Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One)

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Maybe,” I replied.

  “Meat’s scarce this time of year,” the boy chuckled and then licked his thin ebony lips.

  Down at the other end of the hallway, something growled softly, and the boy glanced over his shoulder, then back up at me. He was smiling, a hard smile that was neither cruel nor kind, revealing the sharp tips of his long canines and incisors. He looked disappointed.

  “All in good time,” he said and took my hand. “All in good time,” and I let him lead me towards the eager shadows crouched at the other end of the hallway.

  Near the end of his book, Emmanuel Weatherby-Jones writes, “The calamities following, and following from, the return of the IcePIC probe may stand as mankind’s gravest defeat. For long millennia, we had asked ourselves if we were alone in the cosmos. Indeed, that question has surely formed much of the fundamental matter of the world’s religions. But when finally answered, once and for all, we were forced to accept that there had been greater comfort in our former, vanished ignorance.”

  We are more alone than ever. Ronnie got that part right.

  When I’d backed out of the contact and the techs had a solid lockdown on the critter’s signal, when the containment waves were pinging crystal mad off the putrescent walls of the bedroom on Columbus and one of the medics had administered a stimulant to clear my head and bring me the rest of the way home, I sat down on the floor and cried.

  Nothing unusual about that. I’ve cried almost every single time. At least I didn’t puke.

  “Good job,” Templeton said and rested a heavy gloved hand on my shoulder.

  “Fuck you. I could hear them. I could hear both of them, you asshole.”

  “We did what we could, Deet. I couldn’t have you so tanked on morphine you’d end up flat lining.”

  “Oh my god. Oh Jesus god,” I sobbed like an old woman, gasping, my heart racing itself round smaller and smaller circles, fried to a crisp on the big syringe full of synthetadrine the medic had pumped into my left arm. “Kill it, Temp. You kill it right this fucking instant.”

  “We have to stick to protocol,” he said calmly, staring down at the writhing mass of bone and meat and protoplasm on the bed. A blood-red tendril slithered from the place where the man’s mouth had been and began burrowing urgently into the sagging mattress. “Just as soon as we have you debriefed and we’re sure stasis is holding, then we’ll terminate life signs.”

  “Fuck it,” I said and reached for his Beretta, tearing the pistol from the velcro straps of the holster with enough force that Temp almost fell over on top of me. I shoved him aside and aimed at the thing on the bed.

  “Deet, don’t you even fucking think about pulling that trigger!”

  “You can go straight to Hell,” I whispered, to Templeton, to the whole goddamn Agency, to the spooch and that single hurting blue eye still watching me. I squeezed the trigger, emptying the whole clip into what little was left of the man and woman’s swollen skulls, hoping it would be enough.

  Then someone grabbed for the gun, and I let them take it from me.

  “You stupid motherfucker,” Temp growled. “You goddamn, stupid bastard. As soon as this job is finished, you are out. Do you fucking understand me, Deet? You are yesterday’s fucking news!”

  “Yeah,” I replied and sat back down on the floor. In the silence left after the roar of the gun, the containment waves pinged, and my ears rang, and the yellow fog settled over me like a shroud.

  At least, that’s the way I like to pretend it all went down. Late at night, when I can’t sleep, when the pills and booze aren’t enough, I like to imagine there was one moment in my wasted, chickenshit life when I did what I should have done.

  Whatever really happened, I’m sure someone’s already written it down somewhere. I don’t have to do it again.

  In the cluttered little room at the end of the third-floor hallway, the woman with a cat’s face and nervous, twitching ears sat near a hole that had been a window before the mortars. There was no light but the dim winter sun. The boy sat at her feet and never took his eyes off me. The woman – if she had a name, I never learned it – only looked at me once, when I first entered the room. The fire in her eyes made short work of whatever resolve I had left, and I was glad when she turned back to the hole in the wall and stared north across the river towards the Astoria refineries.

  She told me the girl had left a week earlier. She didn’t have any idea where Jet Miyake might have gone.

  “She brings food and medicine, sometimes,” the woman said, confirming what I’d already suspected. Back then, there were a lot of people willing to risk prison or death to get supplies to Roosevelt Island. Maybe there still are. I couldn’t say.

  “I’m sorry to hear about her parents,” she said.

  “It was quick,” I lied. “They didn’t suffer.”

  “You smell like death, Mr. Paine,” the woman said, flaring her nostrils slightly. The boy at her feet laughed and hugged himself, rocking from side to side. “I think it follows you. I believe you herald death.”

  “Yeah, I think the same thing myself sometimes,” I replied.

  “You hunt the aliens?” she purred.

  “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  “There’s a certain irony, don’t you think? Our world was dying. We poisoned our world, and then went looking for life somewhere else. Do you think we found what we were looking for, Mr. Paine?”

  “No,” I told her. “I don’t think we ever will.”

  “Go back to the city, Mr. Paine. Go now. You won’t be safe after sunset. Some of us are starving. Some of our children are starving.”

  I thanked her and left the room. The boy followed me as far as the stairs, then he stopped and sat chuckling to himself, his laughter echoing through the stairwell, as I moved slowly, step by blind step, through the uncertain darkness. I retraced my path to the street, following Main to East, past the wild places, through the canyons, and didn’t look back until I was standing on the bridge again.

  I found Jet Miyake in Chinatown two days later, hiding out in the basement of the Buddhist Society of Wonderful Enlightenment on Madison Street. The Agency had files on a priest there, demonstrating a history of pro-stitch sentiment. Jet Miyake ran, because they always run if they can, and I chased her, down Mechanics Alley, across Henry, and finally caught up with her in a fish market on East Broadway, beneath the old Manhattan Bridge. She tried to lose me in the maze of kiosks, the glistening mounds of factory-vat octopus and squid, eel and tuna and cod laid out on mountains of crushed ice. She headed for a back door and almost made it, but slipped on the wet concrete floor and went sprawling ass over tits into a big display of dried soba and canned chicken broth. I don’t actually remember all those details, just the girl and the stink of fish, the clatter of the cans on the cement, the angry, frightened shouts from the merchants and customers. But the details, the octopus and soba noodles, I don’t know. I think I’m trying to forget this isn’t fiction, believe that it happened, that I’m not making it up as I go along.

  Sometimes.

  Sometimes I’m a savage.

  I held the muzzle of my pistol to her right temple while I ran the scan. She gritted her teeth and stared silently up at me. The machine read her dirty as the grey New York snow, though I didn’t need the blinking red light on the genetigraph to tell me that. She was hurting, the way only long-term carriers can hurt. I could see it in her eyes, in the sweat streaming down her face, in the faintly bluish tinge of her lips. She’d probably been contaminated for months. I knew it’d be a miracle if she’d infected no one but her parents. I showed her the display screen on the genetigraph and told her what it meant, and I told her what I had to do next.

  “You can’t stop it, you know,” she said, smiling a bitter, sickly smile. “No matter how many people you kill, it’s too late. It’s been too late from the start.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, whether I actually was or not, and squeezed the trigger. The 9mm boomed like thund
er in a bottle, and suddenly she wasn’t my problem anymore. Suddenly, she was just another carcass for the sweepers.

  I have become an unreliable narrator. Maybe I’ve been an unreliable narrator all along. Just like I’ve been a coward and a hypocrite all along. The things we would rather remember, the things we choose to forget. As the old saying goes, it’s only a movie.

  I didn’t kill Jet Miyake.

  “You can’t stop it, you know,” she said. That part’s the truth. “No matter how many people you kill, it’s too late. It’s been too late from the start.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “We brought it here. We invited it in, and it likes what it sees. It means to stay.” She did smile, but it was a satisfied, secret smile. I stepped back and lowered the muzzle of the gun. The bore had left a slight circular impression on her skin.

  “Please step aside, Mr. Paine,” Sarah said, and when I turned around she was standing just a few feet behind me, pointing a ridiculously small carbon-black Glock at the girl. Sarah fired twice and waited until the body stopped convulsing, then put a third bullet in Jet Miyake’s head, just to be sure. Sarah had always been thorough.

  “Templeton thought you might get cold feet,” she said and stepped past me, kneeling to inspect the body. “You know this means that you’ll probably be suspended.”

  “She was right, wasn’t she?” I muttered. “Sooner or later, we’re going to lose this thing,” and for a moment I considered putting a few rounds into Sarah’s skull, pulling the trigger and spraying brains and blood and silicon across the floor of the fish market. It might have been a mercy killing. But I suppose I didn’t love her quite as much as I’d always thought. Besides, the Agency would have probably just picked up the pieces and stuck her back together again.

  “One day at a time, Mr. Paine,” she said. “That’s the only way to stay sane. One day at a time.”

  “No past, no future,” I replied.

  “If that’s the way you want to look at it.”

  She stood up and held out a hand. I popped the clip from my pistol and gave her the gun and the ammo. I removed the genetigraph from my belt, and she took that, too.

  “We’ll send someone to the hotel for the rest of your equipment. Please have everything in order. You have your ticket back to Los Angeles.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I have my ticket back to Los Angeles.”

  “You lasted a lot longer than I thought you would,” she said.

  And I left her there, standing over the girl’s body, calling in the kill, ordering the sweeper crew. The next day I flew back to LA and found a bar where I was reasonably sure no one would recognize me. I started with tequila, moved on to scotch, and woke up two days later, facedown in the sand at Malibu, sick as a dog. The sun was setting, brewing a firestorm on the horizon, and I watched the stars come out above the sea. A meteor streaked across the sky and was gone. It only took me a moment to find Jupiter, Lord of the Heavens, Gatherer of Clouds, hardly more than a bright pinprick near the moon.

  * * *

  Riding the White Bull

  For many years I’d wanted to write science fiction, and finally Bill Schafer sort of gave me a shove out the door. I’ll admit, I’m very proud of this one, this sprawling, yet claustrophobic, cyber noir. Also, one of my earliest experiment’s with a first-person narrative, a mode I’d long resisted.

  Waycross

  …abasht the Devil stood,

  And felt how awful goodness is…

  John Milton, Paradise Lost

  “Rise and shine, Snow White,” the Gynander growls, and so the albino girl slowly opens her pink eyes, the dream of her dead mother and sunlight and the sheltering sky dissolving to the bare earth and meat-rot stink of the cellar.

  Go back to sleep, and I’ll be home again, she thinks. Close my eyes, and none of this has ever happened. Not the truth, nothing like the truth, but cold comfort better than no comfort at all in this hole behind the place where the monster sleeps during the day. Dancy blinks at the darkness, licks her dry, chapped lips, and tries hard to remember the story her mother was telling her in the dream. Lion’s den, whale belly, fiery-furnace Bible story, but all the words and names running together in her head, the pain and numbness in her wrists and ankles more real, and the dream growing smaller and farther away with every beat of her heart.

  The raw red thing crouched somewhere at the other side of the cellar makes a soft, wet sound and strikes a match to light the hurricane lamp gripped in the long fingers of its left hand. Dancy closes her eyes, because the angel has warned her never to look at its face until after it puts on one of the skins hanging from the rusted steel hooks set into the ceiling of the cellar. All those blind and shriveled hides like deflated people, deflated animals, and it has promised Dancy that some day very soon she’ll hang there, too, one more hollow face, one more mask for it to wear.

  “What day…what day is it?” Dancy whispers, hard to talk because her throat’s so dry, hard to even swallow, and her tongue feels swollen. “How long have I been down here?”

  “Why?” the Gynander asks her. “What difference does it make?”

  “No difference,” Dancy croaks. “I just wanted to know.”

  “You got some place to be? You got someone else to kill?”

  “I just wanted to know what day of the week it is.”

  “It isn’t any day. It’s night.”

  Yellow-orange lantern light getting in through Dancy’s eyelids, warm light and cold shadows, and she squeezes them shut tighter, turns her head to one side so her face is pressed against the hard dirt floor. Not taking any chances because she promised she wouldn’t ever look, and if she starts lying to the angel he might stop coming to her.

  “Sooner or later, you’re gonna have to take a look at me, Dancy Flammarion,” the Gynander says and laughs its boneshard, thistle laugh. “You’re gonna have to open them rabbity little eyes of yours and have a good long look, before we’re done.”

  “I was dreaming. You woke me up. Go away so I can go back to sleep. Kill me, or go away.”

  “You’re already dead, child. Ain’t you figured that out yet? You been dead since the day you came looking for me.”

  Footsteps, then, the heavy, stumbling sounds its splayed feet make against the hard-packed floor, and the clank and clatter of the hooks as it riffles through the hides, deciding what to wear.

  “Kill me, or go away,” Dancy says again, gets dirt in her mouth and spits it back out.

  “Dead as a doornail,” it purrs. “Dead as a dodo. Dead as I want you to be.”

  Dancy tries not to hear what comes next, the dry, stretching noises it makes stuffing itself into the skin suit it’s chosen from one of the hooks. If her hands were free she could cover her ears; if they weren’t tied together behind her back with nylon rope she could shove her fingers deep into her ears and maybe block the noises out.

  “You can open your eyes now,” the Gynander says. “I’m decent.”

  “Kill me,” Dancy says, not opening her eyes.

  “Why do you keep saying that? You don’t want to die. When people want to die, when they really want to die, they get a certain smell about them, a certain brittle incense. You, you smell like someone who wants to live.”

  “I failed, and now I want this all to end.”

  “See, now that’s the truth,” the Gynander says, and there’s a ragged zipping-up sort of sound as it seals the skin closed around itself. “You done let that angel of yours down, and you’re ashamed, and you’re scared. And you sure as hell don’t want what you got coming to you. But you still don’t want to die.”

  Dancy turns her head and opens her eyes, and now the thing is squatting there in front of her, holding the kerosene lamp close to its face. Borrowed skin stitched together from dead men and dogs, strips of diamond-backed rattlesnake hide, and it pokes at her right shoulder with one long black claw.

  “This angel, he got hisself a name?”

  “I don’t know
,” Dancy says, though she knows well enough that all angels have names. “He’s never told me his name.”

  “Must be one bad motherfucker, he gotta send little albino bitches out to do his dirty work. Must be one mean-ass son of a whore.”

  When it talks, the Gynander’s lips don’t move, but its chin jiggles loosely, and its blue-grey cheeks bulge a little. Where its eyes should be there’s nothing at all, blackness to put midnight at the bottom of the sea to shame. And Dancy knows about eyes, windows to the soul, so she looks at the hurricane lamp instead.

  “Maybe he ain’t no angel. You ever stop and let yourself think about that, Dancy? Maybe he’s a monster, too.”

  When she doesn’t answer, it pokes her again, harder than before, drawing blood with its ebony claw; warm crimson trickle across her white shoulder, precious drops of her life wasted on the cellar floor, and she stares deep into the flame trapped inside the glass chimney. Her mother’s face hidden in there somewhere, and a thousand summer-bright days, and the fiery sword her angel carries to divide the truth from lies.

  “Maybe you got it turned ’round backwards,” the Gynander says and sets the lamp down on the floor. “Maybe what you think you know, you don’t know at all.”

  “I knew right where to find you, didn’t I?” Dancy asks it, speaking very quietly and not taking her eyes off the lamp.

  “Well, yeah, now that’s a fact. But someone like me, you know how it is. Someone like me always has enemies. Besides the angels, I mean. And word gets around, no matter how careful – ”

  “Are you afraid to kill me?” she interrupts. “Is that it?”

  And there’s a loud and sudden flutter from the Gynander’s chest, then, like a dozen mockingbirds sewn up in there and wanting out, frantic wings beating against that leather husk. It leans closer, scalding carrion breath and the fainter smell of alcohol, the eager snik, snik, snik of its sharp white teeth, but Dancy keeps staring into the flickering heart of the hurricane lamp.