Wretched Earth (2 page)

As if to prove his point, he began to pull on it, as if hoping
to open it using nothing more than the friction of his fingertips.

Amazingly, it worked. The door slid open with only a token
squeal of protest.

“Watch it—” Reno began.

He had no idea what made him voice the aborted warning. Before
it finished leaving his mouth a dark shape shot from the blackness beyond the
door and hit the kneeling Drygulch as he shouldered his pack. The tall man went
over with a crunch that horrified Reno, until he realized it was likely some of
the small, seemingly sturdy vials Drygulch had just stuffed in his pack
breaking, not his bones.

Then Reno had something to be really horrified about, as he
swung his flashlight on target. Its feeble shine revealed what looked to be a
spiky-furred gray rat the size of a large dog, but with a snoutful of sharp
teeth instead of incisors. And an extra set of appendages like a mantis's clawed
forelimbs jutting from just behind its shoulders, three feet long and covered in
gleaming black chitin.

Drygulch had somehow got a hand under the mutie's lower jaw and
was fending off its fangs. For the moment. Reno stepped up so his shotgun's
muzzle was about six inches from where thick neck met misshapen torso, and
fired.

The noise was like two cast-iron pans being clapped together
either side of his head. Muzzle-flame splashed against the creature's body. The
sickening reek of burned hair went right up Reno's nostrils like barbs. The
charge of scavenged number 4 buck tore the fanged head halfway from the
body.

Reno kicked it aside, where it lay with its legs twitching,
jaws still snapping, and those awful insectile claws scratching futilely at a
synthetic-tiled floor.

Another figure darted from the door. Lariat's .45 bucked and
roared and vomited yellow flame three times, fast. The horror squealed and
tumbled into a forward roll that carried it into the far wall.

Johnny stood with his back to the doorway. His lean, handsome
face stretched to accommodate a mouth that had become a yawning oval of fear. He
held his little carbine halfway to his shoulder as if to shoot at the second
creature that had come through.

Then his expression grew strangely curious. Reno heard a sound
like somebody stepping on a ripe gourd.

A claw like the first mutie's suddenly burst through Johnny's
chest. Blood fountained out around it, but didn't hide the fact that it was way
bigger than the one the other rat thing sported. The clawed arm lifted Johnny
off the floor. He screamed and flailed his limbs mindlessly. The M-1 carbine
cracked with deafening shots, sending ricochets howling around the
adventurers.

“Time to go!” Lariat yelled, as a tumbling round glanced off
Reno's shoulder.

Drygulch jumped up and ran. Lariat raced after him, firing her
handblaster back into the infinite blackness of the inner doorway. Backpedaling
into the corridor, Reno started to warn his boss that she might hit their
guide.

Then he asked himself why that would be a bad thing.

* * *

“L
ET
ME
LOOK
AT
IT
,” Reno said.

Drygulch held his wounded arm away. “No. It's fine. Leave me
'lone.”

The last of their jackrabbit stew boiled in a cast-iron kettle
on a little break-down aluminum tripod over a campfire of driftwood and dried
weeds. Some flakes of what Lariat claimed was sage bubbled in the mix.

The stew smelled to Reno like stinkbug ass. He guessed it would
taste worse. But after this day a good case of the running shits would only be
appropriate. Anyway, he was hungry enough to
eat
a
stinkbug's ass. A whole pot of stinkbug asses.

But by the sick yellow light of the flames, he made out
something disturbing. Reddish inflammation, shot through with nasty dark
discoloration, crept up the man's lanky arm from his bandaged hand.

Lariat pronounced the stew done. Drygulch refused any, which
right there showed he was in bad shape. Reno ate his share with relish. It was
definitely better than stinkbug ass. If not much else.

When nothing remained that his spoon could catch, Reno licked
his bowl. Then he scrubbed it with dirt and a handful of crackly, dry
bunchgrass. As he stuffed his hobo tool and bowl in his pack, Lariat motioned
him aside.

The night sky was full of stars. An orange moon hung near the
western horizon. Wind quested restlessly through sere grass. Most of the light
snow that had fallen earlier had melted away.

“So what do you think he's got?” she asked.

Reno shrugged. “Dunno. Won't let me look at it.”

“I can hear you,” Drygulch said. “Got no call talking about me
in the third person like I was a…a rock or somethin'. Insultin'.”

“Well, if some damn fool hadn't gone and stuck his hand in his
pack and gotten cut to shit on broken glass, we wouldn't be having this
conversation,” Lariat said.

“I was tryin' to find out if them prion vials was okay after I
landed on 'em!”

“And found out the hard way you'd busted most of them.”

“We got a few intact, Lariat,” Reno said. He hated disputes. He
knew how quickly
nasty
could erupt. When that
happened it was usually him who wound up getting the bad end of the ass-wiping
stick. “Oughta be able to get something for them, if we find the right
whitecoats.”

“I can do that,” she said. Then, taking Reno by the arm, she
urged him a little farther outside the circle of faint firelight. And more
important, out of the aggrieved Drygulch's earshot.

“Could it mebbe be gangrene?” she asked.

“Too soon,” Reno said. “Could be blood poisoning, though.”

He glanced uneasily back at the tall man, who had slithered
into his bedroll and deliberately lain down with his back to his comrades as
well as the fire.

“I wonder if those prions have anything to do with his
condition,” Reno said softly.

“Doesn't much matter if the stupe won't let us look at it,”
Lariat said in a tone that suggested it didn't much matter to her if he did. “He
doesn't wake up in the morning, we'll know something was wrong.”

* * *

C
OMMOTION
ROUSED
R
ENO
from a wondrous dream of soft sheets and blow jobs.

He sat up. By the vagrant red gleam of the low coals they'd
kicked the fire into before bedding down, he saw Drygulch thrashing in his
sleeping bag. He moaned like an animal in distress.

“Drygulch?” Reno asked tentatively.

Lariat appeared out of the darkness. She'd been on sentry duty.
Johnny Hueco's M-1 carbine was tipped back over her shoulder.

“Drygulch?” she said.

He uttered a strangled noise somewhere between a cough and a
scream, then spasmed so hard his back arched clear off the ground. His fingers
raked frozen soil, then he fell back silent and still.

After he stayed that way for a full minute, Lariat said, “That
can't be good.”

Reno skinned out of his sleeping bag and started pulling on
jeans encrusted with dirt.

“Lariat, be careful,” he said.

“Why?” she asked. “Poor slagger's chilled.”

She prodded Drygulch with the toe of a boot.

With an inhuman snarl he sat up. His face was a strange gray in
the ember light, cheeks sunken, the lips drawn back from his teeth. A network of
dark lines spread across his face as if his veins were right beneath the skin
and filled with ink. His eyes burned like coals in black-painted cups.

Lariat jumped back in alarm. “Drygulch?” she whispered.

He thrashed, as if the bedroll were a mutie monster whose
clutches he was trying to escape.

“Get back!” Reno shouted. “Get away from him! He isn't
right!”

“Drygulch, you're scaring me—”

Bursting free at last from the sleeping bag, Drygulch uttered
an eerie moan and pounced on Lariat like an angry mountain lion.

Chapter One

“Gig sucks,” Jak Lauren complained.

The crowded barroom of Omar’s Triple-Fine Caravanserai and
Gaudy reeked of spilled beer, spilled sweat and the faint tang of spilled
blood.

At least, Ryan Cawdor thought, leaning on the hardwood bar with
a protective hand on the handle of a mug of beer, I can’t smell puke. Much.

“Reluctant as I am to condone, and thereby encourage, what may
be a new nadir of our young associate’s articulation, I fear I most heartily
concur with the sentiment,” Dr. Theophilus Tanner said. He had to shout to make
himself heard over the din of drunken conversation, riotous laughter and
tinkling of a gap-toothed and out-of-tune upright piano.

The piano, inexplicably painted canary-yellow, was played by a
girl of about twelve with freckles, pigtails, a homespun dress and at least a
little skill. Those who thought her musical talents deficient were well-advised
to keep their opinions behind their teeth, if they liked having teeth. The girl,
Sary-Anne, was one of the innumerable children claimed by the tavern keeper and
his three wives.

Omar kept a hickory cudgel in a leather holster down his leg to
bust the heads of the obstreperous, not to mention the teeth of the
hypercritical. A similar holster down the other leg carried a sawed-off,
double-barrel scattergun for the especially hard to convince.

As gaunt as a crane, Doc Tanner perched next to Ryan on a bar
stool of stout raw planks hammered together, with some sawdust-filled burlap for
a “cushion.” The tails of his frock coat hung down almost to the loose sawdust
that covered the warped wooden floor.

He raised a tumbler of what the bartender sold as “whiskey,”
and which Ryan was sure was just shine colored brown with
he-didn’t-want-to-know-what. For a moment Doc studied its contents, which would
probably have still been murky had the glass been clean and the light better
than the glow of a few kerosene lanterns strung strategically around the crowded
barroom. Strategically so that none of the patrons could get too good a look at
the goods on tap. Then, with a convulsive heave, the ancient-looking man grabbed
the heavy glass in both hands and tossed the shot down his throat. Immediately,
his body quivered.

“Mother’s milk,” Doc said. His long, silver-white hair seemed
to have gotten wilder. His seamed face hitched into a sad smile, and his blue
eyes took on a faraway look.

“You know it’s not like we had a choice,” their shorter
companion said. The man in the leather jacket and battered fedora adjusted the
glasses on the bridge of his nose. “Our point of arrival was picked clean, and
we all got a nasty addiction to eating, which we have to tend to.”

“Point of arrival” was J. B. Dix’s way of saying “redoubt” when
unfriendly ears might be listening to their conversation. Located in redoubts,
deep beneath the earth, was a network of functioning six-sided matter-transfer
units with armaglass walls color-coded for identification. These mat-trans units
gave potential access to sites dotted not just all over North America, but the
rest of the world, as well.

“Can hunt,” Jak said, tossing down his beer. He was a teenager
with a mane of long hair as white as snow. The color of his skin matched his
hair. He was an albino, and still cranky over the dispute that had met his
initial attempt to enter the caravanserai.

The sign over the round arch over the gate through the high
mud-brick wall that surrounded the compound read No Muties. Fortunately, Omar
himself, eventually summoned by one of his sons, understood that albinism wasn’t
a mutie trait, and allowed Jak to enter.

Their employer, Boss Tim Plunkett, had complained loudly at the
delay the whole while. There were reasons why Jak said the gig sucked.

“That’s your answer to everything, Jak,” J.B. said, taking off
his glasses and wiping them clear of condensation with a shirttail. “We can
hunt, yeah. If you don’t mind living on about half an irradiated lizard a week,
which is all even you could come up with in this sorry-ass place.”

“We’ve done jobs before,” Ryan said. “Didn’t always care for
all of them. But we did them and moved on. Like J.B. says, we have to eat.”

“Could leave,” Jak said stubbornly. He meant go back to the
mat-trans and jump out.

A woman as tall as Ryan and skinny as a chicken bone came up,
carrying a tray with empty mugs of grimy glass and chipped ceramic. Despite
stringy blond hair and a thin face without much to boast of by way of a chin,
she wasn’t bad to look at. If he wasn’t deeply in love with a gorgeous redhead
who was off somewhere with the other member of their party, predark freezie
Mildred Wyeth, Ryan might’ve eyed the blonde with some interest after hard days
on the trail. Plenty of the caravanserai customers were doing so—the wag drivers
in their leather and weird hairdos, with hard voices and harder eyes, and even
the mild-mannered cultists who were traveling west in a green school bus, all
wearing scarves over their heads that were tied beneath their chins like
bonnets.

As far as Ryan knew, she wasn’t available for that kind of
service to anyone but Omar himself. That was because she was one of the
caravanserai owner’s wives, known only and unsurprisingly as the Skinny One.
Omar’s other wives, the Fat One and the Nuke Red Hot One, were somewhere out of
the picture, although Ryan thought he could make out Red’s voice, which had a
notable edge to it, carving a new bunghole in one of the kitchen help for
spilling stew.

The Skinny One had arrived to see if they needed refills. Doc
ordered another shot, which made Ryan’s already thin lips tighten until they
almost vanished. Doc sometimes had a tenuous grip on the here and now. The
one-eyed man didn’t see that he needed to kill his brain cells with any more
rotgut.

But J.B., who was the group’s armorer and Ryan’s oldest friend,
flashed an easy grin. “Lighten up and let a man ease his troubles,” he said.
Then, as if to pretend he was talking about himself, he ordered another shot, as
well.

Ryan studied his own heavy tumbler a moment and decided he
didn’t need any more. He wasn’t normally queasy, but the glass had so many
thumbprints on it they appeared to be etched in. Between that and the brown
shine eating the lining off his stomach walls like hydrochloric acid, he
reckoned he’d feel gut-shot if he kept on. He held a hand over the glass to
indicate he didn’t need a refill.

The Skinny One bustled off, returning a moment later to fill
Doc’s and J.B.’s glasses from a bottle.

“Besides,” J.B. said, as if he hadn’t been interrupted, “we
might wind up somewhere worse. It’s happened.”

A commotion started at the door. A tall, stout man with a
florid face and sweeping brown mustache strode in, as proud as a baron. Faces
turned to stare.

“Boss Plunkett sure loves to make an entrance,” J.B.
muttered.

Plunkett was dressed in expensive if tasteless scavenged
clothing: a pink shirt, yellow cravat and a matching vest that strained to
contain his paunch; overly tight brown flare-bottom trousers; black, pointy-toed
boots shiny as lizard eyes. The companions’ employer had a woman on either arm,
one blonde, one black-haired, both looking pretty good, not too hard or
shopworn. They were named Tina and Angela. He called them his secretaries, but
as far as Ryan and his friends could tell they were just sluts, companions hired
to look good on his arm and perform whatever other duties were required.

Behind the big man and his women came Loomis, his bodyguard. He
was middle height, with a dark face like the blade of an ax, black hair cut
close to his narrow skull, a mustache almost as extravagant as Plunkett’s, and a
perpetually unshaved jaw. He wore leather pants and a leather vest, but was
shirtless, showing off a chest furred like a black bear’s ass. On one side of a
silver-studded belt he wore a big survival knife with a saw-back blade. On the
other he carried a chromed .44 Magnum Taurus blaster, which looked to be in good
condition.

He gave Ryan a quick, hateful stare as soon as he noticed him.
He resented the companions’ presence. He seemed to think it reflected a lack of
confidence on his employer’s part, which Ryan reckoned showed Plunkett had more
sense than most people would give him credit for.

The fat man immediately began to berate the nearest server, a
skinny, pigtailed girl, in a loud voice.

“Stupe,” Jak muttered.

“Yeah, well,” Ryan said. “It’ll be over soon. Soon as we
deliver the boss and his mysterious trunks to Sweetwater Junction.”

They’d been three days on the road guarding Tim Plunkett’s
corpulent body, his two “secretaries” and an assortment of other flunkies
including Loomis. The companions spent most of their time split up among a
Toyota Tundra pickup truck that served as a sec wag, a former RV that carried
extra bodies and bags, and occasionally the Land Cruiser that was the boss’s
personal ride. They’d met Plunkett and his motley crew east of Omar’s at a
trading post even farther out in the back of beyond, little more than a shack
and an outhouse set too close to a watering hole for comfort. Despite Loomis’s
swaggering assurance that he and his pair of assistant sec men, who doubled as
roustabouts, could handle anything the wasteland could throw at them, Plunkett
was clearly nervous. He’d offered the friends jobs as extra sec before even
introducing himself.

They’d tried not to act too eager. They really were running on
fumes, with barely the jack to buy water from the sketchy well. They’d had a run
of poor luck of late.

“‘Beware yon Cassius,’” Doc quoted sonorously, “‘for he has a
lean and hungry look.’”

“Plunkett?” J.B. asked in amazement.

“I think he means Loomis,” Ryan said.

“I do indeed, my dear Ryan,” Doc said. “Our esteemed employer
more closely resembles a hog in a silk suit. Though I grant he has a hungry look
to him as well, especially when he’s tucking into a hearty repast.”

Doc shook his head. “Swine. I
hate
swine.” Tears brimmed in his blue eyes. “The sows, the sows—whenever I eat a ham
sandwich, I feel vindicated. Vindicated!”

“Easy there, Doc,” Ryan said.

Although he looked to be on the hard end of his sixties, Dr.
Theophilus Algernon Tanner was chronologically only in his thirties. Yet he was
enormously old—scary old. He’d been born on Valentine’s Day in 1868, then
trawled out of his own time by twentieth-century whitecoats. Doc proved to be a
difficult subject, so he was trawled forward in time to the Deathlands. The
result, along with premature aging, was that his mind wasn’t clamped down any
too hard, and tended to wander at times.

“It was under an evil star that we signed on with Plunkett,” he
said now, suddenly focusing.

Ryan scratched his shaggy head. “Not my favorite thing,
either,” he admitted. “I don’t know whether it’s something he did, something
he’s got in his brain or something he’s got in one of those trunks. But he’s
triple-scared somebody’s going to make a play for it, whatever it is.”

“Folks don’t pay like he pays us if they aren’t scared, Ryan,”
J.B. said. “You’re right. We’ve done tough jobs before, and always come through
ace. Or at least alive, which amounts to the same thing.”

“Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing,” Doc
announced. “Eddie Rickenbacker told me that. He was a good lad, if rather on the
reckless side.”

Ryan had no idea what Doc was talking about. He decided to let
it slide. It wasn’t that he lacked curiosity. But whenever Doc launched into one
of his tortured explanations, Ryan’s head hurt.

Just then, with a gust of cold evening air, somebody poked his
head through the door and shouted, “Hey, everybody! That big-tit redhead and the
black woman are dustin’ it up with a pack of caravaneers!”

Ryan wished he hadn’t passed on that refill. “Time to go.”

* * *

A
HARD
SHOVE
between the breasts
sat Mildred Wyeth down hard on her tailbone. The impact sent white sparks
shooting up in her brain, and raised tears in her eyes.

How’d I get myself into this? she wondered.

It was a question with several possible answers. In one, she’d
been a physician and cryogenics researcher in America at the end of the
twentieth century. Complications following routine abdominal surgery had
resulted in Mildred being frozen in an experimental cryogenic unit, with the
hopes of reviving her in the future.

Then the world ended.

Several years earlier Ryan Cawdor and the others had stumbled
across her cryopod and thawed her. She’d been with them since, trapped in a
future she definitely hadn’t volunteered for.

But, more immediately…

She and Krysty Wroth had been walking back from where the wags
were parked across the compound.

“You know, Krysty,” Mildred said, “it’s weird. Usually these
storage places were built in or real near a town of at least some size. So
they’d have, like,
customers,
you know?”

Krysty nodded and smiled absently. Mildred stifled a sigh.
Sometimes her companions had little curiosity about the history of their kind
and their continent, except insofar as it might lead to plunder or some other
more or less tangible advantage. Not even the tall, statuesque woman with the
flame-red hair and the emerald green eyes, who had a lively intelligence,
imagination and general thirst for knowledge about the world. She, too, was
mostly fixed on the present.

Of course, Mildred reminded herself, if you wake up every
morning with no way to be sure there’ll be food to eat or water to drink, and
that terrible muties aren’t going to kill you or coldhearts rape and enslave
you, you might find the concerns of the moment a lot more pressing than some
past, so long dead it isn’t even moldy anymore.

“I guess the war or the quakes knocked down whatever town lay
nearby, and storms and scavengers took care of the rest,” Mildred said.