“Why there you are,” he said. “When I saw the scan from outside the hospital, I said, ‘Is that Mercedes, Syke’s little friend from the subworlds?’ And by jiminy it’s her in physical person. I always said we’d meet in the meat . . . ”
Mercedes was gaping at him, blinking hard, like she thought something had gone wrong with her eyes. Just looking at the guy she’d had to ditch a dozen times when she was in the social space. The guy who’d stalked her through it. And here he was in person. His cop’s name tag said Sgt. Imber.
Mercedes broke the connection with you, and then she stood up, glaring ice cold at Imber. “You found me.” I never heard three words spoken with more loathing.
He grinned. “Not exactly coincidence. Your name popped up connected to our rogue here, I asked for this one . . . ”
“Don’t let him near me.” Took me a second to work out who said that. It wasn’t Mercedes—it was Dresden, her eyes cracked open. “Wants to kill me,” she said. “Soulless. He’s . . . empty.”
“Empty of what?” Imber said, stepping into the little room, his hand tightening on the butt of his pistol. “No big ass deal. It’s more like an appendectomy.”
I felt a long, deep chill, that seemed to go on and on, when he said that. I was thinking, It’s true.
Imber shook his head sadly at the broken woman. “You didn’t have to go through this, Dresden. You didn’t have to run onto the bridge. You didn’t have to fight our people. Didn’t have to jump just to get away from those boys—that was some crazy shit. You’re lucky to be alive.”
Dresden licked her dry lips. “Wasn’t going to let them . . . take my body . . . push me out . . . ”
I looked at Imber and he looked back at me. It was so clear to me, now, looking at him. The absence was nothing you could see—but it was nothing you could miss.
The empties. Maybe I’d known for awhile. I’d seen them on the streets. In the patrol cars. On TV. More and more of them with nothing behind their eyes; with those reasonable, flat tones, talking of triage and necessity and putting the good of society over the good of the parasites. Thinning the herd.
I guess I’d known they were soulless . . . I just didn’t know why there were so many empties now. The Singularity . . .
I stepped between Dresden and Imber. And it was almost like that plastic gun jumped into my hand. It was a kind of spasmodic act of revulsion, drawing that gun, Syke—and I pointed it at Mr. Dead Eyes and squeezed the trigger. Fired almost point blank.
Imber was drawing his own gun when I shot him. He went over backwards, firing as he fell back. His bullet went between my left arm and my ribs, I could feel it cutting the air there, sizzling that close to me. I heard a despairing grunt and I turned to see that Imber’s bullet had missed me but hit Dresden—it was a charged bullet, I could tell because the wound in her side was shooting sparks and her back was arching . . . and Mercedes was shouting something at me and I was turning to snap another furious shot at Imber. I missed.
He was flat on his back now, just outside the door, writhing around the first bullet I’d fired, the slug tearing up his brisket, and he was firing sloppily up at me. Bullets chewed the doorframe of the cubby to my left, made it smoke with the charges.
I aimed carefully this time and fired and that big chin of his shattered; must’ve been busted bits of it going up into his brain, because he shrieked once and then went silent and slack. Not the first guy I shot—but that’s the first time I felt good doing it.
Down the hall, people were yelling for security. I turned to check on Dresden, but she was dead, her eyes glassy. “Shit,” I said. “Dammit.”
Then Mercedes was pushing me out the door. I had only a couple more shots in the disposable gun, and I used them as we ran out, heading for the back exits, firing over the heads of hospital security to keep them back.
Then we were banging through the door onto the wet asphalt of a back lot, past a row of dumpsters, gasping in the muggy air. We sprinted through the rain toward the hurricane fence topped with razor wire. Have to get over that fence somehow . . .
Mercedes ran ahead of me up to the fence, taking off her coat as she went. She tossed it up high, slung it over the razor wire on the fence, and I got to the fence, locked my hands together; she stepped into them and I boosted her up. She grabbed the coat, climbed up, was dropping over the other side, yelling at me to get over the fence—but I was hearing sirens, turned to see the patrol vans screaming around the corner of the hospital, the burly men and women jumping out, rushing toward me. I got maybe halfway up the fence when they grabbed me, dragged me down off it. I yelled at Mercedes to run but I didn’t have to, I saw her back disappearing as she darted through a rubbishy lot, into the alley between two high rises . . .
They knocked me down but there was talk about being careful not to hurt me, he’s a perfect specimen, he’s young and in good shape, he’s what they want . . .
I saw a man flip his mirror helmet back so he could look me over better. I saw his eyes. Empty.
They sprayed some sleep-you-creep into my mouth and I was gone.
I woke up in restraints, Syke. And naked. Lying on my back. There’s nothing more horrible than waking up in restraints—naked. Trapped and vulnerable. It happened to me once before, when I was a teenager, flipped out on Icy Dust. Woke up in a jail infirmary strapped down. Scary feeling. But not so bad, that time, I knew they were going to let me go, eventually . . .
It was worse this time. Because I knew they’d never let me go.
I could hardly move. There was a clamp holding my head in place. My upper arms and elbows and wrists were clamped down too. My knees and ankles were locked down.
I couldn’t see much. Too many lights shining at my face. I made out several pairs of eyes, the rest of the faces hidden by surgical masks. Those empty eyes. I caught the gleam of instruments. Heard healthbots muttering reports.
“Anybody want to tell me what the fuck?” I said.
“Don’t see why we should,” said a woman in a surgical mask. Her voice pleasant. A nurse—or some kind of biotechnician.
A man in uniform came into the ring of light. I got a look at his face. An old, lizardlike face I knew from the news. General Marsh.
“This him?” What a rumbly, gristly old voice General Marsh had.
“If you want one right away, this’s the best one we have,” the technician said. “There aren’t any better in the vats. He’s in excellent shape. He’s the age and size you wanted. Not a bad looking kid.”
“Kinda skinny. I guess he’ll do. I’m sick. I need uploading quick . . . ”
“We just put the nanos in him . . . If you’ll go with the nurse to upload, we’ll get you in there.”
“Won’t be any of his mind left in his brain to bother me?”
“No, no,” the technician said soothingly. “All that—anything extraneous, his memories, consciousness, the holographic pattern—it’s all going to be pushed out when we upload you into him. It just kind of gets lost in the circuits of the transfer interface. Sort of like when you do a vasectomy—where does the sperm go? The body absorbs it. Our gear will absorb him, and he won’t be there to bother you . . . ”
“That old fuck . . . taking my body . . . ” I said. “Hey general, they’re just uploading a copy of your mind—they’re not sending all you, man.”
“Everything important,” he said distantly amused. “You believe in the soul, kid—that’s such primitive thinking.”
“Look at these people,” I told him. “There’s something missing from them. That Boxell’s got no soul. He’s one of ’em! You want to end up that empty, man? Like Boxell? Let me up out of this shit and we’ll talk . . . ”
The general chuckled. “Superstitious! I do hope none of him stays.”
“None of him will . . . ” The technician leaned close and told me, ever so sweetly: “Now, Whim . . . we’re going to give you a mild tranquilizer—but we can’t put you completely under. It won’t feel like dying, reall
y. More like going down a long, long slide . . . just slide on down and out and . . . it won’t hurt at all.” It’s funny, what she said then. Not to me, to the computer about initiating the process. She said, “Three, five, thirty-five . . . ” Reciting the date. The time: “Three Oh-five a.m . . . and thirty five seconds.”
The numbers know. That was the last thing I heard, alive.
Then, all that was really me, mind and soul, went sliding down, down, and out . . .
Souls. They can’t send them when they upload. Souls go where the universe wants—not where we want them to go. So when they try to put a shaky old General’s consciousness in my body, only his personality and memory will go in. Probably had a shriveled little soul anyway. What’s left of it will dissipate, during the uploading. It doesn’t go where mine has gone—that’s the difference between us, and the uploaded. Their souls just . . . disintegrate. Ours are shoved out of the way . . .
When they pushed me out, I found I was in a somewhere—I was drifting through the circuits of the interface computer. I got stuck in the transfer equipment. Lots of us are wandering around in here. Souls in databanks. I can see ’em sometimes, in my mind’s eye. We can talk a little. I like to say to ’em, Hey, raise your hand if you’re dead. Just to show I still have a sense of humor. The real joke is, there are people walking around in perfectly healthy physical bodies, who are more dead than we are . . .
And I found that I can follow the numbers, feel those 0s and 1s, reach out through these circuits and cables, and send a message to you, Syke, since one computer talks to another—and you’re always interfacing with a computer.
I want to tell you: Come out of your virtual womb before it’s your virtual tomb, Syke. They’re going to come after you subworld people soon. You in particular.
Come out—and go find Mercedes, and take care of her. Ask around Siggy’s Allnighter. You’ll find her. Because I know she matters to you. You and her, you’re soul mates.
Me—well, I think I’ve got it figured out now. I’m not in my body—and something else is. Not someone—some thing. So I’m not ever going to be able to go back to my body. I’m just a soul, organized into a mind; a soul floating in circles, in a machine. And if my mind was uploaded to another body, my soul wouldn’t go with my mind.
I wouldn’t want that.
So no—you can’t help me. I answered my own question. I’m dead. One times zero equals zero. It all adds up. I’m only dead, though, in the physical way. Not in the way that matters.
Don’t worry about me. I followed the numbers, and I’m about to lead the others out of here. I can feel them going into another computer, and then another—and then, one at a time, out through some kind of satellite transmission link. The soul, see, ends up flying through the sky, just like it was supposed to. And there’s something up there waiting. I want to see what it is. Maybe I’ll meet Dresden. I hardly knew her. But I feel cheated, losing her . . . But maybe I’ll meet her somewhere, between here and there—wherever we are.
There’s nothing to be afraid of, she thinks. No more here than in any bad dream. But she finds the thought carries no conviction whatsoever. It’s even less substantial than the dissolving wallpaper and bookcase . . .
AS RED AS RED
CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN
1.
“So, you believe in vampires?” she asks, then takes another sip of her coffee and looks out at the rain pelting Thames Street beyond the café window. It’s been pissing rain for almost an hour, a cold, stinging shower on an overcast afternoon near the end of March, a bitter Newport afternoon that would have been equally at home in January or February. But at least it’s not pissing snow.
I put my own cup down—tea, not coffee—and stare across the booth at her for a moment or two before answering. “No,” I tell Abby Gladding. “But, quite clearly, those people in Exeter who saw to it that Mercy Brown’s body was exhumed, the ones who cut out her heart and burned it, clearly they believed in vampires. And that’s what I’m studying, the psychology behind that hysteria, behind the superstitions.”
“It was so long ago,” she replies and smiles. There’s no foreshadowing in that smile, not even in hindsight. It surely isn’t a predatory smile. There’s nothing malevolent, or hungry, or feral in the expression. She just watches the rain and smiles, as though something I’ve said amuses her.
“Not really,” I say, glancing down at my steaming cup. “Not so long ago as people might like to think. The Mercy Brown incident, that was in 1892, and the most recent case of purported vampirism in the northeast I’ve been able to pin down dates from sometime in 1898, a mere hundred and eleven years ago.”
Her smile lingers, and she traces a circle in the condensation on the plate-glass window, then traces another circle inside it.
“We’re not so far removed from the villagers with their torches and pitchforks, from old Cotton Mather and his bunch. That’s what you’re saying.”
“Well, not exactly, but . . .” and when I trail off, she turns her head towards me, and her blue-grey eyes seem as cold as the low-slung sky above Newport. You could almost freeze to death in eyes like those, I think, and I take another sip of my lukewarm Earl Grey with lemon. Her eyes seem somehow brighter than they should in the dim light of the coffeehouse, so there’s your foreshadowing, I suppose, if you’re the sort who needs it.
“You’re pretty far from Exeter, Ms. Howard,” she says, and takes another sip of her coffee. And me, I’m sitting here wishing we were talking about almost anything but Rhode Island vampires and the hysteria of crowds, tuberculosis and the Master’s thesis I’d be defending at the end of May. It had been months since I’d had anything even resembling a date, and I didn’t want to squander the next half hour or so talking shop.
“I think I’ve turned up something interesting,” I tell her, because I can’t think of any subtle way to steer the conversation in another direction; there are things I’d rather be talking with this mildly waiflike, comely girl than shop. “A case no one’s documented before, right here in Newport.”
She smiles that smile again.
“I got a tip from a folklorist up at Brown,” I say. “Seems like maybe there was an incident here in 1785 or thereabouts. If it checks out, I might be onto the oldest case of suspected vampirism resulting in an exhumation anywhere in New England. So, now I’m trying to verify the rumors. But there’s precious little to go on. Chasing vampires, it’s not like studying the Salem witch trials, where you have all those court records, the indictments and depositions and what have you. Instead, it’s necessary to spend a lot of time sifting and sorting fact from fiction, and, usually, there’s not much of either to work with.”
She nods, then glances back towards the big window and the rain. “Be a feather in your cap, though. If it’s not just a rumor, I mean.”
“Yes,” I reply. “Yes, it certainly would.”
And here, there’s an unsettling wave of not-quite déjà vu, something closer to dissociation, perhaps, and for a few dizzying seconds I feel as if I’m watching this conversation, a voyeur listening in, or I’m only remembering it, but in no way actually, presently, taking part in it. And, too, the coffeehouse and our talk and the rain outside seem a lot less concrete—less here and now—than does the morning before. One day that might as well be the next, and it’s raining, either way.
I’m standing alone on Bowen’s Warf, staring out past the masts crowded into the marina at sleek white sailboats skimming over the glittering water, and there’s the silhouette of Goat Island, half hidden in the fog. I’m about to turn and walk back up the hill to Washington Square and the library, about to leave the gaudy, Disney-World concessions catering to the tastes of tourists and return to the comforting maze of ancient gabled houses lining winding, narrow streets. And that’s when I see her for the first time. She’s standing alone near the “seal safari” kiosk, staring at a faded sign, at black-and-white photographs of harbor seals with eyes like the puppies and little girls from thos
e hideous Margaret Keane paintings. She’s wearing an old pea coat and shiny green galoshes that look new, but there’s nothing on her head, and she doesn’t have an umbrella. Her long black hair hangs wet and limp, and when she looks at me, it frames her pale face.
Then it passes, the blip or glitch in my psyche, and I’ve snapped back, into myself, into this present. I’m sitting across the booth from her once more, and the air smells almost oppressively of freshly roasted and freshly ground coffee beans.
“I’m sure it has a lot of secrets, this town,” she says, fixing me again with those blue-grey eyes and smiling that irreproachable smile of hers.
“Can’t swing a dead cat,” I say, and she laughs.
“Well, did it ever work?” Abby asks. “I mean, digging up the dead, desecrating their mortal remains to appease the living. Did it tend to do the trick?”
“No,” I reply. “Of course not. But that’s beside the point. People do strange things when they’re scared.”
And there’s more, mostly more questions from her about Colonial-Era vampirism, Newport’s urban legends, and my research as a folklorist. I’m grateful that she’s kind or polite enough not to ask the usual “you mean people get paid for this sort of thing” questions. She tells me a werewolf story dating back to the 1800s, a local priest supposedly locked away in the Portsmouth Poor Asylum after he committed a particularly gruesome murder, how he was spared the gallows because people believed he was a werewolf and so not in control of his actions. She even tells me about seeing his nameless grave in a cemetery up in Middletown, his tombstone bearing the head of a wolf. And I’m polite enough not to tell her that I’ve heard this one before.
Finally, I notice that it’s stopped raining. “I really ought to get back to work,” I say, and she nods and suggests that we should have dinner sometime soon. I agree, but we don’t set a date. She has my cell number, after all, so we can figure that out later. She also mentions a movie playing at Jane Pickens that she hasn’t seen and thinks I might enjoy. I leave her sitting there in the booth, in her pea coat and green galoshes, and she orders another cup of coffee as I’m exiting the café. On the way back to the library, I see a tree filled with noisy, cawing crows, and for some reason it reminds me of Abby Gladding.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror Page 6
