Wretched Earth (27 page)
No sooner was it fastened than a blue fist punched through, to
grope about blindly.
With a hawklike scream of fury Krysty let go of Ryan. She
grabbed up her ax and, with a one-handed swing, severed the arm just this side
of the elbow.
“Bill Itomaru, you should be ashamed,” a voice said from under
the table, beside which Ryan sprawled on his butt. “Such shoddy
workmanship!”
There was a little, round-bellied guy in an undershirt and work
apron stretched out beneath the worktable. He had a lantern jaw with a straggly
fringe of beard.
“What are
you
staring at?” he
demanded.
“Fuck you, Brad.”
Ryan looked around to see a wiry little guy with long white
hair pulled into a ponytail behind a dome of bare skull. He had an ax, which he
used two-handed to amputate another arm that reached in through the breached
shutter.
“If you don’t like it here, you can go outside with them!”
A blue face appeared at the hole in the shutter. It gazed in
with a blank, impassive gray eye that reminded Ryan of a shark’s. Doc, stripped
to his stained white shirt, lunged forward and thrust the tip of his sword
through the eye.
Relentless fists hammered at the front door, the shuttered
windows. Nails raked loudly on wood. Similar noises came from other rooms. Dust
flew from the door. Ryan heard wood creak as it started to give way.
“This could be a problem with our plan, friends,” Doc said,
drawing back out of grabbing-range of the hole in the window. At once a third
arm reached in to grope ineffectually. “The rotties must have been a long time
without eating, I suspect. If that is so, their hunger is reaching a crescendo.
It is driving them into a feeding frenzy!”
“Still rather be in here with them out there than outside with
them,” J.B. said.
Holding her ax in her left hand, Krysty hugged Ryan fiercely
with her right arm.
She yelped and jumped back. “Gaia! That stings! You’ve got acid
all over your coat!”
“I’ll get water,” Bill Itomaru said. “Sluice that stuff off
you.”
Ryan shrugged out of his coat and jumped to his feet.
“Fireblast! The rain! Hear it?”
Downpour rattled on the metal roof like falling gravel.
“Comes down hard,” Jak said.
“Hope it doesn’t eat a hole in the damn roof,” said Brad
Sinorice, the erstwhile gaudy owner, from beneath his table.
“My roof is the least of my worries,” the carpenter said.
“They’ll bust in soon. Five minutes, max.”
“Mebbe not,” Ryan said.
Another arm was stuck in the hole in the shutter. Ryan aimed a
little up and right and fired a double-tap, and two more ugly, mustard light
beams stabbed through the gloom of the shut-up shop when the arm slithered back
out the hole.
“Ryan, what are you doing?” Krysty yelled when he jumped
forward and pressed his eye to it.
He saw rotties in the street with the rain pelting down on
them. As he watched, a shriveled hulk of a man rolled dead eyes up in a melting
face. The decomposed flesh was sluicing off his skull and arms like melting wax.
His knees gave way and he fell forward to lie on his face, smoking.
All around the rotties were sizzling, smoking, melting.
Falling.
“Scope it out!” Ryan yelled, dancing back just in time to avoid
a mostly skeletal hand slashing for his face.
He hacked the hand off with his panga. Doc moved up beside him.
He shot the blue face that appeared in the window next, then risked a quick look
out.
“By the Three Kennedys!” he exclaimed. “The acid rain destroys
them!”
He stepped back. “I have rarely seen even the most concentrated
acid rain act with anywhere near such alacrity on living tissue. Apparently
their corrupted flesh is especially susceptible to it.”
“English,” Jak said sourly.
“He means the acid rain melts them triple-fast,” Mildred
said.
J.B. stepped to the other window. Despite Mildred’s warning, he
rose up on tiptoe to peer through where a sliver of ocher light betrayed a crack
in the shutter.
“He’s right,” the Armorer said. “Only rotties still on their
pins are the ones hammering to get in. Porch’s metal roof’s keeping the acid off
them. All the ones in the street are down.”
Ryan looked around at the others. “Everybody fit to fight?”
His friends nodded.
“What do you have in mind, young man?” the carpenter asked in
alarm.
Ryan had holstered his SIG again and gone to the door. His
friends formed up to flank him.
“This,” he said, yanking it open.
If long-dead faces could show surprise, those of the three
rotties right outside did. J.B. stepped to Ryan’s right. His shotgun blast
smashed into an open mouth and tore the head clean off, from the stained and
jumbled teeth of the lower jaw up. To Ryan’s left, Jak’s Python erupted. Ryan
felt the side blast of hot gas and particles hit his cheek and clatter off his
eye patch.
It didn’t stop him from putting the sole of his boot to the
belly of the middle rottie and kicking him into the street.
Acid hissed as it took the changed man. Drying, half-decayed
flesh dissolved and dripped from his hands and face as he raised them toward the
tortured yellow sky. He fell over backward, wreathed in smoke.
“Time for your showers, ladies and gentlemen!” Doc shouted,
stepping past Ryan as Jak slipped out the door and to the left. “Let the sky’s
tainted waters wash this town clean of all your evil!”
Epilogue
“I wish we had a fire,” Mildred said, rubbing her arms. “It's wicked cold out here.”
She squatted in such shelter as the four-foot cut offered from the nighttime prairie wind. The others hunkered around her, except for Ryan and Krysty, who stood side by side atop the bank, gazing south toward the ville they'd fled two hours before.
“Not so cold as things'd be hot in Sweetwater Junction,” J.B. said.
“But we saved their asses!” Mildred exclaimed. “We could have stayed. We would've been heroes! Shoot, Ryan, you were officially sec boss and everything!”
The tall, dark figure silhouetted against the stars seemed to stiffen slightly. “Don't remind him,” Krysty said. She slid her arm around his narrow waist.
The acid rainstorm had passed; the skies had cleared. Inspection had shown that if acid had fallen or flowed in this spot, it had long since sunk into the sand.
“Bound to be questions raised 'bout what happened at the east gate,” J.B. said, squatting at Mildred's side.
“You mean
to
the east gate, don't you, John?”
“That, too.”
Like a white wolf on its haunches, Jak hunkered not far away, content to simply sit and rest with a hunter's patience. Doc, who had drifted away from this plane of realityânot that Mildred could blame him this timeânot long after they slipped away from the ville, sat on the sand humming the same tune he'd hummed the past hour.
Krysty sighed. “Couldn't we have worked something out, lover?” she asked.
“You know we couldn't,” Ryan said. “We all talked this out before. Why jaw about it now?”
“Cold,” Jak said by way of explanation. The others looked at him in surprise. He was the last among them to speak up at all, much less in defense of jawing.
The acid rain had washed away the entire rottie horde, leaving little more than piles of stained bones littering the streets, and the long rise east toward Ten Mile as far as the eye could see. The crazy gambit had paid off. By blowing open the gates and drawing out the bulk of the swarm, they had ensured they'd be caught in the rain, rather than remnants finding shelter somehow.
Ryan didn't know then and didn't know now where the changed might have found shelter in this treeless waste. He just knew that whatever kind of creature Lariat had turned into, he didn't want to leave her the least little slice of a chance.
Inside the ville a few rotties had managed to get in out of the rain. They'd retained sufficient wit and will to break into buildings to escape the acid bringing final death to the unquiet corpses. But they hadn't been able to hide long from the search parties that set out to hunt them once the lethal rain stopped.
Reconnaissance by Baron Sharp's horse patrols reported no sign of rotties anywhere around Sweetwater Junction. Just scoured skeletons.
The one thing they didn't find was a trace of the auburn-haired woman in her leather jacket. Mildred bought into the consensus that the woman once known as Lariat, the rottie queen, had been melted to bones out there with her ghastly flock.
The ville's mood had been madly euphoric. Everybody was utterly beaten down physically, as the companions themselves were. But they still gave themselves over to a wild celebration.
Mildred had to admit they had plenty to celebrate. Not only the victory over the changed, but an end to the civil war that had so ravaged their ville.
Somewhere out in the night a coyote yipped. A shrill chorus of barks and howls answered it. Life went on out there. Somehow knowing that reassured her.
“Never would have worked out,” Ryan said. “You all know it as well as I do. All the good cheer and glorious feelings were ace. As long as they lasted. Along about the time the ville folks start feeling their hangovers they'll start remembering how many of their own we left staring at the sky. Then the bad feelings would start. And then they'd start measuring us for Miranda's old killing poles outside the ville.”
He stretched, then sighed and put his arm around Krysty.
“But yeah,” he said softly. “It'd be nice to kick off our boots and put our feet up for a spell. Hell, yeah.”
“Did we win?” Mildred asked.
“Huh?” Ryan said.
“Alive,” Jak said.
“That's not what she meant.” Ryan scratched the stubble on his right cheek. “All I can say is, reckon so.”
“You
reckon
so!” Mildred exclaimed. “Is that really enough? You were the one who said we absolutely had to stop the rottie plague for good and all. Did we stop it? Absolutely?”
“Like I said, I reckon so,” he replied. “All we can do is all we can do. It's enough to get along with.”
Gently but firmly he disengaged himself from Krysty's loving arms and turned to look down at his companions.
“Now let's get along before that Sharp kid finds more limits to a baron's gratitude and sends the cavalry after us.”
Doc chortled, sprang to his feet like a much younger man and began to sing like a happy child.
“Doc,” Mildred said as she winched her way painfully upright, “one thing you have to tell me before we go.
“Just where did you learn âSingin' in the Rain'?”
* * * * *
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ISBN: 9781459233836
Copyright © 2012 by Worldwide Library
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