Wretched Earth

by James Axler

  “When I went inside there was food on the table and blood all over everywhere. Five places laid, like for a family. But nobody there. All I found was Drygulch lying in the front room with a hole in his forehead and the back of his skull blown out.”

  Reno hunkered down on his haunches and let his head sink to his clavicle. “And that’s how it started.”

  “What about your bite wound, Reno?”

  “Bandaged it best I could. Sickness came over me bad—fever, chills. I stayed in the cabin two days until it passed. There was water there and food, though it took a day and a half before I could keep anything down.”

  “So whatever it is, some people are immune.” Mildred frowned. “Hate to think we might have chilled people who were bitten but might have pulled through.”

  “Didn’t know,” Ryan said. “Couldn’t take the chance if we had. Still can’t.”

  “Honestly,” Reno said, “I’m the only one I know who’s been bitten who hasn’t changed.”

  “So do you think they’re following you?” Colt asked. He sounded more curious than hostile or suspicious. “Like, mebbe you have some kind of link to them? To Lariat, mebbe? She’s the auburn-haired woman we saw on the rise to the east, isn’t she?”

  “She was,” Reno said in a tiny, broken voice. “Don’t know what she is now.”

  “Spy,” Jak said. “Better chill now.”

  “It’s possible he’s played everybody for a fool,” Coffin said. Some of the brandy Jeb Sharp had laid up had allayed the pain of the sec man’s bullet-shattered shin. It hadn’t seemed to dull his wits much, though.

  “If he’s a spy, why would he’ve stayed in the ville?” Ryan asked.

  “Check defenses,” Jak said. “Anyway, caught leaving.”

  “I was trying to get away from them!” Reno said. “They do seem to go the places I go. But it’s not my fault. I swear! I don’t know why.”

  “So mebbe this Lariat is following you,” J.B. said.

  “No!”

  “They’re predators,” said Krysty, who’d been sitting quietly by the table, taking everything in with those emerald-green eyes. “They go where the food is. You’ve been going from outpost to outpost, haven’t you? Settlement to settlement, ville to ville.”

  Reno gave her a wary look. “Yeah.”

  “You’ve been looking for people, right?”

  “Yeah. I want to warn ’em. Well, and find shelter and a bite to eat.”

  “You and they are looking for the same things, then,” she said. “That could be why they seem to follow you.”

  “Could be,” Ryan said, in a tone that said he didn’t wholly buy the idea.

  “How do there get to be so rad-blasted many of them?” Perico asked. “There still has to be a hundred or more of the bastards left out there even though we finished off hundreds today. This is a pretty desolate area. Not much population to change. So where’d they get numbers like that?”

  “Taking villes,” Reno said. “Trading posts. Farms.”

  “There are at least one hundred people on farms around Sweetwater Junction,” Coffin said. “Within, say, a twenty-mile radius. Mebbe more, come to think of it.”

  “They’ve run off or been changed,” Reno said. “At least if they lived east of here.”

  “Sweetwater Junction’s lost some people, too,” Mildred said. “Refugees fleeing the civil war.”

  Perico and Coffin exchanged looks. For just a moment they appeared almost ashamed.

  “Yes,” Coffin said. “That’s so.”

  “Any that went east,” Mildred said, “have come back changed.”

  For a moment only the fire spoke in its crackling voice. Then Doc stirred.

  “I see a germ of hope here, friends,” he said. “This Lariat woman—she appears to be some kind of leader, correct?”

  “Yes,” Reno said. “She had the strongest will of anybody I ever knew. I guess it—that will—survived somehow. In some form. That’s not Lariat out there, not the woman I knew. But it’s like her in a lot of ways. Got a lot of her traits.”

  “We know there’s some form of virus or bacteria that takes over running the body, and can keep it running even without most of the vital processes going,” Mildred said. “Mebbe she and it came to terms.”

  “You were saying, Doc?” Ryan said.

  “What? Oh, yes. Yes. Linear propagation is not a normal pattern for a disease to spread, is it, Mildred?”

  “You know it’s not, old man. Normally it spreads outward like a stain. Unless there’s something that channels the vectors.”

  “Vectors?” Ryan asked.

  “Plague carriers.”

  Doc was nodding and beaming. “Yet so far as we know the horde is cohesive, yes? The rotties are all moving relentlessly west together?”

  “That’s how it looks,” Reno acknowledged.

  “So the swarm somehow gathers around this changed woman companion of yours, this Lariat.”

  “I guess.”

  “How does knowing this fill any mags for us?” Ryan asked.

  “It means that the plague itself is traveling in a single direction, following its leader, the erstwhile Lariat,” Doc said, “instead of radiating outward to take over he world.”

  The Sweetwater Junction people frowned. The discussion had clearly lost them a couple turns back. But Ryan got it. He could tell his friends did, too.

  “So if we can somehow stop it here—”

  “We might be able to stop it for good!”

  “Great! Dr. Tanner, that’s great!” Colt was almost jumping up and down. He looked at Ryan. “Can we stop them?”

  Ryan frowned. “Mebbe. We need a plan.”

  “I got a few ideas rattling around under my hat, Ryan,” J.B. said.

  “Ace,” Ryan said. “I got some, too. Let’s get them out in the air and figure out which give us our best shot. And we best get to it triple-fast, because whatever we come up with is going to take some doing. And only that auburn-haired rottie bitch has any idea how long we’ve got!”

  * * *

  THE PLANNING SESSION wasn’t the free-for-all Ryan was afraid it might be.

  It helped that Colt clearly thought Ryan walked on water. Perico and Coffin didn’t think so, but they seemed pretty impressed by what the outlanders brought to the table. Neither of them exactly hated the sound of his own voice, but both knew when to buckle down and say only what needed saying. And now was such a time.

  The sec men present—the most senior survivor of Miranda’s crew, Morrissey; the eager-beaver loyalist, Hedders; and a burly round guy with a shaved head and a sandy spade beard named Parrack, who’d worn a green armband to start the day—seemed mostly relieved they didn’t have to puzzle out how to defend the ville by themselves. Especially since reports kept filtering in from the patrols orbiting the perimeter fence, via ville-kid runners, of shadowy movements in the night. The ville was surrounded now, though the rotties still kept their distance.

  In a little over an hour, a plan took shape. It wasn’t a perfect one. It wasn’t what Ryan would call a good plan. But it was possibly workable, and better than nothing.

  He hoped.

  Just as they were nailing down the last details, a young sec man raced into the room. “Come outside, quick!”

  “What?” Colt asked in alarm. “Are the rotties attacking?”

  “No, Colt, uh, no, Baron Sharp. It’s the sky.”

  They all went out the door, and didn’t ne
ed to be told what they’d been called out to see. It was plainly visible.

  A front was rolling in from the east, but it wasn’t normal white clouds lit by the stars and sinking moon and scattered lights on the ground. It glowed from within, a seething mass of orange and yellow, like sulfur heated to a yellow-hot boil.

  It was a sight all too familiar to Ryan and his friends, to any survivor who crawled on the face of this world still devastated by long-ago war.

  “That’s a bad one coming,” Krysty said.

  “Acid rain,” Jak said, wrinkling his nose. “Can smell.”

  “Now’s the time we usually get hit by a nasty acid rain storm,” Perico said. “We usually have two bad weeks or so. Then it tapers off again and we start to get regular rain. That’s when we put the crops in.”

  “Oh, no,” Colt said. “How can we fight in this?”

  “How long we got until it cuts loose?” Ryan asked.

  “We’ll get hit before sundown tomorrow,” Coffin said, “unless we’re a luckier lot of fools than we deserve to be.”

  Ryan felt a smile stretch across his face. A grim smile, but a smile.

  “We may just pull this off, after all,” he said, “if we’re triple-sharp and five times as lucky.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  “What in the name of the Three Kennedys does he imagine he’s doing?” Doc queried.

  “Betraying,” Jak said.

  The stinking morning wind whipped his long white hair about his head. His fine-featured face was lifted defiantly to it. Jak showed no sign of being aware of the terrible smell of death and decay, although he had a highly sensitive nose. His arms were folded across his chest, which Ryan thought was triple-ballsy, given all the nasty sharp bits of glass and metal he’d sewn into the fabric of his jacket. Then again, he knew where the pointy bits were.

  “You could drop him from here with your Steyr,” J.B. said from Ryan’s side.

  The figure trudging up the long, slow rise to the eastern horizon was already halfway there. Mebbe eight hundred yards, Ryan thought. Not much crosswind, as the rottie-swarm stench made clear.

  “Long shot,” he said. “Doable.”

  “Shouldn’t we see what he’s really up to first?” Colt asked. He wore pale blue pajamas with darker blue pinstripes, a royal-blue velvet robe and blue-and-pink house slippers. When word had come of Reno’s successful escape from the eastern perimeter, the baron had come running, with his mercies and a drowsy, busily cussing Perico trailing after him.

  Krysty laid a hand on Ryan’s arm. She didn’t need to speak. He knew she’d council mercy. Or at least a degree of patience.

  The sun had yet to rise. The gray false dawn wasn’t yet bright enough to compete with the roiling yellow-and-orange glow from the clouds. A strange piss-colored light lay across the land and the watching faces.

  “Why aren’t the rotties on him like flies on shit?” Mildred asked. The horrors continued to shamble around the razor-coil-topped wire fence. But clumps of the changed wandered out on the long slope. And Ryan had an ugly feeling most of the swarm was currently out of sight beyond the horizon.

  Jak held out an arm. “She not want.”

  “Jak used a pronoun,” Mildred said reverently. “Shit’s gotten serious.”

  At the top of the rise a single figure appeared. Letting his longblaster hang by the sling, Ryan raised his longeyes.

  He saw what he knew he’d see; the auburn-haired, blue-faced woman, Lariat.

  Ryan lowered the longeyes, to find that a long line of rotties had appeared on the distant crest to either side of their leader.

  “At this point, I don’t know what Reno could tell them that would hurt us,” Ryan said. “He doesn’t know what we’re planning.”

  He frowned. This little sideshow was preventing them from getting into position for the day’s inevitable battle. Time wasted. And time was blood. Yet he felt as unwilling as the others clearly were to tear himself away.

  Besides, he thought, we might learn something.

  “Mebbe he’s trying to talk them into sparing the ville,” Krysty said.

  Ryan shrugged. “No way to know.” He didn’t add that he wasn’t sure that would even be a good thing, given the point of the whole scam they’d run here in Sweetwater Junction was to try to finish the rottie threat once and for all.

  “I’m getting on a roof,” he announced. “Mebbe I can drop the queen bitch.”

  “Will that stop them?” the baron asked in a nervous, adolescent tone.

  “Only one way to find out.”

  By the time Ryan had settled himself on his belly on a cold flat roof with his longblaster rested on its bipod, Reno was approaching Lariat. The other changed hadn’t interfered with him. Now, though, they were moving in behind him.

  “Even if he’s trying to screw us,” Ryan muttered, bringing the scene into focus in his sight, “he’s got balls, just to march in among the bastards like that.”

  Reno stopped about ten yards shy of the female figure. He began to gesticulate, obviously telling her something. She inclined her head forward, seeming to listen.

  Then she gestured, and the rotties closed in on Reno. He kept up his arguing, or pleading, or whatever it was, until he felt a dead hand seize his shoulder.

  Then it was too late. Dozens of the changed surrounded the slight figure, and Ryan saw a flurry of frenzied, futile movement.

  Screams floated faintly on the wind.

  “Ryan!” Krysty shouted. “Can’t you help him?”

  “Aren’t there too many of them?” Colt asked. He was following the action through a pair of compact binocs.

  But Ryan knew what Krysty meant. The only help for Reno now was a bullet through the head. Even if he was immune to the change plague, nobody was immune to being eaten alive.

  Ryan was lining up a shot, though—on the auburn-haired rottie woman who seemed somehow to exert command over the horde. But it was a brutally long shot even for a marksman as ace as Ryan Cawdor, and his longblaster wasn’t designed for head shots at that range, even under ideal conditions.

  He didn’t see where the first shot went. Even though he had the longblaster back on target with a fresh cartridge chambered before the bullet had finished its second-and-a-half flight time. Then Krysty called out that it had taken down a rottie twenty feet to the left of Lariat, out of the scope’s narrow vision field. The next one showed no noticeable effect at all; possibly it had gone long.

  The third shot kicked up dirt between the rottie leader’s boots. Ryan’s heartbeat spiked in exultation.

  “Got you now, bitch,” he muttered.

  But Lariat simply turned and walked back down out of sight. He didn’t even try a desperation shot as her auburn hair vanished.

  He couldn’t afford to waste the bullet.

  “All right,” he called to his companions, “show’s over. Let’s move as if we got a purpose. We have a job to do.”

  * * *

  THE STEYR SCOUT LONGBLASTER roared and kicked toward the burning yellow sky. The target was distant enough that the bullet hadn’t reached its home in a female rottie’s skull before Ryan lost sight of his target. But when the long barrel came back down, he saw her going down with half her head blown away.

  That was the job they had to do this day. How it began, at least.

  It was nearly three hours since he’d climbed his uncertain perch and started picking off the changed as they circled and probed the v
ille defenses. It only seemed like a lifetime.

  No doubt about it, the changed were showing crude tactics. They reminded him of a wolf pack scoping out an elk herd, looking for the weak point—the calf, the sickie, the oldie, the easy prey to cut out and take down.

  But wolves were alive, no question, and they were both crafty and smart. These things overwhelmingly showed no more sign of life than a lump of clay. Yet all of them moved, all of them hungered, all of them hunted.

  And some, apparently, thought.

  Only twenty or so rotties were trying to claw their way over the razor wire tangles on the western gate, about six hundred yards away. A small group of sec men and ville dwellers posted there seemed to have the situation well in hand. They used the drill Ryan and friends had worked out on the spot yesterday at the opposite gate. People were stabbing the rotties who tried to scale the fence or gate, using spears improvised from long sticks and kitchen knives, awls or long nails. When some creatures managed to get inside, defenders with polearms of various sorts knocked them down or tripped them up. Others hanging back would chop open their skulls with axes, or bash them in with clubs. Some even squashed them with chunks of concrete.

  Those cinder-block finishes really tickled the ville kids. Ryan had heard from the small herd of runners waiting on the second floor of his lookout that they’d already dubbed it “making jelly.”

  Colt Sharp, a kid himself, had hit on it yesterday: not just keeping the youngsters from underfoot but making them useful, by having them be messengers and carriers of water, meds and ammo. All through the night to this early, yellow-sky morning, small packs of children had raced tirelessly around the streets near the perimeter, keeping extra eyes on the rotties to make sure none sneaked in. With them ran some of the more manageable of the ville’s canine population. Dogs went crazy, barking when a rottie came close. They were afraid to attack the changed, but sure let everybody know they were there.

  Satisfied that the crew at the west gate was going to hold, Ryan swept his longblaster around, pushing with his boots and pivoting on his butt, and hoping the shaky platform he sat on wouldn’t give way before the fence or a gate inevitably did. As always, he saw groups of rotties walking the perimeter. That showed him that something was influencing them beyond their craving.