The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Four

by Jonathan Strahan

  "Two and a half. I fell asleep, and boy did I dream."

  "I bet you did."

  "Thanks a lot."

  "You're welcome. Here's the first of those interesting questions. You want something to drink? I'm buying, unless you wage slaves eat here free, in which case I could use another latte, thanks."

  "Answer another question first. What's that phone-thing in your bag?"

  She hefted it, pressed a switch, waited a moment, then handed it to me. "Handheld GPS. Wherever you go, there you are—your coordinates, on screen."

  "It says 'Acquiring Satellites.'"

  "Isn't that great? That's my favorite part. 'Des, what are you doing out there, the bisque is served.' 'Just a minute, Mom, I'm acquiring some satellites.' Twenty-four medium-Earth-orbit Pentagon satellites, a constellation it's called. The same technology that guides attack drones to Afghan schoolhouses and lures Stephanie Abrams to your bedroom every morning with your local forecast, now turned into your own personal handheld Sherpa guide. Third wonder of the modern age, after the Pocket Rocket and a runner-up to be named later."

  I laughed. "Do you ever shut up?"

  "Yes," she said, with gravity, and then said nothing. I said nothing, either, just watched blue bars appear one by one on the little screen, like on the wireless commercial.

  "So what do you do with it?"

  Another lunge forward. "Ah! Another interesting question. I'll show you right now. How about a cache and dash?"

  "A what?"

  "There's a new cache in the north parking lot, a quick one. I got an e-mail update this morning. With luck, ours will be the first logbook entry. Got any treasure in your purse, just in case? Something to leave behind, to replace what we take. Anything will do: an old Metro stub, a Putt-Putt scoring pencil, an expired Nair coupon. C'mon, c'mon, we won't have the light for long."

  I jogged alongside her through the café, past my register—where Sally threw me a "What's-the-story?" look—through the food court, around the corner of the Cold Gravy store. Only in the parking lot did she slow to a deliberate pace, studying her GPS unit as a dowser would a forked stick. I couldn't see the screen, so I read her instead, and came to anticipate her pauses, her minute course adjustments. She was wearing khaki shorts, and clearly did a lot of hiking. I heard someone slam on brakes and yell, "Assholes!" but he may not have meant us. Inside her right arm was a long narrow discoloration: a birthmark, or a scar.

  Des spoke without looking up from her screen. "When I first spoke to you, Jen, at the cash register? I confess. I had seen you before. Twice."

  "Really."

  "The first time was about a month ago, out at Antietam. I was tracking a cache that was hidden in the Bloody Lane. I didn't want to be seen when I retrieved it, because the National Park Service, you know. So I had to wait around forever for this damn woman to leave. She was sitting on the bank, sketching in a big spiral notebook."

  "I remember that! I was trying to include the observation tower in the distance, and I never could get the angles right."

  Des snorted. "I thought you were going to pitch camp and wait on A.P. Hill's reinforcements. I almost said hi to you then, but you were so engrossed. I know I don't like to be interrupted when I'm engrossed."

  "Are you engrossed now?"

  She glanced at me then, and smiled. "What do you think?"

  "I don't remember you at all at Antietam. I'm sorry."

  "No one remembers me, when I'm lurking. I'm good at lurking."

  The cars had thinned out. We were headed toward the far corner of the lot, beyond which a couple of windblown shopping carts rested at crazy angles in the scrub.

  "And the second time you saw me?"

  "That was quicker. You were on the other side of the gas pump at the Sheetz, out on the bypass. I'm surprised that Tracer is still running, by the way. You must call Car Talk a lot."

  "I'm sorry, but I don't remember you then, either."

  "No, well, you're a watch-the-pump person, aren't you, Jen? I'm a watch-everything-but-the-pump person. It was a windy day, but you just let your sundress blow, you didn't keep clutching at it like those poor timid souls. I always want to yank their hands away and say, 'You bought it short, now wear it short, no apologies.'"

  "You see a lot, but again, you didn't say anything. How come?"

  "Because it was only the second time. You ever read Goldfinger?"

  "What, the James Bond novel? Is that the one with Pussy Galore?"

  Des winced. "Don't remind me. I checked it out of the library in a stack of horse books when I was 12 because a boy at school said it was dirty, and at the end, when Pussy says, 'I never met a man before,' and renounces women, I burst out crying, right there in the treehouse. I was years sorting out why. Anyway, that was Goldfinger's motto. 'Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action.' So that's my dating rule. The battlefield? Happenstance. The Sheetz? Coincidence. The checkout counter? Time to say something to her, you schmuck."

  "So that makes me your enemy?"

  "No, it makes you my act—Whoop! Hang on. We've overshot it. Oh, I get it. Must be here." She dropped the unit in her purse and backtracked a few steps, to the last light pole in the lot, a rusty white pillar on a crumbling knee-high concrete base decorated with long-faded gang tags. "We must be talking a microcache," she said, kneeling and clawing at the chinks and cracks in the concrete. Little clots of it pattered to the asphalt like gray cereal. I knelt on the other side and did the same, not sure what I was looking for until I found it: A plastic canister like the ones film used to come in. Several somethings rattled when I hefted it. I offered it to Des, but she shook her head.

  "Your first treasure," she said. "Open it, Jen, if you dare. Open it, and there's no turning back."

  I popped the lid and shook onto my palm a Putt-Putt pencil, a polished orange rock the size of a marble, a paper clip, and an absurdly small glue-bound notebook, like a doll's. "Damn, two people beat us to it," Des said, rolling the rock between her fingers. "This is Terrapin Dave's. He beats me everywhere."

  Inside the notebook was equally tiny writing, in two different hands. The first said:

  FEB. 2. 1ST FIND! ALL BOW B4 THE POWER OF MY ROCK—TERPDAVE

  The second:

  2/2/08—"No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge."

  "Oh, The Prophet, fuck me," Des said. She stood, dusted her palms against the ass of her khakis, and said, "Go ahead, your turn. Write something. Anything you like. Be as creative as you want. No pressure. Just make it good. And personality-indicating. A summation of all that you are. And hey—if it's Kahlil Gibran? You and me? We're through."

  As she babbled, I looked up at her. The light was going, the wind was picking up, and high clouds were scudding past. Des seemed to stand tall against the sky, hands on hips, the sunset wind rippling her jacket and toying with her long shock of red hair. She looked almost heroic.

  I pressed the absurd notebook flat against the light pole, acutely conscious of Des' thigh at eye level, and printed as small as I could: TO CELEBRATE MY FIRST FIND, DES AND I HAD OUR FIRST KISS. When I was done, I just squatted there, one palm against the pole, looking at what I had written. Behind me, I heard a distant zap, like a bug gone a-sizzle, then more zaps, coming closer. The light directly overhead zapped then, and my hand tingled as the pole hummed with power and the bulbs flickered to life, casting a stark pool around us. Our shadows were like cartoons. Des slid the notebook from my fingers. I didn't watch her read it; I watched the concrete instead. "Oh, well done," Des said. "Come here."

  "So how long has this hobby been going on?"

  "Well, I was new at the high school, and her name was Leah, and soccer practice had just let out . . . "

  "No, you ass." I snatched a pillow off the floor, swatted her with it. Bedding and clothing were everywhere, except on us. We had gone to my apartment, not hers, on orders from Des—"Because," she said, "yours is farther
away."

  "Not this," I said. "Geocaching. Is it new?"

  "Oh, that. No, it's not new, not really. Well, the satellites, yes, that's new. But the basic principle, leaving caches and finding caches, that's been done in one form or another, I'm told, since 1854."

  "No shit?"

  "No shit. Dartmoor was a tourist attraction even then, long before The Hound of the Baskervilles. One of the guides placed a bottle way the hell out by Cranmere Pool, so the hardy souls who hiked out that far could leave their calling cards to prove they'd made it. A lonely, barren place. It's part of a missile range, now."

  "Why bother hiking out there? The pool must have been lovely."

  "The pool, so called, was a dry hole until it rained, whereupon it became a wet hole. The reason hikers went was that it had a story, of course." She twirled a lock of my hair. "You can lead people anywhere, my Jenny Jen, if there's a story attached." She rolled onto her side, facing away from me, facing the wall. "The pool was said to be haunted, you see. Cranmere Benjie, they called the ghost—the shade of Benjamin Gayer, who died broken by guilt because of all the seamen he had doomed. Benjie was a local businessman who had been entrusted a large sum of money, in case it was ever needed for a sailors' ransom. Well, pirates seized a shipload of Dartmoor men, and word was sent home, but was there any ransom to be paid? There was not. Benjie had spent it all, bit by bit—a sailor's right eye here, a sailor's left hand there. So his neighbors came back only in part, and Benjie's neighbors chased him onto the moor, with torches and axes but not with dogs, and so he outran them, wailing with guilt, until he collapsed by the side of Cranmere Pool, and submerged his head beneath the rank waters, and choked himself, and died unsaved and unmourned. And even today you can hear him out there of a night, wailing."

  I heard the fan on the dresser, and cicadas, and a distant tractor-trailer on the downgrade. An unfelt breeze stirred the curtains, and the night light burned steady in the hall.

  I wriggled closer, threw my arm around her, nuzzled into the back of her neck, which smelled like lavender, like sweat, like her. "If Cranmere Pool is such a dry hole," I murmured, "how did Benjie drown himself in it?"

  "Well. I'll tell you how that happened. Things back then were just . . . wetter, that's all." She snorted, I burst out laughing, and she began to pummel me. "The fuck question is that?" she demanded as we wrecked the bed. "It's a fucking ghost story, OK? Work with me!"

  We did lots of things together—not just that, and not just that. And we weren't even together all the time. She was sort of in graduate school at the Appalachian Lab in Frostburg, though at her level it was more of a hike-around-the-woods thing, graphing the connections among forest habitats at Antietam, than a go-to-class thing, and of course I had my job and all its delights, and my parents always after me to visit. Des had no such ties; she said her dad was dead, and she and her mom didn't get along, and that was that. Yet—this was odd—I remember that when I asked what her mom did for a living, she stressed to me that Mrs. Creech was a corporate vice president not of marketing, not some glorified sales job, but of product development. Like, she was in charge of actually designing and building the shit, whatever it was; I don't remember, now. Since my sales job wasn't even glorified, it sort of hurt my feelings. But later, of course, I wished I had blown off my own family, spent more time with Des when I had the chance.

  We watched every movie in The Val Lewton Horror Collection, of course, and certain scenes Des played over and over. Treading water in a basement pool, Alice screams and screams, the echoes drowned by the growls of the thing prowling the encircling tile, claws a-click, a-click. The walls of cane ripple and whisper as Betsy leads Jessica along the bloodied path to the crossroads guarded by the staring dead. Mary sends her would-be protector into the darkness at the end of the corridor, from which he creeps to fall into her arms a corpse. The dropped corn meal sprays across the ground, its thousands of grains an obstacle to vampires but no hindrance to the Leopard Man as the fleeing Teresa leads her pursuer unerringly to her life's last locked door. Mamacita, let me in! Let me in! Let me in! If you love me, let me in!

  But when I think back on those months now, I mainly remember the caches we found, me driving while she leafed through her marked-up printouts from Geocaching.com, getting us as close as the nearest intersection anyway, or the nearest decent place to park, before heading out on foot. Sometimes the treasure really was a cache-and-dash, like the canister hung on the hook inside the two panels of the big sign outside the ice-cream stand. We barely had to leave the car to log that one. Other times it was a lot harder to find, like the Thermos half-buried in the brambles 20 feet off the C&O Canal trail.

  Des was fearless, or simply heedless, when she knew a cache was nearby. The scars on her arms weren't her only scars—some she told me about, eventually—and I wasn't surprised, after watching her in action for a few weeks. She darted across busy highways, looking only at her GPS unit. She clambered up and down steep hillsides, ignoring the trail that offered a safer but less direct route. At the top of the old stone bridge over the Casselman River, she hoisted herself onto the wall and leaned so far out that I grabbed her belt, braced my feet against the base of the wall, and held on, frightened.

  "Hey, leggo!" she hollered. "The cache might be in the outer wall, between the rocks. I can check real easy, if you just—."

  "You ladies mind coming down from there?"

  Behind me, walking up the bridge, left hand hooked into her belt and right hand suspended near her holster, was a Maryland state trooper.

  I froze, my legs braced, Des' belt cutting my hands, her feet kicking the air.

  "Des!" I said. "The cops!"

  Her feet stopped kicking. Her voice was muffled. "Local or state?"

  "The fuck it matters? Come back here!"

  "Come down, I said," the trooper repeated, planting her feet on the flagstones in a way I did not like at all. She was younger than I had thought, with a spray of freckles across her cheeks, but she spoke with the universal now-see-here-young-lady sternness of her tribe.

  "She's coming, officer," I hollered, and so she was, shinnying backward until she dropped down beside me, dusting her T-shirt.

  The trooper cocked her head, looked surprised.

  "Des?" she asked.

  Des squinted at her. The trooper took off her hat, grinned. Des stepped forward. "Terry? Is that you?"

  The trooper laughed and ambled up the slope, swatting her thigh with the hat. "Didn't recognize you at first, Des, not from the, uh, angle you were presenting."

  "My best side," Des said, walking to meet her. They looked as if they might hug, but at the last instant each raised an arm, and they bumped fists.

  "Didn't know you were still around," the trooper said.

  "Yeah, well."

  "Haven't seen you at the bars lately."

  "Been busy," Des said, and then they both looked at me, though the trooper looked first. I was trying to go into unobtrusive prop-girl mode, which is tough on a stone bridge in daylight when you're wearing a bright green LITTLE MISS SAVE THE WORLD T-shirt. Des bought it for me because it matched her hair.

  The trooper stuck out her hand, flashed a dazzling smile. "Busy, yeah. Marjorie Terry. Pleased to meet you."

  "This is Jen," Des said, before I got a chance. I ignored her.

  "Jenny Milledge," I said. Terry's grip was firm and warm and lasted longer than I expected. "Sorry if we gave you a scare."

  "No problem. What were you guys up to, anyway?"

  "Geocaching," I said.

  Trooper Terry looked at Des, a slight crease between her blonde eyebrows. "GPS scavenger hunt," Des mumbled. I never had seen her look embarrassed before.

  "Ohhhhh, so that's the latest," the trooper said. She turned to me. "When I met her, it was chess. She walked into Fusion with an ivory Napoleonic set under her arm and said, 'I can mate every dyke in the house!' Then it was, what came next, bartending? Flipping the tumblers behind your back like Coyote Ugly? The
n you bought that Canon, and hello, Annie Leibowitz."

  "I wasn't the one who posted those," Des said.

  "I know who posted 'em," the trooper said. "So, it's hidden treasure now." She winked at me. "Clearly you've had some good hunting already. I'll see you around, Des. Find your way back to Fusion sometime. I'm usually on night patrol, but at midday I work on my nine ball. You come too, Jenny. New faces always welcome."

  The refusal of Des, thus far, to take me to any of the watering holes west of Baltimore had been a sore point between us. "I'd like that," I said, a little loudly.

  In silence, we watched the trooper slide back into her patrol car and drive westward, toward Grantsville. Then Des looked at me. When she really turned on the charm, it was like watching a marquee light up, but the reverse was just as dramatic. Now a full blackout was in effect, and I could hear the air-raid sirens.

  "Thanks for all the suckup—I mean, backup," she said.

  "Thanks for keeping me a secret from all your friends—if that's all she was."

  "You're projecting." We stomped back to her car. "I wasn't the one fogging her sunglasses. It's the uniform, isn't it? And the freckles."

  "Shut up." As we climbed in, I slammed my door, so Des slammed hers even louder. The dashboard hula girl wiggled her hips.

  "You wanted her to slap on the cuffs," Des said, peeling out eastward, toward Frostburg. She was speeding by the time we reached the foot of the hill, and the new Casselman River bridge thrummed beneath the tires only momentarily. We seemed to reach the interstate in mere moments. Time flies when you're not having fun.

  "When she walked away just now? You totally checked out her ass. Don't even deny it, Jen, I heard you swallow spit and breathe through your nose. Are you familiar with the noun 'tell'? It's a poker term."

  "Christ. Poke this," I said, with a gesture. It was true, I had checked her out, but would I have realized it without Des nattering on? That made me madder. "Do you tell people nothing about yourself? She didn't even know you were a geocacher—which is only, like, your entire life."