The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 12

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Well, thank you,” Anhell exclaimed, giving light skin, delighted surprise, a charming smile. “It’s so nice a you to say that!”

  Oh see? We can’t have this. He got the broad ready to put the pussy on him right here!

  “Bissh,” she slushed, hefting the machète in a manner that said I’m not the one. “You can run or you can die. How you playing it?”

  Anhell peeped her face real quick for resolve, and said, “Yeah, sorry,” to the policewoman regretfully. “But you better run now, for real.”

  Brownskin sister heard and took her leave in such haste, the peaked hat of her uniform was knocked off her head, the hair underneath all short, every which way, and toe up.

  He liked exactly the kind of dudes you’d expect, elevens on the ten-point scale, this jet-black Senegalese model, that Colombian semipro futbolista, another “big dick country ass redbone nigga from down south,” quote unquote, overheard. Anhell only wanted the brown girls, though, and they had to look just like her.

  4.5 police massacre, October

  4.6 state funeral, November

  4.7 police massacre, October

  EULOGY DONE, THE apostle widows came to surround, weeping, the beautiful one at the podium. They clutched one another’s fingers, their red-blotched wet faces becoming downright ugly with sobs. The cameras knew where and on whom to linger, blonde Jesus widow who, blinking her tear-jeweled black lashes, smiled bravely and freed up two or three telegenic drops for St. Patrick’s Cathedral, for New York City, and for the United States of America. Did her mascara smudge or run? Fuck no! And, God, did the bitch look good!

  “Aww...!” said Anhell, every gambler’s exclamation, when his bet goes bad.

  Cracking up, she fell back on the couch. “Didn’t I say, nigga?” She rolled around on the pillows. “Told your ass!”

  Anhell pointed at the recession of president, mayor, widows. “Shit came out just like you said, though. And we ain’t even done yet.” Tumbler in hand, he took the bottle in his other, liquoring up his meltwater and ice. “Copkillers? Godkillers! And we don’t stop.” As if, sitting down, he just couldn’t get the feeling out right, Anhell jumped to his feet shouting at the blue televised ranks filing from the church. “Fuck the poe lease! It’s on for life. We gunning for alla you motherfuckers!” His eyes came alight, red as the EXIT sign far down a dark hallway. In his wild hand, the bottle sloshing. “Fiddy shots shot, fiddy cops dropped!” His pretty lips sputtering, like a lighter that won’t catch, sparks, not spit. And though it was commercials by now, this nigga steady yelling. “... end up dying, staring at the roof the church, ya ladies crying...!”

  She knelt up on the couch and smacked him in the face with a throw pillow.

  Anhell woke up. “Oh, fuck, though, baby,” he said, shaking his head. “You seent that? Devil had me like tweaking!”

  “Yeah, I saw,” she said. “Now gimme that fucking bottle. You spilling shit everywhere...”

  4.6 state funeral, November

  4.7 police massacre, October

  SHE’D ONCE SEEN his long curly hair blown out bone-straight, a black curtain hanging to his ass. Now, auburn, it sat heavily upon his shoulders—huge and soaking wet. She reached into his hair and wrung a handful like some sponge that had sopped deep spill off the slaughterhouse floor. The squishing mass gushed police blood. She pulled his salty mouth down to hers and they kissed.

  Spots lit the night out front to anachronous noon, splashing blue ’n’ red emergency lights, a cordon of NYPD ESU with machine guns at every surrounding intersection, snipers on every overlooking rooftop. From ‘three’ a SWAT team was counting down to storm the place. They made fools of the whole kingdom arrayed against them, and walked out through deep hell, across the burning floor of Gehenna.

  Tag

  TO AVOID THE curfew they took the subway downtown at rush hour every three or four days. They’d walk in some other borough until happening upon today’s luckless whiteboys in blue. Afterwards, they’d come on back uptown. Once, they went all the way out to Staten Island on the ferry, and it was like a date, the sunlight on the water, Statue of Liberty, a whale breaching in the harbor. Incredibly romantic—though probably not for that pair of transit cops at the terminal, whose last vision of this world was of two shadows swaggering up through heat shimmer, a teenage lankiness and the width and curves and thickness of a woman, barely glimpsed against a whole continent of fire. But the City under martial law was boring as fuck, and so she called Mama and got her talking again on that BLM tip. Kind of slipped the question to her sideways. Hey, what’s the worst police department in America?

  “Chicago,” Mama answered. “Or maybe the LAPD. Why you asking?”

  “No reason,” she said. “Oh, by the way, me and Anhell been talking about getting outta town for awhile. Maybe just taking the bus somewhere, a road trip.”

  “Cali?” he said, getting excited when she’d made up her mind. Nobody likes wintertime in New York. The same day their cash allowance came through, they packed some underwear, machète and gun, their pills. A backpack each, just the necessary.

  “What we gonna do, though,” he asked, “when the prescriptions run out?”

  “Walk up in any pharmacy,” she said, “and be like, I want another month’s worf, or every motherfucker up in here getting they head chopped off.”

  “Oh, yup yup,” said Anhell, seeing the sense, nodding. “That’d work!”

  And so down to Port Authority, and on a Greyhound going west.

  AN EVENING WITH SEVERYN GRIMES

  Rich Larson

  Rich Larson (richwlarson.tumblr.com) was born in West Africa, has studied in Rhode Island and worked in Spain, and now writes from Ottawa, Canada. His short work has been nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon Award, featured on io9.com, and appears in numerous Year’s Best anthologies as well as in magazines such as Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed and Apex. His debut short collection, Tomorrow Factory: Collected Fiction, comes out in May 2018 from Talos Press and his debut novel Annex, first book of The Violet Wars trilogy, follows in July 2018 from Orbit Books.

  “DO YOU HAVE to wear the Fawkes in here?” Girasol asked, sliding into the orthochair. Its worn wings crinkled, leaking silicon, as it adjusted to her shape. The plastic stuck cold to her shoulder blades, and she shivered.

  “No.” Pierce made no move to pull off the smirking mask. “It makes you nervous,” he explained, groping around in the guts of his open Adidas track-bag, his tattooed hand emerging with the hypnotic. “That’s a good enough reason to wear it.”

  Girasol didn’t argue, just tipped her dark head back, positioning herself over the circular hole they’d punched through the headrest. Beneath it, a bird’s nest of circuitry, mismatched wiring, blinking blue nodes. And in the center of the nest: the neural jack, gleaming wet with disinfectant jelly.

  She let the slick white port at the top of her spine snick open.

  “No cheap sleep this time,” Pierce said, flicking his nail against the inky vial. “Get ready for a deep slice, Sleeping Beauty. Prince Charming’s got your shit. Highest-grade Dozr a man can steal.” He plugged it into a battered needler, motioned for her arm. “I get a kiss or what?”

  Girasol proffered her bruised wrist. Let him hunt around collapsed veins while she said, coldly, “Don’t even think about touching me when I’m under.”

  Pierce chuckled, slapping her flesh, coaxing a pale blue worm to stand out in her white skin. “Or what?”

  Girasol’s head burst as the hypnotic went in, flooding her capillaries, working over her neurotransmitters. “Or I’ll cut your fucking balls off.”

  The Fawkes’s grin loomed silent over her; a brief fear stabbed through the descending drug. Then he laughed again, barking and sharp, and Girasol knew she had not forgotten how to speak to men like Pierce. She tasted copper in her mouth as the Dozr settled.

  “Just remember who got you out of Corre
ctional,” Pierce said. “And that if you screw this up, you’d be better off back in the freeze. Sweet dreams.”

  The mask receded, and Girasol’s eyes drifted up the wall, following the cabling that crept like vines from the equipment under her skull, all the way through a crack gouged in the ceiling, and from there to whatever line Pierce’s cronies had managed to splice. The smartpaint splashed across the grimy stucco displayed months of preparation: shifting sat-maps, decrypted dossiers, and a thousand flickering image loops of one beautiful young man with silver hair.

  Girasol lowered the chair. Her toes spasmed, kinking against each other as the thrumming neural jack touched the edge of her port. The Dozr kept her breathing even. A bone-deep rasp, a meaty click, and she was synched, simulated REM brain-wave flowing through a current of code, flying through wire, up and out of the shantytown apartment, flitting like a shade into Chicago’s dark cityscape.

  SEVERYN GRIMES FELT none of the old heat in his chest when the first round finished with a shattered nose and a shower of blood, and he realized something: the puppet shows didn’t do it for him anymore.

  The fighters below were massive, as always, pumped full of HGH and Taurus and various combat chemicals, sculpted by a lifetime in gravity gyms. The fight, as always, wouldn’t end until their bodies were mangled heaps of broken bone and snapped tendon. Then the technicians would come and pull the digital storage cones from the slick white ports at the tops of their spines, so the puppeteers could return to their own bodies, and the puppets, if they were lucky, woke up in meat repair with a paycheck and no permanent paralysis.

  It seemed almost wasteful. Severyn stroked the back of his neck, where silver hair was shorn fashionably around his own storage cone. Beneath him, the fighters hurtled from their corners, grappled, broke, and collided again. He felt nothing. Severyn’s adrenaline only ever seemed to spike in boardrooms now. Primate aggression through power broking.

  “I’m growing tired of this shit,” he said, and his bodyguard carved a clear exit through the baying crowd. Follow-cams drifted in his direction, foregoing the match for a celebspotting opportunity: the second-wealthiest bio-businessman in Chicago, 146 years old but plugged into a beautiful young body that played well on cam. The god-like Severyn Grimes slumming at a puppet show, readying for a night of downtown debauchery? The paparazzi feed practically wrote itself.

  A follow-cam drifted too close; Severyn raised one finger, and his bodyguard swatted it out of the air on the way out the door.

  GIRASOL JOLTED, SPIRALED down to the floor. She’d drifted too close, too entranced by the geometry of his cheekbones, his slate gray eyes and full lips, his swimmer’s build swathed in Armani and his graceful hands with Nokia implants glowing just under the skin. A long way away, she was dimly aware of her body in the orthochair in the decrepit apartment. She scrawled a message across the smartpaint:

  HE’S LEAVING EARLY. ARE YOUR PEOPLE READY?

  “They’re, shit, they’re on their way. Stall him.” Pierce’s voice was distant, an insect hum, but she could detect the sound of nerves fraying.

  Girasol jumped to another follow-cam, triggering a fizz of sparks as she seized its motor circuits. The image came in upside down: Mr. Grimes clambering into the limo, the bodyguard scanning the street. Springy red hair and a brutish face suggested Neanderthal gene-mixing. Him, they would have to get rid of.

  The limousine door glided shut. From six blocks away, Girasol triggered the crude mp4 file she’d prepared—sometimes the old tricks worked best—and wormed inside the vehicle’s CPU on a sine wave of sound.

  SEVERYN VAGUELY RECOGNIZED the song breezing through the car’s sponge speakers, but outdated protest rap was a significant deviation from his usual tastes.

  “Music off.”

  Silence filled the backseat. The car took an uncharacteristically long time calculating their route before finally jetting into traffic. Severyn leaned back to watch the dark street slide past his window, lit by lime green neon and the jittering ghosts of holograms. A moment later he turned to his bodyguard, who had the Loop’s traffic reports scrolling across his retinas.

  “Does blood excite you, Finch?”

  Finch blinked, clearing his eyes back to a watery blue. “Not particularly, Mr. Grimes. Comes with the job.”

  “I thought having reloaded testosterone would make the world… visceral again.” Severyn grabbed at his testicles with a wry smile. “Maybe an old mind overwrites a young body in more ways than the technicians suspect. Maybe mortality is escapable, but old age inevitable.”

  “Maybe so,” Finch echoed, sounding slightly uncomfortable. First-lifers often found it unsettling to be reminded they were sitting beside a man who had bought off Death itself. “Feel I’m getting old myself, sometimes.”

  “Maybe you’d like to turn in early,” Severyn offered.

  Finch shook his head. “Always up for a jaunt, Mr. Grimes. Just so long as the whorehouses are vetted.”

  Severyn laughed, and in that moment the limo lurched sideways and jolted to a halt. His face mashed to the cold glass of the window, bare millimeters away from an autocab that darted gracefully around them and back into its traffic algorithm.

  Finch straightened him out with one titanic hand.

  “What the fuck was that?” Severyn asked calmly, unrumpling his tie.

  “Car says there’s something in the exhaust port,” Finch said, retinas replaced by schematic tracery. “Not an explosive. Could just be debris.”

  “Do check.”

  “Won’t be a minute, Mr. Grimes.”

  Finch pulled a pair of wire-veined gloves from a side compartment and opened the door, ushering in a chilly undertow, then disappeared around the rear end of the limousine. Severyn leaned back to wait, flicking alternately through merger details and airbrushed brothel advertisements in the air above his lap.

  “Good evening, Mr. Grimes,” the car burbled. “You’ve been hacked.”

  Severyn’s nostrils flared. “I don’t pay you for your sense of humor, Finch.”

  “I’m not joking, parasite.”

  Severyn froze. There was a beat of silence, then he reached for the door handle. It might as well have been stone. He pushed his palm against the sunroof and received a static charge for his trouble.

  “Override,” he said. “Severyn Grimes. Open doors.” No response. Severyn felt his heartbeat quicken, felt a prickle of sweat on his palms. He slowly let go of the handle. “Who am I speaking to?”

  “Take a look through the back window. Maybe you can figure it out.”

  Severyn spun, peering through the dark glass. Finch was hunched over the exhaust port, only a slice of red hair in sight. The limousine was projecting a yellow hazard banner, cleaving traffic, but as Severyn watched an unmarked van careened to a halt behind them.

  Masked men spilled out. Severyn thumped his fist into the glass of the window, but it was soundproof; he sent a warning spike to his security, but the car was shielded against adbombs, and theoretically against electronic intrusion, and now it was walling off his cell signal.

  All he could do was watch. Finch straightened up, halfway through peeling off one smartglove when the first black-market Taser sparked electric blue. He jerked, convulsed, but still somehow managed to pull the handgun from his jacket. Severyn’s fist clenched. Then the second Taser went off, painting Finch a crackling halo. The handgun dropped.

  The masked men bull-rushed Finch as he crumpled, sweeping him up under the arms, and Severyn saw the wide leering smiles under their hoods: Guy Fawkes. The mask had been commandeered by various terroractivist groups over the past half-century, but Severyn knew it was the Priesthood’s clearest calling card. For the first time in a long time, he felt a cold corkscrew in his stomach. He tried to put his finger on the sensation.

  “He has a husband.” Severyn’s throat felt tight. “Two children.”

  “He still will,” the voice replied. “He’s only a wage-slave. Not a blasphemer.”

 
; Finch was a heavy man and his knees scraped along the tarmac as the Priests hauled him toward the van’s sliding door. His head lolled to his chest, but Severyn saw his blue eyes were slitted open. His body tensed, then—

  Finch jerked the first Priest off-balance and came up with the subcutaneous blade flashing out of his forearm, carving the man open from hip to ribcage. Blood foamed and spat and Severyn felt what he’d missed at the puppet show, a burning flare in his chest. Finch twisted away from the other Priest’s arm, eyes roving, glancing off the black glass that divided them, and then a third Taser hit him. He fell with his jaws spasming; a Priest’s heavy boot swung into him as he toppled.

  The flare died inside Severyn’s pericardium. The limousine started to move.

  “He should not have done that,” the voice grated, as the bleeding Priest and then Finch and then the other Priests disappeared from sight.

  Severyn watched through the back window for a moment longer. Faced forward. “I’ll compensate for any medical costs incurred by my employee’s actions,” he said. “I won’t tolerate any sort of retribution to his person.”

  “Still talking like you’ve got cards. And don’t pretend like you care. He’s an ant to you. We all are.”

  Severyn assessed. The voice was synthesized, distorted, but something in the cadence made him think female speaker. Uncommon, for a Priest. He gambled.

  “What is your name, madam?”

  “I’m a man, parasite.”

  Only a split second of hesitation before the answer, but it was more than enough to confirm his guess. Severyn had staked astronomical shares on such pauses, pauses that couldn’t be passed off as lag in the modern day. Signs of unsettledness. Vulnerability. It made his skin thrum. He imagined himself in a boardroom.