Wretched Earth

by James Axler

  Krysty swung back around, driving her left knee toward the groin of the man who still held her arm. He twisted his own hips. And her knee drove hard into the big muscle of his thigh. It had to have hurt like rad fire, but he grinned in triumph that she’d missed pulping his balls, and made to grab her with his other hand.

  She got her foot down, turned back and, grounding her powerful legs, pistoned a blow against his ribs. Bone cracked like a pistol shot. He gasped and sagged.

  Another man was already closing in from behind. Krysty snapped her left leg straight back, then whipped it up and around. Her heel thwacked the new attacker’s left cheek and spun him away.

  There were too many of them; she and Mildred could never win. But Krysty put that knowledge from her mind and gave herself totally over to fighting.

  * * *

  A TALL MAN IN A JACKET with tarnished silver studs and frayed gray patches spun toward Ryan, and away from an ill-considered attack on Krysty, which had earned him a wheel kick in the cheek.

  He almost stumbled into Ryan. “I’m gonna teach that bitch,” he said. “Get my back!”

  He wheeled to charge the flailing, fighting redhead. Recalling a lesson from Trader, back in the day, Ryan folded his right hand into what the cagey old man had called a “phoenix-eye fist,” with the forefinger knuckle protruding, braced by the thumb. It wasn’t a shot Ryan had had many opportunities to make. He was interested to see how it would pan out.

  It panned out ace. Grabbing the wag driver’s shoulder, Ryan dug a brutal uppercut into the man’s right kidney, putting plenty of hip twist and leg drive into the short, sweet, savage stroke. The guy squeaked like a stepped-on deer mouse and slumped to the ground. There he curled up into a knot of pain and lay mewling and drooling into the hardscrabble dirt.

  “What seems to be the problem here?” Ryan said, raising his voice.

  Nobody paid any attention. Instead, peristaltic waves of mob closed in and over the two women. Setting his jaw, Ryan prepared to wade in.

  A colossal boom roared out behind him, and a garish yellow-white flash lit the whole courtyard.

  Everybody froze, then pale, surprised faces turned in Ryan’s direction.

  But they weren’t gazing at him. He looked around to see Doc standing tall in his frock coat, grinning hugely. Bluish smoke trailed from the shotgun tube fixed beneath the barrel of his enormous LeMat wheel gun.

  “Now that I have your attention, boys,” Doc called in a surprisingly hearty voice, “I yield the floor to Ryan Cawdor.”

  To Ryan’s left, Jak stood with his .357 Magnum Colt Python revolver aimed at the mob. J.B. had checked his Smith & Wesson M-4000 shotgun at the gaudy door, as Omar’s rules required. But he’d drawn the mini-Uzi from beneath his leather jacket, and held it leveled from his hip.

  Several wag drivers yipped in alarm and danced as hot buckshot rained down on them. Doc’s shotgun had enough punch to take off a man’s face or chop up his guts at arm’s length. But fired straight up it didn’t throw the double-0 balls high enough to do more than give a whack when gravity inevitably brought them back down.

  Ryan didn’t draw his own SIG-Sauer handblaster. He didn’t want to escalate the situation.

  All the wag drivers started talking at once. The LeMat’s volcanic roar had knocked the fight out of them. Now they were all tripping over one another to explain how they were just having themselves some fun with this skinny kid for talking crazy, and then these bitches came and jumped them… .

  Krysty moved forward to help Mildred, who in turn was helping the skinny little dude holding a well-crushed pair of specs in one hand. He was the worse for wear.

  The wag drivers paid no attention to them. They seemed to have had a bellyful of the two wild women.

  “All right,” Ryan snapped. “The fun’s over. Nobody’s chilled yet.”

  He swept the crowd with his lone ice-blue eye. “What do you say we keep it that way?”

  The wag drivers looked at one another. He could read their thoughts plainly on their faces and in the set of their shoulders, without need of any mutie mind powers, which he surely didn’t possess. This wasn’t fun anymore. He suspected for those who’d come to grips with Mildred and Krysty, it had stopped being fun considerably earlier.

  He frowned at Mildred. “This was your doing.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  Though she was bent over from the exertion and a fair amount of pummeling, she straightened and braced her shoulders. “They were beating up this poor skinny kid for no reason. Kicking him around like a soccer ball.”

  Ryan shrugged. “Not our business. Minding other people’s is a good way to wind up staring at the sky.”

  “Fine. You didn’t have to back me up, anyway.”

  “Yes, we did, Millie,” J.B. said mildly. He still had his Uzi out, in case some of the mag drivers got frisky again. “You know we’ve got to back each other’s plays. That’s why Ryan doesn’t want you jumping into every swollen river to save every stranded calf. You know what I mean.”

  “Why, John,” the stocky woman said, her deep brown eyes lighting, “that’s almost poetic!”

  Ryan raised a brow and looked at Krysty, who shook back her scarlet hair.

  “She did what she thought was right, Ryan. So did I.”

  He felt a hand pat his shoulder, and glanced back to see Doc’s prematurely aged face hanging over him.

  “Give it over, Ryan,” the old man said. “This is a fight you can only lose. Especially if you win.”

  Ryan was about to retort that the statement made no sense, then it hit him that it made total sense.

  “All right,” he said. “That bullet’s out of the muzzle of the blaster, anyway. Say goodbye to your stray and let’s head back inside. No point freezing our asses off in this wind when the stove’s hot inside.”

  “Can’t he come with us?” Mildred asked.

  The kid hung back. His narrow face was puffy and turning color. “Truth is,” he said, “I’m not even supposed to be here. Me and my friends were attacked. Lost everything.”

  “That why those slaggers were thundering on you?” J.B. asked.

  The kid shook his head. He had a shock of dark hair like an untended garden, and prominent ears. “No. I was trying to warn them.”

  “Warn?” Jak asked. “What about?”

  The youth shook his head again. “You’ll just start hitting me, too. And anyway, I better go.”

  “I say we bring him inside with us,” Mildred said. “I’ll pay for him out of my share of what we got for the job.”

  Ryan frowned. As was standard practice, Boss Plunkett had given them half their pay in advance. Nobody was going to do bodyguard work on credit; nobody was going to hire guards and give them all their jack before they’d guarded their share of body. People who did either weren’t even triple-stupe, they were chills. And it was handsome pay. Handsome enough that Ryan and the others came close to taking for granted Plunkett would try to stiff them at trail’s end. But they’d burn that bridge after they crossed it.

  It wouldn’t be the first time a boss had tried to stiff them. But if Ryan had anything to say about it, it’d be the last time this particular one tried.

  “Millie, you—”

  “Don’t ‘Millie’ me, John! It’s my share, and I can do with it what I choose!”

  “Three days ago we were almost down to boiling the straps of our packs for sweat soup!”

  “That’s about whe
re I find myself now,” the newcomer said. “Sorry. I’m Reno.”

  “Yeah,” Ryan said.

  “I will kick in,” Doc said. “We are flush for the moment. I for one am willing to pay for the entertainment of a good tale, if nothing else.”

  “Pay too,” Jak said. “Want warning.”

  “Shouldn’t he be happy enough to take the fact we saved his life as payment?”

  “He’s in a hard place,” Mildred said. “We’ve been there ourselves. Recently.”

  “I know,” Ryan said. “That’s why we’re working for that fat bastard Plunkett, in case you forgot.”

  “Anyway,” she went on, “hasn’t the notion ever occurred to you that if you help a stranger down on his luck, someday when you’re down on your luck a stranger might help you?”

  Ryan stared at her. So did J.B. and Jak.

  “Drawing a blank here,” the Armorer said after a moment.

  “That a stranger might help another out of kindness, or even deferred self-interest,” Doc said gently to the black woman, “is a concept alien to our friends’ experience.”

  As a usual thing, the two got along like cats and dogs. But there were times when refugees from their own times stuck together against their thoroughly modern comrades.

  “It’s a good practice, Ryan,” Krysty said, “even if it’s hard for you to see.”

  “Oh, for shit’s sake,” Ryan said, throwing his hands up in the air. “When did we become a rolling charity? Fuck it. Bring the bastard.”

  He turned—and ran into a barrier: yet another skinny girl, this one on the cusp of puberty, in a long shapeless frock, with red pigtails and an excess of freckles.

  “My daddy sent me out,” Loretta said. “Ain’t no shooting allowed in the caravanserai.”

  “Tell your daddy it was an accident,” Ryan said. “We’re…sorry.”

  The girl bobbed her pigtails and vanished inside.

  Krysty patted Ryan’s shoulder. “There, now,” she said, smiling. “That didn’t hurt, did it?”

  Ryan rubbed his bristly jaw. “Kinda.”

  Another figure moved to intercept them by the door. “Cthulhu saves,” said a roly-poly man with a green hankie tied around his head, extending a woodblock leaflet.

  “Best step back, son,” J.B. told him in a not unfriendly way. “He’s not on hand to save you.”

  Chapter Three

  “So let me get this straight,” Doc said across the barroom table. “There is an infestation of these strange creatures that is coming this way. And they eat people.”

  “Cannie muties,” Jak said. He was turning one of his throwing knives across the back of a white hand, knuckle to knuckle. “No big.”

  The kid Mildred had rescued from the mob shook his head. “Not muties,” he said. “They’re…sick. And you can catch what they got.”

  “What do you mean?” J.B. asked.

  “They’re not mutants. They’re normal people who have changed. They’ve turned into mindless, soulless monsters who hunger for human meat. For us. There are hundreds, man. And they’re following right behind me!”

  He was getting worked up. He stood half out of his chair. “You’ve got to believe me! Somebody’s got to do something!”

  Sitting protectively beside him, Mildred took the tattered sleeve of his plaid shirt and tugged him back down. Though she never would’ve admitted it to her friends, she was trying her damnedest not to laugh. The poor crazy kid talked like somebody from a B horror movie.

  “So, not muties,” Jak said. “Just cannies. Seen cannies. Killed cannies.”

  “You don’t understand,” Reno said. His face worked as if the muscles were trying to pull themselves apart beneath his grayish skin. “They’re worse than any cannies you’ve seen. Worse than you can imagine.”

  “We’ve seen some pretty rough ones,” J.B. said.

  “And our imaginations are quite expansive,” Doc added, though not unkindly.

  He might be half out of his mind some of the time, and lots of his attitudes struck Mildred as more neolithic than Victorian, but overall he was closer to her conception of what a normal human being was like than these born Deathlanders. Krysty showed at least flashes of compassion. But even she, with her unquestionably big heart and spirit, could surprise Mildred.

  “They’re triple-hard to kill,” Reno said. “At least as bad as stickies. They don’t feel pain, see. It’s like they’re…dead. Walking chills. They even start to rot. But it doesn’t slow them down. Oh, no. They move like lubed-up lightning, some of ’em.”

  Mildred looked at her friends. She could tell they were thinking the caravaneers were right. This was crazy talk. She wasn’t so sure. The young man had clearly seen something that frightened him terribly.

  “And here’s the worst part,” the youth went on. “If they bite you, you become one of them. If they chill you, you rise again as one of them. Unless you’re lucky enough they just eat you alive. Once somebody gets bitten, you have to chill them right away. Right now. Because it’s only a matter of time before they change, too!”

  The little bubble of silence that surrounded the table after that pronouncement seemed to repel the raucous chatter that filled the saloon. At a breath of cold, relatively fresh air from outside, Mildred turned to look at the door, relieved for the break.

  The leader of the Cthulhu cultists, Brother Ha’ahrd, swept in. She was sure the name was really Howard, but that was how the ever-ebullient prophet introduced himself, and how his followers reverently pronounced his name. He was of middle height, a tad taller than J.B. His face had clearly been broad even before age started to turn it shapeless and run it down over his neck. Iron-gray hair hung down the back of his dark green robe. He alone of the believers wore no headcloth.

  He smiled and loudly greeted the Nuke Red Hot One, who was seating customers at the moment. She smiled back. The Fat One was bustling to the kitchen with a big galvanized metal tub full of dirty crockery. The Skinny One still worked the bar. Omar himself was nowhere to be seen.

  Mildred took advantage of the break to study Ryan for his reaction to all this.

  Frowning slightly, he turned to Reno, who was fumbling in a little sorry-ass backpack that, judging by its shape, held mostly nothing. The kid unfolded a fresh pair of eyeglasses, these with bat-wing frames, and fitted them experimentally in front of his watery blue eyes.

  “Where’d you get those, Reno?” Mildred asked.

  He shrugged. “When I’m scavvying, I always keep my eyes peeled for unbusted pairs that’re close to what I need,” he said, smiling shyly and half-apologetically. “Only way I can see anything.”

  “So how do you come to know all this about these…rotties?” Ryan asked.

  Reno shook his head. “Don’t know all about them. Sorry. I know way too much. But not all. We were scavvies, like I said. My friends Lariat and Drygulch and I. A few nights ago they hit us where we were camped.”

  “So you were the only one who got away?” J.B. asked. Mildred looked at the Armorer narrowly, trying to divine whether he was trying to equate the kid’s survival to cowardice. It was a fine line in the Deathlands. Nobody liked somebody who’d run out on his partners when the shit hit. Yet nobody survived any length of time without being ready to just run when the odds got too bad. She still had little idea where the line lay. She suspected it was pretty subjective.

  But Reno shook his head. “No. We all got away. But one of my friends got bit. That night while we wer
e sleeping, Drygulch changed. He jumped on Lariat and bit her. That’s when I ran. And came within a hair of running right into the rest of these—what’d you call them? Rotties?”

  He grimaced. Mildred reckoned he was trying to smile. “Good a name as any, I suppose.” She wondered why nicknames for muties in Deathlands all ended with ie.

  “Pardon my asking,” Doc said. “But how do they come by these numbers? These are desolate lands, barely inhabited.”

  Far away from reality as the old man could wander, he could be as focused as a microscope. Usually he stayed here and now when danger threatened. Or when, as now, his curiosity was aroused.

  “It’s a big country, Doctor,” Reno said. “Look around. There’s fifty, sixty people staying here tonight, and mebbe twenty live and work here full-time. If you shake out all the folks who live in a hundred-mile radius you can get a mighty crowd, even in hard core Deathlands like these.”

  Ryan’s lips tightened, as if he didn’t like the way the skinny kid’s words tasted. Mildred thought she detected something a little off about the tale herself.

  And so what? she asked herself. In the Deathlands, everybody has secrets. We have secrets.

  Back in her day they used to talk about how valuable information was. Talk about the information economy replacing the economy of everyday physical things. In the end physical reality had reasserted itself with a bloody vengeance. Yet information or its lack could get you chilled. Like any other resource.

  She wanted to remind Ryan of that. She suspected it would only make things worse.

  “Sounds crazy,” Jak said. But Mildred could see white around his ruby irises, and his fine nostrils were flared like a winded horse’s. He was spooked by talk about the walking dead. He had been raised in the bayous of the South, steeped in superstition. Except who could say what was superstitious these days when so many fantastic—and horrible—things stalked the land?

  “Please,” Reno said hollowly. “You have to believe me. We need to either get ready to defend this place, or get out of here while we still can!”