Wretched Earth (17 page)

Chapter Twenty

Knuckles rattling the bedroom door snapped Ryan awake
as he lay in the warm circle of Krysty’s arms. Her soft silken nakedness was hot
against his bare back and buttocks.

“What?” he barked hoarsely.

“Baron says come quick,” a male voice called through the
door.

“Come where?”

“Basement,” the man said. “The chill just woke up!”

Ryan bothered to pull on only his jeans and boots. He tucked
his SIG-Sauer handblaster inside the waistband, just in case. It wasn’t an ideal
way to carry the weapon, but these weren’t ideal circumstances.

Krysty followed in bare feet and a thigh-length scavvied
Tennessee University sweatshirt she used as a nightgown.

Shrieks of pain and terror blew out of the stairwell when Ryan
pulled the door open.

“That doesn’t sound like a dead person,” Krysty said.

“Not yet,” he said grimly.

In the medical room they found Miranda wrapped in what looked
to be a brown bearskin, scowling furiously. Beside her Lamellar wrung his hands
in distress, his comb-over hanging down the right side of his face like a
peeled-off scalp. A pair of sec men, presumably the baron’s bedroom-door guard
detail, hovered in the background, looking as if they were trying not to freak
out completely.

Another stick-skinny, middle-aged guy in a white lab coat
liberally spattered with gore and muck had his arm clamped in the jaws of the
dead sec man. He was the one making most of the noise.

The chill growled and rolled eyes glazed over with a milky film
as he shook his prize with bloody teeth.

“It’s impossible, Baron,” Lamellar was saying. Evidently on
behalf of his man, who finally left off howling and thrashing to try gingerly to
dislodge the chill’s teeth from his bare forearm. From the looks of things he’d
given violent tugging a try and failed. “This man died hours ago. He has no
heartbeat nor apparent respiration even now. Morris was trying to monitor his
state of decomposition when…when this happened. There’s no blame, surely.”

Points to the old bastard for having the stone to take the sec
man’s pulse while he was struggling to get loose, with his jaws clamped on the
med tech’s arm, Ryan thought.

“It’s clearly
not
impossible,
Lamellar,” Miranda said. “It happens,
sí?
The dead
man moves. It’s not as if you weren’t warned of this. It’s precisely why you
were directed to secure him firmly. I am
not
pleased.”

The healer’s doleful face went even grayer. Clearly, as terrors
went, chills returning to a ghastly parody of life to attack the living paled
beside the wrath of Baron Miranda.

The baron looked at Ryan. “You and our friends are vindicated,”
she said. “I was double-stupe to doubt you and not act before. I can only act
decisively now, and hope it’s not too late.”

“I don’t believe it is, Miranda,” Krysty said. “But the ville
needs to be roused. The rotties could arrive at any time. And despite the fact
they seem mindless, they’ve shown flashes of cleverness. Even tactical
sense.”

“How is that even possible?”

“We have no idea,” Ryan said. “All we know is that we can’t
underestimate the bastards.”

“Help me,” moaned Morris the med tech. He now had hold of his
own arm above where the rottie’s mouth gripped it, as if hoping to keep the
unnatural creature from swallowing it whole.

“Right,” Miranda said. Her right hand whipped out from her
bulky robe toward Morris’s head. Before even Ryan could grasp what she was
doing, a yellow light flashed and a painful sound shattered the air inside the
little room like glass.

Morris slumped down behind the table, shot in the face and dead
at once. Miranda pivoted back to Ryan. The front of her bare robe fell open,
revealing the olive contours of her body. What really distracted Ryan was the
P08 Luger she held tipped toward the acoustic ceiling with a thin string of
smoke coming from its muzzle.

“You killed him!” Lamellar screeched. His voice was like
fingernails on a chalkboard. Ryan half hoped the baron would chill him next.
Just to shut his pie hole.

“You display a firm grasp of the obvious, Lamellar,” Miranda
said. “I commend you. May I recall to your razor-keen mind what happens to those
who are bitten by the creatures who have—what did you say, Ryan? Changed.”

“But…but…how do we know it happens in every case, Baron?”

“It has happened in every case I have direct knowledge of,” she
said crisply. “In fact, did not this whole unpleasant scene arise from doubting
that very fact? As I said before, we can take no chances.”

Lamellar’s purple lips sagged. He was breathing so quickly Ryan
thought he might be hyperventilating, and waited with a certain interest to see
if he keeled over.

“Now get a grip on yourself,” Miranda told the healer. “Clean
up this mess.”

She turned to Ryan again. “I have a risky mission for you.”

He shrugged. “You pay, I play.”

A sudden movement from the chill made everybody jump. Ryan saw
the corpse’s head come up. The face had gone gray, and the flesh seemed to have
loosened on its bones. Bruised markings discolored the skin, green and brown and
yellow, reminding Ryan of somebody who’d taken a good dose of rads—not enough to
chill him, but enough to make his hair fall out and have him look weird for a
week or two. The skin around the eyes had shrunk and taken on a weird, scaly
appearance, like chicken legs.

The thing chewed with monotonous rhythm on a chunk of skin and
muscle it had ripped from the late Morris’s arm.

“Have we further need of this abomination?” Miranda asked.

“No, ma’am,” said Doc, who had come in late in shirt and
trousers and sock feet, with his suspenders dangling behind. “Unless you wish to
observe the progression of the disease, if we may call the change that. Which,
though it might be of academic interest, I am forced to admit is unlikely to
confer any benefit to us in a useful period of time.”

“To translate,” Ryan said, “no, we don’t need it anymore.”

“Good.” The Luger flared and barked again. The bullet hit the
former sec man above the left eye and blew a divot out of the rear of his skull.
The body bowed upward against the leather restraints. The heels drummed the
shiny steel tabletop. For an instant Ryan feared that the change had changed
itself: that even a brain shot no longer stopped the horrors. But it was only
the last gasp of the monster’s stolen central nervous system. The rottie went
limp with finality.

“You should tell your assistants to exercise the utmost care in
cleaning up the detritus, Dr. Lamellar,” Doc said, giving the healer a courtesy
title he probably didn’t merit. “We don’t yet understand all the possible means
by which the sickness is transmitted. But we know saliva’s involved, at
least.”

“About that mission, Baron,” Ryan said.

“Geither Jacks must be made aware of the gravity of this
situation,” she said.

Her two sec men actually gasped at that. She ignored them. They
quickly got busy trying to cover their obvious relief that she didn’t seem
inclined to send them.

Ryan’s unscarred right eyebrow rose. Her response surprised
him, in a good way.

“Smart,” he said. “Your usual baron might think, if the change
were to get loose in a rival’s part of town, he could mebbe exploit the chaos to
smash that rival. Be triple-stupe here. Self-death sure. But most wouldn’t see
it.”

“I’m not having
that
get loose in
my ville,” she said. “I see too clearly what hell there would be eradicating it.
If we even could.”

“So you’re willing to negotiate a settlement with Jacks?”
Krysty asked.

Miranda shook her head firmly. “Never. This ville is mine—is my
son’s. Jacks is a traitor and usurper. I’ll never rest until he is spinning
slowly in the wind, and what is mine by right is mine once again. But I will not
tolerate his fouling the nest through inaction!”

Ryan nodded. It was a start.

“I’ll do it,” he said. “Doc, finish getting dressed. Krysty,
why don’t you stay here, keep the baron company—”

Green fury flared in Krysty’s eyes. Her scarlet hair whipped
around her shoulders like a nest of angry snakes. “Don’t even say it, Ryan!
Don’t you
dare
try to leave me behind!”

Ryan sighed. “All right. We’ll all get dressed while the baron
writes her note to Jacks. Then we’ll deliver it.”

“But it’s suicide!” Lamellar choked out. “He’ll kill you
all!”

“Then we won’t end up like that poor bastard, will we?”

* * *

L
OUD
MALE
VOICES
and wavering
torchlight carried on up the street.

“Whistling past the grave,” Doc remarked. The three had hidden
behind some crates and assorted trash in a side yard to allow the Jacks sec
patrol to pass. As usual, they had experienced no trouble slipping past each
faction’s foot patrols. Even crossing no-man’s-land had been a breeze.

“Do they think that by waving torches and talking loudly
they’ll keep the rotties from jumping out at them?” Krysty asked.

“Mebbe,” Ryan said. “They’re on edge. Not thinking clear.”

He shook his head. “Well, things won’t get better if we just
stand here.”

When they were within a couple blocks of the former gaudy house
that served Gate Jacks as a palace-in-exile, they stepped out and boldly strode
up the street. Ryan carried a white flag consisting of a bleached linen
pillowcase on a broomstick, prominently displayed.

Almost at once a four-man sec patrol challenged them.

“What have we got here?” The obvious leader was a big man with
the sides of his head shaved, leaving a shock of wavy brown hair on top. He
planted his burly form directly in Ryan’s path, with cantaloupe-size fists on
his hips.

“Looks like some of Miranda’s bitches done jumped the fence and
strayed over here,” a skinny guy with unshaved jaws and a rat’s nest of dark
hair said. One of his eyes shone dead white in the gleam of stars from above. It
reminded Ryan eerily of the changed sec man’s eyes.

“Can we chill ’em, Lou?” asked a third, as tall as the leader
but a real string bean, with an Adam’s apple as large as, well, an apple. “Can
we, huh?”

“After we play with the big-tit bitch,” Dead-Eye said
hurriedly.

“We’re here under a flag of truce,” Ryan said, shaking his
stick to call attention to the fact. “We’re bringing Jacks a message from
Miranda.”

“Well, just hand that bad boy on over,” Lou said, extending a
hand the size of a paving stone. “We’ll see Gate gets it, nice and safe.”

“We’re supposed to deliver it to Jacks’s own hand,” Krysty
said. “And we claim right of passage.”

“Well, whoop-de-do, Sandbag Boobs,” Lou said. “I wasn’t
asking.
Boys, take ’em—”

A loud noise interrupted him. Also a bright yellow flash that
illuminated the big man collapsing on himself. Black fluid squirted out of his
ears as he went down.

His LeMat handblaster held at the end of his extended arm, Doc
let the huge weapon’s muzzle wander back and forth across the three surviving
sec men as if at random. “That is no way to talk to a lady,” he said in tones of
mild reproof. “Now, you gentlemen will be good enough to escort us to Mr. Jacks
without further ado.”

He didn’t phrase it as a request. The patrol didn’t take it
that way. They did as he said.

Blasterfire in his own street was apparently enough to rouse
the man himself. By the time they’d covered the block and a half remaining,
Jacks was standing on the stoop. He wore a robe—maroon silk, judging by the
yellow light spilling out the windows and open double doors—over pale pajamas.
He puffed at a lit cigar.

“So you’re the bitch’s new outlander mercies,” he said, when
Ryan, Krysty and Doc walked up to him with their captive escort. “I got me some,
too. Mebbe we should get you and them to square off.”

Three figures emerged from the French doors behind Jacks,
looking grim as rad death: J.B., Mildred and Jak.

“Another time,” Ryan said. “Miranda said to give you this.”

He handed over a rolled scrap of fancy stationery sealed with
black wax pressed with a signet ring Miranda wore.

“She always did know how to do things in style,” Jacks said,
examining it. As he broke the seal he added, “So I reckon Lou got frisky with
you on the way in?”

“He required instruction in the niceties of diplomacy, sir,”
Doc said. “Also common courtesy.”

“Take it he didn’t survive the lesson? No loss. A white flag’s
got to be respected. It’s part and parcel of the accepted order. Without that we
got anarchy. The rest of you assholes, take that to heart.”

Ryan and his companions practiced squaring off and looking
fierce at their friends as Jacks read the message Miranda had written in her
looping and dramatic but clear hand. The others glared furiously back.

“So all that bull-goose crap about walking chills is true?”
Jacks said. “Or at least Miranda wants me to believe it is.”

“What does she have to gain by your guarding your part of the
ville more closely, Mr. Jacks?” Krysty asked.

He shrugged. “Mebbe string my forces out along the perimeter so
she can bust through? All right. Tell Miranda her message came through loud and
clear.”

“Will you prepare to defend your side?”

“I’ll think about it,” Jacks said. “She can stew in her juices
until she finds out. You can go now. Make sure they get back all safe and
sound.”

“Will do!” said Dead-Eye, throwing a salute so sharp he almost
coldcocked himself.

“Wasn’t talking to you, cock-snot.”

* * *

J.B.
STOOD
IN
THE
COLD
night air, watching his friends
and their three unhappy companions walk away down the street.