“I heard voices,” I told Collins. I wasn’t sure I’d ever tell anyone, but it just came out. “Voices and… I had a vision.” I swallowed the potatoes and shook my head. Patches of murk swam in the darkness, a vague discernment of shapes. I’d welcome just seeing my own hands.
“You heard voices. You mean when they scooped you off the road?”
“Before.” I peered at where I thought Collins stood, where I heard him. “They were telling me to do awful things. I think Randall was poisoned by the sun.”
“Randall was poisoned by the Arapaho. He was babblin’ that nonsense right up until we shot him. You just need some sleep is all.”
I nodded and ate, and Collins gave me silent and invisible company. By nightfall, it felt as though some of my eyesight was returning, but not much. I fell asleep on that cot for drunkards, madmen, and murderers—and wondered which of them I was.
When I awoke, it was not yet dawn. My internal clock had unwound from the late shifts and lack of sleep. But I could see my hands, and my lips only partway stuck together. Groping about, I let myself out of the pen and sought my own bunk.
Along the way, with my fingers brushing cedar clapboards to keep from spinning in circles, I noticed the pinpricks of tiny lights in my vision. It was pitch-black across the fort, and it was like somehow the brightest of stars were able to penetrate my blindness. But no: it was my eyesight returning.
I stopped and marveled at the tiny spots of light in that infinite darkness. The voices were out there, straining to be heard. There was a madness in my soul, an invader.
It hadn’t taken a full hold of me, but its claws had left marks. It was the same madness I’d seen in the war cries of the natives we fought with. It was the madness Randall had seized upon. A cry from some distant throat telling me that this land was someone else’s and that a reckoning was coming. That was the sight I’d seen: a land wiped clean and taken by those who didn’t belong, a land of dead and missing cattle to starve us the way we’d done with the buffalo, a time of great sickness and men dying beyond counting, with infection rained down from the heavens like some poisoned blanket.
This was the calling. I heard it clearer that night than I ever would again. I stood there for what felt like hours, searching for those pinprick stars and marveling at how our own sun was said to be one like them. Our sun, where native tribes stood sentinel in the morning so we couldn’t see them coming, where they would watch and watch and plan their deadly raids. Many a time, they had brought hell on us from the east with the rising of the sun, the Arapaho and the Sioux and the Apache, but I reckoned we’d done the same and that others might do it to us one day. Generations back, a man with my name had crossed a wide sea and brought his own hell from the east. Others would come. It were folly to think we’d be the last.
That was my vision, what I saw clearly that night in my blindness and with an earful of strange voices. I saw the night and its lights like never before. There was a far and dark sea out there, hanging over me. A dark sea that ships sailed on, scouts arriving at dawn to watch over us, vast fleets to rain down by dusk. But it was not yet dusk. It was early yet. And those stars were like campfires impossibly distant where strange men spoke in strange tongues and conjured war. They spoke with words that I could not fathom but could see like scratches in the dirt, could see like a calling to do bad things on their behalf.
I tried to explain this to whoever would listen, but they would only lock me up for my troubles. They would lock me up before I ever got the chance to heed those voices the way Lieutenant Randall had. I was locked up years later and therefore not a part of that massacre at Wounded Knee Creek, which put an end to the war with our red kin. I was locked up while more cattle went missing and a great sickness swept the land, millions and millions of people dying like my brother had. It has not yet come, this thing from the east that whispers for me to clear the land in preparation. It has not yet come. But something stirs and will talk to those crazy enough to look and listen. There is something across that dark sea, across that expanse of space that men saner than me say no one will ever cross, but I wager my red brother thought the same thing of the deep blue Atlantic that lapped their former shores—and here we are. We who hailed from the east, who came from that rising sun too bright to see, who came first with scouts across the pitch-black, standing tall and ignorant and proud atop some deadly ridge.
Very few of my stories came as assignments or via writing prompts. Most are ideas that have been percolating for a long time. I enjoy the luxury of writing whatever seizes me, rather than being stuck writing the same type of story over and over. “Hell from the East” was different. I was invited to submit something for an anthology, and the stories needed to be “weird Western.”
I’ve always been a fan of this genre, which makes it strange that I’d never explored it on my own. The TV show Firefly is a weird Western in a way. Science fiction is the new frontier, a role that Westerns used to play. And survival on the edge will mean relying on cobbled-together technology, being in sparsely populated areas, and a dive back into lawlessness at times.
The theme I wanted to explore with this story is the idea of alien invasion and the settling of the New World. There’s a legend that some Native American tribes would raid during the rising sun and ride in from the east, so they were hidden in the glare of the sun. This got me thinking of how Europeans arrived from the east, and kept arriving from the east, conquering, stealing land, spreading disease. They had bizarre machines and gadgets. They arrived on strange ships. Europeans were the alien invasion.
In this story, the invasions are nested. As we push west, there’s a different threat coming. And you can only see it if you stare into the sun.
The Black Beast
In the Long Ago, there was a beast who couldn’t be caught. She roamed the woods by a small village, where the men would hunt for her and the women would lay traps for her, but the beast could not be caught. She taunted them from the tree line in their own tongue, calling out her eternal threat of “Just wait.”
“Just wait,” she would screech, over and over, trying to scare them. She would fly through their hunting parties and their traps, laughing and mocking them, “Just wait.”
One day, an old man from the village was fetching water down by the stream when the beast came close, as she was fond of doing. The man ignored the beast. He no longer had fear in his heart for her. Despite the many close calls of his youth and her eternal threats, she had never done him any lasting harm.
Standing on the rocks that jutted out over the stream, he lowered his bucket toward the distant gurgling far below, passing the braided rope through his wrinkled hands. While the swaying bucket descended through the air, the beast came closer, her belly to the grass, her breathing audible.
The man let the currents of the stream catch the rim of the bucket and waited for it to be filled no more than halfway; he could stand to hoist no more. Snapping it from the foam, he pulled the bucket hand over hand and set it on a flat moss-covered rock. He wheezed from the effort while the beast crept closer, her shoulders down, her tail slicing the air.
The old man knew the beast was there. He ignored her, but being so close reminded him of younger days, days spent chasing this beast who could not be caught, his hands swishing at air, her screeching laughter, him and his friends in the dirt, hugging nothing. And now the black beast was nearer than ever, taunting him, and he knew in his old bones that he had one lunge yet.