Wretched Earth

by James Axler

  “Guilty as charged.” Krysty rested a hand lightly on his shoulder. “Too bad it’s going to be painted red so soon.”

  “Happens to every place.”

  “Not every place,” she said.

  He shook his head. “Don’t kid yourself. Even if we really do find a sanctuary, we’ll have to be ready to fight at any moment to keep it. A man or woman doesn’t own anything they’re not ready to fight for, lives and loved ones included. Reading history, talking to Doc and Mildred, it’s always been that way. Only, by Mildred’s time most people’d convinced themselves otherwise.”

  “Which might account for why they were foolish enough to burn the world.”

  Ryan shrugged. “Mebbe.”

  Doc stirred from his reverie. “Friends,” he said, extending a twiglike finger out the window, “something transpires outside.”

  Ryan swept the longeyes as far to the right as he could. He could just see the shaded porch of a store or shop that had been shuttered since the late baron’s decline had split the ville violently in two. Three figures crouched there, as furtive as mice.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “Water run,” Krysty said grimly.

  Two of the people darted out into the slanting yellow sunlight. One held a cluster of canteens by cloth straps. The other carried a net full of ceramic jugs over her back. They were swaddled in rags against the chill and questing wind.

  They’d made it halfway to the wide fountain when a volley of blaster shots broke out. Ryan lowered the longeyes to look across at the sniper tower. The two men on station were cranking shots from their lever-action longblasters, one a carbine, one a full-barreled rifle. He could hear their hoots of triumphant bloodlust over the bangs of their weapons.

  The woman bent under the clay jugs dropped onto her face. Her companion darted a few steps more toward the brick-walled fountain. Then he hesitated, with bullets kicking up puffs of dust around his rag-wrapped feet. He took a step back toward his fallen companion, then one toward the fountain.

  Ryan didn’t know whether the bastards in the tower were such bad shots or just playing with their victim. Likely both, he decided.

  “Triple-stupe,” he said, “to make a run like that in daylight.”

  “Triple-desperate,” Krysty said. “Jacks and the baron issue water chits only to people whose loyalty they’re sure of. Others, and those they want to punish, don’t get any. That leaves a lot of people mighty thirsty.”

  “And thirst makes you desperate quicker than anything, shy of being on fire or short on air,” Ryan said.

  The dithering man finally ran back to his companion and began to tug at her. She wasn’t moving at all. He was barely able to budge her deadweight, furiously though he heaved.

  The third water-runner dashed out to help. As he reached them a bullet pierced his gut. He fell into a flailing, bawling ball of intolerable pain.

  “Ryan,” Krysty said urgently, “you have to do something.”

  He shook his head. “We wait,” he said. “For the go signal. This has nothing to do with us.”

  “Oh!” She spun away, careful to get clear of the window before straightening, to stand by the wall with arms crossed under her breasts.

  Ryan watched, his lone blue eye as cold and impassive as the sky, as the drama played out. Eventually the man trying to drag his female comrade to safety was hit. He continued to try to help her until he was shot at least twice more, that Ryan could see, in leg and body. The man fell, but kept trying to crawl back to the shelter of the porch, dragging his friend by her belt. Ryan saw the impacts of more bullets hitting his back, raising little wisps of dust. Eventually he collapsed on his face and didn’t move anymore.

  The last wounded man continued to writhe and howl. Gut-shot, he could keep it up all day and all night. Ryan knew.

  For a few minutes the blaster-storm ceased. Perhaps the coldhearts in the tower were enjoying their victim’s suffering, or perhaps they were just reloading. Likely both, Ryan decided.

  After a while, though, screams like that got on your nerves no matter how cruel a bastard you were. They started shooting at the wounded man again. Bullets hit his legs. An arm.

  “Why do they keep firing?” Krysty asked, her voice vibrating with pain.

  “Mebbe they’re trying to see how often they can shoot him without killing him,” Ryan said.

  He saw the gut-shot man’s head jerk. Dark fluid sprayed from it. His legs straightened and he rolled on his back, drumming his heels on the densely packed earth. Then he went still.

  “Show’s over,” Ryan said.

  From the depths of his waking dream Doc stirred and said in a clear voice, “The stairs. Someone is coming.”

  Krysty, whose hearing was better than Ryan’s—she hadn’t spent as much of her life with blasters going off right in her ears—was already turning, drawing her snubby revolver.

  “Cocker,” a child’s voice said timidly from the darkness outside the open door.

  “Spaniel,” Krysty said. “It’s Luke. The runner I sent to tell Miranda’s assault team we were ready.”

  “Took them long enough,” Ryan said.

  Luke appeared in the door, a boy of about eight or nine, bundled up in a coat and shawl and knit cap so that little more than wide blue eyes were visible.

  “Captain J-Jenkins says he’s ready,” the kid stammered. “He—he wants you to get a move on.”

  “‘Captain,’ he calls himself,” Doc said with amusement. He was clearly back in the here and now, scenting action and livening up like an old coon hound. “Wonder if the baron knows that.”

  Ryan had set down the longeyes and shifted his chair behind his waiting longblaster. He had only to get his eye close enough to the scope to see through, without getting close enough for recoil to stamp it into his face, then lift the rifle butt and snug its cold steel plate to his shoulder.

  When he did, the post-shaped reticule was already fixed on the distant tower. The two snipers held their pieces by the forestocks, obviously talking to each other, high from the chilling. And the long-distance torture.

  “Hope you boys enjoyed the show,” Ryan said.

  He set the post so that its pointed tip had the shaved temple of one of Jack’s sec men right on it. Ryan finished drawing a deep breath, let half of it out, cut it off. Squeezed.

  He was prepared, so the rifle’s smashing roar and accompanying hard kick didn’t catch him by surprise. With practiced ease he worked the bolt as the long barrel rose off-line, carrying the scope momentarily off target.

  When it came back the coldheart he’d targeted was nowhere to be seen. His companion was staring at his feet openmouthed. Blood painted his features, shockingly bright red in the afternoon sun.

  “Target down,” Krysty said. She had slid to Ryan’s side and picked up the longeyes to spot.

  Ryan targeted the remaining man’s left eye, then fired once more.

  He was racking the bolt again when Krysty said, “Second target down.”

  “Let’s roll,” he said, standing. He slung his longblaster and reached for the duffel bag they’d brought the cushions and their water in.

  “Do you not even want to see what happens, my dear Ryan?” Doc asked.

  From below came war whoops and shots as the Sharp assault team charged to the attack.

  “Nope,” Ryan said. “Our job here is done.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “You’re either the bravest m
an alive, Geither Jacks,” the bearded black man said, “or the stupidest.” Skinny as a power pole, he was dressed in a white shirt and canvas drawers.

  The man in the barber chair, his cheeks and chin covered in fluffy white soap lather, took a cigar from his mouth. “Why can’t I be both, Coffin? ‘I’m large. I encompass infinities.’”

  He had a long narrow face that seemed to consist of nothing but folds and seams, and a finger-length shock of dust-colored hair up top. He knew he wasn’t lovely, and he made sure nobody mentioned that fact twice.

  The early morning light was bright enough to fill the room, despite the filmy curtain that covered the window. Not even this deep into his realm did Geither Jacks feel cocky enough to give would-be assassins a free shot at him from outdoors. Especially since evidence suggested rumors that that witch-slut Miranda had hired herself a longblaster chiller were the straight goods, after all.

  “Your pardon, Senor Jacks,” the bearded, roly-poly little barber said. “It is ‘contain.’ ‘I contain multitudes.’”

  “See?” Coffin said. “Not only does he have a blade to your fool throat, the prick is sassing you back. You’re about eight ounces of pressure from a second smile, my friend.”

  Jacks laughed, although not too enthusiastically. He didn’t want to cut his own throat.

  French doors with fancy cut-glass panes in their tops separated the parlor from the great room, where until recently Sinorice’s entertainers had sat or promenaded to show off the wares to prospective customers. Through the doors came the sounds of low-level roistering: low voices, laughter, glasses tinkling. Jacks’s top lieutenant, Hapgood, was kicking back in there with a few of the boys. They were drinking a little. Why not? Let them enjoy the fruits of picking the ultimate winning side. They still knew to keep it down.

  The parlor itself was a wonderland of red-flocked and gilt wallpaper. It smelled of pomander and ointments the little barber used, as well as the residues of the flower essences and scavvied perfumes the sluts had doused themselves with to cover less pleasant odors—although some of the ancient perfumes seemed to have gone a bit off, and smelled mostly like paint thinner. They were still pricey and much in demand, reeking of ancient decadence as they did, or were thought to.

  Jacks liked it all. He felt at home here.

  But he’d never truly be at home ever again until he had the palace back, and with it all of Sweetwater Junction. Then he could rule from wherever he pleased, as befit a benevolent despot.

  “But García here’s got family,” he said. “And he knows I know where to lay hands on them. He doesn’t want his fat wife, Maria, and their two adorable little girls hung up on hooks for Levon to work his wizardry on. Do you, García?”

  Levon was the three-armed mutie who was Jacks’s master torturer.

  “Oh, no, Senor Jacks,” the barber said fervently.

  “You’re slack!” an age-cracked voice screeched. Jacks flinched in his chair.

  “Aw, Jesus shit howdy,” he muttered. “Not now, Grammaw.”

  “You sit here chewing the fat with your little playmates.” The old woman hit the parlor like a dust devil on jolt. She was shriveled down to nothing but whalebone and meanness. You’d think to look at her that a good puff of wind could knock her down and bust her hip. You’d think wrong. “No wonder the witch snatched a vital position right out from under your nose yesterday, Geither!”

  “It wasn’t that key a position, Grammaw,” he said. “Anyway, we’ll get it back. I’ll send Hapgood out to see to it tomorrow.”

  Hapgood had been Jacks’s chief coconspirator in the failed coup that had ended the life of Baron Jeb but, sadly, not the rest of his tainted lineage.

  “Miranda hasn’t got the people to hold it when we surround the buildings on three sides.”

  “Your father never would’ve lost it in the first place!”

  “My father’s dead, so I don’t hardly see how that’s relevant.”

  “He got slack!” she screeched. “That’s why you done right to chill him and take his place. He warn’t fit to serve Baron Jeb no more. And now you’re going slack.”

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Make examples, like a man!” Very few sentences came out of Grammaw Lynndey Jacks’s withered, near-toothless mouth that didn’t begin in sprays of spittle and end in exclamation marks.

  “You could have Levon work over one or two of the sec men who survived getting run out of the tower yesterday,” Coffin said. “Encourage the others, like.”

  “That mutie is an abomination!” Grammaw exclaimed. “He’ll corrupt the pure blood of this ville and bring ruin to us all, sure as shit’s brown!”

  “Levon’s an artist, Grammaw. That extra arm gives more scope to his work. Especially that pincer.”

  “Not much chance he’s gonna do much reproducing here in the ville, Grammaw Lynndey,” Coffin said. “Not if the prospective mama got anything to say about it.”

  “Anyway, I got few enough shooters as it is,” Jacks said.

  “You could recruit more people from the ville,” Grammaw declared, “if you hadn’t let them get slack!”

  Gate to Hell Jacks sighed. Not for the first time he reckoned he was the wrong member of the line, not to mention gender and generation, to bear that nickname. Much as he liked it.

  What was worse, the old lady had a point. She often did, if you could find it in among all the “slacks” and exclamation marks.

  He had recruited new sec men from his side of Sweetwater Junction. But they seemed more interested in sucking up his booze and beating on their fellow citizens than in serious fighting. They didn’t show the proper sort of spirit that was going to take him back to the palace, where he’d slit open that little prick Colt’s fish-colored belly and strangle him with his living guts before his mother’s eyes. Right before he raped Miranda, then had her whipped and burned at the stake like the witch she was.

  “We got people coming through town,” he said.

  “Merchants!”

  You’d also think it was hard to tell when Grammaw wrinkled up her face, since wrinkles were mostly what it consisted of, along with the odd mole sprouting astonishingly long tufts of hair, white to match that tight bun on her head. You’d be wrong there, too. There was no mistaking it: her face folded in on itself until it seemed likely to implode.

  “They got no spirit! They’re slack!”

  “Now, don’t be hasty, there, Grammaw Lynndey,” Coffin said. “Takes some sack to be a merchant. Especially on the long hard roads that meet in the Junction.”

  “There’s other people,” Jacks pointed out. “Travelers. Mercies and such. They—”

  The French doors opened. A recently recruited sec man with his hair just coming back in from the ritual head-shaving stood there.

  “Sorry to bother you, Baron Jacks, but some newcomers just come barging in—”

  “Can’t Hapgood deal with it?” Jacks asked.

  His answer was a brain-smashing sound and a flash from the parlor. The young sec man jumped like a startled cat and spun.

  The wedge-shaped back of Hapgood himself came through the door. He turned to show bloodhound eyes rolled up in his long balding head, and a red-rimmed black hole as big around as a shot glass through the front of his frilled white shirt. He flopped down face-first right at his boss’s feet, clearly already on his way to room temperature.

  “Now whoever did that ain’t slack!” Grammaw crowed.

  * *
*

  “COAST CLEAR,” JAK said from the top of the concrete ramp. Overhead the sky was finally turning daylight blue, though still streaked with apricot and apple-green remnants of sunup.

  J.B. waited at the bottom of the short flight of stairs, with a concrete retaining wall and a round steel rail on his right side and the footing of a building on the left. Mildred crouched on the steps between the two men, her blocky black wheel gun in her hand.

  “What now, John?” she asked.

  “We walk toward the gaudy house where Jacks is holed up as if we owned the place,” he said.

  “What?” she squeaked. He was pleased to see she had presence of mind to keep it nearly inaudible. Also nearly supersonic, but at least no unwanted ears were likely to overhear. “After we went to all the trouble of sneaking into town before the sun even came up?”

  “That’s right,” he said. “Past patrols like as not to shoot on sight. Now, here in the middle of the ville, people who see us are going to at least wonder if we belong before reaching for their blasters.”

  “And if you’re wrong?”

  “Then we wind up staring at the sky a little sooner than anticipated,” he said calmly. “Comes to everybody, sooner or later.”

  “Less talk, more walk,” Jak said under his breath.

  “Roll on, Jak,” J.B. said. “We’re right behind you.”

  He sent a meaningful look to Mildred, who sighed theatrically.

  “You boys’ll be the death of me,” she said. “And here all I ever wanted to do was achieve immortality by not dying!”

  * * *

  “HERE COME,” JAK said.

  “Okay, brace it up,” J.B. said. “You know the plan.”

  “Ace on the line,” Mildred said.

  “That’s the spirit,” J.B. replied.

  He walked point down the dirt street. There was still nobody abroad between the buildings here, which were mostly one-story and obviously built since skydark, if better built than most villes could boast. Mildred walked slightly behind him at his right, while Jak slinked at his left. Their hands were empty; J.B. carried his shotgun slung muzzle-down behind his right shoulder. They wanted to show peaceable intent.