Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

Martinez tapped my shoulder and I almost hit him.

“Adams says move.”

My grandmother fell silent. The wind died a little, and I forced my legs from their awkward crouch. We edged forward. The fresh layer of tiny ice pellets skittering over the hard-packed ground made the going even rougher. Despite the spikes in our boots, we slid. The wind pushed at us, and the cold crawled under our clothes. Behind my mask, my teeth chattered.

“Hold here.” Adams’ voice cut over the storm.

Instinct made us gather around her in a half circle. The honey appeared in her hand, last night’s magic trick in reverse. Everything else wavered in the dying storm, but it was bright and clear.

“It’s the only way we’re getting out of here alive,” Adams said.

I didn’t understand what she meant, but my body folded nonetheless, knees hitting the hard-packed snow. In my peripheral vision I saw Viader, Ramone, and the others do the same. Had Adams ordered us? The air hummed. I couldn’t hear it over the wind, but I could feel it in my bones.

Adams didn’t lower her mask, and goggles still blanked her eyes as she moved down the line. Despite the bulky gloves, her pour was deft. One by one Viader, Kellet, Martinez, Reyes, McMann, and Ramone lowered their masks and received Adams’ honey on their tongues.

I should have felt frost burn immediately, but the proximity of the honey was enough to unleash the effect. I felt it sliding down my throat before it ever touched my tongue. Time bent, and the world went sideways. I had swallowed the honey, would swallow the honey, was always swallowing it. Then Adams tilted the bottle and let a drop touch my tongue.

Her limbs bent strangely, and there were too many of them. I saw myself reflected a dozen-dozen-dozen times in multi-faceted eyes. The honey was liquid fire. It was like holding a burning coal in my mouth, all heat and no taste. It was like swallowing stars. But as soon as I did it, I felt no pain.

The storm raged, but I couldn’t feel it anymore. The wind became a hush, a lullaby. I thought of my grandmother, but it was someone else singing now. The words weren’t Russian; they weren’t even human.

Adams lowered her scarf. Her lips were cracked and bloody, but light clung to her. She was holy, we all were, and I watched in wonder as she used her teeth to pull her glove free, ran her finger around the inside of the bottle, and rubbed the last of the honey on her gums.

It should have been crystallized with the cold, rough against her skin, but it was as liquid as it had been when she’d poured it down my throat.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Everything was sharp and bright after the honey. Adams walked on gravel and broken glass, fallen leaves. Each pellet of ice under her boots cracked inside my bones so I felt it as much as heard it. My blood thumped; eight of us breathed. I heard the crystals growing where my breath froze on my scarf—fractal ice patterns, branching and branching. Forming hexagons. Forming a structure like a hive. Rewriting my cells; instead of bones and blood, guts and liver, there were only endless chambers, dripping honey.

And under it all, the song. A lullaby, a nursery tale. Limbs like needles tucked me in, sealed me in wax and left me to dream. A girl with wild, tangled hair stood under a tree, its trunk lightning-struck and smelling of scorched woods. Bees swarmed the air around her, a steady hum, and liquid gold dripped down the seared bark.

Only she wasn’t a girl, she was much older. Ancient. Her bones were already buried beneath the roots, her skin peeled from her ribs, her insides hollowed to make room for a hive. Raised welts dotted her skin, a secret language I could almost read. History a billion, billion, billion years old. A map. Bees hummed while her bones fed the tree and she stood in its shadow, buried and not buried, dead and alive.

All of it echoed through the song, inhuman concepts crammed into human form. The girl wasn’t a girl, but a god, a seed, a splinter of history forced under my skin. I wanted to scream. Instead, I hummed, my whole body vibrating to the frequency of wings beating. I didn’t feel the cold. None of us did. And together we walked, a segmented body with too many limbs, and Adams as our head.

Night fell, the sky darkening from plum twilight to deep blue-black. I didn’t care where Adams was leading us. I could have walked forever. Ahead of me, Ramone stripped back his protective gear, exposing his arm to the elbow. Kellet pulled a folding knife from her pocket and cut open her palm. I listened to the blood plink-plink-plink on the snow.

The eight of us were joined, bound by an invisible cord. Reyes and McMann, Martinez and Viader, they were my skin and bone.

As we walked, something walked with us. Vast and impossible, just on the other side of a sky that was a blue-dark curtain, painted with stars. Long, thin limbs. Taller than the Empire State Building. Moving slowly. Singing. The song wanted something from me. It wanted me to change.

I wanted to.

I wanted to let the honey stitch my veins with threads of liquid gold. I needed it, more than I’d ever needed anything in my life. I wanted it to subsume me.

Al-Raqqah had been folded into my skin. The world torn apart, gone black and red; the flash-point explosion vaporizing a child. Those things lived between my bones, branched through my lungs. The honey was bigger than that. It could eat my pain whole.

Because it wasn’t just honey, it was a civilization too old and terrible to comprehend. More had been lost than I could fathom. That was in the song. That was in the honey. It was too big to hold, and that gave me permission to let go.

Tears ran on my cheeks. They should have frozen, but the honey left my skin fever hot. It kept the moon from setting and the sun from coming up. I couldn’t tell how far we’d gone, but it was still dark when Adams called a halt. We pitched tents from the packs we carried—packs whose weight we no longer felt—and built wind-blocks out of snow.

I watched the street in Al-Raqqah torn apart, an endless film reel flickering and superimposed on the night. I watched the mother crawl towards the burned remains of her child. I saw her other child caught in a loop of instant incineration, his mouth open in a wail. And none of it mattered.

In the here and now, I watched Reyes kneel to clear space for a fire. There was an old hunting trap buried under the snow. I saw it an instant before it happened. He put his hand into the drift, and metal jaws closed around his arm with a wet snap. Reyes saw it, too. The scene hung inverted in his eyes, playing out like the film reel of Al-Raqqah’s destruction. And Reyes stuck his hand into the snow anyway.

He didn’t scream. I thought of the rat in the cage, cleaning its whiskers as electricity sang through its body. I imagined teeth sunk into flesh and the rat tearing its leg off, bleeding out and at peace with the world. Reyes held his arm out, staring at torn cloth, red nerve, and splintered bone. He smiled.

Kellet and Viader moved to either side of me and together we pried the trap loose. Ramone sat by, watching his flesh redden, then go dead-white with the cold. McMann broke out the first aid kit, cleaning and bandaging the wound as best he could. Adams watched us, arms crossed, her expression saying we were wasting our time. Then Reyes sat down, still smiling, staring in wonder at the flames as Martinez built up the fire.

I don’t remember sleeping. Light crept over the horizon, staining the snow pale gold and carving deep shadows in the hollows. We found Reyes’ clothing, shed like skin and frozen into the ground. There were footprints, spaced farther and farther apart until they simply stopped. But no Reyes, not even his remains.