by James Davis
“I’d rather ask you.”
Jodi leaned back in her chair. “They are missing a legionnaire as a matter of fact. Quite peculiar actually. They can’t locate her or find any hint of her linktag. Do you know something about that?”
Harley scratched his chin. “I know where you can find her.”
“And where might that be?”
“Room 300 of the Castle Valley Inn in Price.”
“She is dead then?”
“Definitely.”
“And you know this because?”
“I killed her.”
This time Jodi leaned forward and her seamless face showed the first hint of real interest. “Why would you do that?”
“She pointed a pulse rifle my way. I don’t take kindly to that.”
“Understandable, but if the Legion were to know they would skin you alive.”
“Maybe. But she told me some things that I thought might interest you. Intrestin things.”
“Such as?”
“She said she had a visitor in her apartment. A man with gray eyes. She thought he was a dream but apparently he was not.”
“What did this gray walker want?”
Harley cocked and eyebrow. “I didn’t call him the Gray Walker.”
“No. You didn’t.”
“He said he wanted to give her the freedom to make her own choice.”
“About what?”
“About where she stood and what she believed. He removed her linktag and when she woke she was in the hotel in Price.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Didn’t think so either. She had a scar on her temple, but I think it was there so I would notice it, me or whoever else found her. I don’t think he needed to scar her to remove the linktag. He just wanted to send a message.”
“The linktag can’t be removed.”
“Could you find her? Could you find her still if I hadn’t told you where her body was? He removed it.”
“What message was he trying to send?”
Harley pursed his lips. “That he’s out there.”
Jodi leaned back in her chair and absently twirled her ponytail between her fingers. Harley didn’t think she was aware she was doing it. “Have you seen this man with the gray eyes?”
Harley shook his head. “No. But there’s whisperings of him. A gray man. The Gray Walker. You’ve heard the legends. He lives among us but is not of us. He is something more.”
Jodi was quiet for some time and her eyes were far away. She was on the Link and Harley wasn’t sure who she might be consulting. When she came back, she smiled coolly, calmly.
“Thank you for the information. I will keep the events leading to the legionnaire’s death between us, as a professional courtesy.”
“There’s more.”
Jodi furrowed her brow, her blue eyes sharp and piercing. “Yes?”
“Deputy Marshal Shelley is dead.”
Jodi paused for a moment and Harley detected the slightest blink of her eyelids as she consulted the Link. “I’m picking up his linktag in Spanish Fork Canyon.”
Harley nodded. “That’s where you’ll find him. Most of him is on the highway, the rest of him is in the belly of a stunning but quite dead Wrynd.”
“How did this happen?”
“He was playing guide for a husband looking for his wife who had been taken by Wrynd. They found her. She didn’t want to come back.”
Jodi gritted her teeth. “Damn zombies.”
Harley smiled softly. “Damn zombies. I wanted to ask you how the Wrynd are on the Link, how they have linktags and how their ink is being delivered by stork?”
“What makes you think that Harley?”
“Let’s just say it’s more than a hunch.”
Jodi stood and sashayed back to the window, where she looked out at the late morning skyline. The first hint of a storm was on the horizon, but it didn’t look like the Rages, just a summer thunderstorm.
“Just another arrow in the quiver Harley.”
“Arrow?”
“Long thing, pointed end, feathers, you shoot it with a bow. How could you not know about an arrow?”
Harley just stared.
“Oh, all right. Just a little joke Harley. In every society you have your bottom feeders; it’s just the way things are. It doesn’t matter how much you do for them, how many opportunities you provide them, there is a certain percentage of the population that will always choose the wrong course. Call it a genetic defect. Those are the Wrynd. On the Link they could be anything, experience anything and cause absolutely no harm to themselves or anyone else, but they would rather take a dangerous narcotic that twists their minds, warps their bodies and ruins them forever. The trick is what do you do with them? Well, they aren’t the only problem we face. The neands and the pilgrims are a problem as well. Not as big a problem as the zombies, but still a problem.”
“Why are they a problem?”
“Because they won’t be happy!” Jodi displayed the first hint of real emotion he had seen. It was irritation. “What more could the Federation possibly provide than the safety and security of the Hubs, where you want for nothing? Yet neands and pilgrims choose to live in the Wilderness, to face the Rages every day rather than live safe and happy lives here.”
“So many rights, so little freedom.”
“What could be freer than what we offer?”
“The freedom to think on your own, make your own mistakes and suffer the consequences.”
“That’s insane Harley. Most people are totally unprepared to think on their own. And mistakes? People don’t want consequences.”
“Well, maybe we’re just crazy then.”
“That’s far easier to accept. We have tried for more than 20 years to bring people in out of the cold, to give them safe harbor in the Hubs. Free housing, medical, income, the Link with all its opportunities, yet more than five percent of the population refuses to leave the Wilderness.”
“Cut off their RTI funds. They’ll come in out of the cold.”
Jodi chortled. “The Senate wouldn’t hear of it. Income is a right to life and the Link and medical and housing and every other thing we freely give to the ungrateful. Just establishing the civilian no-fly zone over the Wilderness for Federation security was a monumental task to get through the Senate. Now they want to make air travel a right of life.”
“That would be welcome news.”
“It’ll never happen.”
Harley shrugged. “And what part do the Wrynd play?”
“Incentive.” Jodi smiled and sat back down. “If they won’t be motivated by what Mother Nature is throwing their way, then perhaps they’ll come to the Hub to escape the zombies.”
“And if they still won’t come?”
“Then the Wrynd will eat them.”
“I guess that would be another way of solving the problem.”
“Yes it would.”
“And the Navajo Nation?”
“Why do you care?”
“They’re my people.”
“Your reputation precedes you. You are considered one who rapes and pillages his people.”
“And by doing so I unify them,” Harley smiled, as much as he ever did. It wasn’t particularly pretty. “We all have our purpose and I would hate to think I was subverted by someone else who wishes to rape and pillage my people in my stead.”
“No need. We have no interest in the reservations.”
“What a relief. I thought we might be chased off our land yet again.” Harley stood and walked to the window. It was starting to rain. “Why does it matter to the Federation that a fringe of the world’s population doesn’t want what the Federation has to offer?”
“Chaos. If we are not united as a people, we are susceptible to chaos. We are irrational beings, humanity; we need order to protect ourselves from ourselves. And…”
“And?”
“And this gray man of yours, this Gray Walker. He is not the only oddity whispered of
in the Wilderness. Then we have the Rages. The world seems determined to destroy us. There are those who say the earth itself is sentient…and angry at the harm we have done. Science can’t explain the Rages, but reason suggests we should huddle up and let the earth have back what we have taken.”
Harley chuckled. “My people have been telling you that for hundreds of years. You just don’t listen.”
“We’re listening now.”
“It’s probably too late for that.”
Jodi nodded, licking her lips. “Any other questions Harley Nearwater?”
Harley shook his head. “Your turn.”
“Oh, I think you’ve answered the questions I meant to ask and maybe a few I hadn’t. But I have a request.”
“Yes?”
“Find this man with the gray eyes for me. Find out who he is, what he is and what he wants.”
“Is that all?”
“Well, if you have the opportunity, you could kill him for me as well, that would be nice.”
“And in return?”
“In return what?”
Harley smiled back. “In return I would like a scye.”
Jodi laughed. "Only deputies are authorized scyes. The legionnaires don't even have them."
"It sounds like you just deputized me."
Jodi smiled. "You wouldn't be able to use it the way you'd like. Even with a linktag it is more than operating a drone or slipping into the Link. With an eyeset, it would be very difficult."
"You might be surprised what I could do. I'm fairly adaptable."
The Marshal nodded and a couple of minutes later an interoffice stork arrived with a scye. "I've tagged it to your eyeset. Do you think you'll want a lesson or two?"
"I'll struggle through. It will give me something to do on the trail."
Jodi stared at him for a moment and Harley found himself gratified to be under her scrutiny. “You’re an odd man Harley Nearwater.” She tossed him the metal orb. "Don't hurt yourself."
Harley took the scye she offered him and strolled out of Marshal Jodi Tempest’s office, a satisfied twinkle in his dark eyes.
Chapter Ten
The Last Cowboy
Harley stopped at the mouth of Spanish Fork Canyon and called up his security box. He stared out at the wind park while he waited for his weapons. Where the horses had died there was no sign and the sentinels hung like ornaments from the windmills, scanning for wildlife entering the Hub boundary.
His thoughts were on the horses and their mad dash toward the Hub. They hadn’t been caught up in the Rages. They were wild and free and had run to their death. Surely they had known humanity was near, that they would die. The world made little sense to him anymore.
Walking out of the marshal’s office Harley had intended to leave the Hub as quickly as possible. He had his prize and it was time to make his way home. But when he picked up the big truck of the late, great Victor Shelley he drove toward the canyon and when it came time to drive down the asphalt of what had once been Utah Highway 6 he turned right and went into old Spanish Fork City instead.
He drove slowly down Spanish Fork Main Street, the truck leering over the little pods that zipped around it. Main Street was much the same as he remembered it 20 years before and probably the same as it had been for the most part 50 years before that. The old fashioned stop lights still worked and he stopped on a red as a blue pod and white one silently went past, followed by a couple of bicyclers and two elderly joggers. He flicked them a wave and wondered why. He had continued south on Main Street and moments before he reached his destination he finally understood what impulse had forced him to turn right in the first place.
He pulled the truck into what had once been the Spanish Fork Fairgrounds and killed the power. He sat inside and looked at the world and what it once had been through filtered eyes.
Through his latter teenage years and into his early 20s Harley had worked on and off for a rancher in the Castle Valley. He was an imposing man in a small body by the name of Art Autumn and he owned and operated one of the last independent and self-sustaining ranches in the state. Harley had hired on as a simple ranch hand, mucking the corrals, feeding the livestock, hauling the hay. He was young and had no experience in the life of a cowboy, but old Art hired him because since Right to Income there just weren’t that many people looking for work and he resisted automation right up until the Rages killed him.
Harley worked hard because he liked the idea of the life he saw Art struggle to maintain; being part of something, being a part of nature and at one with the animals. After a couple of months, the old man had given him a chance to learn to ride and Harley had taken to the horse like it was a natural place to be. Until his life on the ranch he had only ridden the old mare on the reservation, but sitting on the back of a big gelding named Trouble, Harley had felt 10 feet tall and he knew that was where he wanted to be for the rest of his life.
Art owned close to a thousand acres and had tied up most of the free range permits that still existed. When the Exodus began a lot of people who swore they were country through and through gave up the only life they knew for the security of the Hub. Life in the digiverse had already developed to the point that if you wanted a life in the country it could be lived quite easily on the Link and with none of the headaches. Art was one of the few who held on to a reality that was quickly fading away. When Art died, the ranch would die with him. Harley and the other ranch hands knew that, but they stayed anyway because really, where else could they go to live this kind of life?
The Rages had started by then but not the animal Rages. Even so, life was a rollercoaster and you just didn’t know what you were going to face, one day to the next. You could have drought and flood in one week; blistering heat and cold so deep it took your toes the next. They hadn’t finished building the transcontinental waterline so you couldn’t count on desalinated ocean water for your cattle. It was as close to living in the Wild West as Harley thought he might ever get. It was the one time in his life that he felt he truly belonged somewhere.
Of course, even then he didn’t have true friends. But they accepted him, the other ranch hands, because he worked hard and he minded his own business and when there was a strong back needed he was there. He wouldn’t have known what to do with friends anyway.
He loved riding the range the most. He would ride Trouble and listen to the senseless mooing of the cattle. At dusk, you could see the bright, nickel-sized ring of the Wheel in orbit and he smiled thinking that 10,000 people lived in outer space while he herded cattle on the range. Swaying in the saddle as Trouble snorted and as the dust from the herd made his eyes water, Harley thought that he was living in a world on the cusp, and it felt mighty fine.
Art Autumn liked the young man and when rodeo season came around he would try to cut as many of his cowboys free to go kick up a little hell as he could manage. Harley had been secretly delighted when the old man handed him a ticket to the Spanish Fork Fiesta Days Rodeo and told him to not get into in trouble in the big city. Harley had never been to a real rodeo and he went along with the rest of the hands in a big old electric cattle truck. As the rest of the ranch hands laughed and drank and boasted of all the women they would find and bed by the end of the night Harley hadn’t felt like he really belonged, but he hadn’t felt like an outsider either. He had just felt like Harley Nearwater, ranch hand, cowboy and that was good enough for him.
The rodeo had been the most fun he had ever had in his life. He had loved every part of it. The rowdiness of the crowd, the smell of the horses and the livestock, the clowns, the watered down beer and the bad food, he had loved every last bit of it. Sitting in the stands, being jostled by all of the people, he had looked up at the Wheel shining in the sky and thought that hell, if he wanted to, maybe he could even make it up there someday, no matter what his mother might say.
Two weeks later, while sleeping on the range with the sound of the cows serving as a lullaby, he had drifted off to sleep with Trouble grazing softl
y beside him. The next morning he had awakened to an angry snort from his horse and Trouble had reared and aimed a hoof directly at his head. He scrambled out of the way and the horse reared again and tried to land on top of him. Trouble’s eyes were ablaze as it reared and bucked and tried to get at him. Harley tried to make it to his feet but couldn’t seem to get out of the way of those hoofs and his hand stumbled across his pistol, just his dad’s old 9mm back then. He had torn it from its holster and put the horse down.
Within a week, every horse on the ranch had gone mad and 90 percent of the cattle. Half of the hands had been killed in animal attacks, including old man Autumn.
The Animal Rages had begun and humanity was now the hunted.
Several years later, after he had settled into life as a drifter, Harley came across one of the big corporate ranches on the western side of the Utah Hub. Even though they could print just about any kind of meat you desired to eat at a foodprint, ranching was still a big business and a lot of people preferred to eat livestock that had actually lived.
The ranch Harley came across had more than a thousand head of cattle, sheep, pigs, goats and chickens. It was an impressive looking setup and Harley wasn’t able to get within a mile of it. There were electrified fences all around and beyond high stone walls. He was met at the roadway by an automation and informed he was entering a restricted livestock area and for his own protection he needed to turn back. The entire operation ran by ‘bots, drones and remote control. He left and put his eyeset on to get an up close look of the operation by satellite. There were all those animals and not a human in sight. It was a hell of a thing.
Six months after coming across the ranch, he ran into one of the other cowboys who had worked for Art Autumn. He was sitting in a bar on the outskirts of St. George, drinking away his RTI. Harley bought him a drink and bent his ear a little. He couldn’t remember his name clearly; it may have been Buck, but it seemed like everyone always called him Duck for some reason. Buck (or Duck) said he had tried to work on one of the corporate ranches after they got them all set up, but it had been a mess for quite a while, when the animal Rages first hit. There had been a lot of deaths, particularly in the Hubs. But once they figured out that you could manage livestock as long as they didn’t catch sight or smell of you, then it didn’t take long for the whole process to become automated. He hadn’t lasted long. He said something about overseeing cattle through the Link just sucking all the joy out of being a cowboy.
