Wretched Earth Page 10

  “Look, people. You know I’ve got no problem running when running’s the way to survive. This isn’t trouble we can get away from by running. Sooner or later it’ll catch up to us. We have to stop this now.”

  “How?” Mildred said. “You saw how they overran the caravanserai.”

  “Omar wasn’t prepared,” J.B. said. “Nobody’s prepared for something like that.”

  “We can prep the ville,” Ryan said. “Rouse the place, fortify, get the locals to fight.”

  “What if they don’t believe us?” Mildred demanded. “Or what if the sides are more interested in fighting each other?”

  “Then like I said before,” Ryan said. “We got to adjust some attitudes.”

  “You really think you can adjust people out of wanting to be barons?”

  “There’re ways, Mildred. Even for that.”

  “But Ryan, do you think we can end this by fighting?” Krysty asked. “Bullets can stop rotties. Can they stop the change?”

  “I don’t know. I’m damn sure we can’t stop them without fighting. So I say fight ’em as soon as we can. It’ll only keep getting harder until it’s impossible.”

  “Just hypothetically, how could fighting stop a plague?” Mildred asked.

  “Chilling all the carriers,” Ryan said. “Or if we can find out what’s behind this whole deal, stop it at the source.”

  “Those seem like awful slim hopes to pin our survival on,” Mildred said. “Even if we can somehow get the warring factions in Sweetwater Junction to cooperate.”

  Ryan shrugged. “They’re hopes. What does running away offer us? Other than delaying the inevitable.”

  J.B. looked off toward the ville. It was invisible from the little depression they hunkered in.

  “I gotta say I don’t see much chance of us pulling this one off, Ryan,” he said, scratching under his battered fedora.

  “The whole idea’s plain crazy,” Mildred said.

  Krysty’s beautiful face was pale, drawn taut with emotion.

  “Lover,” she said hoarsely, “would you really split us up for this?”

  “I’ll do whatever it takes to survive,” Ryan said. “Like always.”

  Chapter Ten

  “Mother,” Colton Sharp said. “I wish you wouldn’t prance around like that.”

  He winced as he heard the whine that edged his voice. Way to assert yourself, Colt, he thought.

  The woman stood and struck a pose, hand on angled hip, head tipped with long black hair hanging artfully over one shoulder. One naked shoulder. One naked hip.

  “Prance around like how, dear?” she asked. Her words had a trace of the accent of her native Mex-land.

  As she so often did, Colt’s mother, Miranda Sharp—he wasn’t clear on whether she was baron in her own right or acting as regent until his own majority—was fluttering about the common room of their quarters on the third floor of the baronial palace in the nude.

  Miranda stood there artfully silhouetted in the late-morning sunlight filtering through gauze curtains. It cast a halo around her hair and her still-perfect, olive-skinned body—narrow waist, flaring hips, lean legs. It did nothing to hide her full breasts, although shadows added a bit of mystery to the dark arrowhead tangle between her strong thighs.

  She had married Baron Jeb Sharp young, and borne her only child, Colt, to him. She was still in her mid-thirties and religiously kept herself trim.

  Colton Sharp was sixteen years old, his young, slightly pudgy body a constant sizzle of hormones.

  Buck naked, he wanted to reply. But his tongue would tie itself into knots if he tried to say that to his mother. Instead he settled on waving one hand in a feeble gesture.

  “Like, uh—that.”

  She laughed. “It’s not as if you haven’t seen me this way before. Who do you think gave birth to you?”

  “Well, that was kind of a long time ago. I don’t really remember it.”

  He was babbling. He saw her this way all the time. And far from getting used to it, it was starting to…affect him more and more.

  She came swaying up to him, smiling mischievously. She put her hands on either side of his head, against the pink upholstered back of the chair he was sitting in, and leaned in close, so he could smell the freshly bathed feminine scent of her. In fact, almost suffocate in it.

  “Pobrecito,” she said huskily. Her forehead was tipped almost to touch his. Her heavy, untamable hair hung around his face like a curtain. “Does Mother make you uncomfortable?”

  “Umm,” he said. He tried to avoid looking at the two perfect breasts hanging inches from his eyes. His face flushed so hot he was surprised her hair didn’t start to smolder, not to mention his own blond locks.

  She put her lips by his ear. Her hair tickled his cheek and nose. “You need to learn how to handle yourself in the presence of a woman, mi amor,” she purred in his ear. “You need to learn how to handle a woman.”

  “Mom!” he yelped. It was the only thing he could manage to do.

  She straightened and moved away with a half-spiteful laugh. “You’re a good boy, Colt,” she said over her shoulder. “Mama will see you brought up right.”

  It was double entendre city in here. Colt had been well educated. Miranda had insisted. His late father had figured an iron fist and some reliable henchman were all a man really needed to get by in life. Not that he’d done so well on that second part.

  The upshot: Colt knew what a double entendre was. He could read and speak three languages. He could do math. But he’d never learned how to do anything he thought was real.

  Or, indeed, as his mother said, how to handle a woman. He had a feeling no man would ever really handle his mother. His late father sure hadn’t. And her current boy-toy sec boss, Jenkins, couldn’t either, that was for damn sure. Not that he realized it.

  Colt felt suffocatingly hot, even though the potbellied stove on its colorfully painted maroon tiles in the corner wasn’t doing more than keeping the chill coming through the window glass at bay. He had to think of something to say to break the mood. Anything.

  “I want to learn to shoot,” he said. “Dad promised he’d get someone to teach me.”

  She whipped around. “You’ll hurt yourself,” she said, frowning.

  “Not if I’m taught right.”

  “But why would you want to use a blaster?”

  “To, you know, protect myself and stuff.”

  Colt recalled the pants-pissing terror of being caught in the middle of the firefight when Gate to Hell Jacks had betrayed the baron and tried to seize control of Sweetwater Junction. Having angry men trying to hurt him was bad. Seeing his old tutor, Marconi, go down with a big chunk blown out of his bald head and his brains spilling out on the throw rug was bad. Seeing his best friend, Anthony, writhing in terminal agony around the two bullets that had pulped his guts was worse. Hearing bullets crack over his own head as he sheltered behind a table and a pair of loyal sec men was unimaginable.

  Worst by far, though, was not being able to do anything about it. The sense of utter helplessness. In that awful moment he’d understood as never before that having a blaster wouldn’t in any way render him less susceptible to bullets hitting him. But it would let him fight back. Maybe even shoot somebody before that somebody shot him.

  It would give him some kind of power over his own life and circumstances. Which, young Colt Sharp had also come to realize on that terrible night of blood and flame and pain,
was something he in fact had never had. Despite the fact that both his father and his mother had brought him up hearing constantly how he was born to rule.

  His mother was frowning deeper and shaking her head. It made the tip of her nose turn up slightly and her brow furrow.

  “You’re going to be baron,” she said sternly. “Shooting blasters is what you have sec men for. You don’t fix your own wag or empty your own pisspot. You leave that to the menials.”

  “But…but what if the sec men get killed? Or aren’t around?”

  Or turn on you like rabid dogs after years of apparently loyal and devoted service, with the same savagery they brought to the job of keeping the citizens in their place? he thought.

  But he couldn’t say that. Not to his mother, not so soon. It would throw her into one of her rages. The fact that her fury would be directed against Brown and the band of traitors—who had tried to kill her and her son, had succeeded in chilling the desperately ill Baron Jeb, and had stolen half her ville out from under her—and not at Colt himself, wouldn’t make it easier to take. He knew that from bitter experience. It wouldn’t even be much safer, if she got to throwing things.

  The way she scowled told him he’d wandered dangerously close to the edge already. Her face got darker and she took a deep breath. Her breasts rose and spread on her rib cage.

  Oh, shit, Colt thought. Here it comes. Her throwing one of her epic fits stark naked, with all that entailed, would only make everything twice as freaky.

  A knock sounded on the door to the common room. He slumped in the chair, instantly coated in sweat.

  “Baron.”

  It was the voice of Hedders, one of the sec men who had stayed loyal to the Sharp family, his young voice muffled by thick wood. The veneer door that had originally sealed the entryway had, unsurprisingly in retrospect, proved no barrier to bullets. Despite the fact that milled lumber was literally worth its weight in gold out here in this treeless flatland, Miranda had insisted on a solid oak replacement. And gotten it.

  “What is it?” she called. She reached for a green satin robe. For all her flouting of her lush naked body in her son’s presence she was quite prudish about displaying the same goods to the lessers.

  “You got visitors, ma’am.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Three mercies, looking for jobs.”

  She nodded. “I’ll meet them in the parlor downstairs. Tell them to wait.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  * * *

  “BARON,” THE YOUNG, intense, dark-haired sec man who called himself Hedders said, “this is Dr. Theophilus Tanner, Krysty Wroth and Ryan Cawdor.”

  The sitting room in the four-story stone structure at the north end of Sweetwater Junction that served as the baron’s palace was decorated with salvaged porcelain figurines and fussy-seeming furniture with lace doilies on arms and backs to prevent staining of the fabric. The room smelled of lavender and old, dried sweat. Krysty guessed the new baron had had her way in decorating this room, at least, long before Baron Jeb Sharp reached room temperature. It seemed to fit, somehow, with the structure itself, which was of a look and general solidity that suggested it had been old when the Big Cull hit.

  “No such thing anymore,” said the tall and extravagantly muscled sec man introduced as Jenkins, biting into a chunk of dried apple. He even had muscular cheeks. “What he’s a doctor of? Looking stupe?”

  From the corner of her eye Krysty saw Doc give a goofy smile. Sometimes that meant he had slipped his reality tether again. Sometimes it didn’t. He seemed, actually, to be more at ease in this setting than he had in a long time. It went to substantiate Krysty’s theory that the room’s decor was as old-timey as the building itself. Those old times were Doc’s proper time.

  “I had the good fortune to receive a stellar education, my boy,” Doc said cheerfully. “And the term ‘doctor’ was bestowed upon me as a sign of respect for the vast store of knowledge that I acquired over the years.” The lie slid smoothly from the old man’s lips.

  “Huh,” the sec man said. He had dark olive skin that glistened as if oiled. His hair was shaved to a Mohawk, a low, dark one that almost looked painted on. For all his air of hypermasculinity, his manner was petulant and surly. “You still look like a stupe.”

  “Manners, Leroy,” the baron said sharply.

  Watch it, kid, Krysty mentally warned the surly sec man. You have no idea what this man’s capable of.

  The Baron’s dark eyes widened considerably once they lit on the tall, dark and dangerous form of Ryan Cawdor.

  Krysty wasn’t much troubled by jealousy. What did concern her about Miranda Sharp’s not-at-all-subtle interest in Ryan was the mischief it could cause. Such a woman was used to getting what she wanted, and stepping on rivals like roaches.

  Miranda stepped right up to Ryan, hand extended. Krysty felt brief relief. The baron held her hand out vertically, as if expecting a shake, not horizontally, as if expecting a kiss. That’d get things off to all kinds of a wrong start.

  “Ryan Cawdor,” the baron purred, drawing the syllables out and rolling the Rs in a Spanish way. “A pleasure to meet you.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” he answered. “And this is Doc Tanner and Krysty Wroth, like the man said.”

  Ryan nodded firmly at his companions. Krysty bit down on a grin.

  “Dr. Tanner,” the baron said, gravely taking Doc’s hand. “You clearly are a man of the mind. Are you a man of action as well, then?”

  After shaking her hand, firmly but gently, Doc did turn it over and kiss the back. Miranda Sharp’s eyebrows went up.

  “So you are a gentleman of the old school, too,” she said.

  “I try to be all of those things, madam,” Doc said, “as circumstances and chivalry require.”

  Krysty caught Ryan’s eye behind the two and grinned openly. Doc, you sly old dog, she thought. Of course, he really was in his thirties, not terribly older in days actually lived through than the beautiful sex-bomb baron herself. But his aged appearance counted against him.

  Still, he could be remarkably suave when focused and properly motivated. If the baron didn’t so overtly have her claws out for Ryan—and if the sulky guy with the stripe down the middle of his scalp, who was looking rad death at Ryan, wasn’t so obviously her current lover—Krysty thought the professor might actually have a chance. Baron Miranda was clearly a highly sexual being who might just give him a try out of curiosity.

  Krysty felt no disdain or hostility toward the woman for such overt sexuality. Her own nature wasn’t all that much different. But she’d learned to keep it more tightly controlled. Her life hadn’t been the sheltered one of a baron of a powerful ville.

  Finally, the raven-haired woman turned to her. They shook hands in a businesslike way. Krysty wasn’t surprised to find Miranda’s grip had a wiry strength hardly less than a man’s. Krysty’s arm strength had the potential to be greater than a normal man’s, but the baron played nice, without any manlike hand-crushing games. And Krysty always played nice. As long as it was possible to be nice.

  To her surprise the baron enfolded her in a fervent hug, which she returned belatedly but firmly.

  “It is so good to meet a woman of substance,” Miranda said, breaking free. For a moment Krysty wondered if the baron was making a crack about Krysty’s build, even more voluptuous than her own. But Miranda followed instantly with, “Claro, you are a woman of education as well as strength of spirit. I bid you welcome
to Sweetwater Junction.”

  She stepped back. “All of you.”

  “Thank you, Baron,” Ryan said.

  “And this is my son, Colton, the future baron of Sweetwater Junction,” Miranda said, turning to introduce the somewhat ungainly figure who had appeared in the doorway behind her as if on cue. Which suggested to Krysty that he had been waiting for one.

  He was of medium height for a male, somewhat shorter than Krysty herself. His obvious youth suggested he had some growing yet to do. He was fair-complected, unlike his mother, and his eyes were hazel. His hair was blond, curly and tousled. He was a handsome youth, or would’ve been if not for the baby fat that padded his cheeks and frame.

  He stepped up and shook hands with each newcomer in turn. He met Krysty’s eye and his gaze lingered for a moment, as did his grip.

  “It’s a real pleasure to meet you, Ms. Wroth,” he said. His handshake was firm if not indicative of great physical strength. When he released her hand, he did so abruptly and almost convulsively.

  He seemed almost afraid of Ryan, but after only the briefest hesitation shook his hand and looked him in the eye, as well.

  Colt Sharp struck Krysty as a not unintelligent youth trying to break free of chubbiness and uncertainty. Would he be equal to the terror the not-too-distant future seemed to hold for himself and his ville? She saw, sadly, no evidence that he would.

  Give him time, he’d learn, she thought. Triple-shame the one thing he didn’t have was time.

  “So you’re mercenaries?” he asked, stepping back to his mother’s side. She loomed over him, although much of her height was due to the high heels of the laced-front, knee-high boots she wore.

  “You’re not ready to handle such matters yourself yet, Colt,” Miranda said, with a pleasant smile and just a hint of a whip crack. “Watch and learn, mijo.”