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

I waded down a stream to confuse tracking dogs, then dug a hole near the roots of a tree and covered myself in clay, pine needles, and sap. I hadn’t worn hair products or used scented soap or perfume in months. The docs put me on a regimen of an experimental, military grade antiperspirant.

Smeared head to toe in muck, I ran like hell through the dark, dark woods like the doomed heroine of a slasher flick. I angled southeast for the extraction point (would Beasley await my arrival?); kept right on trucking until daylight and then burrowed into a deadfall and slept. Night came around. I slurped brackish water from a puddle and set forth again, skulking from tree to tree with a wild animal’s determination to survive. For a while, I believed I’d successfully evade and escape. Hope makes fools of us all.

Contrary to the cliché, I didn’t trip and sprain an ankle, didn’t sob or shriek to give away my position, and didn’t glance over my shoulder every ten feet. Perversely, that last detail proved my downfall.

She hit me the way a hawk or an owl does an unsuspecting squirrel. Instead of severing my spine on impact, Averna merely snagged my long, luxurious mane and ascended vertically, yanking me off my feet. Similar to those rides at the State Fair—the ones where a scabrous, hungover carny straps you into a harness that dangles from a big metal wheel and up your sorry ass goes, with nothing between your sneakers and sod but a sheer drop.

The radiant sickle moon gashed the clouds; first above, then below. Averna clutched my hair in her left fist and skimmed treetops at a precipitous velocity, dragging me several feet lower like the tail of a kite. We dipped and swooned; accelerating, decelerating. If she had a jet pack strapped on her back, I didn’t hear it. The only sounds I heard were the hissing breeze, and the clatter of branches when she swung me viciously against the canopy. Each blow knocked the breath from me and tore my flesh.

God knows where the bitch’s flight plan would’ve taken us. I didn’t stick around for the surprise. It required a metric fuck-ton of grit to recover from the initial whiplash and saw through my hair with a shard of the designer egg I’d carried (and managed not to drop) this entire time. Sliced my fingers and palm, but it got the job done—half a dozen convulsive hacks later, the last strand parted and I bailed. She cried my name.

Momentum hurled me in a broad arc. I caromed from leafy boughs and they snapped beneath my cannonball passage. Five seconds? Five thousand years? Those few heartbeats stretched across multiple lifetimes. Don’t remember hitting the earth. Black stars cleared and I lay in a pile of dead, slimy leaves, oxygen smashed from my lungs, gaping at the moon.

A circling shadow blotted the light. I caught a glimpse of Averna in her radiant glory and realized the mysteries of the universe dwarfed my comprehension. She didn’t need a wingsuit. She didn’t need wings. She didn’t need anything.

Manson strode from the depths of the forest. She didn’t put a bullet through my skull as I might’ve logically assumed. She scooped my battered self (broken ribs, lacerated hand, and a world class concussion) into her arms and lugged me half a mile to the cabin. I don’t recall a hell of a lot about the next couple of days except that the place was empty. No phone, no Beasley. Pretty clear my fate had been sealed from the beginning.

Manson played nursemaid by firelight from a decrepit hearth. Stuffed me into a sleeping bag and got an I.V. drip pumping fluids into my veins. Everything went blurry after the adrenalin wore off.

I dreamed that Averna, garbed in her horror show suit, shattered the cabin door and loomed over me as I lay helpless. Her wingtips scraped furrows in the walls. Behold. I am the apex. I stand where humanity begins and where it will end. She lovingly popped my eyeballs with her claws.

Woke screaming to beat the band.

Averna, dressed in a natty jacket, tenderly stroked my brow with a damp cloth. She revealed I was merely the second person to ever make it across the finish line. For me to plummet from the treetops and bounce instead of splat, represented a bona fide miracle. I didn’t argue the point. Fell unconscious for however long it took for my injuries to mend.

Jessica, you must understand we’re all meat and blood for the slaughterhouse. Regardless, we should learn until the very end. Sapient beings exist to acquire experience. The beasts of the wilderness kill and eat us. The wilderness itself kills and eats us. Every scrap down to our quintessence reduces and divides among maggots and dirt and adds to the sum.

Go in peace, dear girl. You and the world have unfinished business. Far be it from me to stand in the way.

Could’ve been a fever dream, could’ve been legit; either way, Averna and Manson let me live. Eventually I roused from blind sleep, aching, traumatized, and swaddled in gauze. The girls left clean clothes, pain pills, and an envelope with a few bucks inside a knapsack. Also, a loaded pistol and keys to a Jeep parked by the front porch.

Time passed. I bided it with grim patience.

Beasley the vigilant had to sleep sometime. I waited until he embarked upon one of his not infrequent drunks to make my move. Walked into the New England farmhouse around dawn. The doctors were seated at a table in the den, bickering over a pile of research papers. They registered surprise at my appearance, although less than one might expect. Fuckers had seen everything at least once, I suppose. Dr. Ryoko reached for a drawer, then noticed the pistol in my hand, and sat back with a resigned sigh.

“Hello, boys,” I said. “Tell me about my mother.”

“Hello,” answered some whiteman. “Good morning! Could I speak with—?” He mispronounced her last name and didn’t abbreviate her first, as nobody who knew her would do.

“Who dis?” she repeated. “And what you calling about?”

“Young lady,” he said. “Can you please tell me whether Miss Jean-Louis is there or not. Will you just do that for me?” His tone all floured with whitepeople siddity, pan-fried in condescension.

But she could sit here and act dumb too. “Mmm… it’s hard to say. She be in and out, you know? Tell me who calling and what for and I’ll go check.”

Apparently, the man was Mr Blah D. Blah from the city agency that cleaned out Section 8 apartments when the leaseholder dropped dead. Guess whose evil Aunt Esther had died of a heart attack last Thursday on the B15 bus? And guess who was the last living Jean-Louis anywhere?

“But how you calling me—it’s almost noon—to say I got ’til five , before your dudes come throw all her stuff in the dumpster?”

“Oh good,” exclaimed Blah D. “I was worried we weren’t communicating clearly.”

“She live out by Jamaica Bay! It’d take me two hours just to get there .”

“Miss Jean-Louis,” he said. (Public servants nearing retirement, who never got promoted high enough not to deal with poor people anymore, black people anymore, have this tone of voice, you ever notice? A certain tone.) “There’s no requirement for you to go. This is merely a courtesy our office extends to the next of kin. The keys will be available to you until five.” Blah hung up.

“ Fuck you!” She was dressed for the house, a tank top and leggings, and so went to her room for some sneakers and a hoodie.

Mama was scared of Esther, said she was a witch. Both times they had went out there, Mama left her downstairs, waiting in the streets, rather than bring her baby up to that apartment. Now, she didn’t believe in that black magic bullshit, of course, but she also wasn’t trying to go way the hell out there by herself. Mama, though, wouldn’t want no parts of Esther, dead sister of the dead man who’d walked out on her some fifteen years ago. Naw, better leave Mama alone at work and call her later.