Wretched Earth (21 page)

“People of Sweetwater Junction!” Geither Jacks shouted. “Listen
to me, your new baron!”

That
stilled the hyperkinetic
conversation that had replaced blasterfire in the square. Pale faces turned
toward the tall man, who held one hand to his side and the other bloody palm in
the air.

“I’m in command here now,” Jacks declared. “You all see it.
Baron Miranda is dead. I’m all that stands between you and anarchy. Between you
and these terrible creatures who came to destroy us, our children, our peaceful
way of life.”

“Nuke take you,” a hoarse male voice shouted, “the baron ain’t
dead! She’s just wounded.”

“She’s been bitten by the horrors,” Jacks said. “Sweetwater
Junction, you need to know what that means. It’s a sentence of death! She’s
gone.”

The silence that followed the pronouncement boomed with the
rising wind and crackled with the cries of crows circling overhead, impatient
for the fresh feast laid out below them. Some, bolder than their already bold
comrades, lighted on chills with upturned faces to pick at that greatest of
delicacies, human eyeballs.

Mildred saw the ville folk turn heads toward one another, heard
a mutter of consternation. She didn’t doubt everyone in Sweetwater Junction had
heard the story of the rotties by now, had learned of the terrible way in which
Miranda’s men had confirmed the unimaginable reality that such a pestilence
existed, and now threatened to sweep their ville away in blood and terror.

“Baron Jacks,” she heard a voice call out. The throb of agony
in it only lent it strength and power. “Baron Jacks! Baron Jacks!”

“Coffin,” J.B. said, feeding fresh shells, contemporary reloads
with brown, waxed-paper hulls, into the M-4000’s magazine. “Good man. Too bad
he’s got a prick for a master.”

The crowd began to take up the wounded man’s chant.

Mildred stared at her partner. “What do we do now, John?” she
asked as the chant gained volume and conviction. “Saying those words would
blister my tongue.”

Maybe the people saw the ville’s civil war had to end now or
the rotties would end it for them, she thought. Maybe it was plain
self-interest, backing a contender after the race was won. Which in the
Deathlands was always by far the best time to do it.

“Do we have to acclaim the bastard, too?”

Chapter Twenty-Five

“Now,” Jacks said. His voice was clear and strong, as
if power was the best painkiller, which it likely was, Mildred reflected. “Some
changes got to be made to combat this new and terrible menace. Gone are the days
of slack. We must impose absolute discipline. Absolute—”

“No!”

The voice that pealed out from the north side of the square was
that of a young male, cracking with adolescence. It matched the figure that
stalked out from beside the fountain—a youth in his mid to late teens, curly
blond hair tousled in the wind, wearing fine clothes that seemed mussed and
soiled as if he’d been rolling recently in the dirt. He breathed heavily. His
face was plump, red and twisted with passion.

In his hands he held a big angular semiauto handblaster. The
1911’s squared-off muzzle was wavering badly as the youth’s arms shook, with
emotion or fatigue or both.

“I’m the baron of Sweetwater Junction now,” the youth shouted.
“I’m Colt Sharp, son of the man you treacherously murdered. Now you murdered my
mother, too. I am baron here!”

“But Jacks didn’t murder his mom, actually,” J.B. murmured.
“Close to the other way around, in fact.”

“Hush, now, John. He’s on a roll.”

Jacks showed the youth a sneering grin. “You? Baron of
Sweetwater Junction? Don’t make me laugh, jelly roll. You can’t even hold that
piece steady. Who’s gonna believe you can strong-arm this ville?”

“I am the baron by right,” Colt Sharp declared. He walked past
his fallen mother toward his rival without a sideways glance that Mildred could
see.

Jacks barked a laugh. “Over my chilled body.”

“That’s my intention!”

“You? Shoot me?”

Jacks took out a cigar and struck a match with his thumb. He
puffed the cigar alight.

“You don’t have the balls to pull the trigger, boy.”

His answer was loud enough to make Mildred flinch. Geither
Jacks took a step back. He looked down to see a dark stain spread rapidly in the
middle of his blue shirt. He raised a look of ashy astonishment to the
youth.

Colt Sharp fired again. Jacks jerked as another 230-grain slug
rammed home in his rib cage. The chubby boy was walking forward, his face now as
white as sun-bleached bone.

He pumped two more shots into the tall, lean man. Jacks fell
back a step at each one. His haughtiness was long gone. He looked appalled
now.

He bent over, pressing a hand to one of the new wet wounds in
his chest. Colt marched right up to him.

For a moment Jacks stared down into his palm, filled to
overflowing with his own bright red blood. He looked up at Colt.

“No,” he said, “please. Wait—”

Colt was close enough that the muzzle-flash licked Jacks’s
imploring eyes with yellow fire. The bullet slammed between them. The whole back
of the man’s skull blew out in a spray of blood and chunks.

Gate to Hell Jacks fell down on his face. A crow immediately
settled on his nape and began to eat his remaining brains like cherries from a
bowl.

“Baron Sharp!” a clear, high feminine voice sang out.

* * *

“B
ARON
S
HARP
!”

Ryan’s single eye turned in surprise to Krysty, marching by his
side. They followed the young heir by twenty paces. The redhead had her fist in
the air.

“Baron Sharp!” she cried again. “Baron Sharp!”

One by one the crowd took up the cry, until it beat like the
wind over the lone figure of the youth who stood staring down at the man he’d
just chilled, oblivious to everything but his own thoughts.

“Baron Sharp!” It was Perico, rising from shelter behind the
fountain. He tossed a single unreadable look at the three outlanders walking
down the street toward him from the north. Then, squaring his wide shoulders, he
marched up to the youth, grabbed his gun hand and thrust it and blaster aloft.
“Baron Sharp.”

* * *

“W
ELL
,
ISN
’
T
THAT
a
relief,” J.B. said.

The plump kid shook himself like a wet dog. The stocky
gray-bearded guy let go of his arm and stepped back.

“Amnesty to all those who swear to serve me as rightful baron!”
Colt cried.

“Smart move, kid,” Mildred said. “You might actually pull this
off. If it, you know,
can
be pulled off.”

“Come on, Mildred,” J.B. said, readjusting his hat on his head.
“Let’s go greet the new order here in Sweetwater Junction. Then we gotta get
busy, unless we all want to wake up rotties tomorrow morning!”

* * *

G
EITHER
J
ACKS
’
S
GOONS
all practically jumped out of their skins, dropping
weapons and throwing their fists in the air, each trying to drown out the other
shouting, “Baron Sharp!”

Perico stood by his new baron’s side, his head inclined and
beard wagging as if he spoke urgently.

“Tryin’ to get the kid to put the blaster away before he hurts
someone,” Ryan suggested.

But Colt Sharp refused. He turned away from his new chief
adviser and marched back the way he had come.

The crowd went silent again. Entertainment wasn’t easy to come
by in the Deathlands. They knew impending drama when they saw it.

“Hold me, Colt,” his mother said, extending an arm from where
she lay.

Ryan went stiff. “If she bites him, we’re fucked.” He had slung
his rifle, so he reached for his SIG.

Krysty gripped his arm. “Leave it,” she said. “She hasn’t
changed yet.”

It came to Ryan’s tongue to ask how she knew, but he didn’t
voice the question. When Krysty spoke with that kind of certainty, she
did
know. That was enough for him.

Mostly.

Colt knelt and cradled his mother’s head on his lap. Tears
streamed down his round cheeks.

“People of Sweetwater Junction,” she shouted, pulling away and
rearing up slightly, then using his knee to prop herself. “Listen to me, your
baron.”

Little exclamations of horror burst like squibs from the crowd.
Miranda was in bad shape. The rottie pack had ripped her clothes to shreds. They
had raked and ripped mouthfuls from her firm olive flesh, from the muscles of
arms and shoulders and the flesh of her breasts. She looked as if she had bathed
in blood.

“I almost feel sorry for the bitch,” Ryan rasped.

“I do feel sorry for her,” Krysty said.

Ryan glanced at his woman. Even given her quick healing
ability, her pale skin still bore the marks of the whipping Miranda Sharp had
given her. Yet her words were heartfelt, sincere.

Ryan put his left arm around her.

Then with his right he whipped out the SIG and fired.

Two burly men wearing green armbands were approaching Colt and
his mother from the south, supporting a lean black man between them. The left
leg of the man’s overalls was soaked with dark blood from below the knee down.
Seeing Ryan’s move, his eyes flew wide.

He stretched a desperate hand toward Colt and shouted, “Baron!
Look out!”

Unnoticed by everyone, a rottie who had mauled Miranda lay
facedown right behind the youngster. It had once been a gaunt, middle-aged
woman. Apparently the baron’s sec men had only broken its spine.

Raising its head, opening its jaws, it had reached a bluish
hand toward Colt’s ankle from behind.

Ryan’s shot took the rottie in the temple. The creature dropped
to the dirt.

Colt looked back at Ryan and nodded once.

“I was wrong about the outlanders, Colt, darling,” his mother
said, loudly enough for a good half of the square to hear. “Wrong about the
rotties. And it’s cost me everything. Everything except the thing that means
most in the world to me. You, my darling. You.”

“Mother, no—”

“He is the baron now!” she cried, sweeping the crowd with her
fierce black eyes. “He will lead you through this! Serve him well and
you’ll…live.”

The effort drained her. Her head slumped toward her ravaged
breasts.

“Somebody bring a stretcher,” Colt shouted desperately. “Get
Lamellar. She needs attention, fast!”

“No!” Her head snapped up. “Didn’t you learn anything here,
mijo?
”

Colt recoiled as if she’d slapped him. Miranda’s voice had the
same whip crack that had made her son cringe so often in Ryan’s short
acquaintance of the family. He frowned. If she de-nutted the poor bastard
now
…

“I’ve been bitten by those things,” Miranda said in a voice
vibrant with pain. “You know what that means. Didn’t our new friends tell
us?”

He shook his head. “Mother, there’s got to be some other
way.”

“There is no other way! There is only one. Now, do what you
have to do, my son. And let this be an example to everyone. Because should
anyone be bitten, be it friend or loved one—there is…no other…way!”

Still he hesitated. “Give your mother a kiss, boy,” Miranda
said gently.

Colt bent his wet face to kiss her cheek. She grabbed him and
planted a hard kiss on his face. Then with a sigh she sank back against him.

“Do it fast for Mama, Colt, dear,” she said. “It hurts so.
And—I can feel it coming. The change.”

Colt stood up and hesitated only a few heartbeats.

Then he thrust the handblaster downward and fired a single
shot.

Chapter Twenty-Six

With a screech a small pallid figure flew out of the
closet as if launched on springs. A shattering shotgun blast caught it in
midair. Its head blew apart.

“Don’t get any of that crap in your mouth, Ryan,” J.B. said,
chambering a fresh shell. “Don’t know what you might catch.”

Black ooze spattered his own face and glasses.

Ryan grunted, his heart hammering in his chest. He kept his
finger on the trigger of his SIG-Sauer handblaster.

He’d left his longblaster behind. This was close-quarters work
now. A sniping longblaster was as useless in this house-to-house rottie mop-up
as tits on a boar hog.

“Thought I was ready for it,” he said. “But it still gave me a
fright. Damn, I hate this.”

The smell of mildew and unwashed human bodies in the little
shack’s dim interior was crowded out by the stinks of burned propellant and
lubricant, and the stench of decomposing human flesh. That reek had clued them
in to the rottie’s presence when they’d poked their heads inside. It was their
only real edge in hunting down those who somehow retained enough of a spark of
self-preservation to hide from the otherwise total slaughter of the changed who
had broken into Sweetwater Junction. And it only applied to those who had rotted
enough to start getting ripe.

Ryan nudged the small corpse in its simple shift, which
ground-in blood and guts had turned the same decay-bluish-gray as the rottie’s
neck and bone-thin arms.

“Especially when it’s a kid.”

“Ain’t half as bad as what Millie and Krysty have to do,” J.B.
said.

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “That sucks triple-hard.”

The two women were engaged in something a taut-lipped Mildred
called triage. That meant examining the wounded. The ones who had received bites
had to be chilled. No matter who they were.

Including children like the one J.B. had just blasted. Even
before they changed.

Meanwhile Doc and Jak were teamed up, also performing the risky
and grisly search-and-destroy task Ryan and the Armorer were engaged in. It
might not have been the optimal pairing, especially since Jak and Doc were prone
to jaw at each other. But they knew how to buckle down to the task at hand, and
their strengths and weaknesses complemented each other pretty solidly.

For Ryan’s part, it felt good to have J.B. watching his back
again. The two men made a fast search of the shack. It was shotgun-style, and
looked as if a large number of people had lived there at one point. As far as
they knew, nobody had been inside when the rottie child had gotten in.

No one knew how many rotties had broken into the ville in the
first place. Several dozen had promptly attacked the greatest concentration of
food: the crowd in the square watching Miranda and Jacks hold their final
showdown. Fortunately, the humans had fought back vigorously and effectively,
putting the rotties on the ground before they got their teeth into too many
folks.

Once Colt was in command—of himself as well as the ville, after
shooting his own mother in the head—his first order had been to make sure of the
other
fallen rotties. The one Ryan had finished
off as it was about to latch its jaws on Colt’s ankle was a pretty stark
example. Fortunately, the finishing-off task could be readily done by ville folk
armed with clubs or axes.

Colt, along with Ryan and the companions, had meanwhile rushed
to the east gate, to find the skeleton guard either eaten or gone and presumably
changed. Nobody had a clue as to how they had been overwhelmed without raising
enough of a fuss to attract attention even from the spectacle in the center of
the ville. A single shot loosed off would have done it.

Unless, J.B. pointed out, it had happened while a lot more
people were shooting at each other across the fountain. That would’ve covered up
the sounds of even a decent-size little firefight the quarter-mile or so
away.

Several rotties struggling over the wire fence were quickly
dealt with. None could be seen on the flat land beyond, although in fact the
horizon lay perhaps a mile away, where a small rise crested. Ryan was still glad
Colt had heeded his advice to send sec teams double-quick to the other gates, as
well as to patrolling the perimeter.

Miranda and Jacks had indeed drawn most of their sec forces off
for their confrontation. Everyone was lucky, Ryan reckoned, that bit of classic
baronial shortsightedness hadn’t wound up with all of them at ambient
temperature by now. Though not necessarily just lying there quietly, staring at
the clouds.

Which were beginning to take on an ugly and suggestive mustard
tinge. Acid rain storms on their way, the locals had muttered. Harbinger of
spring in Sweetwater Junction.

The breeze outside was still cold, and stiff enough to blow
away the lingering smell of long-past death, when Ryan and J.B. emerged,
blinking, into the cloud-filtered sunlight. Fortunately, the wind blew from the
west. Otherwise it might have brought the stink of the horde everyone now knew
for sure was coming their way.

A little girl waited outside. She wore a shapeless
linsey-woolsey shirt and canvas pants. The only way they could tell she was a
girl was that her brown hair was done in pigtails.

“Baron Colt wants to see you down at the fountain,” she said,
“pronto.”

* * *

T
HE
SPORADIC
POPPING
of shots from the
south clued them in to what was going on even before they reached Baron Sharp’s
command post, in Bill Itomaru’s carpentry shop, where the south road entered the
square.

“That’ll be Jacks’s grammaw forted up and defying the world,”
J.B. said. “Also that fat maggot mutie bastard, Levon.”

He flashed a taut grin. “Wouldn’t half mind settling up with
that three-armed bastard.”

“Yeah.” Ryan had gotten a quick account of what had befallen
the three friends who’d wound up in Jacks’s camp. None had offered details. He
hadn’t asked for any.

He already knew the drill.

When they reached the carpentry shop, which was the only
building fronting the square to have had its old bullet holes patched—although
today’s fresh crop remained open—Colt Sharp wasn’t there. A sec man in a black
Sharp armband told them the new baron had headed south to Jacks’s former
headquarters.

“Last time I saw that dude he had on a green armband,” J.B.
remarked as they walked toward where a heavily armed crowd had gathered near the
huge gaudy house.

“Reckon a lot have made that switch today,” Ryan said. “As long
as they stay switched until we get the rotties squared away, that’s ace with
me.”

The crowd, it turned out, was standing a block away from
Jacks’s HQ. “They keep taking potshots at us,” Perico told the new arrivals.

The burly graybeard hadn’t apologized for his late mistress’s
treatment of Ryan and company. Then again, he hadn’t been present for any of it.
With Miranda chilled and Colt at least onboard to fight the changed menace, Ryan
was willing to let bygones be.

He’d forgiven worse in his time. Or at least agreed to let it
slide.

“It’s that crazy old lady, Grammaw Jacks,” Perico explained.
“She’s holed up in there with a few diehards and Geither’s freak pet torturer.
Says she’ll never surrender. Also, she says we’ve been chilling the wounded, and
she’s given sanctuary to some of them.”

Ryan and J.B. stared at each other.

“Oh, shit,” the Armorer said.

“Something’s going down!” a man shouted. He showed no weapons
and appeared to be a civilian, not a sec man.

Once Colt Sharp proclaimed himself baron, the ville folk had
turned out in droves. Part of it, Ryan calculated, was simple ass-covering,
showing visible support of the person who already had all Sweetwater Junction’s
sec men under his banner except the holdouts in there with Jacks’s crazy
grammaw. But to Ryan most people seemed genuinely enthusiastic about Colt Sharp,
if for no other reason than they were sick of civil war. Not to mention Miranda
Sharp and her archenemy, both of whom had the disposition of yellowjackets on
Jolt.

Ryan, J.B. and Perico reached the cross street north of the
Royal Flush. A few feet up the road Colt stood surrounded by four sec men, one
of whom, at least, had been a Jacks man. The new baron was acting like the
overexcited kid he was. The bodyguards were wisely keeping him from sticking
himself in the line of fire.

When they reached the corner, J.B. strolled on into the
intersection. At Ryan’s grunt of caution he said, “None of those boys can shoot
for sour owl-shit.”

Nobody shot at him at all. “There is some kind of fuss going
on,” he reported. “You can see past the curtains.”

Ryan shrugged and stepped out beside his friend. As he did,
yellow flame flared behind a ground floor window.

“Uh-oh,” he said. “Somebody busted a lantern.”

A moment later a sec man staggered out. His hair had a scorched
look, and Ryan thought his eyebrows were gone. His shirt was tattered and his
arms ran with blood.

“The chills!” he screamed in the voice of a man whose mind has
gone mad from unendurable terror. “The chills are walking! They—”

Shots cracked from windows above. Bullets kicked up dirt around
the dazed man’s boots. The shreds of his shirt flapping, he spun and gazed
wildly up as if in confusion.

Then his head nodded violently forward, accompanied by a spray
of blood. He dropped.

Ryan saw Hedders, the earnest young Miranda loyalist, lowering
a lever-action carbine. “He was bit,” the young man said.

Ryan’s jaw tightened. Hedders had been one of those who’d
beaten him and strung Krysty up for Miranda to play with. He knew it was the
kid’s job, which didn’t matter a spent casing.

Mebbe I’ll settle up with you after this rottie mayhem’s behind
us, he thought. If we both are still standing.

The gaudy house’s first-floor interior took light pretty
quickly, then flames showed on the second floor. One sec man clambered out a
window there and onto the top of the ornate white portico over the entryway. A
rattle of blasterfire shot up from the street and he fell.

A couple more sec men jumped from higher windows. One rolled
around screaming, with part of his thighbone sticking out a tear in his trousers
like a jagged yellow spear. The other just lay on his back with eyes open, his
neck or back broken. Both got shot up some until Perico shouted to the men in
the street to quit wasting ammo.

A peculiar whistling roar came from the open front door.
Backlit by garish fire, a vast, bulky figure appeared just inside it. It
thrashed and struggled mightily.

“Levon,” J.B. said, and this time his voice wasn’t laid-back at
all. It cracked like a blaster. “Jacks’s torturer. He’s so big and fat he’s
having trouble getting out the door.”

“Especially with rotties hanging all over him,” Ryan said. He
saw gray hands clutching at the stocky figure.

Then a weird pale moon-face appeared in the doorway as Levon
remembered to duck under the lintel. Despite Perico’s earlier command, a volley
of blasterfire cracked out. The three-armed mutie bellowed, staggered back,
fell.

“Seems like former Jacks boys were shooting as enthusiastically
as Miranda’s crew,” Ryan said.

Supine, the vast misshapen form thrashed on the floorboards of
the gaudy house’s foyer. Flames enveloped it. Levon’s roars became high-pitched
screams.

“Being on fire doesn’t seem to dampen the rotties’ appetites
any,” Ryan observed. He could see the changed ripping mouthfuls from the wounded
mutie despite the flames that charred and melted their lifeless flesh.

“Wish Mildred could be here,” J.B. said.

Ryan looked at him. “Thought she was still on the squeamish
side.”

“Not in this case.”

At last Levon’s howls and struggles subsided as the smoke
finished him. A mad screech drew Ryan’s eye to the fourth and top floor of the
gaudy house, where what looked like a khaki prune with a cotton ball on top was
stuck out from a window right beneath the roof’s white painted scrollwork.

“And there you see Geither Jacks’s grammaw,” the Armorer
said.

“Lovely,” Ryan muttered.

“You pricks!” she shrieked. “Burning an old lady out of her
home!”

“It was your own fool sec men,” someone shouted back, “fighting
with the rotties you done brought inside, you old stupe.”

“Lies! All lies! You murdered my poor boy, who was the light
and only hope of this ville! And you’re all going to die! All…going…to…die!”

The last syllable rose into a protracted shriek as decaying,
blue-skinned arms seized her and dragged her back into the room. She screamed
for about a minute as gray smoke first seeped, then boiled out the window.

As near as Ryan could make out, the rotties chilled her before
the flames found her.

“Least she won’t be coming back as one of
them,
” he said. “Not that it wouldn’t be a pleasure putting a bullet
through that face.”

“Still,” J.B. said, cleaning his glasses with a handkerchief,
“it’s a bastard shame, this fire.” He had slung his shotgun for the moment.

“Why’s that, J.B.? You all said you got your gear out and
stashed when you broke free. You got a soft spot for the place?”

An explosion sent a bright yellow fireball rolling into the sky
toward the thickening clouds, riding a pillar of black smoke. Uncountable
smaller secondaries rattled inside. Sparks danced white in the flames that now
fully involved all four floors.

“Nope,” J.B. said calmly, putting his specs back on. “But all
the ammo and blasters Jacks had stored in there might have come in handy in
another hour or so. Guess it really is the gate to hell, now.”

“My gaudy!” a short man with a potbelly and a pencil-thin
mustache said over and over nearby. He clutched his bald head. “My beautiful
gaudy house! How will I live?”