Каарон Уоррен - The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

A girl on the run in a dress and high heels wouldn’t run far is what Spencer bet, and why not? She owned the house. The house always wins.

The isolated mountain house of a high-toned serial killer isn’t the kind of joint you accidentally wander into. I’d been recruited, seduced, and deployed. Dr. Ryoko and Dr. Campbell (more on my patrons—and their sexy, sexy bodyguard, Beasley—in due course), possessed a special interest in Averna Spencer’s activities. My mission was to infiltrate her estate and conduct hostile actions on their behalf.

A few words about our mutual foe:

Averna craved the chase. She wasn’t a slasher of (hapless) womenfolk or a sniper of unsuspecting coyotes. She didn’t howl at the moon; hadn’t been born under a bad sign or suffered childhood trauma. A hunter, nonetheless. Pure predator evolved to the job at hand. Sixty-three kills, if the cobbled-together records told it true. Sixty-three on U.S. soil; only INTERPOL could speak for the body count in Europe where she frequently traveled.

The manifest of persons missing and presumed dead since 1988, included loggers, hikers, ex-military, a baker’s dozen hardened criminals, and a former Olympic decathlete. These folks vanished across the U.S.; law enforcement records established the deeds, but the authorities hadn’t officially put it together. Unofficially, there were rumors. A retired FBI agent in Houston, a discredited private investigator in Wisconsin, and other assorted kooks, rocked the boat now and again. It came to nothing, as these situations usually do.

The track and field star haunted me. Strapping lad. Last known photograph taken at sunset, ice cream cone in hand (an athlete’s notion of decadence), a tall, dark-haired chick hanging on his arm. Track and field dude—let’s call him Rocky since he looked a hell of a lot like a Rocky I knew in high school—dressed nicely, smiled nicely. Only missed snagging the bronze medal by hundredths of a second. I imagined how he must’ve been later, after the kidnapping—alone, lost in a trackless forest. Pressed flat against the trunk of a pine, head cocked, every cord in his neck straining. Then, slice .

Rocky the Olympian’s tragic story ended the same as the rest. Worm food.

Fast, strong, tough. Hadn’t mattered, had it? Can’t fight what you don’t see coming, can’t fight if you’re prey. Dharma 101, friends and neighbors. The rabbit runs and the hawk dives.

Where do I fit into the grand scheme? I muck around in the rising tide of cosmic night. I’m hell on wheels. My totem animal is the coyote, the mongoose, my blazon a bloodied Ka-Bar in a clenched fist against a field of black.

Lest I join the dearly departed in their unmarked graves, the moment had come to make myself scarce. The original extraction plan struck me as sketchy at best—on the bright side of the equation, Spencer’s houseguests normally returned to the world unharmed. The data led Campbell and Ryoko to theorize that those whom she kidnapped (and I qualified) were subsequently hunted across her estate grounds. Should the operation go pear-shaped, I was to flee Averna Spencer’s home and rendezvous at a hunting cabin a mile past the estate’s southeast boundary. My patrons had assured me they’d done the math forward and back—it wouldn’t come to such an extreme. Bastards.

A grand staircase spiraled down into gothic gloom. Marble raptors guarded the way. I ripped the dress to upper thigh, removed my heels, and transformed into a new creature; slippery and dangerous.

I hustled through the door and past a phalanx of artificial eggs arranged on the front lawn. Almost did a doubletake. The eggs were outsized and exaggerated, Andy Warhol style; waist-tall, maybe three feet in circumference, cast from milky-lucent porcelain that glowed in the porchlight. The one nearest my left was bisected at its apex, like a hollow rocket missing its conical nose. An egg and a coffin are antipodes of a closed circuit. Made it halfway across the yard before Averna’s evil sidekick, Manson, shot me in the ass with a dart from a rifle. She waved when I glanced back. I flipped her the bird (ironic to the bitter end). Strength drained from me like blood from a tapped artery. Five more steps and I sprawled.

Averna rolled me onto my side. She moved her lips against mine in a not-quite kiss. Would’ve punched her in the throat except whatever Manson had loaded the dart with froze every muscle in my body. I tabled the impulse. She licked the salt of my tears and leaned back to regard me from the shadows. Eyes without a face. Yellow eyes with strange-as-shit pupils. Hawk pupils. I wanted to ask how she’d known . Maybe she didn’t; and if she didn’t, despite her rhetoric, I might escape with my skin.

This feeble hope persisted for less than five seconds.

“The doctors asked you to acquire a certain document, yes? They promised some grand reward for your service; appealed to your sense of honor. Couldn’t you detect the evil in their black little hearts? Did you not whiff the deception?”

Had I been capable of speech, I’d have said nobody’s perfect, and spat a gob in her eye.

She smiled. “I delivered the formula to them months ago. Payment for your sweet self. I got the best of Campbell and Ryoko, as usual. The formula is worthless, lacking a specific strain of Jurassic protozoa, which, let us pray, no one ever resurrects. Blink if you can hear me.”

I’m stubborn, so I glared, bug-eyed defiant. Impossible to tell if she was lying, and if so, how much. My “power” to behold the evil in the human heart doesn’t work on women half as well as it does on men, and if she was telling the truth, it didn’t work half so well on men as I’d thought.

A sociopath will say anything to make her victims squirm, which meant I dared not believe a word from her lips. Yet, and yet… I tried to speak; to scream, actually. Had my preparation and training been a ruse? Had those kindly eggheads really double-crossed me? Had their man-at-arms (and my lover) Beasley, participated in the con? Et tu , Beasley? Et tu , you handsome sonofabitch?

Averna said, “None of this is an accident. The doctors do not trade in coincidence and neither do I. We’ve observed you for many years. Something happened to your mother as a young woman. She met a friend of mine, a foreigner, you might say, who contracted with the CIA to enhance various programs. Lucius was part of an experiment, alongside many of her friends. She and the other surviving test subjects have been remotely monitored since the latter 1970s, as are their offspring. The… conditions that altered Lucius skipped her firstborn, Elwood, and bloomed within you. Curses can be finicky.

“Did those old goats suggest they knew Lucius’s fate? Spoiler alert: mother dearest isn’t living in a trailer in Tennessee with a failed country singer. She didn’t drink herself to death or get eaten by a bear. I am not privy to the machinations of Campbell and Ryoko. I do have my own brand of intuition. My intuition says they murdered Lucius Lochinvar Mace. Did her in in the name of science.” She rose and gestured to Manson who lurked nearby.

Manson hoisted me with her arms extended as if I were a crash test dummy. My field of view revolved off its y axis. I went bye-bye into the hollow belly of night.

Backtrack, backtrack. Maybe you’re wondering how a nice girl like me ended up in a place like this…

A pair of infamous scientists figured I might be game to solve a mystery and save the world. Unlikely, yet no less so than the rest of the improbable bullshit that increasingly defines my existence. My current boyfriend, the aforementioned Beasley, happened to serve as bodyguard, valet, and moral compass to the renegade doctors. He introduced us. This set the ball rolling. Happy (unhappy) coincidence? As I’ve come to mutter on a routine basis, there are no accidents.