Outrider

by Steven John

  He worked his key into the plural locks then kicked open the iron door. All of the bulbs in this station worked, and Hutton twisted the massive dial to power up the system while bathed in a stark halogen glow. The flesh of his hands was pale and thin, almost translucent in the artificial light. A low rumble had begun, slowly growing into a whine as the charge grew stronger and stronger. Hairs began to rise all over the old outrider’s body. The noise rose in pitch and intensity, beseeching Hutton to hit the button.

  Not a bad goddamn run. Pretty lucky, overall.

  He slammed a fist down on the large black button and the klaxons wailed across the desert sands.

  “Go! Go! Go!” the bearded man screamed, waving his arm at the fourteen men clinging to the ladder above him. Sunlight poured down into the shaft. Though they had opened the hatch ten minutes prior, still the light of day was blinding as the drainers spilled out onto the desert, forming a defensive circle around the tunnel’s mouth.

  The squad leader came out last, screaming commands, spittle flying and catching in his thick brown beard. “Five right, rifles drawn, three right with charges! Four left, weapons, two left, charges! I’m with the left group! Move now, we have less than a minute!”

  The group fanned out to tackle their assignments with precision—they had been rehearsing for weeks. Some of the drainers raised assault rifles to their shoulders; the rest were connecting primer charges to explosive satchels; all worked while running.

  Scofield stopped walking and looked toward the sunfield, towering above the distant horizon. The echoing moan of the horns thundered through the air. OK . . . time to head in. It’s time. Scofield began moving again. He was jogging, then running. He reached the stable and sprinted down the rows of stalls to find Reese tossing her head and shifting about nervously.

  The outrider set to preparing his horse at a frenzied pace. Once she was saddled and ready, he led her out of the stall and toward the stable door, whispering encouragement to her. And to himself. Outside, he mounted up and took off riding toward the field. Scofield was still unsure what he would do once he got there.

  “This is it boys! If it moves and it’s not wearing black, shoot at it!” the captain barked as he leaped up from the folding table, jostling it and spilling maps and charts onto the sandy ground. He grabbed his assault rifle from where it leaned against the armored troop carrier and jogged a few yards north toward the sunfield, his eyes taking in the giant columns, a passing helicopter, the cloudless sky.

  Turning around to survey his men, the captain felt a twinge of near-paternal pride. The soldiers were lined up in parade ground precision: each of the four squads was three feet apart, each soldier separated by twelve inches, all arms presented. The training would pay off today, the officer felt. He nodded to his boys, confidence rising.

  “Make sure the reflectors on your shoulders are never covered. That’s what separates us from dead men as far as our aircraft are concerned. We’re moving in at a fast step. Ready! And . . .” the captain wheeled about, again facing the massive solar stacks a three mile trek from their position, “Move!”

  Haskell pulled back the bolt on his 30.06 rifle and let it slam home. “So you been under us all this time,” he muttered aloud over the persistent wail of the horns. His eyes on were a dozen drainers who had just emerged from an opening in the desert floor some eighty yards distant. OK, Hasky, he sighed, get to work.

  C. J. took in a deep breath and let it out slowly as he steadied his hands. His trigger finger slowly curled inward. The sand was warm on his chest and thighs, the sun hot on his back. He figured he could get off six, maybe seven shots before the drainers zeroed in on him and returned fire. If two of those bullets found homes in flesh, he figured he’d have done his job for the moment and would take cover behind the QV pillar a few feet to his right.

  The first shot was a bull’s-eye. The third caught a drainer in the hip, taking him out of the fight. The sixth and seventh shot ripped a man’s stomach apart. Then a hail of machine gun fire crackled through the air and shredded the sands around Haskell and he was rolling and then he was behind the column. Scores of bullets caromed off the metal pillar with loud thuds and angry whines.

  Your turn, Greg. Get shootin’, Haskell leaned a few inches away from the pillar to look east toward where Gregory White should have been positioned some two hundred yards away. The young man could not see anyone by either of the columns where he expected his comrade. The drainers were closing in. He flinched as a round skittered off the sand by his foot. I got about ten more seconds until I’m hand-to-hand here, Greg. Haskell’s heart was beating out of his chest. He tasted bile as he drew his pistol.

  Then suddenly the gunfire had shifted away—no more rounds were bouncing off the pillar or the nearby earth. Haskell chanced a glimpse around the column, thinking he’d spot Greg White engaging, but shocked instead to see Joseph Bay. And all the more amazing, the Bay was on horseback charging at a full gallop directly toward the remaining nine drainers. Bay had pistols in both hands, and through the exchange of fire Haskell could hear his wild howl.

  Russell Ascher’s boots landed at the bottom of the ladder with a heavy thud. The horns were still wailing above. But they were sure to stop any second. He had to throw the switch before that happened; before the surge of power from the klaxons dissipated.

  The drainer practically leapt across the cavernous room, searching in the dim green light of the chemical lanterns for the little iron box topped by an innocuous looking gray switch.

  He found the metal cube, scarcely eight inches on a side, and, falling to his knees, lifted the precious box a few inches off the ground, cradling it between both hands. Ascher shut his eyes, closing the tips of a thumb and forefinger on the gray switch protruding from the top of the cube.

  In the next second, millions and millions of the amperes drained from the Greater New Las Vegas region during the preceding weeks would be released in one single, terrible wave.

  “Get ready to see some serious firepower, Mr. Mayor.”

  Dreg clapped his hands, rubbing them together like a child anticipating a coveted gift. His black eyes blazed behind narrow slits of flesh; his teeth were bared in a savage smile.

  He and Major Engel, along with a dozen other soldiers jostling for a view from behind the rotund Mayor, were fixated on a bank of three monitors, each displaying real-time thermal imagery from aircraft mere seconds from unleashing an apocalyptic barrage upon the clusters of drainers that had suddenly appeared on the desert floor.

  Fuck with my city, eh? Fuck with Franklin Dreg? Poor decision, lads. The Mayor’s smile broadened. He glanced behind him and then turned halfway around to face a random corporal.

  “Time to wake those bastards up, huh young man!” He clapped the soldier on the shoulder so soundly the young man staggered, forcing a smile.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And about time indeed, boys!” Dreg bellowed, his eyes flashing as he looked at the assembled group. The Mayor took in a deep breath, ready to launch into a rousing monologue.

  All at once, the lights overhead went dark. Monitors around the room flickered and then went black. The mechanical hum and countless beeps and crackling radios fell silent, replaced by the dying whine of numerous cooling fans winding down.

  The Meeting Hall was plunged into an eerie silence. Only the diffuse sunlight from the windows set high in the walls lit the space, casting a pale gray light about the room.

  “What the hell just happened?” Dreg whispered. A moment later, the first thunderous crash was heard from outside.

  Noah Fischer had been hobbling up the dune to get a better look at who was exchanging fire. He cursed his broken hip, sweating both with pain and exertion. Something stopped him in his tracks—it took him a second to isolate the change. There was still the echo of shots from just over the sandy ridge, but there was no other noise. No engines sounded above.

  Fischer cupped his hands around his eyes and raised them to the sky. It took a
second for his vision and then his mind to focus on the plummeting helicopter. Down it fell, silently, rolling slowly onto one side, hanging for what seemed like ages, then it was out of sight on the other side of the dune. A booming explosion sounded as the massive craft impacted on the desert floor.

  Then Fischer was hobbling again, faster than before, bounding ahead with his good left leg and dragging the braced right leg behind. He crested the dune, his head jerking back and forth as now dozens of aircraft came tumbling from the sky: a little gray drone, whirling about in a flat spin; a twin-engine surveillance craft, nose down and shrieking to earth. In the distance, plumes of dust and smoke and flashes of explosions peppered the sunfield.

  Noah stood atop the dune, oblivious to the firefight taking place between three of his comrades and a squad of drainers, though the combat was a mere hundred yards away. Oh sweet Mary Mother what the fuck is happening?

  * * *

  The lights above Timothy Hale flickered, then went out. He rose and made his way through the sudden gloom toward the wall switch, which he toggled up and down. Nothing happened.

  Hale tried the door and found it unlocked. He stepped out of the motel room onto the wooden deck. David Flint was sitting in a chair a few feet from the doorway, flipping through the stack of magazines Hale had rejected earlier that morning.

  “Hey, Tim. What’s the word?” Flint asked with an affable grin.

  “The lights went out.”

  Flint was on his feet in a heartbeat, his smile gone. “Get back inside,” he ordered, pushing his coat open to reveal a holstered pistol. “Now.”

  Shocked by the sudden change in the man’s disposition, Hale stumbled quickly back into the motel room. Flint slammed the door shut behind him and Hale could hear him working the lock.

  “What’s going on, Flint?” Hale shouted through the door.

  “Everything!” The drainer’s pounding footfalls receded down the wooden planks.

  Greg White broke cover to return fire.

  “What the fuck!” he exclaimed aloud. One drainer lay dead on the ground; the remaining five had turned and were running full speed away from him. Never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, White dropped to one knee and tucked his rifle butt tight against his shoulder.

  He drew a steady bead on the slowest of the group, who was lagging behind by a good fifty feet, and squeezed three well aimed shots into the man’s back. Crimson blooms splashed out through the drainer’s beige cloak and he dropped like a stone.

  Immediately the outrider shifted a few degrees up and took aim at the next drainer. Just as he was about to fire, something caught his eye: the fastest runner of the squad had just disappeared down into the sands. Suddenly another leapt and then dropped out of sight. White was just lowering his cheek back down to the rifle’s stock when he heard the crashing above. He threw back his head in time to see the fighter jet plunging through two photovoltaic arrays. The massive plane seemed to catch for a second, tangled in the mass of equipment, and then plummeted the last two hundred feet to the ground streaming flames and smoke. It landed less than fifty yards from Greg, who was thrown onto his chest by the concussive blast.

  With a wretched groan, the damaged QV pillar began listing. A series of loud pops sounded as thick bolts sheared along the pillar’s length and then it was falling. His mind blank, instinct in total control, White found his feet under him and was running headlong away from the path of the falling column.

  It landed with a deafening boom, sending up a mighty cloud of dust and flinging debris through the air. White was aware of nothing. He ran until his lungs ached; ran faster than his large carriage had ever mustered before. Around him now the desert was alive with falling columns and the fires of downed aircraft. Distant automatic weapons rattled murderously. He paid none of it any heed, surging ahead, shifting to the right to avoid a falling drone then veering left as an array broke free above.

  Finally White began to flag, eventually stumbling and finding himself unable to regain his feet. He was exhausted. After a minute sucking in ragged breaths, as his mind slowly regained some semblance of thought, he realized he had been pierced in countless places by flying shrapnel. His jeans were sticky with blood. His face stung and a dull pain pulsated from his lower back.

  The outrider had lost both his guns during his flight. He vaguely remembered tossing the rifle aside. The pistol had simply disappeared. Greg managed to crawl toward a fallen pillar, crossing the hundred feet of open land as quickly as his weary, damaged body would allow. At least he could take refuge under the column and get some of his strength back. Assuming he still had enough blood.

  As he drew near the base of the toppled pillar, a depression in the sand caught the outrider’s trained eye. Gotta be a burrow, he reasoned, changing course to crawl toward the relative shelter the hideaway would afford.

  But when he brushed back a thin layer of sand, White found not a leech’s burrow, but a hatch covering the entrance to a tunnel.

  “We’re holding fast a while, boys!” the drainer hissed through his thick brown beard. “Any of you hit?”

  “They got Osborne and Jacob,” one of the men a few feet down the ladder called back.

  “And Dawson is hit, but I think he’s alive,” added another from above. “He took it in the legs.”

  “OK, we’ll drag him back down as soon as we can. Hold fast. Did anyone get a hit into that fucking cowboy?”

  A few of the men shook their heads; a few called out in the negative. Goddamn madman, the squad leader seethed to himself, wrapping his burly arms more tightly around the ladder.

  “When we go back above ground, I want second team on security. Take that bastard out first if he’s up there. He’s got a death wish. We’ll hook the drag lines to the arrays once we have the area secured. I don’t want to be above ground for more than five minutes, maximum. Whoever is lowest,” he looked down the shaft, fighting his acrophobia and straining to see in the pale light cast by a half dozen glow rods, “start climbing down now and get those cables.”

  The faces that looked up at him were barely discernible in the soft green glow, but every set of eyes was alert, ready, and hardened.

  The captain rose from his belly into a low crouch. He looked around to conduct a quick assessment; all of his men were accounted for and unhurt. No more aircraft were falling and the damage seemed to be over in the field. For now.

  The soldiers had been less than a quarter mile from the towering pillars when all hell broke loose from above. A cloud of ash and dust hung above the earth and trails of smoke rose from dozens of downed vehicles, but silence had returned to the sunfield, save for the crackling flames of a nearby crash site.

  “What the fuck happened, sir?” called out a nearby sergeant.

  “EMP I think.” The captain pulled a pair of binoculars from a pouch on his belt and, after wiping sand and sweat from his brow, raised them to his eyes. “We may be in this fight without much back up.”

  25

  Joseph Bay sighed as he let his horse nuzzle against his palm a few seconds longer. Its breaths were growing labored. The colt had been his partner for more than five years. Now it was another thing he would lose.

  “Sorry, boy. Should have been me got hit. I’ll see you soon.” He took a step back from the horse and placed the barrel of his pistol between its eyes, squeezing the trigger three times without a moment’s hesitation.

  Cold as his heart had grown, Bay couldn’t watch the horse fall. He turned away and was already pulling fresh shells from his belt when the animal pitched sideways, landing with a dull thud. Joe reloaded his six shooter, then knelt to gather up the supplies he’d taken from the saddle bags a minute before. These consisted only of ammunition and tobacco.

  Bay took one long look around at the shattered landscape, the fallen arrays and smoke rising from downed vehicles, the haze of dust drifting over the earth, and then he slung his rifle over one shoulder and lit a cigarette. The hatch the drainers disappeared into wa
s only a few dozen paces away and they were sure to have heard the shots. No matter.

  The outrider walked with slow, measured steps toward the shallow depression in the sand. The cigarette hung loosely from his lips, the pistol was gripped tightly in his right hand. He found the fingers of his left clutching two crosses hanging from his neck. Bay wondered how many times he had approached similar looking holes in this desert. All those years. . . . More thoughts began to form but Joe banished them as he came to a stop three paces from the hatch. He blew smoke through his nose and trained the pistol with both hands.

  C. J. wandered in aimless circles. Blood trickled from both ears and he could only see out of one eye. His head pounded and he struggled to form complete thoughts. Gotta find that horse . . . gotta ride . . . should be moving . . . He tripped over a sage bush, falling roughly to the ground after a few stumbling steps. Gotta get up on my feet. Get up on your feet. In his mind, the outrider rose and was walking again, but he had not moved. He lay crumpled on his right side, limply clawing at the sand before him with both hands. His mouth was bone dry.

  Both of Haskell’s eardrums had burst as the plane exploded on impact a stone’s throw behind him. The massive four-engine charger plane had been circling at high altitude, awaiting aircraft with depleted batteries. It was the last vehicle to come falling down to earth that day; the pilots had almost managed to get the plane gliding under backup manual controls, but the flight systems were simply too dependent on power. Haskell had no idea what had happened. After Joseph Bay had gone charging into the fray, driving the surviving drainers back under ground, Haskell had sprinted to join him, then he remembered hearing explosions and then a QV pillar toppling across his path and he had turned to run the other way and then he was on the ground, deaf and half blind.

  The young man finally regained his feet and began shuffling northeast, vaguely aware that he was headed in the direction of the Outpost. He had gotten it into his mind to go home to his little shack and take a shower. Haskell was scarcely aware of himself as he drew his pistol and aimed it at the drainer crawling out of a burrow not fifteen feet ahead of him. He fired two rounds into the man’s back. The pistol jumped in his hand but Haskell heard only a distant ringing. He pulled the trigger several more times but found the gun empty.