Wretched Earth

by James Axler

  “No. Didn’t seem interested in no wags. Or anything that was in them. Just people.”

  “You said some traders rode horses,” Stone said. He was scowling so hard he looked as if his harsh face was going to implode. “Did these creatures show any interest in them?”

  “If they did, the traders didn’t say nothin’ about it. The monsters just zeroed in on them.”

  “What did these—things—do to the merchants?” Miranda asked.

  “Et ’em alive,” he said, “ma’am.”

  For a moment there was no sound except the popping of the fire. The imported firewood smelled like piñon pine from parts far west.

  Colt Sharp sat perched on the front of a chair, twisting his hands together between his knees. He still looked green around the gills. Apparently the night of blood and fire when his father had died and Gate Jacks and his traitorous accomplices were chased from the palace hadn’t accustomed him to seeing people get chilled up close and personal. Then again, Chad’s death had caught Ryan by surprise, too.

  “So our new friends were right about the rotties all along?” Colt asked.

  His mother scowled.

  “Mebbe,” Perico said quickly.

  “Not proved,” Miranda snapped. “Where are these traders? I want to talk to them now, Stone.”

  The witness turned wide brown eyes to the sec chief. “Tell her,” Stone said.

  “They came riding in on their horses like they had screamwings on their tails,” the witness said. “Threw some jack at the guards for water chits. Let their horses drink from the trough, drank like a day’s ration themselves, and filled their canteens. They just babbled their story to anyone who’d listen. Then when their horses had drunk and caught their breaths, they jumped back on, said they was riding west fast as they could. They said ever’body else should, too, if they liked living.”

  “Send four men, Stone,” Miranda said. “Give them fast horses. Tell them to ride hard to Ten Mile and find out what really happened. Tell them to be careful.”

  “I’ll tell them to do their best, Baron,” Stone said drily.

  He left. As usual, Miranda had come to a decision quickly. She liked them carried out the same way.

  “What do we do now?” Colt asked.

  “Wait,” Perico said. “Your mother’s right. We can’t go running off in all directions until we got a better idea what we’re up against.”

  The baron looked to the townie, still standing by and looking nervous.

  “You may go,” she said.

  “Did I do well, Baron?”

  “Yes. You have served your ville well. Your family shall have a week’s extra water ration chits as reward. See to it, Perico?”

  The man jabbered his thanks to Miranda for her generosity as the grizzled adviser led him out.

  Ryan gave Krysty’s hand a last squeeze and stood. “I’d like to go out, cruise around the ville some. See if I can pick up anything more. Doc, you come with me. Krysty, why don’t you stay here.”

  Miranda nodded. “She can lighten the hours for me with stories of her adventures.”

  “It’d be my pleasure,” Krysty said.

  She gave Ryan a “be careful” look as he gathered up Doc and headed out. He just grinned back.

  Yeah, he thought. As if.

  * * *

  THE TRADERS’ HORROR TALE had gotten the people of Sweetwater Junction stirred up. They stood in little groups on street corners or talked across fences, and even forgot to duck and scurry when Ryan and Doc swung by with their black sec man armbands. The two men garnered no more than increasingly wild rumors about the attack. The stories got stranger every time they heard them.

  Almost strange enough to approach the truth.

  Some spoke in favor of fleeing west into the wasteland straightaway. Others spoke of getting ready and fighting for their homes, their loved ones, their lives. Still others observed that’d just get them chilled by one faction or another. Neither would-be baron of Sweetwater Junction brooked anything resembling rivalry from anywhere else.

  Still, the talk of fighting back made Ryan and Doc exchange a knowing look and furtive smile.

  Mebbe there’s hope, after all, Ryan thought.

  * * *

  STONE’S INVESTIGATIVE PATROL came back at sunset. One lone man rode up to the palace, swaying in the saddle of a horse that blew froth and rolled its eyes in terror. Palace servants ran out to help the injured sec man gently from his saddle.

  The horse uttered a mighty grunt, shuddered and dropped dead.

  The baron’s personal healer, Lamellar, raced out, with Ryan, Krysty and Doc right behind. The wounded man was moaning. His clothes were ripped into ribbons and blotched with blood like a paint horse’s rump.

  Lamellar, who had a black comb-over of prodigious length that was always coming loose, knelt by the injured man’s side. On cue, the comb-over fell down so it was almost tickling the sec man’s cheek.

  “He’s been severely scratched and bitten,” the healer said. “He’s lost a substantial amount of blood. But unless he’s bleeding internally he seems to have no major trauma. We’ll have to get him inside and examine him carefully to tell.”

  “Wait, Miranda,” Krysty said urgently. “If he’s bitten, he’s a danger to everybody. He’ll change.”

  “If that’s true,” Perico said, “best for all concerned to just chill him.”

  “There is no ‘maybe’ about it, my friend,” Doc said. “Unless you think the prospect of becoming a mindless monster with an insatiable appetite for human flesh and brains might appeal to him? I did not know him well.”

  Perico looked hard at Doc.

  “When you get him inside you need to strap him down tight,” Ryan said to Lamellar. “Before you even examine him. And you need to keep him that way. You can work around the restraints.”

  “Why, that’s barbaric!” the healer said, turning his head toward Ryan so that the strayed combover fell to his shoulder.

  “‘Barbaric’ does not even begin to describe the nature and conduct of the creature he is turning into,” Doc said. “‘Diabolical’ would be closer.”

  “Baron—”

  Miranda’s brows were pulled together thoughtfully. “Do as they say,” she said. “If these people are telling the truth about the monsters that did this to him, we don’t dare take the slightest risk.”

  She swept Ryan, Doc and Krysty with her dark and searching gaze.

  “It would appear you were telling the truth,” she said.

  Stone appeared. His long, heavy face hardened as he saw the wounded man.

  “He’s the only one back?” he asked.

  “He’s it,” Ryan said.

  He was about to say something else, something urgent, but Miranda preempted him.

  “We must seal the entrances to the ville,” she snapped. “Not just the main gates. There are ways through the perimeter fence. Everybody knows. They must be sealed or guarded.”

  Stone’s coal-smudge eyebrows squashed even closer together. “What about the other half of the ville?” he asked, with the air of a man who knew the risks he ran in mentioning that the baron was in reality only half a ruler.

  But she was focused. As with Doc’s spells, so it seemed with Miranda’s rages: real danger flatlined everything else.

  “Seal the streets and secure the buildings along the square and the east and west roads,” she ordered. “We’ll deal with the traitor’s side
…later.”

  “That’ll take a lot of men, baron.”

  “Use them all if you have to. Arm trustworthy servants. Impress citizens if that’s what it takes.”

  She looked at Ryan and his companions.

  “We have to at least act as if the whole story the outlanders told us is true. If even one of these horrors gets into my ville undetected…”

  She shook her head. Miranda didn’t strike Ryan as the sort to shrink from much. But even she couldn’t face the consequences of the change sickness taking a foothold in Sweetwater Junction.

  Two servants rushed up carrying a blue tarp. Lamellar directed them to transfer the wounded man onto it as gently as possible. Then, by unspoken consent, Ryan and Doc took the corners of the tarp by the sec man’s feet, leaving the ones by his head to the servants.

  “One, two, three, heave,” Lamellar chanted. The four men rose, picking up the injured man. His deadweight, distributed among the four of them, was bearable.

  “You’re still here?” Miranda said to Stone. He moved off with alacrity surprising in a man so solidly built.

  The rest of them followed the healer into the big house. He led them to a flight of stairs to the basement. Navigating the wooden steps with what amounted to a swaying bag of 170-pound man, with nothing but lantern light to guide them, was tricky, but they got him down without incident.

  An oil lantern burned on a rickety table on the packed-dirt floor of a hallway. The basement was cold and smelled of cool earth and vinegar. At Lamellar’s direction they carried the victim through the first door on the right.

  It was lit by what milky light made its way through long, narrow, glass-block windows near the ceiling. Sudden garish white light flooded the room as the healer flipped a switch. It came from an incandescent bulb in a flattened-cone reflector hanging from the scavvied acoustic-tile ceiling.

  “On-demand alcohol-fueled generator,” he explained. “The late baron’s father didn’t fancy having his wounds tended to by someone with a squint.”

  It told Ryan something about the barons of Sweetwater Junction, that they had the capacity for electric power, and kept it reserved solely for emergencies. Most would’ve used it extravagantly, to show off their own power if nothing else.

  A gleaming stainless-steel surgical table dominated the medical room. Leather straps dangled from brackets above a white tile floor that sloped subtly toward a brass drain in its center.

  Ryan and Doc helped hoist the moaning man onto the table, then they stepped aside.

  “I mislike the look of that table, my dear Ryan,” Doc murmured, as they found themselves in front of white enameled-metal cabinets and a counter of what seemed to be poured and smoothed concrete.

  “I hear you,” Ryan replied.

  Fussing like a mother duck, Lamellar supervised the servants transferring the patient from tarp to table safely, then he shooed them out.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said to Ryan and Doc as he fastened straps over the wounded man’s ankles. “This is my domain. Upstairs in the palace, Miranda rules. In the ville her word is law—or at least in the north half. Down here I’m king, and I would never condone torture.”

  Ryan wasn’t especially reassured by the way the stooped old man emphasized the last by gesticulating with a razor-edged scalpel.

  “Besides,” the healer said, slicing bootlaces stiff and crusty with half-dried blood and muck, “Miranda isn’t much given to private torture. If she’s going to inflict pain, she likes to make a public example of it.”

  He didn’t seem at all abashed by the fact that scarcely were the words out of his mouth than the woman herself blew in, still smelling of the outdoors and glowering like a thunderhead. She was followed closely by Krysty and Perico.

  With a pealing scream that rang off the walls and ceiling tiles, the wounded man sat bolt upright even as Lamellar cinched his waist. The doctor leaped back with his comb-over flapping in alarm.

  “They’re coming!” the sec man shrieked. “Nothing stops them! Blasters can’t stop them! Can’t chill the dead. The eyes—”

  He flopped back, his own eyes staring unblinking at the ceiling.

  With a sigh, Lamellar straightened. “That’s that, then. It’s over.” He reached to shut the man’s open eyes.

  Ryan grabbed his wrist. “Fireblast, it is!” he snapped. “You get right back there and fasten up all those straps now, or I’ll chill you where you stand!”

  Dark eyes saucer wide, Lamellar turned a colorless face to the baron.

  “Do as he tells you,” she ordered, “or I’ll let him do as he said.”

  “And by the Three Kennedys, man, make sure the straps are tight!” Doc proclaimed in a voice that quavered with passion. “Because now is when the real danger starts!”

  Chapter Twenty

  Knuckles rattling the bedroom door snapped Ryan awake as he lay in the warm circle of Krysty’s arms. Her soft silken nakedness was hot against his bare back and buttocks.

  “What?” he barked hoarsely.

  “Baron says come quick,” a male voice called through the door.

  “Come where?”

  “Basement,” the man said. “The chill just woke up!”

  Ryan bothered to pull on only his jeans and boots. He tucked his SIG-Sauer handblaster inside the waistband, just in case. It wasn’t an ideal way to carry the weapon, but these weren’t ideal circumstances.

  Krysty followed in bare feet and a thigh-length scavvied Tennessee University sweatshirt she used as a nightgown.

  Shrieks of pain and terror blew out of the stairwell when Ryan pulled the door open.

  “That doesn’t sound like a dead person,” Krysty said.

  “Not yet,” he said grimly.

  In the medical room they found Miranda wrapped in what looked to be a brown bearskin, scowling furiously. Beside her Lamellar wrung his hands in distress, his comb-over hanging down the right side of his face like a peeled-off scalp. A pair of sec men, presumably the baron’s bedroom-door guard detail, hovered in the background, looking as if they were trying not to freak out completely.

  Another stick-skinny, middle-aged guy in a white lab coat liberally spattered with gore and muck had his arm clamped in the jaws of the dead sec man. He was the one making most of the noise.

  The chill growled and rolled eyes glazed over with a milky film as he shook his prize with bloody teeth.

  “It’s impossible, Baron,” Lamellar was saying. Evidently on behalf of his man, who finally left off howling and thrashing to try gingerly to dislodge the chill’s teeth from his bare forearm. From the looks of things he’d given violent tugging a try and failed. “This man died hours ago. He has no heartbeat nor apparent respiration even now. Morris was trying to monitor his state of decomposition when…when this happened. There’s no blame, surely.”

  Points to the old bastard for having the stone to take the sec man’s pulse while he was struggling to get loose, with his jaws clamped on the med tech’s arm, Ryan thought.

  “It’s clearly not impossible, Lamellar,” Miranda said. “It happens, sí? The dead man moves. It’s not as if you weren’t warned of this. It’s precisely why you were directed to secure him firmly. I am not pleased.”

  The healer’s doleful face went even grayer. Clearly, as terrors went, chills returning to a ghastly parody of life to attack the living paled beside the wrath of Baron Miranda.

  The baron looked at Ryan. “You and our friend
s are vindicated,” she said. “I was double-stupe to doubt you and not act before. I can only act decisively now, and hope it’s not too late.”

  “I don’t believe it is, Miranda,” Krysty said. “But the ville needs to be roused. The rotties could arrive at any time. And despite the fact they seem mindless, they’ve shown flashes of cleverness. Even tactical sense.”

  “How is that even possible?”

  “We have no idea,” Ryan said. “All we know is that we can’t underestimate the bastards.”

  “Help me,” moaned Morris the med tech. He now had hold of his own arm above where the rottie’s mouth gripped it, as if hoping to keep the unnatural creature from swallowing it whole.

  “Right,” Miranda said. Her right hand whipped out from her bulky robe toward Morris’s head. Before even Ryan could grasp what she was doing, a yellow light flashed and a painful sound shattered the air inside the little room like glass.

  Morris slumped down behind the table, shot in the face and dead at once. Miranda pivoted back to Ryan. The front of her bare robe fell open, revealing the olive contours of her body. What really distracted Ryan was the P08 Luger she held tipped toward the acoustic ceiling with a thin string of smoke coming from its muzzle.

  “You killed him!” Lamellar screeched. His voice was like fingernails on a chalkboard. Ryan half hoped the baron would chill him next. Just to shut his pie hole.

  “You display a firm grasp of the obvious, Lamellar,” Miranda said. “I commend you. May I recall to your razor-keen mind what happens to those who are bitten by the creatures who have—what did you say, Ryan? Changed.”

  “But…but…how do we know it happens in every case, Baron?”

  “It has happened in every case I have direct knowledge of,” she said crisply. “In fact, did not this whole unpleasant scene arise from doubting that very fact? As I said before, we can take no chances.”