Orion's Belt - A Dark Sci-Fi Western Romance

“Keep yer guns at the ready in case there’s any up there.”

Josie

I feel his eyes on me, cold steel in this hot desert. I’m sweating hard, my clothes soaked with perspiration. My hair is sticking to my face and my forehead, and the ground in front of my eyes is starting to swim. There’s flies all over what remains of the dead guy.

The rest of the camp has been packed up and is ready to go. There’s a dozen outlaws all waiting on me. Orion stands with his arms folded over his chest, those blue eyes searing into me as we swelter through this torture he’s lined up for me.

Finally, I stab the spade into the hard chunks of dust next to the hole. “I guess your chivalry runs out at the tracks, huh?”

“You took the shot. You deal with the consequences,” he says, spreading his legs a little wider, taking an even more dominant stance. Orion is tall and lanky, but bulky at the same time. You could almost ignore the fact that his arm is fake, except when the sun catches the metal strands on the back of his machine hand.

“It’s hot as hell, but I don’t care. Burying this bastard might be slow, but it is a fucking joy.”

“Rion, we got to get goin’. We’re going to have flyers any second.”

The blond guy who saw me first calls out. His horse is stamping impatiently. The horses here are hardy, fast, and carnivorous. The luckier ones are already grazing on the bits of bad guy left scattered in the grass.

“We get flyers, you take them down,” he says. “The girl buries her kill.”

Sweat is running into my eyes. I was a mess before any of this happened, but now I’m completely filthy. There’s dust and dirt caked on my skin and I’m thinking there’s going to be more than one rash making me uncomfortable for days to come. I don’t care about any of it. I refuse to care.

Orion thinks he’s proving a point. He’s not. I don’t need to be taught any lessons. I learned every lesson that matters before I could walk. People are bastards. Nobody can be trusted. Anyone who hurts me is better off dead. I don’t usually get the satisfaction of getting to put the people who deserve it in the ground.

“That’s deep enough,” I say several long, arm aching, back breaking minutes later. “I don’t give a fuck if the desert dogs dig him up.”

“Put him in then, girl.”

I grab the dead guy by the boots. They come off in my hands. They’re nice, but I throw them in the hole. He can be buried with fine tooled leather for all the good it will do him in hell. I grab him again, this time, my fingers curling around his socked feet.

“Ungh!”

I grunt as I try to move the corpse. It’s not easy. He was a big son of a bitch in life and he’s a hell of a dead weight.

My feet scramble in the dirt as I yank on the dead man, until his socks pull free and I tumble backwards into the shallow grave I just dug.

Orion’s men burst into immediate, humiliating laughter as I crawl out of the grave which now contains boots, socks, and no dead man.

“Paris, Peters, dump the guy in there and get him covered,” Orion says, not a glimmer of laughter on his lips. “You, girl, get up here. We don’t have any more time to waste on this.”

His metal hand closes around my collar as he hauls me up on the back of his horse.

“I can ride, ye know,” I hiss. “You could just let me ride one of the spare horses.”

“Ain’t no such thing a spare horse.”

“What about the half dozen we took off the bad guys?”

“They ain’t spares.”

He doesn’t want to let me go. If I had my own horse, I could point it any direction I wanted and get the hell out of here. But Orion isn’t going to let that happen. He spurs his mount and in an instant we are at a full gallop and it is impossible to get off. I have to wrap my arms around Orion’s powerful waist and hold on as best I can as we thunder west.

I’m always headed west when bad things happen. West is where the dark gathers over the mountains. West is where the wilder things are. When I was a girl, you couldn’t come this far without being slaughtered. Now that I’m grown, outside the law of man and machine, this is the only place I might survive. Same is true for Orion and his gang. The law reached this great planet of Cabbage Patch fifteen solars ago, and since then it has been downhill for anyone who won’t bend the knee to the Imperium Auctoritatis, which, translated from Latin, just means Government Authority, which is as bland a name as you can get for a collective of authoritative bastards who want to tax everything that moves, and levy everything that doesn’t.