Wretched Earth (8 page)

Chapter Eight

“Back off the triggers of your blasters, boys and
girls,” said a bulky figure in a silver wolf-pelt coat, rising on the far side
of the campfire. “Take a look at this specimen. Think he’s triple-stupe enough
to blunder into an armed camp without longblasters trained on it?”

Actually, the only longblaster on them was Ryan’s Steyr Scout
Tactical, being aimed by Krysty. But there was a scattergun and three
handblasters holding down the group from the darkness. So it was a pretty good
call.

“The name’s Ryan,” he said, as weapons were reluctantly
lowered. “I just aim to talk. We got some food and meds to trade.”

They had plenty, thanks to the unwitting and unwilling
generosity of the Cthulhu cultists. Most would remain cached well away from the
campsite. Ryan knew better than to tempt the greed of his fellow man too
much.

A woman had stood up next to the man in the wolfskin coat. Even
taller than he was, she was dressed in a long quilted coat, with her heavy hair
in dark braids. She held a flintlock longblaster in gloved hands. Ryan reckoned
she had a lot of Plains Indian blood flowing through her veins.

“Why come sneaking up like that if you’re friendly?” she
demanded.

“Give it a rest, P.F.,” Wolf Coat said. “If they meant to jack
us, their blasters would’ve opened the palaver for them.”

He looked hard at Ryan, with his head angled slightly to the
side. He was a well-weathered bastard, with silver hair and a black-and-silver
beard on wolf-lean cheeks and a thrusting chin. His eyebrows were as black as
coal smudges. He might’ve had some Mex or Indian in him, as well. He looked as
if he’d be rangy without the bulky coat.

“So now that we’ve got the pleasantries out of the way,” he
said, “why not bring your pals in? There’s room by the fire.”

Ryan closed his right fist, leaving two fingers stuck out,
which he wagged three times.

Almost at once Jak materialized by his side, holstering his big
Magnum revolver. Shortly thereafter Krysty and Mildred emerged into the light to
Ryan’s left, and Doc and J.B. to his right.

Wolf Coat’s eyebrows shot up. Plainly, he recognized what the
companions had done: arranged themselves to take his party in a crossfire that
offered no hope of cover if things went rapidly south, with minimum danger of
shooting one another.

“You people know your business,” he said, “if your business is
chilling. You got any other trade, my friend?”

“What comes along,” Ryan said, “we do. Mind telling me who you
are?”

“Sorry. Your unexpected arrival put me clean off my manners.
I’m Wolfskin Jones. This here’s my life partner, Prairie Falcon. P.F. for
short.”

He indicated the woman in the quilted coat. A dark,
boot-leather brown, her face was handsome rather than pretty, with unplucked
brows, a beak of nose and a generally fierce expression that strongly suggested
her namesake.

“You got to make allowances for P.F. She’s Só’taa’e Cheyenne,
and culturally inclined to a touch of paranoia.”

“Bite me, Wolf Foreskin,” she growled.

“We enjoy what you might refer to as a tempestuous
relationship,” the grizzled man said. “The rest of these hard cases and hard
casettes are all that remain of a once mighty trade convoy. And by that I mean
six power wags and twenty crew. So not so much mighty as respectable. But I
might as well talk ’em up, since they’re gone with the new moon.”

“What happened?” Krysty asked.

The man turned and looked her up and down with obvious
appreciation. Prairie Falcon growled low in her throat, more like her man’s
namesake than her own.

“Don’t get your underwear in a twist, P.F.,” Jones said. “I’m
not fool enough to cross you. And not triple-stupe like I’d have to be if the
one-eyed death machine over there is this one’s mate. As I’m guessing,
miss?”

“You guess right,” Krysty said with a smile that could charm
the snarl off a mama cougar. “And you can call me Krysty.”

“Pleasure,” Jones said. “And in answer to your question,
Krysty, Sweetwater bastard Junction happened.”

* * *

“B
EEN
A
POWER
SHIFT
in Sweetwater,” Ernesto said. He was a burly
dude made bulkier by his parka, complete with a fur-lined hood that made his
round face look like a dark, stubble-bearded moon reflecting yellow firelight.
“Things all went to glowing night shit, triple-sudden-like.”

“Heard the boss there was Baron Jeb Sharp,” J.B. said. “He get
chilled?”

“Some say he did, some say he didn’t,” said Lita, a gangly
woman with red pigtails spilling out from her green knit cap.

“He fell sick, or so the rumor goes,” Jones said. He sat by the
fire gnawing a haunch of roast coyote. Grease glistened on his beard. P.F. knelt
next to him, glowering silently in her blanket robe. “Least that’s what we heard
right before the shit hit the propeller. Shooting broke out in the palace. Next
thing anybody knows the streets are all full of sec goons, popping caps at each
other and everything else that moved.”

“Heard tell Sharp’s sec boss made a power grab,” Ernesto
said.

“Geither Jacks.” Jones turned his head the other way to spit
theatrically. “A real bastard. True coldheart. ‘Gate to hell,’ they call him. As
monikers go it’s a tad on the unwieldy side, but no one can say it ain’t
appropriate.”

“Mostly they call him Gate,” Lita said, “but ever’body knows
what’s meant.”

“But somebody was shooting back,” Ryan prompted. Like a lot of
Deathlands travelers, this bunch loved outside company, but enjoyed hearing
themselves yammer so much it sometimes made it hard for visitors to cram a word
in sideways.

“Yeah,” Jones said. “Loyalists to the baron, or his wife and
his heir, anyway. Some said Miranda was in the thick of the shooting that chased
Gate’s bunch out of the palace, firing a longblaster like a devil in a black
suede skirt. Which’d be just like that Mex-lander she-devil. She’s a fiery one,
beautiful as the clearest winter night and with a soul twice as dark.”

He jumped and turned to glare at his partner. “Ow! Why’d you
have to go and gouge me in the rib cage?” he demanded, although Ryan hadn’t seen
P.F. move a muscle. “You’re she-devil enough for me, and probably two or three
others beside.”

Ryan got the impression a smile flitted across P.F.’s features,
which normally looked as if they’d been hacked out of hardwood by the
steel-hafted hatchet she wore at her waist.

“So this sec boss made a power play and lost,” J.B. said.

“Not exactly,” Jones said. “He didn’t win. Which ain’t the same
thing.”

“No?” J.B. asked.

“Not hardly. He failed to take over the palace. In fact, he and
his blasters got chased clear out of the north half of the ville. But he just
grabbed the other. Sweetwater Junction’s split down the middle. Each side claims
the whole shebang. They’re more’n eager to chill to back it up.”

“But neither side’s strong enough to take on the other,” Ryan
said.

“That’s so,” Jones said.

“What about the ville folk?” Mildred asked.

“Keep their heads down and hope nobody notices ’em, if they got
any sense,” Ernesto said. “Liable to wind up dead or drafted, otherwise. Or
both, uh, usually in opposite order.”

“They stole our wags,” P.F. said, “and grabbed our people to
make ’em fight for them. Or just for slave labor.”

“We just got out with our hides and what we could manage to run
with,” Jones said. “Damn shame about our friends. But our getting chilled or
enslaved ain’t likely to ease their lot appreciably.”

“Thanks for the heads-up,” Ryan said. “What do you people look
to do next?”

“Head east,” Jones said. “Away from Sweetwater Junction as fast
as our legs will carry us.”

“East not good,” Jak said.

The traders looked at him blankly.

“We got a story to tell you, too,” Ryan said.

* * *

R
YAN
COULD
TELL
the traders only half
believed their story of the rotties.

The companions spent the night in camp alongside the refugee
traders, sharing watches. At first Ryan was disturbed by dreams of people dying,
and then rising to attack, hands outstretched, mouths gaping with mindless
bloodlust, coming on and on despite bullet strikes to the body, even with their
own guts tangled around their legs.

But he’d seen things as bad before. Some worse. His body had
spent a hard day and his mind was hard. Eventually he fought through the
nightmares and slept.

In dawn’s ashen light a pair of traders watching the road to
Sweetwater Junction reported strangers approaching from the east. Ryan and Jones
stepped out into the roadway empty-handed as two goggled riders sped toward
them, legs pumping furiously at the pedals of mountain bikes.

“You’ve done this before, my boy,” Jones commented, his
wolfskin coat making him look like a mountain man.

Ryan had automatically stopped short of blocking the
right-of-way. It was standard protocol of the road:
we’re
here, we’d like to talk, mebbe trade.
It wasn’t always sincerely
meant, like anything else in the Deathlands. Except for professions of
bloodlust. Those were always sincere.

“Spent a few years as a trader myself,” Ryan said.

The riders slowed about fifty paces away. They pushed their
goggles up onto their stocking caps. Both were as lean as old coyotes. One was a
woman, the other a man. The woman carried what looked like a crossbow slung over
her back. They held their hands out to their sides in the recognized gesture of
peaceful intent.

“You should be running,” the woman called out. She had a nasal
Northeastern accent.

“Now, why’d that be?” Jones asked. “You wouldn’t be threatening
us?”

“Not us,” the man said. He had a long and narrow face, as if a
giant mutie had clamped his head in a vise and pulled hard on his chin.
“Them.”

He jerked a thumb over his shoulder.

Jones made an exaggerated show of peering up the narrow road.
Dust drifted over it, but fairly regular traffic kept the ancient blacktop from
being buried under the dirt of ages.

“Who’d ‘they’ be?” he asked. “Seeing as you’re the only folks
on the road.”

“Don’t be a dick, Wolfskin,” P.F. said, sliding down the cut
behind her man and Ryan, with her flintlock longblaster cradled in her arms.
Standing, she turned out to be bigger than she looked. She stood a good two
fingers taller than Ryan. “Ask ’em to join us.”

But the riders shook their heads frantically. “We got thirty or
forty miles between us and them,” the man said. “We’d be happier if it was a
hundred and thirty.”

“Thirty-four hundred would be better still,” the woman said.
“You people need to get moving, too. They won’t be here for a few days yet. But
when they do…”

Ryan could see her shudder.

“Who’re these ‘they’ you keep talking about?” P.F. asked.

More of the refugee traders and Ryan’s friends had appeared. He
felt a rise in warmth on more than just a physical level as Krysty came up and
put an arm around him. A quick glance confirmed what he knew: Jak was lying low,
making sure everything stayed on the level. He wasn’t much for palavering, to
say the least.

“Heard some folk call ’em rotties,” the woman said. She shook
her head. “If we told you what they were really like, you’d never believe us.
But imagine the worst trouble you’ve ever known. Then triple that.”

“And it won’t be enough,” her partner added.

“Rotties,” Jones repeated thoughtfully. He turned his pale wolf
eyes to Ryan and Krysty. “Isn’t that what you called those unkillable,
brain-eating monsters you were telling us about?”

“You’ve heard of them?” the woman asked. “Then why are you
still here? You can’t chill ’em unless you shoot ’em in the head. They just keep
coming no matter what. They don’t feel pain or fear.”

“Just hunger,” the man said. “For your meat. And your brains in
particular.”

“And if they bite you, unless they eat all your brains, you
rise up as one of them. If they bite you and you die, the same thing happens.”
She shook her head. “Their numbers just keep growing. There’re dozens of them
already! And they’re heading this way.”

“This sounds familiar.”

“I told you these people were speaking straight,” P.F. said to
her man.

“You didn’t! You never told me that!”

“You’re such a dick.”

Jones shrugged. “It’s part of my charm. Where are you folks
headed?”

“Sweetwater Junction, to spread the word,” the man said. “Then
on. All the way to the Cific if we have to. And then mebbe we’ll catch a
boat.”

“Might want to change your route,” Ernesto called. “The
Junction’s enjoying itself a nice little civil war. Unless you’re willing to
sign as mercies for one side or t’other, best give it a wide berth. They look on
outlanders as meat on the hoof. They’ll chill you or slave you sooner than look
at you.”

“Thanks for the word,” the woman called. “We’ll take a
detour.”

“You could join up with us,” Jones said. “Looks like we’ll be
taking a detour ourselves. Safety in numbers and all.”

The two bicyclists looked at each other. “Thanks,” the woman
called. “But we believe in safety in speed.”

Without another word they pulled their goggles back down and
began pedaling for all their lean-muscled legs were worth. When they passed Ryan
and the rest they were practically flying.

“So,” Jones said, watching them fade into the distance, “you
were telling us straight all along. Well, that’ll teach me to believe there’s
anything too strange for this triple-crazed world of ours.”

Chapter Nine

Dust swirled in a miniature fountain by the side of the
road, mixed with hard, dry snow that had been coming down slowly since Ryan and
friends had said farewell to Jones and his crew.

The traders had decided to head south. “Where at least it might
be warmer,” Jones had put it. “Also, if we got to take a boat to keep away from
these rotties, Gulf Coast’s closer.”

The sound of the gunshot reached Ryan where he lay on his belly
behind a scrubby bush, peering through his Navy longeyes. His companions hid out
of sight in a fold in the flat-looking landscape.

The man running down the road with the loose-limbed stagger of
complete desperation coupled to complete exhaustion staggered back into the
middle of the right-of-way. Thirty yards behind him was a battered pickup truck,
long since gone the color of the plains dirt itself, with a bent-pipe cage
welded over the front bumper. Its bed was full of hooting coldhearts.

The human prey was dressed in rags and as skinny as finger
bones. He lurched into the road with his hands flopping like flippers. It was
obviously the end of the chase for him.

The truck hit the runner. The impact flung him ten feet in the
air and forty feet down the roadway. When he landed, he rolled over several
times and lay flopping like a beached fish.

“Ryan,” Mildred said quietly, through clenched teeth.

The one-eyed man said nothing.

“It’s not our fight, Millie,” J.B. said.

The wag came right up by the flailing, screaming man. It did a
quick U-turn, putting its nose toward the ville and its tailgate toward the
victim. Men wearing green armbands spilled out of the back.

Laughing and whooping, they tied ropes to both the man’s
ankles. The volume of their merriment went up as the volume of his shrieks did
when they jostled his evidently many broken bones, grinding the ends together in
a perfect storm of pain.

They leaped back into the bed. The wag accelerated back toward
Sweetwater Junction, just visible as a low brown serration breaking the western
horizon. The victim bounced behind on the road like a screaming puppet.

“Wonder which side?” Jak said.

“Does it matter?” J.B. replied.

“One’s as likely as the other, I reckon,” Ryan said. “It’s how
barons and sec men act.”

“Not where you came from,” Krysty said.

“True. Until my brother took over.”

“But you set Front Royal right in the end.”

He hunched a shoulder. “That bullet’s long since left the
blaster. Right now we’ve got to see to our own survival.”

“Might that not best be served by following either set of the
travelers we parted with today?” Doc asked. “Heading north or south, giving wide
berth both to the ville of Sweetwater Junction and its woes and the hapless
swarm of the changed?”

“That’s how I’d go, I got to admit,” J.B. said.

“We already jawed this over,” Ryan said. “We go forward with
the plan.”

“Getting caught in a ville civil war doesn’t seem much better
than getting caught by rotties,” Mildred told him. “Just a longer way of dying
badly. You said it’s none of our concern.”

Ryan sighed and looked at Jak. “Eyes skinned,” he said.

The smooth, snow-colored face wrinkled. Ryan knew Jak thought
he might as well remind him to breathe.

Ryan slipped back to settle down out of sight of the road.
“Listen, this rottie thing is special. It’s different from almost anything we’ve
been up against. At least since that thing up in Canada.”

“What does that have to do with getting stuck in Sweetwater?”
Mildred demanded.

“You should know, Mildred. You and Doc both said this shit’s
contagious, right?”

“Evidently so, friend Ryan,” Doc said. “It appears to be
saliva-borne.”

“Or anyway carried by bodily fluids,” Mildred added.

“And it’s spreading, right?”

“So the information we’ve received suggests,” Doc said. “It may
not be altogether reliable.”

“What’s to stop it spreading? Anything?”

Nobody spoke.

“How will us signing on to help the goons in Sweetwater
Junction commit atrocities stop the change spreading?” Mildred asked.

“The rotties are coming to Sweetwater Junction,” Ryan said.

“Wait—now you’re losing even me,” Krysty said. “What makes you
so sure? I know the bicyclists said the creatures were heading west. Why would
that mean they’d be coming here, specifically.”

“Meat.”

Everybody looked at Jak. The albino teen squatted with his
white hair blowing free in the killing wind, gazing out toward the desolate
highway. He seemed to be laughing soundlessly. It made him look even more like
what his enemies used to call him down in the bayou country: the White Wolf.

“Gotta eat. Rotties go to food. Country empty. Ville full. Do
math.”

“The lad does make a compelling point in his unlettered yet
concise way,” Doc said.

“So how’s going into the ville and likely getting ourselves
pulled apart by trucks in the town square going to help end the plague?” Mildred
asked.

“I’d say Ryan reckons we can fight the rotties better if we got
a whole ville to help us,” J.B. said.

“Why would you think that’d even work, Ryan?” Mildred asked.
“Do you really think you can get this lady baron and her turncoat sec man to
just lay aside their differences?”

“If we don’t stop the rotties,” Ryan said, “what will?”

“Is that really up to us, Ryan?” J.B. asked.

“Who else is going to do it?”

“You’re the one who’s big on not sticking our noses into other
people’s business,” Mildred said. “For that matter, Sweetwater Junction’ll at
least slow them down for a while. Why not use the delay to just cruise on our
way and forget about these freaks?”

“Cruise where?” Ryan asked.

She frowned and shook her head. “I don’t know. Mexico? The
Darks? Canada? Someplace far away.”

“How long?”

“Huh?”

“What he means, I believe,” Doc said, “is how long before the
horde catches up to us in those places.”

“Why would they?”

“Mildred,” Krysty said gently, “you said yourself the change
was catching. And the horde is growing. What’s to stop it spreading to overtake
us wherever we go?”

The predark physician looked blank for a moment. Then she shook
her head again, tightly this time, as if trying to shed water from her plaited
hair.

“Maybe we could do what Jones and his friends said they were
going to—go the Cific and jump on a boat.”

“Cific’s big,” Krysty said.

“Mebbe rotties sail,” Jak said.

“They’re mindless,” Mildred pointed out.

“Do we know that?” Ryan said. “Most of them act like they’re
brain-chilled, sure. But they don’t all act alike. That stunt using the little
girl rottie to get Omar’s people to open the gate—that looked like tactics. So
did climbing the wall where nobody could see, and storming the gaudy. What if we
turn up in China and a boatload of rotties hits the coast twenty, fifty, a
hundred miles away?

“Look, people. You know I’ve got no problem running when
running’s the way to survive. This isn’t trouble we can get away from by
running. Sooner or later it’ll catch up to us. We have to stop this now.”

“How?” Mildred said. “You saw how they overran the
caravanserai.”

“Omar wasn’t prepared,” J.B. said. “Nobody’s prepared for
something like that.”

“We can prep the ville,” Ryan said. “Rouse the place, fortify,
get the locals to fight.”

“What if they don’t believe us?” Mildred demanded. “Or what if
the sides are more interested in fighting each other?”

“Then like I said before,” Ryan said. “We got to adjust some
attitudes.”

“You really think you can adjust people out of wanting to be
barons?”

“There’re ways, Mildred. Even for that.”

“But Ryan, do you think we can end this by fighting?” Krysty
asked. “Bullets can stop rotties. Can they stop the change?”

“I don’t know. I’m damn sure we can’t stop them without
fighting. So I say fight ’em as soon as we can. It’ll only keep getting harder
until it’s impossible.”

“Just hypothetically, how could fighting stop a plague?”
Mildred asked.

“Chilling all the carriers,” Ryan said. “Or if we can find out
what’s behind this whole deal, stop it at the source.”

“Those seem like awful slim hopes to pin our survival on,”
Mildred said. “Even if we can somehow get the warring factions in Sweetwater
Junction to cooperate.”

Ryan shrugged. “They’re hopes. What does running away offer us?
Other than delaying the inevitable.”

J.B. looked off toward the ville. It was invisible from the
little depression they hunkered in.

“I gotta say I don’t see much chance of us pulling this one
off, Ryan,” he said, scratching under his battered fedora.

“The whole idea’s plain crazy,” Mildred said.

Krysty’s beautiful face was pale, drawn taut with emotion.

“Lover,” she said hoarsely, “would you really split us up for
this?”

“I’ll do whatever it takes to survive,” Ryan said. “Like
always.”