Wretched Earth (18 page)

“You three follow ’em,” Jacks growled. “Make sure they keep
headed in the right direction.”

“Want us to chill them?” Mildred asked.

“Didn’t you hear me just now?”

“Thought it was a speech for those other numb nuts.”

He laughed. “Good point. But I meant it. This time. Now
move.”

“What’d you go and say that for, Mildred?” J.B. asked when they
were out of sight—and earshot—of their employer and his gaudy house HQ.

She grinned. “Just playing the role, J.B.”

“Wonder if you aren’t enjoying it a mite too much. And such a
mild soul you act, most of the time. We don’t want to come off too
bloodthirsty.”

Jak snorted. “Jacks sec boss,” he pointed out. “No such thing,
too bloodthirsty.”

Chapter Twenty-One

“Listen to me,” Reno shouted to the ville folk and
traders gathered around the thirty-foot-wide fountain in Sweetwater Junction’s
main square. He climbed up on the red sandstone cap of its yard-high brick
walls. “Listen! You’re all in deadly danger!”

Nervous faces turned toward him, pinched and pale. People were
queued up north and south of the big fountain along the main road, clutching
chits that seemed to be written on broken pottery pieces—cheap and available.
Clumps of sec men at barricades took the chits before allowing people access to
the fountain. Trade wags, both gas- and horse-drawn, waited at the north and
south checkpoints.

The sec men north of the east–west highway wore black armbands.
The ones south wore green. They seemed to ignore one another studiously. Just as
the ones manning the checkpoint where he’d entered the ville from the east
had.

Reno had spent the last of his jack, plus bartered his last tin
of scavvied corned beef, to buy the water chit required for entry into the
ville. He wasn’t concerned about that. He had ways of getting more.

And those ways entailed telling tales. True tales. Unwelcome
yet necessary tales.

“There’s an army of monsters headed to your ville!” he
declaimed, his voice ringing back from stone-and-brick building fronts. “They’re
right behind me. You have to listen! They’re coming to eat you—you and your
children! They’ll chill you all unless you get ready to fight them!”

Groups of sec men in both colors of armband stared at him in
consternation. Rousing the populace of a ville to fight was a dangerous
proposition for all concerned. As a rule, barons feared that if their people
decided to fight, they were as likely to fight their own bosses for freedom as
any external enemy.

But not this enemy. Reno knew too well. If only he could
persuade enough people in time.

“They rise from the dead. They’re chills, but they walk like
you and me. If they bite you, you turn into one of them. If they get loose in
the ville, it’ll be the end of all of you.”

The green armbands moved first, three burly men breaking away
to run toward him. An eye blink later the black armbands reacted. But by then a
blond-bearded, green-armband guy had Reno by one elbow.

“Come down from there, you stupe!”

“Listen to me!” Reno yelled. “Hear my words! You must prepare
now!”

As he was dragged away, he turned his head.

“You’ve got to get ready. Or you’re all doomed!”

* * *

“Y
OU
MEAN
YOU
BELIEVE
me?” Reno asked.

Gratefully, he accepted a mug of hot spearmint tea from a
servant girl who, despite a lack of the stucco-thick paint that the kind
customarily wore, put him in mind of a gaudy slut. Come to think of it, the
red-velvet-and-gold decor in Boss Jacks’s audience room wouldn’t have been out
of place in a gaudy. The whole building looked like one that had been taken over
and transformed into a heavily armed headquarters.

“Not exactly the first we’ve heard about it,” Jacks said. He
was a lanky guy with a bit of a pot and a set of wrinkles for a face, and hair
the color and straightness of straw.

“We were fools not to listen,” said the mournful black guy in
coveralls who stood beside the boss’s easy chair.

“Well,” Reno said nervously, “what do you want from me, Mr.
Jacks?”

“The whole story.”

“From the beginning?”

Jacks nodded.

“But—I mean, why? If you’ve heard it all before?”

“I didn’t say we’ve heard it
all
before. I said we heard some. I want everything you got. Leave out no detail,
however minor. If we’re gonna fight these things, we need every edge we can
get.”

“We’d be fools not to learn as much as we can,” the black dude,
Coffin, said.

“You think he repeats himself a lot,” Jacks said, “wait’ll you
meet my grammaw. Go on now, son. Lay it on us.”

* * *

T
HE
TALE
-
TELLING
STRETCHED
for hours. Jacks kept asking him to go back over
parts of it, try to remember more. Reno didn’t mind. This was his bread and
butter now. Literally. Jacks had him served grilled pronghorn with dried apple
slice sandwiches while he talked. If he pleased the baron, or whatever this dude
was, enough, he’d be square to stay here a spell. He’d get chow, and water and
shelter.

Until the swarm came, of course. And then it’d be time to move
on. Or—it wouldn’t.

The sky outside the windows had darkened enough to be
noticeable through the curtains when Jacks stiffened and said, “Wait. Go
back.”

“Huh? I mean, yes, sir, Mr. Jacks, sir. Only what part?” He’d
brought them up to almost the present day with an account of his progress
overland, trying to stay out of the hands, not to mention the mouths, of the
changed. Of hair-raising escapes and scrapes and near misses.

“You said something about the bunch you met up with when you
went to the caravanserai.”

“Oh, yeah.” He’d kind of glossed over that part. The narrative
had been rolling, though, so they hadn’t pressed him before. “They were a pretty
wild crew, I got to tell you. There was the one-eyed dude, first I ever heard
call these creatures rotties. And his sidekick, a short little shit with glasses
and a hat. And his woman was this drop-dead gorgeous redhead with tits out to
here—

“What? Why are you staring at me like that?”

* * *

M
IRANDA
S
HARP
’
S
MOUTH
tightened when she saw Stone come out of the sod
house into the moonlight with a man even bigger than he was.

“Finneran,” she said tightly.

He glared back from his meat slab face.

“Lady,” Perico said at her side.

She set her jaw. It cut her like a knife to have to deal with
those who had betrayed her. But the situation, the very welfare of her ville and
her only child, demanded it.

Besides, the formerly low-ranked sec man wasn’t the most
heinous traitor she would meet with this night.

“We’re good,” Stone said. “No surprises.”

Miranda hated surprises. She always had. She was surprised
enough when she received a message requesting an urgent midnight meeting between
her and her hated enemy, the vile Geither Jacks, in an abandoned farmhouse just
west of the ville. She was even more surprised when Perico urged her to
accept.

It had flashed into her mind that perhaps he had betrayed her,
too, but she quickly saw that was unlikely. Perico had long since had all the
opportunities he could desire had he meant to turn on her.

And his quiet, earnest words had convinced her to agree.

She had also been surprised at Jacks’s terms: “Leave your shiny
new mercies at home. I’ll do the same.” But she had concurred. Reluctantly,
because she had come to rely on the three. Especially Krysty, who was developing
into something she’d never really had in her life before: a female confidante.
And Krysty’s handsome one-eyed devil of a man, of course. Even the courtly and
surprisingly formidable Dr. Tanner had proved his worth, both as a tutor for
Colt and as a fighter.

“What now?” she asked. The wind hissed over the plains. From
the icy knife edge in it she would scarcely have known spring was coming, with
its less-welcome accompaniment of occasional torrential and lethal acid-rain
storms.

“We go inside, Baron,” Stone said. “It’s safe.”

Inside, the single room was lit by two lanterns, and a fire
crackled in the hearth. Three men waited. One was a stranger. The other two were
all too familiar.

And hated.

“Miranda,” said Geither Jacks, turning away from the fire.
Stone and Finneran came in, closing the door against the chill. It had obviously
been recently repaired, and actually kept most of the wind out, though it
whistled in the rafters.

“You will use my proper title,” she gritted.

He grinned that lopsided, trap-mouthed grin of his. “Very well.
Mrs. Sharp.”

She felt her face knot into a grimace of fury.

“Easy, Baron,” Perico said from her elbow. “Now’s the time for
talk and reason.”

She drew in a deep breath. “Very well. I agree. Or I would not
be here. What is so important you want me to see, Jacks?”

“Not see,” he said. “Hear.”

He turned to the third man, the stranger. He was a slight young
man with an unruly mop of brown hair and brown eyes huge behind the lenses of
his glasses.

“Go ahead, boy,” Jacks said. “Talk.”

The young man moistened his lips with a pink tongue.

“Evening, Baron,” he said. “Uh, you can call me Reno.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

The instant Ryan opened the bedroom door, the
steel-shod butt of a longblaster caught him hard in the face. The world spun
into crazy chaos. Vaguely, he heard Krysty’s scream of fear and fury, heard Doc
bellow like an angry bull; a flash, the roar of a shot, and somehow over all the
sound of a bullet striking something; a grunt of pain as the room filled with
acrid black smoke.

Ryan was on his back on the cold hardwood floor without knowing
clearly how he got there.

“Alive!” someone shouted. It sounded like Stone. “The baron
wants them
alive!
”

Ryan fought to get control of his body, leap to his feet, leap
into action. But his muscles refused to respond. His stomach rolled over and
over inside him.

Then the boots began to thud against his ribs. It was all red
and pain, until the blackness mercifully swallowed him.

* * *

“Y
OUR
SENTRIES
KEEP
seeing things outside
the wire, Mr. Jacks,” J.B. said.

Although it was well past midnight, the boss of Sweetwater
Junction’s southern half sat in a dressing gown in his favorite chair, with his
feet up on one of those fancy silky footstools, his inevitable cigar and a
snifter of some dark liquid that might just have been scavvied brandy in hand.
The room smelled of pungent imported firewood and cigar smoke.

Unusually, neither his adviser, Coffin, nor his grandmother
were in attendance, although the old lady often went to bed early. J.B.’s team
had encountered the withered old crone only a few times, which J.B. considered a
good thing.

The heat of the fire blazing in the big fireplace seemed to
sting his cheeks and hands. It was that cold outside. He could still smell the
cold beating off his companions’ clothing and his own from their nocturnal
survey of Jacks’s defensive positions.

Jacks drew on his cigar and blew out a greenish smoke ring.

“Seeing real things?” he asked. “Or seeing shadows?”

“Both,” Jak said. “Some.”

“That seems to be the way of it, Mr. Jacks,” Mildred said. “We
saw some things moving around out there, too, before the moon set. Upright
things, not like coyotes.”

“Are these rotties smart enough to do something like that?”

“Doesn’t take a lot of smarts to walk around at night,” J.B.
said.

“I mean, if they’re mindless and driven purely by hunger,
wouldn’t they just keep coming toward where the food was?”

“We don’t know much about them,” Mildred said. “We don’t know
enough. Remember how we told you that while individual ones act pretty mindless,
collectively they seem to show some kind of sense?”

Jacks’s smile looked a mite peculiar to J.B. He wasn’t a noted
connoisseur of smiles, nothing like that. But he’d learned to keep his eyes
skinned for signs of odd behavior among people he dealt with. Keeping close
watch on
details
was something that came easily to
him.

“Yes,” their employer rasped, drawing out the syllable. “You
told me. So you did. And just today I got pretty solid confirmation of what you
told me.”

He turned his head. “You can come out.”

A slight figure with wild hair and eyeglasses not that
different from J.B.’s own emerged from the staircase.

“Reno?” Mildred said. “You get a different prescription? Last I
saw you, you had bat-wing glasses.”

He smiled shyly. “They got busted. When I’m scavvying, I keep a
lookout for ones I can use. Been collecting ’em a long time.”

J.B. felt the hairs at the back of his neck rise as the
implications of the kid’s presence trickled down his spine.

Apparently, Jak did, too. “We fucked,” he said.

J.B. stuck a hand inside his jacket. He heard metal click right
behind his head, and he froze.

The Armorer knew the sound of a blaster’s safety coming off
when he heard it.

Jacks ticked a finger back and forth at them. “Tut-tut,” he
said. “Don’t do anything foolish, Mr. Dix, Mr. Lauren. Dr. Wyeth, a healer, I’m
given to understand. My men already have the drop on you. You have no
chance.”

“Couldn’t smell,” Jak said disgustedly. “Too much fancy smoke
and whore perfume inside.”

Mildred cut her eyes to J.B.

“If you’re thinking of making a play for me, and either
blasting your way out or going down in a blaze of glory,” Jacks said, “my men
have orders to shoot to wound.”

J.B. raised his hands, as did the others. Hard hands frisked
them professionally.

Brick Finneran came out of the stairwell, smiling all over his
pink adobe-block face. “You made me look triple-stupe out there, Dix,” he said.
“I been hoping for something like this.”

“I didn’t make you look stupe, Brick,” J.B. said. “You did that
all by your lonesome.”

Still smiling, Brick stepped forward and slammed a sledgehammer
fist into J.B.’s gut. The air burst out of him, and he fell to his knees,
gasping and retching.

Hands yanked his jacket down behind him to bind his arms.

J.B. shook his head and looked up. Sec men held a
furious-looking Mildred by the arms. A pair flanked Jak with Winchesters pointed
at his head. Another was tying his hands behind his slender back. His red eyes
had the blankness of an animal’s.

J.B. looked at Jacks, who grinned at him.

“There’s someone I’d like you folks to meet,” he said. “You’re
going to get to know him
real
well. Levon?”

If his arms hadn’t been bound behind him by his own leather
jacket, J.B. would’ve gone for it then and there. They hadn’t met Levon before,
but they’d heard the name. Usually whispered in various mixtures of awe, horror
and sadistic glee.

From the stairs came a thumping and a moist wheezing. The
figure that descended needed to turn sideways to navigate them.

Jacks’s pet mutie torturer Levon was a monster in
size,
sure enough. He had to have been six-seven,
six-eight, and weighed a good four hundred pounds. His face was asymmetrical,
one eye larger and higher than the other, both heavy-lidded. He didn’t have a
nose so much as a swelling in the middle of his face with two thumb-size holes
in it, both running snot into a mouth that was a loose hole J.B. doubted could
even close right, with wet lips framing a few twisted, brown teeth. His
complexion suggested boiled oatmeal poured into a cheesecloth bag shaped kind of
like an onion. The point was on top, with a thatch of brown hair sticking up
like leaves.

Levon wore stained denim overalls above a faded orange T-shirt.
His general body shape suggested a bag of boiled oatmeal, too. His vast splayed
feet were bare, mottled pink and blue and white. The nails were humped, yellow
and cracked. His left foot had four toes.

The most striking feature, as he jiggled and whuffled and
giggled and lurched his way out onto the floral carpet in the sitting room, was
his right shoulder. Or shoulders. An extra one sprouted from the armpit of the
other.

J.B. felt a bit cheated. When he’d heard about Levon’s three
arms, he’d expected three full-size limbs, with meat hooks to match. Instead,
the lower right arm was small, not much larger than a child’s, sticking out
through a hole in the T-shirt. Instead of a hand it had a fleshy, two-lobed
claw.

The real ones were nothing to sneer at, though. Levon had arms
like most men had legs. And the hands were huge even for his massive frame.

“Don’t let those pincers fool you,” Jacks said with
satisfaction. “They got a stronger grip than you do. Stronger than Brick, even.
They can give you the nastiest pinch you ever felt in your
soon-to-be-ending-in-agony lives.”

“Levon…play,” the mutie wheezed. The noise seemed to come as
much out his nose holes as through his mouth. J.B. got the notion that, while
Levon likely wasn’t the brightest star in Constellation Mutie, his slowness of
speech was more a function of physical difficulty in speaking than any necessary
slowness of thought.

“Yes,” Jacks said, “Levon play. But don’t do any permanent
harm. And don’t leave any marks.”

He took a hearty puff on his stogie.

“We don’t want ’em all used-up-looking when you torture them to
death in the central square tomorrow, after my little rendezvous with destiny,
now, do we?”

* * *

T
HE
CAT
O
’
NINE
TAILS
WHISTLED
evilly in the air, to crack against Krysty’s buttocks.
Bright white pain flashed through her whole body. Try as she might, she couldn’t
stifle a cry of agony.

“You
bitch,
” Ryan shouted at her
tormentor. “No way you’ll survive this. No…bastard…way.”

Baron Miranda Sharp trailed the knot-tipped leather thongs over
a bare forearm and smiled. “Ah, the passion, the fire! The devotion! You are
quite the man, Ryan.”

She shook her head. “It’s too bad that you came to the ville
under false pretenses. To do what? Assassinate me? And your friends, to
assassinate Jacks? Seize power for yourselves?”

Suspended by steel manacles cutting agonizingly into her
wrists, Krysty turned slowly on chains hung from a huge iron hook in the
ceiling. Ryan came into view, manacled to a heavy chair that was bolted to the
floor. His face was puffy and bruised from the beating he had received. Then
Doc, likewise fastened in a chair, his head down and his white hair falling lank
almost to his lap.

“Never that,” Doc said. He raised his head with a groan of
effort. A red bib of bloodstain ran down the front of his white shirt. Black
trails of drying blood ran from his nostrils over his lip. “We came here to do
one thing and one thing only—to try to get the ville ready to fight the
rotties!”

Miranda made a sound that was half cluck, half snort. “Perhaps.
But why not come openly?”

“You didn’t…believe us when we told you,” Krysty said. She had
mastered the pain. For the moment. She didn’t want to call on Gaia for strength
unless the situation got worse.

“But you deceived me, all the same. You are not to be trusted.
Under the circumstances, that means you must pay the price.”

Still smiling, she lashed out again. The multithonged whip
licked across Krysty’s buttocks like blowtorch flames. She screamed again.

Ryan roared with fury. His face went red, and the tendons stood
out on his neck and jaw at his colossal struggle to get free.

“You would tear me apart with your hands if you could, Ryan,”
Miranda said. “That’s why I torture and humiliate your woman before you. I’m
pressed for time. And when I’m done meeting with Jacks, you will be promptly
executed in public.”

“Your healer said you were not the sort for private torture,”
Doc said. “Yet you had this dungeon tricked out and ready, all along.”

Again she shrugged. “Normally I’m not. As for this room, it was
built by a baron long ago. I have made little use of it, and that only for
interrogations. But your treachery has wounded me deeply. I thought you were my
friend, Krysty Wroth!”

* * *

T
HE
DOOR
TO
THE
CELLAR
ROOM
beneath the former gaudy house opened inward. A hard hand propelled a slight,
stumbling figure forward.

“There,” a harsh voice said. “You got ’em in here. Now why
don’t you keep them company? You and they should have plenty to talk about.”

Raucous laughter faded down the hall and up the stairs.

With a moan, Mildred rolled over to check out the new
arrival.

“So, Reno,” she heard J.B. say. “How’s it hanging?”

Reno had slammed face-first into the wall. Now he turned and
slumped until his butt rested on the crude concrete floor. In the light
streaming through the long, shallow windows up by the ceiling, far too low even
for Jak to crawl through, she recognized the young man as he adjusted his
glasses on his nose.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I came to warn the ville about the
horde’s approach. I had no idea telling my story would bring disaster on you and
your friends.”

“Right,” Jak said.

“Let him have his say,” J.B. said. He sounded marrow-weary.
“Anyway, how could he have known what we were up to?”

The Armorer settled his own glasses on his face, then picked up
his fedora and adjusted it on his head. He sighed. That came close to shocking
Mildred. Such displays of emotion weren’t like him.

Then again, she had seen what he’d been put through. She had
experienced a lot of it herself. Much too much.

Jacks had been right about the brutal power in the mutie’s
fleshy claw.

“That’s right,” Reno said, with a smile that was either shy or
feeble, depending on how you wanted to look at it. While, rationally, Mildred
knew J.B. was right, that no way could the scavvie have wittingly blown their
scheme, she was disinclined to give him the benefit of justice, much less doubt.
“I mean, I didn’t even know you were here. Right?”

I don’t trust the little weasel, anyway, she thought.

“How come you keep turning up?” she asked. “I mean, alive. And
a step or two ahead of the rotties?”

“Just lucky, I guess,” he said, without apparent irony.

“Listen. There’s some things I didn’t tell you about how this
whole shitstorm started.”

“No shit,” Jak said.

The young man told them how he and his friends, Drygulch and
their fiery auburn-haired leader, Lariat, had descended into a broken-open
redoubt. What had happened there. And afterward, at their camp at night.

“When Drygulch rose up I could see right off how he’d changed,”
Reno said. His voice shook like flesh expecting the kiss of a red-hot iron, and
his body did likewise. “Right then, I knew what was going on. Don’t know how.
But I did.”

“So ran off and left buddies?” Jak said with a sneer, leaning
back against the wall of the basement room with a thump of his shoulders on raw
concrete.