Wretched Earth

by James Axler

  If somebody still wanted to shake it up—well, the three could accommodate them.

  ’Course, he thought as half a dozen sec men in green Jakes armbands spilled out of a nearby building clutching an assortment of weapons as varied as their clothing, I’d feel a whole lot more secure, especially between the shoulder blades, if I knew Ryan was out there somewhere keeping close eye through the scope of his longblaster. But thoughts like that wouldn’t load any magazines for him.

  “So what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” demanded the tall, skinny kid whose bluster and cocky body language marked him as leader. There wasn’t a scrap of rank insignia to this patch.

  The sec men winged out to flank them. From the corner of his eye J.B. saw Mildred’s face crease in concern. The Armorer wasn’t worried much. Let the coldhearts think they held the winning hand. The shock when they learned different might keep them from acting for a few more seconds. And time, J.B. knew, was blood.

  “Mornin’,” he said cheerfully. “We’re new in town. We’d like to talk to your boss. We’re looking for mercie work.”

  The leader showed him a grin whose intent was clearly as nasty as his yellow teeth.

  “The boss ain’t looking to hire sorry-ass outlanders. But you will get to meet him. Also like as not Levon. That’s his head torturer. A three-armed mutie. Third arm lets him do tricks you never dreamed of.”

  “I think we should just leave that to your boss to decide, don’t you?” J.B. asked. He was becoming aware of a triple-nasty cesspit stench.

  Dark night, he thought, if Jacks lets his men patrol the streets in shit trousers, it’s a wonder plague hasn’t chilled the bunch of ’em long since.

  “Chris,” said a burly guy with bulgy eyes, loose purple lips and blond hair, “shouldn’t we oughta just take ’em to talk to Hapgood? Let the big guys decide?”

  “Sure, Morris, you and Rigger and Blackie take these two pencil dicks, the sawed-off one and the white-haired mutie. The woman can stay with the rest of us. She’s got big titties and plenty of meat to go around.”

  As he drew close to Mildred, her face clenched in disgust. J.B. recognized the stench had to be coming from the one called Chris. It took a lot to make a former medical physician make a face like that, even if she’d been mostly into research back before the days of the smoke clouds.

  “You’ll like us triple-fine, baby,” Chris said, grabbing hold of Mildred’s left breast and squeezing. She winced and her shoulders hunched. He looked around at the others.

  “See? I went and found you boys some nice cunny!”

  A gunshot shattered the morning calm.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Grabbing at himself, sec leader Chris went to his knees, letting loose a scream of pain.

  “You shot my dick off! You slut!”

  Mildred already had her ZKR 551 handblaster up and pointing over the wounded man at the round, dark-bearded face of one of his men.

  “If you move, you die,” she said. “I don’t give a fuck about you.”

  The guy dropped his bolt-action .22 rifle and held up his hands. “Lady, I believe you,” he said fervently.

  J.B. had his shotgun up. He stood back to back with Jak, who’d drawn his huge Colt handblaster.

  “Any of the rest of you bored with living?” J.B. asked matter-of-factly. “We can fix that for you.”

  Weapons clattered to the street. Hands went up. Faces were pale and covered with sweat despite the cold of the morning air.

  Jak stepped close to where Chris was kneeling, doubled over and sobbing, and extended his Python. The Colt bellowed as he delivered a mercy round.

  J.B. winced at the noise and side blast. There were handblasters more powerful than a .357 wheel gun, but not a one he knew of more triple-unpleasant to stand next to when they got lit off. A .44 Mag made a louder noise but it wasn’t as high-pitched and piercing. The .357 Magnum was peculiar that way.

  Chris’s head exploded. Chunks of scalp flew in all directions, drawing crazy spirals of smoke behind them. The muzzle-flame had set his hair alight. It smelled almost as bad as he did.

  “Now that that’s finished,” J.B. said, as the headless corpse did its final headless-chicken flopping bit, “take us to your leader.”

  * * *

  AS GAUDIES WENT, Sinorice’s Royal Flush was a big one, J.B. thought, as they strolled up, herding the five surviving members of the sec patrol before them like geese. It was four yellow-stone stories tall and covered a lot of ground. J.B. paused in front of double doors, gold, with a namesake hand in hearts painted on the left one and spades on the right, and fancy cut-glass panes above.

  “You boys can run along,” he said. “Take my advice and head west, and keep right on going. Things’re fixing to heat this town up nuke-red even if Jacks decides not to make examples of you.”

  They set off at a scrambling run down the street, west as he’d suggested. From their loose-jointed stumbling, like a man who’d tripped and was hurtling forward, trying to keep moving rather than land on his face, the Armorer guessed some of them smelled like fresh dreck just as their unlamented leader had.

  “Stow the blasters, people,” he told Mildred and Jak. “We want this to be a friendly social call.”

  “What if they don’t want to be friendly?” Mildred asked.

  “Fix like you fixed bastard with fast hands,” Jak said with a grin. Mildred couldn’t stop herself from grinning back.

  “That’s my girl,” J.B. said, briefly squeezing her shoulder.

  “What about the shotgun?” she asked. “That’s not going to look too friendly even if you keep it slung.”

  “I’ll carry it slung low enough the butt won’t show over my shoulder,” he said, readjusting the sling, “and the barrel tucked down behind my leg. Nobody’ll notice it until introductions are made. You’ll see.”

  “If you say so.”

  He pushed through the doors and led his companions in off the street. They walked into a corridor where the red-and-gold-papered walls held large framed oil paintings of women in various stages of undress and types of display. Some of which left little to the imagination.

  “Wonder if this is the current staff?” Mildred said, looking left and right as they walked down the gold-edged scarlet runner. “These paintings look recent. Not too bad, really.”

  “You like this sort of thing?” J.B. asked.

  “The technique, dummy.”

  The short hallway opened into a wide parlor with couches along the walls and another set of half-glass double doors beyond. Eight or ten men slouched on the couches or played cards at a folding table off to one side.

  They looked at the intruding trio and their eyes got big. They started jumping to their feet.

  A man in what appeared to be the vest and trousers of a brown three-piece suit, over a white shirt with frills down the front, and a gold cravat, stepped to bar their way. He wore two shoulder holsters, each showing the butt of a 9 mm Beretta blaster.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, barging in here?” he demanded. He had a hound dog face gone purple with rage clear to the roots of his receding seal-brown hair.

  “We’re mercies,” J.B. said. “We come to offer our blasters to your boss. Judging by the fact nobody was standing guard outside the front doors, which by the way were unlocked, we reckon he’s a bit short of sec muscle. Not to mention sec brains.”

  A young-looking sec man dashed to the rear set of doors and
threw them open, yelling something. J.B.’s attention was focused on the man who blocked his path. Normally he would have fought his natural tunnel-vision tendency; it invited your target’s friends to thunder on you without you being able to see them. But he trusted Mildred and Jak to have his flanks.

  “Fuck you, your bitch and the mutie you dragged in with you, you sawed-off little shit,” the man in the vest snarled. He snatched at his blasters.

  Before they cleared leather, J.B. had swung up his M-4000 scattergun. He had in fact been holding it barrel-down behind his leg by the pistol grip. Now all he had to do was lift it. He pulled the trigger.

  The guy in the snazzy clothes pulled his hands out of the X they’d been in, presenting the handblasters. J.B.’s shot column had barely begun to spread when it hit dead-center of his white-shirted chest, right above his vest.

  Both handblasters dropped unfired. The tall man reeled back through the opened doors into the room beyond. Inside, J.B. heard a considerable commotion.

  He tipped the muzzle of the Smith & Wesson blaster toward the white-painted ceiling as he stepped forward.

  “Would one of you happen to be Geither Jacks?” he asked.

  A man with hair like a handful of straw sprouting from the top of his narrow head, and soap lather masking the lower half of his face, stepped forward.

  “That’d be me,” he said. He stuck an unlit stub of cigar in his teeth.

  “Gate, you danged fool,” said a rangy, bristling-bearded black dude in overalls, who jumped forward to interpose himself between Jacks and J.B.’s shotgun.

  “Now, that’s style!” screeched an old withered prairie chicken of a woman in a brown dress and stockings.

  With his cigar, Jacks gestured at the man who lay dead at his feet. “Care to explain what this is all about?”

  “We come to offer you our services,” J.B. said. “We’re mercies. Seems like you could use some help.”

  “No shit,” Jacks said, “’specially since you just chilled my main man all over my carpet.”

  “He was rude,” Mildred said.

  “You gotta chill these bastards,” the black man said. “You can’t let them come here and disrespect you like this, shoot poor bastard Hapgood down right in front of you.”

  “Coffin,” Jacks said, “listen. A major part of Hapgood’s job description was keeping his own triple-stupe ass alive to be of use to me. Since he wasn’t competent enough to do that, I reckon I can dispense with his services.”

  He turned a frown on J.B. His eyes vanished into slits.

  “That said,” the renegade sec boss said, “it seems to me you owe me, since you did just chill one of my bodyguards.”

  “Two,” Mildred said. “The other was even less of a loss.”

  Jacks’s eyes reappeared. They were a murky green, like a chem-tainted pond. They all but stood out from his khaki face on stalks.

  “Consider it a free demo of what we bring to the party,” Mildred said. J.B. had to struggle considerably to keep his own eyes from bugging behind his glasses, and keep his face immobile. He knew Mildred could be triple-sparky, but he didn’t think she had that in her.

  “Call it even,” J.B. said. “You’ve seen what we bring. What will you pay us to bring it for you?”

  “Gate,” Coffin said, speaking as if J.B. and friends weren’t there, “you listen to me. You can’t hire people who just stroll in out of the wasteland and into your parlor, shoot up your sec chief right before your eyes. I tell you true, if you trust them you’re a fool. A triple-fool!”

  “He’s more a fool for not chilling you on account of your lip, Coffin!” squalled the old lady, coming forward with the quick short steps of a sparrow hopping after crumbs. “That’s where he’s slack!”

  “If you two are going to discuss my shortcomings,” Jacks said, “why don’t you take it somewhere else? These folks and I got some business to discuss.”

  He looked the newcomers over again. “A little guy in a hat who’s handy with a scattergun. A black woman built like a brick…wall. And a, uhh—red eyes. Right. You’re an albino, aren’t you, Whitey?”

  “Right first time,” Jak said. “Only name not Whitey. Name Jak!”

  “Jak.” Jacks nodded. “And the rest of you are?”

  “I’m Mildred. This is J.B., the finest armorer in the Deathlands!”

  “Ace. Now to keep this on a business footing, can I get you to maybe put away the big blaster?”

  “I reckon your remaining sec boys’re pointing blasters at the backs of our heads right now,” J.B. said with a smile. “So—you know.”

  “Yeah. Pack ’em up, boys. Our new friends here are too polite and cagey to come out and say they got me hostage. But I know which end of the blaster the fucking bullet comes out of.”

  “Gate,” the black man said urgently.

  Jacks held up two fingers by his counselor’s face. “Enough, Coffin. If they wanted to chill me, you and I would be staring at the ceiling right now, without ever being able to look away. And they impress me, for a fact.”

  He smiled around the stump of his cigar. “Enough to hire them for one special gig. You people pull it off, then we’ll talk, you know…long term.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  The sentry stiffened. Too late. J.B. had already grabbed his chin, yanked his head back and punched the two-edged blade of his knife through the right side of his neck.

  J.B. pushed outward with the knife’s pierced hilt, which was cut from a single piece of steel. The blade cut through the cartilage box of larynx and through the tough skin of the sentry’s throat in a gush of blood, black in the starlit street, from both jugular veins. The hot copper tang of blood joined the sour stink of the sec man’s clothing.

  “Relax,” J.B. murmured in the shuddering man’s ear. “It’ll all be over soon.”

  The blood that jetted over the Armorer’s hand on the sentry’s chin felt hot in the cold, unusually still night. It congealed quickly to a sort of film over warm liquid.

  None of which was new to J.B.

  He walked his rapidly weakening victim back into a shadowed gap between the tower and the building next to it. From high overhead drifted the sounds of voices arguing. Though he couldn’t hear the words, J.B. recognized the sound of bored men running their jaws to have something to do.

  Jacks’s sentry’s body jerked hard and became limp weight and J.B. knew life had fled from him. There was no mistaking it if you’d felt it before. He eased the man to the alley grit, wiped the knife on his jacket and resheathed it.

  Few lights showed in either half of the contested ville. Overhead a single lantern seemed to blaze from the top of the tower’s windows, the ville was so dark. Looking southward, J.B. could see the glow from the lights of Sinorice’s Royal Flush, and perhaps a few hints in the northern sky from Miranda’s palace. At night the ville folk hunkered down and mostly tried not to attract attention. Same as in daytime.

  Two soft owl hoots came from the tower’s far side. J.B. cupped hands to mouth and responded in kind to acknowledge Jak’s message received. There had been a second sentry at the tower’s foot. Emphasis on had been.

  J.B. turned to Mildred, who lurked deeper in the alley with her handblaster ready. Her face was a little ashen in the incidental light from the window overhead, but her jaw was firmly set and the hand that held her blaster was rock-steady.

  He gave her an approving nod. She had some odd scruples by his reckoning, such that on ra
re occasions he marveled at how impractical the world she grew up in had to have been. And look what happened to it.

  Mildred gave a little frown as she moved past him into South Street, and he read it plainly: she found it difficult to believe that, having just grabbed a major toehold in enemy territory, the baron’s men weren’t guarding it up the wazoo.

  If the three needed it, it was triple-locked confirmation that their companions weren’t inside, or involved in any way with securing the structure Ryan’s rifle had been key in capturing.

  “I can’t believe they’re this lax,” Mildred whispered.

  “Nobody’s eager to have dirt hitting them in the eye,” J.B. whispered back. “No matter how het up their bosses are.”

  The same half-assed attitude toward sec had made it unexpectedly easy for them to get here. While the objective lay on their own side’s turf, they hadn’t wanted any run-ins with the renegade sec boss’s patrols any more than the enemy’s. As they’d seen, Jacks’s street-level sec had your basic chill first, ask questions never mentality.

  Both sides’ patrols turned out to be loud, not subtle. The sec men were clearly bent on intimidating the populace, but at the same time didn’t seem double-eager to encounter any.

  Jak waited on the other side of the open door at the tower’s base. J.B. and Mildred saw him because he sensed their approach and let them. As white as his hair and skin were, he could dissolve into the night like a drop of milk in a gallon of coffee, quickly and completely. He nodded at J.B. and slipped through the door, little knives gleaming in each pale hand.

  A moment later he popped his head out and nodded to signal the all clear.

  No clouds hung overhead to trap such heat as the faint southerly sun lent the day. It was cold enough to chill you in more than temperature terms if you got careless, or nip off a finger or toe. Despite the open door and uninsulated wooden walls, the ground-floor room felt toasty warm after the street. It smelled of spoiling blood and fairly recent dreck from the dying that had happened inside.