Dangerous Women Part 63

"Do you know why?" Heavy, choked, weak. Kalindris' words.

The human child did not say a thing. Her mother wrapped her arms around the child's tiny form, tried to hold her back. The child would not lower her knife.

"Why I have to kill you?" she asked again.

The child said nothing. Kalindris opened her mouth to tell her. No words came.

"Your knife is too small," Kalindris said. She held up her own blade, thick and choked with red. "You can't do anything with it. You aren't meant to hold it. Put it down."

The child did not put it down. Kalindris raised her weapon, took a step forward, as if to step around the child. The child moved in front of her, thrust her little knife at Kalindris like it would do something. Like she could use it. Like she wasn't scared.

Kalindris hesitated. She looked over her shoulder, as though she expected the child-her child-to be there.

"You don't have to die here," she said, without looking at the child-the human child. "Your ... your father isn't you. Your mother isn't you. I'll take them. You can run."

She looked at the child and her little knife.

"Go. Run away."

The child did not run. The child did not move.

"Why aren't you running?"

"I can't." The child spoke in a terrified voice.

"Why not?"

"Because she's my mother."

The pages of a book fallen from a shelf, turning. Ashes in a long-dead fireplace settling beneath charred logs. A mother weeping. Birds singing. Blood pattering onto the floor from a hole in a soft throat, drop by drop.

Slow sounds.

Quiet sounds.

Full of nothing.

Kalindris could hear the whisper of leather as she slid the blade back into its sheath. Kalindris could hear the sound of her boots on the floor as she turned around and walked out of the cabin. Kalindris could hear the sound of the human child drop to the floor and weep.

She could hear it all the way back to the forest.

And her child.

A river running. Wind blowing through the leaves. A wolf howling.

And birds singing.

No matter how hard she tried, how she angled her ears, how she strained to hear something else, something full of meaning, this was all she could hear. These sounds, common and pointless, the sort of thing any ugly creature could hear.

The Howling wasn't talking to her.

"Where were you?"

The child.

Asking.

Concerned.

She walked into the clearing with her bow on her back and her knife in her belt. The child was sitting down on her heels, looking up at her as she walked past.

"You washed," the child noted, looking at her clean, bloodless hands. "When? What did you do?"

She did not look back at the child as she sat down beside her. She let her legs hang over a small ledge, dangling over a dying brook whose babble had turned to poetic muttering as it sputtered into a thin stream. She looked to her right and saw the child's feet in their little boots, covered in mud, flecked with blood from the dead deer.

Only a few droplets of red. The rest mixed with the mud. It seemed like so much to look at it.

"Why do we kill, child?" she asked absently.

"You already asked me this."

"I know. Tell me again."

The child kicked her feet a little. A few flecks of mud came off. Not the blood.

"I guess I don't know," the child said.

She said nothing.

They stared, together, into the forest. Their ears p.r.i.c.ked up, listening to the sounds. Birds kept singing, one more day they marked by noisy chatter. The wind kept blowing, same as it always had. Somewhere far away, one more deer loosed a long, guttural bugle into the sky.

"Did you kill the beast?" the child asked.

She said nothing.

"I was supposed to do it."

"I didn't."

The child looked at her. "I'm not an idiot."

"No."

She reached over, wrapped an arm around the child and drew her close. A heart beating; excited. A breath drawn in sharply; quivering. A shudder through the body; terrified. She drew the child closer.

"But let me pretend you are for a little while."

No more noises. No more sounds. No more distant cries and close Howling. Only words. Only the child's voice.

"I was supposed to kill it. Father said."

"Your father isn't always right."

"You are?"

"No."

"Then why should I believe you?"

"Because."

"That's not a good reason."

She looked down at the child and smiled. "I'll think of one later, all right?"

The child looked back at her. Her smile came more slowly, more nervous, like she was afraid it would be slapped out of her mouth at any moment. Kalindris blamed herself for that look, for these words that came heavy and slowly. She would learn how to use them better.

There would be time for that. Without so much blood and cold nights. Without so many thoughts of Rokuda and his words. She would learn them on her own. She would tell them to the child.

Her child.

Her daughter.

Smiling.

There would be time enough to look into her daughter's eyes, long from now, and know what it meant to need no words. There would be a time when she would look into her daughter's eyes and simply know.

For now, she had only the sound of her daughter's smile. And forever.

Pat Cadigan Everyone knows what that road to h.e.l.l is paved with, don't they?

Pat Cadigan was born in Schenectady, New York, and now lives in London with her family. She made her first professional sale in 1980, and has subsequently come to be regarded as one of the best new writers of her generation. Her story "Pretty Boy Crossover" has appeared on several critic's lists as among the best science fiction stories of the 1980s, and her story "Angel" was a finalist for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the World Fantasy Award (one of the few stories ever to earn that rather unusual distinction). Her short fiction-which has appeared in most of the major markets, including Asimov's Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction-has been gathered in the collections Patterns and Dirty Work. Her first novel, Mindplayers, was released in 1987 to excellent critical response, and her second novel, Synners, released in 1991, won the Arthur C. Clarke Award as the year's best science fiction novel, as did her third novel, Fools, making her the only writer ever to win the Clarke Award twice. Her other books include the novels Dervish Is Digital, Tea from an Empty Cup, and Reality Used to Be a Friend of Mine, and, as editor, the anthology The Ultimate Cyberpunk, as well as two making-of movie books and four media tie-in novels. Her most recent book was a novel, Cellular.

CARETAKERS.

"Hey, Val," said my sister Gloria, "you ever wonder why there aren't any female serial killers?"

We were watching yet another doc.u.mentary on the Prime Crime Network. We'd been watching a lot of those in the month since she had moved in. Along with two suitcases, one stuffed with products especially formulated for curly brown hair, and a trash bag containing two sets of expensive, high-thread-count bed linens, my little sister had also brought her fascination with the lurid and sensational disguised as an interest in current events-the inverse of expensive sheets in a trash bag, you might say.

"What about Aileen What's-Her-Name?" I said.

"One. And they executed her pretty fast. So fast you can't remember her last name."

"I can remember it," I said. "I just can't p.r.o.nounce it. And it wasn't that fast-at least ten years after they caught her. They executed Bundy pretty quickly, too, didn't they? In Florida. Her, too, now that I think of it."

Gloria gave a surprised laugh. "I had no idea you were such an expert on serial killers."

"We've watched enough TV shows about them," I said as I went into the kitchen for more iced tea. "I could probably make one on my iPad." An exaggeration but not much; the shows were so formulaic that sometimes I wasn't sure which ones were repeats. But I didn't really mind indulging Gloria. She was fifteen years younger, so I was used to making allowances, and as vices went, true-crime TV was pretty minor. More to the point, Gloria had been visiting Mom in the care home every day without fail. I'd expected the frequency to drop after the first two weeks but she was still spending every afternoon playing cards with Mom or reading to her or just hanging (unquote). I had to give her credit for that, even though I was fairly sure she felt this made her exempt from having to look for paid employment.

When I returned, Gloria was busy with my iPad. "Don't tell me there's an app for serial killers?" I said, a little nervous.

"I Googled them and you're right-Aileen Wuornos and Ted Bundy both died in the Florida State Prison. Over twenty years apart-he got the chair, she got lethal injection. But still." She looked up at me. "Think it's something about Florida?"

"Dunno but I really wish you hadn't done that on my iPad," I said, relieving her of it. "Google can't keep anything to themselves. Now I'll probably get a flood of gory crime scene photo spam."

I could practically see her ears p.r.i.c.k up, like a terrier's. "You can get that stuff?"

"No." I moved the iPad out of her reach. "I forbid it. Make do with the crime p.o.r.n on cable."

"Party p.o.o.per."

"I get that a lot." I chuckled. On TV, credits were scrolling upward too fast to read over a sepia photograph of a stiff-looking man, probably a serial killer. Abruptly, it changed to a different set of credits rolling even more quickly against a red background. At the bottom of the screen was the legend, NEXT: Deadlier Than the Male-Killer Ladies.

I grimaced at my sister, who brandished the remote control, grinning like a mad thing, or maybe a killer lady. "Come on, isn't one of the movie channels showing Red Dawn?" I pumped my fist. "Wolverines?"

Gloria rolled her eyes. "How about something we haven't seen a bajillion times already?"

"How much is a bajillion?" I asked.

"Like the exact size or the universe or how many times you've seen Red Dawn, n.o.body knows." She nodded at the iPad on my lap. "Not worried about crime scene spam anymore?"

My face grew warm. "I was surfing on automatic pilot," I said, which was either half-true or half a lie, depending.

"Yeah, you're not really interested in any of that gory stuff."

"The least you could do is microwave us some popcorn," I said. "There's at least one bag left in the cupboard."

She cringed in pretend horror. "This stuff doesn't kill your appet.i.te?"

"If I pick up some pointers, I might kill you."

As usual, the ad break was long enough that Gloria was back with a big bowl of movie-style b.u.t.tered before the end of the opening credits. According to the listings, this was a Killer Ladies marathon, back-to-back episodes into the wee hours. After a teleshopping break from 4 to 6 a.m., early risers could breakfast with Deadly Duos-Killer Couples.

Killer Ladies followed the usual formula but ratcheted up the melodrama. The Ladies in question were all abnormal, evil, twisted, unnatural, cold, devious, and unrepentant, while most of their victims were warm, easygoing, trusting, generous, open, honest, well-liked, down-to-earth, and the best friend anyone could ever ask for. Except for a few misfits who were uneducated, foolish, immature, troubled, reckless, self-destructive, or habitually unlucky, and the occasional ex-con with a long criminal record (no one ever had a short criminal record).

Between bursts of urgent narration and detectives who spoke only in monotone, there were some nuggets of real information, much of it new to me. Of course, I hadn't known a lot to begin with-the only other notorious Killer Lady I could think of besides Aileen Wuornos was Lizzie Borden. Killer Ladies were a h.e.l.l of a lot more interesting than their male counterparts. Unlike men, who seemed mainly to gratify themselves by a.s.serting power, Killer Ladies were all about getting away with it. They planned carefully, sizing up their victims and their situations, and waited for the right time.

They were also masters-or mistresses-of camouflage, with the unwitting help of a society that even in these parlous times still sees women as nurturers, not murderers. When not killing someone, many of the Killer Ladies were nurses, therapists, babysitters, a.s.sistants, even teachers (remembering some I'd had, I could believe it).

Eventually I dozed off and woke to see a repeat of the first episode we'd watched. Gloria was absolutely unrouseable, so I threw one of Mom's hand-crocheted afghans over her. Then the devil got into me-I tucked a pillow under her arm with a note saying, This is the pillow I didn't smother you with. Good morning! before I staggered off to bed.