Wretched Earth (5 page)

Leon was one of Omar’s guards. The Fat One looked at the big
man, who shrugged. “She acted scared,” he said.

“Little girl?” asked J.B., emerging from the neighboring shed.
“What’s going on?”

“Probably nothing,” Ryan said.

“Nothing?” Reno echoed, fumbling to adjust his glasses on his
nose. “They didn’t let anyone in, did they?”

“Appears that they did.”

“They’re crazy! It could be one of them!”

“Where is this little girl?” Mildred asked, hugging herself
tightly beneath her generous breasts and not looking thrilled at being rousted
out of a relatively warm bedroll. Her breath came in puffs of condensation.

“Ryan,” Krysty said, “those men again—”

The wag drivers were hooting in rising merriment. Only the fact
the Fat One was busy reading Locke the riot act prevented her from jumping on
them for making noise at this hour, Ryan reckoned. That was against Omar’s
rules, too.

Then the circle opened a bit and Ryan saw that the wag drivers
were pushing around a girl with pigtails. For a moment he thought it was one of
the host’s daughters. But he quickly dismissed that; if they could stand up, the
wag drivers weren’t
that
drunk. He remembered how
Locke claimed he and Leon had admitted a lone little girl.

Now the wag drivers were bouncing her around the way they had
Reno earlier in the evening.

“What is it with these assholes?” Ryan asked.

“Ryan,” Krysty said, “we’ve got to do something.”

“No,” he amended, “no, we don’t. We’ve got our hands full now.
Let Omar’s people deal with it. What we have to do is get back to sleep.
Plunkett’s going to want us hustling tomorrow.”

Jak was frowning. “Girl not look right.”

“What?” Ryan said. He had headed back to bed. Now he turned to
look once more.

The sky was clear overhead, but the pitiless stars didn’t cast
enough light to see by. Nor did the lantern light seeping through the gaudy
house windows. Still, it struck Ryan that the little girl did move strangely, as
if she were stiff, somehow. And was it a trick of the light, or did her face
appear gray?

“What’s going on out here?” Omar himself, shaved-headed,
ferociously mustached, stood in the doorway to the barroom. He wore his
inevitable apron and held his sawed-off scattergun in his big blunt hands. He
wasn’t shy about raising his voice regardless of the hour.

The wag drivers ignored him. One of them blew kisses at the
teetering, silent child, then he leaned toward her, puckering his lips.

“Gimme a kiss, little girl,” he said.

As if shot from a catapult, she sprang at him. Her arms flew
around his neck. She pressed her mouth to his in what looked like a kiss.

“Jesus God! That’s plain wrong,” Mildred said. “Get him away
from her!”

The wag driver screamed. He reared up, batting frantically at
the child, who continued to cling like a pigtailed monkey.

She turned her head to look at Ryan and his companions. Her
eyes were sunken pits. A dark stain was smeared all around her mouth, and dark
liquid ran freely down her chin.

The wag driver’s lips dangled from her teeth like a limp onion
ring.

Chapter Four

Stiff-legged in horror, the wag drivers backed away
from their stricken friend. They weren’t quick enough. The little girl jumped on
the nearest man’s back and sank her teeth in the side of his neck.

“Shit!” Reno shrieked. “She’s one of them!”

“What the fuck?” Ryan said.

Someone was hollering from the watchtower. “Stand back! Stand
away from the gate there or I’ll shoot!”

Wag drivers pried the little girl off their second stricken
buddy and dashed her to the ground. Omar was striding toward them, shotgun in
his fist. His body language suggested he wasn’t sure who to shoot first.

“Start the wags,” Ryan told his companions. “It’s time to
go.”

“What about Plunkett?” J.B. asked.

“I’ll get him,” Ryan said grimly.

He’d scarcely started walking toward the gaudy when Krysty
screamed,
“Ryan!”

Instinct made him look left, away from where the warning cry
had come from. A man lurched toward him from the shadows between sheds.

He moved hunched over, his face thrusting forward, his arms
dangling. One cheek had been torn off, exposing teeth on his upper jaw. The
wound didn’t bleed. His skin was gray in the faint light, his eyes white
marbles.

At Krysty’s cry Ryan had drawn his handblaster. Bracing it with
both hands, he fired two quick shots through the center of the man’s chest.

They were good hits. He saw them hit, punching through ragged
plaid flannel over the sternum. One or both had to have penetrated the man’s
heart. But rather than slowing, he put on a surprising burst of speed.

“Don’t let it bite you!”
Reno
screamed.

Ryan gave the onrushing thing a front thrust-kick to the
sternum. The creature reeled back three steps, then with unwavering
determination charged forward again.

As much from habit as anything else, Ryan punched a third
bullet through its forehead. The creature folded obediently as a dead man
should, and lay still.

“Head shots work!” Ryan shouted as he sprinted toward the main
building.

Around him people spilled from the sheds and the gaudy house
itself. The yard was filling with bodies, confusion and noise. People screamed.
Shots popped.

At the front gate the Fat One didn’t seem to quite grasp what
was going on. With Locke and Leon trailing behind, she walked toward the center
of the yard, waving her flabby arms and shouting for everyone to cease
firing.

The little girl, the lower half her face painted with the blood
of her victims, jumped up, apparently unhurt. She darted toward the large woman.
The Fat One saw her and dropped to her knees. Holding her arms wide, she cried,
“Come to me, child! Run!”

The girl did. When she was ten feet from the kneeling woman her
head exploded. The decapitated body flopped forward almost to the horrified
woman’s feet.

Stopping by the door to let a knot of panicky people out, Ryan
looked back over his shoulder. Mildred was lowering her blocky ZKR 551 target
revolver from a one-armed shooting stance. He caught a gleam of torchlight on
tears streaming down her cheeks.

The Fat One squalled in outrage and jumped to her feet. “That
wasn’t a little girl anymore!” Reno yelled, jumping in front of Mildred as if to
shield her from the wrath of Omar’s heftiest wife.

From somewhere came the cry “They’re over the wall!”

More of those creatures, men and women but not men or women,
moved with unnatural hitching gaits through the crowd in the yard. Ryan thrust
his way into the gaudy house, breasting a stream of half-naked sluts screaming
as they raced out.

The first thing that hit him when he entered was an eye-searing
stink of smoke. It was more than the potbellied stove could possibly account for
unless the chimney had gotten blocked. He took a wild flying guess that wasn’t
the case.

Behind the bar the Thin One flailed vigorously at three
no-longer-human opponents with an aluminum baseball bat. It made musical
thunking sounds as it bounced off bone lightly padded by muscle or skin, off
joints and skulls. Family members, employees and patrons wrestled with enemies
whose skin, bluish in the lantern light, was cratered with running open sores.
Some were missing big chunks from their bodies, even arms.

A wag driver grabbed the arm of an elderly man to try to pull
the oldie off a comrade. The arm came off in his hands. He stared at it in comic
amazement as the changed oldie sank his few remaining teeth into the second wag
driver’s neck.

Plunkett and crew were nowhere in sight. Fleeing sluts, guards
and customers were blocking the stairs. Ryan began shoving them bodily out of
the way. As strong as he was, their fear was stronger. He didn’t make much
progress.

Smoke began rolling along the hollows of the ceiling between
the beams. The gaudy house was well and truly on fire.

Loomis tumbled down the wooden stairs, wearing only his shiny,
black leather pants. “They’re already changing!” he screamed, catching himself
on all fours.

Buck-naked and baby-pink, Boss Tim Plunkett lurched down the
stairs behind his sec chief. His hairy, fish-pale belly hung low, obscuring his
genitals. Blood gushed from his torn-out throat. His voice box and airway were
apparently still intact, or mostly so. As he banged from rail to wall and back,
clutching his blood-gouting wound with one hand, he kept croaking, “Help
me!”

He toppled, to land on his gut with a massive crash.

* * *

S
HUDDERING
ORANGE
FIRE
erupted from the combined watch- and water tower,
followed a beat later by a roar of full-auto blasterfire. Pressing the hand that
held the pistol grip of his M-4000 scattergun to pin his battered hat against
his head, J.B. reached with his free hand to snag the back of the man’s flannel
shirt Krysty Wroth wore. He dragged her to the ground.

Bullets cracked right over their heads, where their bodies had
been an eye blink earlier. Headlights popped as the burst raked the Tundra’s
front.

The burst went on, sweeping the length of the big RV. Metal
flexed musically.

“Shit!” Krysty exclaimed. That startled J.B. The redhead
normally didn’t use bad language.

Then he smelled gasoline and understood why she cussed. Krysty
threw herself over him, grabbing him so they both rolled sideways over the cold,
trampled earth, away from the fuel-leaking RV. It also took them out of the
dubious cover of the wag’s thin-gauge metal walls.

The burst hammered on. Good way to burn out a barrel fast, the
armorer in J.B. noted. Inevitably, the bullets struck a spark. The big wag lit
up with a fat pillow of blue fire and a low but loud
whump.

J.B. felt a wave of heat wash over him as he came to rest on
top of Krysty, looking down into her green eyes. He grinned.

“I better climb off,” he said. “Don’t want any
misunderstandings with Ryan.”

“Reckon he’d understand,” she said.

The machine gun lashed back across the crowded yard. J.B. could
tell humans were getting hit. They fell and stayed down. The triple-strange
creatures—the rotties—kept shambling along despite repeated torso strikes.

“Look out!” Krysty gritted. J.B. tipped his face to the ground
as bullets stitched right to left not two feet in front of him. Ricochets whined
over him, gouts of dirt tapping the front brim of his hat.

“That stupe in the tower’s gonna chill us before the rotties
do,” he said.

He heard the bark of a .38 from his left. The muzzle-flare from
the tower was cut off. J.B. looked to where the single gunshot had come
from.

Mildred knelt on the dirt, her left elbow braced on one knee,
her left hand cradling her handblaster.

“You chill the dude, Millie?” he called.

She shook her head. “Like you said, J.B. He was a bigger
danger.”

“Wags fucked,” Jak said, coming out of the shed behind J.B.
“Tundra chilled. Other—”

He shook his white-maned head in irritation. The burning cargo
wag blocked the third vehicle in the shed. It blazed too vigorously for anyone
to try to push the big vehicle clear.

Krysty sat up beside J.B. She suddenly whipped her upper body
left and shot twice with her snub-nosed Smith & Wesson. Right toward
Mildred.

Spinning around, J.B. saw a man with a black pit where one eye
should be reel back from where he’d been about to blindside the sturdy woman.
Apparently Krysty had hit him in the body, not the head, and he lunged for
Mildred.

“Shit!” J.B. yelped. He rolled fast right, trying to clear his
own scattergun for a shot at the rottie. It’d be dangerous with Mildred in the
way. But if it was really true that if you got bitten by one of these hoodoos,
it turned you into one of them…

There weren’t many things in this world that J. B. Dix shied
away from. He’d seen his share of scary shit and then some. But he couldn’t
stand to think of that happening to Mildred. To any of his friends.

But he wouldn’t make it in time. Seconds slowed as he watched
the rottie close in on Mildred, who was lining up a shot on another target and
still unaware of her danger. He shouted a warning he knew would come too
late.

With a crunch a thin steel blade poked through the man’s head
from right temple to left. The rottie went to his knees.

“Touché,” Doc cried. He put a boot to the side of the
slack-skinned, veined face and pushed. The creature flopped to its side and lay
unmoving.

J.B. scrambled to his feet. A man with an arm swinging from his
elbow like a busted gate loomed in front of him, a vomitous reek of rotting
flesh.

Whipping up the M-4000, J.B. jabbed the steel-shod butt into
the creature’s face. It lurched back two steps, then its head exploded as J.B.
reversed the scattergun and fired, eight inches from the bridge of its nose.

“You guys hold them off,” Krysty shouted, stuffing a
speed-loader into her snub-nosed handblaster. It held only five shots, a
triple-rough disadvantage in a fight like this. “Mildred, come help me get the
packs.”

“What do you plan?” Doc asked. He fended off a short-haired
changed woman with his rapier and stabbed her deftly through the eye.

“We’ve got to get out of here, fast!” Krysty said. “That’s my
plan!”

She and Mildred ducked into the shed.

* * *

A
N
EYE
BLINK
before his boss’s
nude, bleeding bulk crashed down on him, Loomis took off like a sprinter, almost
knocking down Ryan in his mad desire to get out the door.

Two naked women came down the stairway. By their hair Ryan
guessed they were the boss’s “secretaries,” Tina and Angela. Their faces were
hard to recognize, gray and distorted with some unimaginable passion behind
liberal smears of gore. Bottle-blonde Angela’s belly had been cut or ripped
open. Purple lengths of intestine trailed out the red, gaping cavity. They were
short, their ends ragged, as if the loops had been bitten through.

Black hair flying, Tina flung herself on her boss’s wide, hairy
white back. He thrashed feebly. It amazed Ryan he could move at all, at the rate
he was bleeding out. Tina grabbed his head and, despite the thickness of his
bull-like neck, began to bang his head against a stout square stair post.
Angela, not inconvenienced in the least by her missing viscera, joined right in,
gnawing her boss’s head as her partner rhythmically pounded it into the
wood.

A hellish light showed through the boards of the ceiling over
the barroom. Sparks fell like glowing rain. A bald man stumbled toward Ryan,
extending a clawed hand from which the little finger had been bitten. The wound
had stopped bleeding. Ryan shot him in the face almost casually, so horribly
fascinated was he by what was happening on the stairs.

He felt no strong urge to try to rescue his employer. The big
man was a sure chill anyway, with that neck wound. Not to mention that Reno’s
crazy talk about victims rising again as one of the changed if the rotties
chilled them was looking pretty plausible here.

With a sound like a melon being dropped, Boss Plunkett’s head
split open. Amazingly, his naked limbs continued to twitch, and he moaned in
dismay. Tina clawed briefly, then peeled back a section of skull with scalp
attached.

With a superhuman effort the huge man reared to his knees,
reaching a pudgy arm toward Ryan.

“Help me,”
he mouthed.

Then he stiffened and his eyes rolled up in his beet-red face.
Tina had plunged a long-nailed hand into his opened cranium and scooped up a
juicy handful from his until-then-living brain. She mashed it against her
wide-open mouth, getting as much blood and dough-colored brains on her face as
inside.

Plunkett plopped forward, unmoving.

Chewing, Tina looked at Ryan. Her eyes were as white as milky
marbles, yet had a terrifying intensity. Without thinking, he raised his
SIG-Sauer, swiftly braced and flash-aimed, and shot her through the
forehead.

She slumped. Her partner stayed astride Plunkett’s pale fat
back and began to greedily stuff fistfuls of brains into her mouth.

With a roar, the ceiling caved in over the bar.

“Time to go,” Ryan said. He turned and dashed back into the
night’s cold but welcoming embrace.