Wretched Earth (12 page)

Chapter Fourteen

Grabbing at himself, sec leader Chris went to his
knees, letting loose a scream of pain.

“You shot my dick off! You slut!”

Mildred already had her ZKR 551 handblaster up and pointing
over the wounded man at the round, dark-bearded face of one of his men.

“If you move, you die,” she said. “I don’t give a fuck about
you.”

The guy dropped his bolt-action .22 rifle and held up his
hands. “Lady, I believe you,” he said fervently.

J.B. had his shotgun up. He stood back to back with Jak, who’d
drawn his huge Colt handblaster.

“Any of the rest of you bored with living?” J.B. asked
matter-of-factly. “We can fix that for you.”

Weapons clattered to the street. Hands went up. Faces were pale
and covered with sweat despite the cold of the morning air.

Jak stepped close to where Chris was kneeling, doubled over and
sobbing, and extended his Python. The Colt bellowed as he delivered a mercy
round.

J.B. winced at the noise and side blast. There were
handblasters more powerful than a .357 wheel gun, but not a one he knew of more
triple-unpleasant to stand next to when they got lit off. A .44 Mag made a
louder noise but it wasn’t as high-pitched and piercing. The .357 Magnum was
peculiar that way.

Chris’s head exploded. Chunks of scalp flew in all directions,
drawing crazy spirals of smoke behind them. The muzzle-flame had set his hair
alight. It smelled almost as bad as he did.

“Now that that’s finished,” J.B. said, as the headless corpse
did its final headless-chicken flopping bit, “take us to your leader.”

* * *

A
S
GAUDIES
WENT
,
Sinorice’s Royal
Flush was a big one, J.B. thought, as they strolled up, herding the five
surviving members of the sec patrol before them like geese. It was four
yellow-stone stories tall and covered a lot of ground. J.B. paused in front of
double doors, gold, with a namesake hand in hearts painted on the left one and
spades on the right, and fancy cut-glass panes above.

“You boys can run along,” he said. “Take my advice and head
west, and keep right on going. Things’re fixing to heat this town up nuke-red
even if Jacks decides not to make examples of you.”

They set off at a scrambling run down the street, west as he’d
suggested. From their loose-jointed stumbling, like a man who’d tripped and was
hurtling forward, trying to keep moving rather than land on his face, the
Armorer guessed some of them smelled like fresh dreck just as their unlamented
leader had.

“Stow the blasters, people,” he told Mildred and Jak. “We want
this to be a friendly social call.”

“What if they don’t want to be friendly?” Mildred asked.

“Fix like you fixed bastard with fast hands,” Jak said with a
grin. Mildred couldn’t stop herself from grinning back.

“That’s my girl,” J.B. said, briefly squeezing her
shoulder.

“What about the shotgun?” she asked. “That’s not going to look
too friendly even if you keep it slung.”

“I’ll carry it slung low enough the butt won’t show over my
shoulder,” he said, readjusting the sling, “and the barrel tucked down behind my
leg. Nobody’ll notice it until introductions are made. You’ll see.”

“If you say so.”

He pushed through the doors and led his companions in off the
street. They walked into a corridor where the red-and-gold-papered walls held
large framed oil paintings of women in various stages of undress and types of
display. Some of which left little to the imagination.

“Wonder if this is the current staff?” Mildred said, looking
left and right as they walked down the gold-edged scarlet runner. “These
paintings look recent. Not too bad, really.”

“You like this sort of thing?” J.B. asked.

“The technique, dummy.”

The short hallway opened into a wide parlor with couches along
the walls and another set of half-glass double doors beyond. Eight or ten men
slouched on the couches or played cards at a folding table off to one side.

They looked at the intruding trio and their eyes got big. They
started jumping to their feet.

A man in what appeared to be the vest and trousers of a brown
three-piece suit, over a white shirt with frills down the front, and a gold
cravat, stepped to bar their way. He wore two shoulder holsters, each showing
the butt of a 9 mm Beretta blaster.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing, barging in here?” he
demanded. He had a hound dog face gone purple with rage clear to the roots of
his receding seal-brown hair.

“We’re mercies,” J.B. said. “We come to offer our blasters to
your boss. Judging by the fact nobody was standing guard outside the front
doors, which by the way were unlocked, we reckon he’s a bit short of sec muscle.
Not to mention sec brains.”

A young-looking sec man dashed to the rear set of doors and
threw them open, yelling something. J.B.’s attention was focused on the man who
blocked his path. Normally he would have fought his natural tunnel-vision
tendency; it invited your target’s friends to thunder on you without you being
able to see them. But he trusted Mildred and Jak to have his flanks.

“Fuck you, your bitch and the mutie you dragged in with you,
you sawed-off little shit,” the man in the vest snarled. He snatched at his
blasters.

Before they cleared leather, J.B. had swung up his M-4000
scattergun. He had in fact been holding it barrel-down behind his leg by the
pistol grip. Now all he had to do was lift it. He pulled the trigger.

The guy in the snazzy clothes pulled his hands out of the X
they’d been in, presenting the handblasters. J.B.’s shot column had barely begun
to spread when it hit dead-center of his white-shirted chest, right above his
vest.

Both handblasters dropped unfired. The tall man reeled back
through the opened doors into the room beyond. Inside, J.B. heard a considerable
commotion.

He tipped the muzzle of the Smith & Wesson blaster toward
the white-painted ceiling as he stepped forward.

“Would one of you happen to be Geither Jacks?” he asked.

A man with hair like a handful of straw sprouting from the top
of his narrow head, and soap lather masking the lower half of his face, stepped
forward.

“That’d be me,” he said. He stuck an unlit stub of cigar in his
teeth.

“Gate, you danged fool,” said a rangy, bristling-bearded black
dude in overalls, who jumped forward to interpose himself between Jacks and
J.B.’s shotgun.

“Now,
that’s
style!” screeched an
old withered prairie chicken of a woman in a brown dress and stockings.

With his cigar, Jacks gestured at the man who lay dead at his
feet. “Care to explain what this is all about?”

“We come to offer you our services,” J.B. said. “We’re mercies.
Seems like you could use some help.”

“No shit,” Jacks said, “’specially since you just chilled my
main man all over my carpet.”

“He was rude,” Mildred said.

“You gotta chill these bastards,” the black man said. “You
can’t let them come here and disrespect you like this, shoot poor bastard
Hapgood down right in front of you.”

“Coffin,” Jacks said, “listen. A major part of Hapgood’s job
description was keeping his own triple-stupe ass alive to be of use to me. Since
he wasn’t competent enough to do that, I reckon I can dispense with his
services.”

He turned a frown on J.B. His eyes vanished into slits.

“That said,” the renegade sec boss said, “it seems to me you
owe me, since you did just chill one of my bodyguards.”

“Two,” Mildred said. “The other was even less of a loss.”

Jacks’s eyes reappeared. They were a murky green, like a
chem-tainted pond. They all but stood out from his khaki face on stalks.

“Consider it a free demo of what we bring to the party,”
Mildred said. J.B. had to struggle considerably to keep his own eyes from
bugging behind his glasses, and keep his face immobile. He knew Mildred could be
triple-sparky, but he didn’t think she had that in her.

“Call it even,” J.B. said. “You’ve seen what we bring. What
will you pay us to bring it for you?”

“Gate,” Coffin said, speaking as if J.B. and friends weren’t
there, “you listen to me. You can’t hire people who just stroll in out of the
wasteland and into your parlor, shoot up your sec chief right before your eyes.
I tell you true, if you trust them you’re a fool. A
triple
-fool!”

“He’s more a fool for not chilling you on account of your lip,
Coffin!” squalled the old lady, coming forward with the quick short steps of a
sparrow hopping after crumbs. “That’s where he’s slack!”

“If you two are going to discuss my shortcomings,” Jacks said,
“why don’t you take it somewhere else? These folks and I got some business to
discuss.”

He looked the newcomers over again. “A little guy in a hat
who’s handy with a scattergun. A black woman built like a brick…wall. And a,
uhh—red eyes. Right. You’re an albino, aren’t you, Whitey?”

“Right first time,” Jak said. “Only name not Whitey. Name
Jak!”

“Jak.” Jacks nodded. “And the rest of you are?”

“I’m Mildred. This is J.B., the finest armorer in the
Deathlands!”

“Ace. Now to keep this on a business footing, can I get you to
maybe put away the big blaster?”

“I reckon your remaining sec boys’re pointing blasters at the
backs of our heads right now,” J.B. said with a smile. “So—you know.”

“Yeah. Pack ’em up, boys. Our new friends here are too polite
and cagey to come out and say they got me hostage. But I know which end of the
blaster the fucking bullet comes out of.”

“Gate,” the black man said urgently.

Jacks held up two fingers by his counselor’s face. “Enough,
Coffin. If they wanted to chill me, you and I would be staring at the ceiling
right now, without ever being able to look away. And they impress me, for a
fact.”

He smiled around the stump of his cigar. “Enough to hire them
for one special gig. You people pull it off, then we’ll talk, you know…long
term.”

Chapter Fifteen

The sentry stiffened. Too late. J.B. had already
grabbed his chin, yanked his head back and punched the two-edged blade of his
knife through the right side of his neck.

J.B. pushed outward with the knife’s pierced hilt, which was
cut from a single piece of steel. The blade cut through the cartilage box of
larynx and through the tough skin of the sentry’s throat in a gush of blood,
black in the starlit street, from both jugular veins. The hot copper tang of
blood joined the sour stink of the sec man’s clothing.

“Relax,” J.B. murmured in the shuddering man’s ear. “It’ll all
be over soon.”

The blood that jetted over the Armorer’s hand on the sentry’s
chin felt hot in the cold, unusually still night. It congealed quickly to a sort
of film over warm liquid.

None of which was new to J.B.

He walked his rapidly weakening victim back into a shadowed gap
between the tower and the building next to it. From high overhead drifted the
sounds of voices arguing. Though he couldn’t hear the words, J.B. recognized the
sound of bored men running their jaws to have something to do.

Jacks’s sentry’s body jerked hard and became limp weight and
J.B. knew life had fled from him. There was no mistaking it if you’d felt it
before. He eased the man to the alley grit, wiped the knife on his jacket and
resheathed it.

Few lights showed in either half of the contested ville.
Overhead a single lantern seemed to blaze from the top of the tower’s windows,
the ville was so dark. Looking southward, J.B. could see the glow from the
lights of Sinorice’s Royal Flush, and perhaps a few hints in the northern sky
from Miranda’s palace. At night the ville folk hunkered down and mostly tried
not to attract attention. Same as in daytime.

Two soft owl hoots came from the tower’s far side. J.B. cupped
hands to mouth and responded in kind to acknowledge Jak’s message received.
There had been a second sentry at the tower’s foot. Emphasis on had been.

J.B. turned to Mildred, who lurked deeper in the alley with her
handblaster ready. Her face was a little ashen in the incidental light from the
window overhead, but her jaw was firmly set and the hand that held her blaster
was rock-steady.

He gave her an approving nod. She had some odd scruples by his
reckoning, such that on rare occasions he marveled at how impractical the world
she grew up in had to have been. And look what happened to it.

Mildred gave a little frown as she moved past him into South
Street, and he read it plainly: she found it difficult to believe that, having
just grabbed a major toehold in enemy territory, the baron’s men weren’t
guarding it up the wazoo.

If the three needed it, it was triple-locked confirmation that
their companions weren’t inside, or involved in any way with securing the
structure Ryan’s rifle had been key in capturing.

“I can’t believe they’re this lax,” Mildred whispered.

“Nobody’s eager to have dirt hitting them in the eye,” J.B.
whispered back. “No matter how het up their bosses are.”

The same half-assed attitude toward sec had made it
unexpectedly easy for them to get here. While the objective lay on their own
side’s turf, they hadn’t wanted any run-ins with the renegade sec boss’s patrols
any more than the enemy’s. As they’d seen, Jacks’s street-level sec had your
basic chill first, ask questions never mentality.

Both sides’ patrols turned out to be loud, not subtle. The sec
men were clearly bent on intimidating the populace, but at the same time didn’t
seem double-eager to encounter any.

Jak waited on the other side of the open door at the tower’s
base. J.B. and Mildred saw him because he sensed their approach and let them. As
white as his hair and skin were, he could dissolve into the night like a drop of
milk in a gallon of coffee, quickly and completely. He nodded at J.B. and
slipped through the door, little knives gleaming in each pale hand.

A moment later he popped his head out and nodded to signal the
all clear.

No clouds hung overhead to trap such heat as the faint
southerly sun lent the day. It was cold enough to chill you in more than
temperature terms if you got careless, or nip off a finger or toe. Despite the
open door and uninsulated wooden walls, the ground-floor room felt toasty warm
after the street. It smelled of spoiling blood and fairly recent dreck from the
dying that had happened inside.

Jak shot J.B. a quick glance. When no veto came he slipped up
the stairs. They were warped and old, like the planks that made up the rest of
the structure. Over the worse odors J.B. started to smell the resin of lumber
cut in the none-too-distant past. As an ex-trader himself he reckoned it had
cost a bundle to build this vantage point.

Jak went up the wooden steps with no more sound than a shadow.
Mildred followed with exaggerated care.

Instantly, a board creaked beneath her combat boot. She
froze.

J.B. squeezed her shoulder. The men up top had quit arguing.
Now the sounds of harsh laughter rolled down the stairwell. There was no hitch
in the noise from above to indicate anybody had heard the plank groan.

Jak poked his head up to give the second floor a quick check.
Then he vanished up the stairs. He had surveyed the third floor and clearly
found nothing threatening before his companions reached the second.

Their new employer had told them the ailing baron Jeb had built
the structure as a watchtower. The floors between ground and top existed solely
to keep the two apart. Glancing quickly around the second story, J.B. confirmed
it was empty of everything but dust and darkness.

Jak waited on the stairs, poised just below the opening to the
top floor. J.B. avoided looking directly at the light coming through. He didn’t
want to foul up his night vision.

From his pants pocket he took a compact little mechanism, a
striker based on an ancient wheel lock design that he’d cobbled together himself
out of scavvied gear and metal bits filed to shape and tempered. From the pocket
of his leather jacket he took a bulky object whose dark surface gleamed slightly
in the light of the unseen lantern. It was a glazed ceramic jug of about a pint
capacity. A fused cap had been sealed into it with wax.

Seeing it, Jak slipped back down the stairs and stood to one
side. He drew his big Python. His job now was guarding J.B.’s and Mildred’s
backs. Very soon the shattering noise the big Magnum blaster made would be the
least of anybody’s concerns.

J.B. went up the stairs softly, with Mildred right behind him.
He didn’t make much noise, he reassured himself. He wasn’t that much bulkier
than Jak, nor was he much taller, although he knew that to look at him,
“stealth” wasn’t the word that jumped into someone’s mind ahead of anything
else. But he had a wealth of experience creepy-crawling. He wasn’t as good as
Jak; only the darkness itself was.

Just shy of the rectangle of orange light in the jet-black
overhead, he stopped. He stuck the fuse end into a handy little cup in his
striker, which insured quick ignition even in a stiff wind. J.B. pressed the
release. A soft whir, a smell of burning powder, and then the fuse was hissing
and spitting out tiny sparks.

Mildred holstered her blaster and covered her ears, mouth
open.

J.B. waited a beat to make sure the fuse had lit properly.
Aside from being a man who believed and lived the axiom measure twice, cut once,
he found there was little more embarrassing than having an enemy relight your
bomb and pitch it back at you.

Well and truly lit, the fuse emitted a shower of sparks. He
stuck his hand up through the opening and gave the bomb a little push, sending
it rolling along the plank floor toward the middle of the room.

He ducked back down and imitated Mildred, feeling more than
hearing the grumble of the pot bumping across the uneven floorboards. A young
male voice said, “What the fuck is—?”

A heavy boom cut him off. It wasn’t a terribly sharp sound, and
seemed somehow to have more push than volume. All the same it momentarily
scrambled J.B.’s hearing, despite how he clasped hands to his ears.

He knew it would. Even as a dragon’s breath of hot gas rushed
over them from the opening, he unlimbered his shotgun. Then, without a backward
glance, he went up through the hole.

* * *

A
S
USUAL
M
ILDRED
WAS
knotted with anticipation from
the moment J.B. produced the little home-built hand grenade. Her imagination
started playing horribly vivid films, like those driver-safety movies they’d
made her watch in driving school, of the many, many things that could go wrong.
She had spent enough time as an emergency-room intern to have very explicit
visions. To say nothing of the horrors she’d witnessed since reawakening.

The explosion muffled her hearing, just before J.B. hurried up
the stairs. As she drew her own handgun, she felt a flash of gratitude that the
ringing in her ears muted not only the roar of his burly blaster, but the
screams already pealing from the tower like a warning bell.

Though inclined to describe herself as built more for comfort
than speed, Mildred could move swiftly and agilely when it was called for. She
popped out of the hole almost the instant the Armorer’s boot soles cleared
it.

He went right; she wheeled left. They both knew the drill.

She had her ZKR thrust out before her. It was a target-style
weapon; she was a target shooter, an Olympic competitor in her day, which of
course, here and now, was as remote as the dinosaurs. But she had forgotten
nothing of her skills. In this not-so-brave new world she had learned new
ones—such as close-quarters fighting.

Not that there was much threatening in the eyeless crimson mask
that screamed endlessly at her, sounding faraway and almost dreamlike, from a
ragged black hole. The bursting charge had been surrounded by nails and other
bits and pieces of jagged metal scrap. The black powder was more likely to burn
one badly than do much damage with actual blast, even in enclosed quarters. It
was the little extras that made the difference.

Stepping left to clear the opening, she put a blue hole between
where her assailant’s eyes had been. Her hands felt numb to the ZKR’s kick. Her
ears barely registered the gunshot.

She was already turning to scan the rest of the room. A figure
lay slumped against the wall nearest the fountain. Seeing no one else at first
glance, Mildred kept him covered. He didn’t stir; she judged he had been the
recipient of J.B.’s first double 0 buck blast.

A table was upended against one wall, legs sticking out into
the little room. From behind it reared the third man. He was screaming. He had
blood flowing down his cheeks like muttonchops, Mildred saw as she swung up her
handblaster. His eardrums had burst and bled. But the table evidently had
shielded him from the brunt of blast and shrapnel.

The Sharp sec man held a big Peacemaker-type single-action
revolver. He tried to raise it to shoot J.B., right across the table from him.
With horrified certainty Mildred knew she wasn’t going to get a bullet into the
survivor in time to stop him from shooting her lover.

But the little man in the fedora had the reflexes of a puma. He
skipped forward and smashed the butt of the Smith & Wesson shotgun into the
blood-whiskered face. Mildred’s slowly returning hearing caught bone crunching
and the squeal of breaking teeth.

The kid toppled backward, right out the unglazed east window.
Mildred heard him shout. His cries cut off abruptly, then came back two octaves
higher and triple-loud as he thrashed on the dirt street in a paroxysm of
torment from shattered bones.

The screams stopped again. Leaning his head out, J.B. spoke a
single syllable. “Jak.”

She nodded. No more need be said.

J.B. turned back and grinned at her. She gasped. He had a light
spray of red across his right cheek and temple.

Seeing her reaction, he reached up, touched himself then
glanced at his fingers.

“It’s not mine,” he said.

“Oh, John!” He allowed her to capture him in a brief, fervent
embrace. Then he gently but decisively pushed her clear.

“Watch my back now. Got some work to do.”

* * *

H
AMMERING
AT
THE
DOOR
brought Ryan awake with his
SIG-Sauer in hand.

Beside him, Krysty rolled off the bed. He leaped to his feet on
the other side and stepped away, covering the door with his handblaster as
Krysty, kneeling on the far side, did the same. Lying on his pallet at the foot
of the bed, Doc groped for his bulky LeMat.

“What?” Ryan called. They slept in a guest room on the third
floor of Miranda Sharp’s palace. After the easy and showy success the friends
had handed her, she was inclined to treat them double-well.

“Baron says come quick,” the young sec man said through the
door. What was his name?

“What is it, Hedders?” Krysty called.

“Trouble,” the youth said.

Five minutes later, fully dressed and fully armed, the three
were ushered into the Baron’s frou-frou parlor on the bottom floor. Ryan
reckoned it was a good sign nobody tried to relieve them of their weapons. Then
again, it could have been fear on the part of the underlings assigned the task.
Or given what he’d seen of this outfit, and Jacks’s for that matter, just plain
sloppiness.

While Hedders seemed afraid of them, or perhaps life in general
at this point, he wasn’t treating them as enemies. So there was that.

Baron Miranda was wrapped in a light blue silk gown that didn’t
quite contain her. The top half of her full right breast was clearly visible
when she turned to the side, as were flashes of dark bush beneath the
indifferently tied belt. Nothing could contain the fury that darkened her fine
features. Her unbound hair was a wild black cloud. Ryan half expected to see
blue static discharges crackle through it like lightning in a thunderhead.