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

by Paula Guran [editor]

  I’m pretty sure very few people bother to consider whether or not Mr. Benedict is right. Maybe not because they believe the questions are nonsense, but because no one needs more uncertainty than we have already. I’m not even sure I spend much time on whether or not he’s making sense. I just look up words to see what the questions mean.

  “But it hasn’t fallen down,” Max protested, turning back toward the bridge. “Well, okay. Some pieces broke off, but not the whole bridge.”

  “That’s just the problem,” Mr. Benedict said. “It hasn’t fallen down. You do the math. It would have fallen immediately.”

  “Max is terrible at math,” I told Mr. Benedict, and he frowned.

  “He doesn’t apply himself, Cody. You know that don’t you, Max? You don’t apply yourself. If you did, you’d be an exemplary student.”

  We told him we were late for chores, said our until laters, and left him sitting on the rusty barrel, muttering to himself.

  “Nutty old fart,” Max said, and I didn’t say anything.

  Before I went to cross the bridge, I did some studying up first. In the library, there’s a book about the city that used to be Jacksonville, and I sat at one of the big tables and read about the Mathews Bridge. It was built in 1953, which made it exactly one hundred years old last year. But what mattered was that it’s about a mile and a half across. One morning, I talked Mr. Kleinberg at the garage into lending me his stopwatch, and I figured out I walk about three miles an hour, going at an easy pace. Not walking fast or jogging, just walking. So, barring obstructions, if I could go straight across, it would only take me about half an hour. Half an hour across, half an hour back. Maybe poke about on the other side (which, by the way, used to be called Arlington) for a couple of hours, and I’d be back before anyone even noticed I’d gone. For all I knew, other kids had already done it. Even more likely, some of the olders.

  I picked the day I’d go—July 18, which was on a Friday. I’d go right after my morning chores, during late-morning break, and be sure to be back by lunch. I didn’t tell Max or anyone else. No one would ever be the wiser. I filled a canteen and I went.

  It was easy getting over the fence. There isn’t any barbed wire, like on some of the fences around Sanctuary. I snagged my jeans on the sharp twists of wire at the top, but only tore a very small hole that would be easy to patch. On the other side, the road’s still asphalt for about a hundred yards or so, before the plastic begins.

  Like I said, I’d walked on THE GOO before, so I knew what to expect. It’s very slightly springy, and sometimes you press shallow footprints into it that disappear after a few minutes. On the bridge, there was the fine dust that accumulates as the plastic breaks down.

  Not as much as I’d have expected, but probably that’s because the wind blows it away. But there were heaps of it where the wind couldn’t reach, piled like tiny sand dunes. I left footprints in the dust that anyone could have followed.

  I glanced back over my shoulder a few times, just to be certain no one was following me. No one was. I kept to the westbound lane. There were cracks in the roadway, in what once had been cement. Some were hardly an inch, but others a foot or two across and maybe twice as deep, so I’d have to jump over those. I skirted the places where the bridge was coming apart in chunks, and couldn’t help but think about what all Mr. Benedict had said. It shouldn’t be here. None of it should still be here, but it is. So what don’t we know? How much don’t we know?

  I walked the brown bridge, and on either side of me, far below, the lazy crimson St. Johns River flowed. I walked, and a quarter of a mile from the fence, I reached the spot where the bridge spans the island. I went to the guardrail and peered over the edge. I leaned against the rail, and it cracked loudly and dropped away. I almost lost my balance and tumbled down to the crimson river. I stepped back, trying not to think about what it would be like to slowly sink and drown in that. . . .

  And I thought about turning around and heading back. From this point on, I constantly thought about going back, but I didn’t. I walked a little faster than before, though, suddenly wanting to be done with this even if I still felt like I had to do it.

  I kept hearing Max talking inside my head, saying what he’d said, over and over again.

  Since there’s nothing over there, you’d have to be extra crazy.

  You know what suicide is, right?

  Ain’t nothing over there except what THE GOO left.

  It took me a little longer to reach the halfway point than I thought it would, than my three-miles-an-hour walking had led me to believe it would. It was all the cracks, most likely. Having to carefully jump them, or find ways around them. And I kept stopping to gaze out and marvel at the ugly wasteland THE GOO had made of the land beyond the Mathews Bridge. I don’t know if there’s a name for the middle of a bridge, the highest point of a bridge. But it was right about the time I reached that point that I spotted the car. It was still pretty far off, maybe halfway to the other end. It was skewed sideways across the two eastbound lanes, on the other side of the low divider that I’m sure used to be concrete but isn’t anymore.

  But all the cars were cleared off the bridge by the military years ago. They were towed to the other side or pushed into the crimson river. There weren’t supposed to be any cars on the bridge. But here was this one. The sunlight glinted off yellow fiberglass and silver chrome, and I could tell the nano-assemblers hadn’t gotten hold of it, that it was still made of what the factory built it from. And I had two thoughts, one after the other: Where did this car come from? And, Why hasn’t anyone noticed it? The second thought was sort of silly because it’s not like anyone really watches the bridge, not since most of the Army and National Guard went away.

  Then I thought, How long’s it been there? And, Why didn’t it come all the way across? And, What happened to the driver? All those questions in my head, I was starting to feel like Saul Benedict. It was an older car, one of the electrics that were already obsolete by the time THE EVENT occurred.

  “Cody, you go back,” I said out loud, and my voice seemed huge up there on the bridge. It was like thunder. “You go back and tell someone. Let them deal with this.”

  But then I’d have to explain what I was doing way out on the bridge alone.

  Are you enjoying this, Max? I mean, if I’ve let you read it. If I did, I hope to hell you’re enjoying it, because I’m already sweating, drops of sweat darkening the encyclopedia pages. Right now I feel like that awful day on the bridge. I could stop now. I could turn back now. I could. I won’t, but I could. Doesn’t matter. I’ll keep writing, Max, and you’ll keep reading.

  I kept walking. I didn’t turn back, like a smarter girl would have done. A smarter girl who understood it was more important to tell the olders what I’d found than to worry about getting in trouble for being out on the bridge. There was a strong gust of wind, warm from the south, and the dust on the bridge was swept up so I had to partly cover my face with my arm. But I could see the tiny brown dust devils swirling across the road.

  Right after the wind, while the dust was still settling, I came to an especially wide crack in the roadway. It was so wide and deep, and when I looked down, the bottom was hidden in shadow. It didn’t go all the way through, or I’d not have been able to see down there. I had to climb over the barricade into the eastbound lane, into the lane with the car, to get around it. I haven’t mentioned the crumbling plastic seagulls I kept finding. Well, I figured they’d been seagulls. They’d been birds, and were big enough to have been seagulls. They littered the bridge, birds that died twelve years ago when I was four. Once I was only, I don’t know, maybe twenty-five yards from the car, I stopped for a minute or two. I squinted, trying to see inside, but the windows were tinted and I couldn’t make out anything at all in there.

  The car looked so shiny and new. No way it had been sitting out in the weather very long. There weren’t even any pieces of the plastic girders lying on it, no dents from decayed and falling GOO, so it
was a newcomer to the bridge, and I think that scared me most of all. By then, my heart was pounding—thumping like mad in my chest and ears and even the tip ends of my fingers—and I was sweating. Not the normal kinda sweat from walking, but a cold sweat like when I wake up from the nightmares of this day I’m writing about. My mouth was so, so dry. I felt a little sick to my belly, and wondered if it was breathing in all that dust.

  “No point in stopping now,” I said, maybe whispering, and my voice was huge out there in all the empty above and below and around the Mathews Bridge. “So when they ask what I found, I can tell them all of it, not just I found a car on the bridge.” I considered the possibility that it might have been rovers, might be a trap. Them lying there in wait until someone takes the bait, then they ask for supplies to let me go. We hadn’t seen rovers—looters—in a year or so, but that didn’t mean they weren’t still out there, trying to get by on the scraps of nothing they found and whatever they could steal. Lower than the sneaks, the rovers. At least the sneaks never kill anyone. They just slip in and rob you when no one’s looking. Ma’am Shen says they’re all insane, and I expect that’s the truth of it. I wished I’d brought a knife (I have a lock-blade I keep in my footlocker), but that was dumb, ’cause rovers carry guns and bows and shit. What good’s a knife for a fifteen-year-old girl out on her own, so exposed she might as well be naked. No chance but to turn around and run if things went bad.

  I shouted, “Anybody in there?” At the very top of my voice I shouted it. When no one answered, I shouted again, and still nobody answered me. I hadn’t thought they would, but it didn’t hurt to try.

  “You don’t need to be scared of me,” I called out. “And I ain’t got nothing worth stealing.” Which I knew was dumb because if it was rovers they wouldn’t be after what I had on my person, but what they could get for me.

  No one called back, and so I started walking again.

  Pretty soon, I was close enough I could make out the plates on the front of the vehicle—Alabama, which we all thought was another LOST PLACE, since that’s what the Army guys had told us. On the map of what once was the United States hanging on the wall in the library, Alabama was colored in red, like all the LOST PLACES (which is most of the map). But here was a car from Alabama, and it couldn’t have been sitting on the bridge very long at all, not and still be so shiny and clean. Maybe I counted my footsteps after shouting and not getting an answer, but if so, I can’t remember how many I took.

  There was another southerly gust, and more swirling dust devils, and this time the bridge seemed to sway just a little, which didn’t make my stomach feel any better.

  Then I was finally at the car. Up close, it was a little dirtier than it had seemed from far away. There were a few dents and dings, a little rust, but nothing more than that. None of the tires were even flat. I stared at the tinted windows and waited for rovers to jump out and point their weapons at me, but that didn’t happen. For the first time, I considered the possibility that the doors might all be locked, and I didn’t even have anything to break out the windows.

  I looked past the car at the ruins of Arlington, and considered just sticking to my plan, forget the car for now, poke around over there a bit, then head home again. And yeah, tell the olders about the car and take whatever punishment I’d have coming.

  I leaned forward, peering in through the glass, but the tinting was too dark even right up on it like that. I gripped the driver’s side door handle, and it was very hot from the Florida sun. It was hot enough I almost pulled my hand back, but only almost. Instead, I gave it a quick twist to the left, and the tumblers clicked. Which meant it wasn’t locked after all.

  I took a deep breath and pulled up on the door. It came open easy as pie—like the olders say. It lifted, rising above my head, above the roof. The hinges didn’t even squeak. There was only a soft whoosh from hydraulics and pistons. Scalding air spilled out of the car.

  You know exactly what I found in there, Max? It seems wicked to write it down on these “borrowed” encyclopedia pages. It seems wrong, but I’ll do it anyhow. Just in case you’re right, because yeah, I want the dreams to stop. Dead people don’t have dreams.

  Dead people probably don’t have anything at all, so it’s stupid me worrying like this, hesitating and drawing it out.

  The door opened, and there were two people inside.

  There was what was left of two people.

  Like the might-have-been seagulls, THE GOO had gotten to them, and they were that same uniform shade of bluish green all live things go when the nano-assemblers get hold of them.

  I stepped back immediately and turned my head away. I even thought I might puke. It’s not that I’d never seen a person who’d died that way; it’s just I hadn’t seen any in a long, long time, and you forget. Or I’d forgotten. I covered my mouth, not wanting to be sick and have to see my half-digested breakfast spattered all over the road at my feet. I leaned forward, hands on knees, and took deep breaths and counted to thirty. Someone taught me to do that whenever I’m afraid I might be about to throw up, count to thirty, but I can’t remember who it was. Not that it matters.

  When I felt a little better, 1 looked again. The woman was sitting with her back to the door, and her arms were wrapped tightly around the gift. The woman’s fingers disappeared into the gift’s hair—hair and hand all one and the same now. I figured they drove as far as they could, drove until they were too far gone to keep going. It takes hours and hours for the infected to die. Like the seagulls, the weather hadn’t been at them, and the woman and the gift looked like they’d just been popped fresh out of a mold, like the molds they use in the machine shop to turn non-GOO plastic into stuff we need. Every single detail, no matter how fragile, was still intact. Their plastic eyebrows, each hair, their eyes open and staring nowhere at all. Their skin was almost exactly the color of Ma’am Lillian’s teal-zircon pendant. Only completely opaque instead of translucent.

  Their clothes and their jewelry (I noticed the woman’s silver earrings), those hadn’t changed at all. But it didn’t strike me odd until later, like the car being okay didn’t really strike me odd, though it should have.

  I still felt dizzy even if the first shock of seeing them was fading. Even if I was just seeing them now, not seeing them and wanting to run away. I reached inside the car and touched the back of the woman’s neck. I shouldn’t have, but I did. It was just a little bit tacky from the heat, a little soft, and I left fingerprints behind.

  I thought, You leave them out here long enough, shut up and baking inside that car, they’ll melt away to shapeless globs long before the plastic has a chance to get brittle. I thought that, and pulled my hand back. I was relieved to see none of the PVC had come off on my fingers. But I rubbed them on my jeans anyway. I rubbed until it’s a wonder my skin didn’t start bleeding.

  They looked like dolls.

  They looked almost like the mannequins in the busted shop windows inside Sanctuary.

  But they’d both been alive, flesh and bone and breathing, and it couldn’t have been more than a few days before. A week at the most. I stared at them. I wondered which of them died first. I wondered lots of stuff there’s not much point writing down. Then I glanced into the backseat. And right then, that’s when I thought my heart my might stop, just stop beating like the girl’s and the woman’s had finally stopped beating. There was a cardboard box in the back, and there was a baby in a blanket inside the box. I don’t know how the hell it was still alive, how it had been spared by THE GOO or by the heat inside the car, but it was still alive. It looked at me. I saw it was sick, from the broiling day trapped in the automobile, but goddamn it was alive. It saw me and began to bawl, so I rushed around to the other side of the car and opened that door, too. I lifted the cardboard box out careful as I could and set it on the bridge, and then I sat down next to it. I screwed the lid off my canteen and sprinkled water on its forehead and lips. I finally pushed back the blanket and took the baby in my arms. I’d never,
ever held a baby. We don’t have many in Sanctuary. And the ones we do have, the dozen or so, not just any kid can go picking them up. Just the mothers and fathers, the nurses and doctors. The baby’s face was so red, like she’d been roasting alive in there, so I sprinkled more water on its cheeks and forehead. It’s eyes were glassy, feverish, and it didn’t cry as loudly as I thought it should have been crying. I sat there and rocked it, shushing it, the way I’d seen people do with babies. I sat there trying to remember a lullaby.

  No need to draw this part out, Max.

  The baby, she died in my arms. She was just too hot, and I’d come along too late to save her from the sun. Maybe me sprinkling the water on her had been too much. Maybe just seeing me had been too much. Maybe she just picked then to die. And I wanted to cry, but I didn’t. I don’t know why. I knew I ought to, and I still know I ought to have, but I just sat there holding her close to me like she wasn’t dead. Like she was only asleep and was gonna wake up. I sat there staring at the blue-green plastic people in the front seat, at the sky, at the car.

  In my bad dreams, there are wheeling, screeching gulls in that blue-white sky, and it goes on forever, on out into space, into starry blackness, down to blue skies on other worlds without women and men and youngers, where none of these things have ever happened and where THE EVENT hasn’t occurred and THE GOO will never reach. Where it’s still THE BEFORE, and will never be THE AFTER.