Wretched Earth

by James Axler

  Ryan mustered a sound more like seeds rattling in a dried gourd than a chuckle. “Be lucky if we get ten more minutes,” he said.

  Then a cry went up. “They’re pulling back!”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  As more voices took up the joyful cry, Ryan felt adrenaline blast through his chill-weary bones and muscles.

  “Wait!” he shouted. His voice was a raven’s croak and his throat hurt as if the lining was being pulled. But he managed to make himself heard. “Why are they moving back? How are they moving back? They have no bastard minds!”

  It was true. The remaining rotties had turned and begun wandering away from Sweetwater Junction as if they’d all lost interest. They streamed toward the top of the distant rise, where the horizon cut the sky.

  “They’re not…completely mindless,” a voice said. Ryan looked around to see Reno standing alone between Ryan’s companions and the gate defenders. The slight young man with the unruly hair and heavy glasses had the loneliest look Ryan could ever remember seeing.

  “Some show signs of something like will. Even a kind of intelligence.” The kid turned and looked at Ryan. “You’ve seen it. The flashes of awareness. Mebbe they share a hive mind. Like an ant colony. With its queen.”

  He turned again to look out to the east, where storm clouds gathered in an afternoon sky. Late afternoon, Ryan was surprised to notice. The ville’s angular shadows stretched well up the long swell and darkened the backs of the retreating rotties.

  “Ryan, what’s that?” Krysty asked, pointing.

  A figure stood atop the rise, and the rotties seemed to converge on it. A little farther down the slope a second figure stood waving a hand above its head.

  “I don’t know.”

  Ryan unlimbered the Steyr, which he had slung and cinched up tight to prevent its butt banging him in the kidneys as he fought the rotties.

  He saw a woman on the crest. She had a full figure, and her shoulder-length hair blew in the wind, russet rather than scarlet. The second figure seemed to be twirling something on a rope above its head.

  The woman’s face, and the bare upper torso and arms of the other, showed the dead blue-gray hues of the changed.

  “A bullroarer,” Doc said dreamily.

  “Talk sense, old man,” Mildred said. Exhaustion made her crabby.

  Doc shook himself as if he’d caught himself nodding off.

  “It’s a bullroarer,” he said again. “A hollowed out piece of wood…or bone. When spun around the head it makes that peculiar pulsating moan.”

  Now that he mentioned it, Ryan could hear the strange bass ululation.

  “That’s not mindless behavior,” Krysty said. “Reno’s right. Say, where’d he go?”

  Ryan lowered the glass. For a moment he stared at the auburn-haired figure off in the distance, then he looked around.

  The kid was gone.

  “Ryan!”

  It was Colt Sharp, walking up with a wedge of sec men trotting behind. “You did ace. It was great! You saved the ville.”

  Ryan just looked at him. He was too tired to make nice with a baron, even though the kid showed promise.

  “But there’s…there’s something I need to ask you.”

  “What’s that, Colt?” Krysty asked.

  “We’ve got wounded. Some of them have been bitten. Others—we just don’t know for sure.”

  He paused, blinked, worked his lips in and out. This was obviously not coming easy to him. Plus he was trying triple-hard to talk like a grown-up. Or how he reckoned grown-ups talked, anyway.

  “I—I need you to take care of it for me.”

  It finally dawned on Ryan what the baron was asking. The one-eyed man wasn’t usually this slow. Then again, most of his days didn’t start with a rifle butt in the face and get hairy from there.

  “Taking care of it” meant figuring out which ones had been bitten by the rotties, then chilling them before they could change. That kind of thing could cause hard feelings. Blood feuds, perhaps. Not everybody whose son or sister or father got chilled would see that it wasn’t just necessary for everybody’s sake, it was an act of kindness.

  Naturally, Colt would want his out-of-town mercies to see to it.

  “Yeah,” Ryan said.

  Relief made Colt nearly weepy. “Thanks. I knew I could count on you, Ryan!”

  He hurried away.

  J.B. pushed up his hat to scratch the front of his head. “Boy’s starting to think like a baron already.”

  “Yeah,” Ryan said. “And here I was just startin’ to like him.”

  * * *

  “AT LEAST THERE AREN’T any little kids,” Mildred said with a sigh.

  But that was a relative thing. A boy leaned against the wall of the large shed where the dozen or so questionable wounded had been locked on the baron’s orders. His black hair hung in his fever-flushed face. He couldn’t have been much more than fifteen. Sixteen max.

  “Stay away from my son!” his mother screamed. She knelt protectively between him and the door. Then, she contradictorily added, “He’s bad hurt. He needs attention.”

  The woman was as wasted as the empty lands around Sweetwater Junction by the burdens of her life. The bun her brown hair was wound into was threaded with gray. Her face might’ve been handsome once, if she’d ever had a square meal and enough water to drink. But labor and privation had shrunk her skin to the harsh bones of her face, which was twisted in a grimace of confusion, rage and terror. She held a hand spread, callused palm outward, to ward off Ryan and the companions as they came in.

  “Ma’am,” Krysty said softly, “come away now, please. You can’t do him any good.”

  “He’s hurt! He needs help.” A sob racked her skinny body in its too-big cotton dress. “You want to chill him. But he’s just a boy.”

  “He’s been bit,” Ryan said. “He’ll change. He’s becoming one of them, and there’s nothing you or we or anybody can do to stop it.”

  “No! He ain’t been bit! He’s just hurt!”

  “We can see the bite mark on his cheek from here plain as day,” J.B. said.

  “No! You can’t! I won’t—”

  The flash dazzled Ryan’s eye in the gloom of the shed. The gunshot threatened to bust his eardrums. Dust and mold filtered down from the rafters like khaki sleet.

  The bitten boy lay with his head slumped against a dark blood-splash on the splintery wood. One eye had rolled unseeing up in his head.

  Jak lowered his handblaster. A thread of gray smoke trailed upward from its muzzle. The dead boy’s mother shrieked and jumped at him. Ryan and Mildred caught her by the arms.

  “It doesn’t get easier talking about it,” Mildred said. Her face was frozen in a grim mask. “Now get out of here, lady. We have work to do.”

  * * *

  COMPLETELY DRAINED, physically and otherwise, and once again covered in stinking sludge, the six friends returned to the baron’s palace not long before sundown.

  Some of the bitten had begged and pleaded to be allowed to live. Some had asked to die as quickly and painlessly as possible. Both sets got the same treatment. One got what it asked for.

  The good news was that only one of the six questionable wounded showed definite signs of being bitten. But Mildred remained unsure about the rest.

  J.B. and Jak were for going ahead and chilling them. Mildred wanted them tied up and locked away where they could be watched. If they didn’t
change in a day or so, they were probably not going to. Krysty and Doc backed her.

  In the end Ryan opted to give them the chance. It wasn’t any skin off his ass one way or the other; he and his people weren’t going to be keeping tabs on them. And the fact was, he’d had his fill of chilling and then some.

  The companions surrendered their clothes to palace servants for cleaning, and took turns at hot showers using the palace’s gravity-driven system.

  After a two-hour nap they were summoned downstairs to the dining room to meet with their default new employer. Colt Sharp had obviously neither slept nor cleaned up, apart from having the worst dreck wiped off his face with a wet rag. He looked as haggard as a fat kid could. His cheeks were sallow and hung. His eyes were sunk in dark circles.

  “Are the rotties coming back?” Ryan asked.

  He feared a night assault, but he and his companions had been running on fumes. He hoped if the horde did attack again under cover of darkness, whatever the new young baron had done while they’d napped would be adequate to stand them off for a spell. Ryan and his companions had no more to give, even if the changed were running wild in the streets.

  But Colt shook his head. He was flanked by his advisers, Perico and Jacks’s former man, Coffin. There seemed to be no hard feelings on either side. Ryan didn’t have energy or interest to try to figure it all out.

  An expensive pinewood fire blazed in the hearth. A large map of the ville, hand-drawn in ink on a big sheet of age-yellowed paper, was spread on the big table.

  “No,” Baron Sharp said. “But it looks as if they’re spreading out to surround the ville.”

  “So they’ll try probing attacks,” J.B. said. “Or mebbe just draw everybody with a big feint one side of the ville, then steamroll in on the other.”

  “But that’s tactics, John,” Mildred protested. “These creatures are mindless. They lack volition.”

  “They don’t always act like it,” Krysty said. “Remember, they responded to the call of that bullroarer thing. And it was a rottie working the device.”

  “We’ve seen them use simple tactics before,” Ryan said. “And that kid, what’s his name—he said they’re not all mindless. That rottie woman standing way up there watching the fight wasn’t, sure as rad death’s a bastard way to go.”

  The baron scratched the back of his neck. “Speaking of that,” he said, “I’ve got something to show you.”

  He called out. A door opened, and a figure stumbled into the middle of the room, propelled by a sec man’s hard hand.

  “Reno,” Krysty said.

  The kid’s hands were tied together before him. He used them to set his glasses more or less square on his nose.

  “Krysty,” he said. “Ryan. Everybody. Fancy meeting you here.”

  Ryan looked at Sharp.

  “We’ve got patrols walking the perimeter,” Perico said. “They caught him trying to slip out the west gate right after sundown.”

  “Lucky it was the west gate,” Coffin said. “Or we would’ve strung the fool up already.”

  Colt shook his head. “We’d have talked to him awhile first.”

  “So what’s your story, kid?” Ryan asked. It seemed appropriate. He was nominal sec boss of Sweetwater Junction, after all. In fact, he reckoned. For now.

  Thin shoulders covered in scuffed leather shrugged. “Figured I’d warned you all. Done what I could. So I was looking to move on.”

  “Not looking to circle around and report what you’d spied out to that weird woman?” Ryan asked.

  “Of course not! I’ve been trying to get away from the rotties for…well, you know. Weeks.”

  “You do have a tendency to turn up right before they do,” Mildred said.

  “Well, yeah. I want to warn people what’s in store. I told you that.”

  “Is that it?” she said. Her eyes were hard. “Really? Or are they following you? Are you leading them to fresh meat?”

  The color drained out of his already pale face, leaving it as white as clean paper. “No! I’d never do anything like that. I’m trying to get away from them!”

  “Take your shirt off,” Mildred said.

  “Huh?”

  “Take off your shirt.”

  He stayed pale. “No, really. No reason for that. Can’t we just talk—”

  “Cut it off him,” Ryan told the two sec men who had delivered the prisoner.

  If he needed any confirmation that he really was sec boss, instead of it all being for show, he got it when the two obeyed without hesitation. One drew a hunting knife from a sheath at his belt. Neither glanced at their young baron for confirmation.

  “No! Wait!” Reno yelped, sidling away. “These’re the only shirt and jacket I’ve got.”

  “Why should I care?” Ryan asked.

  “Please! Let me go. I’ll take them off myself.” He held up his tied wrists.

  “How do we know you won’t make a break for it?” Mildred asked.

  Jak laughed. “Hope prick tries,” he said, an ugly glitter in his ruby eyes.

  Ryan looked at Colt. It was his house, after all.

  “You can handle him, can’t you?” the boy asked.

  J.B. chuckled. “You can sure say that.”

  “Do it.”

  The sec man with the knife grabbed Reno’s arm and none too carefully slid the blade under the coil of rope and sliced it.

  “Ouch,” Reno said resentfully, cringing and rubbing one wrist. “You cut me.”

  The sec man laughed at him, put the knife away and went to stand with his back to the fire.

  Reno ran a last desperate look around the room. Whatever he had in his mind—arguing, pleading, flight—he decided not to try it. He took off his jacket. Then, with visible reluctance, his shirt.

  “Gaia!” Krysty exclaimed.

  “Just as I thought,” Mildred said, stepping up to grab his right wrist and holding up his skinny arm. “A human bite wound. Healing, but slowly by the looks of it.”

  She dropped his arm and turned to the others. “He’s been bitten. Maybe a couple weeks ago.”

  “You mean he’s a rottie?” Colt asked in alarm.

  “Clearly not,” Mildred said. “And the sixty-four thousand dollar question is—why not?”

  Chapter Thirty

  Reno’s head slumped to his collarbone. His bare skin was pink-and-blue. His ribs stood out like slats on a window shade.

  “I don’t rightly know why I haven’t changed,” he said.

  “Talk,” Ryan said.

  “All right. What I told you all—what I reckon you told these people here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That was the straight skinny. Mostly. Just not all the details. Nor what happened after Drygulch changed.”

  “We’re all ears,” Perico said.

  Reno told again about the redoubt raid and the cabinet of prions.

  “I remember a bit more about those now,” Mildred said. “Back in the nineties there was debate about whether they caused mad cow disease. Also, they were blamed for a condition called kuru, which tribal people in New Guinea or somewhere like that got from eating the brains of their enemies. Like that cannie disease.”

  “I heard my captors mention these prions,” Doc said.

  “So what are they?” Colt asked.

  She shrugged. “I really don’t know. Supposedly they were a kind of protein that could infect a living thing and make it duplicate them. Like
viruses. Except unlike viruses, they’re not really alive.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know much about them, and I can’t pretend I understand them.”

  “Appropriate,” Doc murmured. He sat near the fire in his shirtsleeves. His chin had drooped as if he was falling asleep. For once Ryan couldn’t blame him if he had.

  “How so?” Mildred asked sharply.

  “Prions, you say, are unliving. How like the changed. They also do not seem to live, insofar as we can tell.”

  “Could these pry-things cause something like this plague?” Perico asked.

  “Something has,” Ryan said. “Don’t see anything else matters a spent round right now.”

  “So what really happened that night by the fire, Reno?” J.B. asked mildly.

  “It was like I told you,” Reno said, “up to the point Drygulch rose up and attacked. He grabbed hold of Lariat, starting biting her and growling. She screamed and tried to fight him off. I blasted him with my shotgun in the body and he went down. Blew his rib cage wide-open.

  “I went to Lariat to help her. She was bit pretty bad. Bleeding heavily from the neck. I was trying to staunch the bleeding when here came Drygulch again. He knocked the shotgun clean outta my hands, bit my arm when I tried to defend myself. Hurt like nuke-red. I fell on my butt, bleeding like a stuck pig. Drygulch kept coming. I grabbed my pack and ran. Just ran till I couldn’t run no more.”

  “You didn’t fight anymore?” Ryan asked.

  “I never saw my shotgun again. Mr. Cawdor, I could see one of his lungs. It was all pink and oozy. But it wasn’t moving. And he still was. Didn’t think anything could stop him, if he could survive a hit like that.”

  “Then what?”

  “Found, like, a wolf den dug in the ground. Burrowed right on in and huddled up for the night. Lucky for me no wolves came back while I was there.

  “Next morning I just headed west. After a spell I spotted smoke rising. When I got closer, I saw it came from the chimney of a sod house.