Stephen (ed.) - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

It was all so dreamlike that it was nearly impossible for her to imagine real people living here. For her a house had always meant a refuge from the world; the place where you hid from whatever catastrophe was breaking that morning.

But now she saw that it could be different. She began to understand that, for Randall at least, a house wasn’t a retreat. It was a way of engaging with the world; of opening himself to it. The view wasn’t yours. You belonged to it, you were a tiny part of it, like the sailboats and the seagulls and the flowers in the garden; like the sunflowers on the highly polished tables.

You were part of what made it real. She had always thought it was the other way around.

“You ready?” Randall came up behind her and put his hand on her neck. “This is it. We’re done. Let’s go have a drink.”

On the way out the door he stopped to talk to the agent.

“They’ll be taking bids tomorrow,” she said. “We’ll let you know on Tuesday.”

“Tuesday?’ Suzanne said in amazement when they got back outside. “You can do all this in two days? Spend a million dollars on a house?”

“Four million,” said Randall. “This is how it works out here. The race is to the quick.”

She had assumed they would go to another restaurant for drinks and then dinner. Instead, to her surprise, he drove to his flat. He took a bottle of Pommery Louise from the refrigerator and opened it, and she wandered about examining his manuscripts as he made dinner. At the Embarcadero, without her knowing, he had bought chanterelles and morels, imported pasta colored like spring flowers, arugula and baby tatsoi. For dessert, orange-blossom custard. When they were finished, they remained out on the deck and looked at the Bay, the rented view. Lights shimmered through the dusk. In a flowering quince in the garden, dozens of hummingbirds droned and darted like bees, attacking each other with needle beaks.

“So.” Randall’s face was slightly flushed. They had finished the champagne, and he had poured them each some cognac. “If this happens – if I get the house. Will you move out here?”

She stared down at the hummingbirds. Her heart was racing. The quince had no smell, none that she could detect, anyway; yet still they swarmed around it. Because it was so large, and its thousands of blossoms were so red. She hesitated, then said, “Yes.”

He nodded and took a quick sip of cognac. “Why don’t you just stay, then? Till we find out on Tuesday? I have to go down to San Jose early tomorrow to interview this guy, you could come and we could go to that place for lunch.”

“I can’t.” She bit her lip, thinking. “No . . . I wish I could, but I have to finish that piece before I leave for Greece.”

“You can’t just leave from here?”

“No.” That would be impossible, to change her whole itinerary. “And I don’t have any of my things – I need to pack, and get my notes . . . I’m sorry.”

He took her hand and kissed it. “That’s okay. When you get back.”

That night she lay in his bed as Randall slept beside her, staring at the manuscripts on their shelves, the framed lines of poetry. His breathing was low, and she pressed her hand against his chest, feeling his ribs beneath the skin, his heartbeat. She thought of canceling her flight; of postponing the entire trip.

But it was impossible. She moved the pillow beneath her head, so that she could see past him, to the wide picture window. Even with the curtains drawn you could see the lights of the city, faraway as stars.

Very early next morning he drove her to the hotel to get her things and then to the airport.

“My cell will be on,” he said as he got her bag from the car. “Call me down in San Jose, once you get in.”

“I will.”

He kissed her and for a long moment they stood at curbside, arms around each other.

“Book your ticket back here,” he said at last, and drew away. “I’ll talk to you tonight.”

She watched him go, the nearly silent car lost among the taxis and limousines; then hurried to catch her flight. Once she had boarded she switched off her cell, then got out her eyemask, earplugs, book, water bottle; she took one of her pills. It took twenty minutes for the drug to kick in, but she had the timing down pat: the plane lifted into the air and she looked out her window, already feeling not so much calm as detached, mildly stoned. It was a beautiful day, cloudless; later it would be hot. As the plane banked above the city she looked down at the skein of roads, cars sliding along them like beads or raindrops on a string. The traffic crept along 280, the road Randall would take to San Jose. She turned her head to keep it in view as the plane leveled out and began to head inland.

Behind her a man gasped; then another. Someone shouted. Everyone turned to look out the windows.

Below, without a sound that she could hear above the jet’s roar, the city fell away. Where it met the sea the water turned brown then white then turgid green. A long line of smoke arose – no, not smoke, Suzanne thought, starting to rise from her seat; dust. No flames, none that she could see; more like a burning fuse, though there was no fire, nothing but white and brown and black dust, a pall of dust that ran in a straight line from the city’s tip north to south, roughly tracking along the interstate. The plane continued to pull away, she had to strain to see it now, a long green line in the water, the bridges trembling and shining like wires. One snapped then fell, another, miraculously, remained intact. She couldn’t see the third bridge. Then everything was green crumpled hillsides, vineyards; distant mountains.

People began to scream. The pilot’s voice came on, a blaze of static then silence. Then his voice again, not calm but ordering them to remain so. A few passengers tried to clamber into the aisles but flight attendants and other passengers pulled or pushed them back into their seats. She could hear someone getting sick in the front of the plane. A child crying. Weeping, the buzz and bleat of cell phones followed by repeated commands to put them all away.

Amazingly, everyone did. It wasn’t a terrorist attack. The plane, apparently would not plummet from the sky; but everyone was too afraid that it might to turn their phones back on.

She took another pill, frantic, fumbling at the bottle and barely getting the cap back on. She opened it again, put two, no three, pills into her palm and pocketed them. Then she flagged down one of the flight attendants as she rushed down the aisle.

“Here,” said Suzanne. The attendant’s mouth was wide, as though she were screaming; but she was silent. “You can give these to them—”

Suzanne gestured towards the back of the plane, where a man was repeating the same name over and over and a woman was keening. “You can take one if you want, the dosage is pretty low. Keep them. Keep them.”

The flight attendant stared at her. Finally she nodded as Suzanne pressed the pill bottle into her hand.

“Thank you,” she said in a low voice. “Thank you so much, I will.”

Suzanne watched her gulp one pink tablet, then walk to the rear of the plane. She continued to watch from her seat as the attendant went down the aisle, furtively doling out pills to those who seemed to need them most. After about twenty minutes, Suzanne took another pill. As she drifted into unconsciousness she heard the pilot’s voice over the intercom, informing the passengers of what he knew of the disaster. She slept.

The plane touched down in Boston, greatly delayed by the weather, the ripple affect on air traffic from the catastrophe. It had been raining for thirty-seven days. Outside, glass-green sky, the flooded runways and orange cones blown over by the wind. In the plane’s cabin the air chimed with the sound of countless cell phones. She called Randall, over and over again; his phone rang but she received no answer, not even his voicemail.