He stops and looks up at the vast, brick prison whose windows are all barred. “I’ve come this far, Glady. We both know she was never right, but I can’t chicken out now,” he says, then climbs the steps to the entrance.
The lobby inside is small and long, with reception stations down the entire length of the building. He wanders first the east wing, then the west, where he passes a slender child who sways to the rhythm of the vents that pump hot, wet air. Her eyes are bloody, and out of habit, he kicks her so that she lands against the tiled hall wall. Something cracks (her femur?) but she doesn’t come after him. Only lies against the cafeteria wall like a fractured doll.
“Sorry,” he mumbles, then keeps walking.
It’s okay, she answers in his mind. Have you seen my daddy? He abandoned me.
“That’s a low blow,” he mumbles back, only maybe he doesn’t say the words. Maybe now, he and the dead understand each other.
She grins.
The holding cells are in the back of the building. About thirty in all, they border the periphery of a large, two-story room. Connie walks from cell to cell. Half are empty, the other half singly occupied by emaciated, uninfected women lying mostly in their beds. None bear Delia’s face. It seems a waste to Conrad that no one thought to set them free or feed them. In cell nine, a woman clings to the bars with locked fingers. Her front teeth are worn down to the gums from where she tried to bite her way out.
There are zombies, too, of course. They walk in aimless circles, and have spread nearly equidistant—about one per every ten square feet—like air molecules in stasis, mindless and inanimate. For the most part, they don’t notice him, though he can hear their thoughts:
I’m hungry.
I’m thirsty.
I’m lonely.
It’s so dark in here, and my love is so dry.
In the basement of the west wing, he finds the makeshift laboratory where it looks like surgeries happened in the hallways. He sees the IV trees, monitors, and needles that remind him of Adam. It occurs to him that he and Gladys never asked Delia if she wanted the child. Instead they took him, then abandoned her as if she were junk. In admitting his own fault, it’s easier to admit the greater truth: she murdered the fish, and Barkley, and those high school kids, too. She was born with a bloodlust.
In the basement, he finds the rest of the prisoners chained to gurneys. They must have been injected with the virus, because their heads are cleanly sawed away.
A doctor and nurse, both infected, wander the aisles, forever trapped in their roles of sick and, well, prisoner and captive. They seem to believe they are ministering comfort as they check lifeless wrists for pulses.
“Delia!” he shouts. They look at him for a moment, then return to their work. If she is alive, and I find her, I will be happy, he thinks. Even if she has not changed, I will take comfort from finishing this journey, and be fulfilled.
“Delia!” he cries. Like his joints, his throat is beginning to lock.
Just then, a tiny, faraway voice shouts back: “Here!”
It’s been years since he’s seen her, but her voice transcends time. It is imprinted upon him and dwells in the reptile part of his brain that even the virus cannot devour. His body moves, almost of its own volition. Not even his back hurts anymore. He is entirely numb.
“Delia!”
In reply is that same hesitation from years ago, when she called late at night while Gladys slept. He’s run that moment over in his mind every day since, and recognizes now that her hesitation was shame. It was always shame.
“ . . . Dad?”
He’s racing on stiff, rigor mortis legs while his favorite memories, long forgotten, surface: the night she stayed home from a party to play chess with him; the poster of dogs playing poker in her bedroom that he never took down, even after Adam moved in; the color red, that he has forever associated with Delia, his perfect child, who was born with a taste for blood. These memories surface like exploding stars, and then just as quickly, disappear. He tries to catch them, but they are mist. By the time he reaches the lower level of the basement, he is aware only of their loss, and not what they contained.
“Delia!” He cries, and now he can’t remember—is he chasing her ghost, or the actual girl?
“Dad, I’m here. In the bomb shelter!” she answers.
He shambles, standing tall now, past the walking dead National Guard and orderlies and reporters, through the second examination room, where the rest of the headless prisoners lay, and toward the back stairs that lead farther down. His muscles tear and creak as he descends. He unlocks another door to another wide room, where there are no zombies. Just a single cell in the center of the room. Several bodies lay half inside the bars, their legs and chests chewed down to the bones. He looks up, and there is Delia, red-cheeked and glowing, peering out from her cage.
“Dad,” she says.
He doesn’t remember her name, and her young, vigorous face doesn’t look familiar, but he knows her, and he loves her like red dawn. He walks stiff-legged to the bars. She’s crying. The sound is both terrible and beauteous.
There are voices, many voices, whispering words of nonsense.
I’m hungry.
I’m lonely.
It’s so dark.
Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, my master will lie.
And then, through all that, so softly he can barely hear it: Connie, promise me. She’s all we’ve got.
The woman is small and sharp-featured. Though he has no evidence or memory, he knows she is his daughter. “You’re immune?” he asks.
“Sort of,” she says. She can’t look him in the eyes.
“Why didn’t they make a vaccine?”
She shakes her head. He waits for more. She doesn’t ask about the boy, Adam. He doesn’t remember the name or what the word represents. He only knows he’s disappointed, like always. And she’s ashamed, like always. And the chasm between their two distinct natures is red.
“I got bit,” he tells her. “Where are the keys? I better get you out so you can run away.”
She nods her head at the key ring about twenty feet away and he retrieves it. There is only one key, and it occurs to him that to put her here, they must have thought she was very dangerous.
“Don’t worry about me,” she says. “I can’t get what you have.”
Something clicks inside him. The part that knew this all along. The part that came all this way because it knew, and needed to finish what it had started.
He comes closer. In one hand, he’s got the shotgun. In the other, the key. He feels himself nodding off. He thinks about the ocean and the sky, and the time they went fishing at dawn, and how she told him she loved him, too.
And then there is Gladys, looking down on them both with the baby in her arms like the Virgin Mary.
“Why are you immune?” he asks.
She points to the back of her cell. He notices that the structures he’d first imagined as furniture are bones. She has fashioned a chair, a bed. The rest are piled and polished like shiny rocks. He realizes why this room is free of zombies. Little is left, save their bones. “I feed on their blood. Any blood. It keeps me young. But you knew that.”
He nods, but doesn’t answer, because he has lost the words. He is losing himself, one brain cell at a time.
She licks her lips, and he sees that she’s less happy to see him than hungry. But this is the nature of parents and children. The former give, the latter take. “The key, Dad?” she asks.
It feels sharp in his hand. He remembers those missing high school kids, and after that, the junkies’ bodies he read about in the paper that had been drained of blood. No wonder she developed a taste for heroin.
“The virus came from me,” she says. “I bit someone and they lived. It mutated inside them and spread.”
“I’m dying,” he says.
Her orange jumpsuit is slack in the hips and waist. It’s probably been a while since she fed. If he opens the doo
r for her, she’ll make a meal of him. But what are fathers for, if not sustenance? “Fuck you, Dad. You never understood it was a gift. You made me ashamed.”
He shakes his head. Feels his heart slowing in his chest. It doesn’t remember how to pump, so he hits it, hard. “I love you,” he says.
Her eyes water. He thinks that means she’s sad, but he can’t really tell. Monsters don’t act like normal people. “I love you, too,” she answers. “Now give me the key.”
Are you lonesome, just like me?
Connie, did you know? Gladys asks. Maybe it’s coming from him. Maybe it’s her ghost.
“Yes, I knew,” he whispers. “So did you.”
Behind the bars, Delia licks her lips. “The key.”
He doesn’t remember his name anymore, or this woman before him. All that is left is the emotion underneath it, and instinct.
“Now, Dad.”
He fires the shotgun. His aim is true.
Then he turns the shotgun on himself, but it is too long and his fingers won’t obey him, so he drops it.
The young woman lies motionless while blood pools around her. He thinks about the color blue as he reaches through the bars that will now separate them for an eternity, and squeezes her fingers. She squeezes back as if she is relieved, and then lets go.
In sadness he can no longer comprehend, his heart tears itself into wings and flaps blood. It is a caged bird in there, that has shred itself inside-out but still can’t get free.
We live in the Age of Solipsism. You care only for yourself and that which is yours. The agony of another—or even the existence of monstrosity—goes almost unnoticed unless viewed on film or video or in pixels . . .
SEA WARG
TANITH LEE
1.
One dull red star was sinking through the air into the sea. It was the sun. But eastward the October night had already commenced. There the water was dark green and the air purple, and the old ruinous pier stood between like a burnt spider.
Under the pier was a ghostly blackness, holed by mysterious luminous apertures. Ancient weeds and shreds of nets dripped. The insectile, leprous, wooden legs of the pier seemed to ripple, just as their drowning reflections did. The tide would be high.
The sea pushed softly against the land. It was destroying the land. The cliffs, eaten alive by the sea (smelling of antique metal, fish odor of Leviathan, depth, death), were crumbling in little pieces and large slabs, and the promenade, where sea-siders had strolled not more than thirty years ago, rotted and grew rank. Even the DANGER notices had faded and in the dark were only pale splashes, daubed with words that might have been printed in Russian.
But the sea-influencing moon would rise in a while.
Almost full tonight.
Under the pier the water twitched. Something moved through it. Perhaps a late swimmer who was indifferent to the cold evening or the warning danger—keep out. Or nothing at all maybe, just some rogue current, for the currents were temperamental all along this stretch of coast.
A small rock fell from above and clove the water, copying the sound of a rising fish.
The sun had been squashed from view. Half a mile westward the lights of hotels and restaurants shone upward, like the rays of another world, another planet.
When the man had stabbed him in the groin, Johnson had not really believed it. Hadn’t understood the fountain of blood. When the next moment two security guards burst in and threw the weeping man onto the fitted carpet, Johnson simply sat there. “Are you okay? Fuck. You’re not,” said the first security guard. “Oh. I’m—” said Johnson. The next thing he recalled, subsequently, was the hospital.
The compensation had been generous. And a partial pension, too, until in eighteen years’ time he came of age to draw it in full. The matter was hushed up otherwise, obliterated. Office bullying by the venomous Mr. Haine had driven a single employee—not to the usual nervous breakdown or mere resignation—but to stab reliable Mr. Johnson, leaving him with a permanent limp and some slight but ineradicable impairments both of a digestive and a sexual nature. “I hope you won’t think of us too badly,” said old Mr. Birch, gentle as an Alzheimer’s lamb. “Not at all, sir,” replied Johnson in his normal, quiet, pragmatic way.
Sandbourne was his choice for the bungalow with the view of the sea—what his own dead father had always wanted, and never achieved.
Johnson wasn’t quite certain why he fitted himself, so seamlessly, into that redundant role.
Probably the run-down nature of the seaside town provided inducement. House prices were much lower than elsewhere in the southeast. And he had always liked the sea. Besides, there were endless opportunities in Sandbourne for the long, tough walks he must now take, every day of his life if possible, to keep the spoilt muscles in his left leg in working order.
But he didn’t mind walking. It gave extra scope for the other thing he liked, which had originally furnished his job in staff liaison at Haine and Birch. Johnson was fascinated by people. He never tired of the study he gave them. A literate and practiced reader, he found they provided him with animated books. His perceptions had, he was aware, cost him his five-year marriage: he had seen too well what Susan, clever though she had been, was up to. But then, Susan wouldn’t have wanted him now anyway, with his limp and the bungalow, forty-two years of age, and two months into the town and walking everywhere, staring at the wet wilderness of waters.
“I see that dog again, up by the old pier.”
“Yeah?” asked the man behind the counter. “What dog’s that, then?”
“I tol’ yer. Didn’ I? I was up there shrimping. An’ I looks an’ it’s swimming aroun’ out there, great big fucker, too. Don’ like the looks of it, mate. I can tell yer.”
“Right.”
“Think I oughta call the RSPCee like?”
“What, the Animal Rights people?” chipped in the other man.
“Nah. He means the RSPCA, don’t ya, Benny?”
“ ’S right. RSPCee. Only it shouldn’ be out there like that on its own. No one about. Just druggies and pushers.”
The man behind the counter filled Benny’s mug with a brown foam of coffee and slapped a bacon sandwich down before the other man at the counter. Johnson, sitting back by the café wall, his breakfast finished, watched them closely in the way he had perfected, seeming not to, seeming miles off.
“An’ it’s allus this time of the month.”
“Didn’t know you still had them, Benny, times of the month.”
Benny shook his head, dismissing—or just missing—the joke. “I don’ mean that.”
“What do ya mean then, pal?”
“I don’ like it. Great big bloody dog like that, out there in the water when it starts ter get dark and just that big moon ter show it.”
“Sure it weren’t a shark?”
“Dog. It was a dog.”
“Live and let live,” said the counter man.
Benny slouched to a table. “You ain’t seen it.”
After breakfast Johnson had meant to walk up steep Hill Road and take the rocky path along the cliff top and inland, to the supermarket at Crakes Bay.
Now he decided to go eastwards along the beach, following the cliff line, to the place where the warning notices were. There had been a few major rockfalls in the 1990s, so he had heard; less now, they said. People were always getting over the council barricade. A haunt of drug addicts, too, that area, “down-and-outs holing up like rats” among the boarded-up shops and drown-foundationed houses farther up. Johnson wasn’t afraid of any of that. He didn’t look either well-off or so impoverished as to be desperate. Besides, he’d been mugged in London once or twice. As a general rule, if you kept calm and gave them what they wanted without fuss, no harm befell you. No, it was in a smart office with a weakened man in tears that harm had happened.
The beach was an easy walk. Have to do something more arduous later.
The sand was still damp, the low October sun reflecting in smooth, m
irrored strafes where the sea had decided to remain until the next incoming tide fetched it. A faintly hazy morning, salt-smelling and chilly and fresh.
Johnson thought about the dog. Poor animal, no doubt belonging to one of the drugged outcasts. He wondered if, neglected and famished, it had learned to swim out to sea, catching the fish that a full moon lured to the water’s surface.
There were quite a few other people walking on the beach, but after the half mile it took to come around to the pier-end, none at all. There was a dismal beauty to the scene. The steely sea and soft gray-blue sky featuring its sun. The derelict promenade, much of which had collapsed. Behind these the defunct shops with their look of broken toy models, and then the long, helpless arm of the pier, with the hulks of its arcades and tea-rooms, and the ballroom, now mostly a skeleton, where had hung, so books on Sandbourne’s history told one, sixteen crystal chandeliers.
Johnson climbed the rocks and rubbish—soggy pizza boxes, orange peels, beer cans—and stood up against the creviced pavement of the esplanade. It looked as if bombs had exploded there.
Out at sea nothing moved, but for the eternal sideways running of the waves.
At the beginning of the previous century, a steamboat had sailed across regularly from France, putting in by the pier, then a white confection like a bridal cake. The strange currents that beset this coast had made that the only safe spot. The fishing fleet had gone out from here too, this old part of the city-town, the roots of which had been there, it seemed, since Saxon times. Now the boats put off from the west end of Sandbourne, or at least they did so when the rest of Europe allowed it.
Johnson wondered whether it was worth the climb, awkward now with his leg, over the boarding and notices. By day there were no movements, no people. They were night dwellers very likely, eyes sore from skunk, skins scabrous from crack.
And by night, of course, this place would indeed be dangerous.
As he turned and started back along the shore, Johnson’s eye was attracted by something not the cloud-and-sea shades of the morning, lying at the very edge of the land. He took it at first for some unusual shell or sea-life washed ashore. Then decided it must be something manufactured, some gruesome modern fancy for Halloween, perhaps.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror Page 33
