Wretched Earth Read online

  INTEGRITY LOST

  After the Megacull, the weak died off, so that a century later, the living have descended from only the toughest stock. Still, it takes more than strength to survive Deathlands. It takes skill, cunning and a warrior’s heart. But for Ryan Cawdor, staying alive isn’t just about living. In this nuke-transformed America, it helps if somewhere, deep inside, there’s hope of finding something better.

  WALKING DEAD

  A virulent strain of a predark biowep has been unleashed upon the denizens of northern Kansas, turning them into rotting, flesh-eating monsters. Running from the mindless, soulless rottie hordes, Ryan and his companions arrive in the civil-war-torn ville of Sweetwater Junction. They’ve got one shot at beating the hungry rotties: turn the bloodlust of the ville’s warring factions away from each other and toward a common enemy. But that means splitting up and hiring on as sec for both sides and surviving the firefight—before the real hell is unleashed.

  In Deathlands, time is blood.

  The rottie yanked the youth against the wire

  Other arms reached out to entangle him, their blackened nails clawing at his flesh. Despite his frenzied thrashing, he couldn’t break free.

  Several of the ville folk darted forward to try to help him.

  “Don’t get close!” Ryan shouted. “Chop their arms off!”

  His friends tried pulling the youth away, but it did no good. Then he screamed, and blood spurted from the side of his head as a rottie bit deep into his ear.

  Ryan stepped into a Weaver stance, his left arm crooked to support his blaster hand, and fired a single round. The trapped boy’s head jerked, and he slumped.

  His friends stared at Ryan in shock and fury.

  “If you’re bit, you’re one of them!” Ryan growled. “Now learn from that stupe and stay back!”

  Other titles in the Deathlands saga:

  Demons of Eden

  The Mars Arena

  Watersleep

  Nightmare Passage

  Freedom Lost

  Way of the Wolf

  Dark Emblem

  Crucible of Time

  Starfall

  Encounter:

  Collector’s Edition

  Gemini Rising

  Gaia’s Demise

  Dark Reckoning

  Shadow World

  Pandora’s Redoubt

  Rat King

  Zero City

  Savage Armada

  Judas Strike

  Shadow Fortress

  Sunchild

  Breakthrough

  Salvation Road

  Amazon Gate

  Destiny’s Truth

  Skydark Spawn

  Damnation Road Show

  Devil Riders

  Bloodfire

  Hellbenders

  Separation

  Death Hunt

  Shaking Earth

  Black Harvest

  Vengeance Trail

  Ritual Chill

  Atlantis Reprise

  Labyrinth

  Strontium Swamp

  Shatter Zone

  Perdition Valley

  Cannibal Moon

  Sky Raider

  Remember Tomorrow

  Sunspot

  Desert Kings

  Apocalypse Unborn

  Thunder Road

  Plague Lords

  (Empire of Xibalba Book I)

  Dark Resurrection

  (Empire of Xibalba Book II)

  Eden’s Twilight

  Desolation Crossing

  Alpha Wave

  Time Castaways

  Prophecy

  Blood Harvest

  Arcadian’s Asylum

  Baptism of Rage

  Doom Helix

  Moonfeast

  Downrigger Drift

  Playfair’s Axiom

  Tainted Cascade

  Perception Fault

  Prodigal’s Return

  Lost Gates

  Haven’s Blight

  Hell Road Warriors

  Palaces of Light

  Wretched Earth

  There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.

  —Eugene Ionesco

  1909-1994

  Rhinoceros

  THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

  This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance.

  There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs in the balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness.

  But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to nature’s heart despite its ruination.

  Ryan Cawdor: The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities.

  Krysty Wroth: Harmony ville’s own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the strength of tempered steel. Her premonitions and Gaia powers have been fostered by her Mother Sonja.

  J. B. Dix, the Armorer: Weapons master and Ryan’s close ally, he, too, honed his skills traversing the Deathlands with the legendary Trader.

  Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn from his family and a gentler life in 1896, Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn’t have imagined.

  Dr. Mildred Wyeth: Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is not much lighter. Restored from predark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.

  Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend.

  Dean Cawdor: Ryan’s young son by Sharona accepts the only world he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.

  In a world where all was lost, they are humanity’s last hope.…

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  The four of them stood in the darkened vanadium-steel room in the guts of the shattered redoubt: a tall rangy man in a tattered greatcoat;
a well-built woman whose hair showed auburn highlights in the backsplash from their lamps off gleaming metal walls; a youth with a mane of long black hair hanging past his shoulders; another youth only a bit older, wearing a patched bomber jacket and glasses.

  The woman played the bluish gleam of her solar-charging flash on the walls of what he took to be a hexagonal chamber. To the kid with glasses the walls looked like glass. What feeble illumination the quartet was able to muster wasn’t enough to let his weak eyes see anything beyond the glass.

  “Shit,” the tall man said. “Nothing in this place. No food, no ammo, no meds. It’s been looted out. I feel like smashing those fancy windows.”

  “What good’ll that do?” the woman asked.

  The tall man shrugged. “Make me feel better.”

  “You can’t,” the youth said.

  The others looked at him, their eyes glinting faintly. He quailed a little under the pressure of their gaze. His own light, a dingy yellow at best, faded to thirsty-man-piss color as he momentarily forgot to keep pumping the little flywheel generator with the palm of his hand, which ached from the constant squeezing.

  The tall man raised a fist as if to backhand him.

  “Step back, Drygulch. He may know something,” the woman said.

  “Yeah,” the tall man said, sneering. “He knows a lot of crap. It’s all he’s good for.”

  The youth in the glasses actually rallied at that. He did know stuff. He was endlessly curious, always seeking to learn more. And he had a memory like a miser’s fist.

  “Let him talk,” the woman said. She wore a homemade leather jacket, the collar of which was lined with silver wolf hide. A belt held up her khaki trousers and the flapped holster for her remade .45 handblaster. “He does know stuff.”

  “Whatever you say, Lariat,” Drygulch agreed, scratching at his cap of hair, which looked like short, tight curls of silver-frosted copper wire. “What’s on your mind, Hamster?”

  “It’s Reno,” he insisted. He didn’t even know how the older man had gotten hold of his hated childhood nickname.

  “Whatever,” Drygulch said. He wasn’t a bad type. He didn’t dislike Reno so much as he liked poking at him.

  Reno swelled inside with the warmth that came from Lariat’s acknowledgment of his value to them. To her. He held on desperately to the hope that someday the auburn-haired adventuress would realize his real worth, and return the fiercely burning love he harbored for her.

  “That’s some kind of armored glass,” he said. “Your wrecking bar’d just bounce off. So would bullets, so forget all about shooting at the walls.”

  Drygulch’s badlands face crumpled even more than it had to start with. But he lowered the revolver in his right hand. His left held up a kerosene lantern whose smoke filled the room with an oily smell.

  “This is a triple-bust,” the tall man growled. “We’re wastin’ our time.”

  “No, my friends,” said the young man who was the party’s fourth member. He wore a long, plaid flannel shirt over holey jeans. The soles of his ancient, pointy-toed cowboy boots were held on by thin pieces of leather, sewed around when wet and allowed to tighten into place as they dried. He carried a well-worn M-1 carbine. “There is treasure down here, I tell you. I have seen it with my own eyes.”

  “Then why didn’t you lead us right to it without dicking around?” Drygulch asked.

  The black-haired kid’s name was Johnny Hueco. He wasn’t one of them. He was a local who’d fast-talked the trio into hiring him to guide them into the busted-open redoubt, where he claimed he knew where to lay hands on a baron’s ransom in prime scavvie.

  “Because we wanted to make sure nothing was going to jump on our backs when we walked all fat, dumb and happy past doors without checking what was behind ’em,” Lariat said. “Also because we wanted to make sure we didn’t miss anything worth hauling out of here. So step back off the trigger, Drygulch.”

  “We got to hurry,” Johnny Hueco said, shifting his weight uneasily from foot to foot. “Things come out at night. Or in.”

  That was why the bunch he’d been with when they’d stumbled onto this place, in what once was western Kansas and was now triple hard core Deathlands, hadn’t stripped the redoubt of its fabulous treasure. So he said. Something had jumped them in the dark. Only Johnny got out alive, and only because he was closest to the door.

  And because whatever it was had been too busy eating his friends, his new companions reckoned. Not that they held it against him. Loyalty was as good as jack or ammo in the Deathlands. Because it was so rare.

  When muties or monsters attacked, sometimes all you could do was bug out, and stickies take the slow. Like jack or ammo or white lightning, loyalty could run out.

  “Lead on, then,” Lariat said.

  Johnny led them back out into the broad main corridor. Their footsteps chased each other up and down the bare metal walls like small frightened creatures.

  “Shouldn’t there be some kind of padding on the floors?” Reno asked. Their boot soles crunched on drifted dirt leavened with some kind of coarse material that didn’t seem quite like rock.

  “Rats ate it,” Johnny said. “Hate rats.”

  “I dunno,” Drygulch said. “Roast ’em just right, they can be mighty tasty. If they ain’t been eatin’ too much fresh shit or old chills.”

  Reno licked his lips, suddenly remembering how ravenous he was. He hadn’t eaten since they broke camp in the watery, greenish-orange light of dawn.

  It wasn’t just his wits and his packrat memory that had sustained him through a brutal childhood. There were the rats, too. Where people were, rats thrived. To the perpetually starving Hamster, the ones that had been feasting off shit and dead people tasted just fine.

  “Here, what’s this?” Lariat said. She strode up beside Johnny.

  They stopped. Lariat shone her flashlight at the wall, where a large white sign with red lettering had been bolted: Danger—Restricted Area—Authorized Laboratory Personnel Only.

  Drygulch read the sign slowly. “Okay, what’s that mean?”

  “It means we’re not supposed to be here,” Johnny said.

  “I know that, ass face. I’m not stupe. I mean, what’s it mean here?”

  “It means there’s valuable stuff inside,” Lariat said.

  “What if there’s something living in there?” Reno asked, hustling to catch up. He didn’t think his friends would cut him out on any ace scavvie they found. He just didn’t like to leave too much to chance.

  It was cold in here—as above, so below. Topside, the plains were dusted with light dry snow that eddied in the wind. Despite that, Reno’s skin prickled as if sunburned.

  He hoped it wasn’t caused by rads from fallout from the old ground-burst crater a few miles west, drifting in through the cracks in the installation’s immensely thick concrete containment shell. They had no way of telling. Unless your skin started getting all mottled and your hair began falling out in clumps. Or you just went straight to the convulsions-and-bloody-shits stage.

  With the first you might not die. With the second, you might not die soon enough. He’d seen both.

  Drygulch held up his kerosene lantern. Next to the sign was a door that had been jammed partway open.

  “Strike,” Lariat said. She poked her head through and shone her own flashlight around. “Looks like some kind of lab, all right.”

  “I don’t know,” Drygulch said. “I don’t feel triple-good fucking with
whitecoat stuff. Especially not from old days.”

  “You think we’re in here scuffling like rats for rations and ammo?” the woman scoffed.

  “Well, yeah. That and meds. Mebbe some blasters. Boots. I could use me some new boots.”

  “Small-time. Mebbe you’re satisfied with that. Not me.”

  Reno caught up. “I don’t think we’ll find much of that kinda stuff, anyway,” he said. “Place has seemed picked pretty clean so far.”

  But Johnny Hueco was dancing from one disintegrating boot to another. “This is it!” he said. “It’s what I told you about.”

  “No shit?” Drygulch said dubiously.

  “Doesn’t look touched in here,” Lariat said, backing out.

  “If there really was anything worthwhile in there, wouldn’t somebody have gotten to it by now?” Drygulch asked.

  “Mebbe not,” Reno said. “Mebbe the door hasn’t been open long.”

  “Why’d it be open now, Reno?” Lariat asked.

  “Earthquakes,” he said. “Get a lot of seismic activity in this area. Some big quakes. Mighta shaken it open.”

  Lariat studied him a moment longer. Her auburn hair hung to just above the wolf-fur-trimmed collar of her jacket, framing wide cheekbones and dark eyes with a touch of the Orient to them. Mebbe she wasn’t a beauty, Reno thought. Most men found her good-looking. She was queen of Reno’s world.

  She’d made it clear early and emphatically that she was too good for the likes of Drygulch and Reno. They might be trail mates and partners, but no touchy-feely stuff.

  Lariat nodded now. “Could be it. I’m going in. Who’s with me?”

  “Might be bad animals in there, Lariat,” Drygulch said. “Muties even.”

  She drew her .45 handblaster, pinching back the slide to confirm she had a round chambered.

  “So, might be animals,” she said. “Right. I’m ready. Who wants to live forever?”

  “Um, just a sec,” Reno said. The others turned, then followed his flywheel flashlight beam upward. The ceiling, higher in here than in the corridor, had buckled sharply downward. “So, if the concrete’s seriously cracked, the whole fucking thing might cave in on our heads at any minute.”