Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

Today, I got an email from Kellet. No subject line, all lowercase: martinez is dead. funeral at st. john redeemer, des moines, iowa. saturday 1100.

Light slanted over the church steps, leaving Kellet and Ramone in shadow as they stood in the doorway. Ramone had his empty sleeve pinned up against the wind snatching at our clothing and hair, blowing a storm of petals around our feet. I’d either forgotten or never known that he’d lost his arm after they pulled us off the ice. What had the past year been like for him, for Kellet? Had the edges of their hearing been haunted by inhuman voices, did they dream?

“What about McMann?” I asked.

“I tried to contact him, no response.” A frown touched Kellet’s lips, and I felt a twinge, a certainty that McMann was gone, and none of us had been there to witness it.

I didn’t bother to ask about Adams.

Our footsteps echoed as we entered the church. A trio of women— Martinez’s sisters? Cousins?—occupied the front-most pew on the left-hand side. A few others were scattered through the rest of the church, but the room was emptier than it should be.

“He shot himself.” Kellet nodded toward Martinez’s casket as we slid into a pew in the back.

A framed picture of Martinez, younger than when we’d known him, sat where his head would be. Draped over the middle of the casket, a spray of purple flowers gave off a sweet scent on the edge of rot.

I thought about Martinez in his tiny bathroom, knees bumping the edge of the tub as he sat on the toilet lid, lips puckered around the barrel of a gun. I’d never seen Martinez’s apartment, or his bathroom. Certainly I hadn’t been there when he died. Except I was there, now, bound as we had been on the ice. A unit. A hive.

Martinez’s shoulders twitched, even as he fought to steady the gun. His cheeks were wet, the tears leaving glistening tracks in a face already carved by pain.

Shoot up. Shoot up, not in.

For a moment, I thought I’d spoken aloud. But the priest behind the lectern didn’t pause, and neither Kellet nor Ramone looked at me. Were they seeing the coffin, or were they seeing Martinez’s bathroom, too?

Martinez jerked, like he at least heard me. Like I was there and then, not here and now. He jerked, but he still fired and the bullet did its job, spraying blood and bone and brain onto the wall.

“I’m going to look for her,” I said, as we stepped out of the church into the too-bright sunlight.

“We’re with you,” Ramone said; neither he nor Kellet had to asked who I meant, and of course they were coming with me. It was never a question.

“Why now?” Ramone leaned forward to be heard over the plane’s engine. We’d tracked Adams to a small fishing village in the Yukon. Through the tiny windows, a network of rivers gleamed below us, the patchwork slowly resolving into detail as we descended. “Why did we wait almost a year?”

“We were scared.” The engine drone swallowed my voice, but it was still just loud enough to be heard.

Kellet shot me a look, but didn’t object. The look on Ramone’s face was one of relief, like he was grateful someone had finally said it aloud. It was easier to breathe when I leaned back. The plane circled lower. After a year of sweat-soaked sheets and night terrors, we were going home.

We found Adams drinking in a bar converted from an old canning plant— corrugated metal walls, plain wooden furniture, the whole thing crouched on a pier jutting out over the water. It still smelled of fish, the odor laden over with sweat and beer. Peanut shells cracked underfoot. I thought of the ice cracking and tiny bones.

Adams kept her back turned, her shoulders hunched until we were close enough to touch her. Heavy cable-knit sweater, thick rubber waders, her hair cropped jagged-short. She didn’t even look up when she spoke.

“I have a small plane,” she said. “I can fly us out anytime.”

She’d been waiting for us. Waiting while we gathered our courage. Waiting until Martinez died, the breaking point to push us into action. She finally turned, and I heard Kellet catch her breath, the smallest of sounds. Adams’ eyes were gold, the color of honey, the color of fire and the stars we’d swallowed on the ice. All this time with the dreams, and she hadn’t fought them. The blind things in the tunnels, the girl under the tree, the shadows, vast and slow moving behind the sky—they’d gotten inside her, and she’d changed.

The base camp Adams flew us to was smaller than the one we’d left from a year ago. Curtains divided cots set along the walls for the illusion of privacy. There was a stove, and stores, but none of us were hungry. Unlike the first base camp, the wind didn’t howl outside. Only silence, the vast stretch of snow waiting beyond the walls, and the stars pricking the darkness. The ghosts were already in the room with us, the spaces of absence carved in the shadows for Reyes, Viader, Martinez, and McMann.

Kellet and Ramone retreated to their cots soon after we arrived. I was too jittery for sleep. As for Adams, I couldn’t tell. I’d always found her hard to read. With her golden eyes and the new angles of her bones, it was even harder. Her impatience, her anger, seemed to have burned away. Instead, she was literally worn thin, almost flickering, like it took all her effort to stay in this world.

A fat candle sat on the table; its light sharpened the planes and hollows of Adams’ face and spread the illusion of wings behind her. She retrieved a bottle of whiskey, tilted it toward me in a silent question. I nodded and watched her fill two glasses. She’d been waiting for us for a year, the strain evident in her movements. I still didn’t understand why.

“What happened a year ago?” The question came out more plaintive, more broken than I intended.

Adams swallowed from her glass, lips peeling back in a grimace.

“You’ll have to be more specific.” Her honey-gold eyes pinned me, testing.

I didn’t know how to ask about the tunnels and the gathering song. I came at it sideways.

“The mission. Did we succeed?”

“You kidding?” Adams knocked back half of her remaining drink; this time when she showed her teeth, it was wholly feral. “Soldiers who feel no pain, who keep fighting even with massive wounds, or missing limbs, soldiers who can go days without eating or sleeping? The honey was never for them. I thought you understood that.”

So, she had run, when the plane came for us, and she’d never turned over the honey.

“Then why?” Why bring us on the mission at all? The map was in her head. She never needed us.

The look Adams returned was pitying. She surprised me further, covering my hands with her own. Her palms were rough, calloused, like she’d spent a year hauling nets in the cold.

“They need us to remember.” Her words sparked something, a twinge of recognition. “We need them to forget.”

Them. Where her hands covered mine, her skin hummed. Those things from beyond the stars, they’d fought and died and torn themselves apart. When the tall things from beyond the sky had come, signaling the end of their time, with the last dying breath of their civilization, they’d made a song. They’d flung their ghosts across the stars, casting their tattered remains into the void, hoping to find something for those echoes to hold onto, someone to remember. And like Adams said, we, the eight of us, had needed them in order to forget.