These days, when the deluge comes, she does more than endure it. Xever has provided her with soap, an insipidly scented scrubbing tube for which she is ridiculously grateful, and already her hair is less lifeless, her skin brighter. When her supplies arrive they include small treats—fresh fruit, honey. Shaya forces her limp limbs into a few star jumps to get her blood moving before settling to eat. She makes sure to thank Xever after each meal. She is being entirely political, cultivating his good will. That does not make her thanks any the less sincere.
“That was wonderful,” she tells him, when he thinks to include coffee. It is an explosion of caffeine; her brain feels kicked into gear, buzzing and alive. She jogs on the spot, hops up and down on alternate feet. Xever laughs again. A little peeved, Shaya taps into her old dance training and smooths out her motions, spinning slowly, sliding her feet across the floor, swaying her spine backwards into an arch with both arms stretched above her head. She is very rusty, but it comes gradually back to her. Her delight is edged with bitterness, remembering a different dance, that night at the bazaar. Zali.
“Why did you stop?” Xever is still watching. “That was beautiful.”
Shaya looks up. “I didn’t want him to die,” she says. “My husband. I loved him. I told everyone that and no one believed me, but it’s true all the same. I wanted to help him. No,” she corrects herself, and it’s her turn to laugh, a mirthless sound. “No, I wanted to save him.”
There is a long, long silence. She has never brought this up before, though as a warden Xever must know why she is here. Perhaps now he thinks about it, he no longer wants to be involved with a murderess—a manipulative, dangerous woman who will enchant him and lie to him. Shaya’s shoulders slump. She sits down quietly, cross-legged, on the floor beside the circle, feeling suddenly drained. Then Xever speaks.
“What happened?” he asks. His voice is hard, guarded, but he asks all the same.
She tells him.
* * *
“Insomnia. Mood swings. Paranoia. It’s more common than you might think.”
Shaya stared at the journalist on the other side of the table, her cooled coffee clutched tightly between her hands. Months venting to family and friends had divided everyone she knew into two camps: the ‘Be A Loyal Wife’s and the ‘Leave The Bastard’s. No one seemed to understand what she was really saying. Zali was no longer Zali. It was like she was living with a completely different man.
Then she had stumbled on a small column in an indie news feed, the only anti-augmentation piece she had ever read, and she had v-mitted her questions to the contact tag at the foot of the article. A couple of days later, she was in a coffee den in South Bezzir while Zali thought she was at a show. It was a reasonably safe cover; he had been banned from entering the pavilion where she staged most of her performances. She hated lying to him, but his obsessive behaviour gave her no choice.
“Three percent,” she echoed. “Three percent of the population get this reaction?”
“So my research would indicate,” the journalist said. He was an Ausasian expat with the distinctive accent that made his every statement sound like a question. “Not easy to be really specific, of course, because many people can’t afford the augmentations or object to them on ethical grounds, but three percent is the rough figure.”
“But why?” Shaya demanded, appalled. “Why weren’t we told?”
The journalist patted her hand like she was a distraught toddler. “GenEx is in denial. They don’t want to pay compensation so they say their enhancements aren’t responsible for this strain of schizophrenia. Science is telling a different story. Sooner or later the government will have to step in, but in the meantime there is no mainstream recognition of the disorder.”
“So what do I do? How do I help him?”
“That’s a question better put to a medico. I’m afraid I can’t offer you much advice. The first step your husband would need to take for any kind of recovery is the removal of his enhancements, but whether he will believe you is another matter. GenEx sufferers are often delusional and dangerous. I would advise you approach him carefully, if at all.”
“I have to do something. He’s my husband, I can’t let him—deteriorate like this.”
“It’s up to you, of course.” The journalist drained his coffee and cleared his throat. “Thank you for your time, Mme. Scherade, I appreciate you agreeing to this interview. Can I quote you by name in my next piece or would you prefer to remain anonymous?”
She remained at the table long after he’d gone, trying to think of a way to explain this to Zali. How could she make him believe her? The prospect made her stomach clench with fear, but she had to try.
It was late when she got home. She keyed open the door, steeling herself for indifference or inquisition, whichever she might find inside. She did not expect to be seized by the throat and slammed against the wall, a butcher’s knife pressed against her jugular. Zali’s face was contorted into a snarl. His eyes were red from crying.
“Whore,” he hissed. Saliva flecked her face. “Betrayer.”
“What are you doing?” Shaya wheezed. “Zali, let me go!”
“I saw you.” He released her so suddenly she slid down the wall and crumpled on the floor at his feet, gasping for breath. “At a show, you said. Why did I ever believe you? I saw you with him. I saw him take your hand.”
“No—no, Zali, you don’t understand—” Shaya struggled to her feet. “Please listen to me. You’re sick, Zali, but I’m going to help you—”
“You want to kill me!” He seized a handful of her hair, yanking her head back. The knife was a cold metal line across her exposed throat. “I know everything! You’re turning everyone against me. You are a whore, a traitorous lying whore!”
He hurled her away from him as though it were she holding the knife, as if it were she threatening him. She collided with the couch, falling to the floor, scrabbled back to her feet as he advanced with the knife. She couldn’t scream. She couldn’t breathe.
“Zali,” she rasped. “Zali, stop.”
She backed away from him, through an open door; she realised too late it led onto the balcony. She was trapped. He was crying, she saw, tears streaking down his face.
“I loved you,” he moaned. “I trusted you. How could you betray me?”
“I never betrayed you!” Shaya’s voice was thin, breathless. He didn’t seem to hear her. She was up against the balcony railing, and then he was there, grabbing at her, slashing at her, sobbing abuse at her. She grappled with him uselessly for the knife. He stabbed at her and her hands shoved with all their force.
Somehow they had got twisted around. He was the one against the railing. The old rusted metal gave way to his weight and he fell, screaming, into the street thirty feet below. Shaya heard his body smack against cement.
She didn’t know how she got down there. She didn’t remember using the stairs, although she supposed she must have done. All she remembered was falling to her knees beside Zali’s beautiful, broken body, cradling what was left of her husband in her arms, screaming at the medicos who came to take him away. Someone gave her a sedative and called a cousin. She was led back to her apartment in the early hours of the morning and told to rest. Alone at last in a bed that smelled of sandalwood and citrus, she fell into a deep, drugged sleep.
She was woken to blinding mid-morning sun and a heavy pounding on her door. A pair of black-armoured demiGs were waiting outside. She had only ever seen them on guard duty at political functions before; she couldn’t remember seeing them up close like this. They were huge, taller and broader than a human, and behind their dark visors burned eyes red as rubies. She and Zali had always argued over whether they were robots or cyborgs, pointless arguments that could never be settled.
Zali. Zali was dead.
“Shaya Scherade.” Even the demiG’s voice did not sound human; it was deep and booming like there was an amplifier built into his throat. “You must come with us.”
As it turned out, someone had witnessed the fight. And so Shaya found herself on trial for her husband’s murder.
From the start, everyone believed she was guilty. Even her cousins. They tried to excuse her, insisted Zali had been violent and deranged, but no one believed them either, held against his mother’s tearful testimony. It took the jury—present in hologram to protect their identities—less than an hour to convict Shaya and sentence her. Fifteen days after Zali’s death she was in a line of prisoners boarding the subcell penitentiary Kraken.
The Kraken was swallowed by the sea. Shaya was swallowed by the void.
* * *
“You didn’t kill him.”
Shaya can tell Xever doesn’t believe her. There is open scepticism in his tone that reminds her of the aggressive prosecutors from her trial. She lets her forehead fall against her knees, her face hidden by a fall of dark hair, the only privacy she can claim.
“No,” she says. “I killed him. But I didn’t mean to.”
Xever is silent for a long time. “Like Gashir,” he says eventually. “And Topaz.”
Shaya looks up, startled. “What?”
“By trying to save her, he made her die faster.”
Shaya’s eyes sting with tears. She nods, not trusting herself to speak.
Xever says nothing more for a long time. She tries talking to him once or twice but receives no response, and she cannot tell whether that means he’s no longer there or no longer wants to talk to her. She tries to sleep and can’t. Eventually she gets up and circles her cube, rubbing at her arms. She turns around and there is someone there.
She screams.
It is a demiG. The carapaced black armour makes it resemble a vast black beetle, its red eyes emitting a hellish glow. It carries a scimitar longer than Shaya’s arm. It steps off the phasing circle and advances towards her. She is still screaming.
“Shaya, it’s all right. He won’t hurt you. Go with him.”
As though Xever’s voice is a signal, the demiG sheaths its scimitar and holds out a vast gauntleted hand. Shaya is still trembling.
“Where will it take me? Xever, what’s going on?”
“Go with him.”
The demiG could rip her limbs from their sockets if it chose. Shaya gives in, accepting the proffered hand instead of waiting to be seized, and is drawn onto the circle. Blinding white light jets around her. She squeezes her eyes shut, throwing up her free arm to protect them against the glare, and when the light fades she is somewhere else entirely. It is a perfectly ordinary corridor, but the sheer size of it all is overwhelming. The wall to her right is punctuated with square portholes and through the nearest she can see the sea, the pale dawn sky. The Kraken is floating towards a cliff-edged coastline.
Shaya doesn’t know why she has been brought here. A jailbreak? A retrial? She doesn’t care. She has told the story that really matters and has been believed. This man she has never met knows more about her than anyone else in the world, knows tragedy when he hears it, and truth. And now Shaya is in a world outside her imagination, the world she almost stopped believing existed.
Light washes across her skin like liquid gold. Through the porthole the dawn sky is streaked in red and rose, dazzling her eyes with raw colour. The sun is rising. A black gauntlet lands on Shaya’s shoulder, turning her from the porthole, but she twists her head back to catch a last glimpse and sees a winged silhouette launch from the cliffs.
She begins to laugh.
Harry’s Dead Poodle
David Kernot
They say Death arrives at the darkest hour of the night and shows no mercy. But Harry hadn’t heard Death arrive that night. He’d been away in another country, fighting a war that people didn’t support. It hadn’t changed the fact that Kim had died, that his life had fallen apart. Perhaps more of him perished that day too? He’d enough troubles on his return without finding the love of his life gone.
Harry’s nostrils flared with disgust. Freshly used toilet paper littered the floor among the flaking paint that fell from the graffiti-covered walls. He stood at the ceramic urinal and drunken laughter, muffled by thick stone of the hundred and fifty year old pub closed around him. A cool gust of wind burst through the half-opened window, and the room’s solitary light globe swung from the long ceiling cable. Harry’s heart rate climbed as shadowy images splashed the wall. He knew the dangers of looking too close, of letting his mind wander. He took a deep breath, and blinked away the dark spectres that swam across his vision.
To his left, somebody coughed inside the toilet stall. Harry froze, surprised he was not alone. He loosened his top button as another gust sent shadows across the wall. Harry fought an internal struggle as the images from his past formed within the shadows. The muffled drunken laughter took on an insistent tone. The cool evening air turned hot, suffocated. The pub’s tiled floor beneath Harry’s feet shifted, turned into hot desert sand. The sun burned on Harry’s exposed military uniform.
A rifle shot rang out.
“Contact front!”
Harry jumped as the forward scout’s machine gun fired. He dived for cover, and his camouflaged uniform blended against the stone building at Al Bahra. Hot sandy soil burned at his hands as he scrabbled forward. He released ‘The Bitch’s’ safety and inched forward, careful not to get sand up the barrel. He glanced through her sights. Ahead several men appeared between two buildings, firing as they ran. Harry heard the smack of bullets, and fragments of the stone building fell onto him. He squeezed the trigger and ‘The Bitch’ unleashed her angry torrent of vengeful bullets. Harry watched with detached interest as the men danced around like puppets on strings before they fell.
The man in the toilet stall threw up. The decade-old images of Al-Bahra faded, and a new wave of nauseous aromas assaulted Harry.
“You alright mate?” he called out to the stranger.
“Yeah.” The man in the stall coughed and then retched again.
Harry stepped back from the urinal, and reached into his pocket for a small bottle of pills. He shook them, contemplated for a moment, then shrugged and dropped them in the trash.
The pills didn’t work. All they had done was steal a little more of his soul each day. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder they said. His hand slid into his pocket and curled around the pocketknife. It gave him comfort. What did they know? It was time to forget about Desert Storm.
Harry returned to his stool at the bar.
“You alright?” Mike shot him an odd look.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” Harry stared out the window to the gum trees that danced in the wind.
“Angie was here the other day. She looks happy.”
“I’m sure she does.” His lip curled. “Guess I’ll have to stop coming here then.”
“Take it easy.” Mike half smiled. “You sure you’re fine? You got that look in your eye again.”
“I’m fine, better, I think.”
“How’s that?”
“I’ve just tossed away my pills.” He sipped his beer.
Out of the corner of his eyes he saw Mike’s eyes widen. “Is that a good idea?”
“It’s done.” Harry downed the rest of his beer in one gulp. “Maybe it’ll cure my stutter. Anyway, I’m out of here. This place gives me the creeps.”
The barman slid Harry’s Icebox across the bar, and chuckled. “Some of my patrons say that you’ve got beer in here to keep you going through the day.”
“That’s my business. Thanks for taking care of it”
* * *
Harry woke when somebody banged on his front door. He reached for his gun. It wasn’t there. This wasn’t Baghdad. He took comfort in the early morning smell of dew outside his window, relaxed slightly and reached for his clock. “It’s four in the morning!” He groaned.
“Police! Open up.”
“What?” He climbed out of bed, half-asleep and his front door splintered.
A man in a crumpled tan suit appeared at Harry’s bedroom door. He held up his warrant card.
“Police. Sit on the bed, hands where I can see them.” He called over his shoulder. “Check the house, Constable.”
“Yes, Senior Constable,” replied the officer in the other room.
Harry peered over the man’s shoulder; to the uniformed police officer who’s reply was crisp.
“It’s Senior out here in the field, Lad. Understood?”
“Yes, Senior.”
The man faced Harry. “Been here all night?”
Harry peered at the man, at one time, as a butcher, he would have known them all, but didn’t recognise this man. But Whittleside Way had grown in recent years. Harry nodded. “What’s going on?”
“Come out here.”
Harry followed the plainclothes officer out to the kitchen and sat down at his table.
“Anyone vouch for your whereabouts tonight?”
“No.” Harry frowned and his voice caught. “W-why? I-I’ve been here on my own all night. W-w-what do you w-want. W-w-what are you d-d-doing here?”
The police officer remained silent, and studied him.
“It’s all clear,” said the other policeman as he returned from Harry’s bedroom.
The plainclothes officer shrugged.
“Tip off was wrong, Senior, there’s nobody here.”
“Doesn’t account for the decapitated poodle on the doorstep, or the blood over the front door.
“Midge is dead?” Harry stood, and looked around the room. He felt hot. He needed to throw up. Midge and Mackenzie were all he had!
“Sit down.”
Harry’s mind reeled. Another one of his poodles killed the same way. She was the last of his four. He closed his eyes with regret.
“You need to come down to the station and answer some questions.” He threw Harry a thin smile. “Help us with our enquiries.”
The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2013 Page 30
