Dangerous Women. Part II

Popular fiction, though, has always had a schizophrenic view of the dangerousness of women. In the science fiction of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, women, if they appeared at all, were largely regulated to the role of the scientist’s beautiful daughter, who might scream during the fight scenes but otherwise had little to do except hang adoringly on the arm of the hero afterwards. Legions of women swooned helplessly while waiting to be rescued by the intrepid jut-jawed hero from everything from dragons to the bug-eyed monsters who were always carrying them off for improbable purposes either dietary or romantic on the covers of pulp SF magazines. Hopelessly struggling women were tied to railroad tracks, with nothing to do but squeak in protest and hope that the Good Guy arrived in time to save them.

And yet, at the same time, warrior women like Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Dejah Thoris and Thuvia, Maid of Mars, were every bit as good with the blade and every bit as deadly in battle as John Carter and their other male comrades, female adventuresses like C. L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry swashbuckled their way through the pages of Weird Tales magazine (and blazed a trail for later female swashbucklers like Joanna Russ’s Alyx); James H. Schmitz sent Agents of Vega like Granny Wannatel and fearless teenagers like Telzey Amberdon and Trigger Argee out to battle the sinister menaces and monsters of the spaceways; and Robert A. Heinlein’s dangerous women were capable of being the captain of a spaceship or killing enemies in hand-to-hand combat. Arthur Conan Doyle’s sly, shady Irene Adler was one of the only people ever to outwit his Sherlock Holmes, and probably one of the inspirations for the legions of tricky, dangerous, seductive, and treacherous “femmes fatale” who featured in the works of Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain and later went on to appear in dozens of films noir, and who still turn up in the movies and on television to this day. Later television heroines such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena, Warrior Princess, firmly established women as being formidable and deadly enough to battle hordes of fearsome supernatural menaces, and helped to inspire the whole subgenre of paranormal romance, which is sometimes unofficially known as the “kick-ass heroine” genre.

Like our anthology Warriors, Dangerous Women was conceived of as a cross-genre anthology, one that would mingle every kind of fiction, so we asked writers from every genre—science fiction, fantasy, mystery, historical, horror, paranormal romance, men and women alike—to tackle the theme of “dangerous women,” and that call was answered by some of the best writers in the business, including both new writers and giants of their fields like Diana Gabaldon, Jim Butcher, Sharon Kay Penman, Joe Abercrombie, Carrie Vaughn, Joe R. Lansdale, Lawrence Block, Cecelia Holland, Brandon Sanderson, Sherilynn Kenyon, S. M. Stirling, Nancy Kress, and George R. R. Martin.

Here you’ll find no hapless victims who stand by whimpering in dread while the male hero fights the monster or clashes swords with the villain, and if you want to tie these women to the railroad tracks, you’ll find you have a real fight on your hands. Instead, you will find sword-wielding women warriors; intrepid women fighter pilots and far-ranging spacewomen; deadly female serial killers; formidable female superheroes; sly and seductive femmes fatale; female wizards; hard-living bad girls; female bandits and rebels; embattled survivors in postapocalyptic futures; female private investigators; stern female hanging judges; haughty queens who rule nations and whose jealousies and ambitions send thousands to grisly deaths; daring dragonriders; and many more.

Enjoy!

Megan Lindholm

Books by Megan Lindholm include the fantasy novels Wizard of the Pigeons, Harpy’s Flight, The Windsingers, The Limbreth Gate, The Luck of the Wheels, The Reindeer People, Wolf’s Brother, and Cloven Hooves, the science fiction novel Alien Earth, and, with Steven Brust, the collaborative novel The Gypsy. Lindholm also writes as New York Times bestseller Robin Hobb, one of the most popular writers in fantasy today, having sold over one million copies of her work in paperback. As Robin Hobb, she’s perhaps best-known for her epic fantasy Farseer series, including Assassin’s Apprentice, Royal Assassin, and Assassin’s Quest, as well as the two fantasy series related to it, the Liveship Traders series, consisting of Ship of Magic, Mad Ship, and Ship of Destiny, and the Tawny Man series, made up of Fool’s Errand, Golden Fool, and Fool’s Fate. She’s also the author of the Soldier Son series, composed of Shaman’s Crossing, Forest Mage, and Renegade’s Magic. Most recently, as Robin Hobb, she’s started a new series, the Rain Wilds Chronicles, consisting of Dragon Keeper, Dragon Haven, City of Dragons, and Blood of Dragons. As Megan Lindholm, her most recent book is a “collaborative” collection with Robin Hobb, The Inheritance and Other Stories.

In the autumnal and beautifully crafted story that follows, she shows us that even the oldest of dogs, white of muzzle and slow of step, may have one last bite left in them.

NEIGHBORS

Linda Mason was loose again.

It was three in the morning, and sleep had fled. Sarah had wandered to the kitchen in her robe, put on the kettle, and rummaged the cupboards until she found a box of Celestial Seasonings Tension Tamer tea bags. She had set out a teacup on a saucer and put the tea bag in her “tea for one” teapot when she heard someone outside in the dark, shouting her name. “Sarah! Sarah Wilkins! You’d better hurry! It’s time to go!”

Her heart jumped high in her chest and hung there, pounding. Sarah didn’t recognize the shrill voice, but the triumphantly defiant tone was alarming. She didn’t want to look out the window. For a moment, she was eight years old again. Don’t look under the bed, don’t open the closet at night. As long as you don’t look, there might be nothing there. Schrödinger’s boogeyman. She reminded herself that she was much closer to sixty-eight than eight and drew back the curtain.

Low billows of fog cloaked the street, a precursor to fall in the Pacific Northwest. Her eyes adjusted and she saw crazy old Linda standing in the street outside the iron fence that surrounded Sarah’s backyard. She wore pink sweats and flappy bedroom slippers. She had an aluminum baseball bat in her hands and a Hello Kitty backpack on her shoulders. The latter two items, Sarah was fairly certain, actually belonged to Linda’s granddaughter. Linda’s son and his wife lived with the old woman. Sarah pitied the daughter-in-law, shoved into the role of caretaker for Robbie’s oddball mother. Alzheimer’s was what most people said about Linda, but “just plain nuts” seemed as apt.

Sarah had known Linda for twenty-two years. They had carpooled their sons to YMCA soccer games. They’d talked over coffee, exchanged homemade jam and too many zucchini, fed each other’s pets during vacation getaways, greeted each other in Safeway, and gossiped about the other neighbors. Not best friends, but neighborhood mom friends, in a fifties sort of way. Linda was one of the few older residents still in the neighborhood. The other parents she had known were long gone, had moved into condos or migrated as snowbirds or been packed off by their kids to senior homes. The houses would empty, and the next flock of young families would move in. Other than Linda, of her old friends, only Maureen and her husband, Hugh, still lived on the other end of the block, but they spent most days in Seattle for Hugh’s treatments.

“Sarah! You’d better hurry!” Linda shouted again. Two houses down, a bedroom light came on. The kettle began to whistle. Sarah snatched it off the burner, seized her coat off the hook, and opened the back door. The darn porch light didn’t work; the bulb had burned out last week, but it was too much trouble to get a step stool and a lightbulb and fix it. She edged down the steps carefully and headed to the fence, hoping that Sarge hadn’t done his business where she would step in it.

“Linda, are you all right? What’s going on?” She tried to speak to her as her old friend, but the truth was, Linda scared her now. Sometimes she was Linda, but abruptly she might say something wild and strange or mean. She did even stranger things. A few days ago, in the early morning, she had escaped into her front yard, picked all the ripe apples off her neighbor’s tree, and thrown them into the street. “Better than letting them fall and rot like last year!” she shouted when they caught her at it. “You’ll just waste them. Feed the future, I say! Give them to the ones who appreciate them!” When Robbie’s wife had seized her by the arm and tried to drag her back into their house, Linda had slapped her. Linda’s little granddaughter and her playmate had seen the whole thing. The child had started crying, but Sarah hadn’t know if it was from distress, fear, or simple humiliation, for half the neighborhood had turned out for the drama, including the neighbor who owned the apple tree. That woman was furious and telling anyone who would listen that it was time to “put that crazy old woman in a home.” She’d lived in the neighborhood a couple of years but Sarah didn’t even know her name.

“I am in my home!” Linda had shrieked back at her. “Why are you living in Marilyn’s home? What gives you more right to the apples off her tree than me? I helped her plant the damn thing!”

“Don’t you think we’d put her in a home if we could afford one? Do you think I like living like this?” Robbie’s wife had shouted at the neighbor. Then she had burst into tears and finally managed to tow Linda back inside.

And now Linda was out in the foggy night, staring at Sarah with round wild eyes. The wind was blowing through her white hair, and leaves rustled past her on the pavement. She wore a pink running suit and her bedroom slippers. She had something on her head, something fastened to a wool cap. She advanced on the fence and tapped the baseball bat on top of it, making it ring.

“Don’t dent my fence!” Sarah cried, and then, “Stay right there, Linda. Stay right there, I’m going to get help.”

“You need help, not me!” Linda shouted. She laughed wildly, and quoted, “‘Little child, come out to play, the moon doth shine as bright as day!’ Except it doesn’t! So that’s what I take with me. Moonlight!”

“Linda, it’s cold out here. Come inside and tell me there.” The phone. She should be calling 911 right now. Alex had told her to get a cell phone, but she just couldn’t budget one more payment a month. She couldn’t even afford to replace her old cordless phone with the faulty ringer. “We’ll have a cup of tea and talk. Just like old times when the kids were small.” She remembered it clearly, suddenly. She and Maureen and Linda sitting up together, waiting for the kids to come home from a football game. Talking and laughing. Then the kids grew up and they’d gone separate ways. They hadn’t had coffee together in years.

“No, Sarah. You come with me! Magic is better than crazy. And time is the only difference between magic and crazy. Stay in there, you’re crazy. Come with me, you’re magic. Watch!”

She did something, her hand fumbling at her breast. Then she lit up. “Solar power!” she shouted. “That’s my ticket to the future!” By the many tiny LEDs, Sarah recognized what Linda was wearing. She’d draped herself in strings of Christmas lights. The little solar panels that had charged them were fastened to her hat.

“Linda, come inside and show me. I’m freezing out here!” They were shouting. Why was the neighborhood staying dark? Someone should be getting annoyed by their loud conversation; someone’s dog should be barking.

“Time and tide wait for no man, Sarah! I’m off to seek my fortune. Last chance! Will you come with me?”

Inside the house, Sarah had to look up Linda’s number in the phone book, and when she called it, no one answered. After ten rings it went to recording. She hung up, took the phone to the window and dialed again. No Linda out there now. The windows in her house were dark. What to do now? Go bang on the door? Maybe Robbie had already come outside and found his mom and taken her in. Call the police? She went back into the yard, carrying the receiver in one hand. “Linda?” she called into the foggy darkness. “Linda, where are you?”

No one answered. The fog had thickened and the neighborhood was dark now. Even the streetlight on the corner, the hateful one that shone into her bedroom window, had chosen this moment to be dark. She dialed Linda’s number again, listened to it ring.

Back in the house, Sarah phoned her own son. She heard Alex’s sleepy “What?” on the seventh ring. She poured out her story. He wasn’t impressed. “Oh, Mom. It’s not our business. Go back to bed. I bet she went right back home and she’s probably asleep right now. Like I wish I was.”

“But what if she’s wandered off into the night? You know she’s not in her right mind.”

“She’s not the only one,” Alex muttered, and then said, “Look, Mom. It’s four in the morning. Go back to bed. I’ll drop by on my way to work, and we’ll knock on their door together. I’m sure she’s okay. Go back to bed.”

So she did. To toss and turn and worry.

She woke up at seven to his key in the lock. Good heavens! She’d made him detour from his Seattle commute to come by, and she wasn’t even up and ready to go knock on Linda’s door. “Be right down!” she shouted down the stairs, and began pulling on clothes. It took her longer than it should have, especially tying her shoes. “Floor just keeps getting farther away every day,” she muttered. It was her old joke with Russ. But Russ wasn’t around any longer to agree with her. Sarge was sleeping across her bedroom door. She nudged the beagle and he trailed after her.

She opened the kitchen door to a wave of heat. “What are you doing?” she demanded. Alex had the back door open and was fanning it back and forth. “What’s that smell?”

He glared at her. “The stove was on when I came in! You’re damn lucky you didn’t burn the house down. Why didn’t your smoke detector go off?”

“Batteries must be dead,” she lied. She had gotten tired of them going off for every bagel the old toaster scorched and had loosened the battery in the kitchen unit. “I must have left the burner on last night when Linda was outside. So it wasn’t on all night, only three or four hours.” The stove top still simmered with heat and the white ceramic around the abused burner was a creamy brown now. She started to touch it, and then drew her hand back. “A little scouring powder should clean that up. No harm done, thank goodness.”

“No harm done? Only three or four hours? Shit, Mom, do you not understand how lucky you were?” To her dismay, he unfolded her kitchen step stool and climbed up to the smoke detector. He tugged the cover open and the battery fell to the floor.

“Well! There’s the problem,” she observed. “It must have come loose in there.”

He eyed her. “Must have,” he said in a tight voice. Before she could stoop down, he hopped off the stool, scooped it up, and snapped it back into place. He closed the cover.

“Want some coffee?” she asked as she turned on the pot. She’d preset the coffeepot just as she had for the last twenty years so she wouldn’t have to fill it up every morning. Just push the button, and then sit at the table and read the paper in her pajamas until the first cup was ready when Russ would come down.

Or not, as was now the case.

“No. Thanks. I need to get on my way. Mom, you’ve got to be more careful.”

“I am careful. It wouldn’t have happened if the night hadn’t been so weird.”

“And you wouldn’t have forgotten your card in the ATM last week, except that the fire truck went by, so you didn’t hear the machine beeping at you as you walked away. But what about locking your keys in the car? And leaving the sprinkler running all night?”

“That was months ago!”

“That’s my point! This ‘forgetfulness’ started months ago! It’s only getting worse. And more expensive. We had that water bill. And the locksmith. Luckily, the ATM sucked your card back in and the bank called you. You didn’t even realize it was gone! And now we’re going to have a little spike in the power bill this month. You need to go to the doctor and get checked out. Maybe there’s a pill for it.”

“I’ll handle it,” she said. Now her voice was getting tight. She hated being lectured like this. “You’d better get on the road before the traffic builds up. You want some coffee in your commuter mug?”

He stared at her for a time, wanting to continue the argument, to reach some sort of imaginary resolution. Luckily, Alex didn’t have the time. “Yeah. I’ll get my mug. Looks like everything’s okay at the Masons’. There goes Robbie to work. I don’t think he’d be doing that if his mom were missing.”

There was nothing to reply that wouldn’t make her sound even more like a crackpot. When he came back in with his mug, she reached for the coffeepot and saw it was full of pale brown water. She’d forgotten to put the grounds in the filter. She didn’t miss a beat as she took out the instant coffee. “I’ve stopped making a full pot just for myself,” she said as she spooned powdered coffee into his commuter mug and poured the hot water over it. He took it with a sigh. Once he was gone, she fixed the coffee properly and sat down with her paper.

It was eleven o’clock before the police arrived, and one in the afternoon before an officer tapped on her door. She felt terrible as he carefully jotted down her account of what she had seen at 4 a.m. “And you didn’t call the police?” the young man asked her, his brown eyes full of sorrow for her stupidity.