Juarez Square and Other Stories

by Young, D. L.

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  The Reader

  Training the Fundies

  Juarez Square

  Dumpside

  Sanctuary City

  The Gianni Box

  Ximena

  Cotner's Bot

  Dogville

  The Jacob Seeds

  Last Goodbye

  Soledad - Chapter 1

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Juarez Square and Other Stories

  by D.L. Young

  Copyright © 2015 by David L. Young. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means - except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews - without the written permission of the author.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead or just hanging on in a coma, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  ISBN-10: 0-9908696-1-X

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9908696-1-0

  For Claudia, Logan, and Madeleine

  Introduction

  The forces shaping contemporary life often feel like they’re moving our world in ominous directions. Technological innovations celebrated as progress frequently seem to bring as many curses as blessings. Fossil fuel-powered industrialization, for example, has ushered in an era of unprecedented prosperity in much of the developed world, but at the expense of environmental disasters, petty oil dictatorships, and global climate change. And advances in information technology have been both a source of inspiration and a sad illuminator of our inner selves. As amazed as I am at the wonder of supercomputers pondering the origins of the cosmos, I’m equally as crestfallen by the mind-sucking banality of social media.

  The stories in this collection revolve around people whose lives become entangled in the unintended consequences—and sometimes the intentional abuse—of advanced technologies like robotics, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and drone warfare. Many of the tales take place in the US-Mexico frontier region, where the future is borderless, savage, and Anglo and Latin cultures have, after generations of commingling, evolved into something which is neither Anglo nor Latin, but something in between.

  I freely admit it’s possible that I’m overly sensitive to my environment, that my concerns may be exaggerated. And since I can’t really be objective here, I’ll leave it to you, dear reader, to decide whether this collection is a harbinger of potential dangers we face, the proverbial canary in a coal mine, or whether it’s simply a literary diversion (hopefully an entertaining one) into an imagined future.

  And to be sure, it’s not all near-future craziness in Ciudad Juarez. You’ll also find stories about a high-stakes political war on a manmade island-nation floating in the Atlantic, an unconventional woman running a robot brothel in Madrid, and a charismatic AI that takes the fashion world by storm.

  Anyway, I hope you enjoy the book. And feel free to send me a note and tell me which stories you liked (or didn’t) at dlyoungwriter@gmail.com

  D.L. Young

  Houston, March 2015

  **2016 UPDATE**

  In this revised edition, I’ve included the first chapter of my debut novel, Soledad, which takes place in the same near-future, dystopian Texas as many of the stories in this collection. In fact, the book is a novelization of The Reader, the first story in Juarez Square. I had a lot of fun expanding the scale of the story (it’s similar, but not exactly the same as the shorter piece), exploring the world in much more depth, and introducing some interesting new characters. I hope you enjoy the first chapter.

  The Reader

  The future didn’t look very bright for our dinner guest, a smooth-talking cowboy who’d just arrived. Like so many others who came before him with high hopes to cut a deal, he was all handshakes and grins. He sat on the far side of the carnival-sized tent we used as our traveling cafeteria, sharing a simple dinner of beans and tortillas with a dozen or so of Flaco Guzman’s retinue. The cowboy grinned and made small talk. I watched him and felt bad for him while I waited for the hierba to take effect. I had a feeling tonight’s reading would go the wrong way, and that feeling was rarely wrong.

  A couple hours earlier we’d made camp after a long day’s ride. I wasn’t sure of our location (out of caution we never took the same route twice), but I guessed we were somewhere between Eagle Pass and San Antonio. That would have put us roughly halfway across the hundred and fifty kilometer stretch of West Texas desert connecting Guzman’s natgas territories. Scrub brush to the horizon in all directions, the occasional glimpse of a coyote or snake, and the nearly unbearable August heat that mercifully turned cool and comfortable each evening.

  The hierba hit me like a hammer and I shuddered. Even after years of using it, that first moment of intense clarity when the weed’s drug grabbed hold still managed to surprise me. A blurry reality slammed into sharp focus and your brain kicked into a different gear. Suddenly you saw everything: every facial twitch, every nervous blink and lip quiver, a universe of details that were always there but you normally wouldn’t pick up on, not consciously anyway. And if you looked hard and long enough at someone it was like being inside their skin, like every breath they took was your own.

  The moment the hierba’s clarity overcame me, I was instantly uncomfortable. A deep suspicion emanated from Guzman’s men and hung heavy in the air, so thick I could almost feel it on my skin. I saw a thousand things at once, all those little things I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. Eyes darted back and forth, neck muscles tightened, vocal chords strained ever so slightly.

  I pushed out all of the noise and focused on the cowboy so I could get a good read.

  “My daddy goes way back with Flaco’s people,” he said.

  Trying too hard to make us feel comfortable. He’s hiding something.

  One of Guzman’s hulking bodyguards nodded and slapped a steaming spoonful of beans onto a tortilla. “You don’t say?” he grunted.

  “Oh, hell yes. My people worked with his father during Secession. Even helped him divvy up the natgas concessions.” He laughed (a forced, fake laugh) and then said, “Of course, back then the families were all pretty much even-steven.”

  And in the years since, the Guzman clan has grown powerful while his own family squandered their concession. The cowboy left the rest of the thought unspoken, but I saw it all over his face.

  The world around me faded into the background as I studied him. I began to see all the lies. There were so many. Lies within lies within lies. A spider’s web of deceit few could have spun with such ease and grace. The cowboy was a practiced, expert liar, one of the best I’d seen.

  I watched him like I’d watched so many others, digging their graves one lie at a time. There was never any shortage of them, the hustlers and freelancers who’d give anything to sit where the cowboy sat now. An audience with Flaco Guzman was the opportunity of a lifetime. One good deal with him could set you up for life. But what these fast-talkers didn’t know, what they never knew, was that Guzman had a secret weapon stacking the odds in his favor: a living, breathing bullshit detector.

  Come on, cowboy, you’re blowing it. You want those stale tortillas and beans to be your last meal? Don’t you know if you keep up this bullshit they’re going to walk you out into the desert and bury you there?

  Before I knew it half an hour had passed. More than enough time to see what I needed to.

  Flaco Guzman appeared at the edge of the tent and all conversation abruptly stopped. At nearly two meters tall and pushing one-forty kilos, I’d always th
ought Guzman looked more like a professional wrestler than a natgas baron. As he entered the tent his men shot up out of their chairs like soldiers at attention.

  “Don Flaco!” the cowboy boomed. “Wonderful to see you.” He rose and took a step toward Guzman, but one of the bodyguards stopped him with a firm hand on the shoulder.

  Guzman ignored the cowboy, turned to me, and raised his eyebrows. “Well?”

  I turned away from the cowboy so I wouldn’t see his reaction. It was an ugly thing to watch, the way a person’s face changed the moment they realized they were going to die.

  Again Guzman asked, “Well, brujo?”

  I answered with a small shake of my head, then Guzman snapped his fingers and motioned toward the desert. The bodyguards knew the drill, instantly seizing the cowboy by the arms. They dragged him kicking and screaming and pleading for his life out into the darkness. A minute later I heard the gunshots.

  ***

  The next morning the sun blazed down as the caravan snaked its way through the desert, pack mules and horses and camels stretching out in a long thin line. There were maybe a hundred of us: roughly a dozen of Guzman’s inner circle, five or six mistresses, and the rest a gaggle of handlers and workers.

  Guzman had an obsession with Pancho Villa, the Mexican revolutionary who thumbed his nose at a gringo army that hunted him for two years across this very same desert. Guzman even emulated Villa’s look, sporting the thick mustache and crisscrossed bandoliers you saw in all the old photos. His men followed suit out of deference, donning the wide-brimmed hats and loose, functional clothes of desert-wandering revolutionaries.

  He could have made the trip connecting his natgas territories in his jet in half an hour, but a three-day’s ride across the desert had some kind of romantic attraction to him. Got him in touch with his Mexican roots, he liked to say. The security logistics were a nightmare, but Guzman had the tech and manpower to make it happen. We were protected on all sides by Guzman clan militia, hundreds of men and vehicles shadowing our movements just out of eyesight so as not to spoil the caravan’s historical look and feel. And Guzman’s drones (also never seen nor heard) kept a constant vigil from high overhead. Strangely enough, our little desert convoy was probably the safest place in the Republic.

  Guzman usually had me do a reading the second day in, and if it went badly the desert offered the perfect location for dealing with the problem. Buzzards and ants took care of any recognizable evidence in a few days—not that anyone in their right mind would go searching through that hell on earth anyway.

  “Hey, brujo,” the horse groom called, moving his black mare alongside and looking my dromedary up and down. “Why do you ride a camel? Doesn’t it hurt your ass?”

  Only someone on their first caravan would ask something so stupid. “Pecking order,” I said sharply and pointed forward. “Inner circle rides up front on horseback, the rest of us camelback it in the rear.” And, yes, it hurt my ass, but I wasn’t about to tell this nosy cabrón that.

  The groom flashed me a confused look.

  “I’m not family,” I said. “I was…adopted from another territory.” I pulled up my sleeve and showed him the tracker implant scar on my forearm.

  The groom nodded. “So you couldn’t go back home even if you wanted to, eh?”

  Like I had a home to go back to.

  Up ahead one of the bodyguards had stopped his horse to one side of the caravan. As we passed by he sidled up next to me and shot the groom a harsh look. The groom understood at once and spurred his horse forward out of earshot.

  “Don Flaco wants another reading tonight,” the bodyguard said.

  “Another one?” I still had cobwebs from the hierba I’d chewed last night.

  “Is that a problema, brujo?”

  “I’m not a brujo, you fucking peasant.”

  The bodyguard smiled. “So I tell him no? I can tell him no if you like.”

  The bodyguards were mostly illiterates from Michoacán. They didn’t understand what I did, calling me a brujo, a witch doctor. More than a few of them wouldn’t have minded seeing me walked out into the desert to get rid of my black magic forever.

  “Just tell me what time I need to be ready,” I said.

  ***

  The air that night was cool and crisp, the kind of peaceful desert evening I might have enjoyed if Guzman’s temper hadn’t just erupted.

  “Why would you say something stupid like that?” Guzman stared harshly at his trade advisor Sanchez, who shifted uncomfortably in his seat. The two men sat across a folding card table covered with stacks of papers. I sat on a stool in the corner of the tent, waiting for them to finish.

  Sanchez spoke slowly and carefully. “Don Flaco, I apologize if I wasn’t clear. With the Cadena acquisition we now control roughly half of the natgas production in the Republic. The expansion of our territories over the last year has been incredible, but if we continue to grow so fast we may spread ourselves thin. We’re already having difficulty maintaining security in some areas.”

  “And your recommendation is that I make like a turtle and hide my head in my shell?” Guzman stroked his mustache and considered. He nodded toward me and said, “Brujo, what do you think?”

  I knew better than to disagree, so I shrugged and said, “Best defense is a good offense.”

  Guzman slapped the table, sending papers flying. “You see? Even the boy knows we have to keep moving forward. Now go on to dinner, no more of this talk about playing safe.” The trade advisor awkwardly agreed, shot me a go-to-hell look, and left the tent.

  Guzman winked at me. “He may be right, you know,” he said calmly, the anger suddenly gone from his face. He took out his pipe and packed it with tobacco. “We’ve come so far so fast. Maybe a bit too fast. Come over here, brujo.”

  The show for Sanchez was classic Guzman. Even in dealings with his inner circle, he preferred to keep everyone off balance at all times, uncertain of his motives, his reasons, his thinking in general. No one, neither his worst enemy nor his closest ally, ever really knew what he might be up to, and he clearly like it that way. He was even careful enough to avoid being present whenever I did a reading. Flaco Guzman’s reputation was that of an unpredictable brute, obsessed with conquest, indiscriminate fucking, and the destruction of rival clans, but the man I knew hardly fit that description. He was anything but reckless. The brutal part, yes, that was totally accurate, but then we lived in brutal times.

  Guzman ran a match over the pipe and puffed, filling the tent with the sweet smell of his favorite veracruzano tobacco. “Did you hear what he said, brujo? Half the natgas in the Republic. Not bad for the grandson of a farmer, eh?”

  I walked over and sat down. “Your grandfather was a farmer?”

  “Well, do poppies count as farming?” Guzman chuckled. “Pero en serio, beautiful country where my grandfather lived, brujo. Seems like a lifetime ago.” He took long draws from his pipe while he told me about the mountain village of his childhood, how his biggest worry in those days was whether or not he’d catch a bigger trout than his cousin’s. He reminisced for some time, and in moments like these he seemed the most humble and simple of souls, hardly a man of great power, dreaded and feared by so many. It was at times like these that I found myself almost fond of Guzman. And for a few precious moments, as I listened to his stories, sometimes I’d forget that I was a slave.

  “Malinalco, brujo. They really know how to cook a trout in Malinalco. You should really take a trip there someday.” He looked down at my tracking scar and his smile faded. “Maybe we’ll take a caravan there someday and you’ll come with us.”

  Guzman shuffled some papers and began to talk business. “A man from the Chen-Johnsons has come in from Amarillo to negotiate the sale of their concession.”

  I felt my mouth drop open. Maybe half wasn’t enough for Guzman after all.

  The Chen-Johnson clan controlled the largest natgas concession. Their territory covered almost the entire panhandle, some forty
thousand square miles sitting atop the richest gas fields in the Republic. If Guzman managed to make a deal with the Chen-Johnsons, he’d hold every major gas play in the Republic. It would be an energy monopoly that not even the richest Saudis or Emirs had ever had before their oil started to dry up.

  Guzman said nothing for several moments.

  “Trust,” he finally said. “Finding someone you can trust in this world is no small thing. You of all people should know how much I value trust, yes?”

  “Of course, Don Flaco.”

  He gazed at me coldly. “Do you know how they got to Pancho Villa in the end? Someone he trusted betrayed him and let his enemies gun him down. A whole gringo army never managed to touch him but a traitor, a single traitor close to him, did him in.”

  I swallowed hard, understanding the implication. “Don Flaco,” I said, “I have no family or friends left in Chen-Johnson territory. My loyalties are here with you.” I made sure I didn’t blink. So many people blinked when they lied.

  Guzman stared at me for a long, uncomfortable moment before speaking again. “I have a little birdie in the Chen-Johnson clan who thinks the offer is some kind of trick to gain my confidence. Bait in the water to catch a big trout, entiendes?” I nodded and he continued. “But some of my men think the deal’s legit. I need to know if the offer is a lie, brujo.”

  The bodyguard who’d taken care of the cowboy appeared and said, “Don Flaco, it’s time.”

  Moments later I walked through the mosquito net curtains of the dining tent and my blood ran cold as I recognized the visitor.

  I hadn’t seen Abner Cunningham in three years. He was supposed to be dead. Killed the same day my parents were killed.

  ***

  I’d just turned seventeen the day a band of panhandle freelancers raided our home, that cramped little house my parents and I shared with Abner and his wife just outside Dalhart. It was literally the middle of nowhere, a lonely outpost on the western periphery of Chen-Johnson territory, flat grasslands as far as you could see under a wide, cloudless sky. Mom had her doubts about being so far away from Amarillo, but the Chen-Johnson’s security chief had assured us it was safe. Well inside protected territory, he’d insisted.