Juarez Square and Other Stories
Read Juarez Square and Other Stories Online
Authors: D.L. Young
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
[email protected]
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 thought 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.”