Wretched Earth

by James Axler

  The albino teen had led her to a point just across the street from a group of three Sharp sec men. Peering through a crack where mortar had fallen out of the wall Mildred had studied them. The sec men had their backs to them, intent on the main force of Jacks’s men. Occasionally one popped around the corner of the house they sheltered behind, let loose a shot without seeming to aim.

  Finneran’s crew could’ve pulled back at any time, she realized. Finneran had to have believed his force was already surrounded. Or maybe he was afraid to withdraw without Jacks’s permission, yet unable or unwilling to drive his men forward against such strong opposition.

  A police whistle shrilled from somewhere down the street ahead and a block or so over. It was the sort of sound that pierced and carried. It might even have been audible over the height of the firefight, which was why J.B. had picked it for a signal.

  She drew in a deep breath and looked at Jak. He nodded.

  “Sorry, guys,” she muttered beneath her breath. “It’s you or us.” Then she popped up over the wall, laid the scattergun’s ghost-ring sight beneath the right armpit of a towheaded man and pulled the trigger.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Grip it tight,” Ryan said. “Not quite that tight. Not so much your hands shake. Just shy of that.”

  Colt’s plump young face was fixed in concentration. A quartet of his mother’s sec men in their black armbands stood by on the bank of the shallow gully, holding the horses and watching with interest as Ryan helped the youth find the proper hold on the handblaster’s grip.

  “All right, good,” Ryan said. “Rest your thumb on the safety, there. Finger off the trigger. Keep it outside on the guard until you’ve got sights on target and you’re ready to shoot.”

  It was a 1911 Colt .45ACP. At some point in its long history somebody had put a decent pair of sights on the weapon.

  “Ain’t that too much gun to start a beginner on?” asked Kowalski, the tallest of the four sec men.

  “No,” Ryan said, not looking around. “Anybody can shoot a .45 if they know how to do it right. And no point teaching a person not to do it right.”

  It was the morning after the battle in north Sweetwater Junction. Ryan and his team officially walked on water now. He knew better than to expect it to last. A baron’s gratitude was legendary. Because, as Doc liked to say, nobody would ever believe such a thing was for real.

  There was a risk in standing in a gully under this kind of sky. A flash flood could wipe them out in a heartbeat. But the locals didn’t seem concerned, and Ryan didn’t know anything that was totally safe to do.

  Colt licked his lips and looked toward Ryan as the tall man gave a last adjustment to the youth’s soft hands.

  “These blasters’re supposed to kick triple-hard,” Colt said. “Are you sure—?”

  “Yeah. Just breathe deep. Relax everything but your grip. Ace. Now push your arms out in front of you, far as they’ll go.”

  He stepped away and back so that he was a yard from Colt Sharp’s shoulder and a step behind.

  “Focus your eyes on the front sight.”

  “Not the target?” A cracked, thus unusable whiskey bottle stood on a mound of sand against the far bank, twenty feet away.

  “No. Not the rear sight, either. Front sight. Target should be a blur. Then you just rest it on top of the front sight like an apple on a post.”

  “All right.”

  The quivering boy was swinging the blaster in little figure eights. Ryan remembered he hadn’t been any better when his father’s men first tried to teach him how to fire a handblaster back at Front Royal. Of course, he’d been half this kid’s age.

  “Draw in a deep breath. Try to bring the sight up to the target. When you got it, let out half a breath, firm up your grip and squeeze the trigger gently.”

  The gun roared and kicked up. Colt jumped in alarm. The bullet knocked dust from the face of the cut two feet left of the bottle, which Ryan saw from the corner of his eye. He was focused on the boy.

  Ignoring a repressed snicker from one of the sec men, he said, “Good job, kid.”

  “But I missed!” he exclaimed. His cheeks were flushed and his voice vibrated with half-controlled excitement.

  “Everybody misses,” Ryan said, “until they learn to hit. You kept your arms straight, didn’t let your elbows bend so you were whacked in the face with your blaster. Just let the piece ride up natural and fall back down.”

  “So why’d I miss?”

  “Pulled off,” Ryan said. “Squeezed the trigger a bit too hard. Didn’t jerk it—then you’d have missed low.”

  “Ooh.” The boy’s face fell like aging pudding. “So I screwed up.”

  “Nobody’s born knowing this shit, kid. Truth is, trigger control’s the hardest thing about handblaster shooting to get right. For your very first shot you did good.”

  It was true. Ryan wasn’t in the habit of flattering barons, much less their pups. He wasn’t intending to start with this one—even if the kid amounted to their fallback plan for defending against the rottie horde that Ryan knew in his gut was out there, coming nearer every day.

  “Try it again. You know now the recoil won’t kill you, so try not to flinch so much. And keep both eyes open.”

  “There’s so much to remember,” Colt whined.

  Ryan’s surge of disgust was following by a vivid memory of himself saying the same thing to his father’s armorer. In an even more sniveling tone of voice.

  “Not really,” he said. “Just seems like it at first. Same thing with everything new you try. Just forget it and do.”

  Despite the snivel, Colt Sharp was visibly more confident as he pushed the big angular blaster out into the isosceles position Ryan had taught him as the easiest stance to learn, and an effective one. He even remembered to breathe in, let some air out, catch it before he fired.

  This time the shot hit right in front of the bottle and threw dust over it.

  “What’d I do wrong?” Colt keened. “I didn’t think I jerked it like you said.”

  “Think it through, kid. Remember what you did.”

  “Well, the gun was moving around a lot. I thought I had the bottle all lined up right. But it seemed like it moved off just as I pulled—uh, squeezed—the trigger.”

  Ryan nodded. “That’s it, for a fact. See, nobody’s perfectly steady, ’less they’re really living steel. Your arms and hands are going to move. The key is to work out your own body’s rhythms, work out when to shoot. And yeah, you can learn to control the swaying better. Just not perfectly.”

  Colt sighed. “It all seems so hard to put together.”

  “Is anything worthwhile easy to come by?”

  “Mebbe too easy, if you’re a baron’s son,” Colt said.

  Ryan repressed a grin. He knew that, of course, but he sure wasn’t about to let on how.

  “I wish… I wish my mother’d let me learn more things earlier. Like this. This is great! But mebbe I’m starting too late.”

  He ended on a defeated note.

  “No such thing,” Ryan said. “Fact is, you don’t have to be able to shoot a horsefly out from between his wings at fifty paces to defend yourself with a handblaster. They’re almost always used inside the distance of a good spit. You just got to hit a coldheart somewhere around the middle of the body to put him down, generally. It’s not hard. Of course, the better you get at shooting a handblaster, the more you’ll be able to use it for. But if you keep doing wh
at I tell you, you’ll be able to keep yourself alive in most situations with a handblaster after mebbe two more hours.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. Now try again.”

  The youth controlled his rising excitement with visible effort. The idea of being able to do anything for himself seemed to thrill him.

  He took aim again, carefully following the steps Ryan had taught him. Keeping both eyes open, he lined up the heavy piece and fired.

  The bottle flew in two, shattered in the middle.

  “I hit it! I hit it!” The kid began to dance in triumph.

  Ryan grabbed his arm. “Mind where you aim that, boy. Never point it at anything you don’t want a hole in.”

  As the echoes of the gunshot died away down the arroyo, Ryan heard the sound of velvet-gloved hands clapping from the bank behind them. He looked around in time to see the four sec men jump in alarm and stare up at their baron, who sat silhouetted against a bullet-colored sky, on the back of a shiny black stallion. At her right side, Chad, her current golden boy, was mounted on a palomino gelding. Flanking Miranda were Krysty, Doc and sec boss Stone, all on horseback.

  “Didn’t you boys hear them ride up?” Ryan asked Colt’s guards. “I did.”

  He had. A quick glance had told him who was approaching. A couple guards looked a bit mulish, but under the eyes of their baron and their immediate boss they had the sense not to talk back.

  “I’m sure I can find ways to sharpen their situational awareness, Ryan,” Stone said drily. He was never going to love mercies, or be best buds with Ryan, but after yesterday he seemed to accept the three outlanders as valuable assets.

  Ryan hoped that would be enough to help him convince Miranda of the reality of the rottie threat soon.

  “You’ve done well, Colt,” the baron said. Chad had hopped off his golden horse. She allowed him to help her dismount. Her long legs were encased in black trousers and black boots. A black jacket and flat-brimmed black hat topped the outfit.

  Miranda lightly jumped down to the sand of the gully floor. Ignoring the moves of the sec men to give her a hand, she walked toward her son. She hugged and kissed him, making him squirm just a bit.

  “You’ve instructed my son well, Ryan,” she said.

  To Colt she said, “May I?”

  She held out a black-gloved hand. He flicked a quick glance at Ryan and handed the piece over. Miranda held it up and expertly pulled the slide back a fraction, cracking the chamber to confirm there was a cartridge up the spout. She does seem to know her way around a blaster, Ryan thought.

  “I used to be a pretty fair shot myself,” she said. At her direction, Kowalski and one of his pals hurried to set up four bottles in a row along the foot of the far bank, while Miranda loaded a fresh magazine into the .45.

  Barely allowing her sec men to jump out of the line of fire, she stepped into a modified Weaver stance: left foot advanced, hips turned slightly toward the target, left elbow down and fingers wrapped tightly over the shooting hand. Ryan grinned at the realization that of course the baron would favor that stance. It would make her look much more elegant than the isosceles.

  She rapped off four quick shots. The fragments of the first bottle were still in the air when the fourth shattered.

  Krysty clapped her hands. “Great shooting, Miranda!” she exclaimed.

  The baron had started buddying up to the statuesque redhead even before yesterday’s triumph. For her part Krysty was no more likely to suck up to a baron than Ryan himself was. She was a warmhearted person, though, and genuinely seemed to find something likable in the beautiful, sexy and rattlesnake-dangerous baron. Now she was telling no more than the truth.

  Colt, of course, looked completely deflated. Your mother really has a knack for cutting your balls off, doesn’t she, boy? Ryan thought.

  “Practice like I showed you, kid,” he called, “and you can learn to do that, too.”

  Miranda’s olive cheeks were flushed. “I’m not so rusty, then, yes? Chad, darling, come here.”

  The muscular young man trotted up like an eager pup. At the baron’s direction a sec man went to her stallion, which had his head down to munch at the winter-dry grass along the cut, and rummaged quickly in her saddlebag. He came back carrying a silver hip flask.

  She handed it to Chad. “Go stand by the bank,” she said, “and put this on your head. I’ll shoot it off.”

  The youth’s beefy cheeks lost some of their lusty pink. From some reason he cut his blue eyes in a murderous side glance at Ryan.

  “That’s kinda risky, don’t you think, Baron?” Ryan asked.

  For that matter the flask looked like predark scavvie. Very valuable. Too valuable, you’d think, to punch a hole through with a bullet. Then again, as Ryan knew too well, some barons were all about waste as a means of displaying their power.

  “Oh, poor dear,” Miranda cooed to Chad. “If you’re afraid—”

  She didn’t have to finish. All the remaining color left his face, but he almost sprinted to the bank. Turning to face her, he balanced the flask atop his head of wavy, white-blond locks. Then, crossing his arms without dislodging the flask, showing more body control than Ryan would’ve given him credit for, he smiled broadly at his baronial lover.

  For this shot Miranda didn’t use a combat stance. She turned right side to the youth, left hand stylishly on her hip, heavy pistol extended confidently in a slender hand. It was a target pose, the way Mildred stood when she needed to make a precise shot and had the time. It had been double-tough to teach her not to try it in the average firefight, where it would likely get her chilled in a hurry.

  With professional assurance Miranda lined up the sights. Her breasts rose and fell as she breathed in and partially out. She squeezed the trigger.

  Pale yellow flame spurted from the handblaster’s blocky muzzle. A black hole appeared in the middle of the smiling Chad’s forehead. His brains blew out in a black cloud behind. He was still smiling as he folded to the soft sand like a suddenly empty suit of clothes.

  Miranda stalked over to stand above his corpse. She tipped the Colt’s muzzle up and blew away a wisp of gray-green smoke.

  “If you had to fuck one of my maids,” she said casually, “you should at least have had the sense not to try to flatter her by telling her how sweet it was to fuck a nice, juicy pussy instead of a withered-up old prune.”

  Dropping the handblaster on the chill’s chest, she turned and strode back toward the bank. A pair of ashen-faced sec men almost bowled each other over to lock hands to provide a step for the baron out of the wash.

  Everybody said lots of nothing.

  As Miranda mounted her stallion, Ryan told Colt, “I guess that wraps it up here for today.”

  The youth was scrutinizing the toes of his boots. “Can we come out again soon?” he asked shyly, without raising his head.

  “Reckon so,” Ryan said.

  He heard hooves drum on hard dirt again. This time they rapped faster than when Miranda and her party had arrived. He walked quickly toward the bank himself, passing close to Krysty. And wasn’t surprised when she fell in beside him. Nor when she gripped his hand until they reached the bank and scrambled up, with Doc close behind.

  Stone had heard the hoofbeats, too. The sec men hustled to get up the bank themselves and put themselves between the baron and the new arrival.

  It was a kid of mebbe ten, a stable boy, Ryan guessed, riding a big bay bareback.

  “Perico sen
t me, Baron,” the boy shouted, reining in. Ryan changed his first assessment: stable girl. Although with bobbed brown hair and a stick figure, she wasn’t easy to identify as such until she opened her mouth.

  “What is it, Sandy?” Miranda asked. Her voice held surprising gentleness, for a woman who had just chilled a faithless lover in cold blood.

  And would of course get away with it, since she was the law in Sweetwater Junction. The north half, anyway.

  “He says to come quick, please. Been a wag train attacked at the ten-mile marker east of town. Only two survived!”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Survivors said that they came out of everywhere,” the young man said, “all at once. Dozens of them. Mebbe hundreds. Just attacked without warning.”

  He wasn’t a sec man, but a local from the north half of the ville. One loyal to Miranda, it would seem, since he had come forward voluntarily. Ryan wasn’t sure that was wise, from the standpoint of continued survival. It seemed to him that the safest way to deal with Baron Miranda was not to be noticed by her. Admittedly, he might have been jaundiced by recent events. Then again, that was how it ran with most barons.

  Krysty gave his hand a squeeze. He sat on a chair, and she on a fancy footstool beside him in the parlor, where Miranda liked to hold audiences. Doc stood by the fireplace in his shirtsleeves, his bright blue eyes blinking as if he was befuddled.

  “So, what did they say attacked them again?” Perico asked.

  The witness shook his shock of brown hair. He was sturdily built, with the big callused hands of a craftsman.

  “It was all crazy, what they were saying,” he said. “It was like—like chills had risen up to attack. Like they were all rotting and everything, but still could walk. You could shoot them again and again, cut them, beat them down. But they just kept coming.”

  “Were they after the cargo?” Miranda asked. She still wore her riding pants and boots, although she’d doffed her jacket to show the pink silk blouse she had worn beneath. She carried a riding crop, which she ticked incessantly against the gray slate of the mantelpiece.