Chapter 1:  Needs Must When the Devil Drives

Chapter One: Needs Must When the Devil Drives

Long before the Exo Wars, and even before I became an outlaw, I was a rancher’s son living on a small, insignificant ball of rock and ice officially named Hades, but known locally as Mala-Mundial.

You know how some animals can feel things coming before they happen? Like an earthquake or a tsunami or a storm? When Dad woke me up that morning, I knew Old Jack was dead. I tried to pass it off as a nightmare, but as soon as we came up on the plains and saw the herd, I knew it wasn’t a bad dream. It was just another day on Mala-Mundial.

Helados had attacked our herd while the mammoths were out on the plains. Helados is our word for ice people. What are ice people? Think of the lowest levels of society – murderers, thieves, and the like. Ice People are even lower. They were repulsed by everybody on both sides of the law. Nobody knew where they lived, but it was assumed they formed small nomadic groups. Normal folk became ice people cause they couldn’t cut it on Mala-Mundial. With nothing left to live for, helados wandered into the vast cold tundras of hell and went insane. We call it helado-headed. Ice crazy. As bands, they killed both protected animals and livestock (to hell with La Regla Primera), raided ranchers, and fed on people. See what I mean? Inhuman.

When Dad discovered our herd was being attacked, he ordered his wranglers to get on their cyber horses and follow him. The wranglers were beat-up men, stragglers who made their wage working the various ranches on Mala-Mundial. They changed out often, sometimes not lasting a week on the ranch. Dad liked it that way, though. If a wrangler skipped out before payday, it was money in the bank. Other times, the wranglers disappeared altogether. They had weird nicknames like Boca, Whitey, or T-bone Tom. Dad indulged them as a necessary evil. The herd was too big for me and him alone to maneuver. Boca was the head wrangler, and he led the wranglers out on the ice. They spread in formation around the rig as we descended on our herd.

We had twelve ‘moths, all woolies. They were circled up, and Old Jack, a hoary-coated bull, was out front, running from one helado to the next. He was protecting his harem best he could. But he’d been shot up so bad, he was slipping in his own blood. As he lost his footing and stumbled to the ground, the helados rushed him with their bayonets.

Cursing, Dad reached over me and grabbed his tranq rifle It was used to subdue moths but had more permanent effects on any creature weighing less than half a ton..

“Take the wheel, Mateo,” he said as he opened the door and stepped onto the ladder. With nothing but an icy door to prop him up, he shot at the raiders. One turned and fired back on us, but with his second shot Dad clipped the pendejo on the arm. Pendejo is a word given to people who should know better than to attack somebody else’s herd. All bets were off, and no marshal would come after a rancher defending his herd.

Our hired men followed suit, all of them firing on the helados.

“Keep it steady,” Dad told me.

As Dad continued to fire, I steered the rig around the herd, which had circled upon itself. Dad moved farther out onto the rig’s ladder. That’s when I noticed his feet sliding. Dad didn’t know he was edging towards a grisly death. If he slipped and fell between the spiked tires of the rig, he was done for. I stuck my foot out onto the runner to keep him from falling.

The half-mad hunters cried out and fled immediately. Helados were opportunistic predators, preferring to kill when nobody was around. At the first sign of trouble, they scattered, even when they outnumbered us. I heard them wailing. The blood lust had driven them crazier than usual; their inability to satiate their craving for meat was almost unbearable for them.

Dad made a motion for me to circle back to the herd. The helados were no more danger to us today.

“I thought your metal mutt was watching the herd,” he grumbled as we closed in on the herd.

“Something must have happened. Cerbie would have warned us.” I couldn’t see my dog anywhere. I hoped they hadn’t stolen him from me.

Without looking to me, Dad muttered, “What good’s a dog if he ain’t gonna do what he’s programmed to do? Assuming you programmed him correctly.”

I wanted to yell at him, but he was my Dad. I was powerless. So I shrunk into the far corner of the seat and tried to not be there. If he didn’t notice me, he couldn’t say anything more.

The wailing of dying ‘moths had died away, the shouting of the slaughter was hushed. Silence fell on the red-stained snow. The ‘moths lay as they had fallen. Three were already dead. One was still breathing faintly, but lay in a pool of her own guts. Of the four, the three cows were all right around each other. After killing the bull, Old Jack, the helados must have gone after the cows all at once, shooting at them until they fell over until we got to them. A wasteful use of bullets, but helados aren’t known for complex strategies.

The females had gathered around Old Jack and were throwing snow and ice on him. I could tell by their body language that they were still highly agitated. Some of them were bleeding from gunshot wounds to their legs and head. Leche, an all-white ‘moth cow that was as docile as a trained horse, was stamping her feet and swaying her trunk forlornly.

Dad saw Jack’s hoary-coated body in the snow and started shouting “No!” over and over again like he’d lost a kid. He jumped out of the rig, leaving me to wrestle it to a stop. Unarmed and alone, he ran right into the herd without flinching. The woolies could have pulverized him if they wanted, but I think they knew he was as anguished as they were. So they let him run among them and kneel down next to Old Jack, his beloved bull mammoth. I say “Old Jack” cause we bought him used when we first came to Hades, not because he was a really old bull. But he was Dad’s first ‘moth, so I guess it meant something special. At least to him.

Once I cut the engine, I went to go see if he needed anything. I was sad, too. I kind of grew up with Old Jack and Leche, but even then I knew that Old Jack’s death was a harbinger of the hard times that would come. Mammoths live in harems, and we’d lost our bull. Our livelihood had taken a direct hit. Even if we replaced Old Jack instantly, and even if that new male impregnated the females instantly, mammoths have really long gestation cycles. We were screwed.

“I’m sorry, Dad.”

Old Ironsides wiped a tear and barked at me to get back into the rig. He sat on his knees and cried over the loss of his ‘moth.

I thought about going straight back to the rig, but Cerbie was still out there, and I didn’t think Dad would mind me searching for him. I didn’t think Dad would care what I did, so long as it wasn’t with him. That was one of those things about Dad. You never felt completely with him. Never knew if he was with you cause he had to be there or cause he wanted to be there.

I took Dad’s old pair of binoculars from the rig’s glove box and turned on the thermal scan. Nothing came up, but that was just shooting in the dark. What would be the odds that a metal object would turn up in a thermal scan?

Cerbie’s transponder was loaded to my comm, so I pulled it out. I pulled up the transponders. I had a transponder on everything in our family that moved. Unless Cerbie blew up into a thousand pieces, the transponder would tell me where he was.

From the direction of the tracks, it looked like he was where the herd stopped for the night. As I left, Boca saw me. He said, “Cuidado, mijo. There could still be helados about.”

That was life on Mala-Mundial. Out looking for my lost dog, and being warned about cannibals by a man who used to kill people for a living. (I didn’t mention Boca used to be a gladiator back in civilized parts? Well, he was. He had a hard time of it, lost all his money, and came out here to earn his keep as one of dad’s ‘mothpokes.) I didn’t worry much about being eaten by helados, though. If I did, I’d never get anything done because I’d be scared of everything.

I found Cerbie sunken in a snowbank. He was built like a German Shepherd, but only taller and longer. I named him Cerbie after the multi-headed dog that guards the gates to Hades in Greek mythology. See, Cerbie had two heads.

Cerbie’s ears were still up and alert. His eyes were dead, though, and he looked completely frozen. The usual whirring was gone, like somebody had turned him off. I checked him over, then found what I was looking for. His myelin sheath was snapped where his body attached to his two heads. As I reached over to fix the connection, I noticed something in the snowbank behind Cerbie. A bullet. Somebody shot my dog!

I cinched the sheath together and taped it. It was a good temporary fix. Cerbie’s lambent eyes came to life, and he barked excitedly. He circled me defensively.

“It’s okay, Cerbie,” I said. “They’re gone now.”

By the time we got back to the herd, the rig was moved to Old Jack’s carcass. The giant backlight shined down on the scene like a spotlight as “Big Betsy,” our crane/forklift finished sliding Old Jack into the back of the trailer.

Dad’s rig was gigantic. It had to be to move moths. It was like a monster truck, but with retractable spikes on the tires and a trailer attached. Inside the trailer was Big Betsy. I always thought Big Betsy looked like an oversized spatula. Dad was barking orders to the wranglers. The wind began to howl, and sleet was falling. Dad saw me and asked, “Where you been?” Then he answered his own question with a guttural sound when he saw Cerbie.

“He looks fine.” There was accusation smothered all over those words.

I held up the bullet. “He was shot. It was a good shot, too.”

Dad jumped down from Big Betsy and took the bullet from me. Ice dangled from his beard. He held the bullet close to his eyes.

“They shot his myelin sheath,” I added.

“That’s one hell of a shot,” Dad said. “Raiders shoot blindly. They have no military training. They’re just hoping a bullet lands somewhere. Helados didn’t shoot Cerbie. Somebody’s after my…wait here.”

Dad climbed into the rig and drove off, calling the wranglers to join him. That left me to watch over the herd.

What I’m about to tell you is one of those things where I wasn’t there. I couldn’t be there cause I was dutifully watching the herd for my dad. But I’ve heard enough and talked to enough people (Boca gave me a lot of the details) to tell you what happened next. My dad led his wranglers all the way across our property, from out on the ice to the rocky impact craters on the edge of our property. The craters were lined with parts of the Acheron mountain range, mostly steep mountains but some cryo-volcanoes, too. They were nothing but avalanches waiting to happen, so we didn’t go out there much.

The rig came up over the outer ridge of the largest crater. Dad and I called it “The Hideout” cause the walls were steep enough that you could hide out there for days and nobody would see you. But the hideout looked very different from any time I’d ever seen it. It was full of low-lying black-leafed plants called cragweed. And half of the cragweed was on fire. A group of women were there, lighting the cragweed up with flamethrowers. They wore thick, black robes like they were like grim reapers, except they had flamethrowers instead of sickles. All of the women were painted up in calavera, candy skull makeup like they were Day of the Dead enthusiasts. They were dressed like this because they were members of the Doña Muertes, one of the gangs that trafficked drugs out of Mala-Mundial. Drugs like cragweed.

My father was not just a mammoth shepherd. He was a drug farmer.

Next Chapter: Chapter Two: La Regla Primera