by Faith Hunter
“So I’m just free to go?”
“Not quite.” Sundown was nearly toe to toe with Frank now. “I’ll need your word on two things. Promise me you won’t come back here until I’ve returned Emily and moved on, and that you won’t seek me out where I go from here. You’ve been the only one to find me. I can’t have you after me again.”
Frank wanted to say the words, but he’d never been able to lie convincingly. And he’d never leave without his daughter. “I promise that if my daughter comes back, and there’s no proof you’re harming anyone, I’ll leave you be.” He hoped that would be enough.
Sundown slammed the stock of the rifle against Frank’s head in one swift motion.
~*~
Frank opened his eyes. Twilight hadn’t deepened perceptibly; he must have only been unconscious for a moment. Looking down, he saw the bandit squatting at his feet. Sundown’s bandana was around his neck.
The man’s face was a nightmare. Deep gouges ran from his forehead to his chin, across both eyes. The orbs were shredded but not shriveled or dry. The torn flesh and eyes were as fresh as if they had just been ravaged, though no blood came from the wounds. There were deep bite marks on the throat.
One moment Frank was looking at the horrific tableau and the next he saw nothing at all. In panic, he groped to his feet. His balance was unsteady in the sudden darkness that was blacker than any night he’d ever known. His stomach clenched as he pictured his eyes a milky white.
“I’ll be taking Betty home now,” Sundown’s deep voice said. She won’t remember any of this. I’ll keep her from being aware until she’s back with her parents, unlike that boy that woke while I was leading a posse away from me.”
Frank heard footsteps in the sand. Sundown’s trousers rubbing on Hank’s hide followed by the rustle of Betty’s skirts told him they’d mounted.
“It’s too bad the way things worked out,” Sundown said. “If those men weren’t down there, I could have just shot you and buried you next to your daughter. You’d have been home safe one day after her.” Hank’s heavy tread crunched in the sand toward Frank. “And if I’d let you go, we both know you wouldn’t have been able to stay away. Better your girl lives with a blind father than you destroy her chance to live again.”
A sick queasiness wormed through Frank’s belly. Had he been blind all along; not believing the stories in town, not believing Sundown, not believing the proof of Betty Holland in front of him? If he’d believed, maybe he would have made the promises asked of him; maybe he would have had both his sight and his daughter.
“I assume you have a horse nearby.” Sundown’s voice came from next to him. “Grab onto Hank’s tail and we’ll get you back to it. I’ll lead your horse near town, so it heads for home instead of for those posse horses. We’ll leave some good tracks while we’re at it, to lead them away from here.”
Blind and scared, Frank had no options but to reach out for the dog. He’d found Emily as June had told him to, but he be coming home without their daughter, and blind on top of it. She was a strong woman; he hoped she was strong enough for this. He touched the dog’s flank and felt down the side of the beast to the tail. The hound moved forward and Frank followed.
He held as tightly to the dog’s tail as he did to the only thing he had left; his hope that Sundown was a man of his word. Frank wouldn’t be reading to Emily anymore, but maybe a month from now he would hold her in his arms again.
Fifteen Seconds
Scott Hungerford
When the chute door opens in front of me, I head forward like a prizefighter, nimble steps, fists clenched tight, boot heels leaving tread in the hard-packed dirt. Up ahead the entire stadium is an off-key symphony of alien voices, thousands upon thousands of Scales wailing for the spectacle to begin. Amidst the strains of their sing-song language, I hear my name spoken aloud by the announcer, the hard syllables echoing through the stadium on the backs of a hundred loudspeakers.
The high walls of the chute lead to a concrete tunnel that descends into the main arena. All of the walls are filled with little hairline cracks like everything else in this city, given a good shake by the bombings that turned bigger places like Kansas City into wide sheets of scorched glass. Above me, perched every twenty feet along the top of the chute, stands a soldier Scale with an energy rifle. Too high to reach, dressed in the dust-color jumpsuits that goes for military uniforms, they watch me through slitted black eyes, knowing that I could leap up, drag them down, and kill any of them at any time. But I don’t want these ones dead. If I’m going to go forward with the plan, if I’m going to kill tonight, it’s going to be out there in the arena under the hot lights, not by a quick death in the shadows away from the roaring crowd.
They hate us, the Scales. I’ve lost count of the years since we lost the planet to them, since they poisoned our lands, burned our cities, and replanted every river basin with wide-leaved varrim plants. Varrim is like a drug to them, like tobacco was to us, one that is sold across the countless planets the Scales call home.
Within the endless fields, those of us that survived the purge use hooked tomak knives to cut the leaves from the fast growing plants in twelve-hour shifts. We raise the wide-pawed vako lizards that the Scales use both as meat and as mounts and try to avoid being eaten or trampled to death in the process. The most unfortunate of us serve the Scales at their dinner table. Not as the main course, as our flesh tastes foul and unpleasant to them. But our blood is praised as a condiment, hot and fresh and lightly spiced, poured from a silvery cup to add umami for their otherworldly palates.
I’ve been in a dozen arenas before this as I made my way up to this final fight. But this is my first time in a stadium this large. All of the other battles, all of the other Scales that I’ve beaten, humiliated, or torn apart with my bare hands, all of those coliseum nights are behind me now. There is only Blackhat, the reigning rider in the competition. Soon the final moment will come to see which one of us is stronger. Whether he will be able to ride me, to subjugate me with his telepathic power—or whether I will be able to fight through his web of control, tear him off his mount, and rip the arms off of his small, child-like body. In this final tournament, my height and mass make me a monster, one that is revered, feared, and bet upon by the Scales in the greatest spectacle they have.
My name is Dotti, with an I and not a Y. And you better believe me—I’m going to win.
~*~
I was that cute girl in the middle row in high school, the one with curly brunette hair in a cowboy town filled with cheerleader blondes. I got straight B’s in high school, worked my ass off in 4H, and spent a year as the flag-rider at every major county event when I turned fourteen.
Because of my family, my chores, and the choices I made, I didn’t have a lot of friends growing up. For me, boys were never a problem. I didn’t have time for them, not with school and all my extracurriculars, not with a forty-acre cattle farm to take care of with my Mom, my Dad, and the hired hands. I did a little bit of everything on the farm on the weekends, from sunrise to sundown just like the rest of my family, and learned to spit on my blisters and keep going no matter what.
Every summer at the fair, the bull-riding events came around, which was just for the guys. For us girls, there was barrel racing, which I loved from the time I first got to ride my mom’s Dasher around the Braxton arena. Barrel racing is a dangerous sport, looping three cans in a matter of a few seconds at breakneck speed. But compared to the guys that climb onto a bull’s back and try to ride it one-handed for eight seconds with only the angels watching over them, I was only looking at a busted arm if I fell. The bull riders were in danger of getting stomped, their skulls bashed in, their spines torn apart if they couldn’t pull a hard ride. It was thrilling to watch, and all I wanted to do from the first bull ride I ever saw was to try my hand at eight seconds to see if I could match up with the best.
My grandfather used to kid me about that. We went together to every event, ate popcorn side by side on th
e hard wooden risers as bull riders tried to defy the will of the thousand-pound, pissed-off beast beneath them. With one hand on the rope and one hand raised up over their shoulder, a successful eight-second ride was like watching an Olympics moment or the last lap of a NASCAR race, where life could utterly change for good or bad based on your skill, your strength of will, and an arbitrary roll of the dice.
After my grandfather died when I was a sophomore in high school, I still went to the events without him, but with him, eating popcorn, drinking orange soda, and imagining what he would say as riders won and fell. About how this one had his weight shifted wrong, or that one didn’t listen to the bull when it was in the chute, or how a white bull named Dustwrecker always spun left when it smelled like rain. Bull riding is part science and part superstition and there’s nothing else like it in the whole wide world.
In my senior year, just a few weeks before I was going to graduate, the world ended. The Scale’s silver ships appeared over all of our major cities, raining down sheets of fire. Smaller ones crisscrossed the rest of the planet, spraying an ocean of poison, killing our crops, our herd animals, reducing our forests to dead tinder that burned with even a hint of lightning. For the first four months we didn’t even see our enemies, as the dwindling armies of the world were never able to bring even one of their ships down. They just kept poisoning everything, changing the pH of the soil, the acidity of the oceans, and there wasn’t a damned thing we could do about it.
When the Scales finally came to Earth, revealed themselves for what they were, there were only a few hundred thousand humans left. Some parts of the United States had been untouched by the poison and the survivors came here, to Braxton County, where we were ready to put up our last fight. For my Mom and Dad and I, we did our part to keep the herds alive, to make sure that people had food and water, and support the soldiers and volunteers that were taking the last of humanity in.
When the Scales came in their hovertrucks and their hoverbikes, wearing dust-colored jumpsuits that seemed right out of a science-fiction film, we couldn’t believe what we were seeing. They were alien grays no more than three feet high with wide black eyes, with elongated skulls that were more football-shaped than round. They came along the roads in convoys seemingly unaware that there was going to be a fight.
In the end, there wasn’t. When they got within a hundred yards of where one of our ambush groups lay hidden in the brush with a bunch of high-powered rifles, or got close to a house with a few refugees hidden inside, they used their mind powers to force them to drop their weapons and walk out like so many docile sheep. A few dozen of the Scales could control a hundred people easy, make them just get up out of their chairs and walk outside into the sunlight, just like my Mom and Dad did on a bright summer morning. The last I ever saw of my parents was from where I hid by the kitchen window, when they were loaded up into a hovertruck and taken away with the rest of the neighbors.
For two days I was alone. Too scared to light a fire, I slept cold and ate food out of cans. I prayed a lot, cried a lot, hoped for some sign, some answer that would make this whole nightmare just go away. I wondered why they didn’t take me, when they took everyone else. The county seemed empty, with only the pets and livestock left behind. I slept with a loaded shotgun beside me on the bed, with empty cans tied to the door handles all around the house in case they came back for more.
They did, two days later, and this time they caught me. The Scales that came down the driveway had devices with them, devices that let them track me. How, I don’t know, but they came right up to the house like they knew I was there. Knowing the jig was up, I came out on the front porch and watched them, waited for them to try to take over my brain.
The leader, different from the others by the shiny, powder-blue jumpsuit he wore, he stepped up and tried to yoke me, to control me, to force me to my knees with a burst of pure willpower. I was tempted to go down just to make the pain stop, but I fought against it, managed to keep my feet, managed to buck the rider off of my back.
When he stepped back, staggered by my resistance, holding his stupid head, the soldiers in his platoon nearly shot me with their rifles. But one of the leaders watching from the back, maybe a female due to her thinner skull and wider hips, she barked at them with a guttural sound, staying the killing shot. Coming forward, just like she was trying to keep from spooking a horse, she carefully bound my hands with something that reminded me of a rope of snot. Then she guided me toward the hovertruck, gentle and cautious at every turn.
It was here I realized that I was important, a human that was able to resist their mind control. But was I going to be vivisected like some kind of science experiment? I was terrified as I got into the truck, but didn’t offer any resistance, as it was probably her way or six feet under. In response, she opened a can of warm Coke with her finger pads and let me sip it, even as she very carefully tickled the edges of my memories, trying to see if there was a way in. I was a stubborn cuss, just like my Mom and Dad, so I bore down, sipped my Coke, and kept her out, keeping the secrets of my life to myself.
I tried to ask about my Mom and Dad, or about what was going to happen to the cattle back at the ranch, but she didn’t have words. She seemed to understand what I was saying, but had no real way to communicate back, not even a yes or no. All she had was her flat, expressionless gaze without a trace of human emotion anywhere in it.
An hour later I arrived at the Braxton Fairgrounds, where I was moved out of the truck at rifle point. While there were a bunch of other people lined up by the arena fence, the Scales marched me right in past the lot of them. I tried to see if Mom or Dad was there, but they weren’t. A couple of sophomores I knew from school waved at me, but I didn’t wave back. I had a sense something bad was going to happen to me, and I didn’t want some other kid to be guilty by association.
I was taken into the center arena where a bunch of Scales sat at a long plastic cafeteria table. As they marched me up, I noticed something odd. Standing over by one side of the table was a Scale not wearing a jumpsuit, but a kid’s cowboy outfit. With a red-and-white-checked shirt, blue jeans, and leather boots, he had a battered black cowboy hat jammed onto his head to complete the look. It would have seemed silly except for the two guns he wore on his belt. One of them was a heavy revolver and the other was a space-age gun made of a black, silvery metal.
When he saw me, he made a guttural, barking command that made the soldiers around me jump. Striking and shoving at me with the butt of their rifles, the little aliens backed me up until I was about thirty paces from the table. Then Blackhat did an unbelievable thing—he tossed the revolver out into the dirt in front of him. He waited, like he was waiting for me to come get it. I stood there not moving, arms crossed. I wasn’t stupid. I’d learned to shoot from my grandfather, enough to shoot a few tin cans off the railing by the barn. But not enough to beat this guy to the draw.
Then he took a stance like a gunfighter—and pushed into my mind, forcing me, using all of his telepathic strength to control me. Unwillingly, I took a step toward the gun, and then another. Even as the handful of Scales in the arena cheered in their weird ululating way, the people lined up on the rail shouted for me to fight it, to fight him. I took a third step and a fourth. I knew that I had to take the gun. I had to pick it up and try to shoot him. But I stopped, forced myself to resist him, kicked him out, shoved him out the suicide doors and drove him out of my mind.
It worked. He stood there, shocked, even as the people cheered and the aliens hissed with displeasure. So I walked right up to him, moving past the gun still laying in the dirt, getting close enough to swing. He tried his mind effects on me one more time, but I pushed past them, raised my arm and slapped him to the dirt. Weirdly enough, I felt brittle bones in his face break under my hand, as just the mere force of a humiliating blow was enough to cause serious harm. When the little alien scampered back up from the dirt spitting white blood, he screamed a command and I was at gunpoint once again. I was still
his prisoner, but he was humiliated, beaten, and all the humans in the arena were cheering like I’d just done a set of barrels in ten seconds flat.
As I got marched outside, this time through the rear gate, I saw something that made me sick to my stomach. Over in the corner of one of the cattle pens there was a pile of dead bodies, maybe a dozen total. Men and women and a couple of teenagers, all shot through clean either the heart or forehead. I got the sense right there of what would have happened to me if I had reached for the gun. Blackhat would have drawn on me and put me down. But I didn’t and I was still alive, at least for the moment. With my Mom and Dad not in the pile, it was possible they were still alive too.
After sitting and waiting in a holding pen until it got dark, a different transport took me to a farm in North Braxton, out past the railroad tracks in the middle of nowhere. When I first got marched into the old barn, converted into a kind of barracks for special people like me, there were maybe thirty folks inside, each with their own cots and boxes of rations. I could see them just for a moment, all staring at me in the dim light. Then when the Scale slammed the door, I was left in pitch-black darkness with them. Over the next few hours until I could finally sleep, I got to know Jan and Stacy, Julio and Big Mike just by the sounds of their voices, and their smooth or rough hands holding mine as we prayed together in a circle on the straw-strewn floor.
~*~
For the next few months until winter came, I was put to hard labor. Working on the family farm meant I was no stranger to hard work, but when the first crop of varrim shot up in the sowed fields, towering two feet over my head with a crown of wide, teal-green leaves, I got to experience field work for the first time. It was simple work that didn’t require much finesse, but there was a method to it, of cutting down the leaves that we could reach, then sawing the pole and cutting off the tuft of fresh leaves at the top of the stalk one by one.
