Wretched Earth

by James Axler

  “Look out!” Krysty gritted. J.B. tipped his face to the ground as bullets stitched right to left not two feet in front of him. Ricochets whined over him, gouts of dirt tapping the front brim of his hat.

  “That stupe in the tower’s gonna chill us before the rotties do,” he said.

  He heard the bark of a .38 from his left. The muzzle-flare from the tower was cut off. J.B. looked to where the single gunshot had come from.

  Mildred knelt on the dirt, her left elbow braced on one knee, her left hand cradling her handblaster.

  “You chill the dude, Millie?” he called.

  She shook her head. “Like you said, J.B. He was a bigger danger.”

  “Wags fucked,” Jak said, coming out of the shed behind J.B. “Tundra chilled. Other—”

  He shook his white-maned head in irritation. The burning cargo wag blocked the third vehicle in the shed. It blazed too vigorously for anyone to try to push the big vehicle clear.

  Krysty sat up beside J.B. She suddenly whipped her upper body left and shot twice with her snub-nosed Smith & Wesson. Right toward Mildred.

  Spinning around, J.B. saw a man with a black pit where one eye should be reel back from where he’d been about to blindside the sturdy woman. Apparently Krysty had hit him in the body, not the head, and he lunged for Mildred.

  “Shit!” J.B. yelped. He rolled fast right, trying to clear his own scattergun for a shot at the rottie. It’d be dangerous with Mildred in the way. But if it was really true that if you got bitten by one of these hoodoos, it turned you into one of them…

  There weren’t many things in this world that J. B. Dix shied away from. He’d seen his share of scary shit and then some. But he couldn’t stand to think of that happening to Mildred. To any of his friends.

  But he wouldn’t make it in time. Seconds slowed as he watched the rottie close in on Mildred, who was lining up a shot on another target and still unaware of her danger. He shouted a warning he knew would come too late.

  With a crunch a thin steel blade poked through the man’s head from right temple to left. The rottie went to his knees.

  “Touché,” Doc cried. He put a boot to the side of the slack-skinned, veined face and pushed. The creature flopped to its side and lay unmoving.

  J.B. scrambled to his feet. A man with an arm swinging from his elbow like a busted gate loomed in front of him, a vomitous reek of rotting flesh.

  Whipping up the M-4000, J.B. jabbed the steel-shod butt into the creature’s face. It lurched back two steps, then its head exploded as J.B. reversed the scattergun and fired, eight inches from the bridge of its nose.

  “You guys hold them off,” Krysty shouted, stuffing a speed-loader into her snub-nosed handblaster. It held only five shots, a triple-rough disadvantage in a fight like this. “Mildred, come help me get the packs.”

  “What do you plan?” Doc asked. He fended off a short-haired changed woman with his rapier and stabbed her deftly through the eye.

  “We’ve got to get out of here, fast!” Krysty said. “That’s my plan!”

  She and Mildred ducked into the shed.

  * * *

  AN EYE BLINK before his boss’s nude, bleeding bulk crashed down on him, Loomis took off like a sprinter, almost knocking down Ryan in his mad desire to get out the door.

  Two naked women came down the stairway. By their hair Ryan guessed they were the boss’s “secretaries,” Tina and Angela. Their faces were hard to recognize, gray and distorted with some unimaginable passion behind liberal smears of gore. Bottle-blonde Angela’s belly had been cut or ripped open. Purple lengths of intestine trailed out the red, gaping cavity. They were short, their ends ragged, as if the loops had been bitten through.

  Black hair flying, Tina flung herself on her boss’s wide, hairy white back. He thrashed feebly. It amazed Ryan he could move at all, at the rate he was bleeding out. Tina grabbed his head and, despite the thickness of his bull-like neck, began to bang his head against a stout square stair post. Angela, not inconvenienced in the least by her missing viscera, joined right in, gnawing her boss’s head as her partner rhythmically pounded it into the wood.

  A hellish light showed through the boards of the ceiling over the barroom. Sparks fell like glowing rain. A bald man stumbled toward Ryan, extending a clawed hand from which the little finger had been bitten. The wound had stopped bleeding. Ryan shot him in the face almost casually, so horribly fascinated was he by what was happening on the stairs.

  He felt no strong urge to try to rescue his employer. The big man was a sure chill anyway, with that neck wound. Not to mention that Reno’s crazy talk about victims rising again as one of the changed if the rotties chilled them was looking pretty plausible here.

  With a sound like a melon being dropped, Boss Plunkett’s head split open. Amazingly, his naked limbs continued to twitch, and he moaned in dismay. Tina clawed briefly, then peeled back a section of skull with scalp attached.

  With a superhuman effort the huge man reared to his knees, reaching a pudgy arm toward Ryan.

  “Help me,” he mouthed.

  Then he stiffened and his eyes rolled up in his beet-red face. Tina had plunged a long-nailed hand into his opened cranium and scooped up a juicy handful from his until-then-living brain. She mashed it against her wide-open mouth, getting as much blood and dough-colored brains on her face as inside.

  Plunkett plopped forward, unmoving.

  Chewing, Tina looked at Ryan. Her eyes were as white as milky marbles, yet had a terrifying intensity. Without thinking, he raised his SIG-Sauer, swiftly braced and flash-aimed, and shot her through the forehead.

  She slumped. Her partner stayed astride Plunkett’s pale fat back and began to greedily stuff fistfuls of brains into her mouth.

  With a roar, the ceiling caved in over the bar.

  “Time to go,” Ryan said. He turned and dashed back into the night’s cold but welcoming embrace.

  Chapter Five

  The caravanserai yard was a hell full of the struggling damned. Bodies thrashed. The doomed screamed as rotties bit great chunks out of living human flesh. Across the yard Ryan saw the former Boss Plunkett’s big RV burning merrily. He made for it at a run, as if it were a beacon.

  He shot a woman covered in human blood when she lunged from his right to bite him. A skinny adolescent boy, not Locke or anyone Ryan had seen before, blocked his path. He drew his panga and hacked at the youth’s head. The kid fell. Whether he stayed down or not Ryan never knew. He wasn’t about to hang around to watch.

  He reached his friends. J.B. was holding a tall man’s head and shoulders against the side of the burning wag, where yellow flames enveloped them. The man continued to paw at the Armorer as if nothing unusual was happening, his sleeves yellow wings of flame.

  Ryan shot the man through the head. He collapsed into a flaming, stinking heap as J.B. leaped clear.

  “Quit fucking around, J.B.,” Ryan said. “We got to shake off the dust of this place.”

  Krysty had her back to a shed, fending off an attacker with a trenching shovel from a wag’s emergency kit. Ryan hacked the rottie across the back of the neck. He folded.

  Doc stuck the tip of his rapier through the eyeball of an approaching rottie. Behind him, Mildred held a baseball bat cocked should anyone get past him. Jak danced around with a big trench knife in his hand, easily evading swipes from a bearlike foe and awaiting an opening to dart past and stab him in the back of the head.


  “We need a ride out, and fast,” Ryan said.

  “Easier said than done, Ryan,” J.B. answered. “Seeing as how our wags are either in flames or blocked in.”

  Krysty ran to Ryan and gave him a quick hug. She had been rooting around inside the wag with the shot-up engine block. The ax handle she held was stained with blood at the tip. He kissed her quickly on the cheek, then pulled free to point back across the yard.

  “There’s our ride,” he said. “Right there.”

  “That’s those damn Cthulhu cultists’ bus,” Mildred said. “They might have something to say about our hitching a lift.”

  Planting the blade of his panga under his right arm, Ryan switched magazines in his SIG. He didn’t much worry about getting gore on his coat. It wasn’t the first time and wouldn’t be the last.

  “Doesn’t mean we got to listen,” he said. “Follow me. Wedge formation.”

  Without looking to see if his companions would follow—because he knew from long experience they would—he set off at a trot for the battered, faded-green bus. It had a snowplow blade up front and chicken wire over the windows, most of which lacked glass.

  Cultists surrounded the school bus, trying to hold off the moaning horde by pushing at them with their bare hands. They were determined and vigorous enough to manage it for now.

  The concentration of warm food drew the changed.

  Ryan passed Brother Ha’ahrd, who was surrounded by a phalanx of followers, including a few former wag drivers that seemed to have undergone a last-minute conversion in the face of overwhelming, mind-frying horror. He was loudly preaching a doctrine of love and forbearance and waiting on the will of the Great Old Ones. The rotties didn’t seem to be listening. They were more interested in eating his head.

  Which meant most of the shambling freaks were focused on something other than the approach of Ryan and friends from the rear. He heard a couple shots pop off behind him, and the thwack of stout ash wood on a skull, accompanied by a grunt of effort and triumph from Mildred. Apparently a few of the freaks still tracked them.

  Ryan didn’t look back. Unless somebody screamed for his help, his job was clearing the way.

  He waded into the mob of rotties surging toward the bus door, where three cultists had linked arms to keep them out. Ryan hacked at the backs of necks and skulls as if the changed were a stand of brush he was trying to cut a trail through.

  A woman turned a blood mask to snarl at him and he shot her between the eyes. He sensed a presence on his right and whipped the butt of his SIG around to squash a changed man’s nose in a spray of dark fluid. The rottie staggered back. An eye blink later Doc’s slim rapier impaled the creature through both temples like an apple on a skewer.

  A burly rottie, obviously a changed wag driver, bare-chested and with a short Mohawk, spun to bare his teeth and spread his arms to seize the one-eyed man. Ryan hammered him between the eyes with the SIG’s butt, then shot him in the forehead as he staggered back.

  The rotties pulled down the two women and one man barring the door. As the cultists futilely screamed and thrashed, the rotties homed in on them. Ryan kicked at the flailing tangle until the way was clear, then rushed into the school bus with his friends at his heels.

  A stout woman in a robe sewn together from burlap bags barred their way. “Stop! There’s no room in here for anyone but believers!”

  Ryan was about to rebut her with a copper-jacketed 9 mm bullet where it would do the most good when Krysty grabbed his arm from behind.

  “Wait!” she yelled. “She’s right!”

  The cultist was. Ryan looked around the bus to see the seats and aisles jammed with refugees. Not all of them looked as if they belonged to Brother Ha’ahrd’s flock, or at least had started the day that way. Still, the practical puzzle was insoluble: even shooting the reticent wasn’t likely to drive these people out into the blood-smeared rottie mob.

  “Up!” he heard Jak call.

  “Say what?” Ryan turned to see Jak disappearing up the first window behind the door.

  Ryan jumped back outside. After even momentary exposure to the relative warmth inside the bus, generated by close-packed bodies and humid panting breath, the chill hit him like a slap. As did the stench of burning petrocarbons, human flesh and hair, and spilled intestines.

  “Follow Jak!” Ryan yelled. He stooped to grab one of Krysty’s calves. J.B. grabbed the other, and the two men boosted the woman high enough to scramble onto the roof after the albino youth.

  Stabbing, slashing, shooting only when utterly necessary, Ryan and Doc helped the cultists stave off the rotties while Mildred and J.B. quickly passed the packs up to Krysty and Jak atop the bus. Then Ryan and J.B. gave Mildred a boost, and Doc. Finally, Ryan stood facing out, while J.B. scaled him like a monkey and clambered up.

  The changed surged forward. Unfeeling hands reached out for Ryan, blood-spilling mouths gaping wide to consume his flesh.

  * * *

  MILDRED HAD BARELY got her bearings atop the ice-cold metal roof of the bus when another stout woman wearing the Cthulhu cult’s flowing robes and head scarf came bustling up alongside the baggage that had been strapped onto a rickety roof rack.

  “You can’t come up here!” she snapped. “This is for believers only—”

  “Gaia forgive me,” Krysty said. She kicked the stout woman off the roof.

  Mildred felt her brows climb up her forehead. Krysty looked back at her and shrugged.

  “Move your broad butt, woman!” yelled a familiar voice from behind. Mildred turned a furious glare on J.B., whose head popped up over the roof edge like a curious prairie dog’s.

  “John,” she said, “you and me are going to talk.”

  But she shifted aside to make way for him as a great cry went up from the cultists below.

  “Brother Ha’ahrd!” a voice screamed.

  Ryan looked past the rotties closing in on him to see the long-haired prophet knocked off his feet by a surge of creatures who had overwhelmed his guards. Cultists stampeded off the bus, bowling over the rotties in their path in their zeal to rescue their guru.

  Ryan had caught a break.

  Not a man to waste an opportunity, Ryan holstered his panga and handblaster, spun around and jumped as high as he could. Krysty and J.B. caught hold of his outstretched arms and hauled him up on top of the bus as if he were a child.

  “After all this trouble we could ride inside now,” Mildred said peevishly. She knelt on the heaped baggage, making fast their own packs. Doc squatted to one side, reloading his revolver as calmly as if he were out for a morning stroll outside his home in nineteenth-century Vermont.

  Ryan shook his head emphatically. “Just as glad to ride up here,” he said. “Rotties get inside—”

  Screams pealed out the door. “Shit!” J.B. said, leaning out to peer over. “They are!”

  “Grab legs!” Jak called. Without waiting to see if anybody responded, he got down on his knees at the front end of the bus roof. While the few cultists and other refugees who had also sought safety up there looked on dumbly, Krysty and Mildred jumped to grab the youth’s ankles as he let himself topple forward.

  An instant later Ryan heard the roar of Jak’s .357 Magnum Colt Python.

  * * *

  FEELING KRYSTY’S AND Mildred’s grips strong on his ankles, Jak let himself almost smack face-first into the cold windshield of the bus, using his right palm at the last moment to keep from breaking his nose.

 
Beyond the glass, which remained unfogged due to the icy air streaming in the open door, he saw the look of terror on the driver’s face, rendered more comic by being upside down: the saucer eyes, the mouth a screaming O below a bearded chin.

  The driver had good reason to scream. He was trying to hang on to the wheel, probably to keep from getting pulled out of his seat, and batting with his right arm at a rottie who was trying to bite his head. Other rotties had got themselves jammed in the door in their lust for human flesh and hot blood.

  Jak pressed the vented muzzle of his blaster against the glass near the first rottie’s head and pulled the trigger. The Magnum blaster kicked itself away from the windshield as the glass collapsed inward. He let his arm straighten to ride out the recoil; he hadn’t been able to brace properly, and expected the reaction.

  Inside, the bus driver stared in even greater horror at his attacker. The back of the changed woman’s head had been blown off. The guy was staring through her mouth at the other rotties still struggling to break free and get at him.

  The half-headed rottie collapsed. People in the bus were screaming and leaning over at least one person who’d been hit by the 125-grain hollowpoint slug, which hadn’t expended all its energy blowing the rottie’s head apart. Jak took in the fact without emotional reaction. These were no friends of his, nor enemies, either. So why care?

  With the window glass gone he had clear shots at the rotties in the door. Grabbing the Python’s grips with both hands, he fired three shots as fast as he could. Two of the creatures went down at once, shot through the forehead. The third reeled back with her lower jaw torn away. Instantly, hands grabbed her from behind and threw her to the ground as furious cultists surged in, bearing their injured leader.

  Jak turned to the driver. “Drive,” he said, gesturing with his Python for emphasis.

  Eyes all but popping free of his lean, ashen face, the driver put the wag in gear and hit the gas.

  * * *