Wretched Earth (23 page)

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The rottie yanked the youth against the wire. Other
arms reached out to entangle him. Their blackened nails clawed at his flesh.

Despite frenzied screams and thrashing, he couldn’t break free.
Several ville folk darted forward to try to help him.

“Don’t get close!” Ryan shouted. “Chop their arms off!”

His friends tried pulling him away. It did no good. Then the
youth screamed, and blood spurted from the side of his head as a rottie bit into
his ear.

Standing now, Ryan stepped into a Weaver stance with left foot
and shoulder advanced and left elbow crooked to support his blaster hand. Taking
a flash sight picture, he fired. The trapped boy’s head jerked and he
slumped.

His friends stared at Ryan with shock and fury mingled on their
faces.

“If you’re bit, you’re one of them!” Ryan shouted. “Now learn
from that stupe, and
stay back.
”

Then he had to partially disregard his own words. Because
despite the way the original cattle fence had been built up to a taller height
with metal-scrap makeshifts, and was topped by razor wire, the rotties were
scaling it.

He, Doc and Jak moved in to show the people of Sweetwater
Junction how hand-to-hand rottie fighting was done. Doc holstered his reloaded
blaster and drew his sword from its sheath. Using the sheath to swat away hands
that snatched at him, he started stabbing rottie faces. Doc kept the tip of his
sword well sharpened, and it was well reinforced for thrusting. He could even
ram it through a forehead or temple.

From somewhere Jak had turned up two hatchets, predark, and
each drop-forged from a single piece of steel. He waded in like a fury, hacking
off hands, breaking arms so that they flopped uselessly, closing in to split
heads. Then, like a white flame, he danced back out of harm’s way, only to pick
a new angle, attack again.

Ryan did much the same thing with his panga. Of course, not
even his panther agility and speed could come close to Jak’s. Fortunately, it
beat even the spriest rottie by a Grand Canyon margin.

When he stepped back for a moment to breathe and wipe sweat
from his eye with the back of one hand, Ryan saw the ville defenders battling
hard to either side of him. They seemed to be getting the hang of it. Those with
poles or long-handled tools poked at the shrunken bellies of the rotties
climbing the mesh, knocking them back into their comrades behind. That thinned
the numbers making it to the top, made them easier to manage. It also made it
less likely the monsters would bring the fence down from sheer weight.

“You’ve left a smear of something unspeakable over your eye,”
Doc said, falling back beside him.

“Thanks for the good news.”

“I certainly hope the change cannot be transmitted by this ooze
we’re inevitably drenching ourselves in.”

Ryan could find nothing to say to that better than “Me,
too.”

He glanced up at Colt on his rooftop. Either out of ammo or
having heeded advisers telling him to save his shots, the young baron stood
looking worried. He clearly wanted to be down there fighting, yet understood why
that was at best a last-ditch measure.

“Colt!” Ryan shouted, trying to make himself heard over the
yells and screams of the defenders. This close, the rotties’ strange muttering
sounded as loud as ocean surf. “Yo, Baron!”

He waved his arms. Colt looked at him.

“Check for places the fence is giving way!” Ryan yelled. “Send
reinforcements!”

For an instant the pudgy, smudged face crumpled in
incomprehension. Ryan realized the kid still had his own mother’s blood and
brains dried on his face. Well, it was a triple-tough day for everybody.

Then Colt jerked his head up as the import of Ryan’s words hit
him. He turned, looked around, started waving his arms and shouting.

“What can we do?” Mildred asked from Ryan’s elbow.

He spun like a cat hit with a static spark. “What the fireblast
are you doing here?” he demanded of his three companions.

“Lookin’ to do some good, Ryan,” J.B. said. “Our ammo won’t
last forever.”

Ryan glared at them. His main intention, though he would never
say so, was to keep the women, especially Krysty, out of rottie reach. He’d been
willing to do without the Armorer fighting at his side to help justify that.

“What about doctoring up the wounded?” Ryan demanded.

“Right,” Mildred said. “Most who get injured are bitten. That
means the indicated treatment is a bullet in the head. Screw that.”

“The fight’s here,” Krysty said. “Our place is with you.”

She held a double-bitted ax. Somewhere Mildred had scored
herself an aluminum baseball bat, and J.B. held a pool cue.

“What the fuck, J.B.?” Ryan said.

The Armorer shrugged and twirled the long, tapered stick. “Just
feels natural in my hands, Ryan.”

Before they could say anything else, screams rang out from
their left. Forty yards or so north a thirty-foot-wide section of fence bowed
inward under the weight of the invaders’ bodies. So hard did the rotties behind
press the ones in front in their mindless, unswerving hunger, that they were
pushing bits of their fellows’ bodies through the heavy-gauge wire mesh as if it
were some kind of rotting-meat strainer.

One of the high-speed rotties went capering up the mound of
flesh to leap over the fence. It twisted in the midst of leaping on a knot of
taken-by-surprised defenders as Ryan sent a snapshot through its body. That
wasn’t enough to put it down to stay, of course, but the hit made the creature
miss its target. A moment later somebody had shattered its skull with an ax.

By now the east gate was mostly barricaded by a mound of
rotties chilled for the second and final time. It seemed to be holding them at
bay.

“Go!” Ryan shouted, leading his companions toward the breach on
the run.

As more rotties surged against the fence, it fell down with a
crash. Rotties rolled into the ville, in among the defenders. Those who weren’t
powering out of there in a panic.

A fat changed man in the stained and tattered remains of an
apron struggled to his feet in front of Ryan. His jowls were dark and crusted
with old gore. His eyes seemed to burn like mad white beacons in his blue-gray
face.

Ryan buried the panga in the man’s forehead, splitting the
bean-shaped head clear to the bridge of a squashed nose. Whatever light had
gleamed in those staring eyes went out. The rottie slumped, done.

And Ryan found out he’d struck the creature
too
well. The panga blade stuck tight in its skull.
The chill’s bulk, which still had to be north of 250 pounds even allowing for
wastage, dragged Ryan’s arm inexorably down.

“Shit!” he yelped. He put a boot against the man-boobs below
where the chin slumped in a pool of loose discolored skin, and pushed hard,
tugging with both hands.

From the corner of his eye he saw a rottie homing in on him,
not fast but almost in range to grab him. He knew those outstretched fingers
contained terrible strength even though half were rotted to little more than
bone and brown sinew.

With a wild cry Mildred skipped past him. Her avenging baseball
bat whistled through the air and struck the rottie attacking Ryan with a ringing
thump. The skull caved in.

At last Ryan’s panga came free. “Thanks,” he breathed to
Mildred. He gave the blade a quick double swipe on the fat chill and stuck it in
his belt.

“Don’t mention it,” Mildred said. “Aiieeee!”

The latter cry was addressed to a skeleton-lean female rottie
with wisps of long graying hair hanging from the half of the scalp that remained
on her head. It wasn’t a cry of dismay. Rather, Mildred had reverted to some
kind of primal berserker state Ryan couldn’t recall seeing before. The stocky
black woman, whom he belatedly noticed had tied a red rag around her head like
Rambo
in an ancient vid-poster, wound up
two-handed and swung for the fences.

Her bat rang like a warning bell as it struck the changed
woman’s high cheekbone. The half-gnawed head snapped around 180 degrees. Her
neck broke with a sound like blasterfire.

It was good enough. She dropped like a sack.

Mildred charged on in search of new heads to break.

“Fuck this,” Ryan grunted. His trusty panga wasn’t doing the
deed. Casting about, he saw a shovel lying ten feet away, where a wounded or
fled defender had dropped it.

Ace. It might not be an ideal weapon, but he’d chilled men and
muties with a shovel before. Its advantage here was that it was long.

He grabbed it up, spun and swung it ball-bat style so that the
shallow-angled blade smacked a rottie across the face. The changed man staggered
back, but he didn’t go down.

Quick balance recovery wasn’t a notable strength among the
changed. The creature was still trying to get into forward motion again when
Krysty pounced and split its head with her ax.

“Good job,” Ryan told her. She grinned at him. The ax’s handle
gave her leverage Ryan hadn’t had when trying to pull his panga out of a
rottie’s head. But it still took her a moment to free it.

Tactics came easy to Ryan.

“Krysty,” he yelled, “Doc. You hang back a couple steps. The
rest of us will put the bastards on the ground. You finish off the ones as they
need it.”

Ryan saw a quick rebellious flare in Krysty’s eyes. It went out
at once. She had long since agreed to accept his command as iron. Plus her
tactical mind was just a beat or two behind his. She saw the wisdom of his plan
as clearly as he did.

He charged into the swarm of rotties battling a clot of
determined ville folk in the mouth of an alley that opened on the cleared path
along the inside of the perimeter. J.B. was at his right, using the pool cue
more as a quarterstaff than a club, holding its middle third between his
callused, sun-browned hands, jabbing and tripping with either end, pushing with
the middle. The grip still allowed him to extend the weapon. As Ryan shifted his
own grip on his shovel to mimic his friend’s, J.B. suddenly lunged, poking the
cue before him like a spear. Its narrow end went into a rottie’s eye socket,
squishing the already shrunken ball, punching through the thin bone backing into
the fevered brain behind.

The tip came out black; the rottie went down.

“Justly struck, John Barrymore!” Doc crowed from behind.

Meanwhile Ryan sidestepped a male rottie about his own size and
build. Letting the shovel handle slide through his hands to almost the end, he
swung the blade edge against the back of a knee. The leg folded under the
rottie. As Ryan recovered from the stroke, he saw Doc’s sword dart like a steel
serpent’s tongue to pierce the creature’s temple.

From behind him Ryan heard the crunch and squelch of Krysty’s
ax hacking into the skull of a rottie someone had put on the ground.

Blaster shots cracked out. And to Ryan, they had the nasty,
high harmonic ring of shots aimed at
him.
He winced
as a bullet sang past his left ear, then he heard Colt Sharp hollering for
people to cease firing. The blasters stopped.

With Mildred batting on his left and Jak with his hatchets just
past her, plus J.B. at his right, Ryan led a lopsided wedge against the rotties
coming through the fallen section of fence. Krysty and Doc had their backs. The
ville defenders making a stand in the alley rushed out, and they all quickly
mopped up the rotties who had gotten inside the wire.

Then it was just a matter of mowing down the creatures as they
came through. With six Sweetwater Junction residents to help, the companions
were able to do it. Most rotties were slow, and they had to wade through their
fellows who had been crushed into the fence in pushing it down. Not all of those
were finished by any means. Their mindlessly clutching hands and biting jaws
attacked their own kind on contact with no more hesitation than they would warm
flesh.

Ryan and his companions had no trouble dealing with the
occasional double-speed rottie. Even with speed they didn’t exactly show
finesse.

The task was more like chopping firewood than a fight. Ryan’s
arms quickly grew tired, grew leaden, screamed with pain and grew numb. His
elbows hurt from repeated impacts. His stomach fought a constant low-level
insurgency against his iron self-control, not just because of the open-grave
stench of the changed, but in sheer revulsion against the ichor and grunge that
coated him from his hair to his boots. It got to be like hitting thrown tomatoes
with a tennis racket. Except instead of tomato pulp and juice, it was foul,
rotting human flesh and skin and byproducts that splattered him.

The problem was when he inhaled, the ooze went up his nostrils,
clogging them physically as well as gagging him with stench. But the
triple-special horror was feeling maggots cast from the decomposing rotties by
the force of his and his friends’ blows writhing on the skin of his face and
arms.

From the corner of his eye Ryan noticed that twenty or so
Sweetwater Junction defenders had set up a similar system at the gate, where
rotties were climbing up and over the fallen bodies of those who had gone
before. The two ranks of defenders seemed to have little trouble finishing them
when they dropped inside the gate.

It was some consolation for the fact that even Ryan, with his
iron endurance and titanium will, fast approached the point where he simply
couldn’t fight anymore.

“I hate to plead incapacity due to my seeming age,” he heard
Doc wheeze, “but I am almost done, I fear.”

“Me, too,” Mildred muttered from his side. The light of fury
burned in her dark eyes, but her movements no longer had the wild energy she’d
shown when she’d ripped into the changed mob like a living chainsaw. Even Jak’s
motions were labored, almost slow.

Their bodies no longer able to obey, the ville defenders had
started to drop out around them. Then men and women were shoving in front of
Ryan and his friends. Men and women who smelled clean, instead of like a dug-up
graveyard in a heat wave.