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

The plan, such as it was, was to play hard to get, work the charm offensive, gain access to the Bird Woman’s home and acquire the formula. Babies, those best-laid stratagems went out the window the instant I got a whiff of her scent.

No, man. Averna didn’t have “sharp features,” or a “cruel nose,” or “talon-like” hands (usually), or any such shit. Dark hair, brown eyes (usually), athletic. The record put her on the backside of fifty. Up close and personal, she felt a hell of a lot younger; ripped as a gymnast (a decathlete?), and nary a wrinkle or crow’s foot. Averna understood how to walk, how to hold herself motionless the way politicians and models do, how to project her personality with kinetic force. Cool to the touch. Worth forty billion and enamored of esoteric scientific research. Spencer’s corporations funded an assortment of crazy projects. Despite this massive wealth, her name seldom surfaced outside of highly insulated circles. A bizarre, protean vibe emanated from her and her retinue. Is evil (capital E evil) protean? That would explain much.

Invited me to freshen up (my quarters contained every amenity including evening wear in my size) and take a stroll with her resident PR man. Dinner at seven on the dot.

I toured the house. Bizarre and immense (immense even before factoring in a network of shops, garages, and the sector of hexagonal cottages where she stashed her off duty workforce and security personnel).

Envision a three-wing mansion of redwood logs and slate, mated to a giant bisected Bucky Ball on loan from the Martians—soaring, crystal-domed atriums with copses of full-sized pine trees and willows and a river falling over glass-smooth rocks; cozy parlors where fake flames danced inside hearths; steel bulkhead hatches concealed by cherry wood paneling and illustrated hangings that were sufficiently moth-eaten to indicate pricelessness; and an array of security cameras, some obvious and others less so. Most of the art was of the abstract genre. I didn’t recognize anything.

Averna Spencer’s PR lackey (a chipper guy named James who smiled like a hostage in fear of his life) took me in tow. According to my guide, the floorplan included a sauna, gymnasium, theater, bowling alley, discotheque, shooting range, and a spa. When his back was turned, I peeked inside vases and cabinets—no corpses, no skeletons. The circuit ended with a glimpse inside a museum gallery that would’ve made a nice addition to the Smithsonian. Dinosaur bones, suspended biplanes, and a two-story spire of glossy, radiant yellow crystal. The usual weird stuff one might expected to find in the trophy den of a megalomaniacal billionaire murderess.

When I craned my neck to get a better look, James became nervous.

“Ms. Spencer would prefer to show you these special exhibits herself. Someone accidentally left this open…”

“That’s a huge chunk of crystal, Jimmy,” I said. “Last I saw something like that was on the cover of a 1970s science fiction novel. And the bird skeleton… What’s the wingspan? Twenty feet? Is it a pterodactyl?”

“No, ma’am, it is not a pterodactyl.” James pulled a pair of brass-plated doors shut. “ Argentavis magnificens. An extinct predator. Among the largest of her kind. She devoured prey whole. Shall we move toward the dining room?” He wiped his brow and checked his watch.

“The crystal. You simply have to give me the scoop, Jimbo.”

“Ms. Spencer awaits.” He led the way, and briskly.

“Does Manson handle the executions around here?”

He glanced over his shoulder, eyes glassy-bright. “Mainly, yes.”

A woman spends her early adult years at hatcheries and aboard fishing trawlers doing the honest labor of tracking and cataloguing salmon (that great Alaskan export), and nobody cares. Americans want their food marginally harmless in a marginally attractive package; the fewer details, the better. A woman gets attacked by a mass murderer and lives to tell, everybody wants a piece of the action.

Type Jessica M into any search engine and the auto-form will suggest Jessica Mace & Eagle Talon Ripper; Jessica Mace US Magazine; Jessica Mace Nude Photos; Jessica Mace Final Girl. Averna Spencer hadn’t merely followed my career as portrayed in the media, she knew my whole origin story—how a while back, I’d barely survived an apartment complex massacre and fire; how I’d risen from near-death and killed the killer; how I’d bailed on my fifteen minutes and vanished (like mother, like daughter). She’d also obtained facts regarding my unpublicized excursions on the road. Averna confessed her fascination regarding people who had confronted the vicissitudes of existence in an intimate manner. I took it to mean she’d burned ants with a magnifying glass as a kid.

We finished supper and wandered through her hanging gardens and lesser aviaries. Flocks of tropical birds dwelled inside a dome of sparkly mesh that protected a lush jungle biome. It would take the gross national product of a small country to stock and maintain such a preserve.

Our path wound through an imported jungle. Paper lanterns (grotesque busts of birds of prey) cast our primeval surroundings in the light of an animated Kipling adaptation. Climate control simulated the tropics. Humidity soaked my clothes and I almost believed the sliver of moonlight peeping through leaves was other than a subtly masked klieg.

She said, “You’re rather trusting for a woman who’s had her throat slashed. Do you jump into a helicopter with any total stranger?”

“Manson isn’t the kind of person you argue with.” I raised my voice to compete with raucous chatter of birds and mating frogs.

“Manson is an extension of my will. I made her.”

“Made her? As in Pygmalion?”

“Isn’t that the idiom the cool kids are using?”

“Yes. Do me next, pretty please.”

“I projected my life essence into her puny mortal frame and voila, a million-year evolutionary leap. It’s a messy process. Not for weak stomachs.”

Seemed an appropriate point to change the subject. “I read in an article that you employ a team of geneticists and zoologists. You want to protect endangered bird species.” Campbell and Ryoko’s dossier alleged that Averna Spencer hired mercenaries to shoot nest robbers and sabotage the infrastructure of land developers who operated in environmentally-sensitive regions such as South America.

“The science team pursues much grander designs,” she said. “We work to resurrect a spectrum of extinct species. Avian, reptile, amphibian. I’m worried for honeybees. As our apian friends go, so go we.”

“The research is conducted here, in house?”

“Yes, and in twenty-three other countries.”

“Good thing you’re loaded. Woman could burn through a fortune on fringe research.”

“She could. Or she could manipulate a host of international political actors to foot the bill. Drug lords, warlords, bored industrialists… It isn’t as difficult to separate them from their spare millions as you might think.”

“Any luck raising the dodo from the dead?”

“Sixty-eight percent of this aviary system is populated by animals that no longer exist in the outside world.”

I flashed to the giant bird skeleton in the private museum, and how the tall, crystal had seethed with a weird yellow fire. Decided to zip my lips. Averna’s stride, long and graceful, reminded me of her unnatural strength. Her friendly smile hinted at savagery.

“My most prized work isn’t specific to avian research,” she said. “I hope to create a trigger of human evolution. A radically accelerated process.”

“Mutation.”

“After a fashion.”

“Toward what end?”

“The ability to survive dramatic climate change. To withstand nuclear radiation and acid rain. To think faster. To dispense with antiquated paradigms of morality and ethics. To soar with the eagles and swim with the fishes.”