Outrider

by Steven John

  “He knows about the drain. Knows it’s bad. He did the whole dog-and-pony bullshit. Showed off his art and cigars and all. He wants to send in the troops.”

  “Go on.”

  “I got a feeling like he didn’t tell me a damn thing that was actually on his mind. That he was planning the whole time. But I bought us a day. I know that. I got us at least one day. I think I convinced him that he needs to wait for our move before he sends in Civil Defense en masse; needs to wait for your cue.”

  “One day . . . maybe that’s all we need.” Hutton smiled again, then began whispering something under his breath. After a minute spent muttering he went on, just loud enough that Scofield could hear. “The field’s been uh . . . been home for most all my life. Yours too, I know. Lots of ours. Ours. These boys,” The Boss waved a hand in a circle over his shoulder, “they’re my boys. My family. My brothers.”

  Scofield impulsively grabbed the bottle of bourbon from where it sat on the bar and took a long pull. “Mine too,” he whispered through clenched teeth.

  “I don’t much give a goddamn about what happens in the city or in the towns,” Hutton said. “I just know that me and you and our brothers are out here, and that for being out here we’re free. We’re . . . we’re alive out here. Tripp was a good man. Good friend.”

  Hutton slowly worked his way to his feet. He kept one hand on the bar to steady himself and turned to face Scofield, head tilted down. He was swaying slightly but managed to look dignified; resolved.

  When he raised his eyes they were made of ice. “I want blood.”

  15

  Timothy Hale woke up into a nightmare. Searing waves of heat washed over his body. All was black. The world quaked and writhed around him. A strange, deafening roar thundered in his ears and he was tossed about, bouncing painfully off the hard floor and against unseen objects. Abject terror kept any attempt at rational thinking from his mind and, unaware of himself, Hale was screaming and thrashing.

  Only after several minutes of this half-conscious hell did Hale form a single cogent thought: You’re alive . . . you’re alive it’ll be OK. Oh God what’s happening to me! You’re alive, Tim! You’re alive, goddammit!

  Slowly, in broken fits and starts, reason began to make its way through the awful, shaking din. Hale was bound and blindfolded, hands and feet tied tightly into a ball in front of him. The rough cord cut into his flesh. As he got his ragged breathing under control, Timothy began to perceive a rhythm in the violent, shaking clamor. Two loud, bass booms were followed by a quick succession of higher-pitched clattering. The room seemed to heave and roll in a steady—though turbulent—pattern.

  I must be by one of the generators, Hale thought suddenly as he tried to roll onto his knees. Only in the salt store power stations had he ever heard such a racket. But as soon as the notion had come to him, he dismissed it, somehow innately knowing there was no way he was in a power station, despite all the noise. The stations used direct electron transmission and heat transfer; all the noise came from cooling systems and the buildings themselves were temperate and remarkably still.

  Hale rocked back and forth in his blind, sweltering, deafening bad dream for what seemed an eternity. Time and again he tried to reconstruct the last few hours and days but nothing made sense. How had Wilbee gotten into his home? And why—never mind the how at all, why! And the giant of a man who’d knocked him out—why? Why! Despite his best efforts at constructive analysis, a consuming fear filled Hale and he couldn’t get past the vision of Candice Wilbee perched comfortably on his sofa and then the huge fist closing in on him. His head ached. He was bathed in stinging sweat and he itched all over. Gradually, despite the terrible shaking and roar, Hale’s mind grew numb. The dark world grew ever more distant as sleep mercifully took him.

  The horror of the waking world slipped into a restless dream. Hale stood in the hall outside his office, staring at the janitor cowered behind the terracotta planter. Timothy was pointing at the frail woman and trying to shout but his voice failed him. Wilbee was wearing an elegant dress and looked younger and ever more poised, almost elegant as the seconds passed. She rose slowly to stand at her full height. Soon she towered over the secretary, looking down with fiery eyes. Candice Is, she whispered, though her lips did not move. Candice Is. Candice IS . . . I . . . AM.

  Shady tossed his mane and snorted, digging at the damp soil with a hoof. Kretch clicked his tongue loudly and raised a hand over one shoulder, not looking back. The horse fell silent. Again Wilton lowered his cheek down against the rifle stock and closed his left eye. He lay prone behind an outcropping of rock and brush atop a small dune. The sun had begun to crest the horizon not five minutes ago.

  About a hundred yards to the west, three hooded men were hauling a heavy object wrapped in drab cloth across the sand. Each man had a thick rope over one shoulder and they trudged slowly, bent nearly double with the weight of their load. The swaddled object was no larger than three or four feet cubed, and Wilton scratched his chin, wondering what it could be. No matter: there was not another soul in sight and even if the men were armed with rifles, which they did not appear to be, Kretch had the drop on them. And an elevated shooting position, no less—these would be clean kills.

  Wilton slid open his rifle’s breech and pressed the thumb of his right hand against the back of a brass casing, applying enough pressure to be sure his piece was at its full capacity of eight rounds. He clicked shut the load lever and worked his way up onto his elbows. Shouldn’t’ve fucked with my field, boys. The stock was damp against his cheek, the gun metal cool on the flesh of his hands. You shouldn’t have fucked with ol’ Kretch.

  His shooting finger tightened. One more second . . .

  “Relax Wilton, it’s Haskell!” C. J. shouted as he dove on top of his comrade, one hand batting away Kretch’s shooting arm, the other clamping down on the gun barrel for good measure. The young outrider rolled off Wilton and rose to his knees, making sure to get his face down where Wilton could see it.

  Kretch let out a piercing shriek and clawed at the rifle, trying to get his hand back on the trigger. His eyes were wide and wild. Only after C. J. let the rifle go and gripped Kretch’s shoulders firmly did Wilton take a clear look at his assailant.

  Rage instantly replaced terror, rage both at his kill interrupted and that the young man had seen the abject fear in his face. “What the fuck are you doin’, kid!” Kretch spat.

  “Might ask you the same thing, Wil.” Haskell replied calmly. He released Kretch and dropped down to his stomach, peering past the older rider out across the sand. “Get down, man! Get flat.”

  Kretch swore under his breath and lowered himself, lying down beside the young man. Both sucked in heavy breaths, Haskell’s eyes were glued to the men below, while Kretch looked askance at C. J., his eyes cold. When it was clear that the trio had not noticed the scuffle, Haskell rolled onto his back.

  “What the hell were you thinking, Wilton?”

  “What’s that, boy?”

  “Ain’t but five of us out here. In the whole field. How long you been staked out up here? How many miles we got uncovered out there?”

  “You don’t see them three out there, Haskell?”

  “Yeah, I see—”

  “Oh, so you do see ’em? You see those three fuckers dragging whatever they got towards our field? You think maybe we oughtta just let ’em—”

  “I could also see your damn horse standing behind you from near a mile off. Fucking miracle you ain’t drawn fire!”

  Wilton was silent for a moment, realizing the young man was right. He hadn’t checked his flank once in the whole time he had been atop the dune. Wilton sneered, glancing out across the sands, and then turning back to C. J. “The second I drew them in they’d a’been dog meat. If you hadn’t fuckin’ jumped on top of me.”

  Haskell rose to his knees and crawled backward a few feet until he could rise into a low crouch. He waved at his horse, Duncan, a jet black colt, to come up the dune; he’d d
ismounted a hundred yards back and jogged up to Kretch. Turning back to Wilton, Haskell was about to issue some further reprimand when he noticed the outrider’s right hand resting loosely on his pistol’s grip.

  “Look, man, The Boss told us to shoot and ride. Not dig in and shoot. You and me gotta head away from these three and then split up again. Keep the field covered. No sense in starting a hot war before we know what we’re up against, right?”

  Kretch said nothing, staring daggers at C. J. His pants and duster were soaked through on the front, leading Haskell to assume he’d been lying still on the damp sands for a good long time. At the rate the three men were making, what with towing their heavy load, it may well have been since before dawn when Wilton dug in. It occurred to Haskell that perhaps Wilton had even spent the night bunked down up here and had spotted the group by luck—it was still barely light enough to see, after all.

  No good pressing the issue, though. Kretch was grinding his teeth, livid with the situation. The fingers of his right hand were still teasing his pistols. C. J. couldn’t tell if Wilton was conscious of the action. So much the worse if not. Haskell was well aware that Kretch had it out for him—Wilton was an inferior rider, a worse shot, and disliked. Time and again Kretch had let his jealousy and enmity out in the form of barroom threats or jibes at Round Up. Alone in the middle of the desert was no place for Haskell to toy with a live wire.

  C. J. considered asking the outrider what he’d seen so far; to try to turn things back to business. But he feared his professional intentions would be construed as inquisition and made up his mind to just get the hell away from Wilton Kretch. He wanted to at least break the news of Tripp’s death, but decided to withhold the information. No telling if word of a fallen comrade would sober the impulsive bastard or fill him with bloodlust. Nothing to do but get away and keep on riding.

  “I’m gonna mount up and head well north of these boys then keep on the westerly route. You’re due to head east near the field, right?”

  “Guess so,” Kretch mumbled in reply.

  “Well let’s light a smoke for luck and get on with it,” Haskell said, forcing a smile he hoped would look genuine. He dug in a pocket of his scuffed suede jacket and drew forth a pack of cigarettes. The tension seemed to leave Wilton as he reached out to accept a smoke. Behind them, Shady let out a whinny.

  “Pipe down, boy!” Kretch rasped.

  Haskell had just flicked his lighter when the first shot came.

  “Goddammit, I’m still drunk,” Boss Hutton croaked out amid a coughing spell. “Shoulda listened to you, Scof. I shoulda backed off from the bottle last night.”

  The jeep skidded to and fro on the wet sand, Hutton overcorrecting each time the tires slipped. They were heading back toward the Outpost at over sixty miles an hour, and while Scofield wasn’t quite prepared to tell Hutton to ease off, he was certainly ready for a rollover. He gripped the handle by his door with white knuckles and found his eyes upon the frayed canvas seatbelt every few minutes. Time was certainly of the essence, though: the sooner they got back to the Outpost, the sooner Scofield could grab Reese and get back out into the field.

  It was just between daybreak and morning. The sky was still a patchwork of gray above but the day promised to be clear. As soon as The Boss had been capable of action, he and Scofield had set out to give a cursory inspection of the stretch of Sunfield closest to the Outpost; closest to New Las Vegas. Their findings had been grim. For a solid five miles east, all had seemed normal. Then, about a mile past the first satellite outpost—simple concrete buildings used as store houses, jail cells, and temporary bunks—Scofield had spotted one of the contraptions. The outriders were cruising along two miles south of the glowline, well past where a sober and clear-headed Hutton would have ventured in his vehicle, and Scofield had kept a pair of binoculars trained on the field the whole time. When through the wildly bouncing field glasses he’d spotted something by a pillar, he bid Hutton stop, and then, to his dismay, confirmed seeing the same type of construction Kretch and he had first discovered a few nights back.

  A mad dash back nearly twenty miles the other way confirmed what both men feared. Scarcely ten miles west of the Outpost, they spotted another of the contraptions built around a QV pillar, this time set a few rows into the sunfield. It was a safe bet the damn things were everywhere.

  “They’re comin’ at us hard, man. They’re comin’ at us full tilt.” Hutton practically moaned out the words. “Jeezus H, Scof, I think we gotta call out Mayor Dreg and his boys right quick after all.”

  “Gonna turn into a war then, Hut. You know that.”

  “Sure I fuckin’ know it! The fuck else we gonna do here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Hutton swore as the jeep bucked over yet another rut carved by the downpour, wrenching the wheel to keep the vehicle driving straight. “I don’t mean to shit on ya, Scof. But we never seen anything like this. All my years riding the fields don’t add up to shit when I ain’t seen anything like this.”

  “Fuckin’ Hell, Boss—don’t apologize for calling it like it is. You think I don’t know how bad this mess is? I just know what I saw in Dreg’s eyes. Almost seemed like he was thinking like this could be—I dunno exactly—like his . . . his shot or something.”

  “What do you mean?” Hutton’s foot eased up on the gas pedal and he looked ninety degrees over at Scofield, not bothering to watch the land ahead.

  “I think he may see this as an opportunity. I don’t know, man. Just something that occurred to me. I’m just talkin’ here. Seemed like he was calculating beyond dealing with the field.”

  Hutton snorted and shook his head. A cryptic smile played across his face. “Maybe that’s so. Maybe not. Dreg’s got a big hand he’s been playing, if what folks whisper is true. Maybe he wants to double down. We’ll see later.”

  The main Outpost was visible ahead now, a smattering of concrete and brick buildings still gray in the quickening dawn. Boss Hutton shifted up into fifth gear and pressed home on the accelerator, steering north toward the stables.

  “I guarantee you he’s awake right now.”

  “You’re probably right.” There was a pause, and then the second voice went on, a lady’s voice, speaking more quietly than before. “In fact, I’m certain you are.”

  Slow, shuffling footsteps made their way toward Hale across the thin carpet, accompanied by a soft clatter and metallic squeaking. When the second voice rose again after a long, wheezing breath, Hale recognized it as belonging to Candice Wilbee.

  “He doesn’t look too much worse for the wear. That chin is pretty bruised where you laid him out.”

  “I’ll be sure to apologize for that.” The first man said with a laugh. It was the gigantic sonofabitch who had accosted Timothy in his home, no doubt.

  “Well,” Wilbee replied, “as you see fit. I’m going to head back to . . .” she paused and then moved away again, her retreat marked by the same clattering. Hale could not make out the next few words she whispered.

  “But give Mr. Hale my best, as it were,” Wilbee said aloud.

  “Of course.” A door opened then shut. All was silent for what felt like minutes. Then five heavy footsteps.

  “You’re awake, aren’t you Timothy?”

  With no calculable reason to lie, Hale answered, his words rasping dryly through his parched throat. “Yes, I’m awake.”

  “I thought so.” The man’s voice was calm, even friendly. “Listen: I’m going to cut you free, then remove your blindfold, then get you a glass of water. I’d like you to stay still on the floor until all that’s done.”

  Without waiting for a response, the man went to work. Large, strong hands gripped Hale’s wrists and he felt the sensation of a blade working at the ropes. Suddenly his hands were free, his arms involuntarily flying apart as the strain released. Then the cords binding his ankles were sliced. Once all his limbs were freed, fingers worked their way under the black cloth bound tightly around his eyes and suddenly h
e was blinking, half-blind, at the giant silhouette before him.

  “Fingers OK? You have feeling in them?”

  It took a second for Timothy to process the question and then to make and release fists to check.

  “Yes.”

  “You have feeling in your feet?”

  “Um . . . pins and needles.”

  “That’s feeling. That’ll be just fine. Work the ropes off yourself, alright? I cut all the knots.” The big man walked past Hale, who had yet to roll off his side, and searched through a cupboard. Hale’s vision was poor in the light after so many hours spent in darkness, though the room was lit by only a few lamps and a weak, naked bulb overhead. He sat up, blinking, as the large fellow knelt beside him and offered a glass of water. Several iced cubes floated in the glass. Hale drained it in one long pull.

  “It gets pretty hot in there, huh?”

  “In where?” Hale asked, his throat still dry despite the liquid. The man made no answer, reaching out to take the glass back from Timothy and rising again. His eyes finally adjusting to the space, Hale looked around. He was in a motel room: floral print bedspread, a loveseat and wooden chair by the single window, and a sink outside the bathroom over which his captor now stood, refilling the glass from a large plastic jug. Looking down at himself he realized he was wearing blue jeans, a gray sweater, and brown loafers. They were his clothes.

  “Where the hell am I?”

  “Sandy Dunes Inn.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Don’t worry about it.” The man turned and stood still, holding the glass of water in his hand. “Why don’t you have a seat. Or lie down if you’d like.”

  Hale rose shakily to his feet, his joints creaking and popping. He held himself as tall as he could against the myriad aches and pains suddenly assailing him.

  “Or stand,” the man smiled. He stepped closer to Timothy and handed him the water. “Sorry about the crack on the cheek, Tim. Far from personal. I’m Russell Ascher. Russ is fine if you’d prefer.”

  “What’s going on, Russ? Where the fuck am I?”