Wretched Earth

by James Axler

  “Let go of me, Ryan,” Mildred said. “I’ve got to—”

  “Got to what, Millie?” J.B. asked. His normally soft voice was edged like a blade. “Get bitten and changed yourself?”

  “I— Oh. Oh.” Her face acquired a greenish-gray tinge.

  “Time to go,” Jak said.

  Ryan heard an exclamation, more an awed mass exhalation, from the direction of the cultists. He turned and looked.

  Brother Ha’ahrd had stood straight up from amid his adoring followers. It was as if he’d been miraculously healed.

  Or…something decidedly else.

  For a moment the huddled believers stared up at their prophet in worshipful awe. The thin blonde who had spoken to Mildred ran toward him, crying, “Brother Ha’ahrd! You’ve returned to us!”

  The others shifted aside to let her through. Brother Ha’ahrd’s big baggy head turned toward her as she ran up, her arms spread to hug him. For an instant Ryan thought he saw a red glow as of reflected firelight in his sunken eyes.

  He grabbed her shoulders and bit a chunk out of her cheek.

  “Fuck me,” J.B. said matter-of-factly.

  “No,” Ryan said. “Fuck these stupes. We’re leaving.”

  The crowd had shrunk away in horror when their beloved prophet sank his teeth into his acolyte. Now she screamed and thrashed impotently as he gnawed at her skull. Around them other figures grappled wildly, silhouetted against the feeble bluish flames of the fire.

  One broke free and sprinted for the companions. It was a small, slight man whose scarf had fallen back to reveal a balding head. One side of his face looked as if it had been chewed off. The eyeball bounced around wildly on the stalk of its nerve.

  Mildred turned sideways, raised her ZKR 551 one-handed and fired once. His head snapped back, a hole in the center of his high forehead. He collapsed, to roll bonelessly across the frozen ground for several feet.

  “Some of these bastards’re fast,” she said.

  “Leave how?” Krysty asked.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” J.B. asked. “Why flee across the landscape on foot like bare-ass hillies when we can ride in style?”

  “Get the gear on the bus,” Ryan commanded. “Also your asses. Time to move.”

  “But it’s not our bus!” Mildred protested.

  “It is now,” he said, hefting his own pack.

  Mildred looked distressed, but she holstered her handblaster, picked up her own backpack and was second on the bus after Doc.

  “Snap it up,” Ryan said. Most of the cultists were still preoccupied dealing with their comrades who hadn’t exactly survived, but refused to stay dead. But one woman spotted the companions piling into the wag, and raised a cry of protest.

  It rose to a shriek as another woman chomped the side of her neck from behind.

  “Don’t know how many of these people’re going to have use for a wag, anyway,” Ryan said as Krysty and Jak piled aboard.

  People started running for the bus. At this point, which were normal and which were rotties didn’t much matter. Ryan sprang quickly up the steps inside.

  J.B. was ensconced in the driver’s seat.

  “No key!” Jak called.

  “Have some faith, Jak,” the Armorer said. He already had a multitool in action, digging a bundle of colored wiring out from beneath the steering wheel. A moment, a spark, a smell of ozone, and the bus’s engine blatted and growled to life.

  Still in the step well, Ryan pivoted and slammed the door shut, leaning on the bar. A heartbeat later a cultist crashed into it. He hammered desperately on the glass with his fists.

  “Let me in!” he pleaded, his voice muted by the glass. His breath made a smear of condensation that blurred the look of sheer fear on his face.

  Other figures came up from behind. Hands seized him, and he howled as fingernails dug into his cheek.

  “Go,” Ryan said. “Now. Time really is blood here, J.B. Ours.”

  The bus accelerated. The screaming cultist and his changed companions bumped along the steel flank and were left behind.

  “Old girl just needed to warm up a moment,” J.B. sang out.

  “Old bitch nearly got us chilled,” Ryan grumbled, hanging on to the steel post by the first seat as the ancient wag bounced overland.

  “People are running after us,” Mildred reported from the rear of the bus. She sounded upset about it. “I don’t think they’re all rotties.”

  “Good for them,” Ryan said. “If they’re not stupes, they’ll keep on running.”

  * * *

  BUT THE OLD CLATTERY BUS had something to say about carrying them all the way to their goal, Sweetwater Junction. Namely, that nobody had topped up its fuel at Omar’s before their unceremonious departure, and the tank ran dry.

  It stopped in the middle of a featureless nowhere. Ryan opened the door and stepped outside into a blast of cold wind freighted with tiny ice particles that stung his face.

  “Damn,” he said, and went back inside.

  They slept the rest of the night in the bus. It wasn’t warm, but it protected them from the wind.

  In the thin gray light of dawn they ate a cold breakfast of jerky and dried fruit from their stores. Then Ryan had them bring the cultists’ packs down from the roof to be rifled for items of use or value.

  “I feel like a grave robber,” Mildred said.

  Ryan and Jak kept watch from the emptied roof. Ryan occasionally swept the horizon with his rifle shouldered and his eye to the scope. He could easily hear the conversation on the ground below despite the rushing wind.

  “We don’t know if all the folks whose packs these were are dead, Millie,” J.B. said.

  Uh-oh, Ryan thought. He and Jak looked at each other.

  J.B. was Ryan’s best friend. There was nobody handier with a gun or a gadget, and nobody he’d rather have at his back—except maybe Krysty. There was no harm or malice in the little armorer. Unless you were an enemy. In which case, fuck you.

  But sometimes he just didn’t say the right thing.

  “That doesn’t exactly make me feel better, John,” Mildred said. The tone in her voice was as cold as the prairie wind. “We’re robbing people of material they might need to survive.”

  They had piled meds, canned food, some jerked meat, jack and water bottles in a heap. It was turning into a tidy pile. To Ryan’s annoyance there were neither weapons nor ammo. These cultists were pacifists.

  “We’re not taking it back to them, Mildred,” Krysty said. “No point in letting it go to waste, is there?”

  She nodded. “I hear you. Still…”

  “Way I see it,” J.B. said, “their loss is our gain.”

  Mildred shot him a look like a burst of machine-gun fire and stalked away. Frowning in puzzlement, J.B. started after her.

  Krysty caught his arm and shook her head.

  It all rolled off Ryan’s shoulders and down his back like rain beading on his coat. Mildred had her spells. She was no different than Doc that way. Only instead of straying from reality, as the old man occasionally did, Mildred sometimes got overwhelmed by how different the world she lived in was from what she’d grown up with. She had come a long way over the years, but she had her moments.

  Her squeamishness didn’t bother him. Both Mildred and Doc had valuable skills for the group. Neither had much trouble snapping to and doing what needed to be done when the shithammer came down. That was what mattered most to Ryan.

  They split the proce
eds among their own packs. Mildred accepted her share without comment, although she was still tight-lipped. J.B. shot the sun with his minisextant and confirmed their position was a two to three days’ walk out of Sweetwater Junction. They set out west for the ville.

  They walked for a day beneath skies filled with clouds the color of spilled brains, bent over to reduce the impact of the wind. They were near enough the main route to the Junction, a predark road with two cracked but mostly intact lanes of pavement, to catch sight of it every now and again. Ryan decided to stay clear. The going wasn’t too bad with the ground frozen, and he didn’t feel eager to encounter any fellow wayfarers just now. If any of the companions didn’t like that decision, they didn’t say so.

  As sunset cast diffused shadows across the plain to the east, they saw smoke drifting from the far side of a rise a mile or two ahead.

  “Coldhearts,” J.B. said.

  “Mebbe,” Ryan said. “But Baron Sharp of Sweetwater’s got a rep for wide-ranging and frequent patrols. And not much sense of mercy.”

  “You thinking of signing on for that, lover?” Krysty asked.

  Ryan shrugged. “Like to keep the option open.”

  “Careless, letting smoke seen,” Jak said, squatting on his heels and looking like a red-eyed white wolf. “Double-stupe.”

  “Mebbe, mebbe not,” Ryan said. “They might just be confident they can handle any grief the smoke draws to ’em. Anyway, we’re not looking to sign on with them. Not sight unseen.”

  “We could use some information,” Krysty said. “Especially if they’re just out of Sweetwater Junction.”

  “Yeah,” Ryan said. “Jak, you head on out front. Creepy-crawl their camp, see what they look like. We’ll come on after you.”

  “Shouldn’t we try to set up some kind of rendezvous point?” Mildred asked.

  Jak laughed. “Day can’t find friends in open,” he said, “day to die.”

  * * *

  AN HOUR LATER, the nighttime landing on the Deathlands like a geological stratum of coal brought the party to a sudden halt.

  “Don’t need to go stumbling into any sentries in the dark,” Ryan said. They were no more than a quarter mile from the camp. Its fire could be seen as a little dome of yellow glowing atop a long slow rise.

  The wind in the grass made a sound like six billion soldier ants on the march.

  The companions hunkered down with their backs to the cut of an arroyo to shelter them from the freezing wind. They’d hardly done so when Ryan heard nine soft hoots float on the cold night air, fading away at the end. They sounded almost like words “who cooks for you, who cooks for you all… .”

  It was the call of the barred owl, a species with a wide range, including the densely wooded bayous of the Gulf Coast. But a bird whose range did not include a land as treeless as this.

  Ryan stood up. The wind ran icy fingers through his hair, and the chill went right through his scalp, seemingly into his brain.

  “Head on in, Jak,” he called softly. “We won’t shoot at you.”

  Even Ryan jumped when Jak suddenly landed on the soft sand of the dry stream bed right at his side. The youth laughed noiselessly.

  “You can be such a dick, Jak,” said Mildred, who’d been half dozing with her arms around her knees.

  “What’d you find?” J.B. asked. “Do we fight or flee?”

  “Or mebbe even talk to them,” Krysty said with gentle irony.

  “Not look like coldhearts.”

  “Ah, but Jak, what do coldhearts look like?” Doc asked.

  “Shave heads. Big mustaches. Tattoos. Too many weps.”

  Hard as it was at first to try to envision “too many weps” in the Deathlands, Ryan quickly caught the point. A peaceful party would be well armed if it wanted to stay alive, unrobbed and unraped. But it couldn’t afford to load itself down with blasters and knives. Those things were heavy and unwieldy, and interfered with carrying trifles like food and water. So a party that bristled with armament meant coldhearts.

  “So what do our friends out there actually look like?” Ryan asked.

  Jak shrugged. He had bitten into a strip of dried fish scavvied from the pilgrims’ packs, and was crunching on it. The stuff was so horrible even his Deathlands-born companions, J.B., Krysty and Ryan, who had been known to eat day-dead coyote with relish, couldn’t stomach it. But the albino teen loved it.

  “Traders,” he said, little bits of fishy vileness falling from his pale lips. “Talk like. Look like had to leave someplace in hurry.”

  “How can you tell that, Jak?” Krysty asked.

  “No wags. Just drag pole, mebbe two.”

  “Even conveyances so crude would constitute a genuine rarity out here,” Doc said, “given the paucity of trees.”

  J.B. swapped looks with Ryan. “Be the sort of thing traders might grab on their way out of a ville in a rush, though,” the Armorer said.

  “And the nearest ville that way is Sweetwater Junction,” Mildred commented.

  “Right,” Ryan said with a decisive nod. He stooped to collect his backpack, which he’d dumped as soon as they’d sheltered in the wash. “Let’s go see if they want to talk.”

  * * *

  FROM TWENTY FEET AWAY Ryan could actually feel the warmth of the fire on his face. It was that cold out there.

  “Evening, friends,” he said, stepping forward, holding his hands spread out at his sides to show they were empty.

  About ten dark figures were huddled around the little buffalo-chip and winter-grass fire. They gave a collective jerk when he spoke.

  Heads turned toward him and he heard the mechanical cricket chorus of blaster safeties coming off.

  Chapter Eight

  “Back off the triggers of your blasters, boys and girls,” said a bulky figure in a silver wolf-pelt coat, rising on the far side of the campfire. “Take a look at this specimen. Think he’s triple-stupe enough to blunder into an armed camp without longblasters trained on it?”

  Actually, the only longblaster on them was Ryan’s Steyr Scout Tactical, being aimed by Krysty. But there was a scattergun and three handblasters holding down the group from the darkness. So it was a pretty good call.

  “The name’s Ryan,” he said, as weapons were reluctantly lowered. “I just aim to talk. We got some food and meds to trade.”

  They had plenty, thanks to the unwitting and unwilling generosity of the Cthulhu cultists. Most would remain cached well away from the campsite. Ryan knew better than to tempt the greed of his fellow man too much.

  A woman had stood up next to the man in the wolfskin coat. Even taller than he was, she was dressed in a long quilted coat, with her heavy hair in dark braids. She held a flintlock longblaster in gloved hands. Ryan reckoned she had a lot of Plains Indian blood flowing through her veins.

  “Why come sneaking up like that if you’re friendly?” she demanded.

  “Give it a rest, P.F.,” Wolf Coat said. “If they meant to jack us, their blasters would’ve opened the palaver for them.”

  He looked hard at Ryan, with his head angled slightly to the side. He was a well-weathered bastard, with silver hair and a black-and-silver beard on wolf-lean cheeks and a thrusting chin. His eyebrows were as black as coal smudges. He might’ve had some Mex or Indian in him, as well. He looked as if he’d be rangy without the bulky coat.

  “So now that we’ve got the pleasantries out of the way,” he said, “why not bring your pals in? There’s room by the fire.”r />
  Ryan closed his right fist, leaving two fingers stuck out, which he wagged three times.

  Almost at once Jak materialized by his side, holstering his big Magnum revolver. Shortly thereafter Krysty and Mildred emerged into the light to Ryan’s left, and Doc and J.B. to his right.

  Wolf Coat’s eyebrows shot up. Plainly, he recognized what the companions had done: arranged themselves to take his party in a crossfire that offered no hope of cover if things went rapidly south, with minimum danger of shooting one another.

  “You people know your business,” he said, “if your business is chilling. You got any other trade, my friend?”

  “What comes along,” Ryan said, “we do. Mind telling me who you are?”

  “Sorry. Your unexpected arrival put me clean off my manners. I’m Wolfskin Jones. This here’s my life partner, Prairie Falcon. P.F. for short.”

  He indicated the woman in the quilted coat. A dark, boot-leather brown, her face was handsome rather than pretty, with unplucked brows, a beak of nose and a generally fierce expression that strongly suggested her namesake.

  “You got to make allowances for P.F. She’s Só’taa’e Cheyenne, and culturally inclined to a touch of paranoia.”

  “Bite me, Wolf Foreskin,” she growled.

  “We enjoy what you might refer to as a tempestuous relationship,” the grizzled man said. “The rest of these hard cases and hard casettes are all that remain of a once mighty trade convoy. And by that I mean six power wags and twenty crew. So not so much mighty as respectable. But I might as well talk ’em up, since they’re gone with the new moon.”

  “What happened?” Krysty asked.

  The man turned and looked her up and down with obvious appreciation. Prairie Falcon growled low in her throat, more like her man’s namesake than her own.

  “Don’t get your underwear in a twist, P.F.,” Jones said. “I’m not fool enough to cross you. And not triple-stupe like I’d have to be if the one-eyed death machine over there is this one’s mate. As I’m guessing, miss?”