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

“Things mad scientists say for five hundred, Alex,” I said. “Any notable successes, a la The Island of Doctor Moreau?”

“Me, a scientist? Hardly. Certainly, I’m slightly bonkers and quite ancient. Old people acquire knowledge. We spread it around, for weal or woe. As to the matter of success, I’m banking on getting lucky tonight, at least. Let’s swing by your room for a nightcap.”

“Mine? Surely yours is more luxurious.”

She took my arm rather possessively. “I sleep hanging upside down from a trapeze bar in Aviary 4. It’s not a cozy rendezvous.”

All I could see was the mask of the devil bird in the video clip, the feather plume; her victim’s corpse tumbling toward the water; men and women screaming in a solarium, its walls splattered in gore. Averna, radiant and exultant as a blood god from the bad history books.

Half a magnum of 1928 Krug later:

“Final girls are a necessarily rare breed.” Averna studied my calloused palms, the yellow bruises along my shoulder. Her nails were trimmed close to the quick and unpolished. Dark specks of blood had gotten under some of them. “Your training regimen is fierce. No enhanced strength or ESP? No telekinetic powers?”

“I skate along on woman’s intuition.”

“No secret weaponry of any kind?”

“Apparently, I’m a mongoose. Natural weaponry. Rawr!”

“She kissed my (also bruised) belly. “I am curious what combination of pathology and trauma drives you to seek danger.”

“This from Miss I-jump-off-cliffs-in a-wingsuit?”

“Pretend a normal person you’d like to fuck asked the question. The event in Alaska opened the world for you.”

“Opened the world? Like I should be grateful? I never volunteered to get brutalized. I didn’t tip that domino. The attack fucked me up royal.” I resisted the urge to touch the scar on my neck.

“Or it awakened dormant DNA. Your latent adrenaline junkie gene.”

“You know how it is—at first, it’s about the rush, then the rush becomes a habit. After a while, you’re basically screwed.”

“Give it an eon. Who’s your favorite superhero?”

“Let me think…”

“Don’t think, tell me.”

“Like tic-tac-toe?” I stalled.

“Cheating already.”

“Okay. The Batman.”

“Not Batgirl?”

“Defending my answer wasn’t part of the game. I want every bit of power. You?”

“Captain Midnight.”

“Who’s Captain Midnight?”

“Seriously?” Averna cupped her chin and regarded me. “I’m reevaluating this whole relationship.”

“All six hours of it.”

“My time is precious, Mace. Bouquets of thousand dollar bills could rain from the sky and it wouldn’t be cost effective to stoop for the ones that didn’t fall into my pocket.”

“Okay, don’t be rethinking anything. Give me a mulligan. Who the hell is Captain Midnight?”

“Ace World War One pilot. Could fly anything. Total badass.”

“You’re busting my balls over a cartoon from World War One?”

She undid my bra and tossed it over the side. “Radio show.”

“Seems like an odd choice for a hero,” I said.

“Not if you knew me for more than six hours.”

Ultimately, I told her my darkest secrets: Mom and Dad fought over the heavyweight title and it brought the Mace kids together; my first real love rescued me from the galley of a fishing boat right before it went to the bottom of the sea and a few happy years went by and nobody was around to rescue him; Mom ran out on us a hundred times, and finally, she stayed gone for good, either dead or reborn; when the Eagle Talon Ripper sliced my throat, I thought I’d died. Such a relief! The real reason I emptied the gun into the sonofabitch was because he’d done a half-assed job putting me out of my misery.

“At last I understand your motivation,” Averna said. “It isn’t thrill-seeking behavior. You experience suicidal ideation, probably stemming from survivor’s guilt.”

“I’m not suicidal anymore. Guilt? Not so much of that ether.”

“Dying isn’t easy for most people. Instinct is a real bitch and she wants to live. Sadly, those with a true death wish, suffer terribly. O cruel universe. It imbued you with unbearable misery and a rational mind. Care to guess what the mind says?”

“Let’s fuck? Let’s drink? Let’s forget?”

“The mind says, no more, let’s stop. The universe also imbued you with the genetics of a survivor. Your subconscious resists annihilation; it says, okay, you can die, but only after jumping through fiery hoops, only after completing an obstacle course in hell. Some people with your particular affliction drink themselves to death or go hunting for Mr. Goodbar. They take on risky jobs. You, my dear, follow this hard road. It led to my doorstep.”

“The other shoe droppeth,” I said.

“Just your panties, at the moment.”

What’s your motivation?”

Her long, cruel fingers dug into my hips. “I like it when my prey runs screaming through the forest. I like the idea that animals will inherit the earth. I like the idea that with a little push we could be apes again.”

“Oh,” I said.

On day two we buzzed the estate in the helicopter. Trees, tree-covered mountains, tree-covered valleys, and more trees. Averna piloted. She wore a shiny black flight suit that exaggerated her figure into comic book proportions. Manson sat in the rear, loose-limbed and heavy-lidded. Her suit and mine were dull gray.

My secret of the day: I’d seen this before. In the course of training for the mission, Dr. Campbell had put me into a hypnotic trance and shown dozens of satellite images of the territory. Military grade imagery that dialed right down to the individual acorn. He explained that a photographic memory wasn’t necessary to retain this information—if I got lost in these woods, a certain phrase would trigger the implanted memories and I’d have access to a 3D “mind map” of the surroundings.

I keyed the mike in my headset. “Averna, I read somewhere that you almost died testing a wingsuit in Finland.”

“Norway. Bad landings happen. Fortunately, the crash appeared nastier than the reality.”

Witnesses said she’d hit the turf at an estimated one-hundred and thirty-miles per hour. The article also claimed it required a team of surgeons four operations and a roll of duct tape to put Humpty-Dumpty together again.

“Tycoons evidently score the world’s greatest docs. I know women with C-section scars that could’ve been done with a boar spear.”

“Flawless skin was a gift from my mother. Hold on.” She banked hard right and put the helicopter into a shallow dive toward the foothills. We shot through a notch in the tree line and she leaned back on the yoke into a near vertical climb to hop over the rocky crown of a hill, then pushed hard and dropped hard to skim several feet above a lake, and steeply up again at the last second as a wall of evergreens closed in. My heart remained where it had leapt from my chest, a couple miles back.

Upon our return to the house, I retreated to my room and pondered the implications. Eighteen hours with Averna Spencer convinced me she didn’t possess a scintilla of spontaneity. Her brain functioned on a beautiful, cold algorithm that perfectly mimicked human thought, human desire, yet possessed the nascent spark of neither. Rich folks often exhibit outsized egos and a narcissistic compulsion to impress the peasants. Averna didn’t give a damn. She’d taken me on the flyover to demonstrate the geography and parameters of her estate for a practical purpose. In retrospect, the message was no less subtle than if she’d leaned over and whispered that I should get my track shoes laced. It’s on like Donkey Kong, girlfriend.