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

He was breathing too heavily. She could nearly feel the hot, choppy distress of it. “You did the right thing, Robbo. He’d killed people. What else could you have done?”

“Are you for real with this shit or is it just an act? I didn’t call the bizzies cause he’d killed people and it was the right fuckin’ thing to do, ’annah. I called ’em cause I thought he was gonna kill me. And he came to my house cause he knew I’d do it, he knew I’d grass ’im up.”

She opened her mouth to speak, maybe to say sorry, but he hadn’t finished. She could hear his boots scraping against the ground, and she could still hear the agitated puff of his breath.

“And as they’re cartin ’im off, still fuckin’ wet from me fuckin’ shower, he says to me, it’s okay, Robbo , like he fuckin’ means it, and I stay standin’ there on the doorstep in me skivvies and slippers, worryin’ about the fuckin’ neighbors.”

“I used to be a troll.”

He coughed again. “What?”

She gestured at the snow. “Before all this. When I still had my sight and the world still had the internet. I worked nightshift in a petrol station as a cashier, and dayshift in online chat rooms as a troll.”

She could nearly hear him blinking. It made her suddenly want to laugh.

“You mean, like, you were one of them blerts gets people to off ’emselves for shits and giggles?”

“No,” she said quickly, though not for exoneration. “I just did what you said before. I watched and I listened. I worked out people’s weaknesses and used them.”

“You’re pretty fuckin’ good at it like,” he said, with a low, sheepish chuckle, because he was a lot cleverer than everyone else thought he was.

For a while, he said nothing else. She couldn’t hear even the sound of his breathing any more, only the cracks of the firewood, the muffled conversations on the other side of camp, the closing, echoless shroud of settling snow. In her mind’s eye, she could see the clustered pine trees that she’d been able to smell just before they made camp. She imagined them padded with new white shoulders, their cones sparkled with frost, dark trunks in shadow. She imagined the abandoned towns and villages and cities made new, smothered under all that breathless white and quiet. And she imagined all the camps doubtless just like this one: small bastions of fiery resistance, like coastal dun beacons passing along messages of doom.

She started when Robbo made a sudden movement, cleared his throat.

“What the fuck d’you do it for?” He sounded angry, and she could understand that at least. Robbo hadn’t only thought that her blindness meant she could hear and smell better, he’d thought that it meant she was better. Better than anyone else.

And she’d thought about the why a lot too. Most often, she’d posed as a man, a predator, whose misogyny had hidden behind feigned interest and casually cruel charm. “I don’t know. I just did.”

She heard a sound: the cracking of a snow-heavy branch maybe, or a starving wild dog trying to hunt. In an instant she was afraid again, uncertain again. She reached out her numb hands toward the fire. “Do you ever get tired, Robbo?”

“Sure.” That self-conscious chuckle again. “Do I wish I’d just stayed in the house and drunk meself to death instead? Deffo sure.”

Some snow crept between her blanket and skin, cricking her neck. “Do you think we’re both better people now?”

“No. Do you?”

“No.” She smiled, and it hurt her chapped lips. “Is there any more of that nasty rum?”

“There ain’t much left, but you’re welcome to it.”

“We can share it.” She heard the screw of the hipflask, and then the tinny slosh of its contents. When Robbo got up to walk around the fire, she could hear his boots sinking into the snow, and the creak-like sound of them shifting inside it before lifting free. The snow had got deep fast. When he squatted down next to her, she could instantly smell the rum, his breath, his sweat. Goosebumps prickled her skin. Perhaps her other senses were getting better after all.

“You okay, ’annah?”

“Yeah,” she said, feeling the cool smoothness of the hip flask against her open palms, putting her numb fingers around its opening before guiding it to her lips. She coughed as soon as she swallowed, and then put it to her lips again before pausing.

“It’s okay, you finish it,” Robbo said.

When he started getting up, she reached out for him, tugging on his coat. And when he squatted back down, she released a breath that she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. She didn’t take another drink, but she swallowed anyway.

“I can see them, Robbo. The Whites. I’ve always been able to see them. Right from the start.”

He lost his balance. She heard his legs going out from under him, boot heels scraping against buried dirt, his arse hitting the snow with a nearly funny whump.

“They’re all I can see.” She felt a need to explain that was pretty much redundant now—but the omission had been too heavy. All those weeks of people trusting her, holding her elbow, thinking she was benignly special, their good luck charm. She’d helped them, but not enough. Not in the ways that she could have. And now there was this.

“That’s boss, ’annah.” But his voice was careful, guarded. Maybe even a little disappointed in her. “And I can understand like, why you never let on. You’d be the same as them folk who didn’t go blind in that Triffid thing, ay? Every cunt’d want a piece of you.”

She tried to smile when he immediately cursed—when he realized what he’d said and tried to take it back. It made her like him more. It made the choppy beating of her heart choppier.

“You’re right, Robbo. You’re right, it’s the same.” But it wasn’t. She hadn’t kept quiet about being able to see those fast and silent white horrors, like nets of bloated muslin twisted by the wind, because she’d been afraid of being exploited. She’d done it because she’d wanted to feel wanted, needed to be needed. Just like all of those yellow days spent hunched over her laptop in the grimy, freezing kitchenette of her bedsit. She’d needed to feel powerful.

She took another swallow of rum and it went down better than the first. This time she didn’t cough. When she shook the flask, it gave a tinny, almost empty slosh. “You finish it,” she said, pushing it against his coat.

“Why d’you make us stop here tonight, ’annah?”

She could hear the quiet neutrality in his voice, the cleverer, fearful certainty. She pictured those fiery dun beacons again.

“Do you know what I think, Robbo?” she said, feeling self-consciously histrionic despite herself, despite the circumstances. “I think the world would be better off without us. I think the land and the sea and everything living in both would be better off without us. And I think that God—if there is one—would be better off without us too.” She stopped, wiped tears as well as fat flakes of snow from under her eyes before turning back towards Robbo, the heat and sweat and fearful certainty of him. “But I need to know what you think, Robbo. I need you to tell me what you think.”

He shifted, got back onto his haunches. When he spoke, she could hear the smile in his words as well as all that fear. “I think we’d be the ones better off without fuckin’ God, ’annah.” He immediately tutted, as if his answer had annoyed him, and then sighed a long, low sigh. “I reckon love’s just another excuse for hate.”

“Good,” she said. Her own breath left her in a shuddery exhale that she imagined as a silvery plume of smoke. “Me too.”

The world will be white and quiet , she thought. Nothing but white and quiet.