Wretched Earth (11 page)

Chapter Twelve

“What happens now?” Doc queried.

Ryan looked at the redhead.

“I sent Luke to tell the baron’s men that we were ready, so
they could take up position to storm the tower,” Krysty said. “Luke” was a boy
sent with them to be their runner.

“Then,” Ryan said, settling back into the comfortless chair and
taking up the longeyes again, “all we can do is wait and not get spotted.”

He scanned as much of the south side of Sweetwater Junction as
he could see from the window without getting too close. The ville had mostly
grown up after the nuke war, cobbled together around a core of predark buildings
solid-built enough to stand through the nuke attacks, and the great quakes that
had resculpted part of the country after the missiles stopped falling. Like many
villes, much of it was essentially a shantytown of scavvied parts, including
flattened cans painstakingly tacked together and used for inner and outer walls
on ramshackle frames of aluminum and PVC pipes, angle iron and precious scraps
of wood.

When the survivors crept out beneath the slowly clearing skies
following the Long Winter, they’d found themselves sitting atop a large,
reliable aquifer. Water that, by reason of being buried deep, escaped the lethal
taint of fallouts and other poisons that had fouled so much of the land. As
trade resumed, as it always did where humans lived, substantial routes
gravitated here, and crossed.

The early barons had rebuilt their domain as best they could.
The wealth from trade—and water—gave them more resources than most to do it
with. They had paid handsomely to have wagloads of scavvied brick and building
stone and timber brought in, gradually replacing shacks with solid, respectable
structures.

It was an ongoing process, and a lot remained to be done. Most
of the new buildings were relatively modest in size. Some larger old buildings
remained derelict because they were too precarious, or eaten away inside, to
use, and too dangerous to tear down. Over the years it had apparently been
decided to leave those and let time take its course, concentrate on what could
readily be done now.

The brick office building on the north side of the town square
was one of those derelicts. Its stairways were alarmingly swaybacked, and
creaked and groaned when walked on. Ryan, Krysty and Doc took their lives in
their hands every time they went up and down.

It wasn’t any novelty for them. And it wasn’t as if they aimed
to stay.

Sweetwater Junction itself showed a variety of tones of
washed-out oranges, browns and yellows in the gradually softening afternoon
light. No colors bright, no colors pure. Just a jumble.

Ryan felt Krysty come up beside him. He could detect the slight
sweetness of her sweat now. She smelled good; the baron had offered them showers
while her strike team got ready to go. Ryan didn’t worry that Krysty might stray
too close to the window, or do anything else to get spotted by their quarry. She
knew this game, too.

“It’s pretty in a way,” she said.

In the corner, his arms wrapped around his chest for warmth,
Doc was murmuring to himself. Ryan could pick out the odd name—Emily, Jolyon,
Rachel—and knew he was talking to his wife and children, his lost family, from
whose arms he’d literally been snatched by the soulless whitecoats of the
Totality Concept. A family that was dust long since by the time the nuke storm
hit.

Ryan grunted. “You see pretty in everything.”

“Guilty as charged.” Krysty rested a hand lightly on his
shoulder. “Too bad it’s going to be painted red so soon.”

“Happens to every place.”

“Not
every
place,” she said.

He shook his head. “Don’t kid yourself. Even if we really do
find a sanctuary, we’ll have to be ready to fight at any moment to keep it. A
man or woman doesn’t own anything they’re not ready to fight for, lives and
loved ones included. Reading history, talking to Doc and Mildred, it’s always
been that way. Only, by Mildred’s time most people’d convinced themselves
otherwise.”

“Which might account for why they were foolish enough to burn
the world.”

Ryan shrugged. “Mebbe.”

Doc stirred from his reverie. “Friends,” he said, extending a
twiglike finger out the window, “something transpires outside.”

Ryan swept the longeyes as far to the right as he could. He
could just see the shaded porch of a store or shop that had been shuttered since
the late baron’s decline had split the ville violently in two. Three figures
crouched there, as furtive as mice.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“Water run,” Krysty said grimly.

Two of the people darted out into the slanting yellow sunlight.
One held a cluster of canteens by cloth straps. The other carried a net full of
ceramic jugs over her back. They were swaddled in rags against the chill and
questing wind.

They’d made it halfway to the wide fountain when a volley of
blaster shots broke out. Ryan lowered the longeyes to look across at the sniper
tower. The two men on station were cranking shots from their lever-action
longblasters, one a carbine, one a full-barreled rifle. He could hear their
hoots of triumphant bloodlust over the bangs of their weapons.

The woman bent under the clay jugs dropped onto her face. Her
companion darted a few steps more toward the brick-walled fountain. Then he
hesitated, with bullets kicking up puffs of dust around his rag-wrapped feet. He
took a step back toward his fallen companion, then one toward the fountain.

Ryan didn’t know whether the bastards in the tower were such
bad shots or just playing with their victim. Likely both, he decided.

“Triple-stupe,” he said, “to make a run like that in
daylight.”

“Triple-desperate,” Krysty said. “Jacks and the baron issue
water chits only to people whose loyalty they’re sure of. Others, and those they
want to punish, don’t get any. That leaves a lot of people mighty thirsty.”

“And thirst makes you desperate quicker than anything, shy of
being on fire or short on air,” Ryan said.

The dithering man finally ran back to his companion and began
to tug at her. She wasn’t moving at all. He was barely able to budge her
deadweight, furiously though he heaved.

The third water-runner dashed out to help. As he reached them a
bullet pierced his gut. He fell into a flailing, bawling ball of intolerable
pain.

“Ryan,” Krysty said urgently, “you have to
do
something.”

He shook his head. “We wait,” he said. “For the go signal. This
has nothing to do with us.”

“Oh!” She spun away, careful to get clear of the window before
straightening, to stand by the wall with arms crossed under her breasts.

Ryan watched, his lone blue eye as cold and impassive as the
sky, as the drama played out. Eventually the man trying to drag his female
comrade to safety was hit. He continued to try to help her until he was shot at
least twice more, that Ryan could see, in leg and body. The man fell, but kept
trying to crawl back to the shelter of the porch, dragging his friend by her
belt. Ryan saw the impacts of more bullets hitting his back, raising little
wisps of dust. Eventually he collapsed on his face and didn’t move anymore.

The last wounded man continued to writhe and howl. Gut-shot, he
could keep it up all day and all night. Ryan knew.

For a few minutes the blaster-storm ceased. Perhaps the
coldhearts in the tower were enjoying their victim’s suffering, or perhaps they
were just reloading. Likely both, Ryan decided.

After a while, though, screams like that got on your nerves no
matter how cruel a bastard you were. They started shooting at the wounded man
again. Bullets hit his legs. An arm.

“Why do they keep firing?” Krysty asked, her voice vibrating
with pain.

“Mebbe they’re trying to see how often they can shoot him
without killing him,” Ryan said.

He saw the gut-shot man’s head jerk. Dark fluid sprayed from
it. His legs straightened and he rolled on his back, drumming his heels on the
densely packed earth. Then he went still.

“Show’s over,” Ryan said.

From the depths of his waking dream Doc stirred and said in a
clear voice, “The stairs. Someone is coming.”

Krysty, whose hearing was better than Ryan’s—she hadn’t spent
as much of her life with blasters going off right in her ears—was already
turning, drawing her snubby revolver.

“Cocker,” a child’s voice said timidly from the darkness
outside the open door.

“Spaniel,” Krysty said. “It’s Luke. The runner I sent to tell
Miranda’s assault team we were ready.”

“Took them long enough,” Ryan said.

Luke appeared in the door, a boy of about eight or nine,
bundled up in a coat and shawl and knit cap so that little more than wide blue
eyes were visible.

“Captain J-Jenkins says he’s ready,” the kid stammered. “He—he
wants you to get a move on.”

“‘Captain,’ he calls himself,” Doc said with amusement. He was
clearly back in the here and now, scenting action and livening up like an old
coon hound. “Wonder if the baron knows that.”

Ryan had set down the longeyes and shifted his chair behind his
waiting longblaster. He had only to get his eye close enough to the scope to see
through, without getting close enough for recoil to stamp it into his face, then
lift the rifle butt and snug its cold steel plate to his shoulder.

When he did, the post-shaped reticule was already fixed on the
distant tower. The two snipers held their pieces by the forestocks, obviously
talking to each other, high from the chilling. And the long-distance
torture.

“Hope you boys enjoyed the show,” Ryan said.

He set the post so that its pointed tip had the shaved temple
of one of Jack’s sec men right on it. Ryan finished drawing a deep breath, let
half of it out, cut it off.
Squeezed.

He was prepared, so the rifle’s smashing roar and accompanying
hard kick didn’t catch him by surprise. With practiced ease he worked the bolt
as the long barrel rose off-line, carrying the scope momentarily off target.

When it came back the coldheart he’d targeted was nowhere to be
seen. His companion was staring at his feet openmouthed. Blood painted his
features, shockingly bright red in the afternoon sun.

“Target down,” Krysty said. She had slid to Ryan’s side and
picked up the longeyes to spot.

Ryan targeted the remaining man’s left eye, then fired once
more.

He was racking the bolt again when Krysty said, “Second target
down.”

“Let’s roll,” he said, standing. He slung his longblaster and
reached for the duffel bag they’d brought the cushions and their water in.

“Do you not even want to see what happens, my dear Ryan?” Doc
asked.

From below came war whoops and shots as the Sharp assault team
charged to the attack.

“Nope,” Ryan said. “Our job here is done.”

Chapter Thirteen

“You’re either the bravest man alive, Geither Jacks,”
the bearded black man said, “or the stupidest.” Skinny as a power pole, he was
dressed in a white shirt and canvas drawers.

The man in the barber chair, his cheeks and chin covered in
fluffy white soap lather, took a cigar from his mouth. “Why can’t I be both,
Coffin? ‘I’m large. I encompass infinities.’”

He had a long narrow face that seemed to consist of nothing but
folds and seams, and a finger-length shock of dust-colored hair up top. He knew
he wasn’t lovely, and he made sure nobody mentioned that fact twice.

The early morning light was bright enough to fill the room,
despite the filmy curtain that covered the window. Not even this deep into his
realm did Geither Jacks feel cocky enough to give would-be assassins a free shot
at him from outdoors. Especially since evidence suggested rumors that that
witch-slut Miranda had hired herself a longblaster chiller were the straight
goods, after all.

“Your pardon, Senor Jacks,” the bearded, roly-poly little
barber said. “It is ‘contain.’ ‘I
contain
multitudes.’”

“See?” Coffin said. “Not only does he have a blade to your fool
throat, the prick is sassing you back. You’re about eight ounces of pressure
from a second smile, my friend.”

Jacks laughed, although not too enthusiastically. He didn’t
want to cut his own throat.

French doors with fancy cut-glass panes in their tops separated
the parlor from the great room, where until recently Sinorice’s entertainers had
sat or promenaded to show off the wares to prospective customers. Through the
doors came the sounds of low-level roistering: low voices, laughter, glasses
tinkling. Jacks’s top lieutenant, Hapgood, was kicking back in there with a few
of the boys. They were drinking a little. Why not? Let them enjoy the fruits of
picking the ultimate winning side. They still knew to keep it down.

The parlor itself was a wonderland of red-flocked and gilt
wallpaper. It smelled of pomander and ointments the little barber used, as well
as the residues of the flower essences and scavvied perfumes the sluts had
doused themselves with to cover less pleasant odors—although some of the ancient
perfumes seemed to have gone a bit off, and smelled mostly like paint thinner.
They were still pricey and much in demand, reeking of ancient decadence as they
did, or were thought to.

Jacks liked it all. He felt at home here.

But he’d never truly be at home ever again until he had the
palace back, and with it all of Sweetwater Junction. Then he could rule from
wherever he pleased, as befit a benevolent despot.

“But García here’s got family,” he said. “And he knows I know
where to lay hands on them. He doesn’t want his fat wife, Maria, and their two
adorable little girls hung up on hooks for Levon to work his wizardry on. Do
you, García?”

Levon was the three-armed mutie who was Jacks’s master
torturer.

“Oh, no, Senor Jacks,” the barber said fervently.

“You’re slack!” an age-cracked voice screeched. Jacks flinched
in his chair.

“Aw, Jesus shit howdy,” he muttered. “Not now, Grammaw.”

“You sit here chewing the fat with your little playmates.” The
old woman hit the parlor like a dust devil on jolt. She was shriveled down to
nothing but whalebone and meanness. You’d think to look at her that a good puff
of wind could knock her down and bust her hip. You’d think wrong. “No wonder the
witch snatched a vital position right out from under your nose yesterday,
Geither!”

“It wasn’t that key a position, Grammaw,” he said. “Anyway,
we’ll get it back. I’ll send Hapgood out to see to it tomorrow.”

Hapgood had been Jacks’s chief coconspirator in the failed coup
that had ended the life of Baron Jeb but, sadly, not the rest of his tainted
lineage.

“Miranda hasn’t got the people to hold it when we surround the
buildings on three sides.”

“Your father never would’ve lost it in the first place!”

“My father’s dead, so I don’t hardly see how that’s
relevant.”

“He got slack!” she screeched. “That’s why you done right to
chill him and take his place. He warn’t fit to serve Baron Jeb no more. And now
you’re going slack.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Make examples, like a man!” Very few sentences came out of
Grammaw Lynndey Jacks’s withered, near-toothless mouth that didn’t begin in
sprays of spittle and end in exclamation marks.

“You could have Levon work over one or two of the sec men who
survived getting run out of the tower yesterday,” Coffin said. “Encourage the
others, like.”

“That mutie is an abomination!” Grammaw exclaimed. “He’ll
corrupt the pure blood of this ville and bring ruin to us all, sure as shit’s
brown!”

“Levon’s an artist, Grammaw. That extra arm gives more scope to
his work. Especially that pincer.”

“Not much chance he’s gonna do much reproducing here in the
ville, Grammaw Lynndey,” Coffin said. “Not if the prospective mama got anything
to say about it.”

“Anyway, I got few enough shooters as it is,” Jacks said.

“You could recruit more people from the ville,” Grammaw
declared, “if you hadn’t let them get slack!”

Gate to Hell Jacks sighed. Not for the first time he reckoned
he was the wrong member of the line, not to mention gender and generation, to
bear that nickname. Much as he liked it.

What was worse, the old lady had a point. She often did, if you
could find it in among all the “slacks” and exclamation marks.

He had recruited new sec men from his side of Sweetwater
Junction. But they seemed more interested in sucking up his booze and beating on
their fellow citizens than in serious fighting. They didn’t show the proper sort
of spirit that was going to take him back to the palace, where he’d slit open
that little prick Colt’s fish-colored belly and strangle him with his living
guts before his mother’s eyes. Right before he raped Miranda, then had her
whipped and burned at the stake like the witch she was.

“We got people coming through town,” he said.

“Merchants!”

You’d also think it was hard to tell when Grammaw wrinkled up
her face, since wrinkles were mostly what it consisted of, along with the odd
mole sprouting astonishingly long tufts of hair, white to match that tight bun
on her head. You’d be wrong there, too. There was no mistaking it: her face
folded in on itself until it seemed likely to implode.

“They got no spirit! They’re slack!”

“Now, don’t be hasty, there, Grammaw Lynndey,” Coffin said.
“Takes some sack to be a merchant. Especially on the long hard roads that meet
in the Junction.”

“There’s other people,” Jacks pointed out. “Travelers. Mercies
and such. They—”

The French doors opened. A recently recruited sec man with his
hair just coming back in from the ritual head-shaving stood there.

“Sorry to bother you, Baron Jacks, but some newcomers just come
barging in—”

“Can’t Hapgood deal with it?” Jacks asked.

His answer was a brain-smashing sound and a flash from the
parlor. The young sec man jumped like a startled cat and spun.

The wedge-shaped back of Hapgood himself came through the door.
He turned to show bloodhound eyes rolled up in his long balding head, and a
red-rimmed black hole as big around as a shot glass through the front of his
frilled white shirt. He flopped down face-first right at his boss’s feet,
clearly already on his way to room temperature.

“Now whoever did that ain’t slack!” Grammaw crowed.

* * *

“C
OAST
CLEAR
,” J
AK
said from the top of the concrete ramp. Overhead the sky was finally
turning daylight blue, though still streaked with apricot and apple-green
remnants of sunup.

J.B. waited at the bottom of the short flight of stairs, with a
concrete retaining wall and a round steel rail on his right side and the footing
of a building on the left. Mildred crouched on the steps between the two men,
her blocky black wheel gun in her hand.

“What now, John?” she asked.

“We walk toward the gaudy house where Jacks is holed up as if
we owned the place,” he said.

“What?” she squeaked. He was pleased to see she had presence of
mind to keep it nearly inaudible. Also nearly supersonic, but at least no
unwanted ears were likely to overhear. “After we went to all the trouble of
sneaking into town before the sun even came up?”

“That’s right,” he said. “Past patrols like as not to shoot on
sight. Now, here in the middle of the ville, people who see us are going to at
least wonder if we belong before reaching for their blasters.”

“And if you’re wrong?”

“Then we wind up staring at the sky a little sooner than
anticipated,” he said calmly. “Comes to everybody, sooner or later.”

“Less talk, more walk,” Jak said under his breath.

“Roll on, Jak,” J.B. said. “We’re right behind you.”

He sent a meaningful look to Mildred, who sighed
theatrically.

“You boys’ll be the death of me,” she said. “And here all I
ever wanted to do was achieve immortality by not dying!”

* * *

“H
ERE
COME
,” J
AK
said.

“Okay, brace it up,” J.B. said. “You know the plan.”

“Ace on the line,” Mildred said.

“That’s the spirit,” J.B. replied.

He walked point down the dirt street. There was still nobody
abroad between the buildings here, which were mostly one-story and obviously
built since skydark, if better built than most villes could boast. Mildred
walked slightly behind him at his right, while Jak slinked at his left. Their
hands were empty; J.B. carried his shotgun slung muzzle-down behind his right
shoulder. They wanted to show peaceable intent.

If somebody still wanted to shake it up—well, the three could
accommodate them.

’Course, he thought as half a dozen sec men in green Jakes
armbands spilled out of a nearby building clutching an assortment of weapons as
varied as their clothing, I’d feel a whole lot more secure, especially between
the shoulder blades, if I knew Ryan was out there somewhere keeping close eye
through the scope of his longblaster. But thoughts like that wouldn’t load any
magazines for him.

“So what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” demanded the
tall, skinny kid whose bluster and cocky body language marked him as leader.
There wasn’t a scrap of rank insignia to this patch.

The sec men winged out to flank them. From the corner of his
eye J.B. saw Mildred’s face crease in concern. The Armorer wasn’t worried much.
Let the coldhearts think they held the winning hand. The shock when they learned
different might keep them from acting for a few more seconds. And time, J.B.
knew, was blood.

“Mornin’,” he said cheerfully. “We’re new in town. We’d like to
talk to your boss. We’re looking for mercie work.”

The leader showed him a grin whose intent was clearly as nasty
as his yellow teeth.

“The boss ain’t looking to hire sorry-ass outlanders. But you
will get to meet him. Also like as not Levon. That’s his head torturer. A
three-armed mutie. Third arm lets him do tricks you never dreamed of.”

“I think we should just leave that to your boss to decide,
don’t you?” J.B. asked. He was becoming aware of a triple-nasty cesspit
stench.

Dark night, he thought, if Jacks lets his men patrol the
streets in shit trousers, it’s a wonder plague hasn’t chilled the bunch of ’em
long since.

“Chris,” said a burly guy with bulgy eyes, loose purple lips
and blond hair, “shouldn’t we oughta just take ’em to talk to Hapgood? Let the
big guys decide?”

“Sure, Morris, you and Rigger and Blackie take these two pencil
dicks, the sawed-off one and the white-haired mutie. The woman can stay with the
rest of us. She’s got big titties and plenty of meat to go around.”

As he drew close to Mildred, her face clenched in disgust. J.B.
recognized the stench had to be coming from the one called Chris. It took a lot
to make a former medical physician make a face like that, even if she’d been
mostly into research back before the days of the smoke clouds.

“You’ll like us triple-fine, baby,” Chris said, grabbing hold
of Mildred’s left breast and squeezing. She winced and her shoulders hunched. He
looked around at the others.

“See? I went and found you boys some nice cunny!”

A gunshot shattered the morning calm.