Wretched Earth (15 page)

“No, sir,” she said. “We’ll take your offer. We’re on our
way.”

* * *

“M
ILLIE
,” J.B.
SAID
MILDLY
, as the three of them trotted along narrow,
deserted streets, “weren’t you worried about mebbe overplaying our hand a
little, back there?”

“We’re playing mercies, John,” she said. “We need to act like
mercies. And mercies are avaricious. To sort of extend his metaphor, Jacks’s
nuts were in a nutcracker. It was natural to apply leverage. And right now we
are
mercies. As Ryan always likes to remind me,
we don’t work out of the goodness of our hearts. Not that ‘goodness of heart’
and ‘working for Geither Jacks’ belong within twenty miles of each other.”

J.B. chuckled. “Said a true thing there, girl.”

“And finally,” she said, “he really pissed me off, giving in so
easily when Brick the Prick said he didn’t want us along. Even if that was the
plan all along.”

* * *

“F
INNERAN
.”

The sec man’s green eyes showed whites all around as he turned
his head to look back over his shoulder.

The situation was what J.B. had expected to find, and exactly
as Jacks had summed it up.

One dead kid with half a head was sprawled out in the middle of
the street. Another slumped against a wall on the far side, leaking from too
many holes to be among the living. The casualty in the rotting-garbage-reeking
alley with Finneran was a guy sitting with his back to a filth-smudged wall,
looking pale and clutching a sleeve whose olive-drab had been dyed dark brown by
blood.

The baron’s men weren’t pressing their advantage. They made a
lot of noise, but that was just busting caps. It didn’t mean all those bullets
were hitting anybody.

“Dix,” the strike-team leader all but gasped.

J.B. didn’t spend much time trying to read people. He didn’t
have a knack for it. Unlike blasters or gears, human beings didn’t have to make
sense.

But even the Armorer could see that Finneran was a beaten man.
It was plain as the often-squashed nose on his face.

“Listen up,” Dix said. “Jacks sent us. We’re here to get you
out. We can distract them long enough for you people to pull back. But you got
to move right away. No telling how long we can hold ’em.”

Fortunately, J.B. was a good poker player, because he had a
hard time saying that with a straight face despite the practice. If the Sharp
troops weren’t doing such a fine job holding themselves, Finneran’s command
would be history already.

“Jacks is ordering us to pull back?”

“Yeah, yeah. That’s what I said. He sent us, didn’t he? Only,
you’ve got to move right now, or…” He ended in a shrug of leather-jacketed
shoulders.

For a moment the big man just stared at J.B. His Adam’s apple
worked up and down in his thick neck.

Probably he’s more afraid of what Jacks’ll do to him if he
loses half his sec force for him, than he is of just dying, J.B. thought.

“Right,” Finneran said. “Right. Orders. Orders are orders.
Gotta be obeyed.”

He grabbed his nearest sec man. “Pass the word. We’re pulling
back. Go!”

He turned back to J.B. “Go do what you can. Buy us time!”

“I’ll do that,” the Armorer said.

He drew a silver whistle from one of his pants pockets. Putting
it to his lips, he blew a single long blast.

* * *

“G
UNFIRE
’
S
PETERING
OUT
,”
Mildred said.

She could hear dogs barking in the distance now, and the bleak
calling of the crows perched on the rooftops and wheeling through the sky. She
held J.B.’s Smith & Wesson M-4000 combat shotgun, which he’d lent her.

“Blasters running out ammo,” Jak said. The two knelt on the raw
dirt of a yard, behind a four-foot-high brick wall.

The albino teen had led her to a point just across the street
from a group of three Sharp sec men. Peering through a crack where mortar had
fallen out of the wall Mildred had studied them. The sec men had their backs to
them, intent on the main force of Jacks’s men. Occasionally one popped around
the corner of the house they sheltered behind, let loose a shot without seeming
to aim.

Finneran’s crew could’ve pulled back at any time, she realized.
Finneran had to have believed his force was already surrounded. Or maybe he was
afraid to withdraw without Jacks’s permission, yet unable or unwilling to drive
his men forward against such strong opposition.

A police whistle shrilled from somewhere down the street ahead
and a block or so over. It was the sort of sound that pierced and carried. It
might even have been audible over the height of the firefight, which was why
J.B. had picked it for a signal.

She drew in a deep breath and looked at Jak. He nodded.

“Sorry, guys,” she muttered beneath her breath. “It’s you or
us.” Then she popped up over the wall, laid the scattergun’s ghost-ring sight
beneath the right armpit of a towheaded man and pulled the trigger.

Chapter Eighteen

“Grip it tight,” Ryan said. “Not quite that tight. Not
so much your hands shake. Just shy of that.”

Colt’s plump young face was fixed in concentration. A quartet
of his mother’s sec men in their black armbands stood by on the bank of the
shallow gully, holding the horses and watching with interest as Ryan helped the
youth find the proper hold on the handblaster’s grip.

“All right, good,” Ryan said. “Rest your thumb on the safety,
there. Finger off the trigger. Keep it outside on the guard until you’ve got
sights on target and you’re ready to shoot.”

It was a 1911 Colt .45ACP. At some point in its long history
somebody had put a decent pair of sights on the weapon.

“Ain’t that too much gun to start a beginner on?” asked
Kowalski, the tallest of the four sec men.

“No,” Ryan said, not looking around. “Anybody can shoot a .45
if they know how to do it right. And no point teaching a person not to do it
right.”

It was the morning after the battle in north Sweetwater
Junction. Ryan and his team officially walked on water now. He knew better than
to expect it to last. A baron’s gratitude was legendary. Because, as Doc liked
to say, nobody would ever believe such a thing was for real.

There was a risk in standing in a gully under this kind of sky.
A flash flood could wipe them out in a heartbeat. But the locals didn’t seem
concerned, and Ryan didn’t know anything that was totally safe to do.

Colt licked his lips and looked toward Ryan as the tall man
gave a last adjustment to the youth’s soft hands.

“These blasters’re supposed to kick triple-hard,” Colt said.
“Are you sure—?”

“Yeah. Just breathe deep. Relax everything but your grip. Ace.
Now push your arms out in front of you, far as they’ll go.”

He stepped away and back so that he was a yard from Colt
Sharp’s shoulder and a step behind.

“Focus your eyes on the front sight.”

“Not the target?” A cracked, thus unusable whiskey bottle stood
on a mound of sand against the far bank, twenty feet away.

“No. Not the rear sight, either. Front sight. Target should be
a blur. Then you just rest it on top of the front sight like an apple on a
post.”

“All right.”

The quivering boy was swinging the blaster in little figure
eights. Ryan remembered he hadn’t been any better when his father’s men first
tried to teach him how to fire a handblaster back at Front Royal. Of course,
he’d been half this kid’s age.

“Draw in a deep breath. Try to bring the sight up to the
target. When you got it, let out half a breath, firm up your grip and squeeze
the trigger gently.”

The gun roared and kicked up. Colt jumped in alarm. The bullet
knocked dust from the face of the cut two feet left of the bottle, which Ryan
saw from the corner of his eye. He was focused on the boy.

Ignoring a repressed snicker from one of the sec men, he said,
“Good job, kid.”

“But I missed!” he exclaimed. His cheeks were flushed and his
voice vibrated with half-controlled excitement.

“Everybody misses,” Ryan said, “until they learn to hit. You
kept your arms straight, didn’t let your elbows bend so you were whacked in the
face with your blaster. Just let the piece ride up natural and fall back
down.”

“So why’d I miss?”

“Pulled off,” Ryan said. “Squeezed the trigger a bit too hard.
Didn’t jerk it—then you’d have missed low.”

“Ooh.” The boy’s face fell like aging pudding. “So I screwed
up.”

“Nobody’s born knowing this shit, kid. Truth is, trigger
control’s the hardest thing about handblaster shooting to get right. For your
very first shot you did good.”

It was true. Ryan wasn’t in the habit of flattering barons,
much less their pups. He wasn’t intending to start with this one—even if the kid
amounted to their fallback plan for defending against the rottie horde that Ryan
knew in his gut was out there, coming nearer every day.

“Try it again. You know now the recoil won’t kill you, so try
not to flinch so much. And keep both eyes open.”

“There’s so much to remember,” Colt whined.

Ryan’s surge of disgust was following by a vivid memory of
himself saying the same thing to his father’s armorer. In an even more sniveling
tone of voice.

“Not really,” he said. “Just seems like it at first. Same thing
with everything new you try. Just forget it and do.”

Despite the snivel, Colt Sharp was visibly more confident as he
pushed the big angular blaster out into the isosceles position Ryan had taught
him as the easiest stance to learn, and an effective one. He even remembered to
breathe in, let some air out, catch it before he fired.

This time the shot hit right in front of the bottle and threw
dust over it.

“What’d I do wrong?” Colt keened. “I didn’t think I jerked it
like you said.”

“Think it through, kid. Remember what you did.”

“Well, the gun was moving around a lot. I thought I had the
bottle all lined up right. But it seemed like it moved off just as I pulled—uh,
squeezed—the trigger.”

Ryan nodded. “That’s it, for a fact. See, nobody’s perfectly
steady, ’less they’re really living steel. Your arms and hands are going to
move. The key is to work out your own body’s rhythms, work out when to shoot.
And yeah, you can learn to control the swaying better. Just not perfectly.”

Colt sighed. “It all seems so hard to put together.”

“Is anything worthwhile easy to come by?”

“Mebbe too easy, if you’re a baron’s son,” Colt said.

Ryan repressed a grin. He knew that, of course, but he sure
wasn’t about to let on how.

“I wish… I wish my mother’d let me learn more things earlier.
Like this. This is great! But mebbe I’m starting too late.”

He ended on a defeated note.

“No such thing,” Ryan said. “Fact is, you don’t have to be able
to shoot a horsefly out from between his wings at fifty paces to defend yourself
with a handblaster. They’re almost always used inside the distance of a good
spit. You just got to hit a coldheart somewhere around the middle of the body to
put him down, generally. It’s not hard. Of course, the better you get at
shooting a handblaster, the more you’ll be able to use it for. But if you keep
doing what I tell you, you’ll be able to keep yourself alive in most situations
with a handblaster after mebbe two more hours.”

“Really?”

“Really. Now try again.”

The youth controlled his rising excitement with visible effort.
The idea of being able to do anything for himself seemed to thrill him.

He took aim again, carefully following the steps Ryan had
taught him. Keeping both eyes open, he lined up the heavy piece and fired.

The bottle flew in two, shattered in the middle.

“I hit it! I hit it!” The kid began to dance in triumph.

Ryan grabbed his arm. “Mind where you aim that, boy. Never
point it at anything you don’t want a hole in.”

As the echoes of the gunshot died away down the arroyo, Ryan
heard the sound of velvet-gloved hands clapping from the bank behind them. He
looked around in time to see the four sec men jump in alarm and stare up at
their baron, who sat silhouetted against a bullet-colored sky, on the back of a
shiny black stallion. At her right side, Chad, her current golden boy, was
mounted on a palomino gelding. Flanking Miranda were Krysty, Doc and sec boss
Stone, all on horseback.

“Didn’t you boys hear them ride up?” Ryan asked Colt’s guards.
“I did.”

He had. A quick glance had told him who was approaching. A
couple guards looked a bit mulish, but under the eyes of their baron and their
immediate boss they had the sense not to talk back.

“I’m sure I can find ways to sharpen their situational
awareness, Ryan,” Stone said drily. He was never going to love mercies, or be
best buds with Ryan, but after yesterday he seemed to accept the three
outlanders as valuable assets.

Ryan hoped that would be enough to help him convince Miranda of
the reality of the rottie threat soon.

“You’ve done well, Colt,” the baron said. Chad had hopped off
his golden horse. She allowed him to help her dismount. Her long legs were
encased in black trousers and black boots. A black jacket and flat-brimmed black
hat topped the outfit.

Miranda lightly jumped down to the sand of the gully floor.
Ignoring the moves of the sec men to give her a hand, she walked toward her son.
She hugged and kissed him, making him squirm just a bit.

“You’ve instructed my son well, Ryan,” she said.

To Colt she said, “May I?”

She held out a black-gloved hand. He flicked a quick glance at
Ryan and handed the piece over. Miranda held it up and expertly pulled the slide
back a fraction, cracking the chamber to confirm there was a cartridge up the
spout. She does seem to know her way around a blaster, Ryan thought.

“I used to be a pretty fair shot myself,” she said. At her
direction, Kowalski and one of his pals hurried to set up four bottles in a row
along the foot of the far bank, while Miranda loaded a fresh magazine into the
.45.

Barely allowing her sec men to jump out of the line of fire,
she stepped into a modified Weaver stance: left foot advanced, hips turned
slightly toward the target, left elbow down and fingers wrapped tightly over the
shooting hand. Ryan grinned at the realization that of course the baron would
favor that stance. It would make her look much more elegant than the
isosceles.

She rapped off four quick shots. The fragments of the first
bottle were still in the air when the fourth shattered.

Krysty clapped her hands. “Great shooting, Miranda!” she
exclaimed.

The baron had started buddying up to the statuesque redhead
even before yesterday’s triumph. For her part Krysty was no more likely to suck
up to a baron than Ryan himself was. She was a warmhearted person, though, and
genuinely seemed to find something likable in the beautiful, sexy and
rattlesnake-dangerous baron. Now she was telling no more than the truth.

Colt, of course, looked completely deflated. Your mother really
has a knack for cutting your balls off, doesn’t she, boy? Ryan thought.

“Practice like I showed you, kid,” he called, “and you can
learn to do that, too.”

Miranda’s olive cheeks were flushed. “I’m not so rusty, then,
yes? Chad, darling, come here.”

The muscular young man trotted up like an eager pup. At the
baron’s direction a sec man went to her stallion, which had his head down to
munch at the winter-dry grass along the cut, and rummaged quickly in her
saddlebag. He came back carrying a silver hip flask.

She handed it to Chad. “Go stand by the bank,” she said, “and
put this on your head. I’ll shoot it off.”

The youth’s beefy cheeks lost some of their lusty pink. From
some reason he cut his blue eyes in a murderous side glance at Ryan.

“That’s kinda risky, don’t you think, Baron?” Ryan asked.

For that matter the flask looked like predark scavvie. Very
valuable. Too valuable, you’d think, to punch a hole through with a bullet. Then
again, as Ryan knew too well, some barons were all about waste as a means of
displaying their power.

“Oh, poor dear,” Miranda cooed to Chad. “If you’re afraid—”

She didn’t have to finish. All the remaining color left his
face, but he almost sprinted to the bank. Turning to face her, he balanced the
flask atop his head of wavy, white-blond locks. Then, crossing his arms without
dislodging the flask, showing more body control than Ryan would’ve given him
credit for, he smiled broadly at his baronial lover.

For this shot Miranda didn’t use a combat stance. She turned
right side to the youth, left hand stylishly on her hip, heavy pistol extended
confidently in a slender hand. It was a target pose, the way Mildred stood when
she needed to make a precise shot and had the time. It had been double-tough to
teach her not to try it in the average firefight, where it would likely get her
chilled in a hurry.

With professional assurance Miranda lined up the sights. Her
breasts rose and fell as she breathed in and partially out. She squeezed the
trigger.

Pale yellow flame spurted from the handblaster’s blocky muzzle.
A black hole appeared in the middle of the smiling Chad’s forehead. His brains
blew out in a black cloud behind. He was still smiling as he folded to the soft
sand like a suddenly empty suit of clothes.

Miranda stalked over to stand above his corpse. She tipped the
Colt’s muzzle up and blew away a wisp of gray-green smoke.

“If you had to fuck one of my maids,” she said casually, “you
should at least have had the sense not to try to flatter her by telling her how
sweet it was to fuck a nice, juicy pussy instead of a withered-up old
prune.”

Dropping the handblaster on the chill’s chest, she turned and
strode back toward the bank. A pair of ashen-faced sec men almost bowled each
other over to lock hands to provide a step for the baron out of the wash.

Everybody said lots of nothing.

As Miranda mounted her stallion, Ryan told Colt, “I guess that
wraps it up here for today.”

The youth was scrutinizing the toes of his boots. “Can we come
out again soon?” he asked shyly, without raising his head.

“Reckon so,” Ryan said.

He heard hooves drum on hard dirt again. This time they rapped
faster than when Miranda and her party had arrived. He walked quickly toward the
bank himself, passing close to Krysty. And wasn’t surprised when she fell in
beside him. Nor when she gripped his hand until they reached the bank and
scrambled up, with Doc close behind.

Stone had heard the hoofbeats, too. The sec men hustled to get
up the bank themselves and put themselves between the baron and the new
arrival.

It was a kid of mebbe ten, a stable boy, Ryan guessed, riding a
big bay bareback.

“Perico sent me, Baron,” the boy shouted, reining in. Ryan
changed his first assessment: stable girl. Although with bobbed brown hair and a
stick figure, she wasn’t easy to identify as such until she opened her
mouth.