Wretched Earth (14 page)

“So where does all this leave us?” Mildred asked.

“Boned,” Jak said. “Should shake ville off boots.”

“We talked this out already, Jak,” Krysty said. “We agreed to
do what we could to make a stand here.”

“So there it is,” Ryan said, “plain as a chill in a chair. We
got to bring Jacks and Miranda to the table, or bring them down. And we got just
about zero time to do it in.”

“We still could run for it, Ryan,” J.B. said. “Like Jak
says.”

Ryan glanced up at his best friend and right-hand man. “Really
think we can run from this threat forever, J.B.?”

The Armorer looked at him for a long moment. Then he took off
his glasses, pulled out a handkerchief and began polishing them.

“Naw. They aren’t fast, but they’re steady. And steady does the
trick, every time.”

“So what are we to do, with the leaders of both dominant
factions in this unfortunate town so obdurate?” Doc asked.

“We could get in touch with the locals,” J.B. said. “So far we
been sticking with Jacks and his sec men. You?”

“Same here,” Ryan said.

“The people are beat down,” Mildred said. “If they were going
to take a stand against their oppressors, wouldn’t they have done so by
now?”

“They may be waiting to see if things get better,” Krysty said.
“Sometimes it even works. Anyway, keeping heads down, waiting and hoping, is a
lot safer than defiance.”

“People fight best when fight for homes, loved ones,” Jak
said.

“That’s true,” Ryan said. “And the sec men on both sides are
mostly stupes. Miranda’s got loyalists with more heart than use. Plus a core of
coldhearts, like her new sec boss, Stone.”

“Jacks has a bunch of bullies and assholes,” Mildred said with
surprising venom.

“We had a bit of a run-in on the way to talk to Jacks,” J.B.
said. “Somebody decided to fondle Mildred’s boob.”

“He live?” Ryan asked.

“She shot his dick off.”

Ryan arched a brow.

“She’s dead-center on Jacks’s men, though,” J.B. said. “Jacks
got the coldest of the coldhearts. Most seasoned and best trained. Sounds like
Miranda’s people are better motivated. Jacks’s are driven purely by greed and
ambition. But bottom line—both sides’ goons are better at thumping unarmed
civilian heads than actual fighting.”

“Gotta fix soon,” Jak warned.

“He’s right,” Krysty said.

“You got some kinda feeling here, Krysty?” Ryan asked.

She shook her head. Her scarlet hair was stirring nervously
about her shoulders of its own volition.

“Call it an intuition, lover.”

“All right,” Ryan said. “I’ve been calculating this. So here’s
what we do.”

He quickly sketched the plan he’d been forming in his mind.

“Won’t that weaken both sides?” Mildred asked when he was
done.

“Only if it works.”

“But why? Won’t that make it harder to fight the horde when it
comes?”

“If the ville’s still split down the middle and fighting
against itself when the rotties show,” J.B. said, “the place’ll fall over like a
twig tepee.”

“We weaken them enough so they
have
to sit down and patch things up,” Ryan said. “They won’t do that, then we’ve
weakened them so we can topple them first, and get the ville ready to fight
ourselves. Like Jak says, the locals’ll fight just fine when there’s a changed
horde staring them in the face, and nobody above them to beat them down.”

“You sure that’ll work, my dear Ryan?” Doc asked.

“Only thing I’m sure of is that one day we’ll all end up with
dirt hitting us in the eyes, Doc,” Ryan said, standing. “Now, unless we want
that to happen sooner rather than later, it’s time we all blew out of here.”

Chapter Seventeen

Reed Wallen stuck close behind the big wedge-shaped
back of Brick Finneran, Geither Jacks’s new sec boss to replace Bill Hapgood,
recently deceased. His sturdy Savage 110 bolt-action longblaster felt as light
as a feather in his hands.

He had been chosen to make history in the ville of Sweetwater
Junction this day.

They had infiltrated deep into the northern half of the ville.
Enemy territory since the night Reed, like so many of his sec brothers, had
joined their beloved leader in an attempt to seize power from the failing baron
Jeb before his crazy, corrupt slut of a wife and her weakling son could grab
command.

White clouds feathered high across a wintry blue sky. A stiff
morning breeze blew a breath of ice from the east. It whistled in the eaves of
the brick houses as the ten-man team crept along an alley. It didn’t drown out
crowd noises from ahead, or the cawing of the ever-present crows.

Jacks’s team had the enemy streets to themselves. Thinking
about why excited Reed all to pieces. He knew where most people of the witch
Miranda’s half of the ville were right now, making all that ruction. Same place
all the taints that passed for her sec men now would be: in front of the old
palace, at a ceremony in which Colton Sharp was being officially invested as
heir to the ville.

When the wind shifted briefly Reed could even smell Sweetwater
Junction’s signature delicacy: roast prairie dog on a stick, coated in a
sweetish dough, deep-frying in grease.

Reed’s stomach rumbled. They’d got no breakfast that morning.
Instead, Brick had led off before dawn with his picked team of chillers.

They’d made it without incident across the no-man’s land of the
road that ran east-west through the ville. Then they’d holed up in an empty
house to wait for the locals to head north to the open space in front of the
palace for the show. They knew most of Miranda’s subjects would be there. She
had made it triple-clear in official proclamations that not turning up would be
taken as evidence of shaky loyalty. Since nobody wanted to have their bones
broken with wrecking bars, and then be hung up, still alive, on one of the
scaffolds outside town, attendance would be good.

And they had no idea what kind of a show they were in for.

* * *

I
T
CAME
TOGETHER
FAST
, because Finneran was a real
go-getter. He should’ve been Jacks’s main man from the outset, but Hapgood
happened to be senior. Reed knew that the sawed-off little shit of an outlander,
Dix, had done Jacks a favor by chilling Hapgood.

Reed had been on guard duty in Jacks’s sitting room the
previous night when it all went down. Strike for him.

Jacks and his big brass were discussing Miranda’s upcoming
ceremony. Finneran was talking up the need to make a decisive move, an offensive
move, that could bring it all in one stroke.

The little mercie with the hat and glasses mentioned that the
ceremony might look like an opportunity for a chill-shot against Miranda. He had
more to say, but Brick grabbed the ball and ran with it like the warrior he was.
It was just the chance they were looking for: the bitch herself, plus her
useless kid coming right out in the open from behind stone palace walls and
their guards. Because Brick knew, like anyone with balls, that the best defense
was a good offense.

And just as Jacks was nodding and frowning and thinking it
over, the black woman mercie, Mildred, who people said was a healer, but who’d
signed on as a shooter, piped up. “But wouldn’t it be triple-stupe to make a
play at Miranda and her boy with her whole sec team drawn up tight around them
and looking for trouble?”

Brick went white to the roots of the short red hair that gave
him his name.

Then he jumped all over that shit. He knew an opportunity when
he saw one, he all but yelled. So Miranda’s cat puke so-called sec men wouldn’t
let anybody near her precious body? Well, her side wasn’t the only one that
could use a longblaster. Finneran had a man on his team who could reach out and
touch them from far, far away.

Reed’s ears had burned then. He’d never felt so proud. He was
the best shot on Jacks’s side. The best in the ville. There’d been nobody to
touch him before the coup went down and Jacks went south.

He just didn’t get a chance to show off his skill very
often.

The outlander mercies tried to argue it down. At least the dude
with the hat and the woman had. The creepy kid with the white hair and red eyes,
who claimed he wasn’t a mutie, though everyone knew he was, never said much. But
once Finneran was on a roll he carried the boss right along with him.

Gate Jacks loved boldness. Or he never would have made his own
move on the palace.

The little mercie, Dix, kept insisting it was a triple-stupe
idea. The more he insisted, though, the more Jacks seemed to like it. Mebbe he
was beginning to see there wasn’t any point relying on mercies when you had the
cream of the crop on your team already.

Jacks had one stipulation to Finneran’s bold plan. The shooter
would get one shot before the baron’s sec men got their charges to cover. Jacks
wanted Reed to take out not Miranda, but the kid. The fat little bastard, Colt,
Jeb Sharp’s son.

“He’s the real threat, long-term,” Jacks said, stabbing the air
with his cigar. “Without him, Miranda’s just some Mex slut who happened to catch
old Jeb’s attention. Colt’s the heir. And he’s the apple of her eye. I want her
to watch him die. It’ll break her mind like—” he took the cigar between his
fists and snapped it “—that. After which she’ll be a pushover. Too fucked up to
offer real resistance when we make our move.”

“Don’t be a fool, Gate,” Coffin started to say. But the boss
wasn’t listening.

“Do this for me, Finneran,” he said. Then he actually laid a
hand on Reed’s shoulder. “Do this for me, kid, and you can write your own
ticket.”

* * *

S
O
HERE
R
EED
WAS
, humping his rifle and ready to go. The team
made for a three-story gray stone building with a clear view of the palace steps
from two hundred yards away. Reed had dropped pronghorn at three hundred. He was
good for the shot.

Finneran stopped at a narrow street to look up and down. He
waved to Mattox, the third man in line, to scout ahead. Holding his Winchester
carbine across his chest, the slight blond Mattox trotted to the far side of the
street. He waved the others to come after him.

They were now a block from their objective.

When Reed stepped from the alley, the only creatures on the
street were a couple crows strutting around half a block to his left.

Holding his longblaster diagonally across his chest, he trotted
confidently forward. His heart hammered. It wasn’t from fear, he told himself,
but pride. Pride and exhilaration at the great service he was about to do his
leader and baron-in-all-but-name.

I wonder what kind of reward Jacks will give me when—

Impact on the left side of his head filled his brain with
blinding white light and the jangling of all the sounds Reed had heard in his
short life.

Then blackness. It would last forever.

* * *

B
RICK
F
INNERAN
HAD
a stone heart, but it landed in his boots when he saw the brains blow
out the right side of his sniper’s head in a gout of doughy chunks and fluid
shockingly red in the morning light. A blink later a bright red spark climbed
toward the sky from off to his left.

Gunfire erupted, from his left, right and out front.
Muzzle-flames winked from windows across the street. Mattox did a death dance in
the far alley as bullets took him from both sides point-blank. Bullets cracked
past Brick’s head. One struck chips off the stone edge of the building right
above him.

“Fuck!” he shouted. “Take cover! It’s an ambush!”

* * *

W
HEN
THE
S
TEYR
SETTLED
back online, Ryan saw the kid with the
scoped bolt gun lying on top of it in the middle of the narrow dirt street. Only
half his blond head was left. His brains had spilled like clotted puke into a
wide crimson pool.

Ryan allowed himself a moment’s satisfaction. Gate Jacks’s new
sec chief had brought his hit team right to where Ryan anticipated he would.

Killzone.

Ryan sat two blocks away in the attic of a two-story house that
looked right up the last street the would-be chillers had to cross.

He couldn’t take much credit himself. He’d relied on J.B. and
Mildred to bait the trap. And Jacks and his overaggressive head thug had gone
right at it.

It took less persuasion than he’d expected to persuade the
baron to go for the plan. She realized the risk in exposing herself and her
beloved son to her enemy’s coldhearts. Miranda Sharp had the heart of a lioness
and the soul of a gambler, however crazy she was. It actively delighted her when
her new mercies showed how to turn Perico’s major concern, and her own greatest
fear, into a lethal trap.

Pride would never allow Miranda to cancel the ceremony. But she
was willing to take the risk of leaving herself and her son defended by a mere
handful of men—and Chad, her current lover, who struck Ryan as about as useful
in a fight as a busted bicycle inner tube—for the chance of laying some serious
hurt on her foe.

As Krysty reassured the unhappy Perico, the bulk of Miranda’s
sec men
were
safeguarding the baron and the heir.
Just from advanced positions.

Satisfied he had achieved his primary objective, which was to
zero out Jacks’s best henchmen, Ryan set his rifle on the floor beneath the
window. He picked a homemade flare from the dusty floorboards beside it and
leaned out to jam the spike of its launching tube into the sill, angling up and
away from his hidey-hole. Taking out a precious butane lighter looted from a
redoubt, he lit the fuse, then quickly moved away from the window and pressed
his back to the wall, in case the firework simply exploded.

It didn’t. The squat little rocket launched, drawing a trail of
dense red smoke in a high arc over the ville.

The thunder of blasterfire rose around him as Krysty and Doc
and a squad of Miranda’s sec men dumped bullets at the left wing of the hit team
and the backing force of more than twenty men behind. Most of the baron’s
refurbished sec forces were arrayed in a crescent wrapping around both flanks of
the Jacks force. They opened up with everything from hunting bows and crossbows
to semiautomatic rifles.

The flare had served its purpose: springing the trap, as well
as reassuring Baron Miranda that things had gone as planned. There was one more
objective to launching it. Only time would tell if that was accomplished.

Picking up his longblaster, Ryan headed down the stairs to help
Krysty and Doc make life miserable for the invaders.

* * *

“W
ELL
,
FUCK
,” C
OFFIN
SAID
. “We sure been played for fools.”

He and his employer and friend stood on a north-facing balcony
of the former gaudy house.

For several more beats of the pulse hammering in his ears,
Geither Jacks continued to grip the cold, white-painted wrought-iron railing in
both hands. The green flare descended over the north half of the ville—enemy
territory, which he had sworn would be his soon, possibly this day—and went
out.

The crackle of gunfire reached his ears.

He pried his hands loose and used one to take his cigar out of
his mouth.

“Finneran,” he rasped, “you chisel-dick. Devil forgive you if
you lose me half my sec force out there. Because I sure won’t.”

He turned and yanked open the door that led inside.

* * *

O
UR
EMPLOYER
DOESN
’
T
look
happy, Mildred thought as she, J.B. and Jak were ushered into the parlor.

“Okay,” Geither Jacks said without preamble. “You were right.
As of now it appears Brick Finneran has officially got his dick stuck in a bear
trap.”

“He’s slack!” his grandmother exclaimed. “I told you! But you
were too slack to listen!”

“Can you go get him back? And, uh, as many of my men as he
hasn’t already managed to get chilled?”

J.B. smiled blandly. “Sure.”

“What’ll you give us?” Mildred demanded.

Jacks’s eyebrows rose. She could almost hear J.B.’s eyeballs
click as he glanced at her from behind the round lenses of his glasses.

“What’s this?” Jacks said. “You work for me.”

“We do, sir,” she said firmly. “And you told us in no uncertain
terms we weren’t good enough to take part in this commando raid Finneran cooked
up. Now you want us to go get his dick out of what you describe as a ‘bear
trap.’ Which is it?”

“Which is what?” Jacks sounded really confused.

“Are we good enough or not? If we’re good enough to go
extracting a sec boss’s dick from a bear trap, it seems to me we deserve more
pay than for just sitting on our hands because we weren’t good enough to go get
trapped with him.”

Everybody stared at her for a moment. She tried to keep her
face impassive.

Grammaw cawed with laughter. “The girl’s not slack! You got to
give her that!”

“Gate,” Coffin began, “don’t be a—”

Jacks waved his cigar at him. “Don’t say it,” he said. “All
right. I’ll double your pay.”

Grammaw screeched like a scorched raven.

“No, no,” Jacks said, “it’s no big deal. I suspect I’m going to
be saving more than enough on salaries today to make up the extra. Not that you
people need to go getting ideas.”