Wretched Earth Page 28

  A couple began pawing at the fence where no defenders were in view. Ryan had various means of alerting his teams, including flares and his somewhat hyper kid runners. But this what was he was up here for.

  Fortunately, these rotties were of the low-awareness variety. When he drilled one through the head, the other didn’t even flinch. It was climbing resolutely into the razor wire coil up top when Ryan shot it, too.

  As his longblaster descended from the second shot’s recoil, he heard a fresh spate of blasterfire break out off to his left.

  An iron band clamped his chest. Krysty.

  Cold logic demanded that he be where he was, doing this job. He was the best sniper in Sweetwater Junction, with the best sniper’s tool. And as Colt’s sec boss, he was tactical commander, possessed of a rough-and-ready system that actually let him exercise a modicum of command over the defenders. Ryan had to be here. Any other way offered more risk than reward, and they operated on the thinnest of margins already.

  But this plan meant he was up here, and his friends were down there, in the thick of it. Including Krysty.

  * * *

  CROUCHING WHERE AN east–west street led onto the wide path that ran along the inside of the wire, Krysty aimed her Smith & Wesson 640 at the mass of rotties pressing against the fence scarcely twenty feet from her. Though she was totally safe from them—for now—the stench of death threatened to knock her to her knees, even though the breeze blew from her back, out of the northeast.

  Then she lowered the blaster and put it away. One rottie more or less wasn’t going to make a difference here. Better to save her bullets.

  The other defenders didn’t seem to agree. They kept shooting.

  Half an hour earlier Ryan had spotted the rotties concentrating outside this point in the perimeter. He’d sent runners to order the reaction force waiting in the square under J.B.’s command to meet the threat. Along with the Armorer, Mildred, Doc, Jak and Krysty heeded the call, with about forty sec men and citizens. They were armed with the standard assortment of blasters and bows. Each fighter also carried some kind of hand weapon to fend off the creatures’ fatal jaws at close range.

  It was the third time they’d had to respond since the rotties began probing at sunup. About an hour ago there had been a breakthrough, when a weak stretch of fence gave way. Fortunately, it had been a minor attack, involving no more than about a dozen rotties. The reaction team got there in plenty of time, and since the rotties were in Ryan’s field of view, they were also in his field of fire. The changed attackers were put down in a minute or two. The fence was restored and shored up by one of the work crews that also waited by the big fountain in the square.

  But this assault was unmistakably more serious. The Sweetwater Junction contingent blazed away furiously from between buildings, from houses and rooftops nearby. Thick, dirty white smoke began to cover the area like a screen.

  * * *

  TO THE COMPANIONS it was obvious they couldn’t defend the whole perimeter. Sweetwater Junction was a substantial ville. All the able-bodied men, women and teens, ville dwellers and sec men alike, could just about encircle the town if they stood inside the fence with arms outstretched and fingertips touching.

  Colt had seen it, too, right off. So had Perico and Coffin. The sec men took a while to bring around.

  The idea was to dot squads of defenders around the perimeter. The kid-and-dog patrols would orbit constantly, keeping eyes, ears and noses skinned for break-in attempts. And Ryan on his precarious perch would keep watch for trouble, use flares and runners to direct reinforcements to serious threats. And, of course, pop rottie heads with his longblaster.

  Even those without the ability or, frankly, the taste to fight, could still help defend the ville by tending the wounded, carting water and ammo for the children to distribute, repairing damaged sections of the fence. Baron Colt was proving clever in finding ways to use everyone. He had a kid’s creativity, Krysty thought. Although she was somewhat surprised his mother hadn’t squeezed it out of him with her suffocating ways.

  But everybody knew that a big rottie break-in couldn’t be held back forever. It was only a matter of time.

  * * *

  “PHEROMONES,” MILDRED SAID over the cracking of blasters. The stocky black woman stood on a sagging wood porch next to Krysty with her back against a wall. She held her ZKR 551 .38 revolver in both hands, barrel tipped upward for safety. Her dented baseball bat, cleaned of the congealed slime that had encrusted it the day before, rode on her back in a sling improvised from an old belt.

  “What?” Krysty said.

  “Maybe that’s how Lariat communicates with the swarm,” Mildred said. “Pheromones. Or some other kind of chemical the rottie pathogen excretes. They seem to react most when the wind comes from her to them, see?”

  Krysty wasn’t following most of what Mildred said, but she got the drift.

  “Mebbe so,” she said.

  J.B.’s hat appeared around the corner of the wall Mildred stood against, hanging from his scattergun muzzle. His head followed.

  “Wanted to make sure nobody blasted me,” he said.

  “You’re clear, John,” Mildred told him with a smile.

  He slipped around, stuffing his hat back on his head.

  “This is the big push,” he said. “They’re coming from all over, and the fence is starting to strain.”

  He turned and stepped into the street. “Cease fire, boys and girls!” he called. “We’ll need the bullets for when they break in. Grab up a long sharp stick and poke some rottie eyes!”

  It took a while for the firing to taper off. The nearest defenders stopped shooting at once and started yelling for their comrades to do likewise. The people of Sweetwater Junction held the Armorer in almost superstitious esteem. A lot of them, especially former sec men, seemed afraid of him, Krysty thought, despite his mild manner.

  Neither Jak nor Doc were in sight, but they were in the area. As the shooting died away, Krysty heard Doc shouting for the cease-fire. She didn’t expect to hear Jak. Making unnecessary noise wasn’t his style. In fact, talking wasn’t his style.

  “We better get Ryan to send up the general pull-back signal,” J.B. said. “The things’re going to bust in here any moment.”

  “Right,” Krysty said. She turned to a runner, a little girl with tufts of short brown hair sticking out between the top tiers of her dense bundling of cold-weather garments.

  “Sandy, honey,” she said, kneeling. “I need you to run a message for me. Can you do it?”

  The child nodded proudly. “To Mr. Cawdor. That’s what I’m here for.”

  From behind Krysty the desperate cry went up. “Fence is comin’ down!”

  * * *

  “MR. DIX SAYS THEY’RE about to bust through on the southwest side, near Miller’s hide warehouse,” Sandy told Ryan. He recognized her as the stable girl who’d brought the first news of the Ten Mile massacre. Although the knees were out of her canvas pants and there were holes in her locally made leather shoes, she was well bundled up against the cold. “He says give the general pull-back signal.”

  “Right. Thanks.”

  Ryan shifted his weight to look that way, gingerly, because he could feel the jury-built scaffolding shift beneath his weight whenever he so much as breathed heavily. Unfortunately, the most central location for a lookout and sniper post in the whole ville was the wooden observation tower, whose top two stories had been blown into kindling—litera
lly, in a fuel-starved ville—by J.B.’s booby trap. So the carpenter had gotten some crash business, pounding together a two-story lookout platform overnight.

  It was as rushed an improvisation as the ville’s other defenses for what was certainly going to be the climactic battle, win or lose. So Ryan didn’t waste too much time feeling sorry for himself.

  Not that he ever did.

  “You got a message for me to take back, Mr. Cawdor?”

  Despite the shooting and screaming and stink and general horror, the little girl seemed more excited than fearful. Most of the kids acted that way. The ville civil war between Jacks and the Sharp tribe had probably acclimated them some to fighting.

  “No,” Ryan said.

  He got his longeyes on the red zone. Defenders battled hand-to-hand against the rotties trying to swarm through the trampled-down section of chain link. He picked up Mildred joyously knocking the decomposing head of a rottie to pieces with her bat.

  He frowned. As awful as the danger Krysty and his other companions faced down there, it was nothing they weren’t all going to be up against. And sooner rather than later.

  “Is your family at a strong point or forted up in your house?” he asked the runner.

  “We’re gonna fight at home,” Sandy said. “Mommy and Daddy are out helping. My brothers and sisters are still home, though.”

  “Good. Why don’t you run along home, then? Your mom and dad’ll be along soon.”

  “All right.” She vanished down the hole in the splintery wood floor.

  “Tell the rest of the kids to take off back home, too!” he called after her.

  “Okay, Mr. Cawdor.” Her words floated up through the floor.

  The farthest shot he had from up here to anywhere along the perimeter was less than six hundred yards. And he could see most of it. He’d burned through most of the ammo he’d gotten from the palace armory, which was pretty much emptying out for the defense of Sweetwater Junction. Fortunately, Colt Sharp saw that if they didn’t win this day, there was no point having ammunition or anything else in reserve.

  It was Trader’s old principle of never dying with bullets in your blaster, written big.

  The fact the new baron did see that marked him as different from both his mother and Geither Jacks in a very key way. Different from most barons Ryan had encountered.

  Through his longeyes Ryan saw the rotties inexorably pushing back the defenders with sheer weight as they trudged through the breach.

  “All right,” he said, “that’s it. Time to go.”

  Closing his longeyes to their soup can size, he stowed them in a pocket and reached for a special flare rocket, one conveniently painted red.

  As he did, a drop fell from the sky to hit the back of his bare right hand.

  It tingled.

  Acid rain.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  “Everybody out of the pool,” Mildred muttered as the red spark climbed up toward the terrible boiling, mustard-colored clouds.

  “What’s that, Millie?” J.B. asked.

  “Time to go, John,” she said. “For you in particular.”

  “Right,” he said. Then he shouted, “Okay, everybody! Pull back! Get to a strongpoint or head to your houses, but get inside and forted up, triple-fast!”

  Some with what Mildred took for relief, others with reluctance, the defenders began to back warily away from the rotties. Some took off running. Others established separation and turned to shoot whatever projectile weapons they had at the changed enemy.

  “Gotta power on,” J.B. said. “Hate to leave you guys like this.”

  “We all signed off on the plan, John,” Mildred replied.

  “Hurry,” Krysty said. She lined up a head shot with her handblaster, then fired. “Be safe.”

  The Armorer threw an arm around Mildred’s sturdy shoulders, hugged her close and kissed her hard. Then he was trotting off down the street on his special mission.

  Mildred found herself looking after him through a screen of tears.

  She blinked them quickly away when Krysty grabbed her arm and started towing her in another direction.

  “He’ll be fine,” the redhead said. Her scarlet hair writhed around her shoulders as she shot a female rottie, little more than a skeleton with long hair and shrunken dugs, who had gotten to within a dozen feet of them. “If anybody can pull it off, it’s J.B.”

  “That’s true,” Mildred said, trying not to sniffle. While he lacked Ryan’s charisma or brilliance, the Armorer was the most competent man she had ever known.

  But competence could carry one only so far.

  Doc and Jak came whipping around opposite corners down the street. Doc actually impaled a rottie standing on the porch in front of him through the back of the head with his sword before racing past with surprising speed. Jak blasted two shatteringly loud shots back the way he’d come, then, tucking away his Colt Python, he drew his favorite new toys, the twin steel hatchets, and hacked his way with focused savagery through to rotties to join his friends.

  The four hurried toward the center of town, fast enough to distance them from the horde. The few rare, more agile rotties who sprinted after them were shot in the face for their trouble and put down to stay.

  The desperate game rushed toward its climax.

  Can we really do it? Mildred wondered. Or had their luck finally run out?

  * * *

  “ALL RIGHT,” J.B. SAID when he joined the two sec men near the hastily repaired eastern gate. “Bastards’ve broke through the fence to the southwest. Time to get back to wherever you’re planning to make your stand.”

  The man J.B. didn’t recognize as a Jacks sec man frowned. He was youngish, with yellow hair and blue eyes.

  “Look out there,” he said, jerking his head toward a window of the house nearest the gate, where they were sheltering. “Most of ’em are still out that way. And they’re heading here now!”

  “That’s why I came to fire off the claymores we set up on the gate last night,” J.B. said. “Drop as many as I can. But in a few minutes the ones from the breakthrough’ll be filtering through. We won’t be safe hightailing it then.”

  “Not safe anyway,” growled Higgs, the former Jacks sec man. He was a human barrel, not much taller than J.B. What hair remained on his head marched down the lines of his jowls to meet up again under his broken nose in an impressive mustache. “Why not stay here and stand these fuckers off?”

  “Suit yourselves,” J.B. said.

  A metal box once meant to cover electrical junctions had been screwed to the wall beneath the window. A bent metal conduit ran up from it, over the sill and down to the ground.

  Taking out his home-brewed fire starter, J.B. flipped open the cover. A cut end of high-speed fuse waited within.

  “Wait,” Higgs said. “Somethin’ ain’t right. I think mebbe you should step away from that thing.”

  He started reaching for his lever-action carbine, leaned against a side wall against a stained, framed bit of embroidery saying Bless This House.

  The fuse caught. A spit and a spark, a whiff of chemical reek, and the flame was on its way along the conduit buried six inches under the ground by the work crew J.B. had supervised the previous night. It took but a second to reach the blasting caps in the charges affixed to either post of the reinforced gate.

  There were claymores mines, of an improvised sort: two big clay jugs filled half with black powder, half with bent n
ails, ball bearings, cast balls for black-powder blasters, and even chunks of broken glass. Anything small, sharp and nasty that could be blown into the faces and bodies of an oncoming enemy by the low but irresistible pressure of the bursting charge. They went off with a yellow flash and single two-beat roar, quite satisfactorily. Ten or twenty rotties nearing the gate fell down. How many would stay down was an open question. Glancing out the unglazed window, J.B. saw freshly detached limbs flying through the air.

  Then the demo charges J.B. had attached along with the improvised claymores exploded, blowing the gate right off its hinges.

  “Fuck!” yelped the blond dude. “He blew up the fucking gate!”

  As J.B. had been striking the flame with his left hand, his right hand hadn’t been idle. It swung up his slung M-4000 by its pistol grip. The blaster roared.

  The column of double 0 buck caught Higgs in his chest as he spun, bringing up his carbine. He reeled back into the wall and went down.

  The blond guy whipped out a Bowie-style knife and leaped at J.B. “You bastard traitor! You killed us all!”

  Slipping off the sling, J.B. slammed the shotgun butt roundhouse against his face. Bones crunched and the kid sprawled on the floor.

  Although his cheekbone was dented in somewhat and his left eye above it didn’t seem to track just right, the kid was game. No sooner had his tailbone stopped skidding across the warped floorboards than he gathered himself for another attack.

  It didn’t make a bit of difference whether he continued his attack or not. A man who valued precision, J.B. shouldered the scattergun to take steady aim.

  “Sorry, boys,” he said.

  The shotgun bellowed again, filling the little room with brief light and the smells of burned propellant and spilled blood.