Wretched Earth

by James Axler

  “It hasn’t fallen yet,” Lariat said blithely, and went in.

  Eager as a hound pup, Johnny followed her. Drygulch sent an eye roll Reno’s way before he went on through.

  Reno carried a Winchester Model 1897 12-gauge scattergun on a rope sling over his shoulder. A pump model with a hammer and a 5-round tube magazine, it had been old, Reno had read somewhere in an old scavvied magazine, even before the Big Nuke lit the skies with hell’s own light. At some point in the weapon’s long history the barrel had been sawed off a few inches past the end of the mag.

  Transferring the flywheel flashlight from his right hand, which had seriously begun to cramp, Reno took the best hold he could on the shotgun’s grip and swung the barrel up. What possible good the weapon could do against a potential cave-in, the young man had no clue. He only knew holding it made him feel better.

  “Okay, what’s ‘prions’ mean?” Drygulch was asking suspiciously when Reno entered the lab. He was peering at a cabinet stenciled prominently with that word, plus numerous danger symbols and scary messages. “I never heard of prions.”

  There was a smell in there Reno couldn’t name. More than just cold metal and dust. Not like anything that had crept inside recently and died. And he knew that if anybody had died down here during the Big Nuke, in the hundred years and more that had passed, they’d have got their stinking done long since. But still, something made him think of death.

  Then again, he reminded himself, that’s an occupational hazard for a scavvie. They were basically all about stealing dead people’s stuff, and trying not to join them in the process.

  “Hamster,” Drygulch said, “you’re the one with your rat nose always buried in a book. What’s it mean?”

  Reno frowned and scratched his brow. Questions he couldn’t answer tickled. “No idea,” he said.

  “Call him Reno,” said Lariat, who didn’t look up from flicking through random debris on a countertop with hands encased in fingerless leather gloves. “Anyway, it means ‘the goods.’ Means we struck black gold.”

  “You know this how?” Drygulch asked.

  “Whatever prions are,” the woman said with an air of tested patience, “the whitecoats back before Fire Day thought they were worth squirreling away under that million tons of concrete and steel that’s got Reno’s panties in a bunch. And a sealed heavy door inside of that. I’d say that’s valuable whatever the fuck it is, wouldn’t you?”

  “Cabinet’s locked,” Drygulch complained.

  “Well, open it,” Lariat said. “Use your pry bar. Reno, guard the door.”

  Johnny prowled the room. Lariat stood watching as Drygulch drew the four-foot pry bar from its scabbard fastened to his big rucksack. They all carried empty packs. Their possessions were cached a half mile from the installation’s entrance.

  The metal cabinet marked Prions wasn’t all that sturdy. A little poking for purchase, a grunt and heave and a squeal of tormented metal, and the door popped open.

  Drygulch resheathed the bar, picked up his lantern and hunkered down to peer inside.

  “Little vials in here,” he said.

  “Load ’em in your pack,” Lariat said.

  Their guide walked to a door at the back of the room. It looked as if it opened by sliding sideways into the alloy wall.

  “There’s more through here,” he said.

  “Can we open it?” Reno asked dubiously. “Looks a little hefty for Drygulch’s bar.”

  “It was open when I was here before,” Johnny said. “I swear it.”

  As if to prove his point, he began to pull on it, as if hoping to open it using nothing more than the friction of his fingertips.

  Amazingly, it worked. The door slid open with only a token squeal of protest.

  “Watch it—” Reno began.

  He had no idea what made him voice the aborted warning. Before it finished leaving his mouth a dark shape shot from the blackness beyond the door and hit the kneeling Drygulch as he shouldered his pack. The tall man went over with a crunch that horrified Reno, until he realized it was likely some of the small, seemingly sturdy vials Drygulch had just stuffed in his pack breaking, not his bones.

  Then Reno had something to be really horrified about, as he swung his flashlight on target. Its feeble shine revealed what looked to be a spiky-furred gray rat the size of a large dog, but with a snoutful of sharp teeth instead of incisors. And an extra set of appendages like a mantis’s clawed forelimbs jutting from just behind its shoulders, three feet long and covered in gleaming black chitin.

  Drygulch had somehow got a hand under the mutie’s lower jaw and was fending off its fangs. For the moment. Reno stepped up so his shotgun’s muzzle was about six inches from where thick neck met misshapen torso, and fired.

  The noise was like two cast-iron pans being clapped together either side of his head. Muzzle-flame splashed against the creature’s body. The sickening reek of burned hair went right up Reno’s nostrils like barbs. The charge of scavenged number 4 buck tore the fanged head halfway from the body.

  Reno kicked it aside, where it lay with its legs twitching, jaws still snapping, and those awful insectile claws scratching futilely at a synthetic-tiled floor.

  Another figure darted from the door. Lariat’s .45 bucked and roared and vomited yellow flame three times, fast. The horror squealed and tumbled into a forward roll that carried it into the far wall.

  Johnny stood with his back to the doorway. His lean, handsome face stretched to accommodate a mouth that had become a yawning oval of fear. He held his little carbine halfway to his shoulder as if to shoot at the second creature that had come through.

  Then his expression grew strangely curious. Reno heard a sound like somebody stepping on a ripe gourd.

  A claw like the first mutie’s suddenly burst through Johnny’s chest. Blood fountained out around it, but didn’t hide the fact that it was way bigger than the one the other rat thing sported. The clawed arm lifted Johnny off the floor. He screamed and flailed his limbs mindlessly. The M-1 carbine cracked with deafening shots, sending ricochets howling around the adventurers.

  “Time to go!” Lariat yelled, as a tumbling round glanced off Reno’s shoulder.

  Drygulch jumped up and ran. Lariat raced after him, firing her handblaster back into the infinite blackness of the inner doorway. Backpedaling into the corridor, Reno started to warn his boss that she might hit their guide.

  Then he asked himself why that would be a bad thing.

  * * *

  “LET ME LOOK AT IT,” Reno said.

  Drygulch held his wounded arm away. “No. It’s fine. Leave me ’lone.”

  The last of their jackrabbit stew boiled in a cast-iron kettle on a little break-down aluminum tripod over a campfire of driftwood and dried weeds. Some flakes of what Lariat claimed was sage bubbled in the mix.

  The stew smelled to Reno like stinkbug ass. He guessed it would taste worse. But after this day a good case of the running shits would only be appropriate. Anyway, he was hungry enough to eat a stinkbug’s ass. A whole pot of stinkbug asses.

  But by the sick yellow light of the flames, he made out something disturbing. Reddish inflammation, shot through with nasty dark discoloration, crept up the man’s lanky arm from his bandaged hand.

  Lariat pronounced the stew done. Drygulch refused any, which right there showed he was in bad shape. Reno ate his share with relish. It was definitely better than stinkbug ass. If not much else.

&n
bsp; When nothing remained that his spoon could catch, Reno licked his bowl. Then he scrubbed it with dirt and a handful of crackly, dry bunchgrass. As he stuffed his hobo tool and bowl in his pack, Lariat motioned him aside.

  The night sky was full of stars. An orange moon hung near the western horizon. Wind quested restlessly through sere grass. Most of the light snow that had fallen earlier had melted away.

  “So what do you think he’s got?” she asked.

  Reno shrugged. “Dunno. Won’t let me look at it.”

  “I can hear you,” Drygulch said. “Got no call talking about me in the third person like I was a…a rock or somethin’. Insultin’.”

  “Well, if some damn fool hadn’t gone and stuck his hand in his pack and gotten cut to shit on broken glass, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” Lariat said.

  “I was tryin’ to find out if them prion vials was okay after I landed on ’em!”

  “And found out the hard way you’d busted most of them.”

  “We got a few intact, Lariat,” Reno said. He hated disputes. He knew how quickly nasty could erupt. When that happened it was usually him who wound up getting the bad end of the ass-wiping stick. “Oughta be able to get something for them, if we find the right whitecoats.”

  “I can do that,” she said. Then, taking Reno by the arm, she urged him a little farther outside the circle of faint firelight. And more important, out of the aggrieved Drygulch’s earshot.

  “Could it mebbe be gangrene?” she asked.

  “Too soon,” Reno said. “Could be blood poisoning, though.”

  He glanced uneasily back at the tall man, who had slithered into his bedroll and deliberately lain down with his back to his comrades as well as the fire.

  “I wonder if those prions have anything to do with his condition,” Reno said softly.

  “Doesn’t much matter if the stupe won’t let us look at it,” Lariat said in a tone that suggested it didn’t much matter to her if he did. “He doesn’t wake up in the morning, we’ll know something was wrong.”

  * * *

  COMMOTION ROUSED RENO from a wondrous dream of soft sheets and blow jobs.

  He sat up. By the vagrant red gleam of the low coals they’d kicked the fire into before bedding down, he saw Drygulch thrashing in his sleeping bag. He moaned like an animal in distress.

  “Drygulch?” Reno asked tentatively.

  Lariat appeared out of the darkness. She’d been on sentry duty. Johnny Hueco’s M-1 carbine was tipped back over her shoulder.

  “Drygulch?” she said.

  He uttered a strangled noise somewhere between a cough and a scream, then spasmed so hard his back arched clear off the ground. His fingers raked frozen soil, then he fell back silent and still.

  After he stayed that way for a full minute, Lariat said, “That can’t be good.”

  Reno skinned out of his sleeping bag and started pulling on jeans encrusted with dirt.

  “Lariat, be careful,” he said.

  “Why?” she asked. “Poor slagger’s chilled.”

  She prodded Drygulch with the toe of a boot.

  With an inhuman snarl he sat up. His face was a strange gray in the ember light, cheeks sunken, the lips drawn back from his teeth. A network of dark lines spread across his face as if his veins were right beneath the skin and filled with ink. His eyes burned like coals in black-painted cups.

  Lariat jumped back in alarm. “Drygulch?” she whispered.

  He thrashed, as if the bedroll were a mutie monster whose clutches he was trying to escape.

  “Get back!” Reno shouted. “Get away from him! He isn’t right!”

  “Drygulch, you’re scaring me—”

  Bursting free at last from the sleeping bag, Drygulch uttered an eerie moan and pounced on Lariat like an angry mountain lion.

  Chapter One

  “Gig sucks,” Jak Lauren complained.

  The crowded barroom of Omar’s Triple-Fine Caravanserai and Gaudy reeked of spilled beer, spilled sweat and the faint tang of spilled blood.

  At least, Ryan Cawdor thought, leaning on the hardwood bar with a protective hand on the handle of a mug of beer, I can’t smell puke. Much.

  “Reluctant as I am to condone, and thereby encourage, what may be a new nadir of our young associate’s articulation, I fear I most heartily concur with the sentiment,” Dr. Theophilus Tanner said. He had to shout to make himself heard over the din of drunken conversation, riotous laughter and tinkling of a gap-toothed and out-of-tune upright piano.

  The piano, inexplicably painted canary-yellow, was played by a girl of about twelve with freckles, pigtails, a homespun dress and at least a little skill. Those who thought her musical talents deficient were well-advised to keep their opinions behind their teeth, if they liked having teeth. The girl, Sary-Anne, was one of the innumerable children claimed by the tavern keeper and his three wives.

  Omar kept a hickory cudgel in a leather holster down his leg to bust the heads of the obstreperous, not to mention the teeth of the hypercritical. A similar holster down the other leg carried a sawed-off, double-barrel scattergun for the especially hard to convince.

  As gaunt as a crane, Doc Tanner perched next to Ryan on a bar stool of stout raw planks hammered together, with some sawdust-filled burlap for a “cushion.” The tails of his frock coat hung down almost to the loose sawdust that covered the warped wooden floor.

  He raised a tumbler of what the bartender sold as “whiskey,” and which Ryan was sure was just shine colored brown with he-didn’t-want-to-know-what. For a moment Doc studied its contents, which would probably have still been murky had the glass been clean and the light better than the glow of a few kerosene lanterns strung strategically around the crowded barroom. Strategically so that none of the patrons could get too good a look at the goods on tap. Then, with a convulsive heave, the ancient-looking man grabbed the heavy glass in both hands and tossed the shot down his throat. Immediately, his body quivered.

  “Mother’s milk,” Doc said. His long, silver-white hair seemed to have gotten wilder. His seamed face hitched into a sad smile, and his blue eyes took on a faraway look.

  “You know it’s not like we had a choice,” their shorter companion said. The man in the leather jacket and battered fedora adjusted the glasses on the bridge of his nose. “Our point of arrival was picked clean, and we all got a nasty addiction to eating, which we have to tend to.”

  “Point of arrival” was J. B. Dix’s way of saying “redoubt” when unfriendly ears might be listening to their conversation. Located in redoubts, deep beneath the earth, was a network of functioning six-sided matter-transfer units with armaglass walls color-coded for identification. These mat-trans units gave potential access to sites dotted not just all over North America, but the rest of the world, as well.

  “Can hunt,” Jak said, tossing down his beer. He was a teenager with a mane of long hair as white as snow. The color of his skin matched his hair. He was an albino, and still cranky over the dispute that had met his initial attempt to enter the caravanserai.

  The sign over the round arch over the gate through the high mud-brick wall that surrounded the compound read No Muties. Fortunately, Omar himself, eventually summoned by one of his sons, understood that albinism wasn’t a mutie trait, and allowed Jak to enter.

  Their employer, Boss Tim Plunkett, had complained loudly at the delay the whole while. There were reasons why Jak said the gig sucked.

  “That’s your answer to e
verything, Jak,” J.B. said, taking off his glasses and wiping them clear of condensation with a shirttail. “We can hunt, yeah. If you don’t mind living on about half an irradiated lizard a week, which is all even you could come up with in this sorry-ass place.”

  “We’ve done jobs before,” Ryan said. “Didn’t always care for all of them. But we did them and moved on. Like J.B. says, we have to eat.”

  “Could leave,” Jak said stubbornly. He meant go back to the mat-trans and jump out.

  A woman as tall as Ryan and skinny as a chicken bone came up, carrying a tray with empty mugs of grimy glass and chipped ceramic. Despite stringy blond hair and a thin face without much to boast of by way of a chin, she wasn’t bad to look at. If he wasn’t deeply in love with a gorgeous redhead who was off somewhere with the other member of their party, predark freezie Mildred Wyeth, Ryan might’ve eyed the blonde with some interest after hard days on the trail. Plenty of the caravanserai customers were doing so—the wag drivers in their leather and weird hairdos, with hard voices and harder eyes, and even the mild-mannered cultists who were traveling west in a green school bus, all wearing scarves over their heads that were tied beneath their chins like bonnets.

  As far as Ryan knew, she wasn’t available for that kind of service to anyone but Omar himself. That was because she was one of the caravanserai owner’s wives, known only and unsurprisingly as the Skinny One. Omar’s other wives, the Fat One and the Nuke Red Hot One, were somewhere out of the picture, although Ryan thought he could make out Red’s voice, which had a notable edge to it, carving a new bunghole in one of the kitchen help for spilling stew.

  The Skinny One had arrived to see if they needed refills. Doc ordered another shot, which made Ryan’s already thin lips tighten until they almost vanished. Doc sometimes had a tenuous grip on the here and now. The one-eyed man didn’t see that he needed to kill his brain cells with any more rotgut.