Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

We lapsed into silence, the answer to Reyes’ question sitting heavy in our stomachs. Adams wanted us because we were broken. Because none of us had anyone at home who would miss us. We were expendable.

“Is that about right?” Kellet asked, looking over my shoulder.

I twisted around to see Adams watching us with her arms crossed. Her posture put a physical shape to something I’d been feeling as the stories and bottle went around. The seven of us had fallen into thinking of ourselves as a unit. Adams was outside of that—us against her. We’d follow her, but we didn’t trust her. She’d drawn our pain to the surface; that made her our enemy.

“I’ll tell you a story,” Adams said, instead of answering.

There was one chair left against the wall. She dragged it over and turned it around, sitting with her arms draped over the back, another barrier between us and her.

“There was a map,” she said. “A soldier in Kandahar sold it to me. He claimed it would lead us to bin Laden, back when we thought he was hiding out in a cave like some desert rat.”

Adams snorted. Without asking, she reached for the bottle, and drank straight from the neck, killing what remained before setting it down with a heavy thunk. The wind chose that moment to pick up. The walls of the station were solidly-built, but it still sounded like something rattling and straining at the door.

“The map was hand-drawn, and we were idiots to follow it. I think my commander only humored me to teach me a lesson.”

Adams twirled the empty bottle. The noise of the glass rolling against the wood made my skin crawl.

“A few clicks out from where the cave was supposed to be, our equipment went haywire. Our radios burst out with static, mixed with echoes of conversations from hours and days ago. Our compasses spun, never settling on north.

“We should have turned back. But there was a cave, right where the map said it would be, and if there was even a chance…” Adams grimaced.

“Ten of us went in. I was the only one who came out.”

Adams pulled a small bottle out of her pocket, thick glass, stoppered with a cork. The air around it shivered, humming with the faint sound of wings. I sat forward, and saw the others all around the table do the same thing, a magnetic pull drawing us towards the glass.

“This is why we’re here,” Adams said.

I stared at the bottle, filled with honey, viscous and bright. It glowed. Martinez reached out, but Adams’ look stopped him. He dropped his hand into his lap. Adams held the bottle up, turning it so we could watch the honey roll.

“They found me two days later, half a click from the cave entrance, or where it should have been, except it was gone. I was severely dehydrated, puncture wounds all over my body, half-dead from some kind of venom they couldn’t identify. They got a med-evac copter to pull me out. Afterward, ground forces combed the area where the cave should have been, but nothing. Nada. It moves. Now it’s here, so here is where we are.”

We stared at her, uncomprehending, but she offered no further explanation, and her expression said there would be none, even though I could tell there was more she wasn’t telling us, knowledge stored up behind her eyes. She honestly didn’t seem to care whether we knew, even if it meant walking blind into the mission she still hadn’t explained. The bottle disappeared, neat as a magic trick. The humming stopped, its absence so sudden my ears popped.

Adams reached into her pocket again, and I couldn’t help flinching, mirrored by Reyes and Ramone. Instead of a bottle, Adams set her smart phone on the table, a video cued up.

“I had the honey with me when I came out of the cave. It saved my life.” She didn’t explain. Doubt flickered from Martinez to McMann to me, a spark jumping between us.

“If I’d been in my right mind, I wouldn’t have told them about it. But.” Adams shrugged, let the word stand. She tapped play.

The video had been shot on another camera phone, one struggling to decide between focusing on a glass cage or the rat inside it. Thin wires ran from multiple points on the rat’s body.

“Lowest voltage,” a voice off camera said.

“This is what happened when the doctors at the military hospital fed a rat the honey.” Adams tone was non-committal, unconcerned. Only the set of her shoulders said different.

Following the voice was a distinct click like a dial being turned. I imagined the snap of electricity, the scent of ozone popping blue-white in the air. The rat showed no reaction.

“Next level,” the voice on the phone said. “Sustain it longer this time.”

Again the thunk of the dial, the ghost of electricity. I felt it shoot up my spine, wrapping around my bones. The rat cleaned its whiskers with its paws.

“What’s the point of this?” Kellet said. “Why the hell would they feed a rat honey, then electro-shock it?”

“Because apparently I told them to,” Adams said. She wasn’t looking at the screen. “I told them it was the only way they’d understand.”

“Maximum voltage.” The camera lost focus briefly, coming back as the dial clicked again.

The scent of singed fur had to be my imagination.

“Jesus Christ.” McMann breathed out.

Adams retrieved the phone as the video ended. She swiped from video to a photo and turned the screen so we could all see. Reyes covered his mouth before the screen angled my way. The rat lay on its side, one of its front limbs missing, the lining of its cage sodden and red.

“After they unhooked the wires, the rat gnawed its own leg off. It did it so quietly, they didn’t notice until it was already dead.”

Adams slipped the phone into her pocket.

“The cave is out there on the ice now. I can see it.” Adams tapped the side of her head. There was no air left in the room; none of us could have questioned her even if we’d dared. “I’m sure it’s obvious why the military has a hard-on for this honey. It’s our job to bring it to them.”

We set out at dawn. Thermal gear blanked our faces so we might have been the same person repeated eight times, not separate individuals. Spikes on our boots crunched against the ice, a raw sound with crystalline edges. The ice itself groaned, like bones breaking, the vast sound of massive trees cracking deep in a forest.

Trapped between the padded mask and my skin, my breath rasped. The holes to let it escape clotted with frost, leaving my face clammy. I kept my eyes on Viader ahead of me, and put one foot in front of the other. I was the tail of the party, Adams, the head.

The sky lightened, a blue so searing my eyes watered even behind the reflective goggles protecting them. Then just as suddenly, clouds rolled in, dark and heavy. Adams led us between two walls of ice, high enough to slice the sky into a thin ribbon and erase everything else. Sheltered from the wind, she called a halt, told us to eat protein bars to keep our strength up. I unwrapped mine, clumsy with my bulky gloves, lifting my mask just high enough to get the food into my mouth. Even so, the cold stung.

As I swallowed the last bite, my radio burst out in static. I jumped at the squawk so close to my ear. It was the snow made auditory, a grey-white flurry of noise. Then, in its wake, my grandmother’s voice. And simultaneous with my grandmother’s voice, the storm broke, howling down on us in our trench. Kellet caught my arm, and tugged me into a crouch. The others were doing their best to wedge themselves against angles in the ice.

I made myself as small as I could, pulling extremities close to the center, conserving heat while my grandmother chattered in my ear. Seven years dead, but her voice was clearer than Kellet’s shouting over the storm. She sang, the way she used to while cooking Sunday dinner. I caught snatches of Slavic fairy tales, the rhythms she’d used to lull me to sleep as a child. As the storm’s fury rose, she called my grandfather’s name in the same high, panicked tone she used in her last days, not seeing the hospital room, but a long-ago village torn apart by war.