FWS Flash Fiction: Empty Places-Part One: "Off-Worlders"

I never told my mother about the number of times I slipped out of the tent, past the guards, and out beyond the fencing. There, in the cold desert air, with the star beaming down on me, I felt the vastness of the universe, and knew in my heart, that one day, I would go out there. While we lived there in the desert camps, I learned all the stars with human colonies orbiting them, and didn’t listen to what people said about how the colonist abandoned Earth after the mushroom clouds. I wrote off most of these people, like my mother, as religious nuts. I didn’t realize these were the good days of my life.


When I asked about colonists, my mother spit on the floor of our tent, “they don’t need us anymore! Left us to rot!” She made a weird sign with her hands, and ordered me never to speak of it. Three days later, a raiding party from the city on the edge of the desert hit our encampment, slaughtered the ones who resisted, took what they wanted, and left the rest to die in the heat. Scavenges picked me, gave me a gun, and told me that if I wanted to live, than I worked for them. For years after, I did what they told me, and those terrible deeds were beyond my imagination. It was a forced hell that lived in for years, but you get used to it, but then one day we rolled into market with a fresh haul, and everything changed.

The ‘market’ was actually an abandoned cattle ranch complex that be converted to a neutral zone for trading in mostly stolen goods and people. I hated place like these, it was a stage for trading on human misery, and we were loading down with misery in the trailer. It was hot, filling the dense air with smell of sweat, grease, and sex; it seemed to me to be the correct odor for a den of organized sin. If only my mother, the godly women she was, could see me now…with a weapon I my hands, and blood my fingernails. Weapons were allowed in the market, but one magazine only, and once we surrounded our ammo, the boss of the outfit started in on me…

“Listen to me, you little bastard,” Zinc, the boss of the outfit spit dust and terrible breath at me as we cleared the checkpoint, “no wandering off, you hear me?! You do, and I’ll shot ya, skin ya, and sell your marrow to the grill.” Then his half-fingered gloves pawed at my chest. “Give me your rifle” I surrounded it without a fight, but my hand was on my knife, “no gun no work…bastard.”He smiled with his three teeth, slung the gun, and jumped out of the ramshackle SUV, dust clouds whipping off of his faded overcoat. “Sandoval,” another one of the dirty raiders pointed to cages we hauled over the last forty miles, “get the women to the dealer.” I sighed, resigned myself to my grim duty, the hauling of captured women to a slave dealer, then taking the pay slip to that greasy bar, where they spend Zinc & Company spent it on one day of drinking and fucking. That was the way it had been for the years I served with Zinc, raiding, stealing, then blowing it all. I normally volunteered for guard duty on the trucks, and it allowed me to see the stars…that’s all I needed.

“No sandbagging, boy,” Zinc pointed from the bar’s door, “I want my money, or I’ll whoop’ya!” He threw the keys to the cage directly at me; I moved and allowed them to sail into the sand. They turned, laughing as disappeared in their cave of Sodom and Gomorrah.

The women always begged me to free them, most cried, offered me all manner of sexual favors, but a few, who were brandings with the marks of other owners, wore blank, lifeless expressions. They just entered the cages, waiting for the bidding to start with dead eyes. I wondered if my mother was like these women now. A women that was broken and waiting on death. I processed them as quick as possible with Oz, she knew us, and Zinc’s ways. Oz didn’t even blink when she had her boys shove the captured women into those dirty pens…’cause she had the same eyes…soul-less, like a doll.

Oz wrote out a payment slip while swatting away the flies that swarmed her tents. I, oddly had gotten use to the smell of dirty pens and bodies. “Damn, I wish they’d shut the hell up!” Oz cursed at a gathering down the street.

“Snake-oil?” I asked looking at the elevated stage, as a man paced and spoke to the gathering of townspeople and raiders. It didn’t look friendly, I could hear that much, but the man was unlike anyone I had seen. He was dressed in a crisp, clean suit, I’d seen those only in pictures.

“Off-Worlders…been here two weeks.” Oz blurted. I turned my neck so hard to Oz, I felt a pop.

“Off-Worlders?!", My eyes bugged out and she looked up, “like from the stars, right?!”

“Yeah… what the hell, Sandoval?! She probed me, but I ignored her, shocked at the fact that an honest-to-god colonist was standing a few hundred meters from me. “Why do you care?” I couldn’t hear the speech, but I heard the mob booing and cussing. I watched as several well-armed, armored guards leveled factory-fresh carbines at the hissing crowd. Their gas-masks obscured their humanity, but they didn’t need the unwashed masses to see their eyes to know that they were serious like a heart-attack.

“What do they want, Oz?”

She walked up behind me, “seems the colonies need our help.”

That caught my attention more than the alien-looking colonial soldiers. “Help?” I repeated, trying to listen.

“Yeah, they didn’t help us one bit after the nukes!” I blocked Oz out, and strained to hear pitch from the stars, while recalling my mother telling me about the day of red skies and black rain. How the great cities and important people got swept away in great nuclear fires. Not a single colony came to help us… but now… they needed us? My mind spun.

“War up there, like down here, Sandoval.” She hinted, I uncross my arms, and dug at my belt, searching for something while Oz painted the scene for me. “That man’s been talking about someone trying to wipin’em out… He says they’re coming here, next.” She laughed and took a drink, “My worn ass that someone wants to come here!” She smacked it with a free hand, “But that’s what Mr. Fancy been saying, they been gettin' their ass kick. So they figure they come down here, and get some real warriors, ‘cuz we’ve been killin’ each other since the mushrooms!”

“What’s they been promising?” I turned towards her good eye, and unbuttoned my pants. “Gotta be something big, right, Oz?” She laughed again, and turned to hand me the payment slip that would pay for Zinc’s whoring.

“If you fight, and they win, you never have to come home,” She watched me dig out something from my pants. “Like some green farming colony or some shit like that.” Green, I though, it’s all dust here… I refused the slip, and handed Oz a small leather bag.

“For my sins.” I said as she opened the small pouch and dumped out some wedding rings and loose stones. She wore surprise as she fingered through the jewelry that I collected in secret from Zinc and the raiders. I wouldn’t need money where I was going. “How many?” I asked as watched the platform.

“Women, Sandoval?” She questioned, “goin’ to start a whore house?” She laughed, but I smashed down my fist.

“Fuck, Oz!” I pushed the rings and stones towards her, “free as many as you can!” She was clearly bewildered.

“Where the bloody hell are you going?”, I bolted from her tent, before she could react, I was running at full-clip directly to the stage, the off-world soldiers saw the movement, and trained their compact weapons on me as pushed my way through the crowd. Laser bounced around my forehead, I stopped dead and shot up my arms. The thin man in the suit walked over, hand on a pistol, brushing aside his guards,”you wanting to sign up that bad, eh, boy?” His glare looked deep into my eyes. The mob hushed as I looked back this flea-bitten dust town, then back to the flawless pressed uniform.

“Ready to go, sir.”