Wretched Earth (13 page)

“The bastards!” she exclaimed when the three stepped in. “They
have stolen back the tower!”

“See?” It was Jenkins, all but hopping out of his skin with
eagerness, like a teen boy about to get his first blow job. “I told you they’d
fuck up! You shouldn’t trust these bastard outlanders!”

Colt Sharp sat on a chair behind his mother. He’d stuffed
himself into a shirt and trousers and socks, but no shoes. His pudgy young face
looked sleepy and concerned.

“Ma, it isn’t true!” he said. “They did what you asked them to.
It’s not their fault your—the sec men couldn’t hold the tower!”

Seeing anger flare in her face when the youth spoke, Ryan was
afraid the outburst had broken it for them. He tensed.

Take out that bastard Jenkins first, he thought, snapping into
contingency-planning mode. Then Hedders, though Krysty or Doc can likely handle
him. Then mebbe grab Miranda for a hostage—

But the baron only stroked her son’s cheek fondly. “You’re
right,
querido,
” she said.

She turned to Jenkins, whose excitement had morphed into sullen
resentment, which Ryan judged was a usual state for him.

“The outlanders have indeed done just as I asked them,” she
said. “
Others
have failed me in allowing the tower
to fall back into Jacks’s bloodstained hands. No doubt they have paid with their
lives for their incompetence, which is a good thing for them.”

She paused to smile, as if contemplating the awful things she
would have done to the men supposed to hold the tower for her, had any of them
been stupe enough to survive.

“Now, Leroy, dear boy,” Miranda purred, “you have your chance
to shine in your baron’s eyes. Go and recapture the tower for me. Show me what
you can do.”

He snapped to attention and threw a sharp salute. “You got it,
Baron!” he said, flashing an evil grin at Ryan and his friends.

Miranda’s smile grew fangs. “And may God have mercy if you
cannot hold it this time,
chico.
Because I will
not!”

* * *

S
MILING
IN
TRIUMPH
,
Leroy Jenkins surveyed the carnage on the top floor of the wooden sniper
tower. Granted, at least half came from his own men. He’d had two killed and
four wounded retaking the tower. But this was war. You didn’t make omelets
without breaking eggs. Even your own.

He was bare-armed and his head was wrapped with a rolled
bandanna, after an old-days poster he’d seen as a kid of
Rambo.
He didn’t feel the cold. He was way too hyped on blood and
victory.

“Send up the flare,” he ordered one of his troops. He didn’t
know his name. Why bother with names? They were just worms. Disposable.

That was how a real power guy thought. A baron. He practiced
thinking like a baron. Because he’d be one someday. When that hot-ass bitch
Miranda finally gave in all the way to his manliness. She’d marry him, and then
he’d have the power.

And she better not talk to him then the way she did now. Not if
she liked having teeth.

One of his wounded men was still screaming as comrades carried
him back to the Sharp side of the square on a stretcher. Jenkins thought about
shouting an order to chill him to shut his pussy ass up. The new order was going
to need strong men, not babies. But he decided not to bother.

He drew in a deep breath instead, cold and bracing and full of
the smells of spilled blood and burned powder. Well, and piss and shit, too. But
a real man got used to those things.

“All right, you outland trash,” he said aloud. “I showed the
baron how it’s really done. Your asses are next!”

“Hey, Leroy.” A voice floated up from the floor below.

“It’s Captain Jenkins to you, jackhole!”

“Hey, Captain, they left a crate down here. Looks like it’s
whiskey!”

He grinned. Nothing sweeter than drinking to their victory with
their dead enemies’ hooch.

“What are you waiting for? Open it up and see what’s
inside.”

There was a bright light and a big noise.

The explosion of two pounds of predark moldable plastic
explosive launched Jenkins right out through the plank roof of the tower, a
moment before the overpressure blew the top two floors completely apart. When he
broke free into the open air, he was measurably shorter than the six-foot-four
he’d started his brief, memorable flight as, owing to the upper half of his
cranium being flattened like a slug mushrooming against bone and all.

To compensate, he was dazzlingly aflame as he arched through
the sky of Sweetwater Junction, to land with a hiss and a steam cloud right in
the midst of the public fountain.

* * *

A
T
THE
HARD
RAP
OF
AN
explosion Coffin jumped and
went to the sitting room window. Throwing caution to the winds, he ripped open
the curtain.

J.B. smiled at the glow that lit the sky to the north. He
closed his hand around the fistful of jack Jacks had just pressed into it, and
savored the feel.

“You were right,” the rogue sec boss said around a stub of
cigar. He stood beside the Armorer’s chair. It was a double-comfy chair. “The
stupes actually fell for your booby. Not ten minutes after they retook the damn
tower.”

Huddled beside J.B. in a comforter, Mildred only shook her
head. Jak had headed to bed as soon as the group reported in to Jacks and his
advisers. J.B. wasn’t triple-thrilled about having them split up, but the albino
teen could take care of himself. So could J.B. and Mildred, for that matter.

Fortunately, Jacks’s grandmother had retired, too, before word
came that Miranda’s goons had grabbed the tower right back.

Exactly as J.B. had told Jacks they would.

“Truth is,” the Armorer said, “what really surprised me was
your own boys actually obeyed orders not to open the damn crate.”

“You gonna let him talk to you like that in your own parlor,
Gate?” Coffin asked. “Don’t let yourself get played for a fool.”

Jacks laughed sourly. “I was thinking that same thing,
myself.”

He pulled up an ottoman upholstered in red-and-gold silk and
sat at J.B.’s elbow.

“We need to talk,” he said.

“We’re listenin’,” J.B. replied.

* * *

T
HE
RATTLE
OF
WINDOW
GLASS
from a powerful
but distant blast roused Ryan from sleep. He sat up in bed, chuckling.

“My, my,” Doc said from his pallet. “That was a potent
explosion. Perhaps even what my captors would have termed overkill.”

“Mebbe J.B. overplayed this one,” Krysty said, lying on her
side close to Ryan. “Won’t we need that tower to fight the rotties?”

He shrugged. “If we do, we can build it up again. At least put
up scaffolding. Important thing now is getting in a position where we stand a
chance against the bastards.”

“J.B. knows what he’s doing, I guess.” Krysty sounded
unconvinced. “I hope we all do.”

Chapter Sixteen

“So your side didn’t buy it, either?” Ryan asked.

J.B. shook his head. “Not for a second.”

The six of them huddled together around a lone candle burning
on a crate in a root cellar beneath yet another Sweetwater Junction house
abandoned during the recent troubles. This was their first reunion since
splitting up days before, to make their separate ways into the ville. It was an
emotional one.

Even Ryan felt relief and an effusive warmth at having the
companions back again. Plus a certain ache that they’d have to split up again in
a matter of minutes.

Setting up the meeting had been simple. They had used terse
handwritten notes, hidden in locations revealed by simple marks cut into walls—a
blaze language Jak had taught them all from his old guerrilla days in the bayou
country. The marks appeared accidental, so no one else gave them a second
glance. Much less understood their import if they did.

Not that anybody in Sweetwater Junction was looking too closely
at marks on walls. It seemed everyone was focused on survival.

“Miranda threw one of her diva fits,” Krysty said. She and
Mildred sat side by side on a crate. Both of them were equally comfortable with
all their companions, but after a few days apart they seemed to feel a need to
assert female solidarity.

“From what I hear those’re pretty spectacular,” Mildred said.
“Although I don’t think Jacks is an unbiased witness.”

“It was quite the eruption,” Doc said. “The lady has a flair
for the dramatic.”

* * *

S
HOULD
HAVE
KNOWN
it’d
turn out like this, Ryan told himself. We didn’t believe a word of it, either,
when that skinny kid told us at the caravanserai.

“Do you think to take advantage of me, a poor widow trying
desperately to hold on to my son’s inheritance?” Miranda was yelling as she
rampaged back and forth across the flowery throw rug in her parlor. She was
wearing tight black riding pants and boots, and a short black vest over a
lavender blouse. Ryan had yet to see her ride a horse. He had to admit she
looked good in the outfit.

“Miranda—Baron,” Krysty said, “we’re not asking for anything
over this. We’re telling you the truth.”

“The rotties are real,” Doc said. “The
change
is real. And it is terrible to behold. It is the single
greatest threat you, the ville and your son face.”

“It sounds cool,” Colt said.

Everybody stopped and looked at the youth, who sat on a
satin-upholstered footstool, eating sugar cookies from a plate on a round table
beside him. Most looked shocked at his reaction.

Ryan suppressed a grin. There’d been a time, when he was a
baron’s privileged teenage son, that he’d have thought stories of the rotties
were cool, too. Like something from the predark storybooks he’d loved to
read.

“Do you have any idea what you are saying, Colt?” his mother
raved, turning on him like an angry cougar. “This isn’t some game or fancy
story. I have seen real horrors. I watched while my father, your grandfather,
was pulled apart and eaten alive by stickies. My baby brother and I hid behind a
bush and looked on, helpless, as they burned our home and danced. Danced! And
then, as we fled from the muties across the desert, my brother, my beloved
Antonio, died of thirst before my eyes! Those are horrors enough without made-up
tales of the living dead.”

Colt cringed and bit his lip to keep it from quivering. He
couldn’t keep his eyes from growing shiny with tears.

“It’s some kind of trick, Baron.”

That was Stone, Miranda’s new sec boss after Jenkins’s demise,
which not even she seemed too torn up about. The new guy was a hard case, a bit
above medium height but thick, with coal-smudge brows and retreating black hair
leaving a widow’s peak behind on his slab of a face.

He wasn’t Miranda’s new plaything. That would be Chad, a former
servant. He had blond hair, a wide empty face, and even emptier blue eyes, set
off by the white shirt with the fancy collar she’d stuffed him into, along with
too-tight denim pants. Ryan wasn’t sure what Chad, who couldn’t be more than a
couple years older than Miranda’s son, did to pack all that muscle into his
skin. He was willing to bet the muscle was packed densest between his ears,
though.

Right now Chad stood to one side, as if trying to hide behind a
lamp with a gilt-fringed shade, proving his head did contain at least a few
brains. Enough for a basic sense of self-preservation, anyway. Although even
scorpions and screamwings would hide from the baron when she was in a mood like
this.

Ryan stood with Krysty at his side and Doc perched on another
fancy footstool, his hands knotted between his gangly legs.

“What do you even know about these mercies, Miranda?” Stone
asked.

She spun to face him.

“I know they have served me well,” she said tartly. Clearly,
she was in a mood to snap back at any perceived challenge. Even one offered in
implicit support of the rant she’d been delivering mere heartbeats before. She
was full-on crazy, no doubt about it. “Not like some who claim to, who could not
deal with that devil Jacks’s snipers in their tower!”

To his credit Stone stood his ground.

“Why are they playing you, then?” he asked. “Why do they come
in here telling a story only a total stupe would believe?”

“Yes, why?” Miranda wheeled to confront Ryan. “Why do you bring
this fairy story, after you have done service to this ville?”

“Because we’re trying to do you more service, Baron,” Ryan
said. He wasn’t going to bend to her, any more than to Miranda’s new sec boss,
Stone. “We bring you this warning in good faith. The threat is out there. It’s
real.”

He met her furious black eyes with an ice-cold blue one.

“If you don’t reckon you can trust us anymore,” he said, “we’ll
hit the road again. We’ll head west, fast as we can. Away from the rotties.”

He felt Krysty stiffen at his side. She was wondering if he’d
let his own anger get the better of him. If he’d overplayed his—their—hand.

But while Krysty was definitely the gentle-persuader half of
their partnership, he was no beginner at hard bargaining, nor diplomacy, either.
And he had noticed the baron, for all her furious whims, tended not to press too
hard on those strong enough not to cower at her outbursts.

Of course, if I’m wrong, he thought, she’ll happily have my
guts yanked out and tied into a noose, to hang me from a windowsill.

Miranda frowned, but thoughtfully, not in anger. At least Ryan
hoped that was the case.

“You asked the right question, Miranda,” Krysty said.

The baron looked at her and some of her tension dissipated.
That was something Ryan couldn’t comprehend. By rights the baron should have
been turned into a whirling ball of jealous claws by the presence of a rival so
potent as Krysty, with her drop-dead looks and gentle yet Gaia-strong
personality. Instead, Miranda seemed to have taken a positive shine to the
redhead.

“What do you mean,
chica?
” the
baron asked.

“Why would we bring you a fairy story? Why would we risk with a
lie the goodwill we’ve earned from you?”

“There’re reasons,” Stone muttered. “Scammers always have their
reasons.”

Krysty shot him a daggered glance. “Was it a scam that took
down the snipers in the tower?”

Ryan saw Stone open his mouth, no doubt to give back a “yeah,
but” argument that would just lead to a chain of “and thens.” Ryan had seen that
cycle many times. Evidently, Stone had, too; he shut the bear trap he used for a
mouth on whatever he was going to say.

Smart, Ryan thought. Hope he’s not too smart for everybody’s
good.

A slapping sound attracted everybody’s attention. Perico,
Miranda’s leathery old chief adviser, had brought his palms down emphatically on
the thighs of his tan canvas pants. Now he rose from the overstuffed chair where
he’d been sitting with his jaw shut and his ears, obviously, open.

“Isn’t it clear they believe the story, Baron?”

“Yeah,” Colt said. “They wouldn’t lie to you, Mother!”

Fortunately for the kid, Perico had Miranda’s full
attention.

“It may be as Stone says,” she said. “They may be seeking some
advantage.”

“Of course they’re seeking advantage! They’re alive. Every
living thing seeks advantage. Your question should be, are they seeking
unfair
advantage? Where’s their angle in lying to you,
Baron?”

“More power,” Stone growled. “More jack.”

“They asked for that? Miranda, you made your terms with them
after they iced the snipers. Have you heard them ask to change those terms?”

“No. But, still—”

“Yeah,” Perico said. “It’s a hard story to swallow. Well,
don’t.”

“I thought you were defending them!”

“Me, too,” Krysty said under her breath. She took hold of
Ryan’s hand.

“I’m sayin’ I don’t think they’re consciously lying to you,
Miranda. I said they seem to believe what they say, and I stick to that.”

“What should I do, then?”

He shrugged. “Let them bring you evidence.”

Miranda nodded. One thing you could say for the woman, Ryan
thought: she wasn’t big on dithering. Whether a mood swing or a decision, she
got right to it.

“Very well.” She turned to the trio. “I shall believe you when
you bring me more evidence. Until then you would be wise not to mention the
matter again. And do not let it detract from your real duties to me! We must
prepare to deliver a death blow to the traitor, Jacks.”

She smiled a wicked smile. “If you are telling the truth, after
all—so much more important to finish him quickly,
¿qué
no?
”

* * *

“R
YAN
.”

Walking down the hallway away from the baron’s parlor, Ryan
stopped. And turned. It was Perico, rolling up behind him on his slightly bowed
legs.

Something about the man’s gait suggested to Ryan he’d spent
years walking the decks of a sailing ship. He hadn’t said anything about his
past or how he’d wound up in Sweetwater Junction, and Ryan wasn’t inclined to
ask. Perico didn’t seem the sort to go in for idle chitchat.

Neither was he.

Ryan waved for Krysty and Doc to walk on, which they did.
Perico came up and fell into step beside him.

“Handled yourself well in there, boy,” the old man said. “Not
everybody’s got the smarts or the stone to stand up to Miranda. Especially in
one of her moods.”

Ryan said nothing.

The adviser dug a finger in one hairy ear. “Here’s the thing.
I’m the man who keeps track of things around here for her, now that Jacks isn’t
exactly doing the job anymore.”

By keep track of he meant spy, Ryan knew. It didn’t surprise
him.

“There’s something in the wind that don’t smell good,” Perico
said. “We’re getting fewer travelers from out of the east. I mean, even fewer
than since the dust-up happened, when Baron Jeb got chilled. Once word of that
got around traffic through here dropped off major. But now it’s like there’s a
gate slammed shut between here and parts east.”

Ryan shrugged. “We spoke our piece.”

“So you did. And well. I’ve also heard some rumors in the
marketplace about strange goings-on. Things that may refer to what you were
talking about.”

At the hallway’s end Ryan stopped and faced him. “So why didn’t
you back us with the baroness?”

“Because I got no evidence. No witnesses. So far it’s all talk.
And I need to keep credibility with her, to keep her on as even a keel as I
can.”

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “Good luck with that.”

Perico laughed. “Bring me something solid, Ryan. You know
what’s at stake better than I do.”

* * *

“W
OW
,
WHAT
A
HARPY
,” Mildred said. when her friends finished
their tale. “Jacks isn’t totally wrong about her, then.”

“Not if he characterizes the baron as something of a virago,”
Doc said.

“She’s smart,” Ryan said. “Just got too short a fuse, and too
many fuses sticking out of her waiting for a spark. Like a porcupine.”

“That’s an image I’m not going to thank you for,” Mildred
said.

“For what it’s worth, she’s no worse than plenty of barons and
bosses we’ve bumped into,” Ryan said. “Better than most, I reckon.”

“She really cares about the ville,” Krysty said. “Passionately.
If only so her son will have something to rule over once he gets old
enough.”

“Think she’ll be able to let go of power just because Junior’s
got to be a certain age?” Mildred asked.

Krysty shrugged.

“Doesn’t matter,” Ryan said. “Not our problem. If we’re here
that long, it’ll be because we’re wandering around with something else driving
our bodies, looking for warm bodies to bite chunks off of.”

“What of your experiences?” Doc asked J.B.’s group.

“Jacks just shook head,” Jak said. “Laughed. Dickhead.”

“His adviser, Coffin, did considerable ranting and raving about
it all being nonsense he’d have to be a fool to believe,” J.B. said. “Coffin’s
pretty shrewd, actually. But he’s too in love with his own opinions.”

“Who isn’t?” Mildred said. “Jacks is also advised by his
grandmother, who looks like a little shriveled monkey and screeches like a
paranoid parrot. Mostly about what a slacker her grandson is. She wasn’t having
any of it, either. But Jacks is used to tuning her out.”

“So, no help from that direction, either?” Ryan said.

“Jacks didn’t get where he is by being stupe,” J.B. said.

“Get where?” Jak said. “Run out palace, owning half ville?”

“He didn’t get chilled, Jak. Old Jeb might not have been aware
of what was going on, but Miranda’s paranoid as a tomcat passing by a stickie
nest, and as protective of her cub as a mama bear. Plus not even Jacks says
she’s a stupe. If she didn’t twig to what he was up to, he had to be playing
pretty smooth.”