The New Weird (56 page)

Authors: Ann VanderMeer,Jeff Vandermeer

Tags: #Fiction, #Fantasy, #General, #Science Fiction, #Fantasy fiction, #American, #Anthologies, #Horror tales; American, #Fantasy fiction; American, #Short Stories, #Horror tales

WITH HER HANDS beneath the armpits of the wounded man she deemed unconscious, Safiya was completely unprepared for the victim of the salp-dog attack to speak.

"Where did you get that gun?"

His unexpected and perplexing words shocked her into dropping him and jumping back. He grunted at the impact with the paving stones, then recovered enough to climb shakily and slowly to his feet.

"Where did you get that gun?" he asked again, gesturing at the weapon whose butt protruded from Safiya's shoulder bag. His ankle was bleeding badly.

Why was he so concerned with weapons? Hardly the common reaction of an injured man..

"You were bitten," she said, her eyes wide. He didn't seem to care. Or perhaps he didn't know. He was not from Riarnanth. She knew about fabric and this man's simple dhoti, beneath the grime, was of a better cut than the city's usual parade of garments. And what was he thinking with these sandals? Nobody she knew wore sandals like that in the city. The streets were too rough, too thronged for straps like this. The man would be lame inside a day.

"I just need to clean it. It will be fine."

"But the salps."

He sighed and closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose with fingers that were thin and long. She saw something of her father in him then, the deceptive power in hands that had always been used to turn pages in library books.

"My name is Safiya. What's yours?"

No response. She persevered.

"I can get salves from my workplace. We have many. There are a lot of minor injuries at the factory. And I might be able to find you some shoes while we're there."

He looked down at his feet. He seemed to come to some decision. His face relaxed. "That would be helpful. Thank you."

"I can dress your cuts, but I can't do anything for the toxin. You should see a healer. We have excellent marrow leeches in Riarnanth."

"I'm all right. I have immunity."

He gazed at her as she drew her breath sharply. He had underestimated the woman, whose familiarity now opened itself to him; she was the woman from the hide factory. He had seen this same expression on her face as she stood across from the officious little man in the office.

Her hand moved to tighten around the pistol's grip, but she did not yet withdraw the gun fully. "Who are you?" she asked. He saw her making connections, putting things together that might or might not be true. "The Festival," she said. "What's happening?"

He pressed his lips together, as if reassuring himself that he would not answer, and then found himself opening up. He was late for Djudrum Lane. They would be going ahead without him now, his own death subcontracted to street vermin. He had come all this way just to turn into a clown, a sideshow for children to laugh at while the main festivities unfolded.

"I don't know yet," he said. "I had an appointment. I missed it. Events are out of my hands now."

"Where are you from?" She was growing more confident. She unlimbered the gun from its enclosure and poked him with the pistol's muzzle.

"It really doesn't matter anymore," he said. "You're talking to a dead man."

He turned his back on her and began shambling off in the direction of the terminal.

"Wait," she said, sheathing the gun. "Come with me."

Safiya had never, in all her time at the hide factory, been back to the building so late in the day. Valvay did not ask her to work late and no functions were held behind its doors after the tanners and seamstresses had downed tools. She wondered, as she bypassed security, whether Valvay would still be in his office, or had decided to go hunting for women in the fevered carnival streets. The temptation would surely be too great for him, she thought, with a smile. The books could wait when there was so much flesh caroming around the city.

She led the way through a great hall of stitching machines, pistons raised into the heights like steel elbows. She was used to the rich, animal smell, the ammoniac tang of the treatment baths, the brown stench of the tannery, but the man was suffering, trying to cover his mouth and nose with the strap of his bindle.

Kerao slid out of the shadows ahead, his slingshot draped loosely at his hips. An insouciant smile, the ever-present smolder of his resin crucible cupped in his fingers. The sharp hit of it reached her seconds later. It was a wonder that he could draw a bead on anything after breathing that for most of his shift. But the fruits of his labor were there to see. A stack of pale, hairless bodies: rind rats, attracted to the factory by the smell of wet membranes. Kerao was good at his job.

"Valvay's going to void bodkins if he finds out you're bringing lovers back to his factory."

"He won't find out," Safiya snapped. 'And anyway, this is no more my lover than you are my future husband. He's hurt. He needs help."

Kerao lazily traced the shape of his weapon with a finger. He eyed the other man keenly. "What's your name?" he asked.

"I don't need to answer you."

Kerao spread his hands. "Of course not. I was being friendly. Cannot a man cheated of his time at the Festival take advantage of an unexpected visit? Eke out a little warmth from his fellow man?"

He followed, strolling, occasionally loading and emptying his slingshot with hands that knew the task so well they didn't need his eyes to guide them anymore.

They passed through to a room with a bench and a sink and a red chest. From the chest, Safiya pulled a small, lozenge-shaped disc. She pressed her patient into the seat and tenderly wiped the ugly, puffy wound with a wipe teased from a clear envelope. The man clenched his jaw. "Wait," Safiya said. She positioned the lozenge over the wound and gently shook it. Thin wafers, the color of wet cement, slid out on to the wound, concealing it. A second or two, a flare of intense light, and the smell of burned flesh. The man might have passed out had he known what was coming, but the heat was bearable. He shot Safiya a quizzical glance.

"There's an anesthetic in there. It's heat-sealed now. No threat of infection. I just hope it will heal okay."

There was a clean, soft moment of calm. Nobody talked. A veil came down. Safiya and the man shared a smile. Their first. Their last.

A sound, a soft pop in triplicate, audible over the dulled fizz of the crowd outside.

The wall next to Kerao sprouted a red branch; Kerao looked down at his chest and spread his hands, as if to say
How am I going to wash that out?
He crumpled, the breath grunting out of him as his body found new, awkward configurations on the way down.

Safiya thrust out her hand. The man took it. She risked a look behind her as she ran with him through a pair of wooden doors and down the stairs to the chaos of Poonma Way.

Men strolling through the bands of shadow in the sweatshop, reloading, their targets locked on retinas that would not refresh for any other image until they had been dispatched.

The terminal was a great, bronze slab, like a monumental piece of machinery built only for the purpose of processing people. It sucked them in and churned them through ticket barriers and security grilles. It forced them through the mangle of soup huts and noodle hammocks; tiers of families hawking poorly manufactured bracelets and charms; men or women or inbetweeners offering equally poor services in hastily erected tents along the platforms. Heat and smoke rose to the rafters in the enormous train shed where it condensed and returned to the ground as a bitter, tarry rain.

The man was looking around him nervously, sweating hard, the salp wound, though thermosealed, turning the skin of his leg the color of unripe calloon fruit.

Normally, this area, with its promise of departure, would inspire Safiya with excitement. She had always loved the noise and movement, the scorch of demon's-prick chilis in the air, the hiss and roar of food being cooked for impatient travelers. The haggling, the thick din of debate, the curiously attractive trilling of the sirens and horns on the great trains. Now all she saw was threat.

Beige meringues of filth quivered in the ditches by the roadside. Beggars with stumps pleaded for money or food or regenerative hormone gels. A herd of thuc, painted with slashes of brilliant paint, turned onto the main drag. Acrobats and jugglers fussed and fretted at the clawed feet of the beasts, dared to get close enough to pin banners and pennants on to their plated hides.

There was a sense of arrival. The Festival seemed to be spiraling into the centre of things, both in terms of location and time. There was a feeling of criticality. The smoke and the stir ― the electricity of the moment ― turned the twilight sky into something bewitching, palpable.

At that moment, a dark seam split the heavens.

Safiya looked up to see what resembled a smudged purple underscore on a pale grey page. The leading point of it slowed and smeared and grew. She was put in mind of a sleeping bird at its roost, unfurling great wings in the moments before flight. She had to turn away when the thing's head shifted to show her a flash of too many teeth crammed into a mouth that seemed ill-suited to contain them.

What she hoped were firecrackers began exploding throughout the square abutting Battidarmala station's grand entrance. The energy of the crowd changed. Movement became less sinuous, more arbitrary. People began screaming. Pockets of red mist burst into the sky and hung there in the heat. She was no longer able to keep track of the specter in the sky, or what its smoking eyes were trying to fasten on in the crowd.

"Keranjian mani?Irith cullviridim?Anji?Ordu?"

The words, anger-spiced, pealed from the howls of desperation like something exotic freed from a bottle of vapors. She knew this tongue, but had not heard it spoken on the streets of her city before. "Nobody would dare," she cried.

The man she had rescued was crouched, crabbing his way toward shelter. He was volleying back sentences of Dardarbji over the uncertain heads of the Festival-goers. It was not yet apparent where the danger was coming from. Only that it was coming.

"Huth ninia,"
he shrieked:
There was another.

Then he turned to her. "Barafil tau! Get down!"

A great bronze ripple bent the aspect of the sky. She felt its heat reduce her hair to stubble as it passed overhead. It was spent almost immediately. When she was able to blink moisture back into her eyes, the man was gone and every tree along the Khunds Road was ablaze.

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