GUNFIGHT AT THE SUGARLOAF PET FOOD & TAXIDERMY

by Jeff Carlson

Jeff Carlson’s short fiction has appeared in venues such as Strange Horizons, Space and Time, and Writers of the Future XXIV. His first novel, Plague Year, will be published by Ace in August. He welcomes correspondence from readers at www.jverse.com. Jeff’s great-grandmother was a Montana homesteader in the early 1890s, and his familiarity with the state comes in handy in his first story for Asimov’s—a near-future thriller about a young woman who will have to draw upon her remarkable résumé to have any chance of surviving the...

* * * *

Fortunately there was always one more moron coming down the road. Otherwise Julie would’ve 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 hotheads, 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 brakelights 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 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. 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 MizBoo-kane or Boy-shane.

Julie did not prefer the hostile anonymity of urban life. It was just that her first thirty-six 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 drug 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 sunvisor.

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. He seemed to view 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. Her decoys were cursed bitterly 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. Not in a brotherly way, she hoped. His hands were giant and scarred and always nimble with equipment, colored like cinnamon to her chocolate, and 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 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.

There was a vehicle on the jeep trail behind the garage, a car easing its way down 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’d wanted to. 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.

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 had 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? The foreman 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. 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 around the severed, 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, all these greenhouses, 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 and 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 WatchMan 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. The work paid 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 of 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 six-pack 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 and 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 could be a paying market—and a trio of elves stood 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 looked 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 aimed 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, expecting 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 bandsaw and that raw hurt was the promise of death.

But LaChapelle wasn’t handling the smoke well either. He went completely bug-nuts, and started 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 hair—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?

Julie 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.”

Julie stepped closer and Highsong brought his open arms in, enfolding her. When she kissed him, he kissed back.