Wretched Earth

by James Axler

  “What now?” she asked. The wind hissed over the plains. From the icy knife edge in it she would scarcely have known spring was coming, with its less-welcome accompaniment of occasional torrential and lethal acid-rain storms.

  “We go inside, Baron,” Stone said. “It’s safe.”

  Inside, the single room was lit by two lanterns, and a fire crackled in the hearth. Three men waited. One was a stranger. The other two were all too familiar.

  And hated.

  “Miranda,” said Geither Jacks, turning away from the fire. Stone and Finneran came in, closing the door against the chill. It had obviously been recently repaired, and actually kept most of the wind out, though it whistled in the rafters.

  “You will use my proper title,” she gritted.

  He grinned that lopsided, trap-mouthed grin of his. “Very well. Mrs. Sharp.”

  She felt her face knot into a grimace of fury.

  “Easy, Baron,” Perico said from her elbow. “Now’s the time for talk and reason.”

  She drew in a deep breath. “Very well. I agree. Or I would not be here. What is so important you want me to see, Jacks?”

  “Not see,” he said. “Hear.”

  He turned to the third man, the stranger. He was a slight young man with an unruly mop of brown hair and brown eyes huge behind the lenses of his glasses.

  “Go ahead, boy,” Jacks said. “Talk.”

  The young man moistened his lips with a pink tongue.

  “Evening, Baron,” he said. “Uh, you can call me Reno.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The instant Ryan opened the bedroom door, the steel-shod butt of a longblaster caught him hard in the face. The world spun into crazy chaos. Vaguely, he heard Krysty’s scream of fear and fury, heard Doc bellow like an angry bull; a flash, the roar of a shot, and somehow over all the sound of a bullet striking something; a grunt of pain as the room filled with acrid black smoke.

  Ryan was on his back on the cold hardwood floor without knowing clearly how he got there.

  “Alive!” someone shouted. It sounded like Stone. “The baron wants them alive!”

  Ryan fought to get control of his body, leap to his feet, leap into action. But his muscles refused to respond. His stomach rolled over and over inside him.

  Then the boots began to thud against his ribs. It was all red and pain, until the blackness mercifully swallowed him.

  * * *

  “YOUR SENTRIES KEEP seeing things outside the wire, Mr. Jacks,” J.B. said.

  Although it was well past midnight, the boss of Sweetwater Junction’s southern half sat in a dressing gown in his favorite chair, with his feet up on one of those fancy silky footstools, his inevitable cigar and a snifter of some dark liquid that might just have been scavvied brandy in hand. The room smelled of pungent imported firewood and cigar smoke.

  Unusually, neither his adviser, Coffin, nor his grandmother were in attendance, although the old lady often went to bed early. J.B.’s team had encountered the withered old crone only a few times, which J.B. considered a good thing.

  The heat of the fire blazing in the big fireplace seemed to sting his cheeks and hands. It was that cold outside. He could still smell the cold beating off his companions’ clothing and his own from their nocturnal survey of Jacks’s defensive positions.

  Jacks drew on his cigar and blew out a greenish smoke ring.

  “Seeing real things?” he asked. “Or seeing shadows?”

  “Both,” Jak said. “Some.”

  “That seems to be the way of it, Mr. Jacks,” Mildred said. “We saw some things moving around out there, too, before the moon set. Upright things, not like coyotes.”

  “Are these rotties smart enough to do something like that?”

  “Doesn’t take a lot of smarts to walk around at night,” J.B. said.

  “I mean, if they’re mindless and driven purely by hunger, wouldn’t they just keep coming toward where the food was?”

  “We don’t know much about them,” Mildred said. “We don’t know enough. Remember how we told you that while individual ones act pretty mindless, collectively they seem to show some kind of sense?”

  Jacks’s smile looked a mite peculiar to J.B. He wasn’t a noted connoisseur of smiles, nothing like that. But he’d learned to keep his eyes skinned for signs of odd behavior among people he dealt with. Keeping close watch on details was something that came easily to him.

  “Yes,” their employer rasped, drawing out the syllable. “You told me. So you did. And just today I got pretty solid confirmation of what you told me.”

  He turned his head. “You can come out.”

  A slight figure with wild hair and eyeglasses not that different from J.B.’s own emerged from the staircase.

  “Reno?” Mildred said. “You get a different prescription? Last I saw you, you had bat-wing glasses.”

  He smiled shyly. “They got busted. When I’m scavvying, I keep a lookout for ones I can use. Been collecting ’em a long time.”

  J.B. felt the hairs at the back of his neck rise as the implications of the kid’s presence trickled down his spine.

  Apparently, Jak did, too. “We fucked,” he said.

  J.B. stuck a hand inside his jacket. He heard metal click right behind his head, and he froze.

  The Armorer knew the sound of a blaster’s safety coming off when he heard it.

  Jacks ticked a finger back and forth at them. “Tut-tut,” he said. “Don’t do anything foolish, Mr. Dix, Mr. Lauren. Dr. Wyeth, a healer, I’m given to understand. My men already have the drop on you. You have no chance.”

  “Couldn’t smell,” Jak said disgustedly. “Too much fancy smoke and whore perfume inside.”

  Mildred cut her eyes to J.B.

  “If you’re thinking of making a play for me, and either blasting your way out or going down in a blaze of glory,” Jacks said, “my men have orders to shoot to wound.”

  J.B. raised his hands, as did the others. Hard hands frisked them professionally.

  Brick Finneran came out of the stairwell, smiling all over his pink adobe-block face. “You made me look triple-stupe out there, Dix,” he said. “I been hoping for something like this.”

  “I didn’t make you look stupe, Brick,” J.B. said. “You did that all by your lonesome.”

  Still smiling, Brick stepped forward and slammed a sledgehammer fist into J.B.’s gut. The air burst out of him, and he fell to his knees, gasping and retching.

  Hands yanked his jacket down behind him to bind his arms.

  J.B. shook his head and looked up. Sec men held a furious-looking Mildred by the arms. A pair flanked Jak with Winchesters pointed at his head. Another was tying his hands behind his slender back. His red eyes had the blankness of an animal’s.

  J.B. looked at Jacks, who grinned at him.

  “There’s someone I’d like you folks to meet,” he said. “You’re going to get to know him real well. Levon?”

  If his arms hadn’t been bound behind him by his own leather jacket, J.B. would’ve gone for it then and there. They hadn’t met Levon before, but they’d heard the name. Usually whispered in various mixtures of awe, horror and sadistic glee.

  From the stairs came a thumping and a moist wheezing. The figure that descended needed to turn sideways to navigate them.

  Jacks’s pet mutie torturer Levon was a monster in size, sure enough. He had to have been six-seven, six-eight, and weighed a good four hundred pounds. His f
ace was asymmetrical, one eye larger and higher than the other, both heavy-lidded. He didn’t have a nose so much as a swelling in the middle of his face with two thumb-size holes in it, both running snot into a mouth that was a loose hole J.B. doubted could even close right, with wet lips framing a few twisted, brown teeth. His complexion suggested boiled oatmeal poured into a cheesecloth bag shaped kind of like an onion. The point was on top, with a thatch of brown hair sticking up like leaves.

  Levon wore stained denim overalls above a faded orange T-shirt. His general body shape suggested a bag of boiled oatmeal, too. His vast splayed feet were bare, mottled pink and blue and white. The nails were humped, yellow and cracked. His left foot had four toes.

  The most striking feature, as he jiggled and whuffled and giggled and lurched his way out onto the floral carpet in the sitting room, was his right shoulder. Or shoulders. An extra one sprouted from the armpit of the other.

  J.B. felt a bit cheated. When he’d heard about Levon’s three arms, he’d expected three full-size limbs, with meat hooks to match. Instead, the lower right arm was small, not much larger than a child’s, sticking out through a hole in the T-shirt. Instead of a hand it had a fleshy, two-lobed claw.

  The real ones were nothing to sneer at, though. Levon had arms like most men had legs. And the hands were huge even for his massive frame.

  “Don’t let those pincers fool you,” Jacks said with satisfaction. “They got a stronger grip than you do. Stronger than Brick, even. They can give you the nastiest pinch you ever felt in your soon-to-be-ending-in-agony lives.”

  “Levon…play,” the mutie wheezed. The noise seemed to come as much out his nose holes as through his mouth. J.B. got the notion that, while Levon likely wasn’t the brightest star in Constellation Mutie, his slowness of speech was more a function of physical difficulty in speaking than any necessary slowness of thought.

  “Yes,” Jacks said, “Levon play. But don’t do any permanent harm. And don’t leave any marks.”

  He took a hearty puff on his stogie.

  “We don’t want ’em all used-up-looking when you torture them to death in the central square tomorrow, after my little rendezvous with destiny, now, do we?”

  * * *

  THE CAT O’ NINE TAILS WHISTLED evilly in the air, to crack against Krysty’s buttocks. Bright white pain flashed through her whole body. Try as she might, she couldn’t stifle a cry of agony.

  “You bitch,” Ryan shouted at her tormentor. “No way you’ll survive this. No…bastard…way.”

  Baron Miranda Sharp trailed the knot-tipped leather thongs over a bare forearm and smiled. “Ah, the passion, the fire! The devotion! You are quite the man, Ryan.”

  She shook her head. “It’s too bad that you came to the ville under false pretenses. To do what? Assassinate me? And your friends, to assassinate Jacks? Seize power for yourselves?”

  Suspended by steel manacles cutting agonizingly into her wrists, Krysty turned slowly on chains hung from a huge iron hook in the ceiling. Ryan came into view, manacled to a heavy chair that was bolted to the floor. His face was puffy and bruised from the beating he had received. Then Doc, likewise fastened in a chair, his head down and his white hair falling lank almost to his lap.

  “Never that,” Doc said. He raised his head with a groan of effort. A red bib of bloodstain ran down the front of his white shirt. Black trails of drying blood ran from his nostrils over his lip. “We came here to do one thing and one thing only—to try to get the ville ready to fight the rotties!”

  Miranda made a sound that was half cluck, half snort. “Perhaps. But why not come openly?”

  “You didn’t…believe us when we told you,” Krysty said. She had mastered the pain. For the moment. She didn’t want to call on Gaia for strength unless the situation got worse.

  “But you deceived me, all the same. You are not to be trusted. Under the circumstances, that means you must pay the price.”

  Still smiling, she lashed out again. The multithonged whip licked across Krysty’s buttocks like blowtorch flames. She screamed again.

  Ryan roared with fury. His face went red, and the tendons stood out on his neck and jaw at his colossal struggle to get free.

  “You would tear me apart with your hands if you could, Ryan,” Miranda said. “That’s why I torture and humiliate your woman before you. I’m pressed for time. And when I’m done meeting with Jacks, you will be promptly executed in public.”

  “Your healer said you were not the sort for private torture,” Doc said. “Yet you had this dungeon tricked out and ready, all along.”

  Again she shrugged. “Normally I’m not. As for this room, it was built by a baron long ago. I have made little use of it, and that only for interrogations. But your treachery has wounded me deeply. I thought you were my friend, Krysty Wroth!”

  * * *

  THE DOOR TO THE CELLAR ROOM beneath the former gaudy house opened inward. A hard hand propelled a slight, stumbling figure forward.

  “There,” a harsh voice said. “You got ’em in here. Now why don’t you keep them company? You and they should have plenty to talk about.”

  Raucous laughter faded down the hall and up the stairs.

  With a moan, Mildred rolled over to check out the new arrival.

  “So, Reno,” she heard J.B. say. “How’s it hanging?”

  Reno had slammed face-first into the wall. Now he turned and slumped until his butt rested on the crude concrete floor. In the light streaming through the long, shallow windows up by the ceiling, far too low even for Jak to crawl through, she recognized the young man as he adjusted his glasses on his nose.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I came to warn the ville about the horde’s approach. I had no idea telling my story would bring disaster on you and your friends.”

  “Right,” Jak said.

  “Let him have his say,” J.B. said. He sounded marrow-weary. “Anyway, how could he have known what we were up to?”

  The Armorer settled his own glasses on his face, then picked up his fedora and adjusted it on his head. He sighed. That came close to shocking Mildred. Such displays of emotion weren’t like him.

  Then again, she had seen what he’d been put through. She had experienced a lot of it herself. Much too much.

  Jacks had been right about the brutal power in the mutie’s fleshy claw.

  “That’s right,” Reno said, with a smile that was either shy or feeble, depending on how you wanted to look at it. While, rationally, Mildred knew J.B. was right, that no way could the scavvie have wittingly blown their scheme, she was disinclined to give him the benefit of justice, much less doubt. “I mean, I didn’t even know you were here. Right?”

  I don’t trust the little weasel, anyway, she thought.

  “How come you keep turning up?” she asked. “I mean, alive. And a step or two ahead of the rotties?”

  “Just lucky, I guess,” he said, without apparent irony.

  “Listen. There’s some things I didn’t tell you about how this whole shitstorm started.”

  “No shit,” Jak said.

  The young man told them how he and his friends, Drygulch and their fiery auburn-haired leader, Lariat, had descended into a broken-open redoubt. What had happened there. And afterward, at their camp at night.

  “When Drygulch rose up I could see right off how he’d changed,” Reno said. His voice shook like flesh expecting the kiss of a red-hot iron, and his body did likewise. “Right then, I knew what wa
s going on. Don’t know how. But I did.”

  “So ran off and left buddies?” Jak said with a sneer, leaning back against the wall of the basement room with a thump of his shoulders on raw concrete.

  Mildred wondered if the room had been dug out and shored with cement post-nuke. She also wondered what it was meant for. It certainly seemed like a cell. And it had obviously been here long before Geither Jacks took up residency just a few weeks ago. Was it for gaudy house customers to play out certain dark kinks? Or did it have a more evil purpose?

  Whatever its original intent, it was being used for something amply bad now.

  “What could I have done? Stayed and got bit, too? Become one of them?”

  “Naw, back off the trigger of the blaster, there, Jak,” J.B. said. “You been there, you would have done the same thing. Have to be triple-stupe not to. Dark night, it happens to us, you run right off like a jackrabbit, never look back.”

  Jak appeared mulish but said no more.

  “So the cabinet was labeled Prions,” Mildred said.

  “You know the word?” Reno asked.

  She shrugged. “A bit.” She didn’t want to tell him too much about her actual origins. You never knew what evil uses information like that could be put to. And one thing was sure: the boy had loose lips.

  “A prion is a kind of protein that seems to act in ways similar to a virus. It can spread like a virus, and cause its host to produce copies of it. But it doesn’t seem to be even a little bit alive. It was implicated in a nasty sickness called mad cow disease, or Creutzfeldt-Jakob syndrome in humans, back before…before the war.”

  “So could something like that be causing the change?” Reno asked.

  “I don’t really know.” Not my area of expertise, she thought, but chose not to say. “One way or another it looks as if the old-days whitecoats have a lot to answer for.”

  “True words,” Reno said, nodding.