Wretched Earth Read online

  I see, Krysty thought. I know that story. She recognized a mother who loved her son—perhaps mebbe too much—but not more than she feared loss of control over him. Or, judging by what they’d heard of events in Sweetwater Junction, over any tiny little element of life in the ville.

  “It is true you wished to discuss employment?” the baron asked Ryan.

  “We heard you were having a bit of a set-to with your former sec boss,” Ryan said. “Thought you might be able to use three more blasters at your side.”

  Eyebrows arched, Miranda swept the trio with her dark, intense gaze. “You all three are handy with blasters, then?”

  “We all know our way around them,” Ryan said. “Don’t let Doc’s appearance fool you. You could do worse than have him at your back when blasters start talking.”

  “What a bunch of crap,” Jenkins said. “I could mop the floor with all three of them at once.”

  “If you think that, you’re a bigger fool than I thought,” the baron said without turning. “Now, keep silent. Or I’ll force you to try to make good on your empty-headed boast.”

  The darkly handsome face got a lot darker. If the man had been glaring hot death at Ryan before, now it was a wonder just the side-scatter didn’t set the antimacassars ablaze.

  Miranda glanced to where the travelers’ packs leaned discreetly by the baseboard, behind a china cabinet.

  “So, Mr. One-Eyed Stranger,” Miranda said. “Do you really know how to use that very big rifle of yours?”

  “He’s masterful with it,” Krysty almost purred.

  I know it’s naughty to say it that way, she thought. But at least I didn’t say “and the longblaster, too.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “Ryan,” Doc said from behind him. “Krysty’s back.”

  “Ace,” Ryan said. As intensely focused as he could be when chilling was at stake, he had had trouble concentrating the whole time Krysty was out on the bitterly contested streets of Sweetwater Junction doing recce.

  He sat in an uncomfortable wooden chair beside a heavy wooden table, both of which had been shellacked within an inch of their lives. The varnish had long since started to discolor in shades of yellow and brown, and crack. Perhaps that was why no one had bothered scavvying the furniture from the fourth floor of the ancient redbrick office building on the northern side of Sweetwater Junction’s central square. Or perhaps they were just too heavy and uncomfortable to lug down so many stairs. He wasn’t sure why they hadn’t been broken up for fuel if nothing else, in this timber-poor, fuel-poor desolation.

  The room smelled of cold brick, wood, varnish and the dust that floated in the ocher afternoon light coming through the unglazed, south-facing window. The desk was set a yard back from that window. On it rested Ryan’s Steyr Scout Tactical longblaster, propped on some water-damaged throw cushions Baron Miranda had donated from the palace for this mission.

  Whether scoping out a target or lining up a shot, you didn’t do it from the window itself. The target would spot you, sure as stickies loved hurting norms.

  By the time they’d sneaked into the old office building and climbed the dusty stairs to the fourth floor, the sun had passed far enough west not to shine directly into the room. The gloom was good cover if you didn’t make sudden moves.

  Ryan didn’t take his eye from the Navy longeyes focused on the five-story wooden tower two hundred yards away across the square. The big scope atop the longblaster would let him look into a man’s ear hole at this range. But it was too unwieldy and its field of vision too restricted for him to go to it until he was ready to take a shot or needed to be prepared to do so on an instant’s notice.

  The same pair of men he’d been watching for two hours were still up there. By the visual evidence they were just smoking and joking and taking regular hits of something Ryan didn’t think was water.

  Not even in a ville whose prosperity was mostly built on being the only large-scale source of clean, pure water for fifty miles in any direction would they carry it in square-sided glass bottles, he reckoned. Nor that the ville would be called Sweetwater if its namesake was that shade of brown.

  He also didn’t think for a moment it was predark whiskey the Jacks-faction snipers were tossing down their throats over there. He judged it was most likely Towse Lightning with brown dye or even tobacco spit mixed in for color.

  A soft footfall made the bare hardwood floor creak behind him. He lowered the glasses and turned. Krysty stood in the doorway. Even he scarcely recognized her in the bulky quilted jacket and the billed, big-crowned cap that contained her hair and half obscured her face.

  “Ace,” he said. “You’re back.”

  Below the bill of her green cap her grin was radiant as always. The fresh-air smell of her livened up the room.

  “Did you ever doubt, lover?” she asked.

  You bet your sweet ass I did, he thought. I worried every second you were out there alone. Just like I wasn’t triple-comfortable with moony old Doc being my only sec while I’m lost in the glass.

  He longed to have Jak, elusive as a living ghost, doing the scouting. Or at least watching Krysty’s back while she scouted the ville around the plaza with its big public fountain. Ryan wished he had the steady, unflappable Armorer keeping guard while he watched their targets. He wished Mildred were there to patch them in case they got shot.

  But he had chosen to split the companions. And life had taught him early on he had to live with the choices he made.

  “Shall I take up surveillance of yon scapegrace inebriates, Ryan?” Doc asked.

  Setting the longeyes on the table next to his Steyr, Ryan shook his head. “No. I’ve been trying not to look at them too long at a stretch. Man can sense when somebody’s staring at him too keenly.”

  “Surely that’s mere superstition.”

  “No. It’s true. Happened to me on both ends, plenty times. And to everybody I ever talked to who’s hunted humans, or been hunted himself. You can feel eyes on you.”

  “It’s true, Doc,” Krysty said. “I’ve felt it, too.”

  Ryan got up to catch her in a brief, strong embrace. He didn’t want to show how nervous he’d been, for fear she’d take it as evidence he didn’t trust her competence. Which wasn’t true. She was as solid as they got, smart, shifty and resourceful, and never lost her head. The thing was, what she’d done was nuke-red dangerous for anybody, no matter how expert in skulking. And she was his woman.

  But she insisted on carrying her own weight, no matter what. It was one of many reasons he loved her.

  He kissed her forehead and cheek. In her dancing emerald eyes he plainly read that he didn’t fool her for a millisecond. And that she was fine with his concern as long as he didn’t say anything to show her up.

  “What’d you find?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Only two people up there at a time. Nobody saw any different today. They got about two hours left on their shift. They’ll switch around sunset.”

  She’d been wandering around trying to talk to the ville folk. Better, trying to find ville folk talking so she could eavesdrop.

  “People on the north side of the line say there’s just two up there, day and night,” Krysty said. “They have longblasters.”

  “And why do the ville folk keep such close tabs on them?” Doc asked.

  “Because they shoot at anyone from the north side of town who tries to get water from the fountain.”

  “So, it’s all just
like Miranda told us,” Ryan said, sitting down and picking up the longeyes again.

  * * *

  BARON MIRANDA SHARP and her son may have lost their sec boss when Jacks turned his coat, but she retained a core of loyalist sec men, backed up by the palace staff and servants. The quiet people who came and went to do the new baron’s bidding had the air of having done so for a spell, Krysty thought.

  She also had an adviser in the form of a hard-bitten man on the grizzled side of middle age who went by the name Perico. He was middle height and seemed to be made of burnished hardwood, with steel wool for hair, growing in tufts from the sides of his bald head, on his thick forearms and the backs of his hands, and encasing his wolf-trap jaws.

  “When that bastard Jacks, may he suffer, made his play,” he was saying as he smoothed a hand-drawn map of contemporary Sweetwater Junction across a round drawing-room table cleared of bric-a-brac for the occasion, “he got most of the sec force, plus some malcontents from the ville, to back it.”

  Perico put what looked to be a small, ancient iron on one side of the map to hold it in place. On the other side he put a square, cut-crystal dish holding various trade-good candies. Baron Miranda stood by looking competent and forbidding in her tight black pants and lavender silk blouse. Colt hovered by her side, half eager and half scared he might get whipped. Like a mistreated pup, Krysty thought.

  Hedders, who seemed nice enough for a sec man, had withdrawn. Jenkins stood by and sneered. Krysty already mostly discounted him. He could be dangerous, like a scorpion in a boot. But he didn’t count.

  Likely he knew it, too. And it made him angry.

  “Geither Jacks favored his goons and toadies. Otherwise he was a pure bully—sucked up to his bosses, rained pain on everyone beneath him.”

  “Not a new story,” Doc murmured.

  Perico raised a brow to stare at the old man for a moment. “Be surprised if it was,” he said after a moment. “While Jacks got some of the key richies in town, like Morgan the cloth trader and Delgado the spice guy, most of the ville folk supported the old baron, and after they found out he was gone, Baron Miranda and Colt. Got to admit it wasn’t so much out of love for the Sharp family as knowing what a vicious stoneheart Jacks is. Your pardon, Baron.”

  Miranda’s flushed face was knotted in anger, but her scarcely checked rage wasn’t aimed at her plainspoken adviser.

  “Some on this side harbor treachery in their hearts,” she said, her voice a hiss of fury. “We’ll root them out and destroy them like the snakes they are! Then we’ll put an end to this stickie in man’s clothing, Jacks.”

  Ryan raised his unscarred right eyebrow at the baron’s display. She was too preoccupied to notice, Krysty saw with relief.

  If we held out only for employers who weren’t even a little crazy, she reminded herself, we’d’ve starved to death years ago.

  “Now the ville’s split pretty much in two,” Perico went on in a voice like a heavy wag driving down a gravel road. “There’s a no-man’s-land runs right through the middle of it. Smack in the center is the big public fountain.”

  “How does anybody get water?” Krysty asked.

  “Every other day there’s a two-hour truce. Starts an hour before noon. Anybody with a chit can draw water from the fountain. We still get traders coming through. Even a mad dog like Jacks knows that’s gotta continue. Also the ville folk from both sides can draw their water rations.”

  “That’s how you keep the palace supplied?” Ryan asked.

  Perico shook his head. “We’ve got wells dug in a few key buildings,” he said. “Here in the palace. Also on the south side, in Sinorice’s gaudy, where all the drovers and wag draggers went. When we ran his traitor ass out of here, Jacks took his coldhearts straight there. They chased out poor Brad Sinorice and made his place their headquarters. Sinorice is bunking with his old pal Bill Itomaru the carpenter in no-man’s-land west of the square.”

  “It is forbidden to dig wells for private purposes,” Miranda declared. She had recovered her composure and with it her hauteur. “Those who attempt such selfish acts are publicly drowned in glass vats for their crimes.”

  “Don’t get offenders more’n once or twice a generation,” Perico said. “There’re wells in some other locations. Jacks’s headquarters has one.”

  The sec man rapped the map with hairy knuckles. “Anyway, there’s your tactical situation.”

  “And the gig you want us to do for you?” Ryan asked.

  “There’s a square wood tower,” Perico said, stabbing the middle of the map with a blunt forefinger, “on the south side of the square. Gives a commanding view of the fountain and everything around. They keep a team of snipers up there.”

  “It is an intolerable provocation,” the baron declared. “I want them destroyed.”

  “They’re a royal pain in the ass,” Perico said. “If we can seize that tower, it’ll be a major coup for our side. Be a long first step toward recovering the whole ville.”

  “I beg your pardon, Mr. Perico, Baron, young master,” Doc said, “but as adept as we are, we are but three. Storming an enemy tower is much to ask of us.”

  “That’s not what we’re asking,” Perico said. “We just want you to take down the blasters. You do that for us, Jenkins here will lead an assault team to do the rest.”

  “You will be handsomely compensated if you handle this for us,” Miranda said. “Do it well enough, and we shall discuss longer-range employment.”

  “Fair enough,” Ryan said. “When you want it done?”

  “Today would be good,” Perico replied with a grin.

  Ryan polled the others with a glance. Krysty nodded once, while Doc smiled slightly.

  “Get your strike team ready,” Ryan said. “Give us an hour or two to scout and set up, and we’re good to go.”

  “And we’ll do the hard work,” Jenkins said. “Remember that, money-fighter.”

  “Keep telling yourself that, son,” Ryan said. “Now, what do we have on this side of the line for vantage points?”

  Chapter Twelve

  “What happens now?” Doc queried.

  Ryan looked at the redhead.

  “I sent Luke to tell the baron’s men that we were ready, so they could take up position to storm the tower,” Krysty said. “Luke” was a boy sent with them to be their runner.

  “Then,” Ryan said, settling back into the comfortless chair and taking up the longeyes again, “all we can do is wait and not get spotted.”

  He scanned as much of the south side of Sweetwater Junction as he could see from the window without getting too close. The ville had mostly grown up after the nuke war, cobbled together around a core of predark buildings solid-built enough to stand through the nuke attacks, and the great quakes that had resculpted part of the country after the missiles stopped falling. Like many villes, much of it was essentially a shantytown of scavvied parts, including flattened cans painstakingly tacked together and used for inner and outer walls on ramshackle frames of aluminum and PVC pipes, angle iron and precious scraps of wood.

  When the survivors crept out beneath the slowly clearing skies following the Long Winter, they’d found themselves sitting atop a large, reliable aquifer. Water that, by reason of being buried deep, escaped the lethal taint of fallouts and other poisons that had fouled so much of the land. As trade resumed, as it always did where humans lived, substantial routes gravitated here, and crossed.

  The early barons had rebuilt their domai
n as best they could. The wealth from trade—and water—gave them more resources than most to do it with. They had paid handsomely to have wagloads of scavvied brick and building stone and timber brought in, gradually replacing shacks with solid, respectable structures.

  It was an ongoing process, and a lot remained to be done. Most of the new buildings were relatively modest in size. Some larger old buildings remained derelict because they were too precarious, or eaten away inside, to use, and too dangerous to tear down. Over the years it had apparently been decided to leave those and let time take its course, concentrate on what could readily be done now.

  The brick office building on the north side of the town square was one of those derelicts. Its stairways were alarmingly swaybacked, and creaked and groaned when walked on. Ryan, Krysty and Doc took their lives in their hands every time they went up and down.

  It wasn’t any novelty for them. And it wasn’t as if they aimed to stay.

  Sweetwater Junction itself showed a variety of tones of washed-out oranges, browns and yellows in the gradually softening afternoon light. No colors bright, no colors pure. Just a jumble.

  Ryan felt Krysty come up beside him. He could detect the slight sweetness of her sweat now. She smelled good; the baron had offered them showers while her strike team got ready to go. Ryan didn’t worry that Krysty might stray too close to the window, or do anything else to get spotted by their quarry. She knew this game, too.

  “It’s pretty in a way,” she said.

  In the corner, his arms wrapped around his chest for warmth, Doc was murmuring to himself. Ryan could pick out the odd name—Emily, Jolyon, Rachel—and knew he was talking to his wife and children, his lost family, from whose arms he’d literally been snatched by the soulless whitecoats of the Totality Concept. A family that was dust long since by the time the nuke storm hit.

  Ryan grunted. “You see pretty in everything.”