Wretched Earth Read online

  For a moment Jacks stared down into his palm, filled to overflowing with his own bright red blood. He looked up at Colt.

  “No,” he said, “please. Wait—”

  Colt was close enough that the muzzle-flash licked Jacks’s imploring eyes with yellow fire. The bullet slammed between them. The whole back of the man’s skull blew out in a spray of blood and chunks.

  Gate to Hell Jacks fell down on his face. A crow immediately settled on his nape and began to eat his remaining brains like cherries from a bowl.

  “Baron Sharp!” a clear, high feminine voice sang out.

  * * *

  “BARON SHARP!”

  Ryan’s single eye turned in surprise to Krysty, marching by his side. They followed the young heir by twenty paces. The redhead had her fist in the air.

  “Baron Sharp!” she cried again. “Baron Sharp!”

  One by one the crowd took up the cry, until it beat like the wind over the lone figure of the youth who stood staring down at the man he’d just chilled, oblivious to everything but his own thoughts.

  “Baron Sharp!” It was Perico, rising from shelter behind the fountain. He tossed a single unreadable look at the three outlanders walking down the street toward him from the north. Then, squaring his wide shoulders, he marched up to the youth, grabbed his gun hand and thrust it and blaster aloft. “Baron Sharp.”

  * * *

  “WELL, ISN’T THAT a relief,” J.B. said.

  The plump kid shook himself like a wet dog. The stocky gray-bearded guy let go of his arm and stepped back.

  “Amnesty to all those who swear to serve me as rightful baron!” Colt cried.

  “Smart move, kid,” Mildred said. “You might actually pull this off. If it, you know, can be pulled off.”

  “Come on, Mildred,” J.B. said, readjusting his hat on his head. “Let’s go greet the new order here in Sweetwater Junction. Then we gotta get busy, unless we all want to wake up rotties tomorrow morning!”

  * * *

  GEITHER JACKS’S GOONS all practically jumped out of their skins, dropping weapons and throwing their fists in the air, each trying to drown out the other shouting, “Baron Sharp!”

  Perico stood by his new baron’s side, his head inclined and beard wagging as if he spoke urgently.

  “Tryin’ to get the kid to put the blaster away before he hurts someone,” Ryan suggested.

  But Colt Sharp refused. He turned away from his new chief adviser and marched back the way he had come.

  The crowd went silent again. Entertainment wasn’t easy to come by in the Deathlands. They knew impending drama when they saw it.

  “Hold me, Colt,” his mother said, extending an arm from where she lay.

  Ryan went stiff. “If she bites him, we’re fucked.” He had slung his rifle, so he reached for his SIG.

  Krysty gripped his arm. “Leave it,” she said. “She hasn’t changed yet.”

  It came to Ryan’s tongue to ask how she knew, but he didn’t voice the question. When Krysty spoke with that kind of certainty, she did know. That was enough for him.

  Mostly.

  Colt knelt and cradled his mother’s head on his lap. Tears streamed down his round cheeks.

  “People of Sweetwater Junction,” she shouted, pulling away and rearing up slightly, then using his knee to prop herself. “Listen to me, your baron.”

  Little exclamations of horror burst like squibs from the crowd. Miranda was in bad shape. The rottie pack had ripped her clothes to shreds. They had raked and ripped mouthfuls from her firm olive flesh, from the muscles of arms and shoulders and the flesh of her breasts. She looked as if she had bathed in blood.

  “I almost feel sorry for the bitch,” Ryan rasped.

  “I do feel sorry for her,” Krysty said.

  Ryan glanced at his woman. Even given her quick healing ability, her pale skin still bore the marks of the whipping Miranda Sharp had given her. Yet her words were heartfelt, sincere.

  Ryan put his left arm around her.

  Then with his right he whipped out the SIG and fired.

  Two burly men wearing green armbands were approaching Colt and his mother from the south, supporting a lean black man between them. The left leg of the man’s overalls was soaked with dark blood from below the knee down. Seeing Ryan’s move, his eyes flew wide.

  He stretched a desperate hand toward Colt and shouted, “Baron! Look out!”

  Unnoticed by everyone, a rottie who had mauled Miranda lay facedown right behind the youngster. It had once been a gaunt, middle-aged woman. Apparently the baron’s sec men had only broken its spine.

  Raising its head, opening its jaws, it had reached a bluish hand toward Colt’s ankle from behind.

  Ryan’s shot took the rottie in the temple. The creature dropped to the dirt.

  Colt looked back at Ryan and nodded once.

  “I was wrong about the outlanders, Colt, darling,” his mother said, loudly enough for a good half of the square to hear. “Wrong about the rotties. And it’s cost me everything. Everything except the thing that means most in the world to me. You, my darling. You.”

  “Mother, no—”

  “He is the baron now!” she cried, sweeping the crowd with her fierce black eyes. “He will lead you through this! Serve him well and you’ll…live.”

  The effort drained her. Her head slumped toward her ravaged breasts.

  “Somebody bring a stretcher,” Colt shouted desperately. “Get Lamellar. She needs attention, fast!”

  “No!” Her head snapped up. “Didn’t you learn anything here, mijo?”

  Colt recoiled as if she’d slapped him. Miranda’s voice had the same whip crack that had made her son cringe so often in Ryan’s short acquaintance of the family. He frowned. If she de-nutted the poor bastard now…

  “I’ve been bitten by those things,” Miranda said in a voice vibrant with pain. “You know what that means. Didn’t our new friends tell us?”

  He shook his head. “Mother, there’s got to be some other way.”

  “There is no other way! There is only one. Now, do what you have to do, my son. And let this be an example to everyone. Because should anyone be bitten, be it friend or loved one—there is…no other…way!”

  Still he hesitated. “Give your mother a kiss, boy,” Miranda said gently.

  Colt bent his wet face to kiss her cheek. She grabbed him and planted a hard kiss on his face. Then with a sigh she sank back against him.

  “Do it fast for Mama, Colt, dear,” she said. “It hurts so. And—I can feel it coming. The change.”

  Colt stood up and hesitated only a few heartbeats.

  Then he thrust the handblaster downward and fired a single shot.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  With a screech a small pallid figure flew out of the closet as if launched on springs. A shattering shotgun blast caught it in midair. Its head blew apart.

  “Don’t get any of that crap in your mouth, Ryan,” J.B. said, chambering a fresh shell. “Don’t know what you might catch.”

  Black ooze spattered his own face and glasses.

  Ryan grunted, his heart hammering in his chest. He kept his finger on the trigger of his SIG-Sauer handblaster.

  He’d left his longblaster behind. This was close-quarters work now. A sniping longblaster was as useless in this house-to-house rottie mop-up as tits on a boar hog.

  “Thought I was ready for it,” he said. “But it still gave me a f
right. Damn, I hate this.”

  The smell of mildew and unwashed human bodies in the little shack’s dim interior was crowded out by the stinks of burned propellant and lubricant, and the stench of decomposing human flesh. That reek had clued them in to the rottie’s presence when they’d poked their heads inside. It was their only real edge in hunting down those who somehow retained enough of a spark of self-preservation to hide from the otherwise total slaughter of the changed who had broken into Sweetwater Junction. And it only applied to those who had rotted enough to start getting ripe.

  Ryan nudged the small corpse in its simple shift, which ground-in blood and guts had turned the same decay-bluish-gray as the rottie’s neck and bone-thin arms.

  “Especially when it’s a kid.”

  “Ain’t half as bad as what Millie and Krysty have to do,” J.B. said.

  “Yeah,” Ryan said. “That sucks triple-hard.”

  The two women were engaged in something a taut-lipped Mildred called triage. That meant examining the wounded. The ones who had received bites had to be chilled. No matter who they were.

  Including children like the one J.B. had just blasted. Even before they changed.

  Meanwhile Doc and Jak were teamed up, also performing the risky and grisly search-and-destroy task Ryan and the Armorer were engaged in. It might not have been the optimal pairing, especially since Jak and Doc were prone to jaw at each other. But they knew how to buckle down to the task at hand, and their strengths and weaknesses complemented each other pretty solidly.

  For Ryan’s part, it felt good to have J.B. watching his back again. The two men made a fast search of the shack. It was shotgun-style, and looked as if a large number of people had lived there at one point. As far as they knew, nobody had been inside when the rottie child had gotten in.

  No one knew how many rotties had broken into the ville in the first place. Several dozen had promptly attacked the greatest concentration of food: the crowd in the square watching Miranda and Jacks hold their final showdown. Fortunately, the humans had fought back vigorously and effectively, putting the rotties on the ground before they got their teeth into too many folks.

  Once Colt was in command—of himself as well as the ville, after shooting his own mother in the head—his first order had been to make sure of the other fallen rotties. The one Ryan had finished off as it was about to latch its jaws on Colt’s ankle was a pretty stark example. Fortunately, the finishing-off task could be readily done by ville folk armed with clubs or axes.

  Colt, along with Ryan and the companions, had meanwhile rushed to the east gate, to find the skeleton guard either eaten or gone and presumably changed. Nobody had a clue as to how they had been overwhelmed without raising enough of a fuss to attract attention even from the spectacle in the center of the ville. A single shot loosed off would have done it.

  Unless, J.B. pointed out, it had happened while a lot more people were shooting at each other across the fountain. That would’ve covered up the sounds of even a decent-size little firefight the quarter-mile or so away.

  Several rotties struggling over the wire fence were quickly dealt with. None could be seen on the flat land beyond, although in fact the horizon lay perhaps a mile away, where a small rise crested. Ryan was still glad Colt had heeded his advice to send sec teams double-quick to the other gates, as well as to patrolling the perimeter.

  Miranda and Jacks had indeed drawn most of their sec forces off for their confrontation. Everyone was lucky, Ryan reckoned, that bit of classic baronial shortsightedness hadn’t wound up with all of them at ambient temperature by now. Though not necessarily just lying there quietly, staring at the clouds.

  Which were beginning to take on an ugly and suggestive mustard tinge. Acid rain storms on their way, the locals had muttered. Harbinger of spring in Sweetwater Junction.

  The breeze outside was still cold, and stiff enough to blow away the lingering smell of long-past death, when Ryan and J.B. emerged, blinking, into the cloud-filtered sunlight. Fortunately, the wind blew from the west. Otherwise it might have brought the stink of the horde everyone now knew for sure was coming their way.

  A little girl waited outside. She wore a shapeless linsey-woolsey shirt and canvas pants. The only way they could tell she was a girl was that her brown hair was done in pigtails.

  “Baron Colt wants to see you down at the fountain,” she said, “pronto.”

  * * *

  THE SPORADIC POPPING of shots from the south clued them in to what was going on even before they reached Baron Sharp’s command post, in Bill Itomaru’s carpentry shop, where the south road entered the square.

  “That’ll be Jacks’s grammaw forted up and defying the world,” J.B. said. “Also that fat maggot mutie bastard, Levon.”

  He flashed a taut grin. “Wouldn’t half mind settling up with that three-armed bastard.”

  “Yeah.” Ryan had gotten a quick account of what had befallen the three friends who’d wound up in Jacks’s camp. None had offered details. He hadn’t asked for any.

  He already knew the drill.

  When they reached the carpentry shop, which was the only building fronting the square to have had its old bullet holes patched—although today’s fresh crop remained open—Colt Sharp wasn’t there. A sec man in a black Sharp armband told them the new baron had headed south to Jacks’s former headquarters.

  “Last time I saw that dude he had on a green armband,” J.B. remarked as they walked toward where a heavily armed crowd had gathered near the huge gaudy house.

  “Reckon a lot have made that switch today,” Ryan said. “As long as they stay switched until we get the rotties squared away, that’s ace with me.”

  The crowd, it turned out, was standing a block away from Jacks’s HQ. “They keep taking potshots at us,” Perico told the new arrivals.

  The burly graybeard hadn’t apologized for his late mistress’s treatment of Ryan and company. Then again, he hadn’t been present for any of it. With Miranda chilled and Colt at least onboard to fight the changed menace, Ryan was willing to let bygones be.

  He’d forgiven worse in his time. Or at least agreed to let it slide.

  “It’s that crazy old lady, Grammaw Jacks,” Perico explained. “She’s holed up in there with a few diehards and Geither’s freak pet torturer. Says she’ll never surrender. Also, she says we’ve been chilling the wounded, and she’s given sanctuary to some of them.”

  Ryan and J.B. stared at each other.

  “Oh, shit,” the Armorer said.

  “Something’s going down!” a man shouted. He showed no weapons and appeared to be a civilian, not a sec man.

  Once Colt Sharp proclaimed himself baron, the ville folk had turned out in droves. Part of it, Ryan calculated, was simple ass-covering, showing visible support of the person who already had all Sweetwater Junction’s sec men under his banner except the holdouts in there with Jacks’s crazy grammaw. But to Ryan most people seemed genuinely enthusiastic about Colt Sharp, if for no other reason than they were sick of civil war. Not to mention Miranda Sharp and her archenemy, both of whom had the disposition of yellowjackets on Jolt.

  Ryan, J.B. and Perico reached the cross street north of the Royal Flush. A few feet up the road Colt stood surrounded by four sec men, one of whom, at least, had been a Jacks man. The new baron was acting like the overexcited kid he was. The bodyguards were wisely keeping him from sticking himself in the line of fire.

  When they reached the corn
er, J.B. strolled on into the intersection. At Ryan’s grunt of caution he said, “None of those boys can shoot for sour owl-shit.”

  Nobody shot at him at all. “There is some kind of fuss going on,” he reported. “You can see past the curtains.”

  Ryan shrugged and stepped out beside his friend. As he did, yellow flame flared behind a ground floor window.

  “Uh-oh,” he said. “Somebody busted a lantern.”

  A moment later a sec man staggered out. His hair had a scorched look, and Ryan thought his eyebrows were gone. His shirt was tattered and his arms ran with blood.

  “The chills!” he screamed in the voice of a man whose mind has gone mad from unendurable terror. “The chills are walking! They—”

  Shots cracked from windows above. Bullets kicked up dirt around the dazed man’s boots. The shreds of his shirt flapping, he spun and gazed wildly up as if in confusion.

  Then his head nodded violently forward, accompanied by a spray of blood. He dropped.

  Ryan saw Hedders, the earnest young Miranda loyalist, lowering a lever-action carbine. “He was bit,” the young man said.

  Ryan’s jaw tightened. Hedders had been one of those who’d beaten him and strung Krysty up for Miranda to play with. He knew it was the kid’s job, which didn’t matter a spent casing.

  Mebbe I’ll settle up with you after this rottie mayhem’s behind us, he thought. If we both are still standing.

  The gaudy house’s first-floor interior took light pretty quickly, then flames showed on the second floor. One sec man clambered out a window there and onto the top of the ornate white portico over the entryway. A rattle of blasterfire shot up from the street and he fell.

  A couple more sec men jumped from higher windows. One rolled around screaming, with part of his thighbone sticking out a tear in his trousers like a jagged yellow spear. The other just lay on his back with eyes open, his neck or back broken. Both got shot up some until Perico shouted to the men in the street to quit wasting ammo.