Wretched Earth Page 25

  One youth wielding a pocketknife thought it would be fun to race right up to the wire and stab at the bodies seemingly immobilized against it. His buddies cheered him on.

  Then a blue arm showing yellow bone between wrist and elbow snaked through and caught his shirt.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The rottie yanked the youth against the wire. Other arms reached out to entangle him. Their blackened nails clawed at his flesh.

  Despite frenzied screams and thrashing, he couldn’t break free. Several ville folk darted forward to try to help him.

  “Don’t get close!” Ryan shouted. “Chop their arms off!”

  His friends tried pulling him away. It did no good. Then the youth screamed, and blood spurted from the side of his head as a rottie bit into his ear.

  Standing now, Ryan stepped into a Weaver stance with left foot and shoulder advanced and left elbow crooked to support his blaster hand. Taking a flash sight picture, he fired. The trapped boy’s head jerked and he slumped.

  His friends stared at Ryan with shock and fury mingled on their faces.

  “If you’re bit, you’re one of them!” Ryan shouted. “Now learn from that stupe, and stay back.”

  Then he had to partially disregard his own words. Because despite the way the original cattle fence had been built up to a taller height with metal-scrap makeshifts, and was topped by razor wire, the rotties were scaling it.

  He, Doc and Jak moved in to show the people of Sweetwater Junction how hand-to-hand rottie fighting was done. Doc holstered his reloaded blaster and drew his sword from its sheath. Using the sheath to swat away hands that snatched at him, he started stabbing rottie faces. Doc kept the tip of his sword well sharpened, and it was well reinforced for thrusting. He could even ram it through a forehead or temple.

  From somewhere Jak had turned up two hatchets, predark, and each drop-forged from a single piece of steel. He waded in like a fury, hacking off hands, breaking arms so that they flopped uselessly, closing in to split heads. Then, like a white flame, he danced back out of harm’s way, only to pick a new angle, attack again.

  Ryan did much the same thing with his panga. Of course, not even his panther agility and speed could come close to Jak’s. Fortunately, it beat even the spriest rottie by a Grand Canyon margin.

  When he stepped back for a moment to breathe and wipe sweat from his eye with the back of one hand, Ryan saw the ville defenders battling hard to either side of him. They seemed to be getting the hang of it. Those with poles or long-handled tools poked at the shrunken bellies of the rotties climbing the mesh, knocking them back into their comrades behind. That thinned the numbers making it to the top, made them easier to manage. It also made it less likely the monsters would bring the fence down from sheer weight.

  “You’ve left a smear of something unspeakable over your eye,” Doc said, falling back beside him.

  “Thanks for the good news.”

  “I certainly hope the change cannot be transmitted by this ooze we’re inevitably drenching ourselves in.”

  Ryan could find nothing to say to that better than “Me, too.”

  He glanced up at Colt on his rooftop. Either out of ammo or having heeded advisers telling him to save his shots, the young baron stood looking worried. He clearly wanted to be down there fighting, yet understood why that was at best a last-ditch measure.

  “Colt!” Ryan shouted, trying to make himself heard over the yells and screams of the defenders. This close, the rotties’ strange muttering sounded as loud as ocean surf. “Yo, Baron!”

  He waved his arms. Colt looked at him.

  “Check for places the fence is giving way!” Ryan yelled. “Send reinforcements!”

  For an instant the pudgy, smudged face crumpled in incomprehension. Ryan realized the kid still had his own mother’s blood and brains dried on his face. Well, it was a triple-tough day for everybody.

  Then Colt jerked his head up as the import of Ryan’s words hit him. He turned, looked around, started waving his arms and shouting.

  “What can we do?” Mildred asked from Ryan’s elbow.

  He spun like a cat hit with a static spark. “What the fireblast are you doing here?” he demanded of his three companions.

  “Lookin’ to do some good, Ryan,” J.B. said. “Our ammo won’t last forever.”

  Ryan glared at them. His main intention, though he would never say so, was to keep the women, especially Krysty, out of rottie reach. He’d been willing to do without the Armorer fighting at his side to help justify that.

  “What about doctoring up the wounded?” Ryan demanded.

  “Right,” Mildred said. “Most who get injured are bitten. That means the indicated treatment is a bullet in the head. Screw that.”

  “The fight’s here,” Krysty said. “Our place is with you.”

  She held a double-bitted ax. Somewhere Mildred had scored herself an aluminum baseball bat, and J.B. held a pool cue.

  “What the fuck, J.B.?” Ryan said.

  The Armorer shrugged and twirled the long, tapered stick. “Just feels natural in my hands, Ryan.”

  Before they could say anything else, screams rang out from their left. Forty yards or so north a thirty-foot-wide section of fence bowed inward under the weight of the invaders’ bodies. So hard did the rotties behind press the ones in front in their mindless, unswerving hunger, that they were pushing bits of their fellows’ bodies through the heavy-gauge wire mesh as if it were some kind of rotting-meat strainer.

  One of the high-speed rotties went capering up the mound of flesh to leap over the fence. It twisted in the midst of leaping on a knot of taken-by-surprised defenders as Ryan sent a snapshot through its body. That wasn’t enough to put it down to stay, of course, but the hit made the creature miss its target. A moment later somebody had shattered its skull with an ax.

  By now the east gate was mostly barricaded by a mound of rotties chilled for the second and final time. It seemed to be holding them at bay.

  “Go!” Ryan shouted, leading his companions toward the breach on the run.

  As more rotties surged against the fence, it fell down with a crash. Rotties rolled into the ville, in among the defenders. Those who weren’t powering out of there in a panic.

  A fat changed man in the stained and tattered remains of an apron struggled to his feet in front of Ryan. His jowls were dark and crusted with old gore. His eyes seemed to burn like mad white beacons in his blue-gray face.

  Ryan buried the panga in the man’s forehead, splitting the bean-shaped head clear to the bridge of a squashed nose. Whatever light had gleamed in those staring eyes went out. The rottie slumped, done.

  And Ryan found out he’d struck the creature too well. The panga blade stuck tight in its skull. The chill’s bulk, which still had to be north of 250 pounds even allowing for wastage, dragged Ryan’s arm inexorably down.

  “Shit!” he yelped. He put a boot against the man-boobs below where the chin slumped in a pool of loose discolored skin, and pushed hard, tugging with both hands.

  From the corner of his eye he saw a rottie homing in on him, not fast but almost in range to grab him. He knew those outstretched fingers contained terrible strength even though half were rotted to little more than bone and brown sinew.

  With a wild cry Mildred skipped past him. Her avenging baseball bat whistled through the air and struck the rottie attacking Ryan with a ringing thump. The skull caved in.

  At last Ryan’s panga cam
e free. “Thanks,” he breathed to Mildred. He gave the blade a quick double swipe on the fat chill and stuck it in his belt.

  “Don’t mention it,” Mildred said. “Aiieeee!”

  The latter cry was addressed to a skeleton-lean female rottie with wisps of long graying hair hanging from the half of the scalp that remained on her head. It wasn’t a cry of dismay. Rather, Mildred had reverted to some kind of primal berserker state Ryan couldn’t recall seeing before. The stocky black woman, whom he belatedly noticed had tied a red rag around her head like Rambo in an ancient vid-poster, wound up two-handed and swung for the fences.

  Her bat rang like a warning bell as it struck the changed woman’s high cheekbone. The half-gnawed head snapped around 180 degrees. Her neck broke with a sound like blasterfire.

  It was good enough. She dropped like a sack.

  Mildred charged on in search of new heads to break.

  “Fuck this,” Ryan grunted. His trusty panga wasn’t doing the deed. Casting about, he saw a shovel lying ten feet away, where a wounded or fled defender had dropped it.

  Ace. It might not be an ideal weapon, but he’d chilled men and muties with a shovel before. Its advantage here was that it was long.

  He grabbed it up, spun and swung it ball-bat style so that the shallow-angled blade smacked a rottie across the face. The changed man staggered back, but he didn’t go down.

  Quick balance recovery wasn’t a notable strength among the changed. The creature was still trying to get into forward motion again when Krysty pounced and split its head with her ax.

  “Good job,” Ryan told her. She grinned at him. The ax’s handle gave her leverage Ryan hadn’t had when trying to pull his panga out of a rottie’s head. But it still took her a moment to free it.

  Tactics came easy to Ryan.

  “Krysty,” he yelled, “Doc. You hang back a couple steps. The rest of us will put the bastards on the ground. You finish off the ones as they need it.”

  Ryan saw a quick rebellious flare in Krysty’s eyes. It went out at once. She had long since agreed to accept his command as iron. Plus her tactical mind was just a beat or two behind his. She saw the wisdom of his plan as clearly as he did.

  He charged into the swarm of rotties battling a clot of determined ville folk in the mouth of an alley that opened on the cleared path along the inside of the perimeter. J.B. was at his right, using the pool cue more as a quarterstaff than a club, holding its middle third between his callused, sun-browned hands, jabbing and tripping with either end, pushing with the middle. The grip still allowed him to extend the weapon. As Ryan shifted his own grip on his shovel to mimic his friend’s, J.B. suddenly lunged, poking the cue before him like a spear. Its narrow end went into a rottie’s eye socket, squishing the already shrunken ball, punching through the thin bone backing into the fevered brain behind.

  The tip came out black; the rottie went down.

  “Justly struck, John Barrymore!” Doc crowed from behind.

  Meanwhile Ryan sidestepped a male rottie about his own size and build. Letting the shovel handle slide through his hands to almost the end, he swung the blade edge against the back of a knee. The leg folded under the rottie. As Ryan recovered from the stroke, he saw Doc’s sword dart like a steel serpent’s tongue to pierce the creature’s temple.

  From behind him Ryan heard the crunch and squelch of Krysty’s ax hacking into the skull of a rottie someone had put on the ground.

  Blaster shots cracked out. And to Ryan, they had the nasty, high harmonic ring of shots aimed at him. He winced as a bullet sang past his left ear, then he heard Colt Sharp hollering for people to cease firing. The blasters stopped.

  With Mildred batting on his left and Jak with his hatchets just past her, plus J.B. at his right, Ryan led a lopsided wedge against the rotties coming through the fallen section of fence. Krysty and Doc had their backs. The ville defenders making a stand in the alley rushed out, and they all quickly mopped up the rotties who had gotten inside the wire.

  Then it was just a matter of mowing down the creatures as they came through. With six Sweetwater Junction residents to help, the companions were able to do it. Most rotties were slow, and they had to wade through their fellows who had been crushed into the fence in pushing it down. Not all of those were finished by any means. Their mindlessly clutching hands and biting jaws attacked their own kind on contact with no more hesitation than they would warm flesh.

  Ryan and his companions had no trouble dealing with the occasional double-speed rottie. Even with speed they didn’t exactly show finesse.

  The task was more like chopping firewood than a fight. Ryan’s arms quickly grew tired, grew leaden, screamed with pain and grew numb. His elbows hurt from repeated impacts. His stomach fought a constant low-level insurgency against his iron self-control, not just because of the open-grave stench of the changed, but in sheer revulsion against the ichor and grunge that coated him from his hair to his boots. It got to be like hitting thrown tomatoes with a tennis racket. Except instead of tomato pulp and juice, it was foul, rotting human flesh and skin and byproducts that splattered him.

  The problem was when he inhaled, the ooze went up his nostrils, clogging them physically as well as gagging him with stench. But the triple-special horror was feeling maggots cast from the decomposing rotties by the force of his and his friends’ blows writhing on the skin of his face and arms.

  From the corner of his eye Ryan noticed that twenty or so Sweetwater Junction defenders had set up a similar system at the gate, where rotties were climbing up and over the fallen bodies of those who had gone before. The two ranks of defenders seemed to have little trouble finishing them when they dropped inside the gate.

  It was some consolation for the fact that even Ryan, with his iron endurance and titanium will, fast approached the point where he simply couldn’t fight anymore.

  “I hate to plead incapacity due to my seeming age,” he heard Doc wheeze, “but I am almost done, I fear.”

  “Me, too,” Mildred muttered from his side. The light of fury burned in her dark eyes, but her movements no longer had the wild energy she’d shown when she’d ripped into the changed mob like a living chainsaw. Even Jak’s motions were labored, almost slow.

  Their bodies no longer able to obey, the ville defenders had started to drop out around them. Then men and women were shoving in front of Ryan and his friends. Men and women who smelled clean, instead of like a dug-up graveyard in a heat wave.

  “You’ve done enough,” Colt shouted close to Ryan. “We’ll take over now.”

  “You…shouldn’t…be here, Baron,” Ryan panted. With no mutant enemy within range, his arms had fallen of their own accord. He literally wasn’t sure he could lift them again. He had to glance down to make sure he still gripped the shovel. He couldn’t feel his hands anymore.

  “Not…safe,” he managed to mutter.

  The plump young baron had his blaster in his left hand and a wrought-iron fireplace poker in the other. He jabbed it at a rottie’s face, forcing the creature back a step. A sec man crushed its skull with an ax handle.

  “This is where I have to be now, Ryan,” Colt said.

  Ryan couldn’t argue. He and his friends retreated to the weathered plank front of a house and just leaned there.

  “Need water,” Mildred said.

  “Parched as I am,” Doc said, “I am not sure I could stomach water that had passed through the vileness on my lips, and even in my mouth.”

&nb
sp; “We need to wash this shit off us!” Mildred said, with more energy than Ryan reckoned she had in her. “We don’t know what it’ll do.”

  Either on his own hook or his counselors’ advice, Colt had mustered ville kids to act as runners. Most of what they were bringing was buckets and jugs of water, anyway, to rehydrate the defenders. Whatever the new baron did about controlling Sweetwater Junction’s main resource in the future, rationing was off for this day.

  The kids ranged in age from near-toddlers to eleven or twelve. Anybody older was either hiding out or fighting. Far from being horrified or disgusted, the children treated all this as a marvelous game.

  Ace, Ryan thought, as a little girl laughingly threw a whole bucket of water in his face. They had moved back in the alley, away from where Baron Sharp and his subjects now battled the advancing horde.

  Somebody brought rags. Ryan and friends scrubbed as much of the rottie ooze and chunks off them as they could.

  “Not sure this cloth’s very clean itself,” Mildred remarked, although she didn’t stop scrubbing her face with the one she held.

  “They could be fresh-used ass wipes,” J.B. said, “and it’d be better than this.”

  Finally, Ryan reached the point where he could think about drinking without wanting to puke. A terrible thirst promptly hit him. His lips felt like the cracked dry mudflats outside the ville, the inside of his mouth and throat like paper. He felt as if he were shriveling into a prune from the inside out, and wondered that he hadn’t just sort of imploded.

  “Don’t drink too much too fast,” Mildred cautioned.

  “I know,” Ryan said. He caught himself on the verge of taking a giant swallow that would have hurt like a steel fencepost going down, and might have caused massive cramps. Instead, he rinsed his mouth and spit. He could feel the water swelling his tissues back into shape.

  “Be fit to fight in a little while,” J.B. croaked, wringing out his well-soaked hat. “No more than, say, a week, ten days.”