by Jeff Carlson
Julie let off the gas before she reached the north gate and turned in. Too fast. She yelped as her truck jolted through a pocket of mud, then yanked on the emergency brake. Finally she stopped. Her head thrummed with adrenaline.
She made too much noise rummaging through the mountain of boxes and bags in the truckbed, and stopped getting enough oxygen to think before she found what she wanted. That was okay. It was easier just to be muscle and a pair of eyes.
Most of the employee huts were dark. One seemed packed with people, talking too loud, laughing.
She came across Shorty's car in the shadows behind a row of greenhouses, its hood ticking as it cooled. He'd actually kicked in his taillights, and Julie smiled to think of him cursing his way over the hills and through the woods. Someone who lived here must have shown him that back route. LaChapelle? He might have been standing guard, waiting for Shorty. But why? What were they doing?
Julie blundered around the garage in time to be pinned by a slash of light spilling from the door of a double-wide trailer. Bond, James Bond, she thought disgustedly. Two men stepped inside, one small, one regular. Good thing they didn't glance back. She must have been a heck of a sight mincing along on tiptoe with her arms wrapped the decapitated, long-necked heads of a doe and a trumpeter swan.
She wedged herself into the muddy shadows under the trailer, beneath the living room window, and forced herself to work slowly. She was using new gear for the first time and wanted this field test to be a success.
She raised the swan first, bumping the trailer's wall with its beak as she thrust its face up to the glass.
"—king pinhead, you're smoking it yourself!?"
"Man, why don't you just relax."
Julie triple-checked the tape recorder she'd spliced into the wires falling from the swan's neck. Then she grinned. A swan's eyes were too small to be replaced with cameras that she could afford, so she'd plugged in high-gain microphones instead.
"Look at you." That was LaChapelle. "Look at your face all squinty and bloodshot. You know cTHC is addictive, right?"
"Just testing the product."
Shorty's voice was slower and deeper than she would've guessed, maybe because smoke had made his throat raw. Marijuana. THC was the drug in marijuana. Her brother had sucked it down the same way mom soaked herself in rum and coke.
Shorty said, "You wanna do business or what, man?"
"Do you? You almost got all of us shafted tonight playing Canuck Cowboy."
This just got better and better. Shorty was Canadian. Were they smuggling across the border? How much pot could you stuff into a sports car? It would make more sense just to grow it here with all these greenhouses and horticulture experts...
Julie performed quick surgery on the doe's wiring while she pinned the base of the swan's neck between the trailer wall and the back of her head. Then every muscle in her neck seized up. She leaned away, clumsily grabbing the swan before it hit the ground. If LaChapelle looked out now he'd think she was putting on a puppet show.
The doe had nightvision camera-eyes, of course, which she'd spliced into a DVD recorder. Staring at the tiny screen in her lap, Julie lifted both animals again and zeroed in on the faint outlines behind the drapes.
"—even carrying a gun like that?"
"Wanna try it? Let's have a toke and go blow the tits off some stuff, buddy, you should see—"
"We're not buddies," LaChapelle said quietly. "We're business partners. And I think our other partners would be very, very unhappy to hear you're taking chances. And testing the product, you idiot, cTHC is addictive."
See THC. Canadian? Camouflaged. Cocaine. Cockamamie. Julie was too revved up to play Wheel of Fortune.
A bad ache knotted her shoulders again and she twisted her butt around in the dirt, trying to find a comfortable pose. It couldn't be done.
Shorty had what must be a briefcase and laid out several small items on the table, the first hot enough to show on infrared. A nifty little incubator. But LaChapelle gave him no money as far as she could tell, only paperwork, and Shorty muttered his way through a few lines: "The select crossbreeding resulting in concentrated THC has proved independent of the plus nitrogen fertilizer." He laughed. "You guys really think you're rocket scientists or something."
"Just bring it back to the lab, all right?"
Concentrated THC. They were retooling the plant to sink its teeth into people like tobacco or heroin.
Could Mr. Shaug know about this? He didn't need more money, that was for sure, and it didn't fit with his protectiveness of his family... LaChapelle and some cronies were probably looking to cash in on the side. Julie wondered why they were using a lab across the border, but it must be tough to find people with the right training, especially out in the middle of nowhere.
Busting an international biotech drug ring! She was going to be absolutely buried in venture capital money, and she couldn't wait to see the look on Sheriff Tom's face when the grumpy old boob realized she was his best friend in the world.
She was going to have to let him in on the glory.
#
Despite its fabulous name, the Sugarloaf Pet Food & Taxidermy was merely a three-room cabin set beside a warehouse in a dirt lot graced with two trees and a sagging fence. By rights the place should have been named something more along the lines of Beauchain Security, but Julie hadn't thought it prudent yet to draw that sort of attention. In any case it was Highsong who'd christened her shop, with mischief in his often unreadable dark eyes, and Julie had blown a hundred and forty bucks getting a sign made in the hope that he might feel a possessive twinge each time he picked her up.
She did not sell pet supplies. Highsong was a tease. He found it amusing that she had six bird feeders and threw snacks to every mutt in town, yet packed her warehouse with armies of dead beasts. Most of it was FW&P work, of course, although she did perform some regular taxidermy since it was decent money and also generated good will among the townies she'd busted.
Tonight her cabin seemed stuffy, too small. It had been one wild ride of a day — a new day now; it was twenty minutes after midnight — but things had ended well. Sheriff Tom had goggled at her recordings and actually stammered thanks. He said he'd go straight to the nursery as soon as the state police arrived. He also warned her that she stood some chance of trouble herself, having no authority, no warrant, but Julie pulled her tapes out his hands and told him to say he received an anonymous tip. Big deal. The man really was dense sometimes.
Heading home, she'd considered a drive out to Highsong's place with a sixpack to celebrate. But what if he wasn't alone?
She was putting water on for tea when twin lights flashed across her window, then again. She leaned over the hot stove to peek out. Speeding into her lot was a sports car, the sports car, followed by the sheriff's hard-top jeep.
"God no," Julie said.
Too late it all made sense. Idiot. How else could LaChapelle have known that Shorty machine-gunned her decoys?
Now she had maybe twelve seconds before they got inside, and used three grabbing her phone and punching 911. Then she wasted two more realizing that calling the cops might not be the best idea. What if all six members of the Sugarloaf sheriff's unit were in on the deal?
The slam of car doors felt like malfunctions in her heart. Julie forgot to think again as gunfire blew through her front door right over her head.
Originally she'd drawn up the killer lawn gnomes as a gag. In Florida, however, people crammed their yards with shiny plastic flamingos and miniature windmills and such. She'd realized there would be a paying market — and a trio of elves had been standing on her coffee table because she thought she might lure Highsong inside for a little show-and-tell.
Julie dove back behind her kitchen counter as Shorty kicked through the door. He goggled down at the weird greeting party he discovered inside, then snorted and started to kick at them.
The first elf misfired, its jaunty green cap rocketing off to the left. The second either a
imed or launched poorly. Its taser-leads bit into the sofa with a flash of white electricity, at least twenty inches off-target.
The third elf rammed its juice home directly over Shorty's heart. His chest seemed to explode into ashes.
Julie screamed, expected buckets of blood. An instant later, though, her cabin was saturated in tasty blue smoke. He must have been carrying a personal stash in his pocket.
He toppled like Goliath onto the ceramic elves.
Coughing and wheezing, Julie rose from her hiding place and ran for the back door. Her feet felt huge, weightless, like soft balloons pushing her skyward. She was looking down at them when her face encountered the door and then her butt met the linoleum.
Oh jeez I'm totally schnockered! she realized, and sat there owlishly counting her own thoughts.
The sound of two gunshots slapped her like her mother's palm. She pushed herself upright. But the small, neat holes in the door stopped her again. Just missed. When she looked around her vision seemed dim — they were shadows thrashing toward her in great swimming motions and everyone was yelling.
Suddenly she was outside, wrapped in fogbanks of smoke. Then she could see again. The stars glittered and the chill air felt exquisite on her neck. She made sense of the fact that she was wearing only floppy socks and knew she couldn't run all the way back to Florida. She sprinted toward her warehouse instead.
"Goddamn goddamn goddamn!" Sheriff Tom chanted behind her.
She slammed the door on his anger and dropped to her hands and knees, sensing bullets like she had radar. Her consciousness felt huge and sensitive and vulnerable, as if every hair on her head had been squeezed full of brains like toothpaste.
She rolled right, then popped up beside a work table as the door crashed open with a resounding metal gong. The vibration felt so intense that her fingers wouldn't close on the master remote she wanted. Groping for it through the jumble of tools and wiring, she cut herself on a band saw and that raw hurt was the promise of death.
But LaChapelle wasn't handling the smoke well either. He went completely bug-nuts, shooting away from her — shooting her pets.
The black bear's only moving parts were its neck and one foreleg, yet even positioned on all fours it was nearly as tall as a man, a hulk of claws and teeth. Shotgun blasts echoed through the warehouse. Then she activated the rest of her toys and Sheriff Tom also opened fire, shrieking in fear.
Julie had not invented the robo-decoys. That honor went to a Wisconsin taxidermist. She had, however, made improvements as word got round and poachers grew wary.
The migratory elk were capable of walking stiffly and waddled forward in a slow-motion stampede, bumping and bonking each other. Julie realized with surprising passion that she had to take them to Hollywood, here's the pitch, live-action Bambi crossed with Night of the Living Dead. They formed a shaggy wall of muscle from which Sheriff Tom and LaChapelle could only blast meaningless, fist-sized hunks.
High in the rafters, a mass of shadows flopped and twitched.
She'd run out of working space in autumn, when gun lovers were permitted to kill beautiful fuzzy things and her decoys had to be put away. And in winter, Fish, Wildlife & Parks focused more on maintaining habitats than on trapping the few hunters enthusiastic enough to brave the elements.
Her birds nested on sheets of plywood laid across the open rafters — and her turkeys and sage grouse could all walk. The lone bald eagle and platoon of ring-necked pheasants could all open both wings. They carried the immobile owls, cranes and swans to the edge.
It was Biblical, a rain of fowl.
Most of the palsied horde crashed down upon the elk or her work tables, but enough hit their targets that Sheriff Tom vanished from sight and LaChapelle was driven to his knees, hacking on old dry feathers.
He put one last shot into the ceiling as Julie charged in for the coup de grace, high-stepping through the flapping mess. She brained LaChapelle with a duck and kicked him four times for good measure, then drove her bruised knee into Sheriff Tom's belly when she was bumped from behind by an elk still diligently marching its way forward.
#
The paramedic kept pressing his thumb down on the skin beneath Julie's eyes, checking her pupil response to see if she was concussed. She had repeatedly lost track of what she was saying, fascinated by the blizzard of red and blue lights. The confusion of emergency vehicles and personnel seemed roughly equal to the congestion inside her stoned brain.
"Look up," the paramedic kept saying. "Can you look up?"
"Let's go over it again," the state trooper said. "They followed you into the warehouse..."
"Right." Julie tried to point and nearly fell over. She'd squeezed three industrial-size tubes of epoxy over the pile of robo-fowl, binding LaChapelle and Sheriff Tom into a surreal cake of beaks and bodies that would have to be taken apart with a power sander, no doubt painfully. As for Shorty, she had simply hit him with the taser again because she was unable to tie him up, having unfortunately glued her right hand to her own hip.
She gestured with her chin instead and saw Highsong among the milling uniforms. His head was also turning, searching, and Julie's first impulse was to hide. She was very aware of her own sour adrenaline breath and lumpy afro — but with the sudden clarity of the smoke, Julie understood that this might be her best and only chance.
He spotted her as soon as she started toward him, shuffling. Then his eyebrows went up. Did she look even worse than she thought?
She was confrontational: "So what was so important you couldn't even come in for a cup of coffee earlier?"
He hesitated, then grinned and shrugged, an expansive motion that was unlike him. "Left-over tacos and a two volume biography of Eisenhower," he said.
"What?"
"I just didn't think we should rush things," he said.
Julie stepped closer and Highsong brought his open arms in, enfolding her.
And when she kissed him, he kissed back.
END
Afterword
"Gunfight" is my Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid. My parents took my brother and me to see Butch Cassidy at a drive-in when we were kids. It made a huge impression, not least because we were each given our own bucket of popcorn.
When I grew older, William Goldman became one of my favorite writers and a man I've studied for his craft. Go read The Color Of Light or The Princess Bride. (Yeah, yeah, I know you've seen the movie version of Bride, which was adequate, but go read the book.) Goldman's technique is deft, spare, and honest. Even better, he always delivers a rollercoaster ride of surprises and reversals.
I didn't process any of this when I was eight. Not consciously. Sitting in our station wagon's front seat beneath a sixty-foot screen, here's what I learned: Guns are TOTALLY AWESOME! And cliff-jumping! Horse chases! Explosions and bank robberies!
It's a mystery why I didn't grow up to be an outlaw.
Julie Beauchain ranks among my favorite characters because she's fun. I'm a fun guy. People who know me — my friends and family — are still trying to figure out why I write dark novels like Plague Year. That's because my parents also let me read books like The Stand and On The Beach before I was twelve. Gritty drama resonates even more deeply than all-for-laughs adventures like Butch Cassidy. Like I've said, the things I admire the most about human beings are our strength and intelligence. But I enjoy a good romp.
"Gunfight" was sparked by a Newsweek article about a Wisconsin taxidermist who aided local rangers by creating robot deer, which they used to entrap poachers. That was the coolest thing I'd read all year. Instantly I knew I wanted to write my own story, and I have family in Montana, including an uncle who runs one of the largest nurseries in North America.
Sugarloaf is a fictional town, but the landscape is real.
One more thing. Sheila Williams, the editor at Asimov's, was brave enough to ask me for a sequel to "Gunfight" after taking a lot of heat from an abusive nut who objected to what he perceived as the subversive pinky-pie liberal
agenda embedded in this story. After all, the heroes are a black woman and a Native American, whereas the evil sheriff and his cronies are white guys. Obviously I'm trying to indoctrinate the youth of America. White, bad! Color, good!
Well, no.
For me, Julie's race was nothing more than craftsmanship. I am not a Manchurian Candidate brainwashed by the mainstream media who's now regurgitating the same self-hating message of the weak, socialist left. Relax, man! Science fiction is supposed to be a literature of ideas. Its fans don't tend to be people who purposely limit themselves, and yet more than one white supremacist has also taken me to task for the cast of Plague Year, which features a Latino and a genius Jew.
I'll talk more about their weird accusations later in this collection in an essay called "Rose-Colored Demons," but, like my protagonist in "Monsters," I think people sometimes can't see past their own problems. In fact, a lot of times, people consciously or unconsciously wrap themselves in their pain, their own failings, and their hate, which distort everything.
Julie being black was a deliberate decision with one goal. Yes, I got a nice bit of poetry comparing her skin color with Highsong's, but the main intent was to introduce an additional layer of tension to the story. For a genre writer, suspense is critical, and it's not difficult to find outsider themes in nearly all of my writing.
Now back to Butch Cassidy... er, I mean back to Julie Beauchain...
A LOVELY LITTLE CHRISTMAS FIRE
Someone was smart enough to call her. Even with the Army and DHS on scene, the governor had tapped her personally. Miss Beauchain? he said on the phone. The job couldn't have been any dirtier, but that kind of compliment was better than cash, neck rubs, or beaches, so Julie grinned as she turned into the moist stink of the bugs.
"Watch the ceiling!" she yelled.
"I'm more worried about the floor," Highsong said.