Wretched Earth (19 page)

Mildred wondered if the room had been dug out and shored with
cement post-nuke. She also wondered what it was meant for. It certainly
seemed
like a cell. And it had obviously been here
long before Geither Jacks took up residency just a few weeks ago. Was it for
gaudy house customers to play out certain dark kinks? Or did it have a more evil
purpose?

Whatever its original intent, it was being used for something
amply bad now.

“What could I have done? Stayed and got bit, too? Become one of
them?”

“Naw, back off the trigger of the blaster, there, Jak,” J.B.
said. “You been there, you would have done the same thing. Have to be
triple-stupe not to. Dark night, it happens to us, you run right off like a
jackrabbit, never look back.”

Jak appeared mulish but said no more.

“So the cabinet was labeled Prions,” Mildred said.

“You know the word?” Reno asked.

She shrugged. “A bit.” She didn’t want to tell him too much
about her actual origins. You never knew what evil uses information like that
could be put to. And one thing was sure: the boy had loose lips.

“A prion is a kind of protein that seems to act in ways similar
to a virus. It can spread like a virus, and cause its host to produce copies of
it. But it doesn’t seem to be even a little bit alive. It was implicated in a
nasty sickness called mad cow disease, or Creutzfeldt-Jakob syndrome in humans,
back before…before the war.”

“So could something like that be causing the change?” Reno
asked.

“I don’t really know.” Not my area of expertise, she thought,
but chose not to say. “One way or another it looks as if the old-days whitecoats
have a lot to answer for.”

“True words,” Reno said, nodding.

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.

* * *

L
YING
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
successor, 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.

* * *

“D
ARK
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.

* * *

“R
YAN
! K
RYSTY
! D
R
.
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 him for mutual support.

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