Wretched Earth

by James Axler

  A BLOOD-STREAKED GRAY head appeared over the rear end of the bus roof as the vehicle took off with a jerk. Kneeling on the cool metal, Ryan had unstrapped his Steyr from the top of his backpack and cracked the bolt to make sure the weapon was loaded. He put a hand down briefly to steady himself against the sudden acceleration, then whipped the longblaster’s butt to his shoulder and fired.

  The head disappeared. Whether he’d destroyed the brain or not Ryan didn’t know. The 7.62 mm bullet might have caught the creature in the shoulder. It didn’t matter as long as the thing didn’t get up here.

  “Everybody all right?” Ryan shouted, hanging on to the jury-built luggage rack as the bus wheeled in as tight an arc as it could toward the compound exit. “Sing out.”

  “Yes,” Krysty called.

  “I’m here,” J.B. said.

  “Capital, Ryan!” Doc declared.

  “Ace,” Mildred said sourly, as she and Krysty stood up together, hoisting Jak back up with his white hair swinging wildly. “Jak’s here, too.”

  The albino youth jackknifed up between the two women and popped to his feet.

  “Holy shit!” Ryan saw Mildred pointing straight ahead.

  The caravanserai gate was shut. It was also on fire.

  Chapter Six

  Yellow flames danced against the backdrop of the snow-dusted prairie beyond.

  The bus driver never slowed. “Brace yourselves!” Ryan shouted. He saw Krysty and Mildred turn away from the front of the bus and throw themselves on the mounded baggage. He did likewise.

  The snowplow blade hit the gate. Whether more weakly constructed than it appeared, or weakened by the flames, it flew apart, sending flaming planks and posts spiraling away like pinwheels.

  The bus took off down the dirt road, which was basically a pair of ever-deepening ruts running northeast to southwest.

  “Tie on!” Ryan shouted over his shoulder to his companions. As far as he could see, the six of them now had the roof to themselves. The handful of cultists who had climbed up here, presumably not as keenly honed to a survival edge as the companions, either had been tossed off by the wag’s wild maneuvering, or had bailed voluntarily.

  A mob tottered in slow pursuit of the wag, black figures silhouetted against yellow flame. They faded rapidly as the school bus jounced off across the countryside.

  Lying on his belly, Ryan used his belt to fasten himself to the steel rail of the roof rack. His companions chimed in with shouts as they finished making themselves fast.

  “Weapons out!” he called when Doc called the last acknowledgment.

  “The rotties can’t catch us on foot,” Mildred said.

  “Do you know there’s not a hundred of ’em waiting out here?”

  “Weapon out,” Mildred said.

  * * *

  THE GREAT PLAINS were never as flat as they appeared, Mildred thought. The dark land scrolling past them mostly looked like the top of a billiard table. Yet she ached in elbows and thighs and breasts from being slammed on the metal roof every time the bus bounced over an unseen obstacle or crashed down onto ground as hard as a baron’s heart, each time threatening destruction to its ancient suspension. Meanwhile the back of her was freezing through from the ice-blast wind of passage, especially her legs, covered only by the thin fabric of her camo pants.

  Every bounce also reminded her that the dark country abounded with hiding places for lurking foes. Not just the changed, either. Lethal predators abounded in the Deathlands, animal, mutie and human.

  Shadows seemed to flit across the shadowed land. A score of times Mildred opened her mouth to cry an alarm, or slipped her gloved finger into the trigger guard of her Czech-made .38-caliber target revolver. Each time she held herself back from screaming or shooting. And each time no attack came.

  She was horribly aware that didn’t mean the threats she thought she saw in the shadows weren’t real.

  The bus picked up speed, trading the occasional bone-slamming jolt for a constant rattle that felt as if it might detach Mildred’s retinas. But she gritted her teeth and hung on.

  Because one thing she’d learned, more than a century before she’d ever opened her eyes to this terrible new world, was to endure.

  * * *

  AN HOUR LATER the bus rumbled to a stop in a sandy wash next to a slowly moving stream. Steam rolled from under the hood. The engine hissed and pinged as it cooled.

  “What’s happening?” Ryan called.

  “Driver says he thinks we’re far enough away to take a break.” Krysty called back. “He says we’ve come about thirty miles.”

  “Great,” J.B. said. “I could stand to try to winch my bones straight again. The knots in my muscles’re getting knots in them.”

  “All right,” Ryan said. “Everybody cut loose. Keep eyes skinned and blasters ready.”

  “Really, friend Ryan,” Doc croaked, “sometimes you belabor the obvious.”

  Ryan stood and stretched. He felt about the same way J.B. did—as if some triple-size mutie had grabbed his ankles and tried to bust boulders using Ryan as a hammer.

  The door opened and passengers spilled out onto drifted sand. Some fell weakly to hands and knees. Somebody puked noisily.

  A woman with a hood pulled up over her head scarf stopped after several paces and turned to look up at Ryan.

  “Any of our brothers and sisters up there with you?”

  “No,” he said.

  She gazed up at him for a spell, then turned and walked off.

  “What that about?” Jak asked, walking up to Ryan. He moved with his customary youthful-predator swagger. Ryan shrugged in response. He reckoned Jak didn’t feel much better than anybody else, but had enough resilience to hide it better.

  The one-eyed man already knew none of his party was injured. It had been hard to make himself heard above the bus’s clatter, but he’d confirmed that nobody had caught any grief beyond scrapes and bruises.

  And, most importantly, no bites.

  The companions moved off to the side. The cultists and other refugees showed no interest in mingling with them, and they were just as glad not to have to answer any uncomfortable questions about the manner in which they’d hitched a ride. Not to mention the fates of the cultists who’d been atop the bus with them.

  “A fire would be welcome,” Doc said, rubbing his hands together. “Restore warmth to chilled bones.”

  In lieu of that they squatted in the lee of the bus. An east wind had risen during their uncomfortable ride. It came whistling beneath the wag’s swaybacked undercarriage, cutting through Ryan’s clothes and skin like a knife.

  “What do you plan to burn for fuel, you old coot?” Mildred asked. “Your extra long johns from your pack?”

  They had unloaded their backpacks from the luggage rack, just in case they needed to make their own way out of there in a hurry. Or in case some of the cultists unexpectedly drove off.

  “What are those rad-blasted creatures?” Ryan said, ignoring the byplay. He stood with his back to the wag and his Steyr slung over his shoulder.

  “Triple-pain in the hindquarters, is what,” J.B. said.

  “They have me feeling the creepies all over,” Krysty said.

  Ryan looked at her. “How come they don’t feel pain? How come a wound that would drop any normal man doesn’t slow them down? How can they even move? And why do they need to eat, anyway? Far as I can tell, they’re chills, or next thing to it. What do they need
food for?”

  “Why, my dear Ryan,” Doc said, “you seem to have taken an unusually empirical turn of mind.”

  “Didn’t think you went in much for abstract curiosity,” Mildred said.

  “Nothing abstract about it. ‘Know your enemy like you know yourself,’ Trader always said.”

  “I don’t want to know these things,” Krysty said. “They’re not part of Gaia’s nature.”

  “Worse than muties?” J.B. asked.

  “Yes,” the redhead said emphatically. “There’s a wrongness about them I’ve never felt from the most horrible mutie. Ryan, they’re dead. They really are. Just like those hogs in Canada.”

  Ryan nodded. “That’s why I want to know about them, Krysty. How do you fight what’s already dead?”

  “Shoot head,” Jak said. “Works.”

  “Yeah,” Ryan said. “Why?”

  “You really aren’t succumbing to curiosity for its own sake?” Doc asked.

  “Fireblast, no. If I know why that chills them, I may be able to find something else that does it, too. At least waste less time and ammo doing stuff that doesn’t faze the bastards.”

  “Chopping their heads off should work,” Krysty suggested.

  “Yeah,” Ryan said. “I hacked one or two through the back of the neck, too. That seemed to drop them, and made them stay down.”

  “Their central nervous system appears to retain some function,” Mildred said. She squatted with her arms crossed tightly beneath her breasts. Her big chocolate eyes stared intently at nothing in particular as she wrestled with the questions.

  “Or perhaps something else makes use of their nervous system,” Doc said.

  “You talking crazy, Doc? Don’t need you losing it, just now,” Ryan said.

  But Mildred had raised her head and was looking hard at her customary antagonist. “What are you getting at, old man?”

  “Clearly, or at least so far as we can tell, life has fled these poor unfortunates that Ryan dubbed ‘rotties.’ Yet they move. And we saw none of those horrid worms from the north.”

  “You channeling Galileo?” Mildred asked. “Eppur si muove.”

  Doc laughed, a soundless, head-bobbing motion.

  “What are you two rambling on about?” Ryan demanded.

  “Ancient history,” Mildred said. “You wouldn’t be interested.”

  “Perhaps these unfortunates have been taken over by some kind of organism, not the worms of Canada, which we haven’t seen.”

  “Well, we definitely know that’s a possibility,” Ryan said.

  “When I was held captive by the vile whitecoats,” Doc said, “my captors often spoke of artificial organisms that they could program to do their bidding. Like living steel, but so small the finest optical microscope could not see them.”

  “You talking about nanotechnology, Doc?” Mildred asked.

  He blinked. A light snow had begun to fall, swirling on the side of the bus away from the wind. White crystals crusted the long lashes above his intense blue eyes.

  “I believe that was the term they used, yes.”

  “We’ve heard about that before,” Krysty said. “But how could this nanotechnology be involved here? These are people. Or rather, creatures that were people.”

  “Perhaps the nanotechnological machines permeate the bodies of their victims,” Doc said slowly, clearly speaking thoughts as they formed in his mind. “Somehow they animate the limbs and impart some measure of direction to their actions.”

  “That almost sounds like demonic possession you’re talking about, old man,” Mildred said.

  Doc frowned at her, seeming to chew over the concept mentally rather than take offense.

  “Aside from arising from an agency not strictly supernatural,” he said slowly, “how is this possession not aptly described as demonic?”

  “So why does shooting their heads chill them?” J.B. asked.

  “Obviously, the organisms, or whatever they are, require their victims’ bodies to sustain and reproduce themselves. Like disease germs. Perhaps they also make use of the human nervous system to control their stolen bodies.”

  “Ugh.” Krysty shivered.

  “Drive us,” Jak said. “Like bus.”

  J.B. turned to him, his eyes squinted behind the round lenses of his glasses. “That’s cold-blooded even for you, Jak.”

  The albino teen just shrugged.

  “If the pathogens are nanoscale robots,” Mildred said, “that might explain why the, uh, the change is infectious.”

  “There’s something I don’t understand,” Ryan said. “Or mebbe I should say, something else I don’t understand. From what that skinny kid told us back in the ’serai, it took his friend hours to ‘change’ after he got bitten. But Plunkett’s gaudy sluts were already rotties when he came screaming down the stairs, when I went in to get him. They couldn’t have been bitten more than a few minutes before.”

  “That reinforces the idea the change works like a sickness,” Krysty said.

  “How would that happen?” Ryan asked.

  “Different people show different reactions to disease,” Mildred said. “Some die quickly, some just get sick. Some are even immune.”

  Ryan felt his lips peel back from his teeth, which instantly sent spikes of pain up the bones of his face from the cold.

  “So they’re plaguers?” he said.

  Mildred nodded.

  “All right,” he said. “So we know blowing their brains out drops them. So does cutting the spinal cord, at least in the neck. Shooting them anywhere else is pretty much a waste, unless it gets them to back off long enough to get in a head shot. Or bash their skulls in.”

  “Cutting off their arms and legs should do it, too,” Mildred said. “Eliminate them as threats, anyway.”

  “Long as you’re careful not to get close enough they can bite you,” Dix said.

  “Always the charmer, John,” Mildred said. He flashed her a grin.

  For a while they squatted, or in Ryan’s case stood, in silence, listening to the wind boom and sigh across the plains.

  “I feel kinda bad we lost the body we were supposed to be guarding,” Mildred said. “Plunkett did pay us up front to protect him and his people.”

  “It happens,” Ryan said. “Not even the first time it happened to us.”

  “We could never be accused of failing to do everything within our power to carry out our charge,” Doc said. “These were circumstances as unforeseeable as they were beyond our control.”

  “Boss Plunkett,” Jak said. He spit, carefully aiming downwind of himself and his companions. “Was dick.”

  Mildred shrugged. “And there you have it.”

  J.B. rubbed the stubble on his chin. “So what now, Ryan?”

  “Continue on to Sweetwater Junction, I reckon. We got some jack and supplies from Plunkett up front, but we burned a triple-lot of ammo getting away. Mebbe we can buy more there.”

  “And water,” J.B. said. “That ammo will command some serious jack, though.”

  “Right.” Though it lay in the midst of some of the worst, most desolate Deathlands, the ville of Sweetwater Junction was relatively large and prosperous, owing to its location on a trade crossroad, as well as the aquifer that gave it its name. “Our canteens’ll be dry as neutron bones by the time we get there. Mebbe we can even find work for a while, stock up.”

  Krysty looked up at that, her emerald eyes big and her red hair starting to uncurl a bit.
Ryan knew what she was thinking. She never gave up hope that they’d find a place to settle down, rest from their wanderings and make a real life for themselves.

  Fireblast, Ryan thought. It’s what keeps me going, too. Nothing he’d heard about Sweetwater Junction really screamed out “safe haven” to him. But what the nuke? They wouldn’t know until they got there.

  “Excuse me.”

  Everybody’s head snapped around at the timid words. The speaker was a thin young cultist woman, shivering in her sackcloth robe.

  “We heard that one of you was a healer,” she said. “We have wounded.”

  Mildred got up. Ryan frowned briefly but said nothing. He wasn’t thrilled with her helping the cultists, but he had to admit he had no grounds to try to stop her. None of them needed her services, and he could see how a little extra goodwill might come in handy out here in the middle of the badlands. Even the goodwill of as sorry a pack of people as the cultists.

  “Thank you so much,” the thin woman said. “Brother Ha’ahrd is in a mighty sore way.”

  “Brother Ha’ahrd?” J.B. repeated incredulously. “He’s alive?”

  She nodded. The wind whipped wisps of blond hair from under her head scarf.

  “He’s hanging on to life, by the grace of the Great Old Ones,” she said. “He was bit something grievous by those monsters. As were a number of our brothers and sisters. But the faithful rescued him and brought him back aboard the bus, and we were carried here to safety.”

  Mildred was nodding, her mind already switched to the mode of assessing the task ahead of her. She started walking toward the clump of moaning cultists.

  Ryan caught her arm.

  “What?” she demanded, turning back.

  The others had gone still, as if they’d finally been frozen in place by the merciless late-winter wind. Ryan felt as if his skin was stretched over an ice sculpture himself.

  “Did you say bitten?” Krysty asked.

  Chapter Seven

  “Yes.” The young woman nodded. “Some were shot, or cut or burned pretty bad. But most of our injured were bitten and scratched by those horrible things.”