The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2013 Edition

by Paula Guran [editor]

  Only Damien remained. Gwendolyn smiled, shy again, afraid, sad. “Will you go too?” she asked.

  “Aye, love. It’s long past time I did something with these old bones. I’ve followed that lot around so long, I’ll be half-mad without them.”

  “You could stay,” she said.

  “I shan’t, though. Your heart only has room for one ghost, Gwen, love, and you must keep her safe from the city, and from us.”

  Gwendolyn nodded, and she reached out to touch him, to offer a final gesture of goodbye—but it was too late, too late as all goodbyes are. Particularly the ones that matter. And when he vanished, it was amongst a group of giggling school girls come to the city for the weekend to celebrate their A-levels.

  She knew she was supposed to be sad, but the funny thing was, in the end, she wasn’t anymore. The sadness was gone with the ghosts—for that, my best beloved, is the way of things. It has always been the way of things. The dead cannot stay. They are decay, ruination. Things falling apart. They cannot stay, my bright, beautiful girl—my Gwendolyn. My best beloved. But I will tell you a secret, a secret only I know—the secret that makes this a happy story, after all, and not a sad one, or a scary one, or even a hurtful one. As Gwendolyn left King’s Cross, she felt a kind of weight settling in her chest, a good weight like a rosebush anchoring into her stomach and sprouting beautiful blossoms, pink, orange-tipped, yellow, into the dark spaces inside her.

  It is time, best beloved. I have held you and I have loved you, but my fingers are cold and dead: you cannot hang on to me forever. You are young, as that Gwendolyn was, as her mother was before her, and you are destined for places that sparkle with their own newness. Those places would devour me. What is warm and bright for the living is hateful to the dead. It is the way of things. Always. Even thus. Look once, my love, my little girl, because when you love someone, and you know you will not see them again, then you must look. And then carry me with you. Inside. Where I can take root and grow. Where my hands will stay clean.

  Helen Marshall is an author, poet, and bibliophile. Her poetry and fiction have been published in ChiZine, Paper Crow, Abyss and Apex, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Tor.com among others. A collection of her poems—Skeleton Leaves—was published in 2011 and her collection of short stories—Hair Side, Flesh Side—was released in 2012. Currently, she is pursuing a PhD in medieval studies at the University of Toronto.

  The bottle was supposed to save the world, but did just the opposite.

  FAKE PLASTIC TREES

  Caitlin R. Kiérnan

  “You’re not sleeping,” Max said. “You’re still having nightmares about the car. When you’re awake, it’s what you think about. I’m right, Cody, aren’t I?”

  “Mostly,” I told him, and then neither of us said anything else for a while. We sat together and stared at the ugly red river. It was Max finally spoke up and broke the silence.

  “Well, I was thinking,” he said, “maybe if you were to write it down. That might help, I was thinking.”

  “It might not, too,” I replied. “I already saw Dr. Lehman twice. I did everything he said, and that didn’t help. How’s writing it down supposed to help?”

  “Well, it might,” he said again. “You can’t know until you try. Maybe you could get the bad stuff you saw out of your head, like when you eat spoiled food and throwing up helps. See, that’s what I’m thinking.”

  “Maybe you ought to think less, Max. Besides, where am I supposed to get anything to write it on?”

  He promptly handed me the nub of a pencil and some paper he’d torn out of the H–G volume of an encyclopedia in the Sanctuary library. I yelled at him for going and ruining books when there aren’t so many left to ruin.

  “Cody, we can always put the pages back when you’re done,” he said impatiently, like I should have thought of that already without him having to explain it to me. “Only, they’ll be better than before, because one side will have your story written on them.”

  “Who’s gonna want to read my story?” I asked.

  “Someone might. Someday, someone might. Anyway, that’s not the point. Writing it’s the point.”

  Sitting there on the riverbank, listening to him, it began to make sense, but I didn’t tell him that, because I didn’t feel like letting him know I didn’t still think he was full of shit, and because I still don’t think I can do this. Just because it’s my story doesn’t mean I can put it into words like he wants.

  “At least try,” he said. “Just you take a day or two and give it a go.” I told him I had too much to do in the greenhouses, what with the beans and corn coming on ripe, and he said he’d take my shifts and no one would even care because there’s so little work right now at pumps and filters in the hydroplant.

  “Oh, and while you’re at it, put in how things went wrong with the world, so when things get better, people will know how it all happened.”

  I said that was just dumb. Other people have already written it down, what went wrong. The smart people, the people who weren’t four years old on the first day of THE END OF THE WORLD.

  I stared at the shiny encyclopedia pages in my hands. If they’d been ripped out of a real encyclopedia, words would already have been printed on both sides, but they were just copies got made right after THE EVENT. See, that’s how the olders always talk about it, and they say certain words and phrases like THE BEFORE and THE AFTER and THE EVENT and THE GOO as if they were being said all in capital letters. I stared at the pages, which were at least real paper, made from real wood pulp, and I told him if I do this I get more than a kiss. Max said sure, why not, so long as you’re honest, and he kissed me then and told me I was prettier than any of the other girls in Sanctuary (which is bullshit), and then he left me alone at the edge of the river. Which is where I’m sitting now. Sitting, writing, stopping to toss a rock that’s still a rock into the sludgy crimson river that isn’t still a river because most of the water went FACSIMILE twelve years ago.

  The river moves by about as slowly as I’m writing this down, and I count all the way up to fifty-three before the rock (real rock) actually sinks out of sight into the not-water anymore. At least the river still moves. Lots of them went too solid. I’ve seen rivers that stopped moving almost right after THE EVENT. These days, they just sit there. Red and hard. Not moving, and I’ve even walked on a couple. Some people call them Jesus Streams. Anyway, I walked all the way across a broad Jesus Stream on a dare. But it wasn’t much of a dare since I got a good dose of SWITCH OFF in me right away, back when I was four.

  Okay. Fine, Max. So I’m doing this even though it’s stupid.

  And you better not welch on that bet or I’ll kick your ass, hear that? Also, I’m not writing much about what happened. I shouldn’t waste my time writing any of that stuff. I don’t care what Max says, because that’s all down on paper somewhere else. I don’t even know most of it, anyway, that EVENT three-quarters of my whole life ago. What I know for sure doesn’t take long to set down. I learned what they bother to teach about THE GOO in classes. They don’t teach all that much because why bother telling us about THE BEFORE and WHAT WENT WRONG so we got THE EVENT, when what we need to be learning is how to run the hydros and keep the power on, horticulture, medicine, engineering, and keeping the livestock alive (Max’s dad used to oversee the rat cages before he was promoted to hydro duty, or Max would still be feeding pellets to rats and mice and guinea pigs). But, okay, Max:

  This Is What They Teach You

  Twelve years ago, in THE BEFORE, there were too many people in the world, and most of them were starving. There wasn’t enough oil. There wasn’t enough clean water. There wasn’t enough of much of anything because people kept having babies almost as fast as the rats do. They’d almost used up everything. There were wars (we don’t have those anymore, just the rovers and sneaks), and there were riots and terrorists. There were diseases we don’t have anymore. People started dying faster than anyone could hope to bury them, so they just pile
d up. I can’t imagine that many people.

  Ma’am Shen says there were more than nine billion people back then, but sometimes I think she surely exaggerates.

  Anyway, in the year 2048, in a LOST PLACE called Boston, in a school the olders call MIT, scientists were trying to solve all these problems, all of them at once. Maybe other scientists in other parts of the world at some other schools and some of THE COMPANIES were also trying, but SWITCH ON happened at MIT in Boston, which was in a place called New England. SWITCH ON, says Ma’am Shen, started out in a sort of bottle called a beaker. It gets called THE CRUCIBLE sometimes, and also SEAL 7, that one particular bottle. But I’ll just call it the bottle.

  Before I started writing this part, I made Max go back to the library and copy down some words and numbers for me on the back of one of these pages. I don’t want to sound more ignorant than I am, and it’s the least he could do. So, in the bottle, inside a lead box, were two things: a nutrient culture and nano-assemblers, which were microscopic machines. The assemblers used the culture to make copies of themselves. Idea was, make a thing you could eat that continuously made copies of itself, there’d be plenty enough food. And maybe this would also work with medicine and fuel and building materials and everything nine billion people needed. But the assemblers in the bottle were a TRIAL.

  So no one was sure what would happen. They made THE GOO, which Max’s notes call polyvinyl chloride, PVC, but I’ll call it plastic, ’cause that’s what it’s always called when people talk about it.

  People don’t talk about it much, though I think they might have back before the SWITCH OFF really started working.

  Okay, lost my train of thought.

  Oh, right. The bottle at MIT. The bottle that was supposed to save the world, but did just the opposite. The assemblers (or so say Max’s notes, and I can hardly read his handwriting) during the TRIAL were just four at the start, and four of them made four more of them. Those eight, though, because the production was exponential, made eight more assemblers. Thirty-six made seventy-two made 144 made 288 made 576 copies, then 1,152, 2,304, 4,608, and this was just in one hour. In a day, there were . . .

  I don’t know, Max didn’t write that part down.

  The assemblers went ROGUE and obviously the bottle wasn’t big enough to hold them. Probably not after a few million, I’m thinking. It shattered, and they got out of the lead box, and, lo and behold, they didn’t need the culture to make copies of themselves.

  Just about anything would do. Glass (the bottle). Stone. Metal (the lead box). Anything alive. Water, like the river. Not gases, so not air.

  Not water vapor, which is one reason we’re not all dead. The other reason, of course, is SWITCH OFF, which was made at another lab, and that one was in another LOST PLACE called France. People got injected with SWITCH OFF, and it was sprayed from the air in planes, and then bombs of SWITCH OFF were dropped all over. THE EVENT lasted two weeks. When it was more or less over, an estimated seventy-eight percent of the global biomass and a lot of the seas, rivers, streams, and the earth’s crust had stopped being what it was before and had become plastic. Oh, not all crimson, by the way. I don’t know why, but lots of different colors.

  I didn’t know all these numbers and dates. Max’s notes. What I know: my parents died in THE EVENT, my parents and all my family, and I was evacuated to Sanctuary here in Florida on the shores of the St. Johns crimson plastic river. I don’t think much more than that matters about THE EVENT. So this is where I’m gonna stop trying to be like the vandalized encyclopedia and tell the other story instead.

  The story that’s my story.

  Isn’t that what Max wanted me to start with?

  My Story

  (Cody Hernandez’s Story)

  I’m discovering, Max, that I can’t tell my story without telling lots of other little stories along the way.

  Like what happened the day that’s still giving me the bad dreams, that was almost a year ago, which means it was about five years after most of the Army and the National Guard soldiers left us here because all of a sudden there were those radio transmissions from Atlanta and Miami, and they went off to bring other survivors back to Sanctuary. Only, they never brought anyone back, because they never came back, and we still don’t know what happened to them. This is important to my story, because when the military was here with us, they kept a checkpoint and barricades on the east side of the big bridge over the St. Johns River, the Sanctuary side. But after they left, no one much bothered to man the checkpoint anymore, and the barricades stopped being anything more than a chain-link fence with a padlocked gate.

  So, the story of the Army and National Guard leaving to find those people, I had to get that out to get to my story. Because I never would have been able to climb over the fence if they hadn’t left. Or if they’d left but come back. They’d have stopped me. Or I’d probably never even have thought about climbing over.

  Back in THE BEFORE, the bridge was called the Mathews Bridge. Back in THE BEFORE, Sanctuary wasn’t here, and where it is was part of a city called Jacksonville. Now, though, it’s just the bridge, and this little part of Jacksonville is just Sanctuary. About a third of the way across the bridge, there’s an island below it. I have no idea if the island ever had a name. It’s all plastic now, anyway, like most of the bridge. A mostly brown island in a crimson river below a mostly brown plastic bridge. Because of what the sunlight and weather do to polyvinyl chloride—twelve years of sunlight and weather—chunks of the bridge have decayed and fallen away into the slow crimson river that runs down to the mostly-still-crimson sea. The island below the bridge used to be covered with brown plastic palmetto trees and underbrush, but now isn’t much more than a scabby-looking lump. The plastic degrades and then crumbles and is finally nothing but dust that the wind blows away.

  I wanted to know what was on the other side. It’s as simple as that.

  I considered asking Max to go with me, Max and maybe one or two others. Maybe the twins, Jessie and Erin (who are a year older than me and Max), maybe Beth, too. There are still all the warning signs on the fence, the ones the military put there. But people don’t go there. I suspect it reminds them of stuff from THE BEFORE that they don’t want to be reminded of, like how this is the only place to live now. How there’s really nowhere else to ever go. Which might be why none of the olders had ever actually told me to stay away from the bridge. Maybe it simply never occurred to them I might get curious, or that any of us might get curious.

  “What do you think’s over there?” I asked Max, the day I almost asked him to come with me. We were walking together between the river and some of the old cement walls that used to be buildings. I remember we’d just passed the wall where, long time ago, someone painted the word NOWHERE. Only, they (or somebody else) also painted a red stripe between the W and the H, so it says NOW HERE, same as it says NOWHERE.

  “Nothing,” he replied. “Nothing’s over there anymore,” and Max shaded his eyes from the bright summer sun. Where we were, it’s less than a mile across the river. It’s still easy to make out where the docks and cranes used to be. “You can see for yourself, Cody. Ain’t nothing over there except what the goo left.”

  Which is to say, there’s nothing over there.

  “You never wonder about it, though?”

  “Why would I? Besides, the bridge ain’t safe to cross anymore.” Max pointed south to the long span of it. Lots of the tall trusses, which used to be steel, have dropped away into the sludgy river a hundred and fifty feet below. Lots of the roadway, too. “You’d have to be crazy to try. And since there’s nothing over there, you’d have to be extra crazy. You know what suicide is, right?”

  “I think about it sometimes, is all. Not suicide, just finding out what’s over there.”

  “Same damn difference,” he said. “Anyway, we ought’a be getting back.” He turned away from the river and the bridge, the island and the other side of the river. So that’s why I didn’t ask Max to cross the bridge
with me. I knew he’d say no, and I was pretty sure he’d tell one of the olders, and then someone would stop me. I followed him back to the barracks, but I knew by then I was definitely going to climb the chain-link fence and cross the bridge.

  Oh, I almost forgot, and I want to put this in, write down what I can recall of it. On the way home, we came across Mr. Benedict.

  He was sitting on a rusty barrel not far from the NOW|HERE wall. In THE BEFORE, Mr. Benedict—Mr. Saul Benedict—was a physicist. He’s one of our teachers now, though he isn’t well and sometimes misses days. Max says something inside his head is broken. Something in his mind, but that he isn’t exactly crazy.

  Anyway, there he was on the barrel. He’s one of the few olders who ever talks much about THE GOO. That afternoon, he said hello to me and Max, but he had that somewhere-else tone to his voice. He sounded so distant, distant in time or in place. I don’t know. We said hello back. Then he pointed to the bridge, and that sort of made me shudder, and I wondered if he’d noticed us staring at it. He couldn’t have overheard us; we were too far away.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” he said.

  “What doesn’t make sense?” Max asked him.

  “It should have fallen. Steel and concrete, that’s one thing.

  Iron, steel, precompressed concrete, those materials, fine. But after the bots were done with it . . . that bridge, it should have collapsed under its own weight, even though, obviously, its not nearly as heavy or dense now as it was before. Plastic could never bear the load.”

  This is the thing about Saul Benedict: he asks questions no one ever asks, questions I don’t understand half the time. If you let him, he’ll go on and on about how something’s not right about our understanding of THE EVENT, how the science doesn’t add up right. I’ve heard him say the fumes from the outgassing plastic should have killed us all years ago. And how the earth’s mass would have been changed radically by the nano-assemblers, which would have altered gravity. How lots of the atmosphere would have been lost to space when gravity changed. And how plate tectonics would have come to a halt. Lots of technical science stuff like that, some of which I have to go to the library to find out what he means.