Wretched Earth (26 page)

Krysty wasn’t following most of what Mildred said, but she got
the drift.

“Mebbe so,” she said.

J.B.’s hat appeared around the corner of the wall Mildred stood
against, hanging from his scattergun muzzle. His head followed.

“Wanted to make sure nobody blasted me,” he said.

“You’re clear, John,” Mildred told him with a smile.

He slipped around, stuffing his hat back on his head.

“This is the big push,” he said. “They’re coming from all over,
and the fence is starting to strain.”

He turned and stepped into the street. “Cease fire, boys and
girls!” he called. “We’ll need the bullets for when they break in. Grab up a
long sharp stick and poke some rottie eyes!”

It took a while for the firing to taper off. The nearest
defenders stopped shooting at once and started yelling for their comrades to do
likewise. The people of Sweetwater Junction held the Armorer in almost
superstitious esteem. A lot of them, especially former sec men, seemed afraid of
him, Krysty thought, despite his mild manner.

Neither Jak nor Doc were in sight, but they were in the area.
As the shooting died away, Krysty heard Doc shouting for the cease-fire. She
didn’t expect to hear Jak. Making unnecessary noise wasn’t his style. In fact,
talking
wasn’t his style.

“We better get Ryan to send up the general pull-back signal,”
J.B. said. “The things’re going to bust in here any moment.”

“Right,” Krysty said. She turned to a runner, a little girl
with tufts of short brown hair sticking out between the top tiers of her dense
bundling of cold-weather garments.

“Sandy, honey,” she said, kneeling. “I need you to run a
message for me. Can you do it?”

The child nodded proudly. “To Mr. Cawdor. That’s what I’m here
for.”

From behind Krysty the desperate cry went up. “Fence is comin’
down!”

* * *

“M
R
.
D
IX
SAYS
THEY
’
RE
about to bust through on the
southwest side, near Miller’s hide warehouse,” Sandy told Ryan. He recognized
her as the stable girl who’d brought the first news of the Ten Mile massacre.
Although the knees were out of her canvas pants and there were holes in her
locally made leather shoes, she was well bundled up against the cold. “He says
give the general pull-back signal.”

“Right. Thanks.”

Ryan shifted his weight to look that way, gingerly, because he
could feel the jury-built scaffolding shift beneath his weight whenever he so
much as breathed heavily. Unfortunately, the most central location for a lookout
and sniper post in the whole ville was the wooden observation tower, whose top
two stories had been blown into kindling—literally, in a fuel-starved ville—by
J.B.’s booby trap. So the carpenter had gotten some crash business, pounding
together a two-story lookout platform overnight.

It was as rushed an improvisation as the ville’s other defenses
for what was certainly going to be the climactic battle, win or lose. So Ryan
didn’t waste too much time feeling sorry for himself.

Not that he ever did.

“You got a message for me to take back, Mr. Cawdor?”

Despite the shooting and screaming and stink and general
horror, the little girl seemed more excited than fearful. Most of the kids acted
that way. The ville civil war between Jacks and the Sharp tribe had probably
acclimated them some to fighting.

“No,” Ryan said.

He got his longeyes on the red zone. Defenders battled
hand-to-hand against the rotties trying to swarm through the trampled-down
section of chain link. He picked up Mildred joyously knocking the decomposing
head of a rottie to pieces with her bat.

He frowned. As awful as the danger Krysty and his other
companions faced down there, it was nothing they weren’t all going to be up
against. And sooner rather than later.

“Is your family at a strong point or forted up in your house?”
he asked the runner.

“We’re gonna fight at home,” Sandy said. “Mommy and Daddy are
out helping. My brothers and sisters are still home, though.”

“Good. Why don’t you run along home, then? Your mom and dad’ll
be along soon.”

“All right.” She vanished down the hole in the splintery wood
floor.

“Tell the rest of the kids to take off back home, too!” he
called after her.

“Okay, Mr. Cawdor.” Her words floated up through the floor.

The farthest shot he had from up here to anywhere along the
perimeter was less than six hundred yards. And he could see most of it. He’d
burned through most of the ammo he’d gotten from the palace armory, which was
pretty much emptying out for the defense of Sweetwater Junction. Fortunately,
Colt Sharp saw that if they didn’t win this day, there was no point having
ammunition or anything else in reserve.

It was Trader’s old principle of never dying with bullets in
your blaster, written big.

The fact the new baron
did
see that
marked him as different from both his mother and Geither Jacks in a very key
way. Different from most barons Ryan had encountered.

Through his longeyes Ryan saw the rotties inexorably pushing
back the defenders with sheer weight as they trudged through the breach.

“All right,” he said, “that’s it. Time to go.”

Closing his longeyes to their soup can size, he stowed them in
a pocket and reached for a special flare rocket, one conveniently painted
red.

As he did, a drop fell from the sky to hit the back of his bare
right hand.

It tingled.

Acid rain.

Chapter Thirty-Two

“Everybody out of the pool,” Mildred muttered as the
red spark climbed up toward the terrible boiling, mustard-colored clouds.

“What’s that, Millie?” J.B. asked.

“Time to go, John,” she said. “For you in particular.”

“Right,” he said. Then he shouted, “Okay, everybody! Pull back!
Get to a strongpoint or head to your houses, but get inside and forted up,
triple-fast!”

Some with what Mildred took for relief, others with reluctance,
the defenders began to back warily away from the rotties. Some took off running.
Others established separation and turned to shoot whatever projectile weapons
they had at the changed enemy.

“Gotta power on,” J.B. said. “Hate to leave you guys like
this.”

“We all signed off on the plan, John,” Mildred replied.

“Hurry,” Krysty said. She lined up a head shot with her
handblaster, then fired. “Be safe.”

The Armorer threw an arm around Mildred’s sturdy shoulders,
hugged her close and kissed her hard. Then he was trotting off down the street
on his special mission.

Mildred found herself looking after him through a screen of
tears.

She blinked them quickly away when Krysty grabbed her arm and
started towing her in another direction.

“He’ll be fine,” the redhead said. Her scarlet hair writhed
around her shoulders as she shot a female rottie, little more than a skeleton
with long hair and shrunken dugs, who had gotten to within a dozen feet of them.
“If anybody can pull it off, it’s J.B.”

“That’s true,” Mildred said, trying not to sniffle. While he
lacked Ryan’s charisma or brilliance, the Armorer was the most competent man she
had ever known.

But competence could carry one only so far.

Doc and Jak came whipping around opposite corners down the
street. Doc actually impaled a rottie standing on the porch in front of him
through the back of the head with his sword before racing past with surprising
speed. Jak blasted two shatteringly loud shots back the way he’d come, then,
tucking away his Colt Python, he drew his favorite new toys, the twin steel
hatchets, and hacked his way with focused savagery through to rotties to join
his friends.

The four hurried toward the center of town, fast enough to
distance them from the horde. The few rare, more agile rotties who sprinted
after them were shot in the face for their trouble and put down to stay.

The desperate game rushed toward its climax.

Can we really do it? Mildred wondered. Or had their luck
finally run out?

* * *

“A
LL
RIGHT
,” J.B.
SAID
when he joined the two sec men near the hastily repaired
eastern gate. “Bastards’ve broke through the fence to the southwest. Time to get
back to wherever you’re planning to make your stand.”

The man J.B. didn’t recognize as a Jacks sec man frowned. He
was youngish, with yellow hair and blue eyes.

“Look out there,” he said, jerking his head toward a window of
the house nearest the gate, where they were sheltering. “Most of ’em are still
out that way. And they’re heading here now!”

“That’s why I came to fire off the claymores we set up on the
gate last night,” J.B. said. “Drop as many as I can. But in a few minutes the
ones from the breakthrough’ll be filtering through. We won’t be safe hightailing
it then.”

“Not safe anyway,” growled Higgs, the former Jacks sec man. He
was a human barrel, not much taller than J.B. What hair remained on his head
marched down the lines of his jowls to meet up again under his broken nose in an
impressive mustache. “Why not stay here and stand these fuckers off?”

“Suit yourselves,” J.B. said.

A metal box once meant to cover electrical junctions had been
screwed to the wall beneath the window. A bent metal conduit ran up from it,
over the sill and down to the ground.

Taking out his home-brewed fire starter, J.B. flipped open the
cover. A cut end of high-speed fuse waited within.

“Wait,” Higgs said. “Somethin’ ain’t right. I think mebbe you
should step away from that thing.”

He started reaching for his lever-action carbine, leaned
against a side wall against a stained, framed bit of embroidery saying Bless
This House.

The fuse caught. A spit and a spark, a whiff of chemical reek,
and the flame was on its way along the conduit buried six inches under the
ground by the work crew J.B. had supervised the previous night. It took but a
second to reach the blasting caps in the charges affixed to either post of the
reinforced gate.

There
were
claymores mines, of an
improvised sort: two big clay jugs filled half with black powder, half with bent
nails, ball bearings, cast balls for black-powder blasters, and even chunks of
broken glass. Anything small, sharp and nasty that could be blown into the faces
and bodies of an oncoming enemy by the low but irresistible pressure of the
bursting charge. They went off with a yellow flash and single two-beat roar,
quite satisfactorily. Ten or twenty rotties nearing the gate fell down. How many
would
stay
down was an open question. Glancing out
the unglazed window, J.B. saw freshly detached limbs flying through the air.

Then the demo charges J.B. had attached along with the
improvised claymores exploded, blowing the gate right off its hinges.

“Fuck!” yelped the blond dude. “He blew up the fucking
gate!”

As J.B. had been striking the flame with his left hand, his
right hand hadn’t been idle. It swung up his slung M-4000 by its pistol grip.
The blaster roared.

The column of double 0 buck caught Higgs in his chest as he
spun, bringing up his carbine. He reeled back into the wall and went down.

The blond guy whipped out a Bowie-style knife and leaped at
J.B. “You bastard traitor! You killed us all!”

Slipping off the sling, J.B. slammed the shotgun butt
roundhouse against his face. Bones crunched and the kid sprawled on the
floor.

Although his cheekbone was dented in somewhat and his left eye
above it didn’t seem to track just right, the kid was game. No sooner had his
tailbone stopped skidding across the warped floorboards than he gathered himself
for another attack.

It didn’t make a bit of difference whether he continued his
attack or not. A man who valued precision, J.B. shouldered the scattergun to
take steady aim.

“Sorry, boys,” he said.

The shotgun bellowed again, filling the little room with brief
light and the smells of burned propellant and spilled blood.

“Nothin’ personal. Just has to be done.”

Movement from the window caught J.B.’s eye as he jacked the
slide. He spun and blew off the top of a blue-faced head right outside.

Then he turned to run out the door.

* * *

W
HEN
HE
CAME
INTO
the square and sighted the sign that read
Itomaru’s Wood Works, J.B. reckoned he’d made it.

Whether it was just bad luck or one of those unpredictable
flashes of cunning that hit some of the rotties from time to time, he’d never
know. But as J.B. crossed the street toward the shop, at least ten of the
creatures rotties suddenly surrounded him.

The shells J.B. had loaded would punch through wooden walls
pretty readily. He didn’t want to risk shooting in the direction of the building
where his friends were sheltering. Despite his lack of size, he had some speed
built up, and decided to put his head down and try to power through.

He shouldered a couple of changed aside—they didn’t exactly
have lightning reflexes—but then he was yanked to a stop. A rottie had seized
the collar of his jacket.

If the creature had the wits or the luck to yank it down over
his arms and pin them, J.B. would’ve been chilled right there. Or worse.

Instead the Armorer used his momentum to twist in his
attacker’s grasp. He pivoted and slammed the shotgun’s butt into the decaying
face.

The rottie let go, but the others closed in on J.B., pressing
in from all sides. Blue hands grabbed him.

He stuck the scattergun’s muzzle up under a rottie’s chin and
pulled the trigger. The blast ripped the whole front of the changed man’s head
off, and the body dropped.

A pair of hands grabbed the barrel. J.B. struggled for control.
Though she had superhuman strength, the changed woman lacked eyes. It hadn’t
stopped her homing in on his warm human flesh, however.

He felt the terrible nuzzle of a corroded face against his
cheek. A monster behind was trying to bite him!

With a terrific adrenal surge he yanked himself away from the
questing jaws. But the eyeless rottie kept bony hands clamped on the
scattergun’s barrel. Stinking arms as strong as barrel hoops encircled J.B.’s
body. He turned his head and saw open jaws with a rotting, blue-black lump of
tongue between them descending toward his face.

Blue brows and forehead suddenly blew out in a rancid black
eruption. J.B. flinched, shutting tight his mouth and eyes against the reeking
gobbets of cold corruption resulting.

He heard the thunder of a second longblaster shot. The rottie’s
hands abruptly released their death grip on his shotgun.

J.B. flailed furiously with it, not trying to bust heads, just
to knock the horrors off him. He wasn’t a squeamish man, nor prone to panic. But
right this instant he was as close to losing his mind to sheer terror as he ever
had been.

He heard a third booming blast from a high-powered longblaster.
A bullet drilled the head of the rottie right in front of him crosswise. The way
to the porch of the carpenter’s shop, the front door, safety, lay clear.

As J.B. rabbited forward, he saw Ryan perched on the tin roof
of the building just west of the shop. He had apparently hopped from roof to
roof from the crudely rebuilt sniper tower. A rottie mob stood beneath him,
faces eagerly raised, pawing the air like puppies standing up against a fence,
begging for meat.

Ryan paid them no heed. His single blue eye was locked on his
embattled friend. He held his Steyr in his left hand and his SIG in his right.
The 9 mm handblaster was flashing yellow flame in J.B.’s direction.

Ryan was shouting something the Armorer couldn’t hear.

Suddenly three more rotties lurched into J.B.’s path. With
survival on the line right now he couldn’t worry about his backstop. He poked
the shotgun toward a decaying rib cage and fired, hoping the blast would take
the rottie down, and that the wasted body would stop the .33 caliber pellets
from traveling on to hurt one of his friends.

The creature reeled back. The other two got between J.B. and
the door. Rotting fingers rasped at J.B.’s right sleeve. He was out of Ryan’s
line of fire now. There was no help for him. He smashed in the teeth of one of
the beings blocking the way. From the corner of his eye he saw the rottie he’d
blasted lunging back, to claw at J.B.’s face.

The door burst open. A double-bit ax hit the creature in the
side of the head with such force that his femurs broke and speared out through
decomposed and desiccated skin.

A silver flash went by J.B.’s face to the right. He heard the
ringing of an aluminum bat on a rottie’s skull. Then hands—warm human
hands—grabbed him and yanked him into a warm room that smelled of wood
chips.

From behind him he heard Doc Tanner say, “Not wanted here!”
That was followed by the disproportionately huge roar of the tiny stub of
shotgun beneath the main barrel of Doc’s LeMat handblaster. The door squeezed
the weird yellow glow from outside down to nothing and closed with a slam.

J.B. collapsed, panting, next to the heavy worktable in the
middle of the room. Mildred flung her arms around his neck.

“Thanks,” he wheezed, patting her arm. “Now ease up a bit
before you choke me, Millie!”

* * *

A
SPATE
OF
ACID
RAIN
hit Ryan as he leaped from the gutter of the tin roof he was on to the roof of
the carpenter’s shop. It stung the exposed backs of his hands and the tip of his
left ear. He could hear his hair sizzle. Smell it, too.

Nonetheless, he managed to catch himself on the corrugations of
the metal roofing sheets. The stock of the Steyr, which he had slung once he
heard J.B. hustled inside, slammed him in the left butt cheek.

It didn’t dislodge him. He scrambled up and over, to slide down
to the porch on the south side. It was roofed in tin sheeting, as well.

Rotties milled in the street outside the shop. At least a dozen
wandered across the square. Drops of acid rain sizzled and smoked on Ryan’s long
coat. Can’t stay here long or I’ll fry, he thought.

He drew his SIG with his left hand and his panga with his
right, then stepped to the edge of the roof and jumped into the street.

Ryan shot a rottie in the head even before he landed. His boots
hit; his legs flexed. Then rising he spun, slashing savagely with the heavy
blade. The blow took the legs right out from under a rottie.

The one-eyed man got onto the porch by the main window. It was
stoutly shuttered, just the way it was supposed to be. The door was blocked by a
solid mass of the changed.

The ones in the street came toward him. They stared at him with
their vacant, questing eyes. Hands reached; mouths opened.

He fired a couple of shots before they got too close. Then,
roaring his rage, Ryan hacked at arms and blue gaping faces.

The shutter to his right slammed open. An arm snaked around his
neck from inside. He froze. Had the rotties gotten in with his people? But the
skin of the arm beneath his chin was smooth and warm and didn’t stink of death.
Instead it had a familiar, welcome smell.

Krysty hauled him in through the window as if he were a child.
As his boot heels thumped on the floor, somebody yanked the shutter shut.