Outrider

by Steven John

  Dreg lingered outside the pressboard doors. From within came the hum of many voices, machines, and motion. He nodded to himself. It was all happening. So a challenge had been made? Well, let it be answered. If he was to be provoked, let him roar. They were not thoughts that came to The Mayor, exactly; rather ideas fully formed and unshakable appeared as if always present, only waiting to be tapped.

  He lit the cigar.

  The Meeting Hall was awash in light. Bright rows of fluorescent tubes hung above, scores of lamps were scattered about on desks and countless monitors, screens, and a thousand little bulbs blinked red, green, and blue and every color in between. No specific sound could be singled out amid the electric hum, the whispering static, and the murmur and mumble of a hundred men’s voices.

  Dreg lingered in the open doorway. It took his eyes the better part of a minute to isolate details among the bustle of uniformed men, the serpentine coil of cables, the mountains of stacked equipment, and all those numberless lights. The space was positively alive, a writhing mass of machine and man. He had never seen anything quite like it. At first the sight was unsettling, so unfamiliar as to be even frightening. But as his vision adjusted to the brightness and the motion, he began to nod to himself. This was his doing. This was here by his edict. He took a few great puffs off the cigar and then ran a palm across his mustache, smoothing the coarse hairs flat.

  “Who thinks they’re in charge here!” Mayor Dreg bellowed, unaware that he was reciting, word for word, Boss Hutton’s entrance from hours before. This time, however, the room fell silent. Scores of eyes rose from their computer screens and graphs or broke from conversations to look at Dreg, standing there with his feet wide, his chin out, and his chest puffed up beneath a heavy gray overcoat.

  “Come on now, one of you must remember how to speak!” With a twinkle in his eye, The Mayor slammed the double doors shut behind him and made his way into the room. He clapped the two men sitting nearest the doorway on their backs, not bothering to glance over at what they were working on. A young fellow with high cheekbones and narrow eyes forced a smile as Franklin reached out and clutched his hand, shaking it vigorously.

  Dreg sauntered about the cavernous room uttering “attaboys” and “good work” and other aphorisms, entirely unconcerned for the moment with the grave nature of the work being done. It failed to occur to The Mayor that this room was usually filled with nothing but folding chairs and a few dozen horsemen. The enormity and complexity of the operation and the threat such an apparatus’s construction necessitated were outside his realm of thought. Rather here were his men in need of a good dose of encouragement.

  Strayer had been talking to three of his officers in the far corner when The Mayor entered. He had immediately turned his back and lowered his face when he spotted Dreg, well before The Mayor had begun his shouting and salutations. Now he drew the three men into a closer huddle.

  “Listen hard: Dreg is in command so if he gives a direct order, unfortunately we have to follow it. He has something big cooking and it’s a fool’s errand. When he briefed me in, I told him he was goddamn fool to his face. He has known about the drainer build-up for days now. I told him we had to attack then and there. He ordered me to stand down, wanted to take them out in ‘one mighty blow’ rather than attacking them before they could launch their own offensive. Now we’re in it deep because of one fat man’s fat ego.”

  The officers’ faces were shocked but attentive. Strayer shifted his gaze every few seconds, engaging each of his men directly. “He’s got fucking Federal troops lining up. He thinks I don’t know how many or what they brought with them, but I do, to some extent. He’s not the only guy who hears things around this town. Mayor Dreg’s got a few thousand Federals pouring into the area, and if they want to end up dead, fine. Fuck it. But not us—we’re not dying so he can run for president later. Got it? So we’re not going to tell him one single bit of actionable intelligence, and we’re going to stall until we know exactly what we’re up against and we have our own strategy in place. Anything we tell him we’re only telling to Feds who’ll just want to brush us aside, understand?

  “The man doesn’t know a goddamn thing about combat operations and that’s the way we like it. So we’re going to use lots of terminology, lots of obscure details and stats and we’re going to tell him nothing while we do it, got it? We’re going to solve this with bullshit. Or at least delay things. Clear?” All three men nodded, understanding fully.

  Strayer went on: “The man’s ego is surgically attached to his asshole, so kiss it as much as you can. The more he feels inflated, the less he’s going to get in the way and fuck things up. Engel, for some reason he took a shine to you a while back, so it’s going to fall largely to you to keep his fat ass out of any real business.”

  “I can handle that,” Major Engel smiled, his teeth flashing bright white in his dark face. “He loves hearing about munitions, as I recall, so talk about lots of things that flash and make loud booms.” Engel looked at the other two officers, both captains, who muttered their assent back to him.

  Dreg’s circuit of handshakes and backslaps was drawing him ever nearer to the group. Strayer whispered his last commands.

  “Mayor Dreg has no idea how many men even make up the forces we have at our disposal, and I don’t want him to. If he asks any specifics, direct him to someone else, someone who’s not here—make up a name if you have to. If he learns we have no effective Civil Defense reserves, he may send the Federal troops right in on top of us. If that happens, we’re no longer in command. You boys want a chance for us to gain some ground . . . to gain some clout and control, well, it’s here for the first time any of us have ever seen—let’s not let the fucking politician score off this.”

  “Ah, Mr. Strayer!”

  Colonel Ridley Strayer straightened up, let his face go blank, then slowly turned toward his elected commander. “Ah. Mayor Dreg.”

  “So how’s my town doing, Captain?”

  “Colonel.” Strayer waited just long enough to let the pause linger awkwardly. “The town will be fine. Sir. But I have my work cut out for me. We do, rather. The sunfield is strategically sound but tactically under active encroachment with sporadic engagement. So far the insurgency has used low-tech and non-collateral divergence but without full leverage of both our rapid response and ranged force factors, we’ll have a potentially—”

  “English, man! Goddammit!”

  Strayer threw an arm around The Mayor congenially, turning him to face the room. “Walk with me. Major Engel, you have a solid grasp of our tactical vernacular—come with me and The Boss here.”

  As Strayer and Engel led Dreg into the sea of monitors and maps and graphs and antennae, the two captains left behind turned to face each other.

  “Non-collateral divergence?” the shorter of the two said through teeth clenched to ward off a grin.

  “I guess we just need to leverage our ranged force factors until he leaves us the fuck alone,” the other man said as he turned away with a wry smile. “I gotta wonder, though, if that son of a bitch is really as clueless as Colonel Strayer thinks . . . who’s actually in charge here?”

  C. J. Haskell had taken a half step into the Meeting Hall when he froze. His left boot hung in the air and his grip on the door knob tightened involuntarily. What the fuck is going on here? Slowly, not breathing, eyes not focusing, he eased back out of the room into the frigid night. After a long look around the Hall, he shut the door behind him and turned around, leaning against the concrete wall.

  Haskell’s hat fell to the ground as he let his head slump back against the building. He barely noticed. Well this is the last goddamn thing I need right now. He was not sure if he had thought or said these words. He was exhausted. He was cold and sore and hungry. Christ I’m so wore down. I’m so damn wore down.

  The young man’s hand was trembling from a mix of cold and nerves as he worked open the buttons of his duster and dug within the jacket for his pouch of tobacco. He s
pilled finely cut leaves all over the cement landing as he struggled to steady his fingers enough to get tobacco and paper into the rough semblance of a cigarette, eventually cobbling together a tube-shaped mess.

  The smoke was warm and rich and relaxing, though, when finally he felt it flow across his tongue. C. J. had been a smoker for ony three years but one would never have guessed it from his affinity for the pastime. Unconsciously, he blew a perfect ring out into the cold, still air, followed by two slow plumes from his nostrils. The smoke drifted up toward the moonless starry night, fading into nothing, unwatched.

  Haskell had killed another man a few hours before. He hoped the last ever—he hated it. He couldn’t level with it. Two in one fucking day. Three in his short life. The first man he’d killed had at least been shooting back and that was over a year ago when things made sense. The second was during honest combat.

  This one had been running. Neither for him nor away from him; he had been running toward where the half-brothers Joe and Eric Bay were dug in behind a QV pillar and Haskell didn’t know if the drainer was making for them or was just running that way but he knew he wasn’t any friend and he had led him a few feet with his rifle and then damn if he wasn’t a good shot.

  He sucked deeply on the cigarette which crackled and folded as the cherry hit a pocket that was more paper than tobacco. Haskell dropped the smoke as it burned his fingers, stomping it out angrily. The Bay brothers had told him they’d seen a group of some forty men jog past their hideout less than fifteen minutes before he made contact. It was a safe bet that someone had heard his shot and C. J. wondered now if rather than protecting his comrades he’d brought the Dark Angel down upon them.

  Eric, the younger of the two, had told him to keep moving; he’d said the Bay boys were going to keep watch over a pass between the dunes where the group of drainers came from. Haskell pleaded with them to pull out; reasoned with them that the two brothers alone out there against dozens were as good as cold bodies, while alive back with the team they could fight on. One of them whispered something about someone “at the bridge.” Bullshit romance nonsense talk. Dead man’s bullshit talk, C. J. had raged to himself as left the brothers, feeling a strange mix of sorrow and impotence.

  This had been near the very eastern tip of the sunfield and C. J. had been riding west, back toward the Outpost, ever since. The trip had taken him from midnight until now. He’d arrived minutes ago, unsaddled and watered the little colt he’d ridden to damn near breaking, and made a quick check in vain to see if Duncan had made it back to the stable. There was no sign of his horse. And not another man in sight, at that. Moses Smith’s horse was in its pen, so that meant Greg White must have gotten back OK. The two men had split up hours before, Greg returning to the Outpost to report their comrade’s death; Haskell going on to complete his initial reconnaissance assignment.

  Reese, Scofield’s girl, was in her stable. C. J. Haskell took great comfort in that. Somehow, knowing Scofield was close by made things seem more sensible, more tolerable. He respected and trusted that man as much as any other alive.

  He’d left the stable at a sprint heading toward the Meeting Hall—its bright lights a beacon of security in the darkness—only to find it infested with these faceless, uniformed city bastards.

  Haskell knelt slowly, picking up his hat from where it had fallen. He did not put it back on his head. Still crouching, numb, the young man wondered how much blood would spill this day. He wondered why the PV arrays had all shifted in the darkness those hours ago. Back when Moses had breath in him. He wondered so many things.

  Haskell hadn’t had the stomach to tell the Bay brothers of Moses’s death—he had yet to deal with it himself. They knew about Tripp Hernandez’s hanging. And they had been delivered supplemental ammunition and chow. Boss Hutton had the five most junior riders (Haskell was in fact younger than two of them but never counted among their ranks; he had been riding the fields for years longer and could outperform even most of the seasoned men) on a constant loop now, checking in on the dozen odd outriders dug in, delivering news and supplies, and acting as messengers and scouts while moving between these static positions and the horsemen on patrol routes.

  Haskell tried to swallow Boss Hutton’s admonitions, delivered by one of the young riders who had hailed him to a stop an hour before, that everything was stable and that the response was in full gear. Goddamn fool, Haskell shook his head, thinking back on how close he’d come to shooting the young outrider who had stopped him. Shouting like a fuckin’ banshee in the dark. The youth, scarcely two years younger but a manchild nonetheless, had cut him off and then, never realizing Haskell had a pistol on him and was ready to shoot until the very second his face became visible in the starlight, had said that orders were to: “Stick to routes, engage only in defense, and to assume every stranger was a combatant.”

  These were the same basic orders C. J. had been given two days earlier and he knew well that it was just lip service horseshit to keep the men from panicking. But the young rider had given him one new piece of information: the Civil Defense Forces were slated to move into the field shortly after noon. What was that, seven, maybe eight more hours?

  And that man in there. That huge, lumbering man—he knew it though he hadn’t seen his face. It was Mayor Dreg. No doubt. The epitome of the city world, the other world, the world C. J. Haskell had rejected years before, now here and he had brought all the faceless nameless soulless black-clad rank-and-file city soldiers out to save the day, and none of them even understanding what a goddamn day was worth. None of them knowing what it was like to spend sunup to sundown away from the bullshit constructs of broken-down people abiding by transportation schedules and using the right fork for the right dish and blushing rather than speaking out or standing up and not knowing the smell and touch of horseflesh or the wonderful sting of windburned cheeks or worn out thighs and I just thought it would go on and on I guess. I ain’t so wise and old souled as I got em’ all believing. You aren’t. I’m not. Jesus Christ your horse is gone and here you are and there he is and all them. There you are. Here we are.

  Haskell reached into his pocket and clutched the tobacco pouch, then slowly withdrew his hand again, empty. He was entirely unaware of the action. It doesn’t mean shit in the end, he thought. But it was not a thought. He did not mean anything by “it” or “the end” and as soon as the words had formed in his mind they were gone, not remembered, as fleeting as a distant breeze.

  He felt very light, suddenly. He stretched, reaching his arms above him and rising onto his tiptoes and all in matter of seconds he was calm and collected and unconcerned with the greater, now focused on the moment. It was very clear what he needed to do. He had to go into that place—that hall he counted as a room in his home—and find out what was happening and he had to become a part of it. No specific thoughts or emotions stirred his thinking; rather he had acquired convicted. This thing that was happening, this threat that had now taken from him two friends at least, that had drawn him close enough to death that he had tasted its bile, that had taken over the very life he had chosen and cherished, it demanded of the young man action—it demanded his concerted action and he would rise to it and give all.

  The first step would not be pleasant. Haskell had only seen The Mayor in person one time. As an almost-man of eighteen, he had attended a rally for Dreg’s second re-election. Dreg had been over a hundred yards away and all the outrider could recall was a stripe of dark hair below his nose, a thatch of dark hair atop his head and those massive shoulders lumbering about the stage. Now he would have to see the eyes beneath that mane and hear the words coming from beneath that mustache. It was his goddamn sunfield, after all. I’ll be damned if I let these city boys run this show into the ground.

  “Hot damn I bet that gets those sonsabitches running!” Dreg bellowed, clapping Major Engel on the back.

  The officer forced a smile, nodding. “Yeah, it—I mean yes, sir, the Falcon III is just about the best of our muni
tions. It packs nearly the equivalent of a traditional five hundred pounder into a missile we can load onto our remote craft. And it’s guided by satellite to within five feet of the designated target. We have about ten drones in the air currently—maybe a dozen by now—and we’ll have over fifty by the afternoon. Plus the manned fighter bombers and choppers.”

  “What else? Surely there must be more soldiers, tanks and trucks and . . . and the like! When can we have the boots on the ground move in?”

  Engel leaned back in his chair, reaching for a cup of coffee. He took a sip and winced at the tepid swill. Looking askance across the large room he could see Colonel Strayer pacing back and forth in a corner, gesticulating wildly, phone pressed to his ear. Strayer’s left hand wrapped itself into a fist which he held against clenched teeth. Major Engel desperately wanted to know what had his superior so worked up, but for now it was his duty to keep Dreg occupied.

  Engel set the mug down and turned his attention back to The Mayor. “There are brigades fanning out in both directions along the axis of the sunfield as we speak. We have half-tracks and ATCs depositing squads every few miles. The plan is to have the area surrounded by twelve hundred hours, so by the time close air is fully in place in the early afternoon, troops will be able to overwhelm the interior.” Engel tapped a few keys, pulling up a map of the area of operation. “It’s going to take a while to get communication channels in place, though, or we’d be able to move earlier, but what with the frequency displacement in the field—” he looked over his shoulder and found Dreg paying no attention. The Mayor was punching away at his mobile. After a moment Franklin looked up.