Wretched Earth (24 page)

“You’ve done enough,” Colt shouted close to Ryan. “We’ll take
over now.”

“You…shouldn’t…be here, Baron,” Ryan panted. With no mutant
enemy within range, his arms had fallen of their own accord. He literally wasn’t
sure he could lift them again. He had to glance down to make sure he still
gripped the shovel. He couldn’t feel his hands anymore.

“Not…safe,” he managed to mutter.

The plump young baron had his blaster in his left hand and a
wrought-iron fireplace poker in the other. He jabbed it at a rottie’s face,
forcing the creature back a step. A sec man crushed its skull with an ax
handle.

“This is where I have to be now, Ryan,” Colt said.

Ryan couldn’t argue. He and his friends retreated to the
weathered plank front of a house and just leaned there.

“Need water,” Mildred said.

“Parched as I am,” Doc said, “I am not sure I could stomach
water that had passed through the vileness on my lips, and even in my
mouth.”

“We need to wash this shit off us!” Mildred said, with more
energy than Ryan reckoned she had in her. “We don’t know what it’ll do.”

Either on his own hook or his counselors’ advice, Colt had
mustered ville kids to act as runners. Most of what they were bringing was
buckets and jugs of water, anyway, to rehydrate the defenders. Whatever the new
baron did about controlling Sweetwater Junction’s main resource in the future,
rationing was off for this day.

The kids ranged in age from near-toddlers to eleven or twelve.
Anybody older was either hiding out or fighting. Far from being horrified or
disgusted, the children treated all this as a marvelous game.

Ace, Ryan thought, as a little girl laughingly threw a whole
bucket of water in his face. They had moved back in the alley, away from where
Baron Sharp and his subjects now battled the advancing horde.

Somebody brought rags. Ryan and friends scrubbed as much of the
rottie ooze and chunks off them as they could.

“Not sure this cloth’s very clean itself,” Mildred remarked,
although she didn’t stop scrubbing her face with the one she held.

“They could be fresh-used ass wipes,” J.B. said, “and it’d be
better than
this.
”

Finally, Ryan reached the point where he could think about
drinking without wanting to puke. A terrible thirst promptly hit him. His lips
felt like the cracked dry mudflats outside the ville, the inside of his mouth
and throat like paper. He felt as if he were shriveling into a prune from the
inside out, and wondered that he hadn’t just sort of imploded.

“Don’t drink too much too fast,” Mildred cautioned.

“I know,” Ryan said. He caught himself on the verge of taking a
giant swallow that would have hurt like a steel fencepost going down, and might
have caused massive cramps. Instead, he rinsed his mouth and spit. He could feel
the water swelling his tissues back into shape.

“Be fit to fight in a little while,” J.B. croaked, wringing out
his well-soaked hat. “No more than, say, a week, ten days.”

Ryan mustered a sound more like seeds rattling in a dried gourd
than a chuckle. “Be lucky if we get ten more minutes,” he said.

Then a cry went up. “They’re pulling back!”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

As more voices took up the joyful cry, Ryan felt
adrenaline blast through his chill-weary bones and muscles.

“Wait!” he shouted. His voice was a raven’s croak and his
throat hurt as if the lining was being pulled. But he managed to make himself
heard. “Why are they moving back? How are they moving back? They have no bastard
minds!”

It was true. The remaining rotties had turned and begun
wandering away from Sweetwater Junction as if they’d all lost interest. They
streamed toward the top of the distant rise, where the horizon cut the sky.

“They’re not…completely mindless,” a voice said. Ryan looked
around to see Reno standing alone between Ryan’s companions and the gate
defenders. The slight young man with the unruly hair and heavy glasses had the
loneliest look Ryan could ever remember seeing.

“Some show signs of something like will. Even a kind of
intelligence.” The kid turned and looked at Ryan. “You’ve seen it. The flashes
of awareness. Mebbe they share a hive mind. Like an ant colony. With its
queen.”

He turned again to look out to the east, where storm clouds
gathered in an afternoon sky. Late afternoon, Ryan was surprised to notice. The
ville’s angular shadows stretched well up the long swell and darkened the backs
of the retreating rotties.

“Ryan, what’s that?” Krysty asked, pointing.

A figure stood atop the rise, and the rotties seemed to
converge on it. A little farther down the slope a second figure stood waving a
hand above its head.

“I don’t know.”

Ryan unlimbered the Steyr, which he had slung and cinched up
tight to prevent its butt banging him in the kidneys as he fought the
rotties.

He saw a woman on the crest. She had a full figure, and her
shoulder-length hair blew in the wind, russet rather than scarlet. The second
figure seemed to be twirling something on a rope above its head.

The woman’s face, and the bare upper torso and arms of the
other, showed the dead blue-gray hues of the changed.

“A bullroarer,” Doc said dreamily.

“Talk sense, old man,” Mildred said. Exhaustion made her
crabby.

Doc shook himself as if he’d caught himself nodding off.

“It’s a bullroarer,” he said again. “A hollowed out piece of
wood…or bone. When spun around the head it makes that peculiar pulsating
moan.”

Now that he mentioned it, Ryan could hear the strange bass
ululation.

“That’s not mindless behavior,” Krysty said. “Reno’s right.
Say, where’d he go?”

Ryan lowered the glass. For a moment he stared at the
auburn-haired figure off in the distance, then he looked around.

The kid was gone.

“Ryan!”

It was Colt Sharp, walking up with a wedge of sec men trotting
behind. “You did ace. It was great! You saved the ville.”

Ryan just looked at him. He was too tired to make nice with a
baron, even though the kid showed promise.

“But there’s…there’s something I need to ask you.”

“What’s that, Colt?” Krysty asked.

“We’ve got wounded. Some of them have been bitten. Others—we
just don’t know for sure.”

He paused, blinked, worked his lips in and out. This was
obviously not coming easy to him. Plus he was trying triple-hard to talk like a
grown-up. Or how he reckoned grown-ups talked, anyway.

“I—I need you to take care of it for me.”

It finally dawned on Ryan what the baron was asking. The
one-eyed man wasn’t usually this slow. Then again, most of his days didn’t start
with a rifle butt in the face and get hairy from there.

“Taking care of it” meant figuring out which ones had been
bitten by the rotties, then chilling them before they could change. That kind of
thing could cause hard feelings. Blood feuds, perhaps. Not everybody whose son
or sister or father got chilled would see that it wasn’t just necessary for
everybody’s sake, it was an act of kindness.

Naturally, Colt would want his out-of-town mercies to see to
it.

“Yeah,” Ryan said.

Relief made Colt nearly weepy. “Thanks. I knew I could count on
you, Ryan!”

He hurried away.

J.B. pushed up his hat to scratch the front of his head. “Boy’s
starting to think like a baron already.”

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “And here I was just startin’ to like
him.”

* * *

“A
T
LEAST
THERE
AREN
’
T
any little kids,” Mildred said
with a sigh.

But that was a relative thing. A boy leaned against the wall of
the large shed where the dozen or so questionable wounded had been locked on the
baron’s orders. His black hair hung in his fever-flushed face. He couldn’t have
been much more than fifteen. Sixteen max.

“Stay away from my son!” his mother screamed. She knelt
protectively between him and the door. Then, she contradictorily added, “He’s
bad hurt. He needs attention.”

The woman was as wasted as the empty lands around Sweetwater
Junction by the burdens of her life. The bun her brown hair was wound into was
threaded with gray. Her face might’ve been handsome once, if she’d ever had a
square meal and enough water to drink. But labor and privation had shrunk her
skin to the harsh bones of her face, which was twisted in a grimace of
confusion, rage and terror. She held a hand spread, callused palm outward, to
ward off Ryan and the companions as they came in.

“Ma’am,” Krysty said softly, “come away now, please. You can’t
do him any good.”

“He’s hurt! He needs help.” A sob racked her skinny body in its
too-big cotton dress. “You want to chill him. But he’s just a boy.”

“He’s been bit,” Ryan said. “He’ll change. He’s becoming one of
them, and there’s nothing you or we or anybody can do to stop it.”

“No! He ain’t been bit! He’s just hurt!”

“We can see the bite mark on his cheek from here plain as day,”
J.B. said.

“No! You can’t! I won’t—”

The flash dazzled Ryan’s eye in the gloom of the shed. The
gunshot threatened to bust his eardrums. Dust and mold filtered down from the
rafters like khaki sleet.

The bitten boy lay with his head slumped against a dark
blood-splash on the splintery wood. One eye had rolled unseeing up in his
head.

Jak lowered his handblaster. A thread of gray smoke trailed
upward from its muzzle. The dead boy’s mother shrieked and jumped at him. Ryan
and Mildred caught her by the arms.

“It doesn’t get easier talking about it,” Mildred said. Her
face was frozen in a grim mask. “Now get out of here, lady. We have work to
do.”

* * *

C
OMPLETELY
DRAINED
, physically and otherwise,
and once again covered in stinking sludge, the six friends returned to the
baron’s palace not long before sundown.

Some of the bitten had begged and pleaded to be allowed to
live. Some had asked to die as quickly and painlessly as possible. Both sets got
the same treatment. One got what it asked for.

The good news was that only one of the six questionable wounded
showed definite signs of being bitten. But Mildred remained unsure about the
rest.

J.B. and Jak were for going ahead and chilling them. Mildred
wanted them tied up and locked away where they could be watched. If they didn’t
change in a day or so, they were probably not going to. Krysty and Doc backed
her.

In the end Ryan opted to give them the chance. It wasn’t any
skin off his ass one way or the other; he and his people weren’t going to be
keeping tabs on them. And the fact was, he’d had his fill of chilling and then
some.

The companions surrendered their clothes to palace servants for
cleaning, and took turns at hot showers using the palace’s gravity-driven
system.

After a two-hour nap they were summoned downstairs to the
dining room to meet with their default new employer. Colt Sharp had obviously
neither slept nor cleaned up, apart from having the worst dreck wiped off his
face with a wet rag. He looked as haggard as a fat kid could. His cheeks were
sallow and hung. His eyes were sunk in dark circles.

“Are the rotties coming back?” Ryan asked.

He feared a night assault, but he and his companions had been
running on fumes. He hoped if the horde did attack again under cover of
darkness, whatever the new young baron had done while they’d napped would be
adequate to stand them off for a spell. Ryan and his companions had no more to
give, even if the changed were running wild in the streets.

But Colt shook his head. He was flanked by his advisers, Perico
and Jacks’s former man, Coffin. There seemed to be no hard feelings on either
side. Ryan didn’t have energy or interest to try to figure it all out.

An expensive pinewood fire blazed in the hearth. A large map of
the ville, hand-drawn in ink on a big sheet of age-yellowed paper, was spread on
the big table.

“No,” Baron Sharp said. “But it looks as if they’re spreading
out to surround the ville.”

“So they’ll try probing attacks,” J.B. said. “Or mebbe just
draw everybody with a big feint one side of the ville, then steamroll in on the
other.”

“But that’s tactics, John,” Mildred protested. “These creatures
are mindless. They lack volition.”

“They don’t always act like it,” Krysty said. “Remember, they
responded to the call of that bullroarer thing. And it was a rottie working the
device.”

“We’ve seen them use simple tactics before,” Ryan said. “And
that kid, what’s his name—he said they’re not all mindless. That rottie woman
standing way up there watching the fight wasn’t, sure as rad death’s a bastard
way to go.”

The baron scratched the back of his neck. “Speaking of that,”
he said, “I’ve got something to show you.”

He called out. A door opened, and a figure stumbled into the
middle of the room, propelled by a sec man’s hard hand.

“Reno,” Krysty said.

The kid’s hands were tied together before him. He used them to
set his glasses more or less square on his nose.

“Krysty,” he said. “Ryan. Everybody. Fancy meeting you
here.”

Ryan looked at Sharp.

“We’ve got patrols walking the perimeter,” Perico said. “They
caught him trying to slip out the west gate right after sundown.”

“Lucky it was the west gate,” Coffin said. “Or we would’ve
strung the fool up already.”

Colt shook his head. “We’d have talked to him awhile
first.”

“So what’s your story, kid?” Ryan asked. It seemed appropriate.
He was nominal sec boss of Sweetwater Junction, after all. In
fact,
he reckoned. For now.

Thin shoulders covered in scuffed leather shrugged. “Figured
I’d warned you all. Done what I could. So I was looking to move on.”

“Not looking to circle around and report what you’d spied out
to that weird woman?” Ryan asked.

“Of course not! I’ve been trying to get away from the rotties
for…well, you know. Weeks.”

“You do have a tendency to turn up right before they do,”
Mildred said.

“Well, yeah. I want to warn people what’s in store. I told you
that.”

“Is that it?” she said. Her eyes were hard. “Really? Or are
they following you? Are you leading them to fresh meat?”

The color drained out of his already pale face, leaving it as
white as clean paper. “No! I’d never do anything like that. I’m trying to get
away from them!”

“Take your shirt off,” Mildred said.

“Huh?”

“Take off your shirt.”

He stayed pale. “No, really. No reason for that. Can’t we just
talk—”

“Cut it off him,” Ryan told the two sec men who had delivered
the prisoner.

If he needed any confirmation that he really was sec boss,
instead of it all being for show, he got it when the two obeyed without
hesitation. One drew a hunting knife from a sheath at his belt. Neither glanced
at their young baron for confirmation.

“No! Wait!” Reno yelped, sidling away. “These’re the only shirt
and jacket I’ve got.”

“Why should I care?” Ryan asked.

“Please! Let me go. I’ll take them off myself.” He held up his
tied wrists.

“How do we know you won’t make a break for it?” Mildred
asked.

Jak laughed. “Hope prick tries,” he said, an ugly glitter in
his ruby eyes.

Ryan looked at Colt. It was his house, after all.

“You can handle him, can’t you?” the boy asked.

J.B. chuckled. “You can sure say that.”

“Do it.”

The sec man with the knife grabbed Reno’s arm and none too
carefully slid the blade under the coil of rope and sliced it.

“Ouch,” Reno said resentfully, cringing and rubbing one wrist.
“You cut me.”

The sec man laughed at him, put the knife away and went to
stand with his back to the fire.

Reno ran a last desperate look around the room. Whatever he had
in his mind—arguing, pleading, flight—he decided not to try it. He took off his
jacket. Then, with visible reluctance, his shirt.

“Gaia!” Krysty exclaimed.

“Just as I thought,” Mildred said, stepping up to grab his
right wrist and holding up his skinny arm. “A human bite wound. Healing, but
slowly by the looks of it.”

She dropped his arm and turned to the others. “He’s been
bitten. Maybe a couple weeks ago.”

“You mean he’s a rottie?” Colt asked in alarm.

“Clearly not,” Mildred said. “And the sixty-four thousand
dollar question is—why not?”