Love Minus Eighty (41 page)

Lycan was grinning. “It’s all taken care of.
I’m
going to revive Jeannette for you.”

This wasn’t making sense. Mira wondered if Lycan was delusional. This was real, but they were only words, spoken by a man she didn’t know. “Are you sure?”

Lycan tapped in the air for a moment, and words appeared above her face, partially blocking Lycan. “That’s a legal document.” He pointed out a line near the bottom. “My DNA-coded signature. I borrowed most of the money against my future earnings.”

For the first time, Mira dared allow a sliver of hope to break through. Lycan reached to remove the document, and Mira said, “
Wait.
Please. Let me read what it says.”

It said Jeannette was going to live, to breathe, to speak in her own beautiful voice again.

“Satisfied?” Lycan asked when she’d finished.

“Yes. Thank you. So much.”

“You can thank me the next time I see you. We want to have you and Jeannette over for dinner as soon as you’re both able. ‘We’ is me and my girlfriend. Her name is Veronika.”

It was inconceivable to Mira, she and Jeannette walking into a room together, sitting down, eating.

All Mira could think to say was, “I’d like that.”

“Good. I’m glad. I’m glad you’re not angry at me. I’ll see you soon, then.”

“Yes. Soon.” Although still, she couldn’t quite believe it.

Lycan reached up.

I’m deeply grateful to my editor Tom Bouman, and to my friends and fellow writers Ian Creasey, Rachel Swirsky, and Laura Valeri, who provided incredibly insightful feedback on the first draft of this novel.

Warm thanks to my friend psychologist Jim Pugh, who provided indispensable input as we mapped out this novel on a napkin at Moe’s. I miss our lunches.

As always, thanks to Codex, my online writing community, and to Clarion East and Taos Toolbox, for their roles in my development as a writer.

Thank you, Sheila Williams, editor of Asimov’s, for publishing “Bridesicle,” the short story on which this novel is based.

Thanks to my wonderful wife, Alison, for her support and love, and to my parents, who are always there for me.

Finally, this novel wouldn’t exist if not for the people at Orbit, and my agent, Seth Fishman. I mean that quite literally: they suggested I turn my short story “Bridesicle” into a novel. Thanks to Orbit for believing in this novel before I’d even written it, and to Seth, for his masterful guidance and wisdom.

Paul Harrison

W
ILL
M
C
I
NTOSH
is a Hugo Award winner and Nebula finalist whose short stories have appeared in
Asimov’s
(where he won the 2010 Reader’s Award for Short Story),
Strange Horizons, Interzone
, and
Science Fiction and Fantasy: Best of the Year
, among others. His first novel,
Soft Apocalypse
, was released in 2011 and his second novel,
Hitchers
, was published in February 2012. In 2008 he became the father of twins.

If you enjoyed

LOVE MINUS EIGHTY,

look out for

AMERICAN ELSEWHERE

by Robert Jackson Bennett

SOME PLACES ARE TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE.

Under a pink moon, there is a perfect little town not found on any map.

In that town, there are quiet streets lined with pretty houses, houses that conceal the strangest things.

After a couple years of hard traveling, ex-cop Mona Bright inherits her long-dead mother’s home in Wink, New Mexico. And the closer Mona gets to her mother’s past, the more she understands that the people of Wink are very, very different
…

From award-winning writer Robert Jackson Bennett comes the next great American supernatural novel: a work that explores the dark dimensions of the hometowns and neighbors we thought we knew.

Even though it is a fairly cool night, Norris is sweating abundantly. The sweat leaks out of his temples and the top of his skull and runs down his cheeks to pool around his collarbones. He feels little trickles weaving down his arms to soak into the elbows and wrists of his shirt. The entire car now has a saline reek, like a locker room.

Norris is sitting in the driver’s seat with the car running, and for the past twenty minutes he’s been debating whether leaving the car running was a good idea or not. He’s made several mental charts of pros and cons and probabilities, and overall he thinks it was a good idea: the odds that someone will notice the sound of a car idling on this neighborhood lane, and check it out and sense something suspicious, feel fairly low; whereas the odds of him fumbling with the ignition or the clutch if he needs to start the car quickly seem very, very high right now. He is so convinced of his own impending clumsiness that he hasn’t even dared to take his hands off the steering wheel. He is gripping it so hard and his palms are so sweaty that he doesn’t know if he could remove them if he tried.
Suction
, he thinks.
I’m stuck here forever, no matter who notices what.

He’s not sure why he’s so worried about being noticed. No one lives in the neighboring houses. Though it is not posted anywhere—in any visual manner, that is—this part of town is not open to the public. There is only one resident on this street.

Norris leans forward in his seat to reexamine the house. He is parked right before its front walk. Behind the car is a small, neat gravel driveway that breaks off from the paved road and curves down the slope to a massive garage. The house itself is very, very big, but its size is mostly hidden behind the Englemann spruces; one can make out only hints of pristine white wooden siding, sprawling lantana, perfectly draped windows, and clean redbrick walls. And there, at the end of the front
walk, is a modest, inviting front door with a coat of bright red paint and a cheery bronze handle.

It is a flawless house, really, a dream house. It is a dream house not only in the sense that anyone would dream of living there; rather, it is so perfect that a house like this could exist only in a dream.

Norris checks his watch. It has been four minutes by now. The wind runs through the pines, and the sound of thousands of whispering needles makes him shiver. Otherwise, it is quiet. But it is always quiet near homes like this, and it is always ill-advised to venture out at night in Wink. Everyone knows that. Things could happen.

He sits up: there are noises coming from the garage. Voices. He grips the steering wheel a little harder.

Two dark figures in ski masks emerge from the garage dragging something bulky between them. Norris stares at them in dismay as they begin making their way up to the car. When they finally get close enough, he rolls down the passenger-side window and whispers, “What happened? Where’s Mitchell?”

“Shut up!” one of them says.

“Where is he? Did you leave him in there?”

“Will you shut up and open the trunk?”

Norris starts to, but he is distracted by what they are carrying. It appears to be a short man wearing a blue sweater and khakis, but his hands and feet are tightly bound, and a burlap sack has been pulled down over his face. Yet despite all this the man is speaking very, very quickly, almost chanting: “… Cannot succeed,
will not
succeed, such a vain hope that I personally cannot
imagine
, do you understand, I cannot
imagine
it. You do not have the
authorities
, the
privileges
, and without those this is but sand brushing over my neck, do you understand, no more than reeds dancing in violent waters…”

“Open the fucking trunk already!” says one of the men.

Norris, startled, reaches over and pulls the trunk lever. The trunk pops open and the two drag the hooded man back, stuff him in, and slam it shut. Then they scramble back around and jump in the backseat.

“Where’s Mitchell?” asks Norris again. “What happened to him?”

“Fucking drive!” shouts one of the men.

Norris glances at the house again. There is movement in all the windows now—could those be dark figures pacing back and forth in the halls? Pale faces peeping out the windows? And some of the front lights are on, ones Norris could have sworn were dark just a second ago. He tears his eyes away, puts the car in first, and guns it.

They rip through the neighborhood lanes until they reach the main roads. The two men remove their ski masks. Zimmerman is older and bald with a graying beard, his cheeks bulging with the promise of pendulous jowls in later life. Out of the three of them he’s by far the most experienced in this kind of thing, so it’s extra unnerving to see how obviously terrified he is. The other, Dee, is an athletic young man with blond, perfectly parted hair, the sort of hair found only in Boy Scout advertisements. Dee either doesn’t understand what’s going on or is so dazed by everything that he can hardly shut his mouth.

“Jesus,” says Zimmerman. “Jesus. Jesus fucking Christ.”

“What happened?” asks Norris again. “Where’s Mitchell? Is he all right?”

“No. No, Mitchell isn’t all right.”

“Well, what happened?”

There is a long silence. Then Dee says, “He fell.”

“He what? He fell? Fell into what?”

The two are quiet again. Zimmerman says, “There was a
room. And… it just seemed to keep going. And Mitchell fell in.”

“And when he fell,” says Dee, “he just didn’t
stop
… he just kept
falling
into the room…”

“What do you mean?” asks Norris.

“What makes you think we understand what we saw in there?” asks Zimmerman angrily.

Norris turns back to the road, abashed. He points the car north toward the dark mesa that hangs over the town. Sometimes there is a thud or a shout from the trunk behind them. They all try to ignore it.

“He knew we were coming,” says Dee.

“Shut up,” says Zimmerman.

“That’s why he’d prepared those rooms for us,” says Dee. “He knew. Bolan
said
it’d be a surprise. How could he have known?”

“Shut up!”

“Why?” asks Dee.

“Because I’m willing to bet that that thing in the trunk can hear us!”

“So?”

“So what if this doesn’t go right? What if he gets away? You just gave him one name. What more do you want to give him?”

There is a heavy silence. Norris asks, “How about some music?”

“Good idea,” says Zimmerman.

Norris hits the tuner. Immediately Buddy Holly begins crooning “That’ll Be The Day” from the car’s blown-out speakers, and they all fall silent.

As they climb the mountain road they leave the town behind. The grid of streetlights shrinks until it is a spiderweb beaded with morning dew, stretched across the feet of the mesa. The town sits in the center of a dark fan of vegetation running
down the mountain slopes, fed by the little river that winds through the center of the city. It is the only dependable source of water for miles around the mesa, a rarity in this part of New Mexico.

A painted sign swims up out of the darkness ahead, marking the northern border of the town. It has a row of white lights at the bottom, making it glow in the night. It shows a smiling man and woman sitting on a picnic blanket. They are a wholesome, white-bread sort, he square-jawed and squinty, she pale and delicate with cherry-red lips. They are looking out on a marvelous vista of crimson mesas at sunset, and at the top of one mesa is a very small bronze-colored antenna, one that would obviously be much larger if you were close. The clouds in the pink skies seem to swirl around the antenna, and there is something beyond the antenna and the clouds, something the man and the woman are meant to be looking at, but the two rightmost panels of the sign have been torn off, leaving raw wood exposed where there should be some inspiring vision. Yet some vandal has tried to complete the picture with a bit of chalk, though what the vandal has drawn is difficult to determine: it is an outline of a figure standing on the mountains, or where the mountains would be, a giant, titan-size body that would fill up the sky. The figure is generally human but somewhat deformed: its back is too hunched, and its arms are too ill-defined, though that may be an indication of the limits of the artist.