The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Late in the afternoon, Sandra headed off down the road, leaving him to sit in the kitchen and watch the news on the TV that had been unrolled and stuck to the freezer door. Upstairs, the sound of a shooter game came from Sean’s room. Casey dissolved a vitamin tablet in a cup of warm chicken broth, slurped it up slowly through his tube, then cleaned the tube and cup at the sink.

  Sandra came back half an hour later with a package under her arm.

  “C’mon,” she said. “Something to show you here.”

  Inside the Quonset hut, she handed him the box and unfolded the tarp again on the floor, carefully brushing it clean of dust.

  Casey popped it open. Nestled in old newspapers was a femur head. It looked like real bone, or close enough. He touched it with one finger pad, and felt the cool of hard porcelain.

  “Printed ceramic,” said Sandra. “A friend of mine has a really good printer in his shed. He can’t do metal, though, so I’m afraid it won’t be nearly as good as your old titanium one. Should be better than one held together with cheap glue, though. It’ll get you farther.”

  “This … I can’t afford this.”

  “You’ve done two days of specialized tech support, not to mention working on the harvester.”

  “That’s not nearly enough.…”

  “Jesus, Casey. Sit down and help me install it, would you? The thing’s done, and you can argue about how much an unlicensed copy of a femur is worth some other time, okay?”

  He didn’t say anything, then started to mutter some proper thanks. His eye sockets burned, where what was left of his tear ducts had been sealed off by the doctors. He lowered himself to the tarp and began peeling back the rubberized surface of his knee and the plastic casing of his upper leg.

  * * *

  He left two days later, having done every bit of work he could at the farm, as well as helping out two of Sandra’s neighbors. Terry didn’t show up again, but the black-and-white always seemed to be lurking nearby.

  “I’d drive you, but I’ve got to head over to my cousin’s today,” Sandra said. “If you’re sure you won’t stay one more day, you should go south. Skirt around Patience Lake that way, the south end is outside of Terry’s jurisdiction. Head into Saskatoon from there.”

  Casey nodded, mapping a route. It would take him all day, into the night.

  He thanked her as much as he thought she could stand, and started walking.

  The puddles from the nightly storms baked off the gravel roads by mid-morning. Casey set a relatively slow pace, pausing several times under trees to drink water and let his fan cool his core down. Crickets droned their steady song from the grass.

  His new knee felt good, or at least it wasn’t setting off any alarms. He walked past farms, four out of five of them derelict, boarded-up houses standing amid fields watched by quadcopters or blimps.

  He veered west finally, just short of dusk, as the banks of heavy black stormclouds gathered again in the south. He started keeping an eye out for an abandoned farmhouse or barn to spend the night in. He could too-easily imagine long fingers of lighting drawn down to his metal bones.

  He found shelter a few moments before the edge of the storm hit.

  The old house had been torn apart from the inside. His low-light vision showed long tears in the walls where copper wire had been ripped out. Parts of the ceiling had collapsed where the light fixtures had been torn down. The kitchen was a disaster area, sink and piping torn out. The living room wasn’t too bad, though. There was a battered couch missing two legs, dotted with stains. Casey avoided it, sweeping a section of floor clean with his feet and sitting down in the corner, back against a wall.

  He set his system to monitor the ambient noise—if the storm dropped in intensity, he could head out again, cover some miles in the cool of the early morning. He drifted off to sleep, lulled by rolling thunder.

  The beeping of his alarm woke him into a state of confusion. Thunder still rolled outside the house, and rain hammered on the vinyl siding. Why had his alarm gone off?

  Then he heard the other noise drop away—a heavy diesel growl. Someone had just shut off a big truck.

  Casey slipped a hand into his backpack and pulled out the largest screwdriver from his set of tools, a flathead with a chipped yellow plastic handle. It didn’t actually fit any of the screws that held his legs or arms together, but it looked less suspicious than a knife.

  He pushed himself up slowly and amped up his hearing, to almost painful levels as another peal of thunder shook the house’s timbers.

  Two sets of footsteps, moving slowly, too cautious to be people just trying to get out of the rain. They came up the wooden steps, keeping to the outside edges of the stairs, avoiding the creaking middle.

  Casey pushed himself up and sidled toward the door, screwdriver held like a dagger.

  “Gimme the goggles,” someone said, a low whisper. A young voice, sullen, a little scared.

  “Fuck you, you forgot yours, use a flashlight.” Young again, and again that hint of fear.

  “We’ll spook him!”

  “He isn’t getting far. He’s not that fast.”

  The second voice was familiar. His hands would have shaken, if they’d been flesh. Betrayal didn’t feel quite the same without a whole body.

  “In there,” said the second voice.

  The one without the goggles complied, almost stumbling over some debris, swearing, slapping at the walls for support. They were coming closer, in through the dining room now.

  Lightning flashed, a series of blue-white arcs lighting up the room. The boy poked his head into the living room, stepped forward. A taser was in his hand.

  Casey stood still as a statue.

  The boy took one more step. Casey turned and plunged the screwdriver into the kid’s thigh. The metal disappeared, just a plastic handle stuck to faded denim.

  The boy screamed, first in shock and then in pain. He staggered back, falling, both hands reaching for the screwdriver. The taser clattered to the floor, and Casey lunged for it, scrabbling on all fours. Lighting flashed and his eyes whited out for a second, too much light straight into the artificial retinas. He felt for the weapon, hands sweeping the floor like a blind man’s cane.

  “Dev!” shouted the second kid.

  Dev swore and cursed and kicked at the floor with his good leg.

  Behind him stood Sean, Sandra’s grandson.

  Casey found the dropped taser, grabbed its plastic barrel and fumbled for the grip.

  “Shit!” Sean said. He raised his own taser, a ruby red laser sight gleaming through the drywall dust.

  Sean fired.

  A sudden jerk at the side of Casey’s cheek, but no shock, no loss of control. Then he was up again, still moving, the other taser in his hands. Sean took a single step back. Casey shot the boy in the chest, and he went down hard.

  Unspooled metal wire lay on the floor between them. Sean’s shot had been a good one. But the metal barbs had glanced off the smooth, hard plastic of Casey’s face. He reached up and felt two tiny divots on one cheek.

  * * *

  In Sean’s backpack, Casey found heavy-duty zip ties. He strung a couple together as a tourniquet and put it around Dev’s leg above the oozing wound.

  “Don’t take the screwdriver out, no matter what you do,” Casey said. “Imagine a geyser, okay?”

  Dev nodded, his face grey.

  Sean he cuffed, hands behind the kid’s back. He bundled them both into the truck, Devon in the back under the canopy. The vehicle had been left in manual mode.

  “What’s the password?” Casey asked Sean, as he boosted himself into the driver’s seat.

  Sean glared back, sullen. More than just a kid in deep trouble, though. Scared, Casey thought, but not as scared as he ought to be.

  “C’mon, your friend needs to get to a hospital.”

  Sean told him, and Casey thought the words into the wireless login. The truck was a newer model, good haptics, and he enjoyed the feeling of the ti
res digging through mud as they wound their way back down the battered dirt roads, out to the gravel and back onto the highway. The windshield wipers slapped away sheets of rain.

  He pulled up in front of Sandra’s place.

  “You’re getting out here,” Casey said.

  “Please don’t tell her!” Sean blurted, the first thing he’d said since they started driving.

  Casey just stared at him. “She doesn’t already know?” Casey asked. “She didn’t send you?” It was bullshit, of course. But it was a lever to get at the truth. “She knew where I was going. If she didn’t send you, who did?”

  Sean looked down.

  “C’mon, say it,” said Casey.

  “Terry,” Sean said. Terry, who kept an eye on everything through the drones that hovered over every field. Terry who’d watched him walk out into the middle of nowhere and then sent two kids to ambush him.

  “We owe him,” Sean said. “A lot more than we can pay, right now. He, he said this would have squared us away for six months.”

  “And you were going to what, just leave me out there? Pull off my arms and legs, yank out my eyes, sell them, let me starve slow in the middle of nowhere?”

  “No!” Sean said. “We were going to put you in a public car, have it drop you off at the hospital. There’s a Veterans Affairs center in Regina. Terry said they’d keep you there until they ordered you some new limbs.”

  Casey shook his head. The center would have been bad enough. Months of waiting, or hobbling around on the cheapest limbs. But he’d never have made it there. His organic remains would have wound up fertilizing one of the more distant fields, of that Casey had no doubt. Sandra had said Terry was careful. Leaving witnesses wasn’t careful.

  “Get out,” he said, popping the door lock with a thought.

  Sean stumbled out, and Casey dropped out on his side, careful to land on his good leg. “We’re going inside to have a talk with your grandmother.”

  He closed the doors and told the truck to haul Dev to the nearest hospital, patting its fender as it pulled out of the driveway.

  Casey pounded on the screen door until a light came on upstairs. Sandra, wearing sweatpants and a Rough Riders T-shirt, opened the door. Her face was confused, bleary with sleep. Her eyes dropped to Sean’s wrists, zip-tied together and to his belt. She almost broke then, Casey thought. Her face began to crumple and her eyes welled for a moment. Then she clamped down again, through force of will. The sadness and shock were still there, but controlled.

  Casey wondered, as he cut Sean loose with an X-ACTO knife, what that kind of control cost.

  “Tell her,” he said to Sean.

  Sean spilled the story, circling around and trying to justify himself, until Sandra slapped one hand down hard on the kitchen table, a sound like a rifle crack.

  “Was it your idea, or Dev’s, or Terry’s?” she said.

  “Terry called me,” Sean said.

  “How much were you going to get paid?” Sandra’s eyes were hard as polished steel.

  “Nothing!” Sean said. “Dev was getting six thousand. We were going to have our debt cleared.”

  “We owe him more than six thousand,” Sandra said.

  “I know that!” Sean yelled, his voice breaking. “Do you want to end up like the McKays? They’re gone, grandma, remember? Do you want to have to sell everything, declare bankruptcy, and move into a pre-fab welfare box in the city? If we didn’t get some money soon, we were going to have to start selling equipment, and what comes after that? What would we have left?”

  Sean flung himself back into his chair, still rubbing at his left wrist, at the red mark left by the zip tie. He looked at Casey.

  “We’d have been better off if you’d never stopped here,” Sean said. He sounded tired, and weighed down by more than fourteen years.

  “I know,” said Casey. “Give me a ride to Saskatoon. Get me out of here, tonight, far away from Terry and his boys as we can get. And I won’t say anything to the Mounties about Sean.

  “You know Terry wouldn’t have left me as a loose end, alive,” Casey said. “Sean could do an adult sentence. Accessory to attempted murder. But I’ll just walk away, because you don’t deserve to have another bad break.”

  Sandra’s face was hard, hurting. She swallowed and looked across the table at her grandson, his face now white.

  “That’s more kindness than Sean showed you, I know. But Terry … You’d best be gone before he realizes what’s happened. We’d better get you in the truck, now. Otherwise, it’ll be like what happened to Bill Frazier, except not as neat. Maybe he’ll finally see the RCMP come down on him, but none of us are going to be around to see any of that.”

  The screen door had barely had time to swing shut behind them before they noticed it. Sean picked it up first, the faint orange glow to the west. Casey stopped and zoomed in. Over the rolling prairie, a column of smoke rose up, oily and black.

  “I don’t think Dev made it to the hospital,” Casey said. “Dammit.” He wondered now whether it wouldn’t have been three graves, not just his, that Terry would have dug.

  Casey cranked up his hearing. The sound of grass rustling in the wind was like the roar of a waterfall. He could hear trucks and drones heading up and down the highway, electric motors whirring and tires hissing on the wet pavement. And in the distance but coming on fast, fast as a storm, was the sound of the big black-and-white. Off to the west, its lights strobed red and blue on the horizon.

  “Christ on a crutch,” Sandra muttered. “I’m getting Sean out of here and finding the rifle.”

  “No,” Casey said. “Rifle won’t stop him. Need something bigger.”

  “Don’t have anything bigger. You think we hunt elephants around here?”

  “This is a farm,” Casey said. “You’re not short on tools.”

  When the car spun into the farmyard, spraying arcs of gravel, Casey stood near the metal curve of the Quonset hut. He raised one hand, a cheerful wave.

  The driver’s side of the car sprang open and Terry lunged out, his arms two sides of a triangle on the car’s hood, in his hands the giant pistol.

  Casey was already behind the shed, jogging. The first shot punched a hole in the metal just in front of his face. He skidded to a halt on the gravel and the second blasted through just behind him, peppering his shirt with shards of metal.

  From above, Casey heard the whine of a crop-monitoring drone, laboring against the gusts that lingered in the storm’s wake.

  He was using the blimp’s cameras, Casey realized. Terry was targeting him through his eyes in the sky, lining up his shots using targeting software.

  Casey bolted, pushing his legs to their limits. They weren’t made for running, weren’t high-end military models. They were hospital jobs, three years old, battered and used hard, and with a cheap replacement knee on one side.

  Something in the knee clicked as he rounded the far corner of the Quonset. Casey lost control, muscles failing to push him forward, and he fell. His hands hit the gravel, sending shocks of pain straight to his brain, while the red indicators flashed in the corners of his vision. SEEK REPAIR, they said.

  That’s all I was trying to do, he thought.

  He pulled himself upright, propped himself against the cinderblock wall at the flat end of the shed. Next to him the big sliding doors were open, the interior black.

  There were no more shots. The red and blue lights still flickered on the far side of the building. Footsteps crunched on the gravel, coming around the other side of the building.

  Terry stood with his back to the big yellow light that illuminated the farmyard, his face in shadow. The big pistol was still in his right hand, but lowered.

  “Casehead,” Terry said. “Did I clip you there?”

  “Knee went out.”

  Terry chuckled. “Where are the others?”

  “Not here,” Casey said.

  Terry cocked his head to one side, accessing some video.

  “They’re just
in the house. Unless they’ve got some secret tunnel or something. C’mon. We can all go have a chat together.”

  “No.”

  “I’m not even going to bother saying you’re under arrest, Casehead. We know how this is going to go down. You’re going to wind up in a vets’ hospital, if you’re lucky. I had phone and net cut off to the house before I was halfway here, so you’re not calling anyone.”

  He stepped forward, right hand still holding the gun casually, left outstretched.

  The shape unfolded from inside the Quonset, tarp-shrouded. It reached out with metal arms and lurched forward, wheels crunching gravel.

  Terry jumped back. His gun snapped up and he fired twice. Casey felt the shots send shudders through the metal chassis. Probably did some damage, but farm equipment was built tough.

  One arm, designed to hold and drive in heavy wood posts, clamped around Terry’s ankle. The cyborg staggered and fell, his knee at an uncomfortable angle. He was still trying to line up another shot with the revolver when the augur came down like steel lightning.

  Casey turned away for a second, relying on the crude cameras on the post-hole digger to watch. Terry screamed. He had real skin over those limbs. That was real pain, not transmitted by wires or red warnings flashed in the corner of his vision. Casey almost felt bad for the security man, as the digger tore off his right arm.

  Terry stopped struggling after a moment, though the arm kept twitching on the ground.

  Casey levered himself upright and locked that damaged knee in place again as best he could, ordering the tendons and muscles to tighten. He walked over to just outside of Terry’s reach. Strips of skin hung from the edge of the mangled arm, dripping blood onto the wet gravel. Shredded plastic muscle hung behind that, and in the center the bright, twisted metal of a heavy steel humerus. Casey gingerly pulled the heavy pistol safely free from the twitching fingers.

  “Sandra thought you’d be too cautious than to do something this stupid,” Casey said. “Stripping a vet for parts, murdering him. It would have taken a while, but someone would have eventually tracked you down and figured out where my parts came from, who killed me. But I’m guessing you’re already more desperate than anyone around here knows. Money, right?”