Five Days Dead (10 page)

“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.

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 softly 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.

“Guess the cowboys are all dead now, huh Harley?”

Harley had raised a shot his way. “Guess so Duck.”

“Buck.”

“Whatever.” 

A year or so later Harley heard Duck (or Buck) had been taken down by a wolf pack outside of the Seattle Hub.

Sitting in the parking lot of what had once been the Spanish Fork Fairgrounds, Harley looked out the windshield of his truck at the new expansive building that stood where the rodeo grounds had been. The sign in front of the bowl-shaped building proclaimed “Spanish Fork Wild West Living Museum” and a giant display screen showed images of horses galloping across the range. He opened the door and walked toward the museum, pushing his cowboy hat back on his head.

At the front door, a soft voice urged him to enter and see the West, the way it had been before the Rages. He donned his eyeset, paid his admission and walked inside. The digihost encouraged him to take advantage of the opportunity to mingle with nature the way it was before the Rages and in a soothing, singsong voice assured him that all animals in the exhibit were automations and he was completely safe from attack. 

He nodded and walked on; removing the eyeset as he did and tucking it back into his pocket. 

The inside of the museum was high-ceilinged and there were artificial trees stretching artificial limbs toward an artificial sky. Automated birds that called the Western United States home flitted from one branch to the other and high in the sky he could see an eagle soar. To look so far away it must be a digital one displayed on the ceiling, Harley figured.

The interior was sectioned off into a dozen or more large exhibit rooms and inside each room was a display of the world the way it used to be, when humanity could interact with nature. The first room he entered was a mountain scene of a large meadow and Harley thought it vaguely familiar, a picture of perhaps Upper Joe’s Valley. There were a dozen deer grazing and half again that many elk. The big bulls bugled as he watched them, so close that he could almost touch them, and he smiled. They sure looked real, those elk.

Another room showed a panoramic from the desert with robot coyote hunting ‘bot jack rabbits and in another room he watched a mama bear and her cubs dig at an old tree stump for ants. But his favorite room, the room he had been looking for, was the room showing life on a ranch and when he stepped inside his heart hurt just a little bit.

There were robot free range chickens scratching at the ground looking for bugs or worms and a couple of old Tomcats lounging in the sun. They purred loudly when he walked in and wove in-between his boots. On the other side of an old cedar post fence, there was a field where cattle grazed, chewing their cud and they stared at him with the big blank eyes he always remembered. In the corral, there were four horses and as he walked toward them, they approached the fence and hung their heads over the side for a scratch.

He reached out a tentative hand and let it caress the side of a big sorrel. Its ear twitched as he scratched it and it snorted, blowing imitation snot onto the sleeve of his shirt. There were robot flies zipping around for the horses to swat at with their mangy tails. They even had the smell of the horses down and he inhaled the earthy mustiness with a sigh.

Trouble had been a bay, not a sorrel, but his horse and the robot horse were about the same size, 15 hands, a good size working horse. As he scratched the robot horse, he had to resist the urge to climb over the fence and throw himself up for a ride. 

“I wish you were real old girl.” He scratched the horse a little more, patted it on the side and turned to look back at the rest of the artificial ranch. “I wish any of this was real.” The sorrel tugged playfully at his hat and he stepped away. “But it’s all just make-believe.”

He knew there was a whole segment of society that lived in the digiverse “country” as cowboys. They worked on a digital ranch, rode digital horses, herded digital cows. Hell, maybe they even stepped in digital cow shit, he didn’t know. But he knew it wasn’t real. It may feel real; it may feel exactly the way it always had in reality, but it wasn’t real. The ‘bot horse trying to take the hat off his head was more real than that. He wouldn’t have anything to do with it.

He went out to his truck and drove back down Main Street toward the Wilderness, leaving the memories where they belonged, in the past.