The Weird Wild West (The Weird and Wild Series)

by Faith Hunter

  All around us, beyond the hovering pylon forcefield fences that surrounded our area, the Scales had built other work colonies. In these places there were almost no guards. Every group of human workers, about five to eight in number, had a single Scale watching over them. Compared to those of us within the high-security perimeter that had some level of resistance to the psychic push, the ones out in the other fields toiled like drones and worked until they dropped. Every evening at dusk when the hovertrucks moved in to suck up the day’s cut leaves, we would get marched back single file at gunpoint to the barracks where we would get fed and watered. The other people, off in the distance, followed along behind their Scale like so many bobbing balloons as their master psychically moved them slowly from field to shed.

  Those of us in the Null barracks, as we started to call them, we got along pretty well. Most of the people there were my parents’ age. We ate together, slept in the same room on cots, and cried together when the Scales left us alone at night with only the rafter cameras to watch us plot and sleep. We shared everything we knew about the Scales, about the landscape and the terrain around the camp and tried to figure a way out. But at the end of it all, even if we did get away, there was nowhere to go, nowhere they couldn’t track us with those devices of theirs.

  In the late fall, snow fell, which was really unusual weather for our part of the country. But the varrim plants kept on growing, even under four inches of snow and beneath miles of thick cloud cover. Here is where the weak amongst us fell, the ones who couldn’t take the continual labor out in the cold and the wet. Those few who refused to do their duties, who dropped the tomak knives and refused to work, they were shot without hesitation. Big Mike, he tried to take one of the Scales out with a spear he’d carved from a varrim stalk, but he didn’t get much further than that. Thirty became nineteen, and nineteen became twelve, without any new nulls to replace those that had fallen.

  For me, I did calisthenics. I ran everywhere, did laps around the field whenever I could to keep in shape. I practiced swinging the tomak, throwing it, using it to cut stalks into makeshift spears. The exercise didn’t just make the cutting easier, as someday when I got out of here, when I got the chance to run, I wanted to make sure that I could run for miles and miles. I was going to get away from the Scales, but I just didn’t know how.

  ~*~

  It had to be sometime around Christmas when the Scale soldiers came and loaded up Julio and I into one of their trucks. I was hoping to see the female who had saved me, but there was no sign of her, just more soldiers in dust-colored uniforms. A half hour later the two of us were back at the Braxton Fairgrounds, herded out at gunpoint, then marched through the pens down the chute to the arena. An arena that was now made up to look like a farm site, complete with a couple of shacks, barrels filled with varrim stalks, and a couple of tomak sickles scattered here and there in the dirt. Before we could ask questions or get a better look, Julio and I were each shoved into our own metal cage, in a long line of eight cages lined up in a row.

  As the crowd of Scales shrieked, ululated, and smoked their varrim, we tried to figure out what was going on. While the people in the other cages were freaking out, Julio and I, in cages next to one another, just hunkered down and got ready for whatever was going to come next. Was it gladiatorial games of some kind? Were we going to fight for our lives with the tools we’d trained with in the fields?

  When a Scale came out of the far gate, riding a giant, gray-green lizard with padded feet, the small crowd went wild. Small as a child, dressed up in a shining red jumpsuit, he seemed mean even from twenty yards away. If this Scale was going to be our challenger, the one that we were going to fight, Julio and I were ready for him. We might be able to pull him down off that lizard and tear him up a bit, if we could just get close enough to connect.

  A low, rumbling tone blared from somewhere in the stadium and the cage doors all swung open. I started to leap forward, but got arrested mid-step as my legs froze and my feet got tangled up in themselves. The psychic push wasn’t enough to fully stop me, but it was enough to tumble me face-first into the dirt. As I struggled forward, crawling out of the cage while trying to break the compulsion, over the screaming crowd I could hear a sound like a ticking clock counting down in the arena.

  At the eighth stroke Julio was clear of his box. At the tenth I was as well. But the farmhand with the straw-colored hair in the next cell over, he was rooted in the cage, frozen in place by the rider, unable to move. Right up to the point where the fifteenth tick sounded and the boy died as all eight of the cages lit up with blue lightning forking from every bar. While three of the other occupants were up and sprinting, going for tools and weapons, the farmhand and two others were reduced to unmoving, smoking hulks on the final stroke.

  As the rider turned to focus on the other three runners, tripping them all down within a blink of an eye, his hold on my mind loosened. Without a moment of hesitation I ripped through what little grasp he had and was up and running, using all my might to charge the little brat, even as the alien announcer amped up the crowd with the play by play. Scooping up a tomak, I didn’t wait to get close. Like I’d done in the fields, I took a couple of steps, lined it up, and hurled the hand sickle at the Scale with full strength. The weapon took him handle first right under the jaw, toppling him off his saddled-up lizard, which hissed and scampered away toward the far exit as fast as it could stride.

  Julio got to him first and kneed the Scale down as he tried to get up. I got there next and kicked him hard, feeling the fragile bones inside his torso break from the strike. Struggling, the rider tried to reach for his fallen whip, so I grabbed his arm and yanked, intending to hurt him, to keep him from getting the weapon. But I was more than surprised when I tore his arm clean off, spraying gouts of white blood on top of the dirt.

  Freaked out, I dropped the useless limb and moved away, astonished at what I’d done. All around us, the crowd was making a really unpleasant, droning noise, something that reminded me of mourning, of loss. But I didn’t care. The Scale wasn’t moving and he wasn’t hurting my people anymore. As the other survivors gathered around us, soldiers entered the arena once again with rifles in hand, making to move us back toward the pens. They weren’t shooting, so that was something.

  When we finally ended up in a small concrete room in the back, the same room where I used to do 4H presentations about ozone and rabbits, we were given real food, human food, microwaved TV dinners, beer, and even ice cream. That’s when I saw the female again. She had a little bit more of a human expression on her face now, had learned to make a little crooked smile that worked against her jaw.

  “You win,” she told me, poking me in the chest with her blunted fingertip. “You good.”

  “And if I didn’t win?” I asked her.

  “Then die.” She smiled even wider now, as if enjoying some great cosmic truth. But even as the crowd roared in the background once again, and the beating of the fifteen-second clock marched down toward the stroke when the cages would alight anew, I realized that the arena game wasn’t an isolated event. It was a sport the Scales played with all of their slaves, a game of life or death where the rider controlled their charges or died at their hand.

  I saw my way out. Or up was a better way to put it. Maybe there was a way to get my Mom and Dad free of this as well, if I could even find out if they were alive. I figured the longer I could play this game, the longer I could hold out, and the better chances I had to have a life somewhere other than a cage.

  ~*~

  There were no more matches for the rest of the snowy winter, and no real change in routine for those of us at the camp. We told the others about what had happened in detail and started doing our best to get everyone in shape. If the Scales took Julio and I at random, to act as a kind of tougher seed in the battles, then it might well happen to the others at a moment’s notice. The Scales didn’t seem to mind that we were all running, getting stronger, even training right in front of them at the
end of our field shifts with sharpened stalk staffs and tomak. A few of them even seemed to enjoy watching it, though their fingers were never far from their rifle triggers.

  Around the circle of portable heaters every night, huddled together in the converted barn, we talked it all through. We figured that a strong psychic like Blackhat might be able to hold a couple of us, but not all of us. Against people with no resistance, like the ones in the next field over, up to a dozen humans could be controlled, or at least harnessed so they didn’t become a nuisance. We also figured that different Scales had different kinds of psychic powers. The one that I’d disarmed seemed to focus on disrupting muscular coordination with his powers, while Blackhat controlled what you did, forced you to do things you didn’t want to do. While we couldn’t predict how the others would come at us in the future, Julio had read enough Stephen King books to know that there could be all kinds of psychics—telekinetics, empaths, mind-controllers, pain-givers. We couldn’t be ready for all of them, but it gave us an idea of what they could do.

  But best of all, we knew now that the Scales could die. If I could tear one apart with so little force, then it was just a matter of getting in close, or getting a lucky strike with a thrown spear. I had to assume that the one that Julio and I had faced in the arena, he wasn’t very good at his job. The battles would likely get harder as time went along, but we would be ready. If I was going to somehow earn enough leverage to save my family, I was going to have to beat the Scales at their own game.

  When the snow melted and spring started to come around once more, then the Scales started taking us in pairs again. Julio and I didn’t get to go for another three months and had nothing to do but fieldwork and training. But of the other ten, four pairs were chosen—and only two pairs came back alive.

  One of the women who returned victorious, an older lady named Kary who used to work as a postal worker, she revealed a very interesting fact. That if any of the humans managed to make it the whole way down the field to the far gate, they were considered safe. She and the seven others the Scale had faced off against had conducted a mad sprint across the dirt. Five made it to the end zone, while the other three were run down by the rider with either his lightning whip, this whirling bolo, or shouldered to the ground and pinned down by the lizard’s wide-spread sticky paws.

  Two weeks later the trucks took me and Kary this time. I wanted to go with Julio, but at least Kary and I had trained together, so we were ready.

  Back at the Braxton Fairgrounds, the moment we were in the cages with the doors locked up tight, we started yelling to everyone that they had to get out of the boxes or die. When one old lady froze up when the doors swung open, Kary and I drug her out just before the clock struck fifteen. The Scale tried to freeze us as well, numbing our legs and arms, making it hard to know which way was up from down. But he could only hold one of us nulls, and not both of us together. Before long we were using varrim stalks to jab at his mount’s sensitive eyes and mouth. The Scale may have thought it was safe saddled up there, but when we managed to unhorse him by sticking a splintery length of stalk up the lizard’s nose, we were able to beat the rider down and got everybody else get to safety.

  This time, the crowd was different. More than a few of them were rooting for us, the humans, the ones being ridden rather than the ones trying to dominate us into place. When I took my hat off and saluted the crowd, hat held high, some of them even cheered, waving fat handfuls of purple currency.

  Again, at the end of the run there was real food, as well as Scales taking pictures of us with something that looked like a spherical iPhone. Out on the battlefield we were utterly expendable; in here, as the victors we were a celebrated commodity. I watched over my people as they ate, acting fierce and ornery as I towered over the three-foot-high Scales. It was all for show, as the guards could have shot me full of holes anytime they wanted to. But the more I acted the unholy terror, the more attention we got.

  That night, when we got back in the trucks to head home, we didn’t. We headed north, up through the canyon, passing abandoned gas stations and burned-out houses along the road. There were more Scale farms along the way, but most of the landscape featured an endless tide of wild varrim, waving in the spring breeze, obscuring everything beneath a shroud of purple and green leaves.

  By the outskirts of Houston, Kary and I stayed in an old Hilton, in rooms on the bottom floor. There was a gym and a pool, and servant Scales cooked our food and brought us our meals. There was one overseer there who seemed to be making sure that we were well fed and cared for. When I tried to ask him what would happen to the rest of the people back at the farm, he had no words, no answers. Instead he just gave us boxes of clothes and board games stolen from a local Wal-Mart. Neither Kary nor I had much desire to play Monopoly, but swimming in the pool, working out in the gym, and practicing sprints up and down the long hallway that led from the lobby to the conference room, that’s how we passed the time.

  A week later, we were taken to a county fairground just down the highway. It was a bigger competition, not just a few hundred Scales in the seats smoking varrim and eating popcorn, but thousands of them sitting hip to hip. When Kary and I were waiting in one of the old concrete prep rooms before the match, we could hear our names being blasted through the loudspeakers in the arena. Kay-ree and Dough-tee, over and over again, hard syllables tangled up in the middle of the alien babble.

  I paced back and forth, trying to keep moving, trying to keep limber, while Kary read a magazine in the corner, turning the pages of an old People rag she’d found in one of the drawers, dating back to before the apocalypse. We didn’t talk, as both of us were nervous as hell. The other people fighting for their lives in the arena outside, we’d started to learn what the crowd sounded like when they were excited, and when they were outraged.

  At eight o’clock sharp we were led down the chute to our cages and locked in. The arena around us featured a bunch of farm buildings, and even tools like axes and shovels were dropped amongst the usual tomak and barrels of varrim poles. Six other cages were lined up next to ours, each with their own people. These folks, like us, looked ready and they knew what was going on. This was the next rung up in the tournament, so there were no strangers to violence here.

  When the rider came onto the field in a green sparkling jumpsuit, riding his lizard tall and proud, the crowd went wild for him. He lined up his mount, tipped his hat, then pulled out his bolo and started whirring it over his head. When the cage doors cracked open and the first tick sounded—

  None of us moved an inch. I was suddenly overwhelmed with fear, drowning in it. Visions of my Mom and Dad lying in the pile of bodies in the cattle stall. Images of the whirring nest of hornets I once stirred up with my .22 rifle when I was a kid. Pictures of our farmhouse burning down amidst a field of slaughtered cattle. For nine ticks I couldn’t move a step, before I finally staggered forward, eyes tightly shut against the visions of horror the Scale was pushing through my brain.

  As I cleared the cage, trying to find the strength to push the bastard out of my mind, I heard the clock tick its last—and the rest of the cells behind me lit up like Christmas. When the psychic effects abruptly cleared, I turned to see who else had made it out, and realized with horror I was the only one.

  The crowd was cheering so loudly I didn’t even hear the whistle-whine as the Scale’s bolo took me around the throat, knocking me hard to the ground. Struggling, bruised, and battered, I managed to get the damned thing untied, undone, and tossed it aside, but only in time for the rider to move his lizard right up over me. He waited as I stood up, whip in hand, waiting for me to do something, to make a noise or move to attack him. But instead I just started to walk, not toward him but past him, heading for the exit gate one step at a time.

  The nightmare assault came on hard again, the bastard doing his best to force me to the ground with just the power of his mind. But I had already seen the end of my world. My parents had been taken from me. He’d killed
Kary, leaving me alone without another human soul to depend upon. So I just kept walking, pushing back the nightmare visions, setting aside the torrents of torture and violation.

  Screaming challenge, he came up behind me and knocked me to the ground with a varrim stalk he’d picked up as a spear. But as I got up, I wrested the spear out of his hands, broke it over my knee, and then kept going. He was beneath me, a thing of no consequence that could neither hurt nor stop me. As I approached the line, the crowd went wild, on their feet, shouting me on with every step. When he rode his lizard into me from behind, knocking me down, I just got up again, punched the damned thing in the eye and kept on going.

  When I crossed the line, I looked back and saw that he was sitting in the saddle, defeated, with the most emotion I’d ever seen displayed on a Scale’s face. As the announcer called out my name, Dough-tee, over and over again, I gave the rider the finger like he was some foul-mouthed jock from Algebra class and walked through the gate like I owned the place.

  ~*~

  After that, my world became a blur. Kary was gone, likely tossed on the dead pile with the rest after the day was done. I cried for her, cried for the others, cried for my parents, cried for the whole damned world that had just vanished. The Scale guards didn’t know what to do with me, and even brought in one of their doctors to see if there was something that they could fix. But after trying to give me a checkup, instead he went and brought me a fifth of bourbon and a couple of six packs of Coke from the hotel bar. I spent a day losing myself in Top Gun and Chasing Amy videos from the lobby rental counter, drank the whole bottle, got sick and hung over for another day, and then never touched alcohol again.