Wretched Earth Page 9

  “You guess right,” Krysty said with a smile that could charm the snarl off a mama cougar. “And you can call me Krysty.”

  “Pleasure,” Jones said. “And in answer to your question, Krysty, Sweetwater bastard Junction happened.”

  * * *

  “BEEN A POWER SHIFT in Sweetwater,” Ernesto said. He was a burly dude made bulkier by his parka, complete with a fur-lined hood that made his round face look like a dark, stubble-bearded moon reflecting yellow firelight. “Things all went to glowing night shit, triple-sudden-like.”

  “Heard the boss there was Baron Jeb Sharp,” J.B. said. “He get chilled?”

  “Some say he did, some say he didn’t,” said Lita, a gangly woman with red pigtails spilling out from her green knit cap.

  “He fell sick, or so the rumor goes,” Jones said. He sat by the fire gnawing a haunch of roast coyote. Grease glistened on his beard. P.F. knelt next to him, glowering silently in her blanket robe. “Least that’s what we heard right before the shit hit the propeller. Shooting broke out in the palace. Next thing anybody knows the streets are all full of sec goons, popping caps at each other and everything else that moved.”

  “Heard tell Sharp’s sec boss made a power grab,” Ernesto said.

  “Geither Jacks.” Jones turned his head the other way to spit theatrically. “A real bastard. True coldheart. ‘Gate to hell,’ they call him. As monikers go it’s a tad on the unwieldy side, but no one can say it ain’t appropriate.”

  “Mostly they call him Gate,” Lita said, “but ever’body knows what’s meant.”

  “But somebody was shooting back,” Ryan prompted. Like a lot of Deathlands travelers, this bunch loved outside company, but enjoyed hearing themselves yammer so much it sometimes made it hard for visitors to cram a word in sideways.

  “Yeah,” Jones said. “Loyalists to the baron, or his wife and his heir, anyway. Some said Miranda was in the thick of the shooting that chased Gate’s bunch out of the palace, firing a longblaster like a devil in a black suede skirt. Which’d be just like that Mex-lander she-devil. She’s a fiery one, beautiful as the clearest winter night and with a soul twice as dark.”

  He jumped and turned to glare at his partner. “Ow! Why’d you have to go and gouge me in the rib cage?” he demanded, although Ryan hadn’t seen P.F. move a muscle. “You’re she-devil enough for me, and probably two or three others beside.”

  Ryan got the impression a smile flitted across P.F.’s features, which normally looked as if they’d been hacked out of hardwood by the steel-hafted hatchet she wore at her waist.

  “So this sec boss made a power play and lost,” J.B. said.

  “Not exactly,” Jones said. “He didn’t win. Which ain’t the same thing.”

  “No?” J.B. asked.

  “Not hardly. He failed to take over the palace. In fact, he and his blasters got chased clear out of the north half of the ville. But he just grabbed the other. Sweetwater Junction’s split down the middle. Each side claims the whole shebang. They’re more’n eager to chill to back it up.”

  “But neither side’s strong enough to take on the other,” Ryan said.

  “That’s so,” Jones said.

  “What about the ville folk?” Mildred asked.

  “Keep their heads down and hope nobody notices ’em, if they got any sense,” Ernesto said. “Liable to wind up dead or drafted, otherwise. Or both, uh, usually in opposite order.”

  “They stole our wags,” P.F. said, “and grabbed our people to make ’em fight for them. Or just for slave labor.”

  “We just got out with our hides and what we could manage to run with,” Jones said. “Damn shame about our friends. But our getting chilled or enslaved ain’t likely to ease their lot appreciably.”

  “Thanks for the heads-up,” Ryan said. “What do you people look to do next?”

  “Head east,” Jones said. “Away from Sweetwater Junction as fast as our legs will carry us.”

  “East not good,” Jak said.

  The traders looked at him blankly.

  “We got a story to tell you, too,” Ryan said.

  * * *

  RYAN COULD TELL the traders only half believed their story of the rotties.

  The companions spent the night in camp alongside the refugee traders, sharing watches. At first Ryan was disturbed by dreams of people dying, and then rising to attack, hands outstretched, mouths gaping with mindless bloodlust, coming on and on despite bullet strikes to the body, even with their own guts tangled around their legs.

  But he’d seen things as bad before. Some worse. His body had spent a hard day and his mind was hard. Eventually he fought through the nightmares and slept.

  In dawn’s ashen light a pair of traders watching the road to Sweetwater Junction reported strangers approaching from the east. Ryan and Jones stepped out into the roadway empty-handed as two goggled riders sped toward them, legs pumping furiously at the pedals of mountain bikes.

  “You’ve done this before, my boy,” Jones commented, his wolfskin coat making him look like a mountain man.

  Ryan had automatically stopped short of blocking the right-of-way. It was standard protocol of the road: we’re here, we’d like to talk, mebbe trade. It wasn’t always sincerely meant, like anything else in the Deathlands. Except for professions of bloodlust. Those were always sincere.

  “Spent a few years as a trader myself,” Ryan said.

  The riders slowed about fifty paces away. They pushed their goggles up onto their stocking caps. Both were as lean as old coyotes. One was a woman, the other a man. The woman carried what looked like a crossbow slung over her back. They held their hands out to their sides in the recognized gesture of peaceful intent.

  “You should be running,” the woman called out. She had a nasal Northeastern accent.

  “Now, why’d that be?” Jones asked. “You wouldn’t be threatening us?”

  “Not us,” the man said. He had a long and narrow face, as if a giant mutie had clamped his head in a vise and pulled hard on his chin. “Them.”

  He jerked a thumb over his shoulder.

  Jones made an exaggerated show of peering up the narrow road. Dust drifted over it, but fairly regular traffic kept the ancient blacktop from being buried under the dirt of ages.

  “Who’d ‘they’ be?” he asked. “Seeing as you’re the only folks on the road.”

  “Don’t be a dick, Wolfskin,” P.F. said, sliding down the cut behind her man and Ryan, with her flintlock longblaster cradled in her arms. Standing, she turned out to be bigger than she looked. She stood a good two fingers taller than Ryan. “Ask ’em to join us.”

  But the riders shook their heads frantically. “We got thirty or forty miles between us and them,” the man said. “We’d be happier if it was a hundred and thirty.”

  “Thirty-four hundred would be better still,” the woman said. “You people need to get moving, too. They won’t be here for a few days yet. But when they do…”

  Ryan could see her shudder.

  “Who’re these ‘they’ you keep talking about?” P.F. asked.

  More of the refugee traders and Ryan’s friends had appeared. He felt a rise in warmth on more than just a physical level as Krysty came up and put an arm around him. A quick glance confirmed what he knew: Jak was lying low, making sure everything stayed on the level. He wasn’t much for palavering, to say the least.

  “Heard some folk call ’em rotties,” the woman said. She shook her
head. “If we told you what they were really like, you’d never believe us. But imagine the worst trouble you’ve ever known. Then triple that.”

  “And it won’t be enough,” her partner added.

  “Rotties,” Jones repeated thoughtfully. He turned his pale wolf eyes to Ryan and Krysty. “Isn’t that what you called those unkillable, brain-eating monsters you were telling us about?”

  “You’ve heard of them?” the woman asked. “Then why are you still here? You can’t chill ’em unless you shoot ’em in the head. They just keep coming no matter what. They don’t feel pain or fear.”

  “Just hunger,” the man said. “For your meat. And your brains in particular.”

  “And if they bite you, unless they eat all your brains, you rise up as one of them. If they bite you and you die, the same thing happens.” She shook her head. “Their numbers just keep growing. There’re dozens of them already! And they’re heading this way.”

  “This sounds familiar.”

  “I told you these people were speaking straight,” P.F. said to her man.

  “You didn’t! You never told me that!”

  “You’re such a dick.”

  Jones shrugged. “It’s part of my charm. Where are you folks headed?”

  “Sweetwater Junction, to spread the word,” the man said. “Then on. All the way to the Cific if we have to. And then mebbe we’ll catch a boat.”

  “Might want to change your route,” Ernesto called. “The Junction’s enjoying itself a nice little civil war. Unless you’re willing to sign as mercies for one side or t’other, best give it a wide berth. They look on outlanders as meat on the hoof. They’ll chill you or slave you sooner than look at you.”

  “Thanks for the word,” the woman called. “We’ll take a detour.”

  “You could join up with us,” Jones said. “Looks like we’ll be taking a detour ourselves. Safety in numbers and all.”

  The two bicyclists looked at each other. “Thanks,” the woman called. “But we believe in safety in speed.”

  Without another word they pulled their goggles back down and began pedaling for all their lean-muscled legs were worth. When they passed Ryan and the rest they were practically flying.

  “So,” Jones said, watching them fade into the distance, “you were telling us straight all along. Well, that’ll teach me to believe there’s anything too strange for this triple-crazed world of ours.”

  Chapter Nine

  Dust swirled in a miniature fountain by the side of the road, mixed with hard, dry snow that had been coming down slowly since Ryan and friends had said farewell to Jones and his crew.

  The traders had decided to head south. “Where at least it might be warmer,” Jones had put it. “Also, if we got to take a boat to keep away from these rotties, Gulf Coast’s closer.”

  The sound of the gunshot reached Ryan where he lay on his belly behind a scrubby bush, peering through his Navy longeyes. His companions hid out of sight in a fold in the flat-looking landscape.

  The man running down the road with the loose-limbed stagger of complete desperation coupled to complete exhaustion staggered back into the middle of the right-of-way. Thirty yards behind him was a battered pickup truck, long since gone the color of the plains dirt itself, with a bent-pipe cage welded over the front bumper. Its bed was full of hooting coldhearts.

  The human prey was dressed in rags and as skinny as finger bones. He lurched into the road with his hands flopping like flippers. It was obviously the end of the chase for him.

  The truck hit the runner. The impact flung him ten feet in the air and forty feet down the roadway. When he landed, he rolled over several times and lay flopping like a beached fish.

  “Ryan,” Mildred said quietly, through clenched teeth.

  The one-eyed man said nothing.

  “It’s not our fight, Millie,” J.B. said.

  The wag came right up by the flailing, screaming man. It did a quick U-turn, putting its nose toward the ville and its tailgate toward the victim. Men wearing green armbands spilled out of the back.

  Laughing and whooping, they tied ropes to both the man’s ankles. The volume of their merriment went up as the volume of his shrieks did when they jostled his evidently many broken bones, grinding the ends together in a perfect storm of pain.

  They leaped back into the bed. The wag accelerated back toward Sweetwater Junction, just visible as a low brown serration breaking the western horizon. The victim bounced behind on the road like a screaming puppet.

  “Wonder which side?” Jak said.

  “Does it matter?” J.B. replied.

  “One’s as likely as the other, I reckon,” Ryan said. “It’s how barons and sec men act.”

  “Not where you came from,” Krysty said.

  “True. Until my brother took over.”

  “But you set Front Royal right in the end.”

  He hunched a shoulder. “That bullet’s long since left the blaster. Right now we’ve got to see to our own survival.”

  “Might that not best be served by following either set of the travelers we parted with today?” Doc asked. “Heading north or south, giving wide berth both to the ville of Sweetwater Junction and its woes and the hapless swarm of the changed?”

  “That’s how I’d go, I got to admit,” J.B. said.

  “We already jawed this over,” Ryan said. “We go forward with the plan.”

  “Getting caught in a ville civil war doesn’t seem much better than getting caught by rotties,” Mildred told him. “Just a longer way of dying badly. You said it’s none of our concern.”

  Ryan sighed and looked at Jak. “Eyes skinned,” he said.

  The smooth, snow-colored face wrinkled. Ryan knew Jak thought he might as well remind him to breathe.

  Ryan slipped back to settle down out of sight of the road. “Listen, this rottie thing is special. It’s different from almost anything we’ve been up against. At least since that thing up in Canada.”

  “What does that have to do with getting stuck in Sweetwater?” Mildred demanded.

  “You should know, Mildred. You and Doc both said this shit’s contagious, right?”

  “Evidently so, friend Ryan,” Doc said. “It appears to be saliva-borne.”

  “Or anyway carried by bodily fluids,” Mildred added.

  “And it’s spreading, right?”

  “So the information we’ve received suggests,” Doc said. “It may not be altogether reliable.”

  “What’s to stop it spreading? Anything?”

  Nobody spoke.

  “How will us signing on to help the goons in Sweetwater Junction commit atrocities stop the change spreading?” Mildred asked.

  “The rotties are coming to Sweetwater Junction,” Ryan said.

  “Wait—now you’re losing even me,” Krysty said. “What makes you so sure? I know the bicyclists said the creatures were heading west. Why would that mean they’d be coming here, specifically.”

  “Meat.”

  Everybody looked at Jak. The albino teen squatted with his white hair blowing free in the killing wind, gazing out toward the desolate highway. He seemed to be laughing soundlessly. It made him look even more like what his enemies used to call him down in the bayou country: the White Wolf.

  “Gotta eat. Rotties go to food. Country empty. Ville full. Do math.”

  “The lad does make a compelling point in his unlettered yet concise way,” Doc said.

  “So how’s going into th
e ville and likely getting ourselves pulled apart by trucks in the town square going to help end the plague?” Mildred asked.

  “I’d say Ryan reckons we can fight the rotties better if we got a whole ville to help us,” J.B. said.

  “Why would you think that’d even work, Ryan?” Mildred asked. “Do you really think you can get this lady baron and her turncoat sec man to just lay aside their differences?”

  “If we don’t stop the rotties,” Ryan said, “what will?”

  “Is that really up to us, Ryan?” J.B. asked.

  “Who else is going to do it?”

  “You’re the one who’s big on not sticking our noses into other people’s business,” Mildred said. “For that matter, Sweetwater Junction’ll at least slow them down for a while. Why not use the delay to just cruise on our way and forget about these freaks?”

  “Cruise where?” Ryan asked.

  She frowned and shook her head. “I don’t know. Mexico? The Darks? Canada? Someplace far away.”

  “How long?”

  “Huh?”

  “What he means, I believe,” Doc said, “is how long before the horde catches up to us in those places.”

  “Why would they?”

  “Mildred,” Krysty said gently, “you said yourself the change was catching. And the horde is growing. What’s to stop it spreading to overtake us wherever we go?”

  The predark physician looked blank for a moment. Then she shook her head again, tightly this time, as if trying to shed water from her plaited hair.

  “Maybe we could do what Jones and his friends said they were going to—go the Cific and jump on a boat.”

  “Cific’s big,” Krysty said.

  “Mebbe rotties sail,” Jak said.

  “They’re mindless,” Mildred pointed out.

  “Do we know that?” Ryan said. “Most of them act like they’re brain-chilled, sure. But they don’t all act alike. That stunt using the little girl rottie to get Omar’s people to open the gate—that looked like tactics. So did climbing the wall where nobody could see, and storming the gaudy. What if we turn up in China and a boatload of rotties hits the coast twenty, fifty, a hundred miles away?