Asimovs future history v.., p.3
Hollow Beasts, page 3
The sun was sinking toward the faraway horizon when they finally arrived at the secluded springs around eight in the evening. Happily, there was no one there but them. Yvonne had told Ivan she would just die and then kill him if there was, like, some fat old man naked in there.
Ivan and Yvonne stared at the woods, the clearing, the flowers and view, overjoyed not so much because it was beautiful and spoke to their souls but more because the whole setup would make for some kick-ass pics. There were three separate natural hydrothermal pools, with the biggest and most photogenic one being in the center, overlooking the entire mountain and valley below. This place was perfection. It was Eden. Wild strawberries grew everywhere, and the fruits were so red and so tiny and so cute; they’d make for great photos! It was amazing how far you could see in every direction from up here, and even though it wasn’t cloudy or raining where they were—thank God—they could absolutely see two massive storms in the far-off distance, throwing down lightning bolts on the horizon. With the fiery colors streaking the sky, and the stars just coming out, and the sunset, and the storms, the photo potential was off the charts. Ivan would use burst mode and video to get some of that lightning. This was going to be amazeballs, and that was all.
As Ivan, who studied photography in his free time, set up the tripod and collapsible photo reflectors, Yvonne stripped down to her tangerine bikini and yellow floppy hat with the wide brim. She fixed her makeup, which was meant to look like no makeup, and crimped her long hair a bit with her fingers. Then she eased herself into the natural hot spring, which wasn’t as hot as it could have been and smelled a little bit like sulfur, truth be told, but nature didn’t exactly have an on-off button for volcanic action, so. As long as it looked amazing, they were golden. Careful not to mess up her hair or makeup, she found a good spot at the far edge of the pool and floated, butt up, with her head turned away from the camera, gazing out at the storms.
“Good,” said Ivan. “But, like, maybe a foot or two to the right from there. Yeah. Like that! Stay right there, babe. I’m almost done.”
It was then that Ivan screamed in a way Yvonne had never heard, not even when he fell off a ladder that time in Maine. He sounded like a wounded dinosaur mixed with a murdered baby. It was bloodcurdling and extremely upsetting, and when she spun around in shock to see what the heck was happening, half of her face got wet.
“Oh my fucking God!” shrieked Ivan, who was stooped over like someone had kicked him in the chest. He had dropped the camera and the tripod. One hand was pressed against his cheek and the other pointed at the ground near his feet, where long grass and wildflowers grew.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s a motherfucking hand!” Ivan backed away, shaking his head.
“A what?”
“A. Fucking. Hand. A human hand. There’s a human hand right there.”
“Where?”
“On the ground. Under those very lovely flowers, in the middle of those strawberries.”
“Like, coming out of the ground like a zombie hand?” Yvonne paddled across the natural pool to get a closer look but still couldn’t see anything.
“No. Like, totally by itself, on top of the ground. Like, somebody cut that shit off, and it’s right there.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. Why do you always have to question me about everything?”
“I wasn’t questioning you!”
“Asking me ‘Are you sure?’ is literally a question that is questioning me, Yvonne.”
“Sorry. But sometimes there are weird mushrooms that can look like body parts. See if it’s a mushroom.”
“It is not a fucking mushroom! It is wearing nail polish and a ring.”
“Seriously?”
“Look at it for yourself, if you don’t believe me!”
“Fine. Hand me a towel.”
Yvonne toweled off and joined Ivan in the grass. She wrinkled her nose when she saw the hand, and she blinked a bunch of times in a row, like maybe that could make it go away.
“Gross,” she said.
“Gross?” he asked her, looking incredulous.
“I mean, yeah. It is totally gross, and it is totally ruining our shoot.”
“Is that all you have to say?” he asked.
“I mean, it’s sad, I guess. And creepy as fuck.”
“It’s not a prop, Yvonne. It’s a real hand.”
“I understand that.”
“How can you be so calm?” he asked her.
“Well, what do you want me to do? Scream like a little girl, like you did?”
“That was unnecessary,” he said.
“I mean, it’s not going to help anything if I start screaming, is it?”
“No.”
“So. Now what?” asked Yvonne.
“I mean, we have to call the cops.”
Yvonne shrugged, like maybe they didn’t.
“Right?” Ivan asked. “We have to call the cops. We found a hand.”
“Yeah, totally,” she said, unconvinced. “But what about the photo shoot?”
“I mean, I don’t know.”
“It might not even be a real hand,” she said.
“It looks real.”
“But what if it’s not, and we don’t take the shots, and then Taylor totally wins? Again. She’s at three million now. That’s a whole million more than me.”
“Us.”
“Us. Sorry.”
“I can’t believe that’s what you’re worried about right now. Followers.”
“I mean, it’s our job, Ivan. It’s not about my ego. It’s about our paycheck. I’m not trying to be a jerk here. I am trying to balance our personal professional needs with our civic responsibilities. We came all the way here. Gas is expensive. We promised our sponsors.”
“Fine. So. What do you want to do?”
“I mean, we will absolutely call the cops. After we take the shots.”
“You’re—I don’t even know what to say,” said Ivan.
“I mean, it’s not like it’s going anywhere.” She gestured to the hand. “It’s just sitting there.”
Ivan sighed.
“We can be quick,” she said. “It’s just there’s a lot of money riding on this, as you know.”
“I know.”
They hesitated, both of them thinking about all the planning and money it had taken them to get here, about how they had a deadline to meet or they’d piss off their sponsors, and how they did not have a plan B for this shoot.
“We have everything almost ready,” she said, in full sales mode with him now.
“Yeah, and tomorrow there will probably be, like, a ton of cops up here, and we won’t even get to take the pictures at all.”
“And that would be no bueno.”
“No bueno.”
“Let’s just take some pics really fast. Like, in and out. We can run back down to the van.”
“We can sprint. But there’s no reason to not take advantage of the storm and the sunset—I mean, look at the light!”
“We came all the way here for this. And it sucks about that hand and that girl, and we will totally do the right thing, but this is also a job for us.”
“And we can’t screw up our job.”
Ivan resumed setting up the tripod, and Yvonne, after repairing her makeup that was meant to look like no makeup, lowered herself into the lukewarm sulfuric water, for the perfect photo of her butt.
3
On Monday morning, Jodi woke at 5:29 a.m., one minute before her phone’s alarm, configured to sound off as one of her favorite Lucinda Williams songs, was scheduled to ring. Her small L-shaped house, hand built with adobe and topped with a corrugated pitched metal roof, was nestled high in the Valle Ovejitas, a narrow alpine meadow cut in two by Ovejitas Creek, which ran down its middle. Three sides of the meadow were walled in by mountains, with the third side ending in a mesa that overlooked a vast expanse of high desert.
The house had been built in 1860 by her great-great-great-grandfather, Elias Chavez San Juan de Bautista, who also planted the original surrounding apple, pear, and apricot orchards. The place had been rebuilt and maintained by subsequent generations, some better than others, up until it fell into Jodi’s father’s hands when she was a kid, and froze, stylistically, in 1985, as he focused most of his energy on building the much larger Rancho Atencio cattle-and-sheep ranch he’d married into and then renamed Luna Land & Cattle. Until Jodi moved in two years ago with her daughter, then twelve, the house, referred to by the family as “the old Bautista cabin,” had mostly sat unused by anyone but bats and mice and was used primarily for weekend camping getaways and hunting and fishing trips. The bones of the house were strong, though, and it felt solid now that she’d put a new roof on it last year. The only other major renovations she’d had time for had been deep cleaning and repairing the gutters, replanting the house’s many food and flower gardens, ripping out the orange shag carpeting to reveal the beautiful pale matte pine floors beneath, and replastering the thick adobe walls a soothing creamy white. The kitchen and bathrooms still needed updating, but everything worked, and for now, that was all that mattered. Behind the house stood a large brown barn and a circle pen, and next to those were several sheds of varying sizes, which held all the equipment needed to run a small farm. To the left of the house and barn was a metal detached garage, heated and insulated, with its own small kitchen, large enough to house several trucks and home, at the moment, to a compact utility tractor and an all-terrain vehicle.
Before the alarm had a chance to come on, Jodi dismissed it with a swipe of her phone screen and snuggled in for just five more minutes beneath the plain white goose-down comforter, enjoying the earthen scent of home. The bed was the same one she had shared with her husband, Graham Livingston, back when he was still alive and they lived in a six-bedroom white colonial house on a cul-de-sac outside Andover. With its delicate Victorian-style cherrywood posts, the bed was a stylistic mismatch for this sturdy old rustic house made of mud and straw bales, and the only thing she’d kept from her former life. When Jodi put her nose just right, in certain places on that mattress, she could still smell Graham’s curly brown hair. When she lay awake at night, staring up at the posts, she could remember all those times she’d held on to them as he moved in his powerful, graceful way above her. She was not quite ready to give the bed up, yet, just as she was not able to let go of the feeling that they were still married.
Jodi reached out to tap the lamp on the bedside table and rolled onto one side to look at the framed photo she kept of Graham there. In it, Graham, tanned and windswept, paddled a bright-yellow sea kayak through the dark, agitated waters off the coast of Nantucket, minutes before storm clouds lashed through. He was like that, always teetering gleefully at the edge of some dangerous thing, needing the possibility of death or disaster to make him feel alive. She’d snapped the image on her phone, taken from her own rocking kayak, on one of their many trips to his family’s summer home on Cape Cod. He’d taken a pause in his latest daredevil action to give her one of his magnetic smiles. Those perfect white teeth were what had drawn her to him the first time she saw him, in their shared freshman seminar class at Harvard. Well, the teeth and the mischievous sparkling blue eyes. And the dimple. And the cleft chin. And the fact that he’d liked her, in spite of her enormous imposter syndrome. All of it.
“I love you,” she told the photo, kissing her fingertips before pressing them against the glass. “Wish me luck.”
After bathing in the old claw-foot tub in the master bath, she dressed in the uniform she had ironed the night before: black pants, sports bra, undershirt, bulletproof vest, black T-shirt, slate-gray button-down, and black ball cap. Jodi then tiptoed in thick athletic socks down the hallway from the back of the house toward the front, passing her daughter’s closed bedroom door and then the open guest room slash home office along the way. Jodi kept both sets of her work boots—the black cowboy boots and the black lace-up steel-toed hiking boots—next to the metal gun locker in the house’s entry closet. She was careful, as she prepared a pot of strong New Mexico piñon coffee, to be quiet so that Mila could sleep in. Teenagers needed rest, and it was summer vacation.
As the pot brewed, she slipped on her cowboy boots and went out into the chilly morning to let Juana out of her enclosure, and to tend to the morning chores that came along with owning your own chickens and horses. At this altitude, mornings often hovered around freezing, even in the summer. As Jodi worked, Juana, her powerful seventy-five-pound brown-and-black Belgian Malinois, often mistaken for a German shepherd, with a K-9 police dog certification, ran around sniffing everything on the ten-acre homestead. Though the dog had plenty of water in her enclosure, she preferred her morning drink to come straight from the clear cold flow of the Ovejitas Creek, fed all year round by springs and high snowpack on the surrounding Ovejas Mountains. Jodi got the dog as a puppy, and they had both gone through their training together. People said dogs were man’s best friend, but in this case, a dog, Juana, was a woman’s best friend, and there were times Jodi swore, looking into the soulful creature’s golden-colored eyes, that they must have known each other in some past life or something.
Juana was first to hear the minivan crunching its way up the long, rough dirt road that stretched a half mile from the state highway to the locked gate to Jodi’s property, an acre away from the house. The dog began to bark, but Jodi silenced her with a hand gesture and the word Halt. Like most police dogs educated in the United States, Juana had been trained in German, and it just so happened that halt was the same in English too.
“Hier,” Jodi commanded the dog, meaning here, as she headed toward the broad front porch of the house to await the arrival of the expected visitor beneath its eaves, which were hung with bright-red chile ristras and hanging pots of flowering geraniums.
The brown minivan belonged to the Our Lady of La Trappe Monastery, a secluded rural abbey nestled along the banks of the Chama River, thirty-seven miles northwest of here, a stone’s throw from the Colorado border. Though the monks who lived there were dedicated to prayer and study, they were best known by the heathens in the region for their tasty craft beers. Trappists had a long and storied tradition of brewing Bockbier as a way to raise funds, and those at La Trappe did it well enough, and with enough marketing savvy, to have generated high demand for their products in the finest gourmet food shops and restaurants in the American Southwest. This explained the TIPSY MONK BEER logo that had been professionally wrapped across the van’s sides, and the fact that its driver, Friar Oscar Luna, thirty-five years old, short, dark, and handsome enough to have pursued a career in acting if he had not chosen instead to be a priest, exited the vehicle wearing his chocolate-colored robe and sandals but carrying a freshly bottled six-pack of Enkel, or what Jodi referred to as the Pope’s pilsner.
“I see you brought me breakfast,” said Jodi.
“¡Buenos días, hermana!” Oscar smiled and held his arms out for a hug as he approached the steps up to the porch, more like a guy who’d just joined a great party than a man who had come to spend the day watching his working, widowed sister’s teenage daughter.
“How are you?” she asked as they embraced.
“It’s a beautiful day to be alive!” he replied, coming out of the hug to kneel down and pet Juana, who, like all animals he came across, was magnetically drawn to Oscar and had trusted him from the moment she first saw him. Jodi would never forget the first time a bird landed in his hand, just because he held it out. He was two years old. She suspected, in secret, that her brother might have been some kind of weird saint.
“¿Y tú?” he asked her. “You ready for your first day as the big boss, or what?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” she said. “Had your coffee yet?”
“Pues, sí, but I am always ready for more coffee,” he said, and they went inside. Jodi poured herself a camo travel mug of simple black coffee and prepared Oscar’s in a thick pottery mug, just the way he liked it, with heavy cream, two tablespoons of sugar, and a dash of cinnamon powder. Her brother refused to accept payment for helping her with Mila—which he had done as a nearly full-time job these past two years as she went back to school for her fourth college degree, this one in biology, and attended the police academy. She knew she could never have made this job switch without his support, so she tried to do whatever else she could to make his life more pleasant.
“Gracias,” he said as he took the cup and sat down at the rustic pine dining table that served as the line of demarcation between the kitchen and the living area. “¿Y la princesa? Still asleep?”
“Of course,” she said as she set the to-go cup on the entry table, opened the closet, and began to put on her duty belt and all its assorted accoutrements, each with its own holster—expandable baton, extra ammunition magazines, bear spray, handcuffs, Glock, and Leatherman multitool. “I know you just got here, but I want to head out a little early. Make a good impression on my first day flying sola.”
“Do what you gotta do,” he said.
“Call me if you need anything,” she said. “Hope you two have a good day.”
Jodi got Juana situated on her blanket on the front passenger seat, then settled herself behind the wheel. She flipped on the two police radios—one for her department’s dispatch out of Santa Fe, the other for the state police dispatch for the northern part of the state. All was quiet, for the moment.
