by Jeff Carlson
Prince fired. The bullet struck the asphalt beside her, then bounced up through the skin of her thigh into the open car door. Plastic specks burst from the stereo speaker under the armrest.
An idea knifed through her, and Shawna swung her left hand up against the outside of the door, fracturing both bones in her wrist, feeling nothing. The door swung over her and slammed the pistol from Prince's hand, twisting him around, bringing him to his knees. His weight trapped one of Shawna's legs, but she rose into a sitting position and bashed him with the door again.
And again. And again, yanking her twisted, sprained leg free of his half-conscious body, putting every muscle into the swing of the door. Again and again and again.
#
Of course she had to explain everything, first while she lay in a hospital bed, then later in more detail. Eventually she gave well-rehearsed speeches, although it was seven months before public announcements were made — twenty-eight weeks in which Shawna was allowed to play at least a supporting role in the autopsies of Jim Prince and his accomplice, in subsequent tests and experiments, and in the new investigation of Prince's murder of Joan Tarwater. Shawna was hardly a star among the many neurologists, pathologists, and assorted Ph.Ds, but she worked long hours and made a name for herself, a place for herself.
It was the beginnings of a real career. In retrospect, that made the entire ordeal worthwhile. She’d become a success.
Ironically, the police reached nearly the same verdict as they had before. They attributed Joan's murder to Prince and closed the case, but there just wasn't enough information to discern what argument or simple evil had made him do it.
Prince and his buddy must have come after Shawna out of fear of being caught, but it had been an incredibly reckless thing to do, given the number of witnesses who'd seen her at CNG Copiers. They might have hoped to pass it off as a mugging or rape gone bad. Or maybe they hadn't worried much about the consequences.
Shawna had nightmares that their motivation had been something deeper — the fear of being discovered.
Could Prince have known he was different?
Was it possible that he and Joan had shared some instinct that was the basis of their attraction? If so, that would be more irony. The same reduced sensitivities that made them different had no doubt led to friction, then hatred...
Parts of Prince's frontal lobes were literally shrunken.
More disturbing in some ways, however, was that Prince's accomplice had proved normal in every way. One hundred percent normal. Aggression and stupidity would not be erased from the human race simply by curing this cerebral disorder.
Medical examiners across the nation were quietly told to gather more information. They began to open all of the skulls in their morgues. But the initial report, after seven months, offered more questions than answers. The disorder was widespread, affecting maybe one person in fifteen, almost entirely in urban areas — but it did not seem to be caused by anything so obvious as pollution, advanced bacteria, or a virus. None of those things had been ruled out as contributing factors, and wouldn't be for years to come, yet they were extremely reluctant to label it learned behavior as Shawna had suggested.
Shawna was certain. That it was affecting kids like Steven Huff seemed proof enough.
They were doing it to themselves.
Nurture could be just as strong as nature. Every day people deliberately shut down parts of their minds to escape the noise and congestion and sheer emotional impact of their lives. Ignoring so much so often became more than habit. It caused atrophying, a defense mechanism that did more harm than good, because people with limited empathy, patience, and self-control would have a greater tendency toward confrontation and risk.
The papers and TV had a spectacular time with the news. Conspiracy theories flooded the Internet. Politicians and religious leaders bemoaned economic woes or liberal social programs. Hot-lines were established, studies funded.
But nothing changed, of course. There really wasn't anything to be done.
#
Shawna quit her job and went home.
END
Afterword
I wrote "Nurture" when I moved back to the urban sprawl of the Bay Area after living for several years in small towns in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, and on California’s central coast. There was an amount of culture shock. I especially hated how much time it suddenly took to run simple errands.
On the coast, I used to rollerblade to the grocery store with a backpack. In the Bay Area, it became a 15 minute drive in each direction, plus several minutes to hunt around for a spot in the store’s overloading parking lot. Yuck.
"Nurture" is the only "trunk story" in this collection — the only story that never sold anywhere — and I can tell you why.
Editors didn’t like this piece because it doesn’t have a neat, perfect ending in which our brave young heroine identifies the cause of the epidemic, confronts it, and defeats it. One of the fallacies in storytelling is that every story needs a tidy wrap-up. We’re trained to expect it: three acts and a climax. Sometimes I get complaints about Plague Year and The Frozen Sky for the same reason, but, like "Nurture," those stories deal with planet-wide disasters.
Planet-wide disasters aren’t something you tidily wrap-up. The best you can hope for is an uneasy peace and hope for the future. The world is just like that. Civilization is too large and too complex to pack into an hour-long TV episode.
I felt it would unrealistic, even false, to put Shawna in a prominent role in an internationally-coordinated crash program to develop some kind of super-vaccine. She's a rookie assistant medical examiner. And introducing a new bevy of characters, all of them biologists and toxicologists and secret agents, would step beyond the bounds of this story and begin an entirely new one.
Ultimately, her individual choice to live as well as she can, in the best place she can, needed to serve as the final note in this story. That's the wrap-up. She wants to be happy and safe. We should all be so lucky.
GUNFIGHT AT THE SUGARLOAF PET FOOD & TAXIDERMY
Fortunately there was always one more moron coming down the road. Otherwise Julie would have had to find a real job, or move again, but she loved it here in Big Sky Country as they bragged on their license plates — the high rolling plains, the slow winters and sweet, pungent summers. There was room to think.
Trolling for hot-heads, drunks and fools wasn't exactly big money, yet Julie enjoyed every minute of it. First there was the waiting, tucked away in the brush with her remote controls and a thermos of tea, letting her mind roam or whispering on the radio until some joker passed by in his gun-racked truck. Always a him. Usually tossing out Coors cans and cigarette butts. Cigarettes! In many ways the people here were a century behind the rest of the nation, and proud of it.
The little man in the sports car was a surprise.
As he sped around the turn, his headlights flashed over the silhouettes of Julie's deer standing in a meadow. Of course her beautiful beasties didn't run. Then his brake lights flared and he stepped out wearing a nice jacket, no hat. No lonesome country band thumping on an old cassette deck.
Julie had come north to escape labels and stereotypes, and recognized the irony of her thoughts. She wanted to be a better person. But the fact of the matter was that her victims tended toward a demographic particularly easy to reduce to cartoons: single syllable name, beer gut, filthy pants.
Shorty here did not fit the bill. Julie didn't think he was even driving an American car, given the low shape of it. Maybe an Audi. He looked like a suave TV villain there at the edge of his headlights, trim and spare — and barely five-foot-five.
When he pulled the compact Uzi submachine gun, Julie's headset distinctly said, "Oh no."
Julie froze, her left thumb jammed down on a button, her right hand still pulling on a joystick. In the meadow, the doe's tail twitched and twitched and twitched while the buck's head reared back so far that its antlers gouged its own spine. Any local would have jumped back
in his truck.
Shorty opened fire on full auto. Both deer burst apart into flecks of real hide, white cotton stuffing and metal gears.
"Yeeeeeeehaw!" he screamed.
Already lying prone, Julie squashed her breasts so flat that they migrated into her armpits as the distinct snap of a bullet went overhead. Highsong had let her choose the location and set-up tonight, and her first priority was always to hunker down out of the line of fire. Way out. Some of the drunkards would make superb material for anti-NRA commercials, blasting away like they were General Custer combating the Sioux Nation.
Shorty quit only when the buck's head winged away and its savaged body remained standing. He lowered his Uzi and gawked.
Typically the next stage of the game went smoothly. This wasn't west Miami. The Great White Poacher knew he'd been tricked, and humiliation doused his adrenaline. Highsong would crash out of the woods in a monster SUV, lights flashing, loudspeaker booming. The men about to be ticketed were often indignant, and enough California retirees had invaded the land that now the words entrapment and lawyer came on a regular basis, yet only twice had Julie seen somebody wave a rifle threateningly. Never had anyone actually taken aim. But they weren't packing machine guns.
"Uh, Highsong?" Julie whispered into the radio. She snuck a hand under her belly to see if she'd peed herself.
His voice was a groan: "What!"
"What're you gonna do?"
"We. What are we going to do. I don't know."
Shorty had finally twigged that a deer, like every other living thing, requires a head to stay on its feet. He cut glances left and right as he scuttled back to his car.
"It's a huge bust, don't just let him go." Now that she knew she was okay, Julie got mad. She didn't think of herself as sentimental, but Bongo the Buck out there had survived almost two dozen arrests and twenty-eight gun wounds, three arrows and one rock. Now there would be no more. Neither poor Bongo nor the doe, still too new to have a name, would ever do a job again.
Julie also felt a leaping tickle of excitement. This was way beyond the usual combination of trespassing and hunting out of season at $238 a pop. This was the big time. She hissed, "You smash out onto the road like always and I'll back you—"
"Shut up and stay down."
"Highsong—"
"If you move I'll shoot you myself."
Julie fumbled for her binoculars and jotted down most of the license plate before the little man roared off.
He was headed straight into Sugarloaf.
#
Being the only black woman around for at least three states, as she liked to say, Julie Beauchain would have been notorious even if she wasn't a mad scientist. That made it easy to get dates, but she still freaked when total strangers addressed her as Miz Boo-kane or Boy-shane.
Julie did not prefer the hostile anonymity of urban life. It was just that her first thirty-four years of existence hadn't done much to teach her that human beings could be polite and neighborly and honest. Yes, this region was favored by white supremacists and had been the last refuge of the Unabomber, but in a head-to-head collision, Florida's battalions of drugs lords, smugglers, militants, pimps and psychos would barely break a sweat kicking butt on Montana's worst.
She liked the mountains. She still laughed at the way that so-called cities ended, fading into open country, unlike the gargantuan concrete sprawl of Miami-Dade. The police here let you out of a speeding ticket with five bucks paid on the spot, even for doing a hundred and ten on the ruler-straight highways — and you could forget to lock your car and still find your stash of five dollar bills behind the sun visor.
Highsong drove back into town sedately, not at all interested in catching up to the man with the machine gun. Julie squirmed on the bench seat of the 4x4 Suburban as the radio bled static. Finally the voice of Sheriff Tom came in answer, mumbling, "Haven't seen him, Bow-shane."
"He was headed right at you."
"Well I'm looking up and down main street right now."
Tom Young had never been enthusiastic about Fish, Wildlife & Parks stationing a new unit locally, viewing them as competition instead of as allies, and a few months ago he'd grown openly difficult. The silly pecker had gotten himself nabbed for hunting out of season, twice on the same day.
Julie felt certain that the sheriff's second shooting had been vindictive. Men would let pride get the best of their intelligence every time, as if deer could somehow mock them. Her small experiment in social conditioning was a total failure in that regard, since her decoys must be bitterly cursed across the state. Everyone knew. And yet each four-hour sting still averaged at least one bust. Some guys were simply too full of testosterone to pass up a target.
She tried to keep her voice calm, glancing at Highsong for approval. "Sheriff, there's only a few side roads between here and town. Why don't we each take a couple?"
As usual, the sheriff didn't answer immediately. Then: "Sounds like a goose chase to me, Bow-shane. There's lots more turn-offs than that. You just don't know the area."
"Neither does this guy, he's not local."
"Well we'll keep an eye out for that license plate."
"Sheriff..."
Highsong patted her knee and Julie let herself be distracted, looking down from the dark road ahead to her leg. Lately her weekday partner had grown chummy — and not in a brotherly way, she hoped. His hands were giant and scarred and always nimble with equipment, colored like cinnamon to her chocolate. Julie had memorized an excessively poetic list of the places and ways she wanted to be touched.
She scooched away from Highsong on the long, bed-sized seat, tucking her own small hands into her lap where they couldn't do anything embarrassing. "Out," the sheriff mumbled against her crotch, and she slammed the square microphone back in its cradle.
Highsong might have smiled. Julie opened her mouth but then shut it, angry with herself for being flustered.
When the two of them were lying out there in the cool empty night, murmuring into each other's ear, she imagined her curves against his angles. She imagined being married twenty years. She and Highsong never babbled, but they shared the obvious passions for wildlife, for hiking, for camping out. He was surprisingly obsessed with global politics and always asked about new developments in her work, and it was only on the drives back or sitting face-to-face over burgers and pie in noisy Mother's Tavern that they couldn't find any words.
Somehow that made her crush all the sweeter, and as irritating as hell.
Even romance was different up here on the plains.
#
Back at her shop, unloading the remains of her deer in a cloud of cotton fiber, Julie sneezed directly into Highsong's face. "Oh jeez, I'm sorry!"
He mopped at his cheek, unflappable as always. "I needed a shower anyway."
"Sorry! Really. How about some coffee or something, I'll show you my new mini." That was not an innuendo. Over their five months working together, Julie had grown terrified of spooking him, because if Highsong was indeed courting her it was in some infinitely patient Indian way. She tried to be all business. "This is a hundred times better than the decoys, really, I took some of those little lawn gnomes—"
"Julie, it's late," he said. "Next time, okay?"
But he wiped at his face again as he stepped away.
#
She was too upset to stay home. Still, she knew better than to go hunting an Uzi-toting maniac by herself.
She drove out to Shaug Nurseries as the moon rose.
Their stings were typically set up on private land owned by Drew Shaug, partly because it was a challenge to find more than a foot or two that Shaug didn't own for miles in any direction, mostly because he didn't appreciate trigger-happy cowboys running around the same woods as his grandchildren. Julie couldn't wait to hear his thoughts on assault weaponry. Shaug was employer, landlord or both to most of the local population, and no doubt he'd put a boot in Sheriff Tom's lazy backside.
From the highway, the lights of the
nursery resembled a miniature city. She passed four gates before turning in, but Florida millionaires would have laughed at the Shaug residence. It was a plain ranch home within shouting distance of a sprawl of employee cabins, and the land in between was crowded with partially disassembled tractors.
Headlights rolled out to intercept her.
"Hey there, Boy-shane." Bob LaChapelle was Shaug's foreman and quite the charmer. His pickup truck was bigger than her pickup truck. Julie seemed to own the only small size Nissan ever sold in the state of Montana, and LaChapelle smiled down from the window of his giant Dodge Ram as they jawed like two riders out on the range.
"Mr. Shaug's buyin' seedlings in Europe," he said. "Want me to pass on a message?"
"Um, I guess not. Thanks."
She had already swung her truck around when she noticed an odd pattern of reflections in the dark window of Shaug's house. Looking back, she repressed the impulse to hit her brakes and then barely avoided steering into a ditch.
A car was easing down the jeep trail behind the garage with its headlights off — but its waxed hood glinted in the new light of the moon as it rocked back and forth.
Shorty's sports car.
#
Julie drove much further down the highway than she wanted. The open road felt like a stage and she had to go more than a mile before a rocky knoll concealed her. She made a U-turn, switched off her lights and then cruised back again, wondering how she'd stop without touching her brakes. She supposed she should have bashed out the taillights.
Her truck was personal property rather than an FW&P unit, so no radio. Highsong never answered when he was off-duty anyway. Typically he let his machine get the phone, too. Why? What was so important he couldn't be interrupted? She'd been to his trailer six times and had scrutinized the long living room and the kitchen especially for any sign of a woman's presence, but his home, so much like his face, was just too damn uncomplicated.