Wretched Earth (25 page)

Chapter Thirty

Reno’s head slumped to his collarbone. His bare skin
was pink-and-blue. His ribs stood out like slats on a window shade.

“I don’t rightly know why I haven’t changed,” he said.

“Talk,” Ryan said.

“All right. What I told you all—what I reckon you told these
people here?”

“Yeah.”

“That was the straight skinny. Mostly. Just not all the
details. Nor what happened after Drygulch changed.”

“We’re all ears,” Perico said.

Reno told again about the redoubt raid and the cabinet of
prions.

“I remember a bit more about those now,” Mildred said. “Back in
the nineties there was debate about whether they caused mad cow disease. Also,
they were blamed for a condition called kuru, which tribal people in New Guinea
or somewhere like that got from eating the brains of their enemies. Like that
cannie disease.”

“I heard my captors mention these prions,” Doc said.

“So what are they?” Colt asked.

She shrugged. “I really don’t know. Supposedly they were a kind
of protein that could infect a living thing and make it duplicate them. Like
viruses. Except unlike viruses, they’re not really alive.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know much about them, and I can’t
pretend I understand them.”

“Appropriate,” Doc murmured. He sat near the fire in his
shirtsleeves. His chin had drooped as if he was falling asleep. For once Ryan
couldn’t blame him if he had.

“How so?” Mildred asked sharply.

“Prions, you say, are unliving. How like the changed. They also
do not seem to live, insofar as we can tell.”

“Could these pry-things cause something like this plague?”
Perico asked.

“Something has,” Ryan said. “Don’t see anything else matters a
spent round right now.”

“So what really happened that night by the fire, Reno?” J.B.
asked mildly.

“It was like I told you,” Reno said, “up to the point Drygulch
rose up and attacked. He grabbed hold of Lariat, starting biting her and
growling. She screamed and tried to fight him off. I blasted him with my shotgun
in the body and he went down. Blew his rib cage wide-open.

“I went to Lariat to help her. She was bit pretty bad. Bleeding
heavily from the neck. I was trying to staunch the bleeding when here came
Drygulch again. He knocked the shotgun clean outta my hands, bit my arm when I
tried to defend myself. Hurt like nuke-red. I fell on my butt, bleeding like a
stuck pig. Drygulch kept coming. I grabbed my pack and ran. Just ran till I
couldn’t run no more.”

“You didn’t fight anymore?” Ryan asked.

“I never saw my shotgun again. Mr. Cawdor, I could see one of
his
lungs.
It was all pink and oozy. But it wasn’t
moving. And he still was. Didn’t think anything could stop him, if he could
survive a hit like that.”

“Then what?”

“Found, like, a wolf den dug in the ground. Burrowed right on
in and huddled up for the night. Lucky for me no wolves came back while I was
there.

“Next morning I just headed west. After a spell I spotted smoke
rising. When I got closer, I saw it came from the chimney of a sod house.

“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!”

* * *

T
HE
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 need 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.”

* * *

T
HE
S
TEYR
S
COUT
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 ville
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.

A couple began pawing at the fence where no defenders were in
view. Ryan had various means of alerting his teams, including flares and his
somewhat hyper kid runners. But
this
what was he was
up here for.

Fortunately, these rotties were of the low-awareness variety.
When he drilled one through the head, the other didn’t even flinch. It was
climbing resolutely into the razor wire coil up top when Ryan shot it, too.

As his longblaster descended from the second shot’s recoil, he
heard a fresh spate of blasterfire break out off to his left.

An iron band clamped his chest.
Krysty.

Cold logic demanded that he be where he was, doing this job. He
was the best sniper in Sweetwater Junction, with the best sniper’s tool. And as
Colt’s sec boss, he was tactical commander, possessed of a rough-and-ready
system that actually let him exercise a modicum of command over the defenders.
Ryan
had
to be here. Any other way offered more risk
than reward, and they operated on the thinnest of margins already.

But this plan meant he was up here, and his friends were down
there, in the thick of it. Including Krysty.

* * *

C
ROUCHING
WHERE
AN
east–west street led onto the wide path that ran along the inside of
the wire, Krysty aimed her Smith & Wesson 640 at the mass of rotties
pressing against the fence scarcely twenty feet from her. Though she was totally
safe from them—for now—the stench of death threatened to knock her to her knees,
even though the breeze blew from her back, out of the northeast.

Then she lowered the blaster and put it away. One rottie more
or less wasn’t going to make a difference here. Better to save her bullets.

The other defenders didn’t seem to agree. They kept
shooting.

Half an hour earlier Ryan had spotted the rotties concentrating
outside this point in the perimeter. He’d sent runners to order the reaction
force waiting in the square under J.B.’s command to meet the threat. Along with
the Armorer, Mildred, Doc, Jak and Krysty heeded the call, with about forty sec
men and citizens. They were armed with the standard assortment of blasters and
bows. Each fighter also carried some kind of hand weapon to fend off the
creatures’ fatal jaws at close range.

It was the third time they’d had to respond since the rotties
began probing at sunup. About an hour ago there had been a breakthrough, when a
weak stretch of fence gave way. Fortunately, it had been a minor attack,
involving no more than about a dozen rotties. The reaction team got there in
plenty of time, and since the rotties were in Ryan’s field of view, they were
also in his field of fire. The changed attackers were put down in a minute or
two. The fence was restored and shored up by one of the work crews that also
waited by the big fountain in the square.

But this assault was unmistakably more serious. The Sweetwater
Junction contingent blazed away furiously from between buildings, from houses
and rooftops nearby. Thick, dirty white smoke began to cover the area like a
screen.

* * *

T
O
THE
COMPANIONS
it was obvious
they couldn’t defend the whole perimeter. Sweetwater Junction was a substantial
ville. All the able-bodied men, women and teens, ville dwellers and sec men
alike, could just about encircle the town if they stood inside the fence with
arms outstretched and fingertips touching.

Colt had seen it, too, right off. So had Perico and Coffin. The
sec men took a while to bring around.

The idea was to dot squads of defenders around the perimeter.
The kid-and-dog patrols would orbit constantly, keeping eyes, ears and noses
skinned for break-in attempts. And Ryan on his precarious perch would keep watch
for trouble, use flares and runners to direct reinforcements to serious threats.
And, of course, pop rottie heads with his longblaster.

Even those without the ability or, frankly, the taste to fight,
could still help defend the ville by tending the wounded, carting water and ammo
for the children to distribute, repairing damaged sections of the fence. Baron
Colt was proving clever in finding ways to use everyone. He had a kid’s
creativity, Krysty thought. Although she was somewhat surprised his mother
hadn’t squeezed it out of him with her suffocating ways.

But everybody knew that a big rottie break-in couldn’t be held
back forever. It was only a matter of time.

* * *

“P
HEROMONES
,” M
ILDRED
SAID
over the cracking of blasters. The stocky black
woman stood on a sagging wood porch next to Krysty with her back against a wall.
She held her ZKR 551 .38 revolver in both hands, barrel tipped upward for
safety. Her dented baseball bat, cleaned of the congealed slime that had
encrusted it the day before, rode on her back in a sling improvised from an old
belt.

“What?” Krysty said.

“Maybe that’s how Lariat communicates with the swarm,” Mildred
said. “Pheromones. Or some other kind of chemical the rottie pathogen excretes.
They seem to react most when the wind comes from her to them, see?”