Wretched Earth

by James Axler

  J.B. got up and hobbled to the door. It pained Mildred like the mutie’s claw to see him move so like an oldie. He examined the keyhole of the lock beneath the knob.

  “Is there a padlock or bolt on the outside, boy?” he asked, without looking back.

  “We weren’t in any shape to observe details like that when we were brought here,” Mildred explained.

  “Uh, no. Nothing like that. Just the door lock.”

  J.B. chuckled and stuck into the hole a pick from the compact kit he’d pulled out of the thick leather of his belt.

  “Overconfident stupes,” he muttered. “Be out of here like a bullet out of a blaster.”

  “Guards?” Jak asked.

  Reno shrugged. “One or two. Geither—Mr. Jacks—is heading off to some kind of meeting with the baron. He’s taking pretty much all his sec men with him.”

  “All?” Mildred asked in alarm. “John, what if he’s pulled back the perimeter guards? What if that paranoid witch Miranda’s done likewise? The rotties could be infiltrating the ville right now!”

  She heard a decisive click. J.B. tested the knob gently, then turned back with a grin. He put the pick away, then stuck the kit back into its hiding place.

  “We best move with purpose, then.”

  “What about the guards?” Reno asked in alarm. “They still got blasters and orders to shoot us all if we try anything. Isn’t that kind of a problem?”

  With the resiliency of youth and the intrinsic toughness of whalebone, Jak sprang to his feet. A sliver of blade gleamed in his white fist. Like the lockpick kit, it had been hidden where all but the most intensive search of their clothing would miss it.

  “No problem,” he said with a chilling smile.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  His grizzled beard sunk in the wolf-fur collar of his heavy coat, Perico walked three paces behind his baron. He muttered complaints like water gurgling from a roof gutter in a downpour. She tuned him out.

  Miranda was used to not hearing things she didn’t want to hear. It was part of being a baron, although it was a skill she’d learned long, long before she ever laid eyes on Sweetwater Junction and its baron, Jeb Sharp.

  It was a brisk, blustering morning. Miranda found it bracing. The sun shone from a patch of blue in the sky that dwindled rapidly as thick, evil black clouds blew in from the east. A storm was coming, although from the looks of things it would only be a thunderstorm, or perhaps a late-season blizzard. Not acid rain, yet.

  Good, she thought. Things were coming to a head in the ville of Sweetwater Junction. She didn’t want anything unexpected to interfere with that.

  By nightfall I shall be baron in fact as well as name, she thought. Or staring at the sky with eyes that do not see.

  The latter thought didn’t dampen her haughty eagerness. She was used to all-or-nothing gambles. If the possibility of failure, no matter how terrible, had ever deterred her, she would’ve died long ago, poor and desperate.

  But of course, she believed in stacking the odds on her side as much as possible. That also contributed to her still being on her legs this nippy late-winter morning.

  Citizens thronged around the central plaza and its great fountain. They acted nervous and subdued, which she found appropriate. It was how the rabble should behave in the presence of greatness. Of great persons and great events.

  “Jacks’s bunch is coming from the other side,” Stone said. Her sec boss strode beside her, even more monolithic than normal in his black coat and fur cap. “Per our arrangement.”

  Miranda smiled widely. After learning how they had been manipulated by the outside “mercies” who so fortuitously arrived within a day of one another, the respective heads of the ville’s sundered halves had agreed to a public meeting to resolve their differences, in order to meet the mutie threat properly. Miranda had made her own special arrangements. No doubt Jacks had, too.

  As for those strange outlanders, and how they had played both sides… Miranda felt her face tighten in a frown. She tried to force it away; frowns caused lines, especially at her age. She knew she was still beautiful. Keeping herself that way became more difficult each day.

  No point in dwelling upon the ease with which you were fooled, chica, she assured herself. That bullet had left the blaster long since. The present was titanium hard; the future, ultimately, was impossible. Trying to manage the past was beyond even her considerable capability.

  And anyway, how could they have known? Ryan, Krysty and Doc weren’t the first outlanders who had wandered into the Junction seeking mercie work, nor the last. They were the most coolly competent, which had made them far more attractive than the usual.

  Attractive enough, in several ways, to make it worth coddling them by housing them in her palace as her own elite.

  She shook off the memory with a tight little movement of her head. Enough.

  I wish Colt could be here to see this, she thought. But she had insisted he stay behind. Things would get dangerous soon.

  If anything happened to her son, her life would have no meaning.

  It didn’t take Stone’s glowering face to clear a path toward the townspeople who blocked the north road. Miranda strode forth with her head held high. People naturally gave way to her certainty. Her superiority. Despite the low circumstances of her birth, she had always known she was born to rule.

  They came to where a cordon of sec men in her black armbands held the crowd back from the plaza. They opened up a way for their baron with eyes respectfully downcast. Across the way Jacks likewise came through his green-armbanded ranks, flanked by Coffin and his moving brick wall of a security boss, Brick Finneran.

  Miranda bit down hard on her rage at seeing three arch traitors so close together. Coffin had been a personal friend and adviser to her lost Jeb. Baron Jeb had personally given Finneran his first promotion within the ranks of his sec corps. And the unspeakable Jacks…

  Hold it in, she ordered herself with a savagery she didn’t allow to disturb in the least her placid smile. She had much experience at swallowing her righteous rage. Now was the time to exert control to the utmost, for the sake of her son and all their ville.

  By agreement, the two parties swung to meet south of the great fountain and its associated watering stations. Jacks’s homely, seamed face split in a smile as the two groups grew near. He extended a hand.

  “Miranda,” he said. “Welcome to destiny.”

  Beyond him, her keen eyes spotted movement in the windows of the shops. “Now!” she shouted.

  Longblasters poked out of the dark oblongs of windows along the square’s south side. Miranda turned to dart for the cover of the fountain’s redbrick walls. Stone shouted and pushed her to the ground. He had great strength. The baron went down painfully hard on her right knee, then onto her face.

  Gunfire slammed across the square. Stone grunted. His weight slammed down on top of Miranda, crushing her breasts against the cold packed earth and driving the breath from her lungs.

  The sec men she had infiltrated into the opposing structures on the square’s northern side opened up a beat late. Miranda had intended the same treachery as her archenemy. But to her frustration and rage he had pulled the string first.

  * * *

  LYING FACEDOWN WHERE he’d dived to the ground after giving the signal—extending his hand to the witch as if he actually intended her to shake it—Geither Jacks smiled at the mounded body of his successor. His most recent succe
ssor, he amended mentally, recalling the explosive fate of the self-proclaimed Captain Jenkins.

  Blasterfire roared behind and in front of him. Damn, she had the same idea I did! he thought. I was afraid she’d try something I didn’t expect.

  The first violent volleys from either side gave way to more sporadic crackling of gunfire as those shooters with single-shot weapons, black powder and smokeless alike, ducked into cover to frantically reload.

  “Wait!” he shouted from his prone position. “It’s over! The baron is dead. I saw her fall with my own eyes!”

  It was half a bluff. He had seen her drop, but he hadn’t with certainty seen her hit.

  “Cease firing!” he yelled. The cry was echoed by Finneran, who also lay on his belly, right behind his leader.

  Jacks sensed more than heard a commotion to his right. He glanced back that way. Coffin rolled around on the ground, clutching a shin shattered by a bullet, and moaning. His normally dark face was a color not that different from the clouds gathering overhead.

  Jacks grimaced. The bitch had a lot to pay for. She should hope she was dead.

  And now he decided she had to be. At the best of times her temper was like a rabid giant hound’s, straining constantly to break its leash, or simply to take off, dragging its owner helplessly behind. It was that fiery Mex-land nature, mixed with a woman’s inherent emotionalism. If Miranda Sharp were still alive, she’d be shrieking in fury like a wounded horse.

  In response to the repeated orders to cease firing, the shooting actually died away on both sides. Jacks grinned openly as he rose to his feet. If Miranda really was chilled or badly wounded, he knew, none of her people wanted to be caught still shooting at him. With the so-called baron gone, he was unquestionable master of Sweetwater Junction. Her fat, spoiled fool of a son meant nothing.

  Jacks came up holding his hands over his head in an attitude of triumph. “It’s over!” he shouted, his words echoing back to him off black-eyed building faces of stone and wood and brick. “I’m your baron now! I will lead you out of the—”

  He saw the quiescent, black-suited bulk of Stone shift. Then fire stabbed yellow from beneath the dead sec boss. Before Jacks could react, sledgehammer impacts took him in the gut, low down on the left, and then smashed into his short ribs on the right.

  He lost control of his legs and toppled to the ground. Pain consumed him like fire even before he hit.

  * * *

  “DARK NIGHT!” J.B. exclaimed as shooting broke out across no-man’s land.

  With everybody in Sweetwater Junction either thronging the square or lying low, the three escaped prisoners had easily made their way into a potter’s shop on the corner where the west road hit the square. It stood next door to the two-story stump of the sniper tower whose upper floors J.B.’s booby had vaporized.

  Jacks’s ambushing sec men had hidden along the square’s north edge, so the one-story stone potter’s shop was empty. From the south and east windows, Mildred, J.B. and Jak had a ringside view of the drama playing out around the fountain.

  Wriggling out from under her dead bodyguard, as lithe as a rattler, Miranda reared up to aim what looked like a Luger at the fallen Jacks, who was clutching his belly in agony and kicking at the hard dirt with the heels of his boots. A big-shouldered guy with short grizzled hair and a beard to match darted out from behind the fountain and dragged Miranda bodily back behind it as bullets kicked craters around where she had knelt. Mildred could see her fallen bodyguard’s black suit coat twitch as bullets struck it.

  The front room where the escapees lurked had a stout table with a potter’s wheel on it, and a big jar partially thrown still rested on it. It had gotten to the stage of a truncated cone that put Mildred in mind of a nuclear plant’s cooling tower, before being abandoned during the commotion and confused street fighting that followed Jacks’s abortive coup attempt. The room had the smell of clay and slip, like the soil it derived from, but slightly acrid.

  “Looks as if they’re settling into one of those hesitation waltzes,” J.B. said, “like when we found Brick’s bunch after they made their play at Miranda and her kid.”

  “We should move on, John,” Mildred said. Her every nerve danced with urgency. “We need to rescue Ryan, Krysty and Doc.”

  “Naw,” he said with that infuriating bland assurance of his. “We need to sit right here and keep an eye on things in case the rotties bust in. Jak, you go get Ryan and the others out.”

  Jak showed white teeth in his white face, bobbed his head then turned and slipped out of the room.

  “We have to go with him!”

  “He can get ’em out,” J.B. said.

  “But the baron’s guards—”

  “Are all here, Millie. Don’t you see? Both sides pulled in everybody they could spare for this shindig, each hoping it was pullin’ a fast one on the other.”

  “Everybody—” She felt her stomach lurch as if she’d been gut-punched. “You don’t mean the ville perimeter guards?”

  “I surely do.”

  “But that’d be—that’d be sheer lunacy! It’s as good as inviting the rotties in!

  “Barons and people who want to be barons go blank when they get a whiff of more power or wealth. Can’t see past the ends of their own noses.”

  He smiled. “Which is why we gotta stay right here and keep tabs on things.”

  She drew in a deep breath and opened her mouth, then said nothing.

  After a moment she sighed. “You’re right, John.” Mildred turned to watch out the front window once more.

  * * *

  “RYAN! KRYSTY! DR. Tanner!”

  Ryan raised his head. He sat with his back against the cold outer wall of their basement cell. The warm weight of Krysty, slumped against him with his coat covering her, shifted away from him.

  “Colt?” he heard her call.

  He was having more trouble than usual becoming conscious and sharp. Got something to do with all those rifle butts and boots dancing on your head, mebbe, he thought muzzily.

  “Are you all right?” The boy’s voice was muffled by the solid wood of the door.

  “Splendid, lad,” he heard Doc call. The scholar’s voice was more slurred than was normal. “Absolutely splendid.”

  They heard bolts thrown, and then a clatter from the lock.

  “I’ll have you out of there in a moment,” Colt called.

  The door swung open. What walked in first wasn’t plump Sharp Jr., but a middle-aged sec man with his shirttail out and his sparse hair wild on his head. He looked suspiciously as if he’d been rousted from a good nap.

  “You three are witnesses,” he said a little more loudly than necessary. “I had no choice. Boy held a gun to my head.”

  In marched Colt, holding a gun to the guard’s head. Actually, he had the 1911 Colt, the same as or identical to the one Ryan had been teaching him to shoot with just the day before, held out in front of him with both hands and pointed at the back of the sec man’s balding head. He wore a white shirt and black leather riding pants. He might have cut a ridiculous figure without that big handblaster.

  In Ryan’s experience, it wasn’t wise to laugh at someone holding a blaster. Especially when he held it with such authority. Ryan’s teaching was either that good or the kid was a quick study.

  Ryan shook his head, which made it feel as if somebody was whacking the back of his skull all over again. He got to his feet as steadily as he could. Krysty pressed her hip against h
im for mutual support.

  “What are you doing, Colt?” Doc asked.

  The old man had been lying on his back on the low bench against the wall that was the room’s sole item of furniture. This wasn’t the torture chamber where Miranda had whipped Krysty, but a holding cell across the hall. Now he got to his feet, a little more confidently than his companions had, or so Ryan thought. The one-eyed man suspected the professor hadn’t been beaten as comprehensively as he had. Not because the vengeful baron or her loyalist sec men had any consideration for Doc’s apparent age, but because they reckoned he needed less of a beating to be disabled.

  The boy moistened his lips before defiantly announcing, “I’m getting you out of here.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “Lad,” Doc said, “why would you want to go and do a thing like that? It was your own mother who put us here.”

  “She was wrong about you! I know it!”

  “No, she wasn’t,” Krysty said through her teeth. She was pulling on her clothes, her jaw set against the pain.

  “Krysty,” Ryan said, “that might not be the best way to go about—”

  She waved him off. The sight of blood dried to a brownish hue on her white hand stilled him as much as the gesture. His reflex was to jump the boy, his words—and his blaster—notwithstanding, and seize him as a hostage. He stamped it down hard. His rational mind told him that would be triple-stupe. And he trusted Krysty’s intuition.

  The boy’s face worked like a couple of fists in a pillowcase.

  “My mother,” he gritted out, “is not a…stable person. She wants what’s best for the ville. And me. But she gets blinded by her own anger sometimes.”

  “We did deceive her,” Krysty said evenly.

  “Yes! Because you came here to warn us about the rotties. And you knew she wouldn’t believe you. But you were right! But you…you pissed her off, hotter than nuke-red. And now she’s gone to do something stupe with Jacks!”