The Long List Anthology: More Stories From the Hugo Award Nomination List (The Long List Anthology Series Book 1)

by Annie Bellet

  It is raining in the woods behind her house. Her father has told her to study, but all she’s done since her mother left is read Mishima’s Sea of Fertility novels. She sits on the porch, wondering if it’s better to kill herself or wait for them to come, and just as she thinks she ought to have the courage to die, something rattles in the shed. A rat, she thinks.

  But it’s not rat she sees when she pulls open the door on its rusty hinges. It’s a man, crouched between a stack of old appliance boxes and the rusted fender of the Buick her father always meant to fix one day. His hair is wet and slicked back, his white shirt is damp and ripped from shoulder to navel. The skin beneath it is pale as a corpse; bloodless, though the edges of a deep wound are still visible.

  “They’ve already come?” Her voice breaks on a whisper. She wanted to finish The Decay of the Angel. She wanted to see her mother once more.

  “Shut the door,” he says, crouching in shadow, away from the bar of light streaming through the narrow opening.

  “Don’t kill me.”

  “We are equally at each other’s mercy.”

  She likes the way he speaks. No one told her they could sound so proper. So human. Is there a monster in her shed, or is he something else?

  “Why shouldn’t I open it all the way?”

  He is brave, whatever else. He takes his long hands from in front of his face and stands, a flower blooming after rain. He is beautiful, though she will not mark that until later. Now, she only notices the steady, patient way he regards her. I could move faster than you, his eyes say. I could kill you first.

  She thinks of Mishima and says, “I’m not afraid of death.”

  Only when the words leave her mouth does she realize how deeply she has lied. Does he know? Her hands would shake if it weren’t for their grip on the handle.

  “I promise,” he says. “I will save you, when the rest of us come.”

  What is it worth, a monster’s promise?

  She steps inside and shuts out the light.

  • • • •

  There are nineteen residents of Grade Gold; the twentieth is buried beneath the kukui tree in the communal garden. The thought of rotting in earth revolts Key. She prefers the bright, fierce heat of a crematorium fire, like the one that consumed Jeb the night before she left Mauna Kea. The ashes fly in the wind, into the ocean and up in the trees, where they lodge in bird nests and caterpillar silk and mud puddles after a storm. The return of flesh to the earth should be fast and final, not the slow mortification of worms and bacteria and carbon gases.

  Tetsuo instructs her to keep close watch on unit three. “Rachel isn’t very… steady right now,” he says, as though unaware of the understatement.

  The remaining nineteen residents are divided into four units, five kids in each, living together in sprawling ranch houses connected by walkways and gardens. There are walls, of course, but you have to climb a tree to see them. The kids at Grade Gold have more freedom than any human she’s ever encountered since the war, but they’re as bound to this paradise as she was to her mountain.

  The vampires who come here stay in a high glass tower right by the beach. During the day, the black-tinted windows gleam like lasers. At night, the vampires come down to feed. There is a fifth house in the residential village, one reserved for clients and their meals. Testsuo orchestrates these encounters, planning each interaction in fine detail: this human with that performance for this distinguished client. Key has grown used to thinking of her fellow humans as food, but now she is forced to reconcile that indelible fact with another, stranger veneer. The vampires who pay so dearly for Grade Gold humans don’t merely want to feed from a shunt. They want to be entertained, talked to, cajoled. The boy who explained about Key’s uncanny resemblance juggles torches. Twin girls from unit three play guitar and sing songs by the Carpenters. Even Rachel, dressed in a gaudy purple mermaid dress with matching streaks in her hair, keeps up a one-way, laughing conversation with a vampire who seems too astonished—or too slow—to reply.

  Key has never seen anything like this before. She thought that most vampires regarded humans as walking sacks of food. What pleasure could be derived from speaking with your meal first? From seeing it sing or dance? When she first went with Tetsuo, the other vampires talked about human emotions as if they were flavors of ice cream. But at Grade Orange she grew accustomed to more basic parameters: were the humans fed, were they fertile, did they sleep? Here, she must approve outfits; she must manage dietary preferences and erratic tempers and a dozen other details all crucial to keeping the kids Grade Gold standard. Their former caretaker has been shipped to the work camps, which leaves Key in sole charge of the operation. At least until Tetsuo decides how he will use his dispensation.

  Key’s thoughts skitter away from the possibility.

  “I didn’t know vampires liked music,” she says, late in the evening, when some of the kids sprawl, exhausted, across couches and cushions. A girl no older than fifteen opens her eyes but hardly moves when a vampire in a gold suit lifts her arm for a nip. Key and Tetsuo are seated together at the far end of the main room, in the bay windows that overlook a cliff and the ocean.

  “It’s as interesting to us as any other human pastime.”

  “Does music have a taste?”

  His wide mouth stretches at the edges; she recognizes it as a smile. “Music has some utility, given the right circumstances.”

  She doesn’t quite understand him. The air is redolent with the sweat of human teenagers and the muggy, salty air that blows through the open doors and windows. Her eye catches on a half-eaten strawberry dropped carelessly on the carpet a few feet away. It was harvested too soon, a white, tasteless core surrounded by hard, red flesh.

  She thinks there is nothing of “right” in these circumstances, and their utility is, at its bottom, merely that of parasite and host.

  “The music enhances the—our—flavor?”

  Tetsuo stares at her for a long time, long enough for him to take at least three of his shallow, erratically spaced breaths. To look at him is to taste copper and sea on her tongue; to wait for him is to hear the wind slide down a mountainside an hour before dawn.

  It has been four years since she last saw him. She thought he had forgotten her, and now he speaks to her as if all those years haven’t passed, as though the vampires hadn’t long since won the war and turned the world to their slow, long-burning purpose.

  “Emotions change your flavor,” he says. “And food. And sex. And pleasure.”

  And love? she wonders, but Tetsuo has never drunk from her.

  “Then why not treat all of us like you do the ones here? Why have con—Mauna Kea?”

  She expects him to catch her slip, but his attention is focused on something beyond her right shoulder. She turns to look, and sees nothing but the hall and a closed feeding room door.

  “Three years,” he says, quietly. He doesn’t look at her. She doesn’t understand what he means, so she waits. “It takes three years for the complexity to fade. For the vitality of young blood to turn muddy and clogged with silt. Even among the new crops, only a few individuals are Gold standard. For three years, they produce the finest blood ever tasted, filled with regrets and ecstasy and dreams. And then…”

  “Grade Orange?” Key asks, her voice dry and rasping. Had Tetsuo always talked of humans like this? With such little regard for their selfhood? Had she been too young to understand, or have the years of harvesting humans hardened him?

  “If we have not burned too much out. Living at high elevation helps prolong your utility, but sometimes all that’s left is Lanai and the work camps.”

  She remembers her terror before her final interview with Mr. Charles, her conviction that Jeb’s death would prompt him to discard his uselessly old overseer to the work camps.

  A boy from one of the other houses staggers to the one she recognizes from unit two and sprawls in his lap. Unit-two boy startles awake, smiles, and bends over to kiss the first. A pair o
f female vampires kneel in front of them and press their fangs with thick pink tongues.

  “Touch him,” one says, pointing to the boy from unit two. “Make him cry.”

  The boy from unit two doesn’t even pause for breath; he reaches for the other boy’s cock and squeezes. And as they both groan with something that makes Key feel like a voyeur, made helpless by her own desire, the pair of vampires pull the boys apart and dive for their respective shunts. The room goes quiet but for soft gurgles, like two minnows in a tide pool. Then a pair of clicks as the boys’ shunts turn gray, forcing the vampires to stop feeding.

  “Lovely, divine,” the vampires say a few minutes later, when they pass on their way out. “We always appreciate the sexual displays.”

  The boys curl against each other, eyes shut. They breathe like old men: hard, through constricted tubes.

  “Does that happen often?” she asks.

  “This Grade Gold is known for its sexual flavors. My humans pick partners they enjoy.”

  Vampires might not have sex, but they crave its flavor. Will she, when she crosses to their side? Will she look at those two boys and command them to fuck each other just so she can taste?

  “Do you ever care?” she says, her voice barely a whisper. “About what you’ve done to us?”

  He looks away from her. Before she can blink he has crossed to the one closed feeding room door and wrenched it open. A thump of something thrown against a wall. A snarl, as human as a snake’s hiss.

  “Leave, Gregory!” Tetsuo says. A vampire Key recognizes from earlier in the night stumbles into the main room. He rubs his jaw, though the torn and mangled skin there has already begun to knit together.

  “She is mine to have. I paid—”

  “Not enough to kill her.”

  “I’ll complain to the council,” the vampire says. “You’ve been losing support. And everyone knows how patiently Charles has waited in his aerie.”

  She should be scared, but his words make her think of Jeb, of failures and consequences, and of the one human she has not seen for hours. She stands and sprints past both vampires to where Rachel lies insensate on a bed.

  Her shunt has turned the opaque gray meant to prevent vampires from feeding humans to death. But the client has bitten her neck instead.

  “Tell them whatever you wish, and I will tell them you circumvented the shunt of a fully-tapped human. We have our rules for a reason. You are no longer welcome here.”

  Rachel’s pulse is soft, but steady. She stirs and moans beneath Key’s hands. The relief is crushing; she wants to cradle the girl in her arms until she wakes. She wants to protect her so her blood will never have to smear the walls of a feeding room, so that Key will be able to say that at least she saved one.

  Rachel’s eyes flutter open, land with a butterfly’s gentleness on Key’s face.

  “Pen,” she says, “I told you. It makes them… they eat me.”

  Key doesn’t understand, but she doesn’t mind. She presses her hand to Rachel’s warm forehead and sings lullabies her grandmother liked until Rachel falls back to sleep.

  “How is she?” It is Tetsuo, come into the room after the client has finally left.

  “Drained,” Key says, as dispassionately as he. “She’ll be fine in a few days.”

  “Key.”

  “Yes?”

  She won’t look at him.

  “I do, you know.”

  She knows. “Then why support it?”

  “You’ll understand when your time comes.”

  She looks back down at Rachel, and all she can see are bruises blooming purple on her upper arms, blood dried brown on her neck. She looks like a human being: infinitely precious, fragile. Like prey.

  • • • •

  Five days later, Key sits in the garden in the shade of the kukui tree. She has reports to file on the last week’s feedings, but the papers sit untouched beside her. The boy from unit two and his boyfriend are tending the tomatoes and Key slowly peels the skin from her fourth kiwi. The first time she bit into one she cried, but the boys pretended not to notice. She is getting better with practice. Her hands still tremble and her misted eyes refract rainbows in the hard, noon sunlight. She is learning to be human again.

  Rachel sleeps on the ground beside her, curled on the packed dirt of Penelope’s grave with her back against the tree trunk and her arms wrapped tightly around her belly. She’s spent most of the last five days sleeping, and Key thinks she has mostly recovered. She’s been eating voraciously, foods in wild combinations at all times of day and night. Key is glad. Without the distracting, angry makeup, Rachel’s face looks vulnerable and haunted. Jeb had that look in the months before his death. He would sit quietly in the mess hall and stare at the food brick as though he had forgotten how to eat. Jeb had transferred to Mauna Kea within a week of Key becoming overseer. He liked watching the lights of the airplanes at night and he kept two books with him: The Blind Watchmaker and A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i. She talked to him about the latter—had he ever tasted breadfruit or kiwi or cherimoya? None, he said, in a voice so small and soft it sounded inversely proportional to his size. Only a peach, a canned peach, when he was four or five years old. Vampires don’t waste fruit on Grade Orange humans.

  The covers of both books were worn, the spines cracked, the pages yellowed and brittle at the edges. Why keep a book about fruit you had never tasted and never would eat? Why read at all, when they frowned upon literacy in humans and often banned books outright? She never asked him. Mr. Charles had seen their conversation, though she doubted he had heard it, and requested that she refrain from speaking unnecessarily to the harvest.

  So when Jeb stared at her across the table with eyes like a snuffed candle, she turned away, she forced her patty into her mouth, she chewed, she reached for her orange drink.

  His favorite book became his means of self-destruction. She let him do it. She doesn’t know if she feels guilty for not having stopped him, or for being in the position to stop him in the first place. Not two weeks later she rests beneath a kukui tree, the flesh of a fruit she had never expected to taste again turning to green pulp between her teeth. She reaches for another one because she knows how little she deserves this.

  But the skin of the fruit at the bottom of the bowl is too soft and fleshy for a kiwi. She pulls it into the light and drops it.

  “Are you okay?” It’s the boy from unit two—Kaipo. He kneels down and picks up the cherimoya.

  “What?” she says, and struggles to control her breathing. She has to appear normal, in control. She’s supposed to be their caretaker. But the boy just seems concerned, not judgmental. Rachel rolls onto her back and opens her eyes.

  “You screamed,” Rachel says, sleep-fogged and accusatory. “You woke me up.”

  “Who put this in the bowl?” Kaipo asks. “These things are poisonous! They grow on that tree down the hill, but you can’t eat them.”

  Key takes the haunted fruit from him, holding it carefully so as to not bruise it further. “Who told you that?” she asks.

  Rachel leans forward, so her chin rests on the edge of Key’s lounge chair and the tips of her purple-streaked hair touch Key’s thigh. “Tetsuo,” she says. “What, did he lie?”

  Key shakes her head slowly. “He probably only half-remembered. It’s a cherimoya. The flesh is delicious, but the seeds are poisonous.”

  Rachel’s eyes follow her hands. “Like, killing you poisonous?” she asks.

  Key thinks back to her father’s lessons. “Maybe if you eat them all or grind them up. The tree bark can paralyze your heart and lungs.”

  Kaipo whistles, and they all watch intently when she wedges her finger under the skin and splits it in half. The white, fleshy pulp looks stark, even a little disquieting against the scaly green exterior. She plucks out the hard, brown seeds and tosses them to the ground. Only then does she pull out a chunk of flesh and put it in her mouth.

  Like strawberries and banana pudding and pineapple
. Like the summer after Obachan died, when a box of them came to the house as a condolence gift.

  “You look like you’re fellating it,” Rachel says. Key opens her eyes and swallows abruptly.

  Kaipo pushes his tongue against his lips. “Can I try it, Key?” he asks, very politely. Did the vampires teach him that politeness? Did vampires teach Rachel a word like fellate, perhaps while instructing her to do it with a hopefully willing human partner?

  “Do you guys know how to use condoms?” She has decided to ask Tetsuo to supply them. This last week has made it clear that “sexual flavors” are all too frequently on the menu at Grade Gold.

  Kaipo looks at Rachel; Rachel shakes her head. “What’s a condom?” he asks.

  It’s so easy to forget how little of the world they know. “You use it during sex, to stop you from catching diseases,” she says, carefully. “Or getting pregnant.”

  Rachel laughs and stuffs the rest of the flesh into her wide mouth. Even a cherimoya can’t fill her hollows. “Great, even more vampire sex,” she says, her hatred clearer than her garbled words. “They never made Pen do it.”

  “They didn’t?” Key asks.

  Juice dribbles down her chin. “You know, Tetsuo’s dispensation? Before she killed herself, she was his pick. Everyone knew it. That’s why they left her alone.”

  Key feels light-headed. “But if she was his choice… why would she kill herself?”

  “She didn’t want to be a vampire,” Kaipo says softly.

  “She wanted a baby, like bringing a new food sack into the world is a good idea. But they wouldn’t let her have sex and they wanted to make her one of them, so—now she’s gone. But why he’d bring you here, when any of us would be a better choice—”

  “Rachel, just shut up. Please.” Kaipo takes her by the shoulder.

  Rachel shrugs him off. “What? Like she can do anything.”

  “If she becomes one of them—”