The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

Swift to Chase ^{Laird Barron}

In medias res part II:

After a hard chase and all-too brief struggle, the Bird Woman of the Adirondacks loomed over me; demonic silhouette, blackest outspread wings tipped in iron; gore-crested and flint-beaked. Her thumbnail-talon poised to spike me through the left eye.

“To know itself, the universe must drink the blood of its children.” Her voice cracked like an ice shelf collapsing; it roared across an improbable expanse of inches.

The talon pressed against my iris. It went in and in.

Rewind and power dive from the clouds. Join the story, in medias res, part I:

Where in the world is Jessica Mace? That scene when the superlative secret agent gets captured inside the master villain’s lair is where. Instead of a secret agent, here’s little old me doing my best impression. Rather than a rocket station beneath a dormant volcano, I’d gotten trapped on an estate (1960s Philip K. Dick-esque) nestled among the peaks of the Adirondacks. Cue jazzy intro music; cue rhinestone heels and a dress slit to here. My nemesis, billionaire avian enthusiast and casual murderer of humans, Averna Spencer, wasn’t playing. Except she was playing.

First clue of my imminent demise (more like the fifth or sixth clue, but just go with it): a leather-bound copy of The Most Dangerous Game parked on the nightstand of my quarters. Second clue? The woman herself said over the intercom, “Fly, my swift, my sweet. When I catch you, I’m giving you a blood eagle.”

Viking history isn’t my specialty, but I know enough to not want one.

There I sat, dressed to kill or be killed. The loaner evening gown was a trap. Spencer had set it when she laid the fancy box across the sheets of the poster bed, and I sprang it as I slipped the dress on. Bird-of-paradise-crimson, gilded with streaks of gold and blue, a bronze torc to cover the scar on my neck (so thoughtful of my hostess), and four-inch rhinestone heels amounted to a costume worth more than I’d make in a lifetime unless that lifetime included a winning lotto ticket or sucking millionaire cock on the daily.

The ensemble transcended mere decoration; it reorganized my cells and worked outward like magma rushing through igneous channels. I’d stared at myself in the mirror and come face to face with a starlet. A tad hard-bitten. Close, though. Action heroine on the precipice of unfuckability by Hollywood’s standard. Regardless, the illusion of fabulous me radiated heat—live-wire alive.

Yep, slipping into the dress had been to stick my head right through a dangling snare. Call it the price of admission. Too late to change a damned thing that was coming. I grinned like a prizefighter to keep my gorge down. I’d been here before and survived. Double-edged blade, the notion of past as prologue, and so forth. Resilience in prey excited Averna and made her want me that much more.

A girl on the run in a dress and high heels wouldn’t run far is what Spencer bet, and why not? She owned the house. The house always wins.

The isolated mountain house of a high-toned serial killer isn’t the kind of joint you accidentally wander into. I’d been recruited, seduced, and deployed. Dr. Ryoko and Dr. Campbell (more on my patrons—and their sexy, sexy bodyguard, Beasley—in due course), possessed a special interest in Averna Spencer’s activities. My mission was to infiltrate her estate and conduct hostile actions on their behalf.

A few words about our mutual foe:

Averna craved the chase. She wasn’t a slasher of (hapless) womenfolk or a sniper of unsuspecting coyotes. She didn’t howl at the moon; hadn’t been born under a bad sign or suffered childhood trauma. A hunter, nonetheless. Pure predator evolved to the job at hand. Sixty-three kills, if the cobbled-together records told it true. Sixty-three on U.S. soil; only INTERPOL could speak for the body count in Europe where she frequently traveled.

The manifest of persons missing and presumed dead since 1988, included loggers, hikers, ex-military, a baker’s dozen hardened criminals, and a former Olympic decathlete. These folks vanished across the U.S.; law enforcement records established the deeds, but the authorities hadn’t officially put it together. Unofficially, there were rumors. A retired FBI agent in Houston, a discredited private investigator in Wisconsin, and other assorted kooks, rocked the boat now and again. It came to nothing, as these situations usually do.

The track and field star haunted me. Strapping lad. Last known photograph taken at sunset, ice cream cone in hand (an athlete’s notion of decadence), a tall, dark-haired chick hanging on his arm. Track and field dude—let’s call him Rocky since he looked a hell of a lot like a Rocky I knew in high school—dressed nicely, smiled nicely. Only missed snagging the bronze medal by hundredths of a second. I imagined how he must’ve been later, after the kidnapping—alone, lost in a trackless forest. Pressed flat against the trunk of a pine, head cocked, every cord in his neck straining. Then, slice.

Rocky the Olympian’s tragic story ended the same as the rest. Worm food.

Fast, strong, tough. Hadn’t mattered, had it? Can’t fight what you don’t see coming, can’t fight if you’re prey. Dharma 101, friends and neighbors. The rabbit runs and the hawk dives.

Where do I fit into the grand scheme? I muck around in the rising tide of cosmic night. I’m hell on wheels. My totem animal is the coyote, the mongoose, my blazon a bloodied Ka-Bar in a clenched fist against a field of black.

Lest I join the dearly departed in their unmarked graves, the moment had come to make myself scarce. The original extraction plan struck me as sketchy at best—on the bright side of the equation, Spencer’s houseguests normally returned to the world unharmed. The data led Campbell and Ryoko to theorize that those whom she kidnapped (and I qualified) were subsequently hunted across her estate grounds. Should the operation go pear-shaped, I was to flee Averna Spencer’s home and rendezvous at a hunting cabin a mile past the estate’s southeast boundary. My patrons had assured me they’d done the math forward and back—it wouldn’t come to such an extreme. Bastards.

A grand staircase spiraled down into gothic gloom. Marble raptors guarded the way. I ripped the dress to upper thigh, removed my heels, and transformed into a new creature; slippery and dangerous.

I hustled through the door and past a phalanx of artificial eggs arranged on the front lawn. Almost did a doubletake. The eggs were outsized and exaggerated, Andy Warhol style; waist-tall, maybe three feet in circumference, cast from milky-lucent porcelain that glowed in the porchlight. The one nearest my left was bisected at its apex, like a hollow rocket missing its conical nose. An egg and a coffin are antipodes of a closed circuit. Made it halfway across the yard before Averna’s evil sidekick, Manson, shot me in the ass with a dart from a rifle. She waved when I glanced back. I flipped her the bird (ironic to the bitter end). Strength drained from me like blood from a tapped artery. Five more steps and I sprawled.

Averna rolled me onto my side. She moved her lips against mine in a not-quite kiss. Would’ve punched her in the throat except whatever Manson had loaded the dart with froze every muscle in my body. I tabled the impulse. She licked the salt of my tears and leaned back to regard me from the shadows. Eyes without a face. Yellow eyes with strange-as-shit pupils. Hawk pupils. I wanted to ask how she’d known. Maybe she didn’t; and if she didn’t, despite her rhetoric, I might escape with my skin.

This feeble hope persisted for less than five seconds.

“The doctors asked you to acquire a certain document, yes? They promised some grand reward for your service; appealed to your sense of honor. Couldn’t you detect the evil in their black little hearts? Did you not whiff the deception?”

Had I been capable of speech, I’d have said nobody’s perfect, and spat a gob in her eye.

She smiled. “I delivered the formula to them months ago. Payment for your sweet self. I got the best of Campbell and Ryoko, as usual. The formula is worthless, lacking a specific strain of Jurassic protozoa, which, let us pray, no one ever resurrects. Blink if you can hear me.”

I’m stubborn, so I glared, bug-eyed defiant. Impossible to tell if she was lying, and if so, how much. My “power” to behold the evil in the human heart doesn’t work on women half as well as it does on men, and if she was telling the truth, it didn’t work half so well on men as I’d thought.

A sociopath will say anything to make her victims squirm, which meant I dared not believe a word from her lips. Yet, and yet… I tried to speak; to scream, actually. Had my preparation and training been a ruse? Had those kindly eggheads really double-crossed me? Had their man-at-arms (and my lover) Beasley, participated in the con? Et tu, Beasley? Et tu, you handsome sonofabitch?

Averna said, “None of this is an accident. The doctors do not trade in coincidence and neither do I. We’ve observed you for many years. Something happened to your mother as a young woman. She met a friend of mine, a foreigner, you might say, who contracted with the CIA to enhance various programs. Lucius was part of an experiment, alongside many of her friends. She and the other surviving test subjects have been remotely monitored since the latter 1970s, as are their offspring. The… conditions that altered Lucius skipped her firstborn, Elwood, and bloomed within you. Curses can be finicky.

“Did those old goats suggest they knew Lucius’s fate? Spoiler alert: mother dearest isn’t living in a trailer in Tennessee with a failed country singer. She didn’t drink herself to death or get eaten by a bear. I am not privy to the machinations of Campbell and Ryoko. I do have my own brand of intuition. My intuition says they murdered Lucius Lochinvar Mace. Did her in in the name of science.” She rose and gestured to Manson who lurked nearby.

Manson hoisted me with her arms extended as if I were a crash test dummy. My field of view revolved off its y axis. I went bye-bye into the hollow belly of night.

Backtrack, backtrack. Maybe you’re wondering how a nice girl like me ended up in a place like this…

A pair of infamous scientists figured I might be game to solve a mystery and save the world. Unlikely, yet no less so than the rest of the improbable bullshit that increasingly defines my existence. My current boyfriend, the aforementioned Beasley, happened to serve as bodyguard, valet, and moral compass to the renegade doctors. He introduced us. This set the ball rolling. Happy (unhappy) coincidence? As I’ve come to mutter on a routine basis, there are no accidents.

Most people born prior to 1980 have at least heard of the inseparable duo, Toshi Ryoko and Howard Campbell (erstwhile academic favorites of every male-oriented pop magazine in existence). Renowned for death-defying expeditions, gauche stunts, and outré theories in their heyday; less celebrated of late. The naturalists retired (voluntarily mothballed, as Beasley put it) to a quaintly decrepit New England farm. Ryoko in his wheelchair, Campbell stooped to push. The inseparable duo as drawn by some virtuoso graphic artist; say Mike Mignola or Patch Zircher.

Prior to our first meeting, I did my homework and read the news stories (which traced back into the early ’80s), watched myriad videos, and listened to radio programs devoted to their exploits (the public exploits; turns out the pair really and truly deserved the “mad scientist” appellation). Iconoclasts and apostates to the hilt. Neither man would go quietly to a nursing home. These two were fated for an exotic demise: they’d vanish in the Bermuda Triangle, or into the Amazon rainforest and leave behind a ravaged campsite, cryptic research notes scattered, a cursed Neolithic medallion dangling from a bush; or, an unmarked government van would whisk them to a black site for a final debriefing.

We got along swimmingly. Didn’t mean I’d be a cheerful pawn in their schemes.

“The Shadow of Death slides across the floor,” Dr. Campbell said, and nodded at his shoe in a sliver of sunlight.

“The Shadow of Death!” Dr. Ryoko struggled to light a cigarette. His palsy tremors came and went.

“Soon it will crawl onto us and dig in the spurs. Time yet…”

“…a few years yet. We can do some good.”

“You can do some good, Jessica. Help us hold back the darkness.”

What they wanted wasn’t difficult. Hazardous to my health, yes, but not difficult. Some rich lady possessed a formula; a cure for a deadly strain of avian flu, or a recipe to weaponize the virus, nobody could be sure which. Campbell handed me an envelope full of notes and photographs and that’s how I came to acquaint myself with the legend of Averna Spencer—AKA the Bird Lady of the Adirondacks, AKA (my addition) the Cuckoo Killer. She’d briefly made a public splash on nightly news programs when they profiled her participation in the emergent wingsuit craze during the late 1990s. As one of the few women rich enough and ballsy enough to leap off cliffs and sail like a flying squirrel, she’d represented a curiosity.

Averna kicked it old school, pre-Information Age—nothing left to chance in a computer database, otherwise Ryoko and Campbell would’ve enlisted a hacker and done the job by remote. She kept the formula locked in a safe at her residence; a cliff-side mansion-slash-fortified stronghold amid thousands of acres of wilderness. The aforementioned master villain’s lair. Called it the Aerie.

The broad owned more land than Ted Turner in his Montana heyday with Jane Fonda and the Atlanta Braves. Closest road lay twenty miles southeast. Traffic came and went via a helicopter pad. Power derived from generators, turbines, and solar panels. Security? Ex-military goons provided by Black Dog; armed drones; bloodhounds and German shepherds. Land mines. The wilderness and its many teeth waited for scraps.

How did the doctors score this information? Dr. Ryoko claimed a contact on the inside. A spy in the house of love. While this shadowy individual didn’t possess direct access to the formula, the person had provided a detailed description of the item and the combination to the safe where it currently resided.

My natural skepticism asserted itself. Setting aside reservations regarding the veracity of the alleged spy, why in the hell would Averna Spencer, noted recluse, grant me an audience?

“Never fear, we’ll arrange it,” Dr. Ryoko said. “You are the mistress of inevitability. The opener of the way. Occult forces magnetize to you.”

“Spencer delights in taking things apart. Unbreakable individuals are her weakness.” Dr. Campbell actually rubbed his hands when he said this.

“Oh, goodie,” I said.

“If she isn’t familiar with your résumé as a survivor of massacres and slayer of maniacs, we’ll enlighten her. She won’t be able to resist. You’re a blue-ribbon prize.”

“Nice as that sounds, I’d prefer to live a while yet.”

Ryoko said, “The universe built you to destroy human predators as it built the mongoose to destroy serpents.”

“Dang, as a little girl I adored Kipling’s tales to the max.”

I inquired at length as to what they meant by occult forces and got nowhere fast. Slick as politicians dodging press questions, they relentlessly pivoted to the matter of Averna Spencer and her formula.

Charisma, resourcefulness, and grit notwithstanding, Mission Impossible wasn’t my bag. The doctors hung in there with the hard sell. Dr. Campbell said I owed it to the missing persons and their distraught families. Dr. Ryoko insisted I bore a patriotic duty to obtain the formula from Spencer. Heaven help us if the avian flu developed into a more lethal strain.

This dragged on.

“What’s your decision?” Dr. Campbell tried on a hopeful, earnest smile. “Will you help us avert a global catastrophe?”

“Pass.”

“You’re a born meddler,” Dr. Ryoko said. “Consider the stakes—mass extinction of multiple species…”

“Not for all the chickens in the world.” I actually meant, sweeten the pot, you cheap sonsofbitches. They sweetened the pot.

Dr. Campbell said, “Twenty-thousand. Cash. Our entire rainy-day fund.”

“Tempting, but no thanks.”

The doctors exchanged a glance I’ll take to my grave.

“We’ll tell you what really happened to your mother,” Dr. Ryoko said.

Ding-ding-ding. Winner.

The Aughts exacted a hell of a toll on the Mace family. It felt personal between us and the universe.

Mom took a permanent vacation to parts unknown.

My brother, Elwood, stepped on a landmine. Elwood was “technically” the eldest of my fellow brood—he’d plopped onto the hospital sheets about forty-five minutes before me back in 1980. We didn’t share the Corsican Twins psychic bond as romanticized by pop lit. Elwood and I had barely acknowledged, much less dwelled on, the fact we were twins. I was shocked as anyone to get the bad news from Afghanistan.

Jackson Bane, love of my life, went down with his fishing boat.

Dad followed suit in a separate accident on the Bering.

A bunch of friends and colleagues got murdered by the Eagle Talon Ripper. The Ripper almost did me in as well, hence the scar on my neck. Melodrama galore.

Hindsight: Mom’s final disappearance began the unholy countdown sequence. Unlike the many other instances where Lucius slapped Dad and hit the road for a week or a month, she didn’t return. Didn’t call, didn’t write, didn’t leave a hint where she’d gone and after a couple of years, her fate gradually became the stuff of legends.

Flash forward the better part of a decade. When the mad doctors offered to solve the nagging mystery of Mom’s vanishing act, my instincts were to skip the whole middle part where I went off on a fool’s errand into the den of a sadistic murderer. Quicker and more reliable to extract their information with a sharp stick.

Beasley presented a major obstacle. He watched over Campbell and Ryoko with zeal. The adorable brute exhibited a ruthless streak when it came to protecting the codgers. His bulging biceps and handiness with gun, knife, and hobnail boot, gave me pause.

It’s seldom wise to tackle an irresistible force of nature head-on. I played it coy.

He implored me to forget the mission and slip away into the night. No amount of money was worth the risk, he adored me, et cetera. I informed him the old bastards had made me an offer I couldn’t refuse—and then refused to tell him what the offer entailed. I asked if he’d ever met a woman named Lucius, real slick like. He shrugged and said yeah, she’d blown into camp a few years back, consulted with the doctors, then departed on an evening breeze.

Innocent, and I’m a decent judge of a man’s soul if I gaze into his eyes long enough after a good hard screw. On the subject of screwing: I didn’t have the heart to ask if he’d banged my mom.

“Spencer is a monster,” he said as we smoked cigarettes in bed and slugged from a bottle of vodka. “She’s protected by the powers of darkness. I’ve seen the file. I’ve seen all their files…”

“Who else are your bosses spying on?”

“Don’t ask questions you’ll come to regret. You’re not a professional. The docs aren’t either. Meanwhile, Spencer is queen of her little mountain fiefdom. Absolutely untouchable. The FBI knows. The Department of Defense knows. Everybody.”

“The government is aware that she’s a serial killer?” I feigned shock. Experience had taught me that we primates were capable of anything, everything. There ain’t no good guys.

“Always room for one more creep on the payroll. Uncle Sam wouldn’t give a shit if Spencer had Joseph Mengele’s brain implanted. As long as she keeps her activities on the property and doesn’t kill anyone important, she’s golden.”

“Golden,” I said. “Reminds me of something…”

I loved Beasley, after a fashion. It isn’t unusual, as Tom Jones might say. Big, sorta-handsome (he looked like a soap star who got smashed in the face with a shovel), mean guys rev my motor, and the Bease had it going on in spades. He loved me back, far as I could tell. Our mutual affection complicated matters; made what I had to do to get close to Averna a dilemma of scruples versus pragmatism. My scruples aren’t what they used to be.

“Since I can’t change your mind, I can show you what you’ve signed on for.” He plugged in a laptop and ran three video clips. Surveillance or home footage as shot by an anonymous someone with Ingmar Bergman’s ice-cold aesthetic.

Clip one, black and white: a man sprints along a seaside cliff toward the camera. The fuzzy shape of an enormous bird sweeps through the frame and plucks him in its claws. The man struggles as the bird cruises toward the horizon. They shrink to a distant blot—the smaller blot separates and plummets into the ocean.

Clip two: an actress clad in an elaborate costume (skintight suit pricked with gemstones; a demented mask with a red and yellow feather plume, a vicious iron beak, underarm webbing, and steely talons) glides the length of a vast solarium. She rebounds from the walls to alter course with horrible grace. Naked men and women scatter beneath her. Every pass, the performer decapitates a victim with the swipe of a talon or the slash of a spur. Viscera streams in her wake.

I know from Wire-Fu. I can’t find the wires.

Clip three: Averna Spencer stands near a bonfire with her arms spread. An assistant (the woman in the photo with Rocky the Olympian) fits her into a wingsuit designed by Satan. Spencer’s arms are harnessed to actual wings designed after some gigantic specimen—twenty feet, tip to tip. The feathers ripple, hinting at a spectrum dulled by the black and white film. The fire illuminates queerly-hooked calf-high boots, steel (titanium?) talons strapped to her wrists, metallic panels across her breast, and a bronze helm crafted in the likeness of the god or devil of all avian-kind. Beneath the cruel beak, she grins.

I stared overlong, evidently.

Beasley apologized, mistaking silence for dismay. Truthfully? The images had stolen my breath. A close race between disgust and awe. That’s how much I’d evolved since Alaska. He figured I would react as any normal, rational person and tell the doctors to stuff their espionage mission. Quite the contrary.

Averna Spencer seldom emerged from her mountain fortress. She traveled in rarified company under various aliases and in disguise. Tracking her movements abroad proved a no-go. Campbell and Ryoko approached the finest detective agencies and were rebuffed without explanation. Beasley wasn’t kidding when he said Spencer enjoyed protection from on high. Somebody ran major interference on her behalf, and I suspect that baloney had a first name, spelled CIA, and a second name spelled NSA, and a last name starting with Homeland Security. Spread enough money around and the baddest intelligence agency will act as your very own private concierge.

Since flushing out our quarry didn’t seem a viable option, we needed to attract her interest. Birds appreciate shiny objects. The doctors devised a plan that involved getting me onto the guest list for an exclusive seminar featuring a famed ornithologist rumored to be an on and off again flame of Ms. Spencer. The doctors pulled strings and away I went to make the magic happen.

The lecture occurred in Kingston, New York at the home of a wealthy naturalist who reveled in this kind of groovy shit. Real nice place, if a tad stuffy. Kind of a museum, although the owner rarely opened for tours; he collected documents, weapons (a veritable shit-ton of knives), landscape paintings, and animal artifacts for his sole viewing pleasure. I’ve met a few guys with that particular pathology; the type who stored priceless art in bank vaults. Creepy bastards, the lot of them.

The ornithologist (Henry-something or other), on the other hand, seemed normal enough for a whack-a-doodle birdwatcher. We hit it off after I revealed my secret identity as a retired biologist. Dude gave his talk to a parlor-load of eminently bored stuffed shirts, then took my elbow and introduced me around. Scotch started flowing and I made tons of new friends.

One of these friends shook my hand and said to call her Manson. Manson stood tall and Amazonian in combat boots. She wore a bomber jacket (unzipped to flash DETROIT in block type across a stretched-tight T-shirt) and makeup fit to front The Cure. Cropped hair, heavy eyeliner, cherry-black lipstick, cherry-black nails. Yeah, I’d read her file too—born and raised in the Motor City, ex-con, worked as muscle for hire until Averna Spencer rescued her from the mean streets. I recognized Manson as the mystery girl in the last photo of Rocky, Mr. Decathlete, and in the video of her girding Spencer for mayhem. Guess that made her Oddjob to Spencer’s Goldfinger, or Renfield to Dracula.

We adjourned to the veranda, admiring an autumnal blaze in the eye of the sunset. Manson reminded me of a female iteration of Beasley—big, tough, ruggedly attractive, and not overly gifted in chitchat. Manson came right to the point. She explained that her mega-rich, mega-private employer desired my presence at her estate for dinner and light conversation. The mysterious employer approved of my various exploits (especially the way I’d dispatched the Eagle Talon Ripper in Alaska). Should I be so gracious as to accept the invitation, my forbearance would be well-compensated. A helicopter waited nearby. No need to pack; my every need would be fulfilled.

Damn, the forces of darkness moved in fast. Manson’s Plan B probably involved a rag and chloroform, so rather than play hard to get, I acted tipsy and said, hell yeah, take me to your leader. What girl turns down a ride in a private helicopter? Not this girl! Manson ran a wand over my body from stem to stern and patted me down with more intimacy than a zealous airport security agent. Smart call, leaving my knives at home.

The helicopter carried us north for the better part of an hour.

Our pilot wore a snow-white uniform. His (or her) visor concealed his (or her) identity. I thought of Jonathan Harker’s carriage-ride, Dracula at the reins, hell-bent for leather on the way to the castle. Dracula possessed a cold grip and the strength of twenty men. How strong was Averna Spencer’s grip?

The answer—firm. That old saying about a velvet glove and an iron fist applies here. A few minutes after we touched down (and nope, I never saw her and the pilot together), the lady herself greeted me near the front lawn and its koi pond and assorted Greco-Roman statuary. Red dress and sensible shoes; she didn’t wear any jewelry or makeup. She gently closed her hand around my throat and planted a lingering kiss on my cheek. Felt as if she could’ve torn my head off with a twitch. We locked gazes—her pupil flickered yellow and back to black again, foreshadowing troubles galore. I gave not a shit. My legs trembled. Anxiety evaporated, replaced by thrill. Pheromones, mad pheromones.

The plan, such as it was, was to play hard to get, work the charm offensive, gain access to the Bird Woman’s home and acquire the formula. Babies, those best-laid stratagems went out the window the instant I got a whiff of her scent.

No, man. Averna didn’t have “sharp features,” or a “cruel nose,” or “talon-like” hands (usually), or any such shit. Dark hair, brown eyes (usually), athletic. The record put her on the backside of fifty. Up close and personal, she felt a hell of a lot younger; ripped as a gymnast (a decathlete?), and nary a wrinkle or crow’s foot. Averna understood how to walk, how to hold herself motionless the way politicians and models do, how to project her personality with kinetic force. Cool to the touch. Worth forty billion and enamored of esoteric scientific research. Spencer’s corporations funded an assortment of crazy projects. Despite this massive wealth, her name seldom surfaced outside of highly insulated circles. A bizarre, protean vibe emanated from her and her retinue. Is evil (capital E evil) protean? That would explain much.

Invited me to freshen up (my quarters contained every amenity including evening wear in my size) and take a stroll with her resident PR man. Dinner at seven on the dot.

I toured the house. Bizarre and immense (immense even before factoring in a network of shops, garages, and the sector of hexagonal cottages where she stashed her off duty workforce and security personnel).

Envision a three-wing mansion of redwood logs and slate, mated to a giant bisected Bucky Ball on loan from the Martians—soaring, crystal-domed atriums with copses of full-sized pine trees and willows and a river falling over glass-smooth rocks; cozy parlors where fake flames danced inside hearths; steel bulkhead hatches concealed by cherry wood paneling and illustrated hangings that were sufficiently moth-eaten to indicate pricelessness; and an array of security cameras, some obvious and others less so. Most of the art was of the abstract genre. I didn’t recognize anything.

Averna Spencer’s PR lackey (a chipper guy named James who smiled like a hostage in fear of his life) took me in tow. According to my guide, the floorplan included a sauna, gymnasium, theater, bowling alley, discotheque, shooting range, and a spa. When his back was turned, I peeked inside vases and cabinets—no corpses, no skeletons. The circuit ended with a glimpse inside a museum gallery that would’ve made a nice addition to the Smithsonian. Dinosaur bones, suspended biplanes, and a two-story spire of glossy, radiant yellow crystal. The usual weird stuff one might expected to find in the trophy den of a megalomaniacal billionaire murderess.

When I craned my neck to get a better look, James became nervous.

“Ms. Spencer would prefer to show you these special exhibits herself. Someone accidentally left this open…”

“That’s a huge chunk of crystal, Jimmy,” I said. “Last I saw something like that was on the cover of a 1970s science fiction novel. And the bird skeleton… What’s the wingspan? Twenty feet? Is it a pterodactyl?”

“No, ma’am, it is not a pterodactyl.” James pulled a pair of brass-plated doors shut. “Argentavis magnificens. An extinct predator. Among the largest of her kind. She devoured prey whole. Shall we move toward the dining room?” He wiped his brow and checked his watch.

“The crystal. You simply have to give me the scoop, Jimbo.”

“Ms. Spencer awaits.” He led the way, and briskly.

“Does Manson handle the executions around here?”

He glanced over his shoulder, eyes glassy-bright. “Mainly, yes.”

A woman spends her early adult years at hatcheries and aboard fishing trawlers doing the honest labor of tracking and cataloguing salmon (that great Alaskan export), and nobody cares. Americans want their food marginally harmless in a marginally attractive package; the fewer details, the better. A woman gets attacked by a mass murderer and lives to tell, everybody wants a piece of the action.

Type Jessica M into any search engine and the auto-form will suggest Jessica Mace & Eagle Talon Ripper; Jessica Mace US Magazine; Jessica Mace Nude Photos; Jessica Mace Final Girl. Averna Spencer hadn’t merely followed my career as portrayed in the media, she knew my whole origin story—how a while back, I’d barely survived an apartment complex massacre and fire; how I’d risen from near-death and killed the killer; how I’d bailed on my fifteen minutes and vanished (like mother, like daughter). She’d also obtained facts regarding my unpublicized excursions on the road. Averna confessed her fascination regarding people who had confronted the vicissitudes of existence in an intimate manner. I took it to mean she’d burned ants with a magnifying glass as a kid.

We finished supper and wandered through her hanging gardens and lesser aviaries. Flocks of tropical birds dwelled inside a dome of sparkly mesh that protected a lush jungle biome. It would take the gross national product of a small country to stock and maintain such a preserve.

Our path wound through an imported jungle. Paper lanterns (grotesque busts of birds of prey) cast our primeval surroundings in the light of an animated Kipling adaptation. Climate control simulated the tropics. Humidity soaked my clothes and I almost believed the sliver of moonlight peeping through leaves was other than a subtly masked klieg.

She said, “You’re rather trusting for a woman who’s had her throat slashed. Do you jump into a helicopter with any total stranger?”

“Manson isn’t the kind of person you argue with.” I raised my voice to compete with raucous chatter of birds and mating frogs.

“Manson is an extension of my will. I made her.”

“Made her? As in Pygmalion?”

“Isn’t that the idiom the cool kids are using?”

“Yes. Do me next, pretty please.”

“I projected my life essence into her puny mortal frame and voila, a million-year evolutionary leap. It’s a messy process. Not for weak stomachs.”

Seemed an appropriate point to change the subject. “I read in an article that you employ a team of geneticists and zoologists. You want to protect endangered bird species.” Campbell and Ryoko’s dossier alleged that Averna Spencer hired mercenaries to shoot nest robbers and sabotage the infrastructure of land developers who operated in environmentally-sensitive regions such as South America.

“The science team pursues much grander designs,” she said. “We work to resurrect a spectrum of extinct species. Avian, reptile, amphibian. I’m worried for honeybees. As our apian friends go, so go we.”

“The research is conducted here, in house?”

“Yes, and in twenty-three other countries.”

“Good thing you’re loaded. Woman could burn through a fortune on fringe research.”

“She could. Or she could manipulate a host of international political actors to foot the bill. Drug lords, warlords, bored industrialists… It isn’t as difficult to separate them from their spare millions as you might think.”

“Any luck raising the dodo from the dead?”

“Sixty-eight percent of this aviary system is populated by animals that no longer exist in the outside world.”

I flashed to the giant bird skeleton in the private museum, and how the tall, crystal had seethed with a weird yellow fire. Decided to zip my lips. Averna’s stride, long and graceful, reminded me of her unnatural strength. Her friendly smile hinted at savagery.

“My most prized work isn’t specific to avian research,” she said. “I hope to create a trigger of human evolution. A radically accelerated process.”

“Mutation.”

“After a fashion.”

“Toward what end?”

“The ability to survive dramatic climate change. To withstand nuclear radiation and acid rain. To think faster. To dispense with antiquated paradigms of morality and ethics. To soar with the eagles and swim with the fishes.”

“Things mad scientists say for five hundred, Alex,” I said. “Any notable successes, a la The Island of Doctor Moreau?”

“Me, a scientist? Hardly. Certainly, I’m slightly bonkers and quite ancient. Old people acquire knowledge. We spread it around, for weal or woe. As to the matter of success, I’m banking on getting lucky tonight, at least. Let’s swing by your room for a nightcap.”

“Mine? Surely yours is more luxurious.”

She took my arm rather possessively. “I sleep hanging upside down from a trapeze bar in Aviary 4. It’s not a cozy rendezvous.”

All I could see was the mask of the devil bird in the video clip, the feather plume; her victim’s corpse tumbling toward the water; men and women screaming in a solarium, its walls splattered in gore. Averna, radiant and exultant as a blood god from the bad history books.

Half a magnum of 1928 Krug later:

“Final girls are a necessarily rare breed.” Averna studied my calloused palms, the yellow bruises along my shoulder. Her nails were trimmed close to the quick and unpolished. Dark specks of blood had gotten under some of them. “Your training regimen is fierce. No enhanced strength or ESP? No telekinetic powers?”

“I skate along on woman’s intuition.”

“No secret weaponry of any kind?”

“Apparently, I’m a mongoose. Natural weaponry. Rawr!”

“She kissed my (also bruised) belly. “I am curious what combination of pathology and trauma drives you to seek danger.”

“This from Miss I-jump-off-cliffs-in a-wingsuit?”

“Pretend a normal person you’d like to fuck asked the question. The event in Alaska opened the world for you.”

“Opened the world? Like I should be grateful? I never volunteered to get brutalized. I didn’t tip that domino. The attack fucked me up royal.” I resisted the urge to touch the scar on my neck.

“Or it awakened dormant DNA. Your latent adrenaline junkie gene.”

“You know how it is—at first, it’s about the rush, then the rush becomes a habit. After a while, you’re basically screwed.”

“Give it an eon. Who’s your favorite superhero?”

“Let me think…”

“Don’t think, tell me.”

“Like tic-tac-toe?” I stalled.

“Cheating already.”

“Okay. The Batman.”

“Not Batgirl?”

“Defending my answer wasn’t part of the game. I want every bit of power. You?”

“Captain Midnight.”

“Who’s Captain Midnight?”

“Seriously?” Averna cupped her chin and regarded me. “I’m reevaluating this whole relationship.”

“All six hours of it.”

“My time is precious, Mace. Bouquets of thousand dollar bills could rain from the sky and it wouldn’t be cost effective to stoop for the ones that didn’t fall into my pocket.”

“Okay, don’t be rethinking anything. Give me a mulligan. Who the hell is Captain Midnight?”

“Ace World War One pilot. Could fly anything. Total badass.”

“You’re busting my balls over a cartoon from World War One?”

She undid my bra and tossed it over the side. “Radio show.”

“Seems like an odd choice for a hero,” I said.

“Not if you knew me for more than six hours.”

Ultimately, I told her my darkest secrets: Mom and Dad fought over the heavyweight title and it brought the Mace kids together; my first real love rescued me from the galley of a fishing boat right before it went to the bottom of the sea and a few happy years went by and nobody was around to rescue him; Mom ran out on us a hundred times, and finally, she stayed gone for good, either dead or reborn; when the Eagle Talon Ripper sliced my throat, I thought I’d died. Such a relief! The real reason I emptied the gun into the sonofabitch was because he’d done a half-assed job putting me out of my misery.

“At last I understand your motivation,” Averna said. “It isn’t thrill-seeking behavior. You experience suicidal ideation, probably stemming from survivor’s guilt.”

“I’m not suicidal anymore. Guilt? Not so much of that ether.”

“Dying isn’t easy for most people. Instinct is a real bitch and she wants to live. Sadly, those with a true death wish, suffer terribly. O cruel universe. It imbued you with unbearable misery and a rational mind. Care to guess what the mind says?”

“Let’s fuck? Let’s drink? Let’s forget?”

“The mind says, no more, let’s stop. The universe also imbued you with the genetics of a survivor. Your subconscious resists annihilation; it says, okay, you can die, but only after jumping through fiery hoops, only after completing an obstacle course in hell. Some people with your particular affliction drink themselves to death or go hunting for Mr. Goodbar. They take on risky jobs. You, my dear, follow this hard road. It led to my doorstep.”

“The other shoe droppeth,” I said.

“Just your panties, at the moment.”

What’s your motivation?”

Her long, cruel fingers dug into my hips. “I like it when my prey runs screaming through the forest. I like the idea that animals will inherit the earth. I like the idea that with a little push we could be apes again.”

“Oh,” I said.

On day two we buzzed the estate in the helicopter. Trees, tree-covered mountains, tree-covered valleys, and more trees. Averna piloted. She wore a shiny black flight suit that exaggerated her figure into comic book proportions. Manson sat in the rear, loose-limbed and heavy-lidded. Her suit and mine were dull gray.

My secret of the day: I’d seen this before. In the course of training for the mission, Dr. Campbell had put me into a hypnotic trance and shown dozens of satellite images of the territory. Military grade imagery that dialed right down to the individual acorn. He explained that a photographic memory wasn’t necessary to retain this information—if I got lost in these woods, a certain phrase would trigger the implanted memories and I’d have access to a 3D “mind map” of the surroundings.

I keyed the mike in my headset. “Averna, I read somewhere that you almost died testing a wingsuit in Finland.”

“Norway. Bad landings happen. Fortunately, the crash appeared nastier than the reality.”

Witnesses said she’d hit the turf at an estimated one-hundred and thirty-miles per hour. The article also claimed it required a team of surgeons four operations and a roll of duct tape to put Humpty-Dumpty together again.

“Tycoons evidently score the world’s greatest docs. I know women with C-section scars that could’ve been done with a boar spear.”

“Flawless skin was a gift from my mother. Hold on.” She banked hard right and put the helicopter into a shallow dive toward the foothills. We shot through a notch in the tree line and she leaned back on the yoke into a near vertical climb to hop over the rocky crown of a hill, then pushed hard and dropped hard to skim several feet above a lake, and steeply up again at the last second as a wall of evergreens closed in. My heart remained where it had leapt from my chest, a couple miles back.

Upon our return to the house, I retreated to my room and pondered the implications. Eighteen hours with Averna Spencer convinced me she didn’t possess a scintilla of spontaneity. Her brain functioned on a beautiful, cold algorithm that perfectly mimicked human thought, human desire, yet possessed the nascent spark of neither. Rich folks often exhibit outsized egos and a narcissistic compulsion to impress the peasants. Averna didn’t give a damn. She’d taken me on the flyover to demonstrate the geography and parameters of her estate for a practical purpose. In retrospect, the message was no less subtle than if she’d leaned over and whispered that I should get my track shoes laced. It’s on like Donkey Kong, girlfriend.

The second message was delivered much later in the evening as I prowled through the house, casually testing locks and poking my nose where it didn’t belong. Happened to peek into an antechamber and Lo! Averna (naked and gleaming) straddled Manson (naked and gleaming) atop a couch. Averna swallowed grapes from a prodigious clump. She regurgitated into Manson’s wide-open mouth and sealed it with a kiss. She winked at me. Her yellow eye reflected the epoch when scales and dagger-length talons were king (queen).

I backed away slowly, as one does when menaced by a large and partially satiated predator. Propelled by unreasonable jealousy, I strode to Averna’s quarters, temporarily dismantled the security feed with an electromagnetic device disguised as an earring (in addition to zoology, exobiology, physical anthropology, and several other disciplines, including hypnotism, obviously, Doc Campbell dabbled in experimental engineering), and went straight for the safe. I’d memorized the combo and the doctors assured me that all I needed to do was glance at the documents; vital contents would be retrieved via hypnosis during my debriefing. Campbell assured me the mind operated like a camera and everything it experienced was undeveloped film.

The safe lay empty but for a piece of paper that read, Bluebeard is a cautionary tale, lover, and signed with a lipstick kiss.

I decided to hoof it, mission be damned, and take my chances in the mountains with the bears and the wolves and the inevitable pursuit. Two guards were posted on either side of my bedroom door. Stony-faced guys in military uniforms, assault rifles at port arms. So much for sneaking off, stage left.

Day three, several guests emerged to join the fun. Averna behaved as the convivial lady of the manor. We played games of the mundane variety. Mini golf and horseshoes in a horseshoe pit worthy of the Roman Coliseum. Manson caught my attention and casually straightened an iron horseshoe with her bare hands.

Then supper.

While gnawing on a pheasant wing and swilling fancy imported lager, I rubbed elbows with the new folks. Three of them had arrived at the estate a week prior; two others had gotten flown in that morning. Young men, down at the heels, but strong and athletic. Army guys who hadn’t readjusted to life stateside; a boozy ex-cop; a kid maybe six months clear of high school where he’d wrestled varsity; and a couple cop/soldier wannabes. Each of them hoped to score a permanent security gig or at least a free ride as long as it lasted. I chatted the boys up—no close family; they were at loose ends. Nobody back home would notice, much less care, when they went missing. I won’t bother with names; simpler to think of them as Hapless Victims #1 through #5.

Manson stood next to me at the bar. She wore a dark gown and a star pattern of heavy purple eyeshadow. “We don’t usually entertain more than a couple of guests. This is special.”

“What’s the occasion?”

“It’s Tuesday. Go back to your quarters. Ms. Spencer left you a gift.”

“Because it’s Tuesday?”

“Because there will be entertainment later this evening and you may wish to dress appropriately.”

This is where you came in…

Averna kept me stewing (quite literally) for forty-eight hours, plus or minus; a fact I estimated by the phase of the moon and an above average internal clock.

Why giant synthetic eggs? The design of the incubators was strictly symbolic. The contents--a contemporary primordial soup chock full of vitamins, proteins, and assorted mystery elements intended to cleanse her chosen, to heighten our reflexes and provide sufficient high-test nourishment for a proper hunt--could’ve done its work in a tank. She preferred elaborate theatrics; a consequence of eternal life. Have to wonder which came first: murderous rage or immortality. Since I could only hazard a guess, I guessed the eggs were deposited at various predetermined sites on the estate. We prisoners “hatched” and were subsequently hunted by our hostess and her majordomo.

During incubation, my dreams were psychedelic and fantastically, Lucio-Fulci-strength, macabre. Visions, perhaps. I beheld the male guests pelting through a night forest roiling with phosphorescent mist. Averna glided down on stiff, black wings. Her wingsuit defied physics. She tilted vertically and her toes dug into the soil every third or fourth gigantic stride and beheaded each of the fleeing men with a casual swipe of her metallic talons. She accelerated in dizzying curlicues through gaps in the trees.

Averna crooned to me through an intravenous drip. She spoke of evolutionary slippage, of natural mutation and genetic manipulation.

I die and live again and again. My soul regenerates into new flesh.

I have broken the hearts of countless men. I have eaten the beating hearts of countless men. I have devoured so many beating hearts, I shit and piss black heartblood.

I am a fountainhead of raped vitality.

I am a supplicant of the gods of eternal return.

I mean to devour you as I’ve devoured the rest in their multitudes.

You’ll regenerate as I have done since the dawn of hominids. We’ll meet again in a hundred million years at the dawn of the hominids. We’ll meet again between one scream and the next.

Wake up, wake up, wake up…

I love and hate The Vanishing. The Dutch version by Sluizer; don’t bother with the American remake, hunky Jeff Bridges notwithstanding. In a previous life, I made my bread as a marine biologist. I survived many a tedious night aboard fishing tenders on the Bering Sea with a stack of paperbacks and VHS tapes while the rest of the crew was drunk or unconscious. Somewhere in the middle of The Vanishing a character describes a nightmare of being trapped in the darkness of a golden egg. Love it because the image got to me on a primal level and stuck. Hate it for the same reason.

These many years later, waking to fluid blackness three thousand miles east of Alaska, tubes up my nose and down my throat, body coiled like an embryo inside a golden egg of my very own? Must be the abyss everybody talks about.

I kicked, one-two, and dove deep into a sea of blood. Crimson light churned. The shell cracked and broke and the universe spilled me onto a carpet of pine needles. Out came the rubber tubes with a yank; then a bout of projectile vomiting--pheasant, sorbet, and copious amounts of whiskey and synthetic amniotic fluid. The blood in my eyes seeped down and dried into scales. Tears dug diamond furrows through caked-on grime. My convulsions subsided. I stood and leaned like a drunk against the bole of a hemlock and assessed the fucked-uppedness of my situation.

A mild evening in early October. Mosquitos whined; could have been worse. Clouds rolled over a crescent moon. Had to think fast, had to move. Standing still would get me dead. Moving would get me dead. Where was Rikki-tikki-tavi in my hour of need? An owl screeched. The bird glided past; the very shadow of death itself.

I’d trained for the direst scenarios—spent the previous several months jogging barefoot to toughen my feet; I also worked on traveling in New England forests at night to sharpen my lowlight vison. An affinity for rough and tumble notwithstanding, no way, no how am I a martial artist. I sparred with Beasley, who agreed (after I walked into his right hand three or four times) keeping it simple would be for the best. He honed my bag of dirty tricks and taught me a couple new ones.

Should’ve done more. Should’ve stayed in bed.

For all the roadwork and psychological preparation, and despite my alleged “purpose” and indomitable resolve, it was a psychological body blow to wash up on the proverbial lee shore: naked in the middle of the woods in the dead of night, pumped to the gills with experimental juice and on the run from Elizabeth Bathory II and her army of mercs. I intoned Dr. Campbell’s mnemonic phrase (the mind is a camera) that would supposedly trigger a pseudo-holographic image of the surroundings. It worked, too.

I waded down a stream to confuse tracking dogs, then dug a hole near the roots of a tree and covered myself in clay, pine needles, and sap. I hadn’t worn hair products or used scented soap or perfume in months. The docs put me on a regimen of an experimental, military grade antiperspirant.

Smeared head to toe in muck, I ran like hell through the dark, dark woods like the doomed heroine of a slasher flick. I angled southeast for the extraction point (would Beasley await my arrival?); kept right on trucking until daylight and then burrowed into a deadfall and slept. Night came around. I slurped brackish water from a puddle and set forth again, skulking from tree to tree with a wild animal’s determination to survive. For a while, I believed I’d successfully evade and escape. Hope makes fools of us all.

Contrary to the cliché, I didn’t trip and sprain an ankle, didn’t sob or shriek to give away my position, and didn’t glance over my shoulder every ten feet. Perversely, that last detail proved my downfall.

She hit me the way a hawk or an owl does an unsuspecting squirrel. Instead of severing my spine on impact, Averna merely snagged my long, luxurious mane and ascended vertically, yanking me off my feet. Similar to those rides at the State Fair—the ones where a scabrous, hungover carny straps you into a harness that dangles from a big metal wheel and up your sorry ass goes, with nothing between your sneakers and sod but a sheer drop.

The radiant sickle moon gashed the clouds; first above, then below. Averna clutched my hair in her left fist and skimmed treetops at a precipitous velocity, dragging me several feet lower like the tail of a kite. We dipped and swooned; accelerating, decelerating. If she had a jet pack strapped on her back, I didn’t hear it. The only sounds I heard were the hissing breeze, and the clatter of branches when she swung me viciously against the canopy. Each blow knocked the breath from me and tore my flesh.

God knows where the bitch’s flight plan would’ve taken us. I didn’t stick around for the surprise. It required a metric fuck-ton of grit to recover from the initial whiplash and saw through my hair with a shard of the designer egg I’d carried (and managed not to drop) this entire time. Sliced my fingers and palm, but it got the job done—half a dozen convulsive hacks later, the last strand parted and I bailed. She cried my name.

Momentum hurled me in a broad arc. I caromed from leafy boughs and they snapped beneath my cannonball passage. Five seconds? Five thousand years? Those few heartbeats stretched across multiple lifetimes. Don’t remember hitting the earth. Black stars cleared and I lay in a pile of dead, slimy leaves, oxygen smashed from my lungs, gaping at the moon.

A circling shadow blotted the light. I caught a glimpse of Averna in her radiant glory and realized the mysteries of the universe dwarfed my comprehension. She didn’t need a wingsuit. She didn’t need wings. She didn’t need anything.

Manson strode from the depths of the forest. She didn’t put a bullet through my skull as I might’ve logically assumed. She scooped my battered self (broken ribs, lacerated hand, and a world class concussion) into her arms and lugged me half a mile to the cabin. I don’t recall a hell of a lot about the next couple of days except that the place was empty. No phone, no Beasley. Pretty clear my fate had been sealed from the beginning.

Manson played nursemaid by firelight from a decrepit hearth. Stuffed me into a sleeping bag and got an I.V. drip pumping fluids into my veins. Everything went blurry after the adrenalin wore off.

I dreamed that Averna, garbed in her horror show suit, shattered the cabin door and loomed over me as I lay helpless. Her wingtips scraped furrows in the walls. Behold. I am the apex. I stand where humanity begins and where it will end. She lovingly popped my eyeballs with her claws.

Woke screaming to beat the band.

Averna, dressed in a natty jacket, tenderly stroked my brow with a damp cloth. She revealed I was merely the second person to ever make it across the finish line. For me to plummet from the treetops and bounce instead of splat, represented a bona fide miracle. I didn’t argue the point. Fell unconscious for however long it took for my injuries to mend.

Jessica, you must understand we’re all meat and blood for the slaughterhouse. Regardless, we should learn until the very end. Sapient beings exist to acquire experience. The beasts of the wilderness kill and eat us. The wilderness itself kills and eats us. Every scrap down to our quintessence reduces and divides among maggots and dirt and adds to the sum.

Go in peace, dear girl. You and the world have unfinished business. Far be it from me to stand in the way.

Could’ve been a fever dream, could’ve been legit; either way, Averna and Manson let me live. Eventually I roused from blind sleep, aching, traumatized, and swaddled in gauze. The girls left clean clothes, pain pills, and an envelope with a few bucks inside a knapsack. Also, a loaded pistol and keys to a Jeep parked by the front porch.

Time passed. I bided it with grim patience.

Beasley the vigilant had to sleep sometime. I waited until he embarked upon one of his not infrequent drunks to make my move. Walked into the New England farmhouse around dawn. The doctors were seated at a table in the den, bickering over a pile of research papers. They registered surprise at my appearance, although less than one might expect. Fuckers had seen everything at least once, I suppose. Dr. Ryoko reached for a drawer, then noticed the pistol in my hand, and sat back with a resigned sigh.

“Hello, boys,” I said. “Tell me about my mother.”