Self doubt’s a distraction that can get her killed. She spares one more glance at the summer sky, and then she starts walking again, following the white center line, which will just have to do as a road map until the angel decides to speak to her again.

  CALVED

  Sam J. Miller

  SAM J. MILLER (www.samjmiller.com) is a writer and a community organizer. His fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, and The Minnesota Review, among others. He work has been nominated for the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, and has won the Shirley Jackson Award. He is a graduate of the Clarion Writer’s Workshop and lives in New York City. His debut novel The Art of Starving is forthcoming from HarperCollins. His story “Ghosts of Home” appears elsewhere in this book.

  MY SON’S EYES were broken. Emptied out. Frozen over. None of the joy or gladness were there. None of the tears. Normally I’d return from a job and his face would split down the middle with happiness, seeing me for the first time in three months. Now it stayed flat as ice. His eyes leapt away the instant they met mine. His shoulders were broader and his arms more sturdy, and lone hairs now stood on his upper lip, but his eyes were all I saw.

  “Thede,” I said, grabbing him.

  He let himself be hugged. His arms hung limply at his sides. My lungs could not fill. My chest tightened from the force of all the never-let-me-go bear hugs he had given me over the course of the past fifteen years, and would never give again.

  “You know how he gets when you’re away,” his mother had said, on the phone, the night before, preparing me. “He’s a teenager now. Hating your parents is a normal part of it.”

  I hadn’t listened, then. My hands and thighs still ached from months of straddling an ice saw; my hearing was worse with every trip; a slip had cost me five days work and five days pay and five days’ worth of infirmary bills; I had returned to a sweat-smelling bunk in an illegal room I shared with seven other iceboat workers – and none of it mattered because in the morning I would see my son.

  “Hey,” he murmured emotionlessly. “Dad.”

  I stepped back, turned away until the red ebbed out of my face. Spring had come and the city had lowered its photoshade. It felt good, even in the cold wind.

  “You guys have fun,” Lajla said, pressing money discretely into my palm. I watched her go with a rising sense of panic. Bring back my son, I wanted to shout, the one who loves me. Where is he. What have you done with him. Who is this surly creature. Below us, through the ubiquitous steel grid that held up Qaanaaq’s two million lives, black Greenland water sloshed against the locks of our floating city.

  Breathe, Dom , I told myself, and eventually I could. You knew this was coming. You knew one day he would cease to be a kid.

  “How’s school?” I asked.

  Thede shrugged. “Fine.”

  “Math still your favorite subject?”

  “Math was never my favorite subject.”

  I was pretty sure that it had been, but I didn’t want to argue.

  “What’s your favorite subject?”

  Another shrug. We had met at the sea lion rookery, but I could see at once that Thede no longer cared about sea lions. He stalked through the crowd with me, his face a frozen mask of anger.

  I couldn’t blame him for how easy he had it. So what if he didn’t live in the Brooklyn foster-care barracks, or work all day at the solar-cell plant school? He still had to live in a city that hated him for his dark skin and ice-grunt father.

  “Your mom says you got into the Institute,” I said, unsure even o
f what that was. A management school, I imagined. A big deal for Thede. But he only nodded.

  At the fry stand, Thede grimaced at my clunky Swedish. The counter girl shifted to a flawless English, but I would not be cheated of the little bit of the language that I knew. “French fries and coffee for me and my son,” I said, or thought I did, because she looked confused and then Thede muttered something and she nodded and went away.

  And then I knew why it hurt so much, the look on his face. It wasn’t that he wasn’t a kid anymore. I could handle him growing up. What hurt was how he looked at me: like the rest of them look at me, these Swedes and grid city natives for whom I would forever be a stupid New York refugee, even if I did get out five years before the Fall.

  Gulls fought over food thrown to the lions. “How’s your mom?”

  “She’s good. Full manager now. We’re moving to Arm Three, next year.”

  His mother and I hadn’t been meant to be. She was born here, her parents Black Canadians employed by one of the big Swedish construction firms that built Qaanaaq back when the Greenland Melt began to open up the interior for resource extraction and grid cities starting sprouting all along the coast. They’d kept her in public school, saying it would be good for a future manager to be able to relate to the immigrants and workers she’d one day command, and they were right. She even fell for one of them, a fresh-off-the-boat North American taking tech classes, but wised up pretty soon after she saw how hard it was to raise a kid on an ice worker’s pay. I had never been mad at her. Lajla was right to leave me, right to focus on her job. Right to build the life for Thede I couldn’t.

  “Why don’t you learn Swedish?” he asked a French fry, unable to look at me.

  “I’m trying,” I said. “I need to take a class. But they cost money, and anyway I don’t have –”

  “Don’t have time. I know. Han’s father says people make time for the things that are important for them.” Here his eyes did meet mine, and held, sparkling with anger and abandonment.