Wretched Earth (20 page)

The old man had been lying on his back on the low bench against
the wall that was the room’s sole item of furniture. This wasn’t the torture
chamber where Miranda had whipped Krysty, but a holding cell across the hall.
Now he got to his feet, a little more confidently than his companions had, or so
Ryan thought. The one-eyed man suspected the professor hadn’t been beaten as
comprehensively as he had. Not because the vengeful baron or her loyalist sec
men had any consideration for Doc’s apparent age, but because they reckoned he
needed
less of a beating to be disabled.

The boy moistened his lips before defiantly announcing, “I’m
getting you out of here.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

“Lad,” Doc said, “why would you want to go and do a
thing like that? It was your own mother who put us here.”

“She was wrong about you! I know it!”

“No, she wasn’t,” Krysty said through her teeth. She was
pulling on her clothes, her jaw set against the pain.

“Krysty,” Ryan said, “that might not be the best way to go
about—”

She waved him off. The sight of blood dried to a brownish hue
on her white hand stilled him as much as the gesture. His reflex was to jump the
boy, his words—and his blaster—notwithstanding, and seize him as a hostage. He
stamped it down hard. His rational mind told him that would be triple-stupe. And
he trusted Krysty’s intuition.

The boy’s face worked like a couple of fists in a
pillowcase.

“My mother,” he gritted out, “is not a…stable person. She wants
what’s best for the ville. And me. But she gets blinded by her own anger
sometimes.”

“We did deceive her,” Krysty said evenly.

“Yes! Because you came here to warn us about the rotties. And
you knew she wouldn’t believe you. But you were right! But you…you pissed her
off, hotter than nuke-red. And now she’s gone to do something stupe with
Jacks!”

“Fireblast,” Ryan said. “So beyond letting us loose, what’s on
your mind, Colt?”

The kid’s chest swelled out past his gut as he drew in a
decisive breath. “We’re going to make sure the rotties don’t take this
ville.”

* * *

“M
AMA
!” C
OLT
YIPPED
as blasterfire
boiled up from the center of town. The fountain was still out of sight, since
they didn’t want to walk right down the main north–south drag in plain view of
the square.

Ryan’s hard grip on the youth’s shoulder prevented him from
rabbiting toward the sound of shooting. A vast crowd of crows circled above the
square and its public fountain like a black whirlwind.

“He lacks little of courage, my dear Ryan,” Doc said, “if still
much of sense.”

A stiffening breeze ruffled Ryan’s shaggy hair. He held his
head up even though the wind’s icy fingers managed to probe even beneath his
eyepatch and wake a dull throb of pain in the socket. The bruises and scrapes
he’d suffered being battered into a stupor hurt double-bad now. But he was
damned if he’d let the world—much less Miranda Sharp—see evidence of that in his
face or bearing.

Well, other than the puffiness, bruising and split lip, of
course. Nothing he could do there.

They had the streets to themselves this early morning. Ryan
guessed most of the citizens were inside, heads down, knowing that whatever
happened on the main square, all they could gain personally from any kind of
involvement, or mebbe even seeing too much, was a triple-load of grief.

Floating on the wind he heard a
dee-dee-dee
like a killdeer flying nearby. It wasn’t an uncommon
winter sound here on the plains. Just not in the middle of a ville, with the
only birds in view being crows. He grinned.

“Come on out, Jak,” he called.

“Who that?” a voice asked from somewhere unseen. “Baron’s
son?”

“Yes,” Colt said, not even slowing his stride. “I’m going to—to
talk some sense into my mother.”

Krysty caught Ryan’s eye and shrugged, wincing as she did.
Personally, Ryan wouldn’t undertake to pound sense into Miranda with a
nuke-powered pile driver. But plans began to coalesce from the myriad
contingencies that swarmed in his mind like the crows above the firefight. The
boy might yet be the key to saving the ville.

And, most importantly, the asses of Ryan and his companions.
Which, after all, was the whole purpose of the enterprise.

Jak vaulted a board fence to join them. “Where’re Mildred and
J.B.?” Krysty asked.

“By square. Watching shitstorm come down.”

“How did you come to be there?” Doc asked.

“Thrown in jail. J.B. picked lock. Chilled guards, grabbed
gear, blew out.” He frowned. “Glasses kid in cell with us. Told about rotties,
first.”

“Reno?” Krysty asked.

“Fireblast!” Ryan said. “That must be what blew our cover. He
told his story to fucking Jacks, who recognized us in the tale.”

“And told Miranda,” Krysty said. “They must have used that as a
pretext to set up their meeting today.”

“Which, predictably, has ended in violence,” Doc added.

The initial burst of blasterfire had died down. Now Ryan heard
shouting and the fresh rippling of shots from the square.

“Come on!” Colt shouted. This time he was too far from Ryan to
grab. He cut left toward the main road that ran from the palace to the
square.

“Ryan?” Doc asked.

He shrugged again. “We follow. Kid’s our best card right now.
And he seems set on playing himself, here and now.”

Colt Sharp stopped stock-still in the middle of the wide dirt
road and screamed.

* * *

W
ATCHING
FROM
THE
SHOP
’
S
east window, Mildred had to give Brick Finneran credit. He was right on Jacks
after Miranda shot him. He scooped his boss, groaning and doubled up around at
least one gut wound, into his treetrunk arms and carried the tall straw-haired
man toward cover.

The man’s big body rocked as bullets slammed him from behind.
He managed to make it to the shelter of a stack of barrels under the overhang of
a porch fronting on the square. The wooden containers had to have been filled
with something fairly solid, for Coffin had dragged himself behind them, and he
and several sec men successfully sheltered there.

The black man waved an arm and shouted. Two sec men jumped out
to take hold of their wounded boss. Finneran fell on his face and didn’t
move.

In low, quick bursts of words between high points in the
shooting, Mildred reported to J.B., who was keeping an eye on Miranda’s side
from the south window. Despite the blasterfire, she was worried about being
overheard by Jacks loyalists angling for better shots. After Jak left, she had
shut the rear door and shoved the big table against it. And the front door was
locked, so they’d have at least some warning if enemies tried to come into their
hideout.

J.B. listened, nodding. Then Mildred saw his eyes widen behind
his wire-rimmed lenses.

“Dark night, look!” he whispered. “Rotties! They’re in the
ville!”

Mildred saw a sudden flurry of wild action from where Miranda’s
people had dragged her to cover behind the fountain. Shrieks of rage that had to
have come from the baron turned quickly to those of pain laced with mind-melting
fear.

At first glimpse the gray figures shambling into the square
from the east didn’t look anything too out of the ordinary. Until you noticed
some were walking obliviously into the killzone of a full-on firefight,
something you’d have to be deaf
and
blind to
miss.

Or dead.

The ville folk who’d been bold, or stupe, enough to turn out to
watch the Great Conciliation reunite the happy ville of Sweetwater Junction had
taken cover when blasters joined the negotiations. Now Mildred saw commotion and
heard shrieks as the rotties found them.

Miranda erupted from her hiding place with rotties clinging to
her by claws and jaws like wolves taking down a bull bison. Why they had homed
so directly in on her Mildred would never learn. There was so much meat on the
hoof here. Mildred would’ve expected the changed to focus first on the warm
pumping blood of the wounded.

Men and women rotties alike beset the furiously struggling
baron. In age they ranged from a twelve-year-old boy with his left arm missing
from elbow on, to a white-haired granny who had the four or so teeth remaining
in her head clamped firmly on Miranda’s left shoulder. Some had been dead so
long they had rotted almost to pieces; others displayed gaping, bloodless
wounds. One thick dude had a blue-gray face whose width and impressive sagginess
suggested he’d been morbidly obese. But his paunch and the entrails it had
contained had been eaten away almost to the spine. Mildred wasn’t sure how he
managed to stay upright.

But Miranda Sharp was a strong woman, and adrenaline had
turbocharged her strength and speed. The toggle action atop her antique
handblaster was locked up in a little triangle, confirming it was both a Luger
and out of ammo. But she lashed out ferociously with it, hammering a woman in
the forehead so hard the rottie went down as if shot.

There were still too many of the changed for the baron, for all
her strength and fury. With her black hair whipping out of the tight bun it had
been wrapped in, she went down, screaming like a red-tailed hawk and fighting
like a badger. Mildred saw the flash of a knife in her hand as they swarmed over
her.

The roar of J.B.’s shotgun snapped Mildred’s attention back to
their hideout. She had been so focused on the baron’s dramatic last stand she
hadn’t even noticed a rottie wandering right up the street in front of the
potter’s shop until J.B. blew its head off.

“Mebbe we should join the party?” he asked, racking the
action.

For answer she raised the ZKR, lined up the sights and shot one
of Miranda’s attackers through the head from a good fifty yards off.

It wasn’t so much she was trying to save Miranda—who was beyond
help, anyway—as that was the first target to offer itself. But now Mildred faced
a new problem: the rotties had gotten in among their intended victims so
thoroughly it was hard to target one without hitting another.

J.B. saw her hesitation. “Go ahead and shoot,” he said. “If
people get bit, a .38 hole or two’s gonna be the least of their worries!”

* * *

W
ITH
DESPERATE
ENERGY
but not much skill,
Colt Sharp ran toward where his mother had fallen. His arms and legs went any
which way, like the limbs of a newborn moose calf, and he was slow. But he was
dead set on running right into the killzone.

“Jak!” Ryan rapped. He didn’t have to add a command. Hair
streaming behind like a snow-white pennon, the albino teen ran after the baron’s
boy, seemingly weightless. He ran him down like a coyote after a rabbit, raced
past him, dropped to a crouch and tripped him with a leg sweep.

“Oh, dear,” Krysty said as the chubby boy sprawled onto the
hard dirt and slid four feet on his face. It still was a lot healthier than
running right into a battle.

“Cover,” Ryan ordered, unlimbering the Steyr from his back.
Racing out of the palace with Colt as a guarantee of safe passage, the
companions had left backpacks behind and just grabbed up weapons and ammo.

Krysty and Doc split to the left side of the street. Jak
dragged the weeping and feebly struggling Colt Sharp the same way a mountain
lion would drag a chilled pronghorn. Ryan ducked behind a pile of wood crates
and aimed the longblaster over the top of them.

He laid the scope on Miranda just as she went down. There
wasn’t any point in trying to shoot the rotties off her. They were biting her
all over. He thought briefly of putting a bullet in her brain to end it for her,
but decided she hadn’t exactly earned any breaks from him.

Besides, the changed still on the hunt for flesh were the real
threat.

“Moving, lover!” he heard Krysty call. He took his eye from the
rifle sight to look across the street. Snub-nosed revolver in hand, Krysty raced
down the north road. She ducked behind the parked horse-type wag, minus horse,
where Jak had pulled Colt. The albino youth had pushed the heir to the ville
down on his back and was sitting on him while he looked for targets around the
wag’s wooden side.

Kneeling beside the youths, Krysty bent her head to speak
earnestly to Colt. Her prehensile red hair writhed around her cheeks.

Ryan looked back through the sight and began popping rottie
heads like blood balloons.

* * *

F
RANTICALLY
, M
IRANDA
’
S
sec men blasted and beat the
remaining rotties off their baron. She lay rolling to and fro in pain as
townspeople and sec men from both sides engaged the horrifying creatures in a
brief, savage battle.

Shooting from their window into the square, Mildred and J.B.
did what they could. Mildred tried to pick off rotties directly threatening the
living. J.B., who was shooting buck instead of solid shot and had to contend
with a wide pellet spread at this range, blasted isolated rotties.

Just as she wondered how many of the creatures had got in,
Mildred saw no more targets. The people and sec men of Sweetwater Junction were
tending to their wounded fellows, or just standing around staring at one another
in amazed horror at the sudden invasion of their ville.

To Mildred’s astonishment, Geither Jacks walked back into the
square.

For a moment she thought he had to have been wearing a
bulletproof vest. But no. He pressed a handkerchief against his side. Blood
gleamed red on his knuckles.

Mildred was sure he’d been hit twice. Miranda’s first
copper-jacketed 9 mm slug might have gone through his lower torso without
puncturing his peritoneum, but she doubted it. She knew Jacks had scavvied
antibiotics at his headquarters; he wasn’t necessarily going to die from the
inevitable peritonitis if his body cavity had been penetrated. But if that had
happened, he had to be in brutal pain.

Nobody said Gate to Hell Jacks wasn’t hard-core, she thought.
She lined her sights up on his straw-haired head.

“John,” she said, “should I ice the fucker?” She could feel
once again the horrific caress of Levon’s meat pincer, and burned to take in the
last few ounces of slack in the ZKR’s finely tuned competition trigger.

“Hold off, Millie,” he said softly. “Mebbe he just now turned
into our best shot at staying alive. Much as I hate to say it.”