Wretched Earth (16 page)

“What is it, Sandy?” Miranda asked. Her voice held surprising
gentleness, for a woman who had just chilled a faithless lover in cold
blood.

And would of course get away with it, since she was the law in
Sweetwater Junction. The north half, anyway.

“He says to come quick, please. Been a wag train attacked at
the ten-mile marker east of town. Only two survived!”

Chapter Nineteen

“Survivors said that they came out of everywhere,” the
young man said, “all at once. Dozens of them. Mebbe hundreds. Just attacked
without warning.”

He wasn’t a sec man, but a local from the north half of the
ville. One loyal to Miranda, it would seem, since he had come forward
voluntarily. Ryan wasn’t sure that was wise, from the standpoint of continued
survival. It seemed to him that the safest way to deal with Baron Miranda was
not to be noticed by her. Admittedly, he might have been jaundiced by recent
events. Then again, that was how it ran with most barons.

Krysty gave his hand a squeeze. He sat on a chair, and she on a
fancy footstool beside him in the parlor, where Miranda liked to hold audiences.
Doc stood by the fireplace in his shirtsleeves, his bright blue eyes blinking as
if he was befuddled.

“So, what did they say attacked them again?” Perico asked.

The witness shook his shock of brown hair. He was sturdily
built, with the big callused hands of a craftsman.

“It was all crazy, what they were saying,” he said. “It was
like—like chills had risen up to attack. Like they were all rotting and
everything, but still could walk. You could shoot them again and again, cut
them, beat them down. But they just kept coming.”

“Were they after the cargo?” Miranda asked. She still wore her
riding pants and boots, although she’d doffed her jacket to show the pink silk
blouse she had worn beneath. She carried a riding crop, which she ticked
incessantly against the gray slate of the mantelpiece.

“No. Didn’t seem interested in no wags. Or anything that was in
them. Just people.”

“You said some traders rode horses,” Stone said. He was
scowling so hard he looked as if his harsh face was going to implode. “Did these
creatures show any interest in them?”

“If they did, the traders didn’t say nothin’ about it. The
monsters just zeroed in on them.”

“What did these—
things
—do to the
merchants?” Miranda asked.

“Et ’em alive,” he said, “ma’am.”

For a moment there was no sound except the popping of the fire.
The imported firewood smelled like piñon pine from parts far west.

Colt Sharp sat perched on the front of a chair, twisting his
hands together between his knees. He still looked green around the gills.
Apparently the night of blood and fire when his father had died and Gate Jacks
and his traitorous accomplices were chased from the palace hadn’t accustomed him
to seeing people get chilled up close and personal. Then again, Chad’s death had
caught Ryan by surprise, too.

“So our new friends were right about the rotties all along?”
Colt asked.

His mother scowled.

“Mebbe,” Perico said quickly.

“Not proved,” Miranda snapped. “Where are these traders? I want
to talk to them now, Stone.”

The witness turned wide brown eyes to the sec chief. “Tell
her,” Stone said.

“They came riding in on their horses like they had screamwings
on their tails,” the witness said. “Threw some jack at the guards for water
chits. Let their horses drink from the trough, drank like a day’s ration
themselves, and filled their canteens. They just babbled their story to anyone
who’d listen. Then when their horses had drunk and caught their breaths, they
jumped back on, said they was riding west fast as they could. They said
ever’body else should, too, if they liked living.”

“Send four men, Stone,” Miranda said. “Give them fast horses.
Tell them to ride hard to Ten Mile and find out what really happened. Tell them
to be careful.”

“I’ll tell them to do their best, Baron,” Stone said drily.

He left. As usual, Miranda had come to a decision quickly. She
liked them carried out the same way.

“What do we do now?” Colt asked.

“Wait,” Perico said. “Your mother’s right. We can’t go running
off in all directions until we got a better idea what we’re up against.”

The baron looked to the townie, still standing by and looking
nervous.

“You may go,” she said.

“Did I do well, Baron?”

“Yes. You have served your ville well. Your family shall have a
week’s extra water ration chits as reward. See to it, Perico?”

The man jabbered his thanks to Miranda for her generosity as
the grizzled adviser led him out.

Ryan gave Krysty’s hand a last squeeze and stood. “I’d like to
go out, cruise around the ville some. See if I can pick up anything more. Doc,
you come with me. Krysty, why don’t you stay here.”

Miranda nodded. “She can lighten the hours for me with stories
of her adventures.”

“It’d be my pleasure,” Krysty said.

She gave Ryan a “be careful” look as he gathered up Doc and
headed out. He just grinned back.

Yeah, he thought. As if.

* * *

T
HE
TRADERS
’
HORROR
TALE
had gotten the people of
Sweetwater Junction stirred up. They stood in little groups on street corners or
talked across fences, and even forgot to duck and scurry when Ryan and Doc swung
by with their black sec man armbands. The two men garnered no more than
increasingly wild rumors about the attack. The stories got stranger every time
they heard them.

Almost strange enough to approach the truth.

Some spoke in favor of fleeing west into the wasteland
straightaway. Others spoke of getting ready and fighting for their homes, their
loved ones, their lives. Still others observed that’d just get them chilled by
one faction or another. Neither would-be baron of Sweetwater Junction brooked
anything resembling rivalry from anywhere else.

Still, the talk of fighting back made Ryan and Doc exchange a
knowing look and furtive smile.

Mebbe there’s hope, after all, Ryan thought.

* * *

S
TONE
’
S
INVESTIGATIVE
PATROL
came back at sunset. One lone man rode
up to the palace, swaying in the saddle of a horse that blew froth and rolled
its eyes in terror. Palace servants ran out to help the injured sec man gently
from his saddle.

The horse uttered a mighty grunt, shuddered and dropped
dead.

The baron’s personal healer, Lamellar, raced out, with Ryan,
Krysty and Doc right behind. The wounded man was moaning. His clothes were
ripped into ribbons and blotched with blood like a paint horse’s rump.

Lamellar, who had a black comb-over of prodigious length that
was always coming loose, knelt by the injured man’s side. On cue, the comb-over
fell down so it was almost tickling the sec man’s cheek.

“He’s been severely scratched and bitten,” the healer said.
“He’s lost a substantial amount of blood. But unless he’s bleeding internally he
seems to have no major trauma. We’ll have to get him inside and examine him
carefully to tell.”

“Wait, Miranda,” Krysty said urgently. “If he’s bitten, he’s a
danger to everybody. He’ll
change.
”

“If that’s true,” Perico said, “best for all concerned to just
chill him.”

“There is no ‘maybe’ about it, my friend,” Doc said. “Unless
you think the prospect of becoming a mindless monster with an insatiable
appetite for human flesh and brains might appeal to him? I did not know him
well.”

Perico looked hard at Doc.

“When you get him inside you need to strap him down tight,”
Ryan said to Lamellar. “Before you even examine him. And you need to keep him
that way. You can work around the restraints.”

“Why, that’s barbaric!” the healer said, turning his head
toward Ryan so that the strayed combover fell to his shoulder.

“‘Barbaric’ does not even begin to describe the nature and
conduct of the creature he is turning into,” Doc said. “‘Diabolical’ would be
closer.”

“Baron—”

Miranda’s brows were pulled together thoughtfully. “Do as they
say,” she said. “If these people are telling the truth about the monsters that
did this to him, we don’t dare take the slightest risk.”

She swept Ryan, Doc and Krysty with her dark and searching
gaze.

“It would appear you were telling the truth,” she said.

Stone appeared. His long, heavy face hardened as he saw the
wounded man.

“He’s the only one back?” he asked.

“He’s it,” Ryan said.

He was about to say something else, something urgent, but
Miranda preempted him.

“We must seal the entrances to the ville,” she snapped. “Not
just the main gates. There are ways through the perimeter fence. Everybody
knows. They must be sealed or guarded.”

Stone’s coal-smudge eyebrows squashed even closer together.
“What about the other half of the ville?” he asked, with the air of a man who
knew the risks he ran in mentioning that the baron was in reality only half a
ruler.

But she was focused. As with Doc’s spells, so it seemed with
Miranda’s rages: real danger flatlined everything else.

“Seal the streets and secure the buildings along the square and
the east and west roads,” she ordered. “We’ll deal with the traitor’s
side…later.”

“That’ll take a lot of men, baron.”

“Use them all if you have to. Arm trustworthy servants. Impress
citizens if that’s what it takes.”

She looked at Ryan and his companions.

“We have to at least act as if the whole story the outlanders
told us is true. If even one of these horrors gets into my ville
undetected…”

She shook her head. Miranda didn’t strike Ryan as the sort to
shrink from much. But even she couldn’t face the consequences of the change
sickness taking a foothold in Sweetwater Junction.

Two servants rushed up carrying a blue tarp. Lamellar directed
them to transfer the wounded man onto it as gently as possible. Then, by
unspoken consent, Ryan and Doc took the corners of the tarp by the sec man’s
feet, leaving the ones by his head to the servants.

“One, two, three, heave,” Lamellar chanted. The four men rose,
picking up the injured man. His deadweight, distributed among the four of them,
was bearable.

“You’re still here?” Miranda said to Stone. He moved off with
alacrity surprising in a man so solidly built.

The rest of them followed the healer into the big house. He led
them to a flight of stairs to the basement. Navigating the wooden steps with
what amounted to a swaying bag of 170-pound man, with nothing but lantern light
to guide them, was tricky, but they got him down without incident.

An oil lantern burned on a rickety table on the packed-dirt
floor of a hallway. The basement was cold and smelled of cool earth and vinegar.
At Lamellar’s direction they carried the victim through the first door on the
right.

It was lit by what milky light made its way through long,
narrow, glass-block windows near the ceiling. Sudden garish white light flooded
the room as the healer flipped a switch. It came from an incandescent bulb in a
flattened-cone reflector hanging from the scavvied acoustic-tile ceiling.

“On-demand alcohol-fueled generator,” he explained. “The late
baron’s father didn’t fancy having his wounds tended to by someone with a
squint.”

It told Ryan something about the barons of Sweetwater Junction,
that they had the capacity for electric power, and kept it reserved solely for
emergencies. Most would’ve used it extravagantly, to show off their own power if
nothing else.

A gleaming stainless-steel surgical table dominated the medical
room. Leather straps dangled from brackets above a white tile floor that sloped
subtly toward a brass drain in its center.

Ryan and Doc helped hoist the moaning man onto the table, then
they stepped aside.

“I mislike the look of that table, my dear Ryan,” Doc murmured,
as they found themselves in front of white enameled-metal cabinets and a counter
of what seemed to be poured and smoothed concrete.

“I hear you,” Ryan replied.

Fussing like a mother duck, Lamellar supervised the servants
transferring the patient from tarp to table safely, then he shooed them out.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said to Ryan and Doc as he
fastened straps over the wounded man’s ankles. “This is my domain. Upstairs in
the palace, Miranda rules. In the ville her word is law—or at least in the north
half. Down here I’m king, and I would never condone torture.”

Ryan wasn’t especially reassured by the way the stooped old man
emphasized the last by gesticulating with a razor-edged scalpel.

“Besides,” the healer said, slicing bootlaces stiff and crusty
with half-dried blood and muck, “Miranda isn’t much given to private torture. If
she’s going to inflict pain, she likes to make a public example of it.”

He didn’t seem at all abashed by the fact that scarcely were
the words out of his mouth than the woman herself blew in, still smelling of the
outdoors and glowering like a thunderhead. She was followed closely by Krysty
and Perico.

With a pealing scream that rang off the walls and ceiling
tiles, the wounded man sat bolt upright even as Lamellar cinched his waist. The
doctor leaped back with his comb-over flapping in alarm.

“They’re coming!” the sec man shrieked. “Nothing stops them!
Blasters can’t stop them! Can’t chill the dead. The eyes—”

He flopped back, his own eyes staring unblinking at the
ceiling.

With a sigh, Lamellar straightened. “That’s that, then. It’s
over.” He reached to shut the man’s open eyes.

Ryan grabbed his wrist. “Fireblast, it is!” he snapped. “You
get right back there and fasten up all those straps now, or I’ll chill you where
you stand!”

Dark eyes saucer wide, Lamellar turned a colorless face to the
baron.

“Do as he tells you,” she ordered, “or I’ll let him do as he
said.”

“And by the Three Kennedys, man, make sure the straps are
tight!” Doc proclaimed in a voice that quavered with passion. “Because now is
when the
real
danger starts!”