The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Second Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  The man had a story to tell, and Timo had the eye to see it. Most people missed the story. But Timo always saw. He had the eye.

  Maybe he’d buy a top-shelf tequila to celebrate his page view money. Some diapers for his sister Amparo’s baby. If the photos were good, maybe he’d grab a couple syndication licenses, too. Swap the shit-ass battery in the Ford. Get something with a bigger range dropped into it. Let him get around without always wondering if he was going to lose a charge.

  Some of these could go to Xinhua, for sure. The Chinese news agencies loved seeing America ripping itself to shit. BBC might bite, too. Foreigners loved that story. Only thing that would sell better is if it had a couple guns: America, the Savage Land or some shit. That was money, there. Might be rent for a bigger place. A place where Amparo could bail when her boyfriend got his ass drunk and angry.

  Timo kept snapping photos, changing angles, framing and exposure. Diving deeper into the dead man’s world. Capturing scuffed-up boots and plastic prayer beads. He hummed to himself as he worked, talking to his subject, coaxing the best out of the corpse.

  “You don’t know it, but you’re damn lucky I came along,” Timo said. “If one of those citizen journalist pendejo lice got you first, they wouldn’t have treated you right. They’d shoot a couple shitty frames and upload them social. Maybe sell a Instagram pic to the blood rags … but they ain’t quality. Me? When I’m done, people won’t be able to dream without seeing you.”

  It was true, too. Any asshole could snap a pic of some girl blasted to pieces in an electric Mercedes, but Timo knew how to make you cry when you saw her splattered all over the front pages of the blood rags. Some piece of narco ass, and you’d still be bawling your eyes out over her tragic death. He’d catch the girl’s little fuzzy dice mirror ornament spattered with blood, and your heart would just break.

  Amparo said Timo had the eye. Little bro could see what other people didn’t, even when it was right in front of their faces.

  Every asshole had a camera these days; the difference was that Timo could see.

  Timo backed off and got some quick video. He ran the recording back, listening to the audio, satisfying himself that he had the sound of it: the wind rattling the chain link under the high hot Arizona sky; meadowlark call from somewhere next to the CAP waters; but most of all, the empty dangling jugs, the three of them plunking hollowly against each other—a dead man turned into an offering and a wind chime.

  Timo listened to the deep thunk-thunk-thunk tones.

  Good sounds.

  Good empty desert sounds.

  He crouched and framed the man’s gnawed arm and the milk jugs. From this angle, he could just capture the blue line of the CAP canal and the leading edge of Phoenix beyond: cookie-cutter low-stories with lava-rock front yards and broke-down cars on blocks. And somewhere in there, some upstanding example of Arizona Minute-Man militia pride had spied this sucker scrambling down the dusty hillside with his water jugs and decided to put a cap in his ass.

  CAP in his ass, Timo chuckled to himself.

  The crunch of tires and the grind of an old bio-diesel engine announced Lucy’s pickup coming up the dirt road. A trail of dust followed. Rusty beast of flex-fuel, older than the girl who drove it and twice as beat up, but damn was it a beast. It had been one of the things Timo liked about Lucy, soon as he met her. Girl drove a machine that didn’t give a damn about anything except driving over shit.

  The truck came to a halt. The driver’s side door squealed aside as Lucy climbed out. Army green tank top and washed out jeans. White skin, scorched and bronzed by Arizona sun, her reddish brown hair jammed up under an ASU Geology Department ball cap.

  Every time he saw her, Timo liked what he saw. Phoenix hadn’t dried her right, yet, but still, she had some kind of tenacious-ass demon in her. Something about the way her pale blue skeptical eyes burned for a story told you that once she bit in, she wouldn’t let go. Crazy-ass pitbull. The girl and the truck were a pair. Unstoppable.

  “Please tell me I didn’t drive out here for a swimmer,” Lucy said as she approached.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think I was on the other side of town when you called, and I had to burn diesel to get here.”

  She was trying to look jaded, but her eyes were already flicking from detail to detail, gathering the story before Timo even had to open his mouth. She might be new in Phoenix, but the girl had the eye. Just like Timo, Lucy saw things.

  “Texan?” she asked.

  Timo grinned. “You think?”

  “Well, he’s a Merry Perry, anyway. I don’t know many other people who would join that cult.” She crouched down in front of the corpse and peered into the man’s torn face. Reaching out, she caressed the prayer beads embedded in the man’s neck. “I did a story on Merry Perrys. Roadside spiritual aid for the refugees.” She sighed. “They were all buying the beads and making the prayers.”

  “Crying and shaking and repentance.”

  “You’ve been to their services, too?”

  “Everybody’s done that story at least once,” Timo said. “I shot a big old revival tent over in New Mexico, outside of Carlsbad. The preacher had a nasty ass thorn bush, wanted volunteers.”

  Timo didn’t think he’d ever forget the scene. The tent walls sucking and flapping as blast-furnace winds gusted over them. The dust-coated refugees all shaking, moaning, and working their beads for God. All of them asking what they needed to give up in order to get back to the good old days of big oil money and fancy cities like Houston and Austin. To get back to a life before hurricanes went Cat 6 and Big Daddy Drought sucked whole states dry.

  Lucy ran her fingers along the beads that had sunk deep into the dead man’s neck. “They strangled him.”

  “Sure looks that way.”

  Timo could imagine this guy earning the prayer beads one at time. Little promises of God’s love that he could carry with him. He imagined the man down in the dirt, all crying and spitty and grateful for his bloody back and for the prayer beads that had ended up embedded in his swollen, blackening neck, like some kind of Mardi Gras party gone wrong. The man had done his prayers and repentance, and this was where he’d ended up.

  “What happened to his hand?” Lucy asked.

  “Dog got it.”

  “Christ.”

  “If you want some better art, we can back off for a little while, and the dogs’ll come back. I can get a good tearaway shot if we let them go after him again—”

  Lucy gave Timo a dirty look, so he hastily changed tacks. “Anyway, I thought you should see him. Good art, and it’s a great story. Nobody’s got something like this.”

  Lucy straightened. “I can’t pitch this, Timo. It’s sad as hell, but it isn’t new. Nobody cares if Old Tex here hiked across a thousand miles of desert just to get strung up as some warning. It’s sad, but everyone knows how much people hate Texans. Kindle Post did a huge story on Texas lynchings.”

  “Shit.” Timo sighed. “Every time I think you’re wise, I find out you’re still wet.”

  “Oh fuck off, Timo.”

  “No, I’m serious girl. Come here. Look with your eye. I know you got the eye. Don’t make me think I’m wasting my time on you.”

  Timo crouched down beside the dead man, framing him with this hands. “Old Tex here hikes his ass across a million miles of burning desert, and he winds up here. Maybe he’s thinking he’s heading for California and gets caught with the State Sovereignty Act, can’t cross no state borders now. Maybe he just don’t have the cash to pay coyotes. Maybe he thinks he’s special and he’s going to swim the Colorado and make it up north across Nevada. Anyways, Tex is stuck squatting out in the hills, watching us live the good life. But then the poor sucker sees the CAP, and he’s sick of paying to go to some public pump for water, so he grabs his bottles and goes in for a little sip—”

  “—and someone puts a bullet in him,” Lucy finished. “I get it. I’m trying to tell you nobody cares about dead Texan
s. People string them up all the time. I saw it in New Mexico, too. Merry Perry prayer tents and Texans strung up on fences. Same in Oklahoma. All the roads out of Texas have them. Nobody cares.”

  Wet.

  Timo sighed. “You’re lucky you got me for your tour guide. You know that, right? You see the cigarettes? See them little bitty Beam and Cuervo bottles? The black candles? The flowers?”

  Timo waited for her take in the scene again. To see the way he saw. “Old Tex here isn’t a warning. This motherfucker’s an offering. People turned Old Tex into an offering for Santa Muerte. They’re using Tex here to get in good with the Skinny Lady.”

  “Lady Death,” Lucy said. “Isn’t that a cult for narcos?”

  “Nah. She’s no cult. She’s a saint. Takes care of people who don’t got pull with the Church. When you need help on something the Church don’t like, you go to Santa Muerte. The Skinny Lady takes care of you. She knows we all need a little help. Maybe she helps narcos, sure, but she helps poor people, too. She helps desperate people. When Mother Mary’s too uptight, you call the Skinny Lady to do the job.”

  “Sounds like you know a lot about her.”

  “Oh hell yes. Got an app on my phone. Dial her any time I want and get a blessing.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “True story. There’s a lady down in Mexico runs a big shrine. You send her a dollar, she puts up an offering for you. Makes miracles happen. There’s a whole list of miracles that Santa Muerte does. Got her own hashtag.”

  “So what kind of miracles do you look for?”

  “Tips, girl! What you think?” Timo sighed. “Narcos call on Santa Muerte all the time when they want to put a bullet in their enemies. And I come in after and take the pictures. Skinny Lady gets me there before the competition is even close.”

  Lucy was looking at him like he was crazy, and it annoyed him. “You know, Lucy, it’s not like you’re the only person who needs an edge out here.” He waved at the dead Texan. “So? You want the story, or not?”

  She still looked skeptical. “If anyone can make an offering to Santa Muerte online, what’s this Texan doing upside down on a fence?”

  “DIY, baby.”

  “I’m serious, Timo. What makes you think Tex here is an offering?”

  Because Amparo’s boyfriend just lost his job to some loser Longhorn who will work for nothing. Because my water bill just went up again, and my rationing just went down. Because Roosevelt Lake is gone dry, and I got Merry Perrys doing revivals right on the corner of 7th and Monte Vista, and they’re trying to get my cousin Marco to join them.

  “People keep coming,” Timo said, and he was surprised at the tightness of his throat as he said it. “They smell that we got water, and they just keep coming. It’s like Texas is a million, million ants, and they just keep coming.”

  “There are definitely a lot of people in Texas.”

  “More like a tsunami. And we keep getting hit by wave after wave of them, and we can’t hold ’em all back.” He pointed at the body. “This is Last Stand shit, here. People are calling in the big guns. Maybe they’re praying for Santa Muerte to hit the Texans with a dust storm and strip their bones before they get here. For sure they’re asking for something big.”

  “So they call on Lady Death.” But Lucy was shaking her head. “It’s just that I need more than a body to do a story.”

  “But I got amazing pics!”

  “I need more. I need quotes. I need a trend. I need a story. I need an example…”

  Lucy was looking across the CAP canal toward the subdivision as she spoke. Timo could almost see the gears turning in her head …

  “Oh no. Don’t do it, girl.”

  “Do what?” But she was smiling, already.

  “Don’t go over there and start asking who did the deed.”

  “It would be a great story.”

  “You think some motherfucker’s just gonna say they out and wasted Old Tex?”

  “People love to talk, if you ask them the right questions.”

  “Seriously, Lucy. Let the cops take care of it. Let them go over there and ask the questions.”

  Lucy gave him a pissed-off look.

  “What?” Timo asked.

  “You really think I’m that wet?”

  “Well…”

  “Seriously? How long have we known each other? Do you really think you can fool me into thinking the cops are gonna give a shit about another dead Merry Perry? How wet do you think I am?”

  Lucy spun and headed for her truck.

  “This ain’t some amusement park!” Timo called after her. “You can’t just go poke the Indians and think they’re gonna native dance for you. People here are for real!” He had to shout the last because the truck’s door was already screeching open.

  “Don’t worry about me!” Lucy called as she climbed into the beast. “Just get me good art! I’ll get our story!”

  * * *

  “So let me get this straight,” Timo asked, for the fourth or fifth time. “They just let you into their house?”

  They were kicked back on the roof at Sid’s Cafe with the rest of the regulars, taking potshots at the prairie dogs who had invaded the half-finished subdivision ruins around the bar, trading an old .22 down a long line as patrons took bets.

  The subdivision was called Sonora Bloom Estates, one of those crap-ass investments that had gone belly up when Phoenix finally stopped bailing out over-pumped subdivisions. Desert Bloom Estates had died because some bald-ass pencil-pusher in City Planning had got a stick up his ass and said the water district wasn’t going to support them. Now, unless some company like IBIS or Halliburton could frack their way to some magical new water supply, Desert Bloom was only ever going to be a town for prairie dogs.

  “They just let you in?” Timo asked. “Seriously?”

  Lucy nodded smugly. “They let me into their house, and then into their neighbor’s houses. And then they took me down into their basements and showed me their machine guns.” Lucy took a swig of Negro Modelo. “I make friends, Timo.” She grinned. “I make a lot of friends. It’s what I do.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Believe it, or don’t.” Lucy shrugged. “Anyway, I’ve got our story. ‘Phoenix’s Last Stand.’ You wouldn’t believe how they’ve got themselves set up. They’ve got war rooms. They’ve got ammo dumps. This isn’t some cult militia, it’s more like the army of the apocalypse. Way beyond preppers. These people are getting ready for the end of the world, and they want to talk about it.”

  “They want to talk.”

  “They’re desperate to talk. They like talking. All they talk about is how to shove Texas back where it came from. I mean, you see the inside of their houses, and it’s all Arizona for the People, and God and Santa Muerte to back them up.”

  “They willing to let me take pictures?”

  Lucy gave him another smug look. “No faces. That’s the only condition.”

  Timo grinned. “I can work with that.”

  Lucy set her beer down. “So what’ve you shot so far?”

  “Good stuff.” Timo pulled out his camera and flicked through images. “How about this one?” He held up the camera for her to see. “Poetry, right?”

  Lucy eyed the image with distaste. “We need something PG, Timo.”

  “PG? Come on. PG don’t get the hits. People love the bodies and the blood. Sangre this, sangre that. They want the blood, and they want the sex. Those are the only two things that get hits.”

  “This isn’t for the local blood rags,” Lucy said. “We need something PG from the dead guy.”

  She accepted the rifle from a hairy biker dude sitting next to her and sighted out at the dimming landscape beyond. The sun was sinking over the sprawl of the Phoenix basin, a brown blanket of pollution and smoke from California wild fires turning orange and gaudy.

  Timo lifted his camera and snapped a couple quick shots of Lucy as she sighted down the rifle barrel. Wet girl trying to act dry. Not kn
owing that everyone who rolled down to Phoenix tried to show how tough they were by picking up a nice rifle and blasting away at the furry critters out in the subdivisions.

  The thought reminded Timo that he needed to get some shots of Sumo Hernandez and his hunting operation. Sucker had a sweet gig bringing Chinese tourists in to blast at coyotes and then feed them rattlesnake dinners.

  He snapped a couple more pictures and checked the results. Lucy looked damn good on the camera’s LCD. He’d got her backlit, the line of her rifle barrel across the blaze of the red ball sun. Money shot for sure.

  He flicked back into the dead Texan pictures.

  “PG, PG…,” Timo muttered. “What the fuck is PG? It’s not like the dude’s dick is out. Just his eaten-off face.”

  Lucy squeezed off another shot and handed the rifle on.

  “This is going to go big, Timo. We don’t want it to look like it’s just another murder story. That’s been done. This has to look smart and scary and real. We’re going to do a series.”

  “We are?”

  “Hell yes, we are. I mean, this could be Pulitzer type stuff. ‘Phoenix’s Last Stand.’”

  “I don’t give a shit about Pulitzers. I just want good hits. I need money.”

  “It will get us hits. Trust me. We’re onto something good.”

  Timo flicked through more of his pictures. “How about just the beads in the guy’s neck?” He showed her a picture. “This one’s sweet.”

  “No.” Lucy shook her head. “I want the CAP in it.”

  Timo gave up on stifling his exasperation. “PG, CAP. Anything else, ma’am?”

  Lucy shot him a look. “Will you trust me on this? I know what I’m doing.”

  “Wet-ass newcomer says she knows what she’s doing.”

  “Look, you’re the expert when it comes to Phoenix. But you’ve got to trust me. I know what I’m doing. I know how people think back East. I know what people want on the big traffic sites. You know Phoenix, and I trust you. Now you’ve got to trust me. We’re onto something. If we do it right, we’re going to blow up. We’re going to be a phenomenon.”

  The hairy biker guy handed the rifle back to Lucy for another shot.