Wretched Earth Read online

  Chapter Seventeen

  Reed Wallen stuck close behind the big wedge-shaped back of Brick Finneran, Geither Jacks’s new sec boss to replace Bill Hapgood, recently deceased. His sturdy Savage 110 bolt-action longblaster felt as light as a feather in his hands.

  He had been chosen to make history in the ville of Sweetwater Junction this day.

  They had infiltrated deep into the northern half of the ville. Enemy territory since the night Reed, like so many of his sec brothers, had joined their beloved leader in an attempt to seize power from the failing baron Jeb before his crazy, corrupt slut of a wife and her weakling son could grab command.

  White clouds feathered high across a wintry blue sky. A stiff morning breeze blew a breath of ice from the east. It whistled in the eaves of the brick houses as the ten-man team crept along an alley. It didn’t drown out crowd noises from ahead, or the cawing of the ever-present crows.

  Jacks’s team had the enemy streets to themselves. Thinking about why excited Reed all to pieces. He knew where most people of the witch Miranda’s half of the ville were right now, making all that ruction. Same place all the taints that passed for her sec men now would be: in front of the old palace, at a ceremony in which Colton Sharp was being officially invested as heir to the ville.

  When the wind shifted briefly Reed could even smell Sweetwater Junction’s signature delicacy: roast prairie dog on a stick, coated in a sweetish dough, deep-frying in grease.

  Reed’s stomach rumbled. They’d got no breakfast that morning. Instead, Brick had led off before dawn with his picked team of chillers.

  They’d made it without incident across the no-man’s land of the road that ran east-west through the ville. Then they’d holed up in an empty house to wait for the locals to head north to the open space in front of the palace for the show. They knew most of Miranda’s subjects would be there. She had made it triple-clear in official proclamations that not turning up would be taken as evidence of shaky loyalty. Since nobody wanted to have their bones broken with wrecking bars, and then be hung up, still alive, on one of the scaffolds outside town, attendance would be good.

  And they had no idea what kind of a show they were in for.

  * * *

  IT CAME TOGETHER FAST, because Finneran was a real go-getter. He should’ve been Jacks’s main man from the outset, but Hapgood happened to be senior. Reed knew that the sawed-off little shit of an outlander, Dix, had done Jacks a favor by chilling Hapgood.

  Reed had been on guard duty in Jacks’s sitting room the previous night when it all went down. Strike for him.

  Jacks and his big brass were discussing Miranda’s upcoming ceremony. Finneran was talking up the need to make a decisive move, an offensive move, that could bring it all in one stroke.

  The little mercie with the hat and glasses mentioned that the ceremony might look like an opportunity for a chill-shot against Miranda. He had more to say, but Brick grabbed the ball and ran with it like the warrior he was. It was just the chance they were looking for: the bitch herself, plus her useless kid coming right out in the open from behind stone palace walls and their guards. Because Brick knew, like anyone with balls, that the best defense was a good offense.

  And just as Jacks was nodding and frowning and thinking it over, the black woman mercie, Mildred, who people said was a healer, but who’d signed on as a shooter, piped up. “But wouldn’t it be triple-stupe to make a play at Miranda and her boy with her whole sec team drawn up tight around them and looking for trouble?”

  Brick went white to the roots of the short red hair that gave him his name.

  Then he jumped all over that shit. He knew an opportunity when he saw one, he all but yelled. So Miranda’s cat puke so-called sec men wouldn’t let anybody near her precious body? Well, her side wasn’t the only one that could use a longblaster. Finneran had a man on his team who could reach out and touch them from far, far away.

  Reed’s ears had burned then. He’d never felt so proud. He was the best shot on Jacks’s side. The best in the ville. There’d been nobody to touch him before the coup went down and Jacks went south.

  He just didn’t get a chance to show off his skill very often.

  The outlander mercies tried to argue it down. At least the dude with the hat and the woman had. The creepy kid with the white hair and red eyes, who claimed he wasn’t a mutie, though everyone knew he was, never said much. But once Finneran was on a roll he carried the boss right along with him.

  Gate Jacks loved boldness. Or he never would have made his own move on the palace.

  The little mercie, Dix, kept insisting it was a triple-stupe idea. The more he insisted, though, the more Jacks seemed to like it. Mebbe he was beginning to see there wasn’t any point relying on mercies when you had the cream of the crop on your team already.

  Jacks had one stipulation to Finneran’s bold plan. The shooter would get one shot before the baron’s sec men got their charges to cover. Jacks wanted Reed to take out not Miranda, but the kid. The fat little bastard, Colt, Jeb Sharp’s son.

  “He’s the real threat, long-term,” Jacks said, stabbing the air with his cigar. “Without him, Miranda’s just some Mex slut who happened to catch old Jeb’s attention. Colt’s the heir. And he’s the apple of her eye. I want her to watch him die. It’ll break her mind like—” he took the cigar between his fists and snapped it “—that. After which she’ll be a pushover. Too fucked up to offer real resistance when we make our move.”

  “Don’t be a fool, Gate,” Coffin started to say. But the boss wasn’t listening.

  “Do this for me, Finneran,” he said. Then he actually laid a hand on Reed’s shoulder. “Do this for me, kid, and you can write your own ticket.”

  * * *

  SO HERE REED WAS, humping his rifle and ready to go. The team made for a three-story gray stone building with a clear view of the palace steps from two hundred yards away. Reed had dropped pronghorn at three hundred. He was good for the shot.

  Finneran stopped at a narrow street to look up and down. He waved to Mattox, the third man in line, to scout ahead. Holding his Winchester carbine across his chest, the slight blond Mattox trotted to the far side of the street. He waved the others to come after him.

  They were now a block from their objective.

  When Reed stepped from the alley, the only creatures on the street were a couple crows strutting around half a block to his left.

  Holding his longblaster diagonally across his chest, he trotted confidently forward. His heart hammered. It wasn’t from fear, he told himself, but pride. Pride and exhilaration at the great service he was about to do his leader and baron-in-all-but-name.

  I wonder what kind of reward Jacks will give me when—

  Impact on the left side of his head filled his brain with blinding white light and the jangling of all the sounds Reed had heard in his short life.

  Then blackness. It would last forever.

  * * *

  BRICK FINNERAN HAD a stone heart, but it landed in his boots when he saw the brains blow out the right side of his sniper’s head in a gout of doughy chunks and fluid shockingly red in the morning light. A blink later a bright red spark climbed toward the sky from off to his left.

  Gunfire erupted, from his left, right and out front. Muzzle-flames winked from windows across the street. Mattox did a death dance in the far alley as bullets took him from both sides point-blank. Bullets cracked past Brick’s head. One struck chips off the stone edge
of the building right above him.

  “Fuck!” he shouted. “Take cover! It’s an ambush!”

  * * *

  WHEN THE STEYR SETTLED back online, Ryan saw the kid with the scoped bolt gun lying on top of it in the middle of the narrow dirt street. Only half his blond head was left. His brains had spilled like clotted puke into a wide crimson pool.

  Ryan allowed himself a moment’s satisfaction. Gate Jacks’s new sec chief had brought his hit team right to where Ryan anticipated he would.

  Killzone.

  Ryan sat two blocks away in the attic of a two-story house that looked right up the last street the would-be chillers had to cross.

  He couldn’t take much credit himself. He’d relied on J.B. and Mildred to bait the trap. And Jacks and his overaggressive head thug had gone right at it.

  It took less persuasion than he’d expected to persuade the baron to go for the plan. She realized the risk in exposing herself and her beloved son to her enemy’s coldhearts. Miranda Sharp had the heart of a lioness and the soul of a gambler, however crazy she was. It actively delighted her when her new mercies showed how to turn Perico’s major concern, and her own greatest fear, into a lethal trap.

  Pride would never allow Miranda to cancel the ceremony. But she was willing to take the risk of leaving herself and her son defended by a mere handful of men—and Chad, her current lover, who struck Ryan as about as useful in a fight as a busted bicycle inner tube—for the chance of laying some serious hurt on her foe.

  As Krysty reassured the unhappy Perico, the bulk of Miranda’s sec men were safeguarding the baron and the heir. Just from advanced positions.

  Satisfied he had achieved his primary objective, which was to zero out Jacks’s best henchmen, Ryan set his rifle on the floor beneath the window. He picked a homemade flare from the dusty floorboards beside it and leaned out to jam the spike of its launching tube into the sill, angling up and away from his hidey-hole. Taking out a precious butane lighter looted from a redoubt, he lit the fuse, then quickly moved away from the window and pressed his back to the wall, in case the firework simply exploded.

  It didn’t. The squat little rocket launched, drawing a trail of dense red smoke in a high arc over the ville.

  The thunder of blasterfire rose around him as Krysty and Doc and a squad of Miranda’s sec men dumped bullets at the left wing of the hit team and the backing force of more than twenty men behind. Most of the baron’s refurbished sec forces were arrayed in a crescent wrapping around both flanks of the Jacks force. They opened up with everything from hunting bows and crossbows to semiautomatic rifles.

  The flare had served its purpose: springing the trap, as well as reassuring Baron Miranda that things had gone as planned. There was one more objective to launching it. Only time would tell if that was accomplished.

  Picking up his longblaster, Ryan headed down the stairs to help Krysty and Doc make life miserable for the invaders.

  * * *

  “WELL, FUCK,” COFFIN SAID. “We sure been played for fools.”

  He and his employer and friend stood on a north-facing balcony of the former gaudy house.

  For several more beats of the pulse hammering in his ears, Geither Jacks continued to grip the cold, white-painted wrought-iron railing in both hands. The green flare descended over the north half of the ville—enemy territory, which he had sworn would be his soon, possibly this day—and went out.

  The crackle of gunfire reached his ears.

  He pried his hands loose and used one to take his cigar out of his mouth.

  “Finneran,” he rasped, “you chisel-dick. Devil forgive you if you lose me half my sec force out there. Because I sure won’t.”

  He turned and yanked open the door that led inside.

  * * *

  OUR EMPLOYER DOESN’T look happy, Mildred thought as she, J.B. and Jak were ushered into the parlor.

  “Okay,” Geither Jacks said without preamble. “You were right. As of now it appears Brick Finneran has officially got his dick stuck in a bear trap.”

  “He’s slack!” his grandmother exclaimed. “I told you! But you were too slack to listen!”

  “Can you go get him back? And, uh, as many of my men as he hasn’t already managed to get chilled?”

  J.B. smiled blandly. “Sure.”

  “What’ll you give us?” Mildred demanded.

  Jacks’s eyebrows rose. She could almost hear J.B.’s eyeballs click as he glanced at her from behind the round lenses of his glasses.

  “What’s this?” Jacks said. “You work for me.”

  “We do, sir,” she said firmly. “And you told us in no uncertain terms we weren’t good enough to take part in this commando raid Finneran cooked up. Now you want us to go get his dick out of what you describe as a ‘bear trap.’ Which is it?”

  “Which is what?” Jacks sounded really confused.

  “Are we good enough or not? If we’re good enough to go extracting a sec boss’s dick from a bear trap, it seems to me we deserve more pay than for just sitting on our hands because we weren’t good enough to go get trapped with him.”

  Everybody stared at her for a moment. She tried to keep her face impassive.

  Grammaw cawed with laughter. “The girl’s not slack! You got to give her that!”

  “Gate,” Coffin began, “don’t be a—”

  Jacks waved his cigar at him. “Don’t say it,” he said. “All right. I’ll double your pay.”

  Grammaw screeched like a scorched raven.

  “No, no,” Jacks said, “it’s no big deal. I suspect I’m going to be saving more than enough on salaries today to make up the extra. Not that you people need to go getting ideas.”

  “No, sir,” she said. “We’ll take your offer. We’re on our way.”

  * * *

  “MILLIE,” J.B. SAID MILDLY, as the three of them trotted along narrow, deserted streets, “weren’t you worried about mebbe overplaying our hand a little, back there?”

  “We’re playing mercies, John,” she said. “We need to act like mercies. And mercies are avaricious. To sort of extend his metaphor, Jacks’s nuts were in a nutcracker. It was natural to apply leverage. And right now we are mercies. As Ryan always likes to remind me, we don’t work out of the goodness of our hearts. Not that ‘goodness of heart’ and ‘working for Geither Jacks’ belong within twenty miles of each other.”

  J.B. chuckled. “Said a true thing there, girl.”

  “And finally,” she said, “he really pissed me off, giving in so easily when Brick the Prick said he didn’t want us along. Even if that was the plan all along.”

  * * *

  “FINNERAN.”

  The sec man’s green eyes showed whites all around as he turned his head to look back over his shoulder.

  The situation was what J.B. had expected to find, and exactly as Jacks had summed it up.

  One dead kid with half a head was sprawled out in the middle of the street. Another slumped against a wall on the far side, leaking from too many holes to be among the living. The casualty in the rotting-garbage-reeking alley with Finneran was a guy sitting with his back to a filth-smudged wall, looking pale and clutching a sleeve whose olive-drab had been dyed dark brown by blood.

  The baron’s men weren’t pressing their advantage. They made a lot of noise, but that was just busting caps. It didn’t mean all those bullets were hitting anybody.

  “Dix,” the strike-team leader all but gasped.


  J.B. didn’t spend much time trying to read people. He didn’t have a knack for it. Unlike blasters or gears, human beings didn’t have to make sense.

  But even the Armorer could see that Finneran was a beaten man. It was plain as the often-squashed nose on his face.

  “Listen up,” Dix said. “Jacks sent us. We’re here to get you out. We can distract them long enough for you people to pull back. But you got to move right away. No telling how long we can hold ’em.”

  Fortunately, J.B. was a good poker player, because he had a hard time saying that with a straight face despite the practice. If the Sharp troops weren’t doing such a fine job holding themselves, Finneran’s command would be history already.

  “Jacks is ordering us to pull back?”

  “Yeah, yeah. That’s what I said. He sent us, didn’t he? Only, you’ve got to move right now, or…” He ended in a shrug of leather-jacketed shoulders.

  For a moment the big man just stared at J.B. His Adam’s apple worked up and down in his thick neck.

  Probably he’s more afraid of what Jacks’ll do to him if he loses half his sec force for him, than he is of just dying, J.B. thought.

  “Right,” Finneran said. “Right. Orders. Orders are orders. Gotta be obeyed.”

  He grabbed his nearest sec man. “Pass the word. We’re pulling back. Go!”

  He turned back to J.B. “Go do what you can. Buy us time!”

  “I’ll do that,” the Armorer said.

  He drew a silver whistle from one of his pants pockets. Putting it to his lips, he blew a single long blast.

  * * *

  “GUNFIRE’S PETERING OUT,” Mildred said.

  She could hear dogs barking in the distance now, and the bleak calling of the crows perched on the rooftops and wheeling through the sky. She held J.B.’s Smith & Wesson M-4000 combat shotgun, which he’d lent her.

  “Blasters running out ammo,” Jak said. The two knelt on the raw dirt of a yard, behind a four-foot-high brick wall.