Outrider

by Steven John

  Dreg nodded, looking around the pod at the various commuters. As he often did, he picked one at random and rose. Even at nearly fifty miles an hour, the commuter pod barely trembled, and Dreg walked over to a young man wearing blue jeans and a t-shirt. He sat down beside the fellow and smiled widely.

  “What’s your name, son?”

  “Tom Bowman,” the youth answered, holding The Mayor’s gaze.

  “And what do you do?”

  “Nothing much. Or not yet, sir. I’m a student.”

  “Oh? That’s plenty! What do you study?”

  “Um . . . well mathematics. I guess. I might switch to economics.” The young man’s poise faded as Dreg looked him up and down.

  “Well, Mr. Bowman, a word of advice. Drop them both! Women want engineers or artists!”

  “Yes sir. I’ll . . . try to incorporate that too. Them too, I mean.”

  “You do that, Mr. Bowsen. Find your calling then stay in your post!” Dreg rose and clapped the student on the shoulder. He returned to his bench by Hale, a satisfied look on his large face. Despite his propensity for reading people, Dreg regularly mistook uneasiness for respect. While the gulf between inspiring those two sentiments was not vast, it was definite. After the brief exchange between the young man and the swaggering Mayor, the other commuters worked all the harder to act preoccupied. Hale realized this; Dreg did not.

  The pod came to rest at the first stop in Grid 3 and Hale rose, waiting for Dreg to do the same, then the two men stepped out into the bright, cool streets. The buildings here looked much the as they did in Executive Center, just a few stories shorter.

  2

  Scofield’s thoughts were wandering when the old leech spoke up.

  “Sir?” The man’s voice was timid and small.

  “Hmm,” Scofield grunted in reply.

  “I know I’ve no right to even ask . . . but may I have some water?”

  From atop Reese, the outrider looked down at the elderly man, stumbling along with his sunburned scalp and creaking joints. Scofield had not bothered tying him to the horse—there was no chance he’d put up a fight or make a breakaway across the desert. He had been plodding unevenly beside the trotting mare for miles now and was visibly failing. A mixture of compassion and pragmatism worked their way through Scofield’s thinking and after a minute or two more he drew back on the reins and slid off Reese. He pulled the canteen from her saddle bag and first took a pull himself, then offered water to the horse. She lapped up only a few drops from his palm before tossing her mane and looking away.

  Scofield handed the canteen to the leech, saying “Don’t touch your lips to that. And don’t take much.”

  The man gratefully accepted the canteen and tilted his head back, letting the warm liquid pour into his gaping mouth. He swished the water about behind his cracked lips and then, with a rueful sigh, handed the canteen back. Scofield looked the old man up and down, then shook his head.

  “Mount up,” he barked, looking away. The leech made no move. When Scofield finally looked over at him, the man’s face was a portrait of bewilderment. “Get on the damn horse, old man.”

  The leech took a halting step, paused, and then walked to Reese. His hands trembled as he grasped her saddle and his knee buckled as he tried to lift his weight in the stirrup. Scofield thrust his large, calloused hands under the man’s shoulders and roughly lifted him up onto the mare. Reese sidestepped and let out a whinny at the feeling of the foreign rider.

  “S’alright girl,” Scofield whispered to her, taking her soft muzzle in one hand. He pulled the reins from where they were looped about the saddle horn and set off walking, following the faint trace of the leech’s tap line.

  The sun was at their backs, maybe an hour from dipping below the horizon. The land was just beginning to lose its features while still maintaining what little color the desert palate had to offer: soft beige under foot, coffee brown mountains in the distance, and the charcoal grays of occasional rocky outcroppings. The sky had eased from azure blue to a powdery yellow above a thin layer of late afternoon haze. It was still warm out.

  Scofield’s boots crunched methodically, two falls to every four from Reese’s hooves. Again his thoughts had begun to drift when the old timer spoke.

  “Thank you.”

  Scofield made no reply. Not even a sidelong glance or a shrug. A few minutes passed before the wizened fellow spoke again.

  “You’re a good man, Scofield.” The outrider looked up and the leech hastily added: “Mr. Scofield. You’re a good man. Thank you.”

  “No, I ain’t. Don’t get that thinking into your head.” He looked away again, pulling off his hat and wiping the back of one sleeve across his sweaty brow. “I’m just not a bad man. That’s all. Ain’t too big a distinction. Remember that.”

  The leech drew in a rasping breath as if to say more but let it go silently. They walked on. Scofield found himself ruminating on what he had just said. Was there much of a distinction? Had he really meant it one way or the other regardless? He could count on one hand the times he’d done things he knew to be categorically wrong. But the times his deeds had fallen into a gray area were as measureless as the desert sands. He always sought to do right but didn’t let some ambiguous nod to morality play counsel to his day-to-day living.

  Given more to aimless brooding than active reflection, Scofield let the notion drift. He wondered how far inside the glowline the leech’s collector was. They’d been following the tap wire for easily an hour and would surely be catching up to Kretch soon. He just hoped it was before darkness fell. It had been slow going with the aged man on foot and he had lost track of time. Scofield dreaded a night spent bunked with this old wretch. He’d heard their tales of hard-luck misfortune and their pleas for clemency all too many times. His only desire was for a night alone bedded down in silence. Scofield drew a cigarette from within his long black coat and dug about in another pocket for his lighter.

  As he took his first drag he looked up at the leech. The old man bounced along uneasily in the saddle and cast furtive glances at the outrider, clearly hoping to be offered a smoke of his own. Scofield turned his head away, facing the darkening sands before them. He hadn’t brought enough tobacco to consider sharing.

  Timothy Hale sighed as he crossed the threshold into his large but spartan apartment. He had again failed to summon the courage to talk to Maria. Or really talk to her, anyway: they had exchanged the usual pleasantries as he and The Mayor toured Grid 3’s power station, but the discourse had been professional, sterile. Hale let himself imagine that her demure glances and soft tone had been anything other than the awkward discomfort they had seemed, but he knew well that his attraction to her was one-sided.

  He carefully removed his suit jacket and tie, hanging them each in their respective places in his walk-in closet. Before leaving the closet, Hale took the golden government insignia from his jacket’s lapel and laid the pin on a bare section of shelf. He pulled off his slacks with less care, tossing the pants into a hamper in the hallway, and donned soft linen trousers and leather slippers lined with sable. Hale entered his immaculate kitchen and flicked on a light switch.

  White light filled the room, shining off the polished marble countertops and smooth steel appliances. Timothy never paid a penny for electricity, a perk of his job title; poorer denizens of New Las Vegas lived switch-to-switch, saving power whenever and wherever possible. Currently, Mayor Dreg was keeping local rates affordably low, in fact; but that could all change overnight, based on demand from other markets, a dip in supply caused by inclement weather or technical issues out in the sunfield, or merely based off a capricious whim. Numerous were the times when millions had quite literally paid for the foul mood of Franklin Dreg, keeper of the power, as it were.

  Hale opened the refrigerator and selected from the several half-empty bottles of wine an ’87 chardonnay. There were less than two glasses worth of wine left in the bottle and Timothy allowed himself a private moment of impropriety,
swishing back a mouthful of the cool liquid right from the bottle before filling a glass. He threw out the wine bottle and then, as he did most every night, began to stroll slowly through the rooms of his home, replaying the day’s events in his head.

  Overall, it had been an unremarkable Wednesday. Save for the underwhelming visit to Grid 3, his waking hours had been consumed with paperwork and numbers, all the mundane actual work required to run the city’s executive office and for which his boss had not the slightest concern. No meetings or visitors had been scheduled for the day, so his interaction with others up until the late afternoon had consisted of two or three minutes talking to Dreg and countless phone calls diverted from The Mayor. Dreg hated talking to people who called him, preferring only to speak to whom he chose, when he chose. Hale was in effect a glorified buffer between The Mayor and the world at large. In fact, if he wanted to, he likely could have taken much of the control of the city into his own hands simply by not telling The Mayor what was happening at any given time.

  But Hale had little interest in power. Not in any direct, definite way, at least. He preferred the comfort of stability that came from being near the top but with his neck underexposed. It rarely bothered him to act as a considerable portion of the brain while letting Dreg’s face alone occupy the minds of the millions of citizens of NLV. Hale had achieved most of his life’s goals—save any meaningful romance—before the age of forty-one. This thought brought him less satisfaction than he would have expected, and he quickly tried to clear the notion from his head as he leaned against a window frame in his living room. Only a few lamps shone in this room, their soft yellow light diffused through ornate stained-glass shades.

  Fifty stories below, New Las Vegas sparkled in the clear night. On an evening such as this the city would consume approximately two-hundred eighteen million, four-hundred thousand kilowatt hours of energy between sunset and sunrise. A shift in temperature could drive the figure up or down, depending on the season.

  While Hale had no direct authority to regulate power consumption, his status as Dreg’s right hand put him in a position to, at any given moment, say the word and darken any (or all) of the twenty-one grids that made up the sprawling city. As he let his eyes drift across the glowing metropolis and then out to the dark stretch of desert beyond, a faint smile crept across his lips. Not that he would ever abuse his role, but the knowledge that he could brought him an inner warmth—something akin to a sense of manliness.

  On certain nights, when Hale indulged in more than his usual one glass of wine, he found himself muttering three words over and over: “I’ll show them.” He had no clue who “they” were or exactly what he would show them, but they were out there and he was up here. (Though sometimes “they” took on the visage of a large, mustachioed man as sleep overcame Timothy.) When Hale lay down to sleep on this night, he was sober and his thoughts drifted to more reasonable matters of breakfast and scheduling and business.

  Fifteen years ago Hale had been a graduate student and an aspiring social activist. New Las Vegas in the seventies was a different place than today’s city. The city government sparred with the statehouse for influence; the power company was still private; the traffic patterns were erratic and the streets were often choked with tens of thousands of angry commuters. No one had known for years who was really in control. Then Dreg had come into office on a platform of ostensible reform. This turned quickly to consolidation of power—both literal and figurative. By taking total control of NLV’s electricity production and distribution, Dreg had also established New Las Vegas as something closer to a city-state than a city within a state; these days, the governor asked The Mayor’s permission, rather than the other way around.

  Hale had seen government from the outside and mistrusted it. Then he had been offered a low-level bureaucratic job. Over-educated and under-employed, he took it, meaning only to accept the work—a clerical position with the transportation bureau—for a short time. Hale was surprised to find himself fabulously adroit at maneuvering through the arcane channels of government and within two years was overseeing a staff of some fifty workers. Soon he was managing three times that, heading up a department charged with integrating the latest breakthrough in battery technology, the massive molten salt facilities that could store enough heat to generate power for days when rare instances of inclement weather came to sunny New Las Vegas. It was thanks to the success of Timothy Hale’s department that the city had finally achieved a reliable enough surplus of energy to begin selling it to other regionals; arguably, it was thanks to Hale and his team that New Las Vegas had become such a mighty power center, and of the political stripe, at that: with electricity to spare, the city could leverage deals on grain and livestock from the Midwest, produce from California’s Central Valley, and desalinated water from myriad coastal cities.

  It was only a matter of time before he came to Dreg’s attention. The Mayor had extended an offer Hale could hardly turn down, and Hale’s keen intellect, attention to detail and excellent memory had rapidly moved him into Dreg’s confidence and good graces. Thus the man who had once planned to stand up to and petition against the government became its enforcer, the acting right hand of its ruthless head.

  Given his memory and his propensity for detail, it was surprising that it would take nearly a week for Timothy Hale to catch onto a pattern that began to emerge that night. Somehow, between the time the sun set and the day broke, power consumption in New Las Vegas rose by over forty-million kilowatt hours. That spike in usage would require nearly half of the city’s ten million residents to dry their hair, make toast, vacuum, and do laundry all at once. Which was unlikely in the dead of night.

  It was well after nightfall when Scofield and the leech crossed the glowline. The cord of blue filament pulsed against the dark sands and not a hundred yards beyond it lay the trappings of everyday life: the charge station with its crackling insect lamps, the nearly derelict motel, the grocery store and the rows of huts outriders called home for months out of the year. A score of shadows flitted about in the artificial light; several employees leaving the grocers, a few women of less-than-fine repute, and an outrider or two. Kretch was nowhere to be found.

  The same mild sense of distaste that always washed over Scofield when he returned to society after days out on the land settled over him now, heightened by the fact that he had to deal with the leech. He had found the man’s collection rig about a mile back. The leech had placed it inside the glowline, about a mile west of the Outpost but well safe of the power field’s potent reach. Wilton had clearly taken care of the rig without so much as dismounting. The storage box/generator was riddled with bullet holes; its molten salts had leaked out onto the sands and long ago cooled into a gray pile. The rig was ruined if not properly disposed of and, too tired to much care, Scofield had severed the tap line and traded places with the leech, mounting Reese for the last leg of their trek.

  He had paused to slice and re-bury the tap line three times during their ten or eleven mile journey, but doubted that this old timer would ever again return to the power field. What was next for the leech was none of his concern; the fifth of bourbon and shower awaiting him in his hut were what counted.

  As the lights of society had come into view on the twilight horizon, the leech had begun wringing his hands and making a soft, high pitched whimper. The sound seemed to squeak out of the back of his throat, becoming more and more frequent the nearer they drew to the glowline. He had sounded like an animal scenting a predator’s approach. On a different night, that analogy might have been apt—Scofield had decided what to do with this old fellow hours ago, though, and his fate was to be fabulously mild.

  The outrider and leech entered the omnipresent pool of halogen light bathing the Outpost and Scofield quietly sighed to himself. He led the man a few hundred yards down the thin stretch of asphalt that began not ten feet from the glowline. The only sounds were the stirring of a faint breeze and the click of Reese’s hooves on the paved road. Sco
field reined the horse to a stop beneath a streetlight. He slid down from atop the mare and stretched his neck from side to side, kneading one shoulder between his palm and fingers.

  “I’m guessin’ you ain’t got a penny, hm?”

  “No,” the old man replied, his hands knit together across his belly. Scofield nodded, then turned to face his horse. He dug in a saddle bag and retrieved the satchel where he kept a few coins and crumpled bills. Scofield counted out eleven dollars and fifty cents then turned to face the leech.

  “There’s a commuter pod station a half mile down this road. This here’s exact change to get you from there to Vegas Central.” He extended his arm but kept the cash held firmly in a fist. “Listen real good, old man,” Scofield whispered, his voice cold. “I ever see you out in the sunfield again, you’re dead. Simple as that. Don’t you say a goddamn word, either. Take this cash and get the fuck out of here. Stay out of my power fields. I was you, I’d head east. Way east.” With that he pressed the money into the old man’s gnarled hands and turned back to his mount, once more spitting over his shoulder: “Not a goddamn word.”

  Scofield took hold of the saddle horn and hefted himself up onto his horse. Reese wheeled at the gentle tug on her reins and set off at a trot due north. She knew the way and Scofield didn’t so much as cluck his tongue for the next ten minutes as he rode toward the shack he called home a few nights out of each month. He never once looked back at the leech. Had he done so, he would have seen that the old man had scarcely moved a muscle as the outrider faded into the artificial twilight haze. The leech watched until the horse and rider were mere shadows, then were gone, before finally nodding his ancient head and beginning a slow shuffle to the pod station. The half mile walk took him almost twenty minutes.