Outrider

by Steven John

  Scofield poured feed into Reese’s trough and turned on the tap above her water basin. Dropping his hat, he splashed some of the cold liquid across his face and hair and stretched, shivering in the cold night air. He tied the long lead to the horse’s bridle and unhooked his saddle and bags, tossing them into the storage locker beside his hut. He kicked shut the heavy iron door, not bothering to fiddle with the digital deadbolt. Scofield had requested the most remote post possible and had been rewarded, such as it was, with a hovel nearly a mile from the center of the Outpost proper. The lights of the saloon and stores and charge station shimmered in the distance, a little pocket of light diminished by the undulating glow of New Las Vegas some twenty miles away across the sands.

  He keyed in a code and the door to the ten-by-twelve foot building clicked open. Scofield tossed his hat and jacket inside and pulled two heavy horse blankets from the floor where they rested just inside the hut. These he spread next to his horse as she ate. Then he sat on the step outside his modest home to remove his boots and socks. Finally stepping inside, Scofield flipped on the lights for just long enough to find his kerosene lamp and a book of matches. Once he had the lamp and a few candles lit, the outrider turned the lights down to their lowest setting and stripped naked. All of his clothing he shoved into the washer/dryer unit. He had not changed in two weeks and despite his rugged nature, Scofield was thrilled to be finally free of the musty garments and mere minutes from bathing.

  Stretching his arms to the ceiling then twisting from side to side, he looked about his little home. There was a simple cot, perfectly turned down as he had left it, his little kitchenette, a shelf laden with canned food and an eclectic mix of books, and the armoire where he kept his few items of clothing. The things that mattered were in a steel trunk under his cot. Sealed away behind an old-fashioned padlock were a .44 magnum, hundreds of rounds for both of his pistols and rifle, a few random personal items, and Scofield’s store of tobacco and whiskey. The last two items were all that interested him now. When out riding the sunfield Scofield rarely if ever took a drop of liquor, but once off assignment he partook gladly of his bourbon, if sometimes only for the first night back in the everyday world. Overall, he was a sober man.

  An ordered, settled existence had never sat well with Scofield. He had become an outrider to escape the poisonous monotony of “civilized” life. Others—Kretch among them—made a beeline for New Las Vegas just as soon as their tours of the sunfield were up, throwing dollars and cares to the wind. For Scofield, one good dose of bourbon or rye was all that made coming back into the light (as he and a few others called it) remotely tolerable. He could count on his hands the days he’d spent in the city over the last three years. Many a night—even when he was off duty—he spent bedded down under the stars beside his horse. Reese was better company than any man or woman Scofield had ever met. If it had not been for the occasional need for the latter, the outrider might never have made his way into the light. But there were no women on the plains and he was a man. Scofield had no qualms about picking up a hooker when need be, but his preference was to find some female of the same disposition as him: ready to go and, afterward, ready to leave.

  He stepped into the tiny bathroom of his unit and keyed on the fluorescent lights. In the harsh glow of the pale bulbs his skin was a mix of ruddy brown and milky white where the sun always and never touched, respectively. Scofield took a piss while eyeing his hairy face in the mirror. A few more lines; a few more grays. No matter. He brushed his teeth with meticulous precision, as he did every night, then stepped into the shower. He bathed cold, using the same bar of lye soap on his body, face, and shaggy hair.

  Later Scofield lay naked atop the covers, a tepid glass of whiskey resting in one hand and a cigarette smoking in the other. The ash on its tip had grown to nearly an inch in length, so still was the man. He was not lost in thought; rather his mind was a total, near meditative blank. Eventually gravity bested the ashes and their hot sting on his fingers jolted Scofield back into the present. He sat up in bed, threw back the rye in one large swallow and then dropped the cigarette butt into the glass.

  Scofield rose and slipped on a pair of worn blue jeans and a wool sweater and let himself out into the chill night air. The sand hissed gently beneath his bare feet. He found Reese sleeping soundly and lay down against the horse, easing himself under a part of her blanket. The mare whinnied softly, then was still. Soon Scofield’s thinking was again all but empty, occupied only by his savoring the familiar musty-sweet odor of his horse. Before long he drifted off, his conscious mind melting away into the night.

  Above a thin layer of clouds a new moon lurked in darkness. A few stars snuck through the silken layer of gray but the land was all formless shadow. A gentle breeze crept along the sands, drifting among the pillars of the sunfield and curling about the dunes at its northern border. It was cold out, scarcely forty degrees and, not yet midnight, the temperature was dropping still.

  The QV arrays hung limply in the night air, still and lifeless. The cloud bank thickened as the evening wore on and, at this rate, it was possible that for only the sixth day that year no direct sunlight would find its way down to the hungry quantum voltaic panels the next day.

  What little life persisted in the late fall desert was burrowed away in the near-frozen sands. Save for the gentle rustling of sage brush in the breeze, not a sound stirred the air. Miles away, New Las Vegas glowed on the horizon—a stark contrast to the bleak landscape. Three perfectly still figures crouched atop the tallest dune for miles. Each wore a long black jacket and cowl. From a distance they appeared to be nothing more than a trio of dark stones. Certainly they moved no more than had this been true.

  For a long time the three men knelt in the frigid air. As the night wore on and grew ever darker, their hooded faces were lost even to one another. Just enough diffuse starlight fell across the landscape to make it visible. Three pairs of eyes watched the hills and the sands and the towering arrays before them. Dark cloth fluttered silently in the breeze. Finally, one of the three rose slowly to his full height. After a pause the other two joined him and for several minutes they remained still, now like black monoliths in the night.

  The first to rise turned his back to his compatriots and gently shook his hooded head. “Not yet,” he whispered, “go back down.”

  The New Las Vegas sunfield was comprised of three thousand two hundred and twenty-nine individual QV pillars. It was roughly fifty miles east to west and, at any given point, an average of two miles wide. Certain geological features broke up its mostly straight shape: here and there the line was diverted by hills too large to level or canyons too wide to fill. Atop each pillar sat an array of four massive quantum photovoltaic panels. Throughout the course of the day, a series of motors guided the light-absorbing panels to follow the sun across the sky. In summer, there were more megawatts than New Las Vegas and the dozen smaller cities on its grid could ever use, thus the city’s ability to sell and trade its abundant power. During the winter, energy was still plentiful, but on cloudy days during the season of long nights the grid often dipped deeply into its massive reserve of power stored in cavernous vaults of molten salt.

  Each night as the sun set, the grid began to draw off the stores of energy waiting in its daily reserve chambers. In mid-October, this superheated mixture routinely produced more than enough steam to turn generators through the night without a chance of tapping into the surplus stores. In fact, the salt caverns could likely have kept the turbines churning for weeks. Power had become an endless commodity; no more a concern than air to breathe. Few knew of the immense infrastructure and constant maintenance behind the light switch or microwave; few grasped the fragility of the stability they had come to take for granted. Mayor Dreg knew about it. Timothy Hale understood far better than most. And Scofield was aware at least that he was a part of something much greater and more complex than he fully comprehended. The first man took comfort in knowing he was in control of the balance; the
second man lost sleep thinking about each and every transmission wire and transistor. The third didn’t much give a damn about any of it—Scofield’s job was to keep it all running and his job description kept him far from the rest of it; kept him out on the land where not a single electrical circuit could be closed without the risk of a catastrophe. It was a beautiful trade, for it kept him away from the great All of It.

  3

  A week and a day later found Wilton Kretch back out in the field doing what he did best: tracking down leeches. He had a preternatural knack for finding them. His eyes were fantastically sharp, the rods and cones aligned so perfectly that he saw subtle contrasts, colors, and details where others saw only sand. Many times each year an outrider would trot past a stretch of QV pillars only to have Kretch patrol the same area later and come up with tap lines or the leeches themselves.

  For his skills, Kretch was respected; for his demeanor he was almost universally, if privately, despised. He sensed this and often opted to work alone. It didn’t much bother Kretch to be disliked—he assumed the others were jealous of him. This may have been true with some of his comrades, but it was only one factor of his reputation, and far from the decisive one at that. Wilton Kretch had an itch on his right index finger that no trigger could amply scratch. He had killed three men that year, the same number as had been shot by all the other fifty-odd outriders combined. And he had put lead into two other leeches as well. Both had survived, but one would never walk again.

  Wilton Kretch was a heavy drinker and his inclination for violence grew with inverse proportion to his shortening temper when he was full of whiskey. Many a man and even a handful of women bore scars on their cheeks or crooked noses from a perceived slight against him. Deep down Wilton was and always had been a coward, but his assumed persona had so obscured this fact from the exterior world that even internally his fears had withdrawn from his consciousness, residing only in the shadows of the id. Perhaps Kretch’s propensity to shoot first or start punching at the smallest infraction came from his deep-seated terror of injury or embarrassment. It was far simpler to be feared and loathed than to be perceived as even a bit vulnerable.

  The sun had set not long ago, and true night was taking over. For years Kretch had feared riding through the desert alone at night. But time and self-denial had tempered this sensation, and now he traversed the darkened plains with confidence if not with ease. He kept a monologue running constantly in his head: Alright you sonsabitches . . . you fuckin’ shitkickers . . . ol’ Kretch is here . . . c’mon on out and make it easy. . . . Goddamn cold tonight . . . goddamn dark and cold . . . just me n’ Shady and all these motherfuckers . . . fine by me . . . just fine by me . . . and so on it went. Hour upon hour Kretch muttered to himself as if another person were listening. Effectively enough another person was listening: a sickly child abandoned long ago by a mother who called her boy Willy.

  His keen eyes did little for him at night, and Kretch seldom dismounted to scout around the base of the pillars as outriders were instructed to do. He preferred to maintain a leisurely trot at a good distance from the arrays and let himself believe he was doing his job. Three times on this penultimate night of October the outrider crossed buried tap lines. Two had been set by a leech that had bunked down atop a nearby dune and who, soundly sleeping, was unaware that he was ever in danger. The third tap line led to a freshly planted hook up.

  Even in the gloaming, Kretch easily would have seen the large, bright eyes watching him had he so much as glanced toward the sunfield at the right time. Wilton rode slowly, eyes on Shady’s mane, as he passed within thirty feet of the terrified young man. As the light faded the leech had worked feverishly securing his rig to a pillar, and he had just begun scooping sand over it when Shady let out a random whinny.

  Too terrified even to crawl behind the QV pillar, the youth was lying prone on the cold sand, eyes foolishly locked onto Kretch. Foolishly, for on this night with only thin clouds between the stars and waxing crescent moon, the whites of his eyes shone clearly in the dark. He was perfectly still for a solid ten minutes after the crunch of the horse’s hooves had faded. Then, with trembling hands, he finished covering his hookup, carefully smoothed the sand over the tap line, and then padded off toward the dune where his father slept.

  Soon Kretch reached the end of his route. Every third mile, a thin filament was suspended between the pillars, pulsing with the same chemical blue as the glowline. On a given assignment, each outrider was sent to one of the three-mile-long by two-mile-deep grids marked by these softly glowing cords. The standard time in the field was two weeks, the schedule altered only by Round Up or by rare extenuating circumstances such as illness or a shooting incident. Whenever an outrider used his weapon—or, more accurately, when his lead found its mark—he was obliged to head back to an outpost and debrief. Kretch had debriefed about a shooting three times that year, and only one of those had been about a fatality. Everyone knew about the other two leeches he had killed, but no one gave much of a damn. It was so much simpler just not to ask.

  The young leech, now scrambling up a dune to his camp, had no idea that the outrider who had so nearly seen him was the same man who had put a bullet through his slumbering father’s lung two years ago. Kretch hadn’t so much as dismounted; he’d come upon a middle-aged man tinkering with a hook-up in the shade of a QV array, quietly slid his rifle from the saddle bag, aimed, and fired.

  When Wilton had approached the man, who was writhing in agony on the ground, he had every intention of finishing the job. But the poor bastard’s tears of suffering and his pitiful stammering—about a son and all the usual bullshit—had been enough to stay the outrider’s hand. He had spat on the sand next to the leech and told him that if he ever returned to the sunfield, his death would be summary. The growing patch of crimson on the man’s chest and his gasping breaths had suggested it was rhetorical anyway.

  Kretch stared at the glowing blue filament for a moment longer, and then gave a gentle tug on Shady’s reins, turning the horse ninety degrees to the right. The pair set off across the interior of the sunfield. Every now and then Wilton looked around random pillars and scanned the ground for tap lines or hideouts, but mostly he kept his eyes forward and down, muttering to himself. Cold tonight, Shady. Ain’t gonna be much warmer tomorrow, neither. Gotta watch these fuckers, y’know? Gotta run ’em hard and fast all day. Just you’n me . . .

  It was the first Monday of November. Mayor Franklin Dreg was in a fine mood as he sauntered through the lobby of the executive building wearing a beige suit with impossibly wide lapels and a smile to match. Without glancing at a single person’s face Franklin called out boisterous greetings: “Hello! Good morning to all, hello! Monday again! Hello all!”

  The receptionists and security personnel murmured replies; the old janitor, trailing her IV tower and shuffling about in orthopedic shoes, was the only one to respond in a full voice, saying “Good morning, Mayor!” Her bright smile was lost on Dreg, who was already boarding an elevator and jabbering into his phone. The elderly woman’s smile faded back into the innumerable lines of her face. She cast her eyes downward and got back to work on the scuff marks marring the marble floor.

  The elevator’s doors closed behind Dreg and it began its race up fifty floors. Whenever he or Timothy Hale was aboard, the lifts would go directly to whatever floor was requested, overriding all other stops. The gold chevron pin Hale kept on his lapel and Dreg usually had loose in some pocket did more than display status: their small transistors literally opened doors—or, in this case, kept them closed.

  The Mayor tossed wide the doors to Timothy Hale’s office—a decently large room in its own right, but sparsely decorated at Hale’s request—and warmly greeted his secretary and confidant. “Morning, Timothy! How’s my city today?”

  It was just before eleven o’clock and Hale had been in the office for more than four hours already. His face showed the strain of a sleepless night and stress-filled morning. Hale rose to greet
Dreg and attempted a bright and energetic reply, but even as he opened his mouth to speak The Mayor raised a hand to silence him.

  “Don’t bother with the pleasantries, Mr. Hale. Something’s wrong here, isn’t it?” Dreg stripped off his suit jacket while continuing. “Very wrong, based on how shitty you look. It never gets easier, hmm?” Hale sank back down into his chair and wheeled to face the wall, glancing out the window behind him at the cloudy day.

  “I figured it had to be the math. My math somehow . . . I’ve run the numbers a dozen times. Frank, we’re losing power. Have been for a week. Lots of power.”

  Dreg settled into one of the two chairs across from Hale and unbuttoned his vest, letting his paunch out into the room. He put his hands on his knees and leaned forward.

  “Just shoot me straight.”

  “For the past week, the grid has been bleeding between thirty-five and forty-five million kilowatts every night.” Hale turned back to face The Mayor. “One night we almost hit fifty.”

  “Christ, that’s a lot of juice!” Dreg slammed a fist down on one thigh, his other palm pressed to his forehead. “Fifty million! How is that even possible?”

  “Either a major malfunction . . .” Hale trailed off as Dreg lowered his hand and looked up at him. Timothy raised his palms as if to indicate he was just the messenger.

  “Have you talked to anyone else?”

  “Of course. I’ve talked to everyone—don’t worry, all I did was listen, no one knows anything. That’s what kept me up all night . . . none of the grids have reported anything but the standard fluctuations. As far as everyone knows it was a boring, stable week.”

  Dreg furrowed his brow. “So the problem is somewhere in supply.”