Wretched Earth (6 page)

Chapter Five

The caravanserai yard was a hell full of the struggling
damned. Bodies thrashed. The doomed screamed as rotties bit great chunks out of
living human flesh. Across the yard Ryan saw the former Boss Plunkett’s big RV
burning merrily. He made for it at a run, as if it were a beacon.

He shot a woman covered in human blood when she lunged from his
right to bite him. A skinny adolescent boy, not Locke or anyone Ryan had seen
before, blocked his path. He drew his panga and hacked at the youth’s head. The
kid fell. Whether he stayed down or not Ryan never knew. He wasn’t about to hang
around to watch.

He reached his friends. J.B. was holding a tall man’s head and
shoulders against the side of the burning wag, where yellow flames enveloped
them. The man continued to paw at the Armorer as if nothing unusual was
happening, his sleeves yellow wings of flame.

Ryan shot the man through the head. He collapsed into a
flaming, stinking heap as J.B. leaped clear.

“Quit fucking around, J.B.,” Ryan said. “We got to shake off
the dust of this place.”

Krysty had her back to a shed, fending off an attacker with a
trenching shovel from a wag’s emergency kit. Ryan hacked the rottie across the
back of the neck. He folded.

Doc stuck the tip of his rapier through the eyeball of an
approaching rottie. Behind him, Mildred held a baseball bat cocked should anyone
get past him. Jak danced around with a big trench knife in his hand, easily
evading swipes from a bearlike foe and awaiting an opening to dart past and stab
him in the back of the head.

“We need a ride out, and fast,” Ryan said.

“Easier said than done, Ryan,” J.B. answered. “Seeing as how
our wags are either in flames or blocked in.”

Krysty ran to Ryan and gave him a quick hug. She had been
rooting around inside the wag with the shot-up engine block. The ax handle she
held was stained with blood at the tip. He kissed her quickly on the cheek, then
pulled free to point back across the yard.

“There’s our ride,” he said. “Right there.”

“That’s those damn Cthulhu cultists’ bus,” Mildred said. “They
might have something to say about our hitching a lift.”

Planting the blade of his panga under his right arm, Ryan
switched magazines in his SIG. He didn’t much worry about getting gore on his
coat. It wasn’t the first time and wouldn’t be the last.

“Doesn’t mean we got to listen,” he said. “Follow me. Wedge
formation.”

Without looking to see if his companions would follow—because
he knew from long experience they would—he set off at a trot for the battered,
faded-green bus. It had a snowplow blade up front and chicken wire over the
windows, most of which lacked glass.

Cultists surrounded the school bus, trying to hold off the
moaning horde by pushing at them with their bare hands. They were determined and
vigorous enough to manage it for now.

The concentration of warm food drew the changed.

Ryan passed Brother Ha’ahrd, who was surrounded by a phalanx of
followers, including a few former wag drivers that seemed to have undergone a
last-minute conversion in the face of overwhelming, mind-frying horror. He was
loudly preaching a doctrine of love and forbearance and waiting on the will of
the Great Old Ones. The rotties didn’t seem to be listening. They were more
interested in eating his head.

Which meant most of the shambling freaks were focused on
something other than the approach of Ryan and friends from the rear. He heard a
couple shots pop off behind him, and the thwack of stout ash wood on a skull,
accompanied by a grunt of effort and triumph from Mildred. Apparently a few of
the freaks still tracked them.

Ryan didn’t look back. Unless somebody screamed for his help,
his job was clearing the way.

He waded into the mob of rotties surging toward the bus door,
where three cultists had linked arms to keep them out. Ryan hacked at the backs
of necks and skulls as if the changed were a stand of brush he was trying to cut
a trail through.

A woman turned a blood mask to snarl at him and he shot her
between the eyes. He sensed a presence on his right and whipped the butt of his
SIG around to squash a changed man’s nose in a spray of dark fluid. The rottie
staggered back. An eye blink later Doc’s slim rapier impaled the creature
through both temples like an apple on a skewer.

A burly rottie, obviously a changed wag driver, bare-chested
and with a short Mohawk, spun to bare his teeth and spread his arms to seize the
one-eyed man. Ryan hammered him between the eyes with the SIG’s butt, then shot
him in the forehead as he staggered back.

The rotties pulled down the two women and one man barring the
door. As the cultists futilely screamed and thrashed, the rotties homed in on
them. Ryan kicked at the flailing tangle until the way was clear, then rushed
into the school bus with his friends at his heels.

A stout woman in a robe sewn together from burlap bags barred
their way. “Stop! There’s no room in here for anyone but believers!”

Ryan was about to rebut her with a copper-jacketed 9 mm bullet
where it would do the most good when Krysty grabbed his arm from behind.

“Wait!” she yelled. “She’s right!”

The cultist was. Ryan looked around the bus to see the seats
and aisles jammed with refugees. Not all of them looked as if they belonged to
Brother Ha’ahrd’s flock, or at least had started the day that way. Still, the
practical puzzle was insoluble: even shooting the reticent wasn’t likely to
drive these people out into the blood-smeared rottie mob.

“Up!” he heard Jak call.

“Say what?” Ryan turned to see Jak disappearing up the first
window behind the door.

Ryan jumped back outside. After even momentary exposure to the
relative warmth inside the bus, generated by close-packed bodies and humid
panting breath, the chill hit him like a slap. As did the stench of burning
petrocarbons, human flesh and hair, and spilled intestines.

“Follow Jak!” Ryan yelled. He stooped to grab one of Krysty’s
calves. J.B. grabbed the other, and the two men boosted the woman high enough to
scramble onto the roof after the albino youth.

Stabbing, slashing, shooting only when utterly necessary, Ryan
and Doc helped the cultists stave off the rotties while Mildred and J.B. quickly
passed the packs up to Krysty and Jak atop the bus. Then Ryan and J.B. gave
Mildred a boost, and Doc. Finally, Ryan stood facing out, while J.B. scaled him
like a monkey and clambered up.

The changed surged forward. Unfeeling hands reached out for
Ryan, blood-spilling mouths gaping wide to consume his flesh.

* * *

M
ILDRED
HAD
BARELY
got
her bearings atop the ice-cold metal roof of the bus when another stout woman
wearing the Cthulhu cult’s flowing robes and head scarf came bustling up
alongside the baggage that had been strapped onto a rickety roof rack.

“You can’t come up here!” she snapped. “This is for believers
only—”

“Gaia forgive me,” Krysty said. She kicked the stout woman off
the roof.

Mildred felt her brows climb up her forehead. Krysty looked
back at her and shrugged.

“Move your broad butt, woman!” yelled a familiar voice from
behind. Mildred turned a furious glare on J.B., whose head popped up over the
roof edge like a curious prairie dog’s.

“John,” she said, “you and me are going to
talk.
”

But she shifted aside to make way for him as a great cry went
up from the cultists below.

“Brother Ha’ahrd!” a voice screamed.

Ryan looked past the rotties closing in on him to see the
long-haired prophet knocked off his feet by a surge of creatures who had
overwhelmed his guards. Cultists stampeded off the bus, bowling over the rotties
in their path in their zeal to rescue their guru.

Ryan had caught a break.

Not a man to waste an opportunity, Ryan holstered his panga and
handblaster, spun around and jumped as high as he could. Krysty and J.B. caught
hold of his outstretched arms and hauled him up on top of the bus as if he were
a child.

“After all this trouble we could ride inside now,” Mildred said
peevishly. She knelt on the heaped baggage, making fast their own packs. Doc
squatted to one side, reloading his revolver as calmly as if he were out for a
morning stroll outside his home in nineteenth-century Vermont.

Ryan shook his head emphatically. “Just as glad to ride up
here,” he said. “Rotties get inside—”

Screams pealed out the door. “Shit!” J.B. said, leaning out to
peer over. “They are!”

“Grab legs!” Jak called. Without waiting to see if anybody
responded, he got down on his knees at the front end of the bus roof. While the
few cultists and other refugees who had also sought safety up there looked on
dumbly, Krysty and Mildred jumped to grab the youth’s ankles as he let himself
topple forward.

An instant later Ryan heard the roar of Jak’s .357 Magnum Colt
Python.

* * *

F
EELING
K
RYSTY
’
S
AND
Mildred’s grips strong on his ankles, Jak let himself almost smack
face-first into the cold windshield of the bus, using his right palm at the last
moment to keep from breaking his nose.

Beyond the glass, which remained unfogged due to the icy air
streaming in the open door, he saw the look of terror on the driver’s face,
rendered more comic by being upside down: the saucer eyes, the mouth a screaming
O below a bearded chin.

The driver had good reason to scream. He was trying to hang on
to the wheel, probably to keep from getting pulled out of his seat, and batting
with his right arm at a rottie who was trying to bite his head. Other rotties
had got themselves jammed in the door in their lust for human flesh and hot
blood.

Jak pressed the vented muzzle of his blaster against the glass
near the first rottie’s head and pulled the trigger. The Magnum blaster kicked
itself away from the windshield as the glass collapsed inward. He let his arm
straighten to ride out the recoil; he hadn’t been able to brace properly, and
expected the reaction.

Inside, the bus driver stared in even greater horror at his
attacker. The back of the changed woman’s head had been blown off. The guy was
staring through her mouth at the other rotties still struggling to break free
and get at him.

The half-headed rottie collapsed. People in the bus were
screaming and leaning over at least one person who’d been hit by the 125-grain
hollowpoint slug, which hadn’t expended all its energy blowing the rottie’s head
apart. Jak took in the fact without emotional reaction. These were no friends of
his, nor enemies, either. So why care?

With the window glass gone he had clear shots at the rotties in
the door. Grabbing the Python’s grips with both hands, he fired three shots as
fast as he could. Two of the creatures went down at once, shot through the
forehead. The third reeled back with her lower jaw torn away. Instantly, hands
grabbed her from behind and threw her to the ground as furious cultists surged
in, bearing their injured leader.

Jak turned to the driver. “Drive,” he said, gesturing with his
Python for emphasis.

Eyes all but popping free of his lean, ashen face, the driver
put the wag in gear and hit the gas.

* * *

A
BLOOD
-
STREAKED
GRAY
head appeared over the rear end of the bus roof as
the vehicle took off with a jerk. Kneeling on the cool metal, Ryan had
unstrapped his Steyr from the top of his backpack and cracked the bolt to make
sure the weapon was loaded. He put a hand down briefly to steady himself against
the sudden acceleration, then whipped the longblaster’s butt to his shoulder and
fired.

The head disappeared. Whether he’d destroyed the brain or not
Ryan didn’t know. The 7.62 mm bullet might have caught the creature in the
shoulder. It didn’t matter as long as the thing didn’t get up here.

“Everybody all right?” Ryan shouted, hanging on to the
jury-built luggage rack as the bus wheeled in as tight an arc as it could toward
the compound exit. “Sing out.”

“Yes,” Krysty called.

“I’m here,” J.B. said.

“Capital, Ryan!” Doc declared.

“Ace,” Mildred said sourly, as she and Krysty stood up
together, hoisting Jak back up with his white hair swinging wildly. “Jak’s here,
too.”

The albino youth jackknifed up between the two women and popped
to his feet.

“Holy shit!” Ryan saw Mildred pointing straight ahead.

The caravanserai gate was shut. It was also on fire.

Chapter Six

Yellow flames danced against the backdrop of the
snow-dusted prairie beyond.

The bus driver never slowed. “Brace yourselves!” Ryan shouted.
He saw Krysty and Mildred turn away from the front of the bus and throw
themselves on the mounded baggage. He did likewise.

The snowplow blade hit the gate. Whether more weakly
constructed than it appeared, or weakened by the flames, it flew apart, sending
flaming planks and posts spiraling away like pinwheels.

The bus took off down the dirt road, which was basically a pair
of ever-deepening ruts running northeast to southwest.

“Tie on!” Ryan shouted over his shoulder to his companions. As
far as he could see, the six of them now had the roof to themselves. The handful
of cultists who had climbed up here, presumably not as keenly honed to a
survival edge as the companions, either had been tossed off by the wag’s wild
maneuvering, or had bailed voluntarily.

A mob tottered in slow pursuit of the wag, black figures
silhouetted against yellow flame. They faded rapidly as the school bus jounced
off across the countryside.

Lying on his belly, Ryan used his belt to fasten himself to the
steel rail of the roof rack. His companions chimed in with shouts as they
finished making themselves fast.

“Weapons out!” he called when Doc called the last
acknowledgment.

“The rotties can’t catch us on foot,” Mildred said.

“Do you know there’s not a hundred of ’em waiting out
here?”

“Weapon out,” Mildred said.

* * *

T
HE
G
REAT
P
LAINS
were never as flat as
they appeared, Mildred thought. The dark land scrolling past them mostly looked
like the top of a billiard table. Yet she ached in elbows and thighs and breasts
from being slammed on the metal roof every time the bus bounced over an unseen
obstacle or crashed down onto ground as hard as a baron’s heart, each time
threatening destruction to its ancient suspension. Meanwhile the back of her was
freezing through from the ice-blast wind of passage, especially her legs,
covered only by the thin fabric of her camo pants.

Every bounce also reminded her that the dark country abounded
with hiding places for lurking foes. Not just the changed, either. Lethal
predators abounded in the Deathlands, animal, mutie and human.

Shadows seemed to flit across the shadowed land. A score of
times Mildred opened her mouth to cry an alarm, or slipped her gloved finger
into the trigger guard of her Czech-made .38-caliber target revolver. Each time
she held herself back from screaming or shooting. And each time no attack
came.

She was horribly aware that didn’t mean the threats she thought
she saw in the shadows
weren’t
real.

The bus picked up speed, trading the occasional bone-slamming
jolt for a constant rattle that felt as if it might detach Mildred’s retinas.
But she gritted her teeth and hung on.

Because one thing she’d learned, more than a century before
she’d ever opened her eyes to this terrible new world, was to endure.

* * *

A
N
HOUR
LATER
the bus rumbled to a
stop in a sandy wash next to a slowly moving stream. Steam rolled from under the
hood. The engine hissed and pinged as it cooled.

“What’s happening?” Ryan called.

“Driver says he thinks we’re far enough away to take a break.”
Krysty called back. “He says we’ve come about thirty miles.”

“Great,” J.B. said. “I could stand to try to winch my bones
straight again. The knots in my muscles’re getting knots in them.”

“All right,” Ryan said. “Everybody cut loose. Keep eyes skinned
and blasters ready.”

“Really, friend Ryan,” Doc croaked, “sometimes you belabor the
obvious.”

Ryan stood and stretched. He felt about the same way J.B.
did—as if some triple-size mutie had grabbed his ankles and tried to bust
boulders using Ryan as a hammer.

The door opened and passengers spilled out onto drifted sand.
Some fell weakly to hands and knees. Somebody puked noisily.

A woman with a hood pulled up over her head scarf stopped after
several paces and turned to look up at Ryan.

“Any of our brothers and sisters up there with you?”

“No,” he said.

She gazed up at him for a spell, then turned and walked
off.

“What that about?” Jak asked, walking up to Ryan. He moved with
his customary youthful-predator swagger. Ryan shrugged in response. He reckoned
Jak didn’t feel much better than anybody else, but had enough resilience to hide
it better.

The one-eyed man already knew none of his party was injured. It
had been hard to make himself heard above the bus’s clatter, but he’d confirmed
that nobody had caught any grief beyond scrapes and bruises.

And, most importantly, no bites.

The companions moved off to the side. The cultists and other
refugees showed no interest in mingling with them, and they were just as glad
not to have to answer any uncomfortable questions about the manner in which
they’d hitched a ride. Not to mention the fates of the cultists who’d been atop
the bus with them.

“A fire would be welcome,” Doc said, rubbing his hands
together. “Restore warmth to chilled bones.”

In lieu of that they squatted in the lee of the bus. An east
wind had risen during their uncomfortable ride. It came whistling beneath the
wag’s swaybacked undercarriage, cutting through Ryan’s clothes and skin like a
knife.

“What do you plan to burn for fuel, you old coot?” Mildred
asked. “Your extra long johns from your pack?”

They had unloaded their backpacks from the luggage rack, just
in case they needed to make their own way out of there in a hurry. Or in case
some of the cultists unexpectedly drove off.

“What are those rad-blasted creatures?” Ryan said, ignoring the
byplay. He stood with his back to the wag and his Steyr slung over his
shoulder.

“Triple-pain in the hindquarters, is what,” J.B. said.

“They have me feeling the creepies all over,” Krysty said.

Ryan looked at her. “How come they don’t feel pain? How come a
wound that would drop any normal man doesn’t slow them down? How can they even
move? And why do they need to eat, anyway? Far as I can tell, they’re chills, or
next thing to it. What do they need food for?”

“Why, my dear Ryan,” Doc said, “you seem to have taken an
unusually empirical turn of mind.”

“Didn’t think you went in much for abstract curiosity,” Mildred
said.

“Nothing abstract about it. ‘Know your enemy like you know
yourself,’ Trader always said.”

“I don’t want to know these things,” Krysty said. “They’re not
part of Gaia’s nature.”

“Worse than muties?” J.B. asked.

“Yes,” the redhead said emphatically. “There’s a wrongness
about them I’ve never felt from the most horrible mutie. Ryan, they’re
dead.
They really are. Just like those hogs in
Canada.”

Ryan nodded. “That’s why I want to know about them, Krysty. How
do you fight what’s already dead?”

“Shoot head,” Jak said. “Works.”

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “Why?”

“You really aren’t succumbing to curiosity for its own sake?”
Doc asked.

“Fireblast, no. If I know why that chills them, I may be able
to find something else that does it, too. At least waste less time and ammo
doing stuff that doesn’t faze the bastards.”

“Chopping their heads off should work,” Krysty suggested.

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “I hacked one or two through the back of the
neck, too. That seemed to drop them, and made them stay down.”

“Their central nervous system appears to retain some function,”
Mildred said. She squatted with her arms crossed tightly beneath her breasts.
Her big chocolate eyes stared intently at nothing in particular as she wrestled
with the questions.

“Or perhaps something else makes use of their nervous system,”
Doc said.

“You talking crazy, Doc? Don’t need you losing it, just now,”
Ryan said.

But Mildred had raised her head and was looking hard at her
customary antagonist. “What are you getting at, old man?”

“Clearly, or at least so far as we can tell, life has fled
these poor unfortunates that Ryan dubbed ‘rotties.’ Yet they move. And we saw
none of those horrid worms from the north.”

“You channeling Galileo?” Mildred asked.
“Eppur si muove.”

Doc laughed, a soundless, head-bobbing motion.

“What are you two rambling on about?” Ryan demanded.

“Ancient history,” Mildred said. “You wouldn’t be
interested.”

“Perhaps these unfortunates have been taken over by some kind
of organism, not the worms of Canada, which we haven’t seen.”

“Well, we definitely know that’s a possibility,” Ryan said.

“When I was held captive by the vile whitecoats,” Doc said, “my
captors often spoke of artificial organisms that they could program to do their
bidding. Like living steel, but so small the finest optical microscope could not
see them.”

“You talking about nanotechnology, Doc?” Mildred asked.

He blinked. A light snow had begun to fall, swirling on the
side of the bus away from the wind. White crystals crusted the long lashes above
his intense blue eyes.

“I believe that was the term they used, yes.”

“We’ve heard about that before,” Krysty said. “But how could
this nanotechnology be involved here? These are people. Or rather, creatures
that
were
people.”

“Perhaps the nanotechnological machines permeate the bodies of
their victims,” Doc said slowly, clearly speaking thoughts as they formed in his
mind. “Somehow they animate the limbs and impart some measure of direction to
their actions.”

“That almost sounds like demonic possession you’re talking
about, old man,” Mildred said.

Doc frowned at her, seeming to chew over the concept mentally
rather than take offense.

“Aside from arising from an agency not strictly supernatural,”
he said slowly, “how is this possession not aptly described as demonic?”

“So why does shooting their heads chill them?” J.B. asked.

“Obviously, the organisms, or whatever they are, require their
victims’ bodies to sustain and reproduce themselves. Like disease germs. Perhaps
they also make use of the human nervous system to control their stolen
bodies.”

“Ugh.” Krysty shivered.

“Drive us,” Jak said. “Like bus.”

J.B. turned to him, his eyes squinted behind the round lenses
of his glasses. “That’s cold-blooded even for you, Jak.”

The albino teen just shrugged.

“If the pathogens are nanoscale robots,” Mildred said, “that
might explain why the, uh, the
change
is
infectious.”

“There’s something I don’t understand,” Ryan said. “Or mebbe I
should say, something else I don’t understand. From what that skinny kid told us
back in the ’serai, it took his friend hours to ‘change’ after he got bitten.
But Plunkett’s gaudy sluts were already rotties when he came screaming down the
stairs, when I went in to get him. They couldn’t have been bitten more than a
few minutes before.”

“That reinforces the idea the change works like a sickness,”
Krysty said.

“How would that happen?” Ryan asked.

“Different people show different reactions to disease,” Mildred
said. “Some die quickly, some just get sick. Some are even immune.”

Ryan felt his lips peel back from his teeth, which instantly
sent spikes of pain up the bones of his face from the cold.

“So they’re plaguers?” he said.

Mildred nodded.

“All right,” he said. “So we know blowing their brains out
drops them. So does cutting the spinal cord, at least in the neck. Shooting them
anywhere else is pretty much a waste, unless it gets them to back off long
enough to get in a head shot. Or bash their skulls in.”

“Cutting off their arms and legs should do it, too,” Mildred
said. “Eliminate them as threats, anyway.”

“Long as you’re careful not to get close enough they can bite
you,” Dix said.

“Always the charmer, John,” Mildred said. He flashed her a
grin.

For a while they squatted, or in Ryan’s case stood, in silence,
listening to the wind boom and sigh across the plains.

“I feel kinda bad we lost the body we were supposed to be
guarding,” Mildred said. “Plunkett did pay us up front to protect him and his
people.”

“It happens,” Ryan said. “Not even the first time it happened
to us.”

“We could never be accused of failing to do everything within
our power to carry out our charge,” Doc said. “These were circumstances as
unforeseeable as they were beyond our control.”

“Boss Plunkett,” Jak said. He spit, carefully aiming downwind
of himself and his companions. “Was dick.”

Mildred shrugged. “And there you have it.”

J.B. rubbed the stubble on his chin. “So what now, Ryan?”

“Continue on to Sweetwater Junction, I reckon. We got some jack
and supplies from Plunkett up front, but we burned a triple-lot of ammo getting
away. Mebbe we can buy more there.”

“And water,” J.B. said. “That ammo will command some serious
jack, though.”

“Right.” Though it lay in the midst of some of the worst, most
desolate Deathlands, the ville of Sweetwater Junction was relatively large and
prosperous, owing to its location on a trade crossroad, as well as the aquifer
that gave it its name. “Our canteens’ll be dry as neutron bones by the time we
get there. Mebbe we can even find work for a while, stock up.”

Krysty looked up at that, her emerald eyes big and her red hair
starting to uncurl a bit. Ryan knew what she was thinking. She never gave up
hope that they’d find a place to settle down, rest from their wanderings and
make a real life for themselves.

Fireblast, Ryan thought. It’s what keeps me going, too. Nothing
he’d heard about Sweetwater Junction really screamed out “safe haven” to him.
But what the nuke? They wouldn’t know until they got there.