Wretched Earth (4 page)

Chapter Three

“So let me get this straight,” Doc said across the
barroom table. “There is an infestation of these strange creatures that is
coming this way. And they eat people.”

“Cannie muties,” Jak said. He was turning one of his throwing
knives across the back of a white hand, knuckle to knuckle. “No big.”

The kid Mildred had rescued from the mob shook his head. “Not
muties,” he said. “They’re…sick. And you can catch what they got.”

“What do you mean?” J.B. asked.

“They’re not mutants. They’re normal people who have changed.
They’ve turned into mindless, soulless monsters who hunger for human meat. For
us. There are hundreds, man. And they’re following right behind me!”

He was getting worked up. He stood half out of his chair.
“You’ve got to believe me! Somebody’s got to do something!”

Sitting protectively beside him, Mildred took the tattered
sleeve of his plaid shirt and tugged him back down. Though she never would’ve
admitted it to her friends, she was trying her damnedest not to laugh. The poor
crazy kid talked like somebody from a B horror movie.

“So, not muties,” Jak said. “Just cannies. Seen cannies. Killed
cannies.”

“You don’t understand,” Reno said. His face worked as if the
muscles were trying to pull themselves apart beneath his grayish skin. “They’re
worse than any cannies you’ve seen. Worse than you can imagine.”

“We’ve seen some pretty rough ones,” J.B. said.

“And our imaginations are quite expansive,” Doc added, though
not unkindly.

He might be half out of his mind some of the time, and lots of
his attitudes struck Mildred as more neolithic than Victorian, but overall he
was closer to her conception of what a normal human being was like than these
born Deathlanders. Krysty showed at least flashes of compassion. But even she,
with her unquestionably big heart and spirit, could surprise Mildred.

“They’re triple-hard to kill,” Reno said. “At least as bad as
stickies. They don’t feel pain, see. It’s like they’re…dead. Walking chills.
They even start to rot. But it doesn’t slow them down. Oh, no. They move like
lubed-up lightning, some of ’em.”

Mildred looked at her friends. She could tell they were
thinking the caravaneers were right. This was crazy talk. She wasn’t so sure.
The young man had clearly seen something that frightened him terribly.

“And here’s the worst part,” the youth went on. “If they bite
you, you become one of them. If they chill you, you rise again as one of them.
Unless you’re lucky enough they just eat you alive. Once somebody gets bitten,
you have to chill them right away. Right now. Because it’s only a matter of time
before they change, too!”

The little bubble of silence that surrounded the table after
that pronouncement seemed to repel the raucous chatter that filled the saloon.
At a breath of cold, relatively fresh air from outside, Mildred turned to look
at the door, relieved for the break.

The leader of the Cthulhu cultists, Brother Ha’ahrd, swept in.
She was sure the name was really Howard, but that was how the ever-ebullient
prophet introduced himself, and how his followers reverently pronounced his
name. He was of middle height, a tad taller than J.B. His face had clearly been
broad even before age started to turn it shapeless and run it down over his
neck. Iron-gray hair hung down the back of his dark green robe. He alone of the
believers wore no headcloth.

He smiled and loudly greeted the Nuke Red Hot One, who was
seating customers at the moment. She smiled back. The Fat One was bustling to
the kitchen with a big galvanized metal tub full of dirty crockery. The Skinny
One still worked the bar. Omar himself was nowhere to be seen.

Mildred took advantage of the break to study Ryan for his
reaction to all this.

Frowning slightly, he turned to Reno, who was fumbling in a
little sorry-ass backpack that, judging by its shape, held mostly nothing. The
kid unfolded a fresh pair of eyeglasses, these with bat-wing frames, and fitted
them experimentally in front of his watery blue eyes.

“Where’d you get those, Reno?” Mildred asked.

He shrugged. “When I’m scavvying, I always keep my eyes peeled
for unbusted pairs that’re close to what I need,” he said, smiling shyly and
half-apologetically. “Only way I can see anything.”

“So how do you come to know all this about these…rotties?” Ryan
asked.

Reno shook his head. “Don’t know all about them. Sorry. I know
way too much. But not all. We were scavvies, like I said. My friends Lariat and
Drygulch and I. A few nights ago they hit us where we were camped.”

“So you were the only one who got away?” J.B. asked. Mildred
looked at the Armorer narrowly, trying to divine whether he was trying to equate
the kid’s survival to cowardice. It was a fine line in the Deathlands. Nobody
liked somebody who’d run out on his partners when the shit hit. Yet nobody
survived any length of time without being ready to just run when the odds got
too bad. She still had little idea where the line lay. She suspected it was
pretty subjective.

But Reno shook his head. “No. We all got away. But one of my
friends got bit. That night while we were sleeping, Drygulch changed. He jumped
on Lariat and bit her. That’s when I ran. And came within a hair of running
right into the rest of these—what’d you call them? Rotties?”

He grimaced. Mildred reckoned he was trying to smile. “Good a
name as any, I suppose.” She wondered why nicknames for muties in Deathlands all
ended with
ie.

“Pardon my asking,” Doc said. “But how do they come by these
numbers? These are desolate lands, barely inhabited.”

Far away from reality as the old man could wander, he could be
as focused as a microscope. Usually he stayed here and now when danger
threatened. Or when, as now, his curiosity was aroused.

“It’s a big country, Doctor,” Reno said. “Look around. There’s
fifty, sixty people staying here tonight, and mebbe twenty live and work here
full-time. If you shake out all the folks who live in a hundred-mile radius you
can get a mighty crowd, even in hard core Deathlands like these.”

Ryan’s lips tightened, as if he didn’t like the way the skinny
kid’s words tasted. Mildred thought she detected something a little off about
the tale herself.

And so what? she asked herself. In the Deathlands, everybody
has secrets.
We
have secrets.

Back in her day they used to talk about how valuable
information was. Talk about the information economy replacing the economy of
everyday physical things. In the end physical reality had reasserted itself with
a bloody vengeance. Yet information or its lack could get you chilled. Like any
other resource.

She wanted to remind Ryan of that. She suspected it would only
make things worse.

“Sounds crazy,” Jak said. But Mildred could see white around
his ruby irises, and his fine nostrils were flared like a winded horse’s. He was
spooked by talk about the walking dead. He had been raised in the bayous of the
South, steeped in superstition. Except who could say what was superstitious
these days when so many fantastic—and horrible—things stalked the land?

“Please,” Reno said hollowly. “You have to believe me. We need
to either get ready to defend this place, or get out of here while we still
can!”

That seemed to make an impression even on Ryan. Before Mildred
could more than catch his eye, a fresh commotion came from the direction of the
stairs.

Boss Plunkett and some of his retinue lumbered down from the
upper stories, where the luxury accommodations were located, and where the gaudy
house part of the caravanserai’s trade was carried out. The boss had changed
into a satiny purple dressing gown that looked suspiciously as if it had started
life more than a century before as a bedsheet. He had a bottle in one hand, a
cigar in the other, and his arms draped like beef boughs over the necks of his
“secretaries.” Two of the gaudy sluts accompanied them. Loomis followed close
behind, glaring around at the other bar customers as if ready to take a bite out
of anyone who got within range. As always, he put Mildred in mind of a Village
People wannabe.

Plunkett swept his boiled-ham face around the room. It reddened
slightly when he caught sight of Ryan and friends. He turned to mutter something
to his personal sec man.

As the Nuke Red Hot One squired Plunkett and his female
satellites to a table, which she cleared of caravaneers with one flinty look,
Loomis swaggered over to the companions’ table. He was hitching at his tight
black leather pants as he came. Mildred didn’t even want to
think
about what that might imply about what had just been going on
in the boss’s private room above.

Loomis stopped a few feet away and thrust his unshaved face at
Ryan like a challenging canine. “Boss says he wants to talk to you, Cawdor,” he
said. He jabbed a thumb back over his shoulder.
“Now.”

Behind the round lenses of his glasses, J.B. narrowed his eyes
at the man. For him that was about as good as cussing Loomis out loudly. Mildred
squeezed his leg under the table.

“Be back,” Ryan said laconically, rising. He turned and looked
at Loomis. The sec man stood glaring up at him for half a minute. Then,
realizing he wasn’t going to win any staring contests with the taller man, he
turned and led the way back to their boss’s table.

* * *

“W
HAT
THE
HELL
are you playing at,
Cawdor?” Plunkett bellowed as Ryan came up. “You ain’t gettin’ paid to sit on
your asses listenin’ to fairy stories. Get out there and guard my shit, before
these convoy scum steal me blind!”

Ryan took his time answering. He and his friends had taken
Plunkett’s jack. The one-eyed man felt bound to see a job through once accepted,
if it was at all possible without throwing away the lives of his companions. He
was tempted to give their current boss a second mouth to bellow through,
between, say, chins two and three. But it was bad form, and he didn’t want to do
it unless he really had no choice.

Anyway, it wasn’t as though the boss’s abusive bluster was
news.

Besides, there was an off chance the fat man would pay the
balance owed at the end of the trail, just as he said he would. That in itself
was worth keeping him alive. For now.

“Right,” Ryan said. “We’ll do that.” He glanced at Loomis.
“Startin’ to smell bad in here, anyway.”

He turned back to his party. He doubted the sec man had the
stones to jump him. And if he did, Ryan was certain he’d read it in the faces of
his friends, all of which were turned to watch him.

He got back to the table without incident, noticing the
caravaneers drinking in the bar seemed to let their eyes slide away from him
like oil drops on a hot pan. The cultists, too.

Fine, he thought. It saved complications if they were afraid of
him. Omar had a strict rule against anyone who wasn’t Omar chilling anybody
inside the adobe outer walls of the compound.

“Let’s go,” Ryan said. “Boss says it’s time to get back to
work.”

“Ryan—” Mildred started.

“Yeah, okay,” he said. “He can stay with us.”

“Thank you!” Reno said. “You won’t regret this.”

“Don’t get ideas,” Ryan said. “We’ll probably chill you in the
morning.”

* * *

R
YAN
CAME
AWAKE
all at once, as he
usually did.

He was instantly aware of a presence leaning over him in the
cold darkness of the cinder-block hut. Something was tickling his upturned
face.

It was Krysty’s hair.

“There’s something going on,” she said as soon as his eye
opened.

Ryan sat up. He slept in the shed where Plunkett’s sec wag was
parked. Krysty would’ve slept alongside, but had her turn on watch. J.B. and
Mildred had the shed with the boss’s personal wag. The RV was parked outside the
structures. Jak and Doc slept in it.

“What?” Ryan asked as he picked up his 9 mm SIG-Sauer P-226
handblaster and his eighteen-inch panga from where he had them laid close to
hand. He tucked them away in appropriate places and started to pull his boots
on. Apart from them he slept in his clothes.

“Guards have been reporting movement out in the night,” Krysty
said. The land lay clear for anywhere from fifty to a hundred yards all around
the perimeter wall. Omar’s crew kept it swept of brush or anything else
unwelcome visitors could hide behind. Or use as cover from blasterfire. “They
think they’re human.”

“Could be starting at shadows,” Ryan said, grunting as he
hauled on a boot. “Mebbe they heard your pal Reno’s scary stories.”

The skinny bespectacled guy had pitched his bedroll next door
with J.B. and Mildred. If Mildred was going to take in strays, she was going to
have to take care of them herself. And J.B. would have to deal; Ryan grinned a
little at the thought.

Krysty shook her head. She squatted next to him, ready to
spring into action at an eye blink’s notice.

“Don’t think so, lover.”

From outside they heard voices raised. She looked around.

“Now what?” Ryan said.

Krysty shook her head. She straightened, and they both walked
out the open bay door into the yard.

The first thing they saw was eight or ten of the wag drivers.
They were roaring drunk, standing in a ring passing bottles around.
Fortuitously, they were on the far side of the compound from where Boss
Plunkett’s wags were parked. They seemed to be engaged in some kind of
roughhousing.

From over by the gate they heard voices raised. “But Maw,” a
male voice, high and near cracking with adolescence, called in protest. “She was
just a little girl, wandering out there all alone in the dark. Leon said weren’t
no harm in letting her in.”

The bucktoothed kid was a twig of about thirteen, all nose and
Adam’s apple. Omar’s wives had dropped uncountable girl children—at least, Ryan
hadn’t been able to count them all. But they seemed to have produced only two
boys—this one, Locke, and eight-year-old Paco.