Wretched Earth

by James Axler

  That seemed to make an impression even on Ryan. Before Mildred could more than catch his eye, a fresh commotion came from the direction of the stairs.

  Boss Plunkett and some of his retinue lumbered down from the upper stories, where the luxury accommodations were located, and where the gaudy house part of the caravanserai’s trade was carried out. The boss had changed into a satiny purple dressing gown that looked suspiciously as if it had started life more than a century before as a bedsheet. He had a bottle in one hand, a cigar in the other, and his arms draped like beef boughs over the necks of his “secretaries.” Two of the gaudy sluts accompanied them. Loomis followed close behind, glaring around at the other bar customers as if ready to take a bite out of anyone who got within range. As always, he put Mildred in mind of a Village People wannabe.

  Plunkett swept his boiled-ham face around the room. It reddened slightly when he caught sight of Ryan and friends. He turned to mutter something to his personal sec man.

  As the Nuke Red Hot One squired Plunkett and his female satellites to a table, which she cleared of caravaneers with one flinty look, Loomis swaggered over to the companions’ table. He was hitching at his tight black leather pants as he came. Mildred didn’t even want to think about what that might imply about what had just been going on in the boss’s private room above.

  Loomis stopped a few feet away and thrust his unshaved face at Ryan like a challenging canine. “Boss says he wants to talk to you, Cawdor,” he said. He jabbed a thumb back over his shoulder. “Now.”

  Behind the round lenses of his glasses, J.B. narrowed his eyes at the man. For him that was about as good as cussing Loomis out loudly. Mildred squeezed his leg under the table.

  “Be back,” Ryan said laconically, rising. He turned and looked at Loomis. The sec man stood glaring up at him for half a minute. Then, realizing he wasn’t going to win any staring contests with the taller man, he turned and led the way back to their boss’s table.

  * * *

  “WHAT THE HELL are you playing at, Cawdor?” Plunkett bellowed as Ryan came up. “You ain’t gettin’ paid to sit on your asses listenin’ to fairy stories. Get out there and guard my shit, before these convoy scum steal me blind!”

  Ryan took his time answering. He and his friends had taken Plunkett’s jack. The one-eyed man felt bound to see a job through once accepted, if it was at all possible without throwing away the lives of his companions. He was tempted to give their current boss a second mouth to bellow through, between, say, chins two and three. But it was bad form, and he didn’t want to do it unless he really had no choice.

  Anyway, it wasn’t as though the boss’s abusive bluster was news.

  Besides, there was an off chance the fat man would pay the balance owed at the end of the trail, just as he said he would. That in itself was worth keeping him alive. For now.

  “Right,” Ryan said. “We’ll do that.” He glanced at Loomis. “Startin’ to smell bad in here, anyway.”

  He turned back to his party. He doubted the sec man had the stones to jump him. And if he did, Ryan was certain he’d read it in the faces of his friends, all of which were turned to watch him.

  He got back to the table without incident, noticing the caravaneers drinking in the bar seemed to let their eyes slide away from him like oil drops on a hot pan. The cultists, too.

  Fine, he thought. It saved complications if they were afraid of him. Omar had a strict rule against anyone who wasn’t Omar chilling anybody inside the adobe outer walls of the compound.

  “Let’s go,” Ryan said. “Boss says it’s time to get back to work.”

  “Ryan—” Mildred started.

  “Yeah, okay,” he said. “He can stay with us.”

  “Thank you!” Reno said. “You won’t regret this.”

  “Don’t get ideas,” Ryan said. “We’ll probably chill you in the morning.”

  * * *

  RYAN CAME AWAKE all at once, as he usually did.

  He was instantly aware of a presence leaning over him in the cold darkness of the cinder-block hut. Something was tickling his upturned face.

  It was Krysty’s hair.

  “There’s something going on,” she said as soon as his eye opened.

  Ryan sat up. He slept in the shed where Plunkett’s sec wag was parked. Krysty would’ve slept alongside, but had her turn on watch. J.B. and Mildred had the shed with the boss’s personal wag. The RV was parked outside the structures. Jak and Doc slept in it.

  “What?” Ryan asked as he picked up his 9 mm SIG-Sauer P-226 handblaster and his eighteen-inch panga from where he had them laid close to hand. He tucked them away in appropriate places and started to pull his boots on. Apart from them he slept in his clothes.

  “Guards have been reporting movement out in the night,” Krysty said. The land lay clear for anywhere from fifty to a hundred yards all around the perimeter wall. Omar’s crew kept it swept of brush or anything else unwelcome visitors could hide behind. Or use as cover from blasterfire. “They think they’re human.”

  “Could be starting at shadows,” Ryan said, grunting as he hauled on a boot. “Mebbe they heard your pal Reno’s scary stories.”

  The skinny bespectacled guy had pitched his bedroll next door with J.B. and Mildred. If Mildred was going to take in strays, she was going to have to take care of them herself. And J.B. would have to deal; Ryan grinned a little at the thought.

  Krysty shook her head. She squatted next to him, ready to spring into action at an eye blink’s notice.

  “Don’t think so, lover.”

  From outside they heard voices raised. She looked around.

  “Now what?” Ryan said.

  Krysty shook her head. She straightened, and they both walked out the open bay door into the yard.

  The first thing they saw was eight or ten of the wag drivers. They were roaring drunk, standing in a ring passing bottles around. Fortuitously, they were on the far side of the compound from where Boss Plunkett’s wags were parked. They seemed to be engaged in some kind of roughhousing.

  From over by the gate they heard voices raised. “But Maw,” a male voice, high and near cracking with adolescence, called in protest. “She was just a little girl, wandering out there all alone in the dark. Leon said weren’t no harm in letting her in.”

  The bucktoothed kid was a twig of about thirteen, all nose and Adam’s apple. Omar’s wives had dropped uncountable girl children—at least, Ryan hadn’t been able to count them all. But they seemed to have produced only two boys—this one, Locke, and eight-year-old Paco.

  Leon was one of Omar’s guards. The Fat One looked at the big man, who shrugged. “She acted scared,” he said.

  “Little girl?” asked J.B., emerging from the neighboring shed. “What’s going on?”

  “Probably nothing,” Ryan said.

  “Nothing?” Reno echoed, fumbling to adjust his glasses on his nose. “They didn’t let anyone in, did they?”

  “Appears that they did.”

  “They’re crazy! It could be one of them!”

  “Where is this little girl?” Mildred asked, hugging herself tightly beneath her generous breasts and not looking thrilled at being rousted out of a relatively warm bedroll. Her breath came in puffs of condensation.

  “Ryan,” Krysty said, “those men again—”

  The wag drivers were hooting in rising merriment. Only the fact the Fat One was busy reading Locke the riot act prevented her from jumping on them
for making noise at this hour, Ryan reckoned. That was against Omar’s rules, too.

  Then the circle opened a bit and Ryan saw that the wag drivers were pushing around a girl with pigtails. For a moment he thought it was one of the host’s daughters. But he quickly dismissed that; if they could stand up, the wag drivers weren’t that drunk. He remembered how Locke claimed he and Leon had admitted a lone little girl.

  Now the wag drivers were bouncing her around the way they had Reno earlier in the evening.

  “What is it with these assholes?” Ryan asked.

  “Ryan,” Krysty said, “we’ve got to do something.”

  “No,” he amended, “no, we don’t. We’ve got our hands full now. Let Omar’s people deal with it. What we have to do is get back to sleep. Plunkett’s going to want us hustling tomorrow.”

  Jak was frowning. “Girl not look right.”

  “What?” Ryan said. He had headed back to bed. Now he turned to look once more.

  The sky was clear overhead, but the pitiless stars didn’t cast enough light to see by. Nor did the lantern light seeping through the gaudy house windows. Still, it struck Ryan that the little girl did move strangely, as if she were stiff, somehow. And was it a trick of the light, or did her face appear gray?

  “What’s going on out here?” Omar himself, shaved-headed, ferociously mustached, stood in the doorway to the barroom. He wore his inevitable apron and held his sawed-off scattergun in his big blunt hands. He wasn’t shy about raising his voice regardless of the hour.

  The wag drivers ignored him. One of them blew kisses at the teetering, silent child, then he leaned toward her, puckering his lips.

  “Gimme a kiss, little girl,” he said.

  As if shot from a catapult, she sprang at him. Her arms flew around his neck. She pressed her mouth to his in what looked like a kiss.

  “Jesus God! That’s plain wrong,” Mildred said. “Get him away from her!”

  The wag driver screamed. He reared up, batting frantically at the child, who continued to cling like a pigtailed monkey.

  She turned her head to look at Ryan and his companions. Her eyes were sunken pits. A dark stain was smeared all around her mouth, and dark liquid ran freely down her chin.

  The wag driver’s lips dangled from her teeth like a limp onion ring.

  Chapter Four

  Stiff-legged in horror, the wag drivers backed away from their stricken friend. They weren’t quick enough. The little girl jumped on the nearest man’s back and sank her teeth in the side of his neck.

  “Shit!” Reno shrieked. “She’s one of them!”

  “What the fuck?” Ryan said.

  Someone was hollering from the watchtower. “Stand back! Stand away from the gate there or I’ll shoot!”

  Wag drivers pried the little girl off their second stricken buddy and dashed her to the ground. Omar was striding toward them, shotgun in his fist. His body language suggested he wasn’t sure who to shoot first.

  “Start the wags,” Ryan told his companions. “It’s time to go.”

  “What about Plunkett?” J.B. asked.

  “I’ll get him,” Ryan said grimly.

  He’d scarcely started walking toward the gaudy when Krysty screamed, “Ryan!”

  Instinct made him look left, away from where the warning cry had come from. A man lurched toward him from the shadows between sheds.

  He moved hunched over, his face thrusting forward, his arms dangling. One cheek had been torn off, exposing teeth on his upper jaw. The wound didn’t bleed. His skin was gray in the faint light, his eyes white marbles.

  At Krysty’s cry Ryan had drawn his handblaster. Bracing it with both hands, he fired two quick shots through the center of the man’s chest.

  They were good hits. He saw them hit, punching through ragged plaid flannel over the sternum. One or both had to have penetrated the man’s heart. But rather than slowing, he put on a surprising burst of speed.

  “Don’t let it bite you!” Reno screamed.

  Ryan gave the onrushing thing a front thrust-kick to the sternum. The creature reeled back three steps, then with unwavering determination charged forward again.

  As much from habit as anything else, Ryan punched a third bullet through its forehead. The creature folded obediently as a dead man should, and lay still.

  “Head shots work!” Ryan shouted as he sprinted toward the main building.

  Around him people spilled from the sheds and the gaudy house itself. The yard was filling with bodies, confusion and noise. People screamed. Shots popped.

  At the front gate the Fat One didn’t seem to quite grasp what was going on. With Locke and Leon trailing behind, she walked toward the center of the yard, waving her flabby arms and shouting for everyone to cease firing.

  The little girl, the lower half her face painted with the blood of her victims, jumped up, apparently unhurt. She darted toward the large woman. The Fat One saw her and dropped to her knees. Holding her arms wide, she cried, “Come to me, child! Run!”

  The girl did. When she was ten feet from the kneeling woman her head exploded. The decapitated body flopped forward almost to the horrified woman’s feet.

  Stopping by the door to let a knot of panicky people out, Ryan looked back over his shoulder. Mildred was lowering her blocky ZKR 551 target revolver from a one-armed shooting stance. He caught a gleam of torchlight on tears streaming down her cheeks.

  The Fat One squalled in outrage and jumped to her feet. “That wasn’t a little girl anymore!” Reno yelled, jumping in front of Mildred as if to shield her from the wrath of Omar’s heftiest wife.

  From somewhere came the cry “They’re over the wall!”

  More of those creatures, men and women but not men or women, moved with unnatural hitching gaits through the crowd in the yard. Ryan thrust his way into the gaudy house, breasting a stream of half-naked sluts screaming as they raced out.

  The first thing that hit him when he entered was an eye-searing stink of smoke. It was more than the potbellied stove could possibly account for unless the chimney had gotten blocked. He took a wild flying guess that wasn’t the case.

  Behind the bar the Thin One flailed vigorously at three no-longer-human opponents with an aluminum baseball bat. It made musical thunking sounds as it bounced off bone lightly padded by muscle or skin, off joints and skulls. Family members, employees and patrons wrestled with enemies whose skin, bluish in the lantern light, was cratered with running open sores. Some were missing big chunks from their bodies, even arms.

  A wag driver grabbed the arm of an elderly man to try to pull the oldie off a comrade. The arm came off in his hands. He stared at it in comic amazement as the changed oldie sank his few remaining teeth into the second wag driver’s neck.

  Plunkett and crew were nowhere in sight. Fleeing sluts, guards and customers were blocking the stairs. Ryan began shoving them bodily out of the way. As strong as he was, their fear was stronger. He didn’t make much progress.

  Smoke began rolling along the hollows of the ceiling between the beams. The gaudy house was well and truly on fire.

  Loomis tumbled down the wooden stairs, wearing only his shiny, black leather pants. “They’re already changing!” he screamed, catching himself on all fours.

  Buck-naked and baby-pink, Boss Tim Plunkett lurched down the stairs behind his sec chief. His hairy, fish-pale belly hung low, obscuring his genitals. Blood gushed from his torn-out throat. His voice box and airway were
apparently still intact, or mostly so. As he banged from rail to wall and back, clutching his blood-gouting wound with one hand, he kept croaking, “Help me!”

  He toppled, to land on his gut with a massive crash.

  * * *

  SHUDDERING ORANGE FIRE erupted from the combined watch- and water tower, followed a beat later by a roar of full-auto blasterfire. Pressing the hand that held the pistol grip of his M-4000 scattergun to pin his battered hat against his head, J.B. reached with his free hand to snag the back of the man’s flannel shirt Krysty Wroth wore. He dragged her to the ground.

  Bullets cracked right over their heads, where their bodies had been an eye blink earlier. Headlights popped as the burst raked the Tundra’s front.

  The burst went on, sweeping the length of the big RV. Metal flexed musically.

  “Shit!” Krysty exclaimed. That startled J.B. The redhead normally didn’t use bad language.

  Then he smelled gasoline and understood why she cussed. Krysty threw herself over him, grabbing him so they both rolled sideways over the cold, trampled earth, away from the fuel-leaking RV. It also took them out of the dubious cover of the wag’s thin-gauge metal walls.

  The burst hammered on. Good way to burn out a barrel fast, the armorer in J.B. noted. Inevitably, the bullets struck a spark. The big wag lit up with a fat pillow of blue fire and a low but loud whump.

  J.B. felt a wave of heat wash over him as he came to rest on top of Krysty, looking down into her green eyes. He grinned.

  “I better climb off,” he said. “Don’t want any misunderstandings with Ryan.”

  “Reckon he’d understand,” she said.

  The machine gun lashed back across the crowded yard. J.B. could tell humans were getting hit. They fell and stayed down. The triple-strange creatures—the rotties—kept shambling along despite repeated torso strikes.