The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  I want your life.

  O, Uncle Budgie, Clyde thought, what did you do to me? O, my first wife, O my brother and my father, O my onetime mistress, yes, you were right, for yes, it’s true, you would have hated most of the things I had to do, I’ve been thinking about us, and it’s true, but you’d damn well better take care around me in the future.

  About the Author

  Peter Straub is the author of seventeen novels which have been translated into more than twenty languages. They include Ghost Story, Koko, Mr. X, In the Night Room, and two collaborations with Stephen King, The Talisman and Black House. He has written two volumes of poetry and two collections of short fiction. Straub edited the Library of America’s edition of H.P. Lovecraft’s Tales and the forthcoming Library of America’s two-volume anthology, American Fantastic Tales. He has won the British Fantasy Award, eight Bram Stoker Awards, two International Horror Guild Awards, and two World Fantasy Awards. In 1998, he was named Grand Master at the World Horror Convention. In 2006, he was given the HWA’s Life Achievement Award and, in 2008, both the International Horror Guild’s Living Legend Award and the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award by Poets & Writers.

  Story Notes

  Peter Straub is, without doubt, a master of the dark. This strange little gem plays on the idea of the doppelgänger, a theme the author addresses with stunning originality in his novel Mr. X (1999). Although Clyde here is not one of them, Straub has several fictional alter-egos for himself as well: novelist Tim Underhill (who appears in or even “authors” Straubian fiction) and, most recently, in Lee Harwood, the narrator of Straub’s latest novel, the superb A Dark Matter (2010).

  Then there’s the late Professor Putney Tyson Ridge, chair and sole member of the Department of Popular Culture at Popham College, who sees Straub as a dismal failure, “a case study in the destructive effects of misguided praise and vulgar popularity upon a writer too foolish to accept his limitations.” Perhaps even the professor would find literary merit in this story

  THE WIDE, CARNIVOROUS SKY

  JOHN LANGAN

  I

  9:13 pm

  From the other side of the campfire, Lee said, “So it’s a vampire.”

  “I did not say vampire,” Davis said. “Did you hear me say vampire?”

  It was exactly the kind of thing Lee would say, the gross generalization that obscured more than it clarified. Not for the first time since they’d set out up the mountain, Davis wondered at their decision to include Lee in their plans.

  Lee held up his right hand, index finger extended. “It has the fangs.”

  “A mouthful of them.”

  Lee raised his middle finger. “It turns into a bat.”

  “No—its wings are like a bat’s.”

  “Does it walk around with them?”

  “They—it extrudes them from its arms and sides.”

  “ ‘Extrudes’?” Lee said.

  Han chimed in: “College.”

  Not this shit again, Davis thought. He rolled his eyes to the sky, dark blue studded by early stars. Although the sun’s last light had drained from the air, his stomach clenched. He dropped his gaze to the fire.

  The Lieutenant spoke. “He means the thing extends them out of its body.”

  “Oh,” Lee said. “Sounds like it turns into a bat to me.”

  “Uh-huh,” Han said.

  “Whatever,” Davis said. “It doesn’t—”

  Lee extended his ring finger and spoke over him. “It sleeps in a coffin.”

  “Not a coffin—”

  “I know, a flying coffin.”

  “It isn’t—it’s in low-Earth orbit, like a satellite.”

  “What was it you said it looked like?” the Lieutenant asked. “A cocoon?”

  “A chrysalis,” Davis said.

  “Same thing,” the Lieutenant said.

  “More or less,” Davis said, unwilling to insist on the distinction because, even a year and three-quarters removed from Iraq, the Lieutenant was still the Lieutenant and you did not argue the small shit with him.

  “Coffin, cocoon, chrysalis,” Lee said, “it has to be in it before sunset or it’s in trouble.”

  “Wait,” Han said. “Sunset.”

  “Yes,” Davis began.

  “The principle’s the same,” the Lieutenant said. “There’s a place it has to be and a time it has to be there by.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Lee said. He raised his pinky. “And, it drinks blood.”

  “Yeah,” Davis said, “it does.”

  “Lots,” Han said.

  “Yeah,” the Lieutenant said.

  For a moment, the only sounds were the fire popping and, somewhere out in the woods, an owl prolonging its question. Davis thought of Fallujah.

  “Okay,” Lee said, “how do we kill it?”

  II

  2004

  There had been rumors, stories, legends of the things you might see in combat. Talk to any of the older guys, the ones who’d done tours in Vietnam, and you heard about a jungle in which you might meet the ghosts of Chinese invaders from five centuries before; or serve beside a grunt whose heart had been shot out a week earlier but who wouldn’t die; or find yourself stalked by what you thought was a tiger but had a tail like a snake and a woman’s voice. The guys who’d been part of the first war in Iraq—“The good one,” a sailor Davis knew called it—told their own tales about the desert, about coming across a raised tomb, its black stone worn free of markings, and listening to someone laughing inside it all the time it took you to walk around it; about the dark shapes you might see stalking through a sandstorm, their arms and legs a child’s stick-figures; about the sergeant who swore his reflection had been killed so that, when he looked in a mirror now, a corpse stared back at him. Even the soldiers who’d returned from Afghanistan talked about vast forms they’d seen hunched at the crests of mountains; the street in Kabul that usually ended in a blank wall, except when it didn’t; the pale shapes you might glimpse darting into the mouth of the cave you were about to search. A lot of what you heard was bullshit, of course, the plot of a familiar movie or TV show adapted to new location and cast of characters, and a lot of it started off sounding as if it were headed somewhere interesting then ran out of gas halfway through. But there were some stories about which, even if he couldn’t quite credit their having happened, some quality in the teller’s voice, or phrasing, caused him to suspend judgment.

  During the course of his Associate’s Degree, Davis had taken a number of courses in psychology—preparation for a possible career as a psychologist—and in one of these, he had learned that, after several hours of uninterrupted combat (he couldn’t remember how many, had never been any good with numbers), you would hallucinate. You couldn’t help it; it was your brain’s response to continuous unbearable stress. He supposed that at least some of the stories he’d listened to in barracks and bars might owe themselves to such cause, although he was unwilling to categorize them all as symptoms. This was not due to any overriding belief in either organized religion or disorganized superstition; it derived more from principle, specifically, a conclusion that an open mind was the best way to meet what continually impressed him as an enormous world packed full of many things.

  By Fallujah, Davis had had no experiences of the strange, the bizarre, no stories to compare with those he’d accumulated over the course of basic and his deployment. He hadn’t been thinking about that much as they took up their positions south of the city; all of his available attention had been directed at the coming engagement. Davis had walked patrol, had felt the crawl of the skin at the back of your neck as you made your way down streets crowded with men and women who’d been happy enough to see Saddam pulled down from his pedestal but had long since lost their patience with those who’d operated the crane. He’d ridden in convoys, his head light, his heart throbbing at the base of his throat as they passed potential danger after potential danger, a metal can on the right shoulder, what might be a shell on the
left, and while they’d done their best to reinforce their Hummers with whatever junk they could scavenge, Davis was acutely aware that it wasn’t enough, a consequence of galloping across the Kuwaiti desert with The Army You Had. Davis had stood checkpoint, his mouth dry as he sighted his M-16 on an approaching car that appeared full of women in black burkas who weren’t responding to the signs to slow down, and he’d wondered if they were suicide bombers, or just afraid, and how much closer he could allow them before squeezing the trigger. However much danger he’d imagined himself in, inevitably, he’d arrived after the sniper had opened fire and fled, or passed the exact spot an IED would erupt two hours later, or been on the verge of aiming for the car’s engine when it screeched to a halt. It wasn’t that Davis hadn’t discharged his weapon; he’d served support for several nighttime raids on suspected insurgent strongholds, and he’d sent his own bullets in pursuit of the tracers that scored the darkness. But support wasn’t the same thing as kicking in doors, trying to kill the guy down the hall who was trying to kill you. It was not the same as being part of the Anvil.

  That was how the Lieutenant had described their role. “Our friends in the United States Marine Corps are going to play the Hammer,” he had said the day before. “They will sweep into Fallujah from east and west and they will drive what hostiles they do not kill outright south, where we will be waiting to act as the Anvil. The poet Goëthe said that you must be either hammer or anvil. We will be both, and we are going to crush the hostiles between us.”

  After the Lieutenant’s presentation, Han had said, “Great—so the jarheads have all the fun,” with what Davis judged a passable imitation of regret, a false sentiment fairly widely held. Davis had been sure, however, the certainty a ball of lead weighting his gut, that this time was going to be different. Part of it was that the Lieutenant had known one of the contractors who’d been killed, incinerated, and strung up at the Saddam Bridge last April. Davis wasn’t clear exactly how the men had been acquainted, or how well, but the Lieutenant had made no secret of his displeasure at not being part of the first effort to (re)take the city in the weeks following the men’s deaths. He had been—you couldn’t say happy, exactly, at the failure of that campaign—but he was eager for what was shaping up to be a larger-scale operation. Though seven months gone, the deaths and dishonorings of his acquaintances had left the Lieutenant an appetite for this mission. Enough to cause him to disobey his orders and charge into Fallujah’s southern section? Davis didn’t think so, but there was a reason the man still held the rank of Lieutenant when his classmates and colleagues were well into their Captaincies.

  The other reason for Davis’s conviction that, this time, something was on its way to him was a simple matter of odds. It wasn’t possible—it was not possible that you could rack up this much good luck and not have a shitload of the bad bearing down on you like a SCUD on an anthill. A former altar boy, he was surprised at the variety of prayers he remembered—not just the Our Father and the Hail Mary, but the Apostles’ Creed, the Memorare, and the Hail, Holy Queen. As he disembarked the Bradley and ran for the shelter of a desert-colored house, the sky an enormous, pale blue dome above him, Davis mumbled his way through his prayers with a fervency that would have pleased his mother and father no end. But even as his lips shaped the words, he had the strong sense that this was out of God’s hands, under the control of one of those medieval demi-goddesses, Dame Fortune or something.

  Later, recovering first in Germany, then at Walter Reed, Davis had thought that walking patrol, riding convoy, standing checkpoint, he must have been saved from something truly awful each and every time, for the balance to be this steep.

  III

  10:01pm

  “I take it stakes are out,” the Lieutenant said.

  “Sir,” Lee said, “I unloaded half a clip easy into that sonovabitch, and I was as close to him as I am to you.”

  “Closer,” Han said.

  “The point is, he took a half-step backwards—maybe—before he tore my weapon out of my hands and fractured my skull with it.”

  “That’s what I’m saying,” the Lieutenant said. “I figure it has to be . . . what? Did you get your hands on some kind of major ordnance, Davis? An rpg? A Stinger? I’ll love you like a son—hell, I’ll adopt you as my own if you tell me you have a case of Stingers concealed under a bush somewhere. Those’ll give the fucker a welcome he won’t soon forget.”

  “Fucking-A,” Han said.

  “Nah,” Lee said. “A crate of Willy Pete oughta just about do it. Serve his ass crispy-fried!”

  Davis shook his head. “No Stingers and no white phosphorous. Fire isn’t going to do us any good.”

  “How come?” Lee said.

  “Yeah,” Han said.

  “If I’m right about this thing spending its nights in low-Earth orbit—in its ‘coffin’—and then leaving that refuge to descend into the atmosphere so it can hunt, its skin has to be able to withstand considerable extremes of temperature.”

  “Like the Space Shuttle,” the Lieutenant said. “Huh. For all intents and purposes, it’s fireproof.”

  “Oh,” Lee said.

  “Given that it spends some of its time in the upper atmosphere, as well as actual outer space, I’m guessing substantial cold wouldn’t have much effect, either.”

  “We can’t shoot it, can’t burn it, can’t freeze it,” Lee said. “Tell me why we’re here, again?” He waved at the trees fringing the clearing. “Aside from the scenery, of course.”

  “Pipe down,” the Lieutenant said.

  “When we shot at it,” Davis said, “I’m betting half our fire missed it.” He held up his hand to the beginning of Lee’s protest. “That’s no reflection on anyone. The thing was fast, cheetah-taking-down-a-gazelle fast. Not to mention, it’s so goddamned thin . . . Anyway, of the shots that connected with it, most of them were flesh wounds.” He raised his hand to Lee, again. “Those who connected with it,” a nod to Lee, “were so close their fire passed clean through it.”

  “Which is what I was saying,” Lee said.

  “There’s a lot of crazy shit floating around space,” Davis said, “little particles of sand, rock, ice, metal. Some of them get to moving pretty fast. If you’re doing repairs to the Space Station and one of those things hits you, it could ruin your whole day. Anything that’s going to survive up there is going to have to be able to deal with something that can punch a hole right through you.”

  “It’s got a self-sealing mechanism,” the Lieutenant said. “When Lee fired into it, its body treated the bullets as so many dust-particles.”

  “And closed right up,” Davis said. “Like some kind of super-clotting-factor. Maybe that’s what it uses the blood for.”

  “You’re saying it’s bulletproof, too?” Lee said.

  “Shit,” Han said.

  “Not—more like, bullet-resistant.”

  “Think of it as a mutant healing ability,” the Lieutenant said, “like Wolverine.”

  “Oh,” Han said.

  “Those claws it has,” Lee said, “I guess Wolverine isn’t too far off the mark.”

  “No,” Han said. “Sabertooth.”

  “What?” Lee said. “The fuck’re you going on about?”

  “Sabertooth’s claws.” Han held up his right hand, fingers splayed. He curled his fingers into a fist. “Wolverine’s claws.”

  “Man has a point,” the Lieutenant said.

  “Whatever,” Lee said.

  “Here’s the thing,” Davis said, “it’s bullet-resistant, but it can still feel pain. Think about how it reacted when Lee shot it. It didn’t tear his throat open: it took the instrument that had hurt it and used that to hurt Lee. You see what I’m saying?”

  “Kind of,” Lee said.

  “Think about what drove it off,” Davis said. “Remember?”

  “Of course,” the Lieutenant said. He nodded at Han. “It was Han sticking his bayonet in the thing’s side.”

  For which it crushed hi
s skull, Davis could not stop himself from thinking. He added his nod to the Lieutenant’s. “Yes he did.”

  “How is that different from shooting it?” Lee said.

  “Your bullets went in one side and out the other,” Davis said. “Han’s bayonet stuck there. The thing’s healing ability could deal with an in-and-out wound no problem; something like this, though: I think it panicked.”

  “Panicked?” Lee said. “It didn’t look like it was panicking to me.”

  “Then why did it take off right away?” Davis said.

  “It was full; it heard more backup on the way; it had an appointment in fucking Samara. How the fuck should I know?”

  “What’s your theory?” the Lieutenant said.

  “The type of injury Han gave it would be very bad if you’re in a vacuum. Something opening you up like that and leaving you exposed . . . ”

  “You could vent some or even all of the blood you worked so hard to collect,” the Lieutenant said. “You’d want to get out of a situation like that with all due haste.”

  “Even if your healing factor could seal the wound’s perimeter,” Davis said, “there’s still this piece of steel in you that has to come out and, when it does, will reopen the injury.”

  “Costing you still more blood,” the Lieutenant said.

  “Most of the time,” Davis said, “I mean, like, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a million, the thing would identify any such threats long before they came that close. You saw its ears, its eyes.”

  “Black on black,” Lee said. “Or, no—black over black, like the corneas had some kind of heavy tint and what was underneath was all pupil.”

  “Han got lucky,” Davis said. “The space we were in really wasn’t that big. There was a lot of movement, a lot of noise—”

  “Not to mention,” Lee said, “all the shooting and screaming.”

  “The right set of circumstances,” the Lieutenant said.

  “Saved our asses,” Lee said, reaching over to pound Han’s shoulder. Han ducked to the side, grinning his hideous smile.