Wretched Earth (3 page)

Screw it, she thought. Sometimes it feels good to connect to my
own past. Krysty was a genuinely generous person as well as a friend. Mildred
would just take advantage of her good nature and impose.

“Of course, most of the storage units must’ve gotten wiped out,
too,” she continued. “Only a few dozen are left.”

Those were arranged around three sides of a wide square. The
fourth was occupied by the three-story, wooden gaudy house itself, along with a
combination water- and watchtower, thirty feet high, beside the dirt road to the
main gate beyond. The earth around was stamped flat by generations of feet,
tires and hooves, but Mildred guessed the open space had once been a paved
parking lot. The gaudy probably stood where the office had been. The storage
sheds were still being rented, but mostly by the night—or the hour—as cribs and
temporary shelters for wayfarers across the desolate, acid-rain-racked wasteland
that had once been the Great Plains.

A fair number of wags were parked in the big open space:
Plunkett’s RV, big cargo trucks from the trade caravans and the old school bus,
its bright green paint job faded the color of asparagus.

A pair of people appeared in front of them. Krysty tensed at
Mildred’s side. Strangers moving to intercept wasn’t a comforting nor a
welcoming thing in the Deathlands, but these were nondescript people, a man and
a woman dressed in the usual postskydark shabby clothing, but with dark green
handkerchiefs knotted over their heads.

“Cthulhu wants you,” the woman said, smiling angelically.

Mildred shuddered. “He can’t have me.”

“He’ll have us all someday, friend,” the tall, skinny man said,
beaming. “Come to him now and know the peace of his love.”

“Why do you all wear those green scarves?” Krysty asked. She
had instantly relaxed upon recognizing the pair from the twenty or thirty
cultists overnighting in the caravanserai.

They seemed harmless, but Mildred said, “Don’t talk to them,
Krysty! It only encourages them.”

“Why not?” she asked. “I’m interested in the paths people walk
to the truth. Anyway, I want to know.”

“Why, sister,” the woman said, “it represents seaweed.”

“Seaweed?” asked Mildred despite herself.
“Seaweed?”

“Why, certainly,” the man said, nodding. “The seaweed that
covers our lord Cthulhu’s head as he waits, dead and dreaming, in lost
R’lyeh!”

“Praise Cthulhu!” the woman declared, raising fervent eyes
toward a sky banded with purple, orange, red and indigo. It was just sunset,
though, not any kind of terrible storm coming in. “Cthulhu
fhtagn!
”

“Dead?” Krysty asked, seeming a bit stunned.

“Dead,” they both said, nodding in unison. “Dead to rise
someday.”

Declining the offer of a handout, which seemed to consist of
woodcuts on God—or Cthulhu—the two women walked on.

“What an odd belief system,” Krysty said.

Mildred shook her head. “Dang. I never realized just how
similar the whole Cthulhu thing was to the Christian mythology.”

“You mean the sect existed during your earlier life?”

“Sort of. Only then they were called the science fiction fans.”
She rolled her eyes. “My daddy’d go upside my head, he heard me comparing the
two.”

Some of Omar’s staff, or children—to the extent there was a
difference—were circling the central yard, lighting torches as darkness
fell.

“What’s happening over there?” Krysty asked, pointing.

By the flaring orange torchlight that flickered in a chill,
rising breeze, Mildred saw a skinny guy being bounced like a pinball among a
group of dusty, mean-looking wag drivers. They were hooting derisively as they
thrust him from one to the next. He reeled, unable to get his balance.

Mildred scowled. “They hadn’t ought to do that to a little guy.
With glasses.”

Squaring her shoulders, she marched toward the fracas. It
didn’t even occur to her to wonder whether Krysty would follow or not. Mildred
didn’t care. She hated injustice.

As the little guy was pushed from pillar to post, a bald wag
driver stuck out a boot. The victim went sprawling, his glasses flying off his
face. Desperately, he shoved himself up onto all fours to scuttle after
them.

They’d landed near another knot of jeering, laughing wag
drivers. One waited until the skinny guy’s fingers almost reached the glasses
before he stepped on the specs and crushed them with a vindictive ankle
twist.

“Well, now, look what I gone and done,” he said, showing a
gap-toothed grin to his buddies. “Ain’t that a shame?”

Evidently deciding his pal was getting too much of the
attention, a larger man with a mop of dirty hair took it up a notch. He stepped
toward the scrabbling victim, clearly getting ready to put the boot in.

Mildred grabbed his shoulder. “Here, you got no call to do
that,” she said, spinning him.

The predark doctor was a sturdily built woman. In her time
she’d been an avid hiker, not to mention an Olympic-class pistol shooter. Since
reawakening into the Deathlands she hadn’t exactly slacked off at either
pursuit.

But the guy was a head taller than she was, and what little
wits he had were fuddled by advanced testosterone poisoning. As he turned, he
snarled and punched her hard between the breasts. She reeled backward three
steps and sat down hard.

So there she was. And the dirty-haired guy was winding up as if
to deliver to
her
the kick she’d stymied.

Chapter Two

The burly wag driver, who turned out to have a
rat’s-nest beard to go along with the hair, did a little stutter step to kick
the sitting Mildred. She gave him a hard heel thrust in the nuts. He sat down
not far away from her, bent over and clutching himself.

Mildred jumped up. The whole rowdy group converged on her, the
little dude with the crushed glasses forgotten.

Suddenly Krysty stood shoulder-to-shoulder with her friend. Her
prehensile hair swished around her shoulders, betraying her agitation. It also
betrayed the fact that, however beautiful she was, Krysty Wroth was a mutie.
Given the sign above the gateway, not to mention the temper of the mob closing
in on them, Mildred hoped onlookers would think it was just the breeze stirring
her scarlet locks.

“Wait!” Krysty said, holding up her hands. “What’s all this
about?”

“Thanks, Krysty,” Mildred said from the corner of her mouth.
“But you probably should have stood clear.”

Krysty just smiled at her. That wasn’t the way of any of them,
to stand by and watch a friend get stomped. Mildred felt sick at what she might
have gotten her friend into.

A wag driver with a Mohawk like a dead squirrel atop his head
backhanded Krysty. “Clear out, bitch, or you’ll get what we give her.”

The force of the blow snapped Krysty’s head around. She came
back with an overhand right that flattened the man’s long nose against his face
with a crunch of breaking bone and cartilage, and blood squirting out each
nostril. His eyes rolled up in his skull and he folded to the yard.

With a vicious collective snarl, the man pack closed in around
the two embattled women.

Hard arms enveloped Krysty from behind. Hot breath washed down
her neck and back. It stank like an overflowed shitter.

“Gotcha!” her captor grunted triumphantly as he tried to hoist
her off her feet.

He got more than he bargained for. Krysty brought her knees up
and drove a double-booted kick to the jaw of a short, wide wag driver with a
faded bandanna tied around his head, hurling him into the crowd. Then she
slammed her head back into the face of the man who held her.

Krysty’s skull was stronger than his jaw was. She felt
something crunch at the impact, and he squalled and let her go. She gripped her
hands together and turned into him fast, driving the point of her elbow into the
pit of his stomach. The air burst out of him.

As he jackknifed, Krysty was already responding to the men
rushing in on her. She whipped herself upright, bringing her elbow under the
chin of one of them. His jaws clacked together, then he screamed, revealing red
teeth that had bitten deeply into his tongue.

She caught a glimpse of Mildred. Surrounded, the stocky black
woman had turned into a whirling dervish of fists, boots and elbows. She was
peaceful by nature but could fight when she had to. And years of Deathlands
living had taught her to hold nothing back. She was giving her attackers all
they wanted and a double load more.

Krysty didn’t regret stepping in to help Mildred. The woman was
too softhearted and shouldn’t have intervened. Krysty understood intellectually
that Ryan was right about the need to keep out of fights that weren’t theirs, no
matter how her own compassionate nature rebelled. But there were times when bad
behavior had to be resisted.

Whatever the cost.

Her arms were grabbed from both sides. She sagged toward the
closer assailant, who had caught her right arm. Cocking her knee, she turned and
fired her left leg back in a powerful kick that caught the man who held her
other arm between navel and crotch. It knocked his legs out from under him, and
he slammed into the merciless ground face-first.

Krysty swung back around, driving her left knee toward the
groin of the man who still held her arm. He twisted his own hips. And her knee
drove hard into the big muscle of his thigh. It had to have hurt like rad fire,
but he grinned in triumph that she’d missed pulping his balls, and made to grab
her with his other hand.

She got her foot down, turned back and, grounding her powerful
legs, pistoned a blow against his ribs. Bone cracked like a pistol shot. He
gasped and sagged.

Another man was already closing in from behind. Krysty snapped
her left leg straight back, then whipped it up and around. Her heel thwacked the
new attacker’s left cheek and spun him away.

There were too many of them; she and Mildred could never win.
But Krysty put that knowledge from her mind and gave herself totally over to
fighting.

* * *

A
TALL
MAN
IN
A
JACKET
with tarnished
silver studs and frayed gray patches spun toward Ryan, and away from an
ill-considered attack on Krysty, which had earned him a wheel kick in the
cheek.

He almost stumbled into Ryan. “I’m gonna teach that bitch,” he
said. “Get my back!”

He wheeled to charge the flailing, fighting redhead. Recalling
a lesson from Trader, back in the day, Ryan folded his right hand into what the
cagey old man had called a “phoenix-eye fist,” with the forefinger knuckle
protruding, braced by the thumb. It wasn’t a shot Ryan had had many
opportunities to make. He was interested to see how it would pan out.

It panned out ace. Grabbing the wag driver’s shoulder, Ryan dug
a brutal uppercut into the man’s right kidney, putting plenty of hip twist and
leg drive into the short, sweet, savage stroke. The guy squeaked like a
stepped-on deer mouse and slumped to the ground. There he curled up into a knot
of pain and lay mewling and drooling into the hardscrabble dirt.

“What seems to be the problem here?” Ryan said, raising his
voice.

Nobody paid any attention. Instead, peristaltic waves of mob
closed in and over the two women. Setting his jaw, Ryan prepared to wade in.

A colossal boom roared out behind him, and a garish
yellow-white flash lit the whole courtyard.

Everybody froze, then pale, surprised faces turned in Ryan’s
direction.

But they weren’t gazing at him. He looked around to see Doc
standing tall in his frock coat, grinning hugely. Bluish smoke trailed from the
shotgun tube fixed beneath the barrel of his enormous LeMat wheel gun.

“Now that I have your attention, boys,” Doc called in a
surprisingly hearty voice, “I yield the floor to Ryan Cawdor.”

To Ryan’s left, Jak stood with his .357 Magnum Colt Python
revolver aimed at the mob. J.B. had checked his Smith & Wesson M-4000
shotgun at the gaudy door, as Omar’s rules required. But he’d drawn the mini-Uzi
from beneath his leather jacket, and held it leveled from his hip.

Several wag drivers yipped in alarm and danced as hot buckshot
rained down on them. Doc’s shotgun had enough punch to take off a man’s face or
chop up his guts at arm’s length. But fired straight up it didn’t throw the
double-0 balls high enough to do more than give a whack when gravity inevitably
brought them back down.

Ryan didn’t draw his own SIG-Sauer handblaster. He didn’t want
to escalate the situation.

All the wag drivers started talking at once. The LeMat’s
volcanic roar had knocked the fight out of them. Now they were all tripping over
one another to explain how they were just having themselves some fun with this
skinny kid for talking crazy, and then these bitches came and jumped them… .

Krysty moved forward to help Mildred, who in turn was helping
the skinny little dude holding a well-crushed pair of specs in one hand. He was
the worse for wear.

The wag drivers paid no attention to them. They seemed to have
had a bellyful of the two wild women.

“All right,” Ryan snapped. “The fun’s over. Nobody’s chilled
yet.”

He swept the crowd with his lone ice-blue eye. “What do you say
we keep it that way?”

The wag drivers looked at one another. He could read their
thoughts plainly on their faces and in the set of their shoulders, without need
of any mutie mind powers, which he surely didn’t possess. This wasn’t fun
anymore. He suspected for those who’d come to grips with Mildred and Krysty, it
had stopped being fun considerably earlier.

He frowned at Mildred. “This was your doing.”

It wasn’t a question.

Though she was bent over from the exertion and a fair amount of
pummeling, she straightened and braced her shoulders. “They were beating up this
poor skinny kid for no reason. Kicking him around like a soccer ball.”

Ryan shrugged. “Not our business. Minding other people’s is a
good way to wind up staring at the sky.”

“Fine. You didn’t have to back me up, anyway.”

“Yes, we did, Millie,” J.B. said mildly. He still had his Uzi
out, in case some of the mag drivers got frisky again. “You know we’ve got to
back each other’s plays. That’s why Ryan doesn’t want you jumping into every
swollen river to save every stranded calf. You know what I mean.”

“Why, John,” the stocky woman said, her deep brown eyes
lighting, “that’s almost poetic!”

Ryan raised a brow and looked at Krysty, who shook back her
scarlet hair.

“She did what she thought was right, Ryan. So did I.”

He felt a hand pat his shoulder, and glanced back to see Doc’s
prematurely aged face hanging over him.

“Give it over, Ryan,” the old man said. “This is a fight you
can only lose. Especially if you win.”

Ryan was about to retort that the statement made no sense, then
it hit him that it made total sense.

“All right,” he said. “That bullet’s out of the muzzle of the
blaster, anyway. Say goodbye to your stray and let’s head back inside. No point
freezing our asses off in this wind when the stove’s hot inside.”

“Can’t he come with us?” Mildred asked.

The kid hung back. His narrow face was puffy and turning color.
“Truth is,” he said, “I’m not even supposed to be here. Me and my friends were
attacked. Lost everything.”

“That why those slaggers were thundering on you?” J.B.
asked.

The kid shook his head. He had a shock of dark hair like an
untended garden, and prominent ears. “No. I was trying to warn them.”

“Warn?” Jak asked. “What about?”

The youth shook his head again. “You’ll just start hitting me,
too. And anyway, I better go.”

“I say we bring him inside with us,” Mildred said. “I’ll pay
for him out of my share of what we got for the job.”

Ryan frowned. As was standard practice, Boss Plunkett had given
them half their pay in advance. Nobody was going to do bodyguard work on credit;
nobody was going to hire guards and give them all their jack before they’d
guarded their share of body. People who did either weren’t even triple-stupe,
they were chills. And it was handsome pay. Handsome enough that Ryan and the
others came close to taking for granted Plunkett would try to stiff them at
trail’s end. But they’d burn that bridge after they crossed it.

It wouldn’t be the first time a boss had tried to stiff them.
But if Ryan had anything to say about it, it’d be the last time this particular
one tried.

“Millie, you—”

“Don’t ‘Millie’ me, John! It’s my share, and I can do with it
what I choose!”

“Three days ago we were almost down to boiling the straps of
our packs for sweat soup!”

“That’s about where I find myself now,” the newcomer said.
“Sorry. I’m Reno.”

“Yeah,” Ryan said.

“I will kick in,” Doc said. “We are flush for the moment. I for
one am willing to pay for the entertainment of a good tale, if nothing
else.”

“Pay too,” Jak said. “Want warning.”

“Shouldn’t he be happy enough to take the fact we saved his
life as payment?”

“He’s in a hard place,” Mildred said. “We’ve been there
ourselves. Recently.”

“I know,” Ryan said. “That’s why we’re working for that fat
bastard Plunkett, in case you forgot.”

“Anyway,” she went on, “hasn’t the notion ever occurred to you
that if you help a stranger down on his luck, someday when you’re down on your
luck a stranger might help
you?
”

Ryan stared at her. So did J.B. and Jak.

“Drawing a blank here,” the Armorer said after a moment.

“That a stranger might help another out of kindness, or even
deferred self-interest,” Doc said gently to the black woman, “is a concept alien
to our friends’ experience.”

As a usual thing, the two got along like cats and dogs. But
there were times when refugees from their own times stuck together against their
thoroughly modern comrades.

“It’s a good practice, Ryan,” Krysty said, “even if it’s hard
for you to see.”

“Oh, for shit’s sake,” Ryan said, throwing his hands up in the
air. “When did we become a rolling charity? Fuck it. Bring the bastard.”

He turned—and ran into a barrier: yet another skinny girl, this
one on the cusp of puberty, in a long shapeless frock, with red pigtails and an
excess of freckles.

“My daddy sent me out,” Loretta said. “Ain’t no shooting
allowed in the caravanserai.”

“Tell your daddy it was an accident,” Ryan said.
“We’re…sorry.”

The girl bobbed her pigtails and vanished inside.

Krysty patted Ryan’s shoulder. “There, now,” she said, smiling.
“That didn’t hurt, did it?”

Ryan rubbed his bristly jaw. “Kinda.”

Another figure moved to intercept them by the door. “Cthulhu
saves,” said a roly-poly man with a green hankie tied around his head, extending
a woodblock leaflet.

“Best step back, son,” J.B. told him in a not unfriendly way.
“He’s not on hand to save
you.
”