Wretched Earth (7 page)

“Excuse me.”

Everybody’s head snapped around at the timid words. The speaker
was a thin young cultist woman, shivering in her sackcloth robe.

“We heard that one of you was a healer,” she said. “We have
wounded.”

Mildred got up. Ryan frowned briefly but said nothing. He
wasn’t thrilled with her helping the cultists, but he had to admit he had no
grounds to try to stop her. None of
them
needed her
services, and he could see how a little extra goodwill might come in handy out
here in the middle of the badlands. Even the goodwill of as sorry a pack of
people as the cultists.

“Thank you so much,” the thin woman said. “Brother Ha’ahrd is
in a mighty sore way.”

“Brother Ha’ahrd?” J.B. repeated incredulously. “He’s
alive?”

She nodded. The wind whipped wisps of blond hair from under her
head scarf.

“He’s hanging on to life, by the grace of the Great Old Ones,”
she said. “He was bit something grievous by those monsters. As were a number of
our brothers and sisters. But the faithful rescued him and brought him back
aboard the bus, and we were carried here to safety.”

Mildred was nodding, her mind already switched to the mode of
assessing the task ahead of her. She started walking toward the clump of moaning
cultists.

Ryan caught her arm.

“What?” she demanded, turning back.

The others had gone still, as if they’d finally been frozen in
place by the merciless late-winter wind. Ryan felt as if his skin was stretched
over an ice sculpture himself.

“Did you say bitten?” Krysty asked.

Chapter Seven

“Yes.” The young woman nodded. “Some were shot, or cut
or burned pretty bad. But most of our injured were bitten and scratched by those
horrible things.”

“Let go of me, Ryan,” Mildred said. “I’ve got to—”

“Got to what, Millie?” J.B. asked. His normally soft voice was
edged like a blade. “Get bitten and changed yourself?”

“I— Oh.
Oh.
” Her face acquired a
greenish-gray tinge.

“Time to go,” Jak said.

Ryan heard an exclamation, more an awed mass exhalation, from
the direction of the cultists. He turned and looked.

Brother Ha’ahrd had stood straight up from amid his adoring
followers. It was as if he’d been miraculously healed.

Or…something decidedly else.

For a moment the huddled believers stared up at their prophet
in worshipful awe. The thin blonde who had spoken to Mildred ran toward him,
crying, “Brother Ha’ahrd! You’ve returned to us!”

The others shifted aside to let her through. Brother Ha’ahrd’s
big baggy head turned toward her as she ran up, her arms spread to hug him. For
an instant Ryan thought he saw a red glow as of reflected firelight in his
sunken eyes.

He grabbed her shoulders and bit a chunk out of her cheek.

“Fuck me,” J.B. said matter-of-factly.

“No,” Ryan said. “Fuck these stupes. We’re leaving.”

The crowd had shrunk away in horror when their beloved prophet
sank his teeth into his acolyte. Now she screamed and thrashed impotently as he
gnawed at her skull. Around them other figures grappled wildly, silhouetted
against the feeble bluish flames of the fire.

One broke free and sprinted for the companions. It was a small,
slight man whose scarf had fallen back to reveal a balding head. One side of his
face looked as if it had been chewed off. The eyeball bounced around wildly on
the stalk of its nerve.

Mildred turned sideways, raised her ZKR 551 one-handed and
fired once. His head snapped back, a hole in the center of his high forehead. He
collapsed, to roll bonelessly across the frozen ground for several feet.

“Some of these bastards’re fast,” she said.

“Leave how?” Krysty asked.

“Isn’t it obvious?” J.B. asked. “Why flee across the landscape
on foot like bare-ass hillies when we can ride in style?”

“Get the gear on the bus,” Ryan commanded. “Also your asses.
Time to move.”

“But it’s not our bus!” Mildred protested.

“It is now,” he said, hefting his own pack.

Mildred looked distressed, but she holstered her handblaster,
picked up her own backpack and was second on the bus after Doc.

“Snap it up,” Ryan said. Most of the cultists were still
preoccupied dealing with their comrades who hadn’t exactly survived, but refused
to stay dead. But one woman spotted the companions piling into the wag, and
raised a cry of protest.

It rose to a shriek as another woman chomped the side of her
neck from behind.

“Don’t know how many of these people’re going to have use for a
wag, anyway,” Ryan said as Krysty and Jak piled aboard.

People started running for the bus. At this point, which were
normal and which were rotties didn’t much matter. Ryan sprang quickly up the
steps inside.

J.B. was ensconced in the driver’s seat.

“No key!” Jak called.

“Have some faith, Jak,” the Armorer said. He already had a
multitool in action, digging a bundle of colored wiring out from beneath the
steering wheel. A moment, a spark, a smell of ozone, and the bus’s engine
blatted and growled to life.

Still in the step well, Ryan pivoted and slammed the door shut,
leaning on the bar. A heartbeat later a cultist crashed into it. He hammered
desperately on the glass with his fists.

“Let me in!” he pleaded, his voice muted by the glass. His
breath made a smear of condensation that blurred the look of sheer fear on his
face.

Other figures came up from behind. Hands seized him, and he
howled as fingernails dug into his cheek.

“Go,” Ryan said. “Now. Time really is blood here, J.B.
Ours.”

The bus accelerated. The screaming cultist and his changed
companions bumped along the steel flank and were left behind.

“Old girl just needed to warm up a moment,” J.B. sang out.

“Old bitch nearly got us chilled,” Ryan grumbled, hanging on to
the steel post by the first seat as the ancient wag bounced overland.

“People are running after us,” Mildred reported from the rear
of the bus. She sounded upset about it. “I don’t think they’re all rotties.”

“Good for them,” Ryan said. “If they’re not stupes, they’ll
keep on running.”

* * *

B
UT
THE
OLD
CLATTERY
BUS
had something to
say about carrying them all the way to their goal, Sweetwater Junction. Namely,
that nobody had topped up its fuel at Omar’s before their unceremonious
departure, and the tank ran dry.

It stopped in the middle of a featureless nowhere. Ryan opened
the door and stepped outside into a blast of cold wind freighted with tiny ice
particles that stung his face.

“Damn,” he said, and went back inside.

They slept the rest of the night in the bus. It wasn’t warm,
but it protected them from the wind.

In the thin gray light of dawn they ate a cold breakfast of
jerky and dried fruit from their stores. Then Ryan had them bring the cultists’
packs down from the roof to be rifled for items of use or value.

“I feel like a grave robber,” Mildred said.

Ryan and Jak kept watch from the emptied roof. Ryan
occasionally swept the horizon with his rifle shouldered and his eye to the
scope. He could easily hear the conversation on the ground below despite the
rushing wind.

“We don’t know if all the folks whose packs these were are
dead, Millie,” J.B. said.

Uh-oh, Ryan thought. He and Jak looked at each other.

J.B. was Ryan’s best friend. There was nobody handier with a
gun or a gadget, and nobody he’d rather have at his back—except maybe Krysty.
There was no harm or malice in the little armorer. Unless you were an enemy. In
which case, fuck you.

But sometimes he just didn’t say the right thing.

“That doesn’t exactly make me feel better, John,” Mildred said.
The tone in her voice was as cold as the prairie wind. “We’re robbing people of
material they might need to survive.”

They had piled meds, canned food, some jerked meat, jack and
water bottles in a heap. It was turning into a tidy pile. To Ryan’s annoyance
there were neither weapons nor ammo. These cultists were pacifists.

“We’re not taking it back to them, Mildred,” Krysty said. “No
point in letting it go to waste, is there?”

She nodded. “I hear you. Still…”

“Way I see it,” J.B. said, “their loss is our gain.”

Mildred shot him a look like a burst of machine-gun fire and
stalked away. Frowning in puzzlement, J.B. started after her.

Krysty caught his arm and shook her head.

It all rolled off Ryan’s shoulders and down his back like rain
beading on his coat. Mildred had her spells. She was no different than Doc that
way. Only instead of straying from reality, as the old man occasionally did,
Mildred sometimes got overwhelmed by how different the world she lived in was
from what she’d grown up with. She had come a long way over the years, but she
had her moments.

Her squeamishness didn’t bother him. Both Mildred and Doc had
valuable skills for the group. Neither had much trouble snapping to and doing
what needed to be done when the shithammer came down. That was what mattered
most to Ryan.

They split the proceeds among their own packs. Mildred accepted
her share without comment, although she was still tight-lipped. J.B. shot the
sun with his minisextant and confirmed their position was a two to three days’
walk out of Sweetwater Junction. They set out west for the ville.

They walked for a day beneath skies filled with clouds the
color of spilled brains, bent over to reduce the impact of the wind. They were
near enough the main route to the Junction, a predark road with two cracked but
mostly intact lanes of pavement, to catch sight of it every now and again. Ryan
decided to stay clear. The going wasn’t too bad with the ground frozen, and he
didn’t feel eager to encounter any fellow wayfarers just now. If any of the
companions didn’t like that decision, they didn’t say so.

As sunset cast diffused shadows across the plain to the east,
they saw smoke drifting from the far side of a rise a mile or two ahead.

“Coldhearts,” J.B. said.

“Mebbe,” Ryan said. “But Baron Sharp of Sweetwater’s got a rep
for wide-ranging and frequent patrols. And not much sense of mercy.”

“You thinking of signing on for that, lover?” Krysty asked.

Ryan shrugged. “Like to keep the option open.”

“Careless, letting smoke seen,” Jak said, squatting on his
heels and looking like a red-eyed white wolf. “Double-stupe.”

“Mebbe, mebbe not,” Ryan said. “They might just be confident
they can handle any grief the smoke draws to ’em. Anyway, we’re not looking to
sign on with them. Not sight unseen.”

“We could use some information,” Krysty said. “Especially if
they’re just out of Sweetwater Junction.”

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “Jak, you head on out front. Creepy-crawl
their camp, see what they look like. We’ll come on after you.”

“Shouldn’t we try to set up some kind of rendezvous point?”
Mildred asked.

Jak laughed. “Day can’t find friends in open,” he said, “day to
die.”

* * *

A
N
HOUR
LATER
,
the nighttime
landing on the Deathlands like a geological stratum of coal brought the party to
a sudden halt.

“Don’t need to go stumbling into any sentries in the dark,”
Ryan said. They were no more than a quarter mile from the camp. Its fire could
be seen as a little dome of yellow glowing atop a long slow rise.

The wind in the grass made a sound like six billion soldier
ants on the march.

The companions hunkered down with their backs to the cut of an
arroyo to shelter them from the freezing wind. They’d hardly done so when Ryan
heard nine soft hoots float on the cold night air, fading away at the end. They
sounded almost like words “who cooks for you, who cooks for you all… .”

It was the call of the barred owl, a species with a wide range,
including the densely wooded bayous of the Gulf Coast. But a bird whose range
did
not
include a land as treeless as this.

Ryan stood up. The wind ran icy fingers through his hair, and
the chill went right through his scalp, seemingly into his brain.

“Head on in, Jak,” he called softly. “We won’t shoot at
you.”

Even Ryan jumped when Jak suddenly landed on the soft sand of
the dry stream bed right at his side. The youth laughed noiselessly.

“You can be such a dick, Jak,” said Mildred, who’d been half
dozing with her arms around her knees.

“What’d you find?” J.B. asked. “Do we fight or flee?”

“Or mebbe even talk to them,” Krysty said with gentle
irony.

“Not look like coldhearts.”

“Ah, but Jak, what do coldhearts look like?” Doc asked.

“Shave heads. Big mustaches. Tattoos. Too many weps.”

Hard as it was at first to try to envision “too many weps” in
the Deathlands, Ryan quickly caught the point. A peaceful party would be well
armed if it wanted to stay alive, unrobbed and unraped. But it couldn’t afford
to load itself down with blasters and knives. Those things were heavy and
unwieldy, and interfered with carrying trifles like food and water. So a party
that bristled with armament meant coldhearts.

“So what do our friends out there actually look like?” Ryan
asked.

Jak shrugged. He had bitten into a strip of dried fish scavvied
from the pilgrims’ packs, and was crunching on it. The stuff was so horrible
even his Deathlands-born companions, J.B., Krysty and Ryan, who had been known
to eat day-dead coyote with relish, couldn’t stomach it. But the albino teen
loved it.

“Traders,” he said, little bits of fishy vileness falling from
his pale lips. “Talk like. Look like had to leave someplace in hurry.”

“How can you tell that, Jak?” Krysty asked.

“No wags. Just drag pole, mebbe two.”

“Even conveyances so crude would constitute a genuine rarity
out here,” Doc said, “given the paucity of trees.”

J.B. swapped looks with Ryan. “Be the sort of thing traders
might grab on their way out of a ville in a rush, though,” the Armorer said.

“And the nearest ville that way is Sweetwater Junction,”
Mildred commented.

“Right,” Ryan said with a decisive nod. He stooped to collect
his backpack, which he’d dumped as soon as they’d sheltered in the wash. “Let’s
go see if they want to talk.”

* * *

F
ROM
TWENTY
FEET
AWAY
Ryan could actually feel the warmth of the fire
on his face. It was that cold out there.

“Evening, friends,” he said, stepping forward, holding his
hands spread out at his sides to show they were empty.

About ten dark figures were huddled around the little
buffalo-chip and winter-grass fire. They gave a collective jerk when he
spoke.

Heads turned toward him and he heard the mechanical cricket
chorus of blaster safeties coming off.