Wretched Earth

by James Axler

  Lamellar’s purple lips sagged. He was breathing so quickly Ryan thought he might be hyperventilating, and waited with a certain interest to see if he keeled over.

  “Now get a grip on yourself,” Miranda told the healer. “Clean up this mess.”

  She turned to Ryan again. “I have a risky mission for you.”

  He shrugged. “You pay, I play.”

  A sudden movement from the chill made everybody jump. Ryan saw the corpse’s head come up. The face had gone gray, and the flesh seemed to have loosened on its bones. Bruised markings discolored the skin, green and brown and yellow, reminding Ryan of somebody who’d taken a good dose of rads—not enough to chill him, but enough to make his hair fall out and have him look weird for a week or two. The skin around the eyes had shrunk and taken on a weird, scaly appearance, like chicken legs.

  The thing chewed with monotonous rhythm on a chunk of skin and muscle it had ripped from the late Morris’s arm.

  “Have we further need of this abomination?” Miranda asked.

  “No, ma’am,” said Doc, who had come in late in shirt and trousers and sock feet, with his suspenders dangling behind. “Unless you wish to observe the progression of the disease, if we may call the change that. Which, though it might be of academic interest, I am forced to admit is unlikely to confer any benefit to us in a useful period of time.”

  “To translate,” Ryan said, “no, we don’t need it anymore.”

  “Good.” The Luger flared and barked again. The bullet hit the former sec man above the left eye and blew a divot out of the rear of his skull. The body bowed upward against the leather restraints. The heels drummed the shiny steel tabletop. For an instant Ryan feared that the change had changed itself: that even a brain shot no longer stopped the horrors. But it was only the last gasp of the monster’s stolen central nervous system. The rottie went limp with finality.

  “You should tell your assistants to exercise the utmost care in cleaning up the detritus, Dr. Lamellar,” Doc said, giving the healer a courtesy title he probably didn’t merit. “We don’t yet understand all the possible means by which the sickness is transmitted. But we know saliva’s involved, at least.”

  “About that mission, Baron,” Ryan said.

  “Geither Jacks must be made aware of the gravity of this situation,” she said.

  Her two sec men actually gasped at that. She ignored them. They quickly got busy trying to cover their obvious relief that she didn’t seem inclined to send them.

  Ryan’s unscarred right eyebrow rose. Her response surprised him, in a good way.

  “Smart,” he said. “Your usual baron might think, if the change were to get loose in a rival’s part of town, he could mebbe exploit the chaos to smash that rival. Be triple-stupe here. Self-death sure. But most wouldn’t see it.”

  “I’m not having that get loose in my ville,” she said. “I see too clearly what hell there would be eradicating it. If we even could.”

  “So you’re willing to negotiate a settlement with Jacks?” Krysty asked.

  Miranda shook her head firmly. “Never. This ville is mine—is my son’s. Jacks is a traitor and usurper. I’ll never rest until he is spinning slowly in the wind, and what is mine by right is mine once again. But I will not tolerate his fouling the nest through inaction!”

  Ryan nodded. It was a start.

  “I’ll do it,” he said. “Doc, finish getting dressed. Krysty, why don’t you stay here, keep the baron company—”

  Green fury flared in Krysty’s eyes. Her scarlet hair whipped around her shoulders like a nest of angry snakes. “Don’t even say it, Ryan! Don’t you dare try to leave me behind!”

  Ryan sighed. “All right. We’ll all get dressed while the baron writes her note to Jacks. Then we’ll deliver it.”

  “But it’s suicide!” Lamellar choked out. “He’ll kill you all!”

  “Then we won’t end up like that poor bastard, will we?”

  * * *

  LOUD MALE VOICES and wavering torchlight carried on up the street.

  “Whistling past the grave,” Doc remarked. The three had hidden behind some crates and assorted trash in a side yard to allow the Jacks sec patrol to pass. As usual, they had experienced no trouble slipping past each faction’s foot patrols. Even crossing no-man’s-land had been a breeze.

  “Do they think that by waving torches and talking loudly they’ll keep the rotties from jumping out at them?” Krysty asked.

  “Mebbe,” Ryan said. “They’re on edge. Not thinking clear.”

  He shook his head. “Well, things won’t get better if we just stand here.”

  When they were within a couple blocks of the former gaudy house that served Gate Jacks as a palace-in-exile, they stepped out and boldly strode up the street. Ryan carried a white flag consisting of a bleached linen pillowcase on a broomstick, prominently displayed.

  Almost at once a four-man sec patrol challenged them.

  “What have we got here?” The obvious leader was a big man with the sides of his head shaved, leaving a shock of wavy brown hair on top. He planted his burly form directly in Ryan’s path, with cantaloupe-size fists on his hips.

  “Looks like some of Miranda’s bitches done jumped the fence and strayed over here,” a skinny guy with unshaved jaws and a rat’s nest of dark hair said. One of his eyes shone dead white in the gleam of stars from above. It reminded Ryan eerily of the changed sec man’s eyes.

  “Can we chill ’em, Lou?” asked a third, as tall as the leader but a real string bean, with an Adam’s apple as large as, well, an apple. “Can we, huh?”

  “After we play with the big-tit bitch,” Dead-Eye said hurriedly.

  “We’re here under a flag of truce,” Ryan said, shaking his stick to call attention to the fact. “We’re bringing Jacks a message from Miranda.”

  “Well, just hand that bad boy on over,” Lou said, extending a hand the size of a paving stone. “We’ll see Gate gets it, nice and safe.”

  “We’re supposed to deliver it to Jacks’s own hand,” Krysty said. “And we claim right of passage.”

  “Well, whoop-de-do, Sandbag Boobs,” Lou said. “I wasn’t asking. Boys, take ’em—”

  A loud noise interrupted him. Also a bright yellow flash that illuminated the big man collapsing on himself. Black fluid squirted out of his ears as he went down.

  His LeMat handblaster held at the end of his extended arm, Doc let the huge weapon’s muzzle wander back and forth across the three surviving sec men as if at random. “That is no way to talk to a lady,” he said in tones of mild reproof. “Now, you gentlemen will be good enough to escort us to Mr. Jacks without further ado.”

  He didn’t phrase it as a request. The patrol didn’t take it that way. They did as he said.

  Blasterfire in his own street was apparently enough to rouse the man himself. By the time they’d covered the block and a half remaining, Jacks was standing on the stoop. He wore a robe—maroon silk, judging by the yellow light spilling out the windows and open double doors—over pale pajamas. He puffed at a lit cigar.

  “So you’re the bitch’s new outlander mercies,” he said, when Ryan, Krysty and Doc walked up to him with their captive escort. “I got me some, too. Mebbe we should get you and them to square off.”

  Three figures emerged from the French doors behind Jacks, looking grim as rad death: J.B., Mildred and Jak.

  “Another time,” Ryan said. “Miranda said to give you this.”

 
He handed over a rolled scrap of fancy stationery sealed with black wax pressed with a signet ring Miranda wore.

  “She always did know how to do things in style,” Jacks said, examining it. As he broke the seal he added, “So I reckon Lou got frisky with you on the way in?”

  “He required instruction in the niceties of diplomacy, sir,” Doc said. “Also common courtesy.”

  “Take it he didn’t survive the lesson? No loss. A white flag’s got to be respected. It’s part and parcel of the accepted order. Without that we got anarchy. The rest of you assholes, take that to heart.”

  Ryan and his companions practiced squaring off and looking fierce at their friends as Jacks read the message Miranda had written in her looping and dramatic but clear hand. The others glared furiously back.

  “So all that bull-goose crap about walking chills is true?” Jacks said. “Or at least Miranda wants me to believe it is.”

  “What does she have to gain by your guarding your part of the ville more closely, Mr. Jacks?” Krysty asked.

  He shrugged. “Mebbe string my forces out along the perimeter so she can bust through? All right. Tell Miranda her message came through loud and clear.”

  “Will you prepare to defend your side?”

  “I’ll think about it,” Jacks said. “She can stew in her juices until she finds out. You can go now. Make sure they get back all safe and sound.”

  “Will do!” said Dead-Eye, throwing a salute so sharp he almost coldcocked himself.

  “Wasn’t talking to you, cock-snot.”

  * * *

  J.B. STOOD IN THE COLD night air, watching his friends and their three unhappy companions walk away down the street.

  “You three follow ’em,” Jacks growled. “Make sure they keep headed in the right direction.”

  “Want us to chill them?” Mildred asked.

  “Didn’t you hear me just now?”

  “Thought it was a speech for those other numb nuts.”

  He laughed. “Good point. But I meant it. This time. Now move.”

  “What’d you go and say that for, Mildred?” J.B. asked when they were out of sight—and earshot—of their employer and his gaudy house HQ.

  She grinned. “Just playing the role, J.B.”

  “Wonder if you aren’t enjoying it a mite too much. And such a mild soul you act, most of the time. We don’t want to come off too bloodthirsty.”

  Jak snorted. “Jacks sec boss,” he pointed out. “No such thing, too bloodthirsty.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “Listen to me,” Reno shouted to the ville folk and traders gathered around the thirty-foot-wide fountain in Sweetwater Junction’s main square. He climbed up on the red sandstone cap of its yard-high brick walls. “Listen! You’re all in deadly danger!”

  Nervous faces turned toward him, pinched and pale. People were queued up north and south of the big fountain along the main road, clutching chits that seemed to be written on broken pottery pieces—cheap and available. Clumps of sec men at barricades took the chits before allowing people access to the fountain. Trade wags, both gas- and horse-drawn, waited at the north and south checkpoints.

  The sec men north of the east–west highway wore black armbands. The ones south wore green. They seemed to ignore one another studiously. Just as the ones manning the checkpoint where he’d entered the ville from the east had.

  Reno had spent the last of his jack, plus bartered his last tin of scavvied corned beef, to buy the water chit required for entry into the ville. He wasn’t concerned about that. He had ways of getting more.

  And those ways entailed telling tales. True tales. Unwelcome yet necessary tales.

  “There’s an army of monsters headed to your ville!” he declaimed, his voice ringing back from stone-and-brick building fronts. “They’re right behind me. You have to listen! They’re coming to eat you—you and your children! They’ll chill you all unless you get ready to fight them!”

  Groups of sec men in both colors of armband stared at him in consternation. Rousing the populace of a ville to fight was a dangerous proposition for all concerned. As a rule, barons feared that if their people decided to fight, they were as likely to fight their own bosses for freedom as any external enemy.

  But not this enemy. Reno knew too well. If only he could persuade enough people in time.

  “They rise from the dead. They’re chills, but they walk like you and me. If they bite you, you turn into one of them. If they get loose in the ville, it’ll be the end of all of you.”

  The green armbands moved first, three burly men breaking away to run toward him. An eye blink later the black armbands reacted. But by then a blond-bearded, green-armband guy had Reno by one elbow.

  “Come down from there, you stupe!”

  “Listen to me!” Reno yelled. “Hear my words! You must prepare now!”

  As he was dragged away, he turned his head.

  “You’ve got to get ready. Or you’re all doomed!”

  * * *

  “YOU MEAN YOU BELIEVE me?” Reno asked.

  Gratefully, he accepted a mug of hot spearmint tea from a servant girl who, despite a lack of the stucco-thick paint that the kind customarily wore, put him in mind of a gaudy slut. Come to think of it, the red-velvet-and-gold decor in Boss Jacks’s audience room wouldn’t have been out of place in a gaudy. The whole building looked like one that had been taken over and transformed into a heavily armed headquarters.

  “Not exactly the first we’ve heard about it,” Jacks said. He was a lanky guy with a bit of a pot and a set of wrinkles for a face, and hair the color and straightness of straw.

  “We were fools not to listen,” said the mournful black guy in coveralls who stood beside the boss’s easy chair.

  “Well,” Reno said nervously, “what do you want from me, Mr. Jacks?”

  “The whole story.”

  “From the beginning?”

  Jacks nodded.

  “But—I mean, why? If you’ve heard it all before?”

  “I didn’t say we’ve heard it all before. I said we heard some. I want everything you got. Leave out no detail, however minor. If we’re gonna fight these things, we need every edge we can get.”

  “We’d be fools not to learn as much as we can,” the black dude, Coffin, said.

  “You think he repeats himself a lot,” Jacks said, “wait’ll you meet my grammaw. Go on now, son. Lay it on us.”

  * * *

  THE TALE-TELLING STRETCHED for hours. Jacks kept asking him to go back over parts of it, try to remember more. Reno didn’t mind. This was his bread and butter now. Literally. Jacks had him served grilled pronghorn with dried apple slice sandwiches while he talked. If he pleased the baron, or whatever this dude was, enough, he’d be square to stay here a spell. He’d get chow, and water and shelter.

  Until the swarm came, of course. And then it’d be time to move on. Or—it wouldn’t.

  The sky outside the windows had darkened enough to be noticeable through the curtains when Jacks stiffened and said, “Wait. Go back.”

  “Huh? I mean, yes, sir, Mr. Jacks, sir. Only what part?” He’d brought them up to almost the present day with an account of his progress overland, trying to stay out of the hands, not to mention the mouths, of the changed. Of hair-raising escapes and scrapes and near misses.

  “You said something about the bunch you met up with when you went to the caravanserai.”

  “Oh, yeah.” He’d
kind of glossed over that part. The narrative had been rolling, though, so they hadn’t pressed him before. “They were a pretty wild crew, I got to tell you. There was the one-eyed dude, first I ever heard call these creatures rotties. And his sidekick, a short little shit with glasses and a hat. And his woman was this drop-dead gorgeous redhead with tits out to here—

  “What? Why are you staring at me like that?”

  * * *

  MIRANDA SHARP’S MOUTH tightened when she saw Stone come out of the sod house into the moonlight with a man even bigger than he was.

  “Finneran,” she said tightly.

  He glared back from his meat slab face.

  “Lady,” Perico said at her side.

  She set her jaw. It cut her like a knife to have to deal with those who had betrayed her. But the situation, the very welfare of her ville and her only child, demanded it.

  Besides, the formerly low-ranked sec man wasn’t the most heinous traitor she would meet with this night.

  “We’re good,” Stone said. “No surprises.”

  Miranda hated surprises. She always had. She was surprised enough when she received a message requesting an urgent midnight meeting between her and her hated enemy, the vile Geither Jacks, in an abandoned farmhouse just west of the ville. She was even more surprised when Perico urged her to accept.

  It had flashed into her mind that perhaps he had betrayed her, too, but she quickly saw that was unlikely. Perico had long since had all the opportunities he could desire had he meant to turn on her.

  And his quiet, earnest words had convinced her to agree.

  She had also been surprised at Jacks’s terms: “Leave your shiny new mercies at home. I’ll do the same.” But she had concurred. Reluctantly, because she had come to rely on the three. Especially Krysty, who was developing into something she’d never really had in her life before: a female confidante. And Krysty’s handsome one-eyed devil of a man, of course. Even the courtly and surprisingly formidable Dr. Tanner had proved his worth, both as a tutor for Colt and as a fighter.