Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

“It’s like the story of the wendigo.” Ramone’s voice made me jump. His gazed was fixed on the last footprint, dragged long and impossibly sharp into the snow.

“It comes in the wind to snatch people into the sky, making them run faster and faster until their feet burn to ash. Sometimes, you can hear their voices in the sky, still screaming.”

I didn’t know the story they were talking about, but I tilted my head, listening for Reyes. I didn’t hear anything except the low vibration of wings.

I don’t remember sleeping, but before we woke to find Reyes gone, I woke with Adams’ hand over my mouth. Or maybe it was after, or during. Time was funny on the ice.

“It’s here,” Adams said. “Come on.”

She led me out of the tent and into the dark. I didn’t ask where we were going. I could feel it—a vast system of caves under our feet, the earth gone hollow and strange. Juts of ice stabbed at the sky. I followed Adams through a maze of crystal spikes like crazed, broken teeth. There were steps cut into the frozen earth. We descended into an amphitheater for giants. One bowl below us, the other above us, the sky spattered with stars. Then we were underground.

I crawled behind Adams. Shadows moved on the other side of us. Echoes. Memories. Cracks in the real. The groove worn into the earth was a record. Adams and I were the needle, playing the sound. Occasionally, the record skipped, and we caught flickers of ancient things, impossibly out of time. Somehow, I knew: we were in the blind servants’ tunnels, crawling out of sight of the masters. Wingless. Broken at birth so we couldn’t flee.

There were bones in the ice around us. Australopithecus. Neanderthal. Hives hung in their ribcages, hexagons in place of hearts, dripping with honey.

“Here.” Adams’ voice jolted me into the present.

The ice wasn’t ice anymore, but rock, a slick purplish-grey, like a thin layer of mica spread over slate, but the wrong color—night instead of gold. Or it was both. Ice and stone and rock the color of desert sand. Here and now and on a planet billions of years ago.

“Dig,” Adams said.

My hands moved. I knew the patterns, written into my bones with the gathering song. I was born for this, scraping honey from the walls until my skin tore. Adams kept handing me bottles, which I filled before they disappeared into her coat, more than the folds of fabric should have been able to hold.

The cave buzzed. And all the while, the song echoed. The song like the one my grandmother used to sing while cooking Sunday dinner, calling ingredients and flavors together and compelling them to be a meal. A making song. It mellified my bones. It mummified me, rewriting me in a different language. I was the god-child beneath the tree, curled at its roots. The beginning and the end, the seed of the world. Bees thrummed the air and wrote maps onto my skin. Words. Commands, compelling me to be ancient, to be terrible, to change.

A harvest song. A blinding song. A binding song.

I obeyed.

A day later, or a million years later, we climbed out of the dark. The stars turned in dizzying motion overhead. If I kept going, I could climb right out of the world into the night. Like Reyes, pulled screaming into the sky. Adams caught me by the ankle and hauled me back down. I hit the ice, scrabbled and fought her, weeping and babbling incoherently.

She dragged me back over the snow, tucked me into my tent like a worker bee sealing up a little queen in a cell of wax. She whispered in my ear, a continuation of the song, that humming buzz, and this one said sleep, sleep.

I obeyed.

We packed our gear and left without Reyes. I thought about what we’d tell his family. We didn’t have a body to bring home, no explanation to offer. He disappeared and we didn’t look for him, because we knew he was gone.

The honey still sang in my veins. Had we accomplished our mission? Adams hadn’t said a word about the tunnels. Only the abraded skin on my hands suggested I’d been under the earth, under some earth, gathering.

I had no sense of where we were in relation to the base camp. Like Adams’ story, our compasses spun, and our GPS was useless. We’d given up on the radios long ago.

That night, we pitched our tents next to a wicked-blue crevasse, a scar in the ice so deep we couldn’t see past a few feet even with our lights.

“Do you know where we are?” I asked Martinez, keeping my voice low.

He shrugged, unconcerned, and I moved to help him with the tents. I wanted to ask if he’d heard anything during the storm, or what the honey felt like on his tongue. Maybe Adams had taken him under the earth, too. Maybe she’d taken us all one by one. Maybe what Reyes had seen was too much. Enough to make him stick his hand in a trap. Enough to send him screaming into the sky.

Behind us, Viader and McMann built a fire. In the back of my mind, Reyes played on a loop, the trap closing on his arm. Each strike driving the tent peg into the ice became the snap of bone.

I smelled Viader’s burning flesh an instant before it began to burn. And in my mind, the street in Al-Raqqah went red-black, and the woman crawled. I turned just in time to watch Viader walk into the flames. She made no sound. Her clothes went up in an instant. Then she stood there, eyes closed, humming. I recognized the song, felt the echo in my bones. Sparks kissed her cheek, ate away the skin and heat-cracked her jaw.

“It’s beautiful,” she said. Or maybe she said, “I’m beautiful.”

Heat seared my cheeks, leaving salt-tracks dried to crystal. When had I started crying? I agreed with Viader; she was beautiful.

She was necessary.

Patterns had to be repeated. Viader burning wasn’t really Viader, she was cities turned to ash, wax melting and the sound of wings, all the queens burning in their cells, keening, and the low, sad song as the tall creatures behind the sky moved from the beginning to the end of time.

None of us tried to stop Viader when she went to the crevasse. None of us tried to catch her as she dropped, plunging into the blue. She was a meteor, streaking into the abyss, never hitting the ground.

I woke to the sound of propeller blades, and the spray of ice and snow they whipped up as the tiny plane landed. Panic slammed through me. I couldn’t hear the song over the engine, then the shouting as the team sent to pull us out hit the ground, boots too loud on the snow. Hands on me; I thrashed against them, all fists and elbows. A curse, muffled, as I landed an unintentional blow.

Three sets of arms now, restraining me. A needle snapped in my arm as they tried to give me a sedative. The ice fell away beneath me. I’d been wrestled into the plane and we were leaving. I looked around for Adams in a panic. I couldn’t see her, then someone pushed my head back, strapped me down with more restraints.

A high, wild keening, like the sound of the queens in their cells as the city burned. I didn’t realize until much later the sound was coming from me.

It’s been almost a year since the ice.

A year of therapy, of convincing myself I couldn’t possibly have seen what I thought I saw. Enough time for one honorable discharge, zero contact from Adams, and three hundred and sixty-five, give or take a few, nights of dreams—cities burning, honey dripping from bones, vast shadows crossing the sky. And all that time, the song, just on the edge of hearing. Last week, it started getting louder. Yesterday, I could feel it reverberating inside my skull.