Wretched Earth Read online

  “Fireblast,” Ryan said. “So beyond letting us loose, what’s on your mind, Colt?”

  The kid’s chest swelled out past his gut as he drew in a decisive breath. “We’re going to make sure the rotties don’t take this ville.”

  * * *

  “MAMA!” COLT YIPPED as blasterfire boiled up from the center of town. The fountain was still out of sight, since they didn’t want to walk right down the main north–south drag in plain view of the square.

  Ryan’s hard grip on the youth’s shoulder prevented him from rabbiting toward the sound of shooting. A vast crowd of crows circled above the square and its public fountain like a black whirlwind.

  “He lacks little of courage, my dear Ryan,” Doc said, “if still much of sense.”

  A stiffening breeze ruffled Ryan’s shaggy hair. He held his head up even though the wind’s icy fingers managed to probe even beneath his eyepatch and wake a dull throb of pain in the socket. The bruises and scrapes he’d suffered being battered into a stupor hurt double-bad now. But he was damned if he’d let the world—much less Miranda Sharp—see evidence of that in his face or bearing.

  Well, other than the puffiness, bruising and split lip, of course. Nothing he could do there.

  They had the streets to themselves this early morning. Ryan guessed most of the citizens were inside, heads down, knowing that whatever happened on the main square, all they could gain personally from any kind of involvement, or mebbe even seeing too much, was a triple-load of grief.

  Floating on the wind he heard a dee-dee-dee like a killdeer flying nearby. It wasn’t an uncommon winter sound here on the plains. Just not in the middle of a ville, with the only birds in view being crows. He grinned.

  “Come on out, Jak,” he called.

  “Who that?” a voice asked from somewhere unseen. “Baron’s son?”

  “Yes,” Colt said, not even slowing his stride. “I’m going to—to talk some sense into my mother.”

  Krysty caught Ryan’s eye and shrugged, wincing as she did. Personally, Ryan wouldn’t undertake to pound sense into Miranda with a nuke-powered pile driver. But plans began to coalesce from the myriad contingencies that swarmed in his mind like the crows above the firefight. The boy might yet be the key to saving the ville.

  And, most importantly, the asses of Ryan and his companions. Which, after all, was the whole purpose of the enterprise.

  Jak vaulted a board fence to join them. “Where’re Mildred and J.B.?” Krysty asked.

  “By square. Watching shitstorm come down.”

  “How did you come to be there?” Doc asked.

  “Thrown in jail. J.B. picked lock. Chilled guards, grabbed gear, blew out.” He frowned. “Glasses kid in cell with us. Told about rotties, first.”

  “Reno?” Krysty asked.

  “Fireblast!” Ryan said. “That must be what blew our cover. He told his story to fucking Jacks, who recognized us in the tale.”

  “And told Miranda,” Krysty said. “They must have used that as a pretext to set up their meeting today.”

  “Which, predictably, has ended in violence,” Doc added.

  The initial burst of blasterfire had died down. Now Ryan heard shouting and the fresh rippling of shots from the square.

  “Come on!” Colt shouted. This time he was too far from Ryan to grab. He cut left toward the main road that ran from the palace to the square.

  “Ryan?” Doc asked.

  He shrugged again. “We follow. Kid’s our best card right now. And he seems set on playing himself, here and now.”

  Colt Sharp stopped stock-still in the middle of the wide dirt road and screamed.

  * * *

  WATCHING FROM THE SHOP’S east window, Mildred had to give Brick Finneran credit. He was right on Jacks after Miranda shot him. He scooped his boss, groaning and doubled up around at least one gut wound, into his treetrunk arms and carried the tall straw-haired man toward cover.

  The man’s big body rocked as bullets slammed him from behind. He managed to make it to the shelter of a stack of barrels under the overhang of a porch fronting on the square. The wooden containers had to have been filled with something fairly solid, for Coffin had dragged himself behind them, and he and several sec men successfully sheltered there.

  The black man waved an arm and shouted. Two sec men jumped out to take hold of their wounded boss. Finneran fell on his face and didn’t move.

  In low, quick bursts of words between high points in the shooting, Mildred reported to J.B., who was keeping an eye on Miranda’s side from the south window. Despite the blasterfire, she was worried about being overheard by Jacks loyalists angling for better shots. After Jak left, she had shut the rear door and shoved the big table against it. And the front door was locked, so they’d have at least some warning if enemies tried to come into their hideout.

  J.B. listened, nodding. Then Mildred saw his eyes widen behind his wire-rimmed lenses.

  “Dark night, look!” he whispered. “Rotties! They’re in the ville!”

  Mildred saw a sudden flurry of wild action from where Miranda’s people had dragged her to cover behind the fountain. Shrieks of rage that had to have come from the baron turned quickly to those of pain laced with mind-melting fear.

  At first glimpse the gray figures shambling into the square from the east didn’t look anything too out of the ordinary. Until you noticed some were walking obliviously into the killzone of a full-on firefight, something you’d have to be deaf and blind to miss.

  Or dead.

  The ville folk who’d been bold, or stupe, enough to turn out to watch the Great Conciliation reunite the happy ville of Sweetwater Junction had taken cover when blasters joined the negotiations. Now Mildred saw commotion and heard shrieks as the rotties found them.

  Miranda erupted from her hiding place with rotties clinging to her by claws and jaws like wolves taking down a bull bison. Why they had homed so directly in on her Mildred would never learn. There was so much meat on the hoof here. Mildred would’ve expected the changed to focus first on the warm pumping blood of the wounded.

  Men and women rotties alike beset the furiously struggling baron. In age they ranged from a twelve-year-old boy with his left arm missing from elbow on, to a white-haired granny who had the four or so teeth remaining in her head clamped firmly on Miranda’s left shoulder. Some had been dead so long they had rotted almost to pieces; others displayed gaping, bloodless wounds. One thick dude had a blue-gray face whose width and impressive sagginess suggested he’d been morbidly obese. But his paunch and the entrails it had contained had been eaten away almost to the spine. Mildred wasn’t sure how he managed to stay upright.

  But Miranda Sharp was a strong woman, and adrenaline had turbocharged her strength and speed. The toggle action atop her antique handblaster was locked up in a little triangle, confirming it was both a Luger and out of ammo. But she lashed out ferociously with it, hammering a woman in the forehead so hard the rottie went down as if shot.

  There were still too many of the changed for the baron, for all her strength and fury. With her black hair whipping out of the tight bun it had been wrapped in, she went down, screaming like a red-tailed hawk and fighting like a badger. Mildred saw the flash of a knife in her hand as they swarmed over her.

  The roar of J.B.’s shotgun snapped Mildred’s attention back to their hideout. She had been so focused on the baron’s dramatic last stand she hadn’t even noticed a rottie wandering
right up the street in front of the potter’s shop until J.B. blew its head off.

  “Mebbe we should join the party?” he asked, racking the action.

  For answer she raised the ZKR, lined up the sights and shot one of Miranda’s attackers through the head from a good fifty yards off.

  It wasn’t so much she was trying to save Miranda—who was beyond help, anyway—as that was the first target to offer itself. But now Mildred faced a new problem: the rotties had gotten in among their intended victims so thoroughly it was hard to target one without hitting another.

  J.B. saw her hesitation. “Go ahead and shoot,” he said. “If people get bit, a .38 hole or two’s gonna be the least of their worries!”

  * * *

  WITH DESPERATE ENERGY but not much skill, Colt Sharp ran toward where his mother had fallen. His arms and legs went any which way, like the limbs of a newborn moose calf, and he was slow. But he was dead set on running right into the killzone.

  “Jak!” Ryan rapped. He didn’t have to add a command. Hair streaming behind like a snow-white pennon, the albino teen ran after the baron’s boy, seemingly weightless. He ran him down like a coyote after a rabbit, raced past him, dropped to a crouch and tripped him with a leg sweep.

  “Oh, dear,” Krysty said as the chubby boy sprawled onto the hard dirt and slid four feet on his face. It still was a lot healthier than running right into a battle.

  “Cover,” Ryan ordered, unlimbering the Steyr from his back. Racing out of the palace with Colt as a guarantee of safe passage, the companions had left backpacks behind and just grabbed up weapons and ammo.

  Krysty and Doc split to the left side of the street. Jak dragged the weeping and feebly struggling Colt Sharp the same way a mountain lion would drag a chilled pronghorn. Ryan ducked behind a pile of wood crates and aimed the longblaster over the top of them.

  He laid the scope on Miranda just as she went down. There wasn’t any point in trying to shoot the rotties off her. They were biting her all over. He thought briefly of putting a bullet in her brain to end it for her, but decided she hadn’t exactly earned any breaks from him.

  Besides, the changed still on the hunt for flesh were the real threat.

  “Moving, lover!” he heard Krysty call. He took his eye from the rifle sight to look across the street. Snub-nosed revolver in hand, Krysty raced down the north road. She ducked behind the parked horse-type wag, minus horse, where Jak had pulled Colt. The albino youth had pushed the heir to the ville down on his back and was sitting on him while he looked for targets around the wag’s wooden side.

  Kneeling beside the youths, Krysty bent her head to speak earnestly to Colt. Her prehensile red hair writhed around her cheeks.

  Ryan looked back through the sight and began popping rottie heads like blood balloons.

  * * *

  FRANTICALLY, MIRANDA’S sec men blasted and beat the remaining rotties off their baron. She lay rolling to and fro in pain as townspeople and sec men from both sides engaged the horrifying creatures in a brief, savage battle.

  Shooting from their window into the square, Mildred and J.B. did what they could. Mildred tried to pick off rotties directly threatening the living. J.B., who was shooting buck instead of solid shot and had to contend with a wide pellet spread at this range, blasted isolated rotties.

  Just as she wondered how many of the creatures had got in, Mildred saw no more targets. The people and sec men of Sweetwater Junction were tending to their wounded fellows, or just standing around staring at one another in amazed horror at the sudden invasion of their ville.

  To Mildred’s astonishment, Geither Jacks walked back into the square.

  For a moment she thought he had to have been wearing a bulletproof vest. But no. He pressed a handkerchief against his side. Blood gleamed red on his knuckles.

  Mildred was sure he’d been hit twice. Miranda’s first copper-jacketed 9 mm slug might have gone through his lower torso without puncturing his peritoneum, but she doubted it. She knew Jacks had scavvied antibiotics at his headquarters; he wasn’t necessarily going to die from the inevitable peritonitis if his body cavity had been penetrated. But if that had happened, he had to be in brutal pain.

  Nobody said Gate to Hell Jacks wasn’t hard-core, she thought. She lined her sights up on his straw-haired head.

  “John,” she said, “should I ice the fucker?” She could feel once again the horrific caress of Levon’s meat pincer, and burned to take in the last few ounces of slack in the ZKR’s finely tuned competition trigger.

  “Hold off, Millie,” he said softly. “Mebbe he just now turned into our best shot at staying alive. Much as I hate to say it.”

  “People of Sweetwater Junction!” Geither Jacks shouted. “Listen to me, your new baron!”

  That stilled the hyperkinetic conversation that had replaced blasterfire in the square. Pale faces turned toward the tall man, who held one hand to his side and the other bloody palm in the air.

  “I’m in command here now,” Jacks declared. “You all see it. Baron Miranda is dead. I’m all that stands between you and anarchy. Between you and these terrible creatures who came to destroy us, our children, our peaceful way of life.”

  “Nuke take you,” a hoarse male voice shouted, “the baron ain’t dead! She’s just wounded.”

  “She’s been bitten by the horrors,” Jacks said. “Sweetwater Junction, you need to know what that means. It’s a sentence of death! She’s gone.”

  The silence that followed the pronouncement boomed with the rising wind and crackled with the cries of crows circling overhead, impatient for the fresh feast laid out below them. Some, bolder than their already bold comrades, lighted on chills with upturned faces to pick at that greatest of delicacies, human eyeballs.

  Mildred saw the ville folk turn heads toward one another, heard a mutter of consternation. She didn’t doubt everyone in Sweetwater Junction had heard the story of the rotties by now, had learned of the terrible way in which Miranda’s men had confirmed the unimaginable reality that such a pestilence existed, and now threatened to sweep their ville away in blood and terror.

  “Baron Jacks,” she heard a voice call out. The throb of agony in it only lent it strength and power. “Baron Jacks! Baron Jacks!”

  “Coffin,” J.B. said, feeding fresh shells, contemporary reloads with brown, waxed-paper hulls, into the M-4000’s magazine. “Good man. Too bad he’s got a prick for a master.”

  The crowd began to take up the wounded man’s chant.

  Mildred stared at her partner. “What do we do now, John?” she asked as the chant gained volume and conviction. “Saying those words would blister my tongue.”

  Maybe the people saw the ville’s civil war had to end now or the rotties would end it for them, she thought. Maybe it was plain self-interest, backing a contender after the race was won. Which in the Deathlands was always by far the best time to do it.

  “Do we have to acclaim the bastard, too?”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “Now,” Jacks said. His voice was clear and strong, as if power was the best painkiller, which it likely was, Mildred reflected. “Some changes got to be made to combat this new and terrible menace. Gone are the days of slack. We must impose absolute discipline. Absolute—”

  “No!”

  The voice that pealed out from the north side of the square was that of a young male, cracking with adolescence. It matched the figure that stalked out from beside the fountain—a youth in his
mid to late teens, curly blond hair tousled in the wind, wearing fine clothes that seemed mussed and soiled as if he’d been rolling recently in the dirt. He breathed heavily. His face was plump, red and twisted with passion.

  In his hands he held a big angular semiauto handblaster. The 1911’s squared-off muzzle was wavering badly as the youth’s arms shook, with emotion or fatigue or both.

  “I’m the baron of Sweetwater Junction now,” the youth shouted. “I’m Colt Sharp, son of the man you treacherously murdered. Now you murdered my mother, too. I am baron here!”

  “But Jacks didn’t murder his mom, actually,” J.B. murmured. “Close to the other way around, in fact.”

  “Hush, now, John. He’s on a roll.”

  Jacks showed the youth a sneering grin. “You? Baron of Sweetwater Junction? Don’t make me laugh, jelly roll. You can’t even hold that piece steady. Who’s gonna believe you can strong-arm this ville?”

  “I am the baron by right,” Colt Sharp declared. He walked past his fallen mother toward his rival without a sideways glance that Mildred could see.

  Jacks barked a laugh. “Over my chilled body.”

  “That’s my intention!”

  “You? Shoot me?”

  Jacks took out a cigar and struck a match with his thumb. He puffed the cigar alight.

  “You don’t have the balls to pull the trigger, boy.”

  His answer was loud enough to make Mildred flinch. Geither Jacks took a step back. He looked down to see a dark stain spread rapidly in the middle of his blue shirt. He raised a look of ashy astonishment to the youth.

  Colt Sharp fired again. Jacks jerked as another 230-grain slug rammed home in his rib cage. The chubby boy was walking forward, his face now as white as sun-bleached bone.

  He pumped two more shots into the tall, lean man. Jacks fell back a step at each one. His haughtiness was long gone. He looked appalled now.

  He bent over, pressing a hand to one of the new wet wounds in his chest. Colt marched right up to him.