James Axler - Wretched Earth

Stopping by the door to let a knot of panicky people out, Ryan looked back over his shoulder. Mildred was lowering her blocky ZKR 551 target revolver from a one-armed shooting stance. He caught a gleam of torchlight on tears streaming down her cheeks.

The Fat One squalled in outrage and jumped to her feet. “That wasn’t a little girl anymore!” Reno yelled, jumping in front of Mildred as if to shield her from the wrath of Omar’s heftiest wife.

From somewhere came the cry “They’re over the wall!”

More of those creatures, men and women but not men or women, moved with unnatural hitching gaits through the crowd in the yard. Ryan thrust his way into the gaudy house, breasting a stream of half-naked sluts screaming as they raced out.

The first thing that hit him when he entered was an eye-searing stink of smoke. It was more than the potbellied stove could possibly account for unless the chimney had gotten blocked. He took a wild flying guess that wasn’t the case.

Behind the bar the Thin One flailed vigorously at three no-longer-human opponents with an aluminum baseball bat. It made musical thunking sounds as it bounced off bone lightly padded by muscle or skin, off joints and skulls. Family members, employees and patrons wrestled with enemies whose skin, bluish in the lantern light, was cratered with running open sores. Some were missing big chunks from their bodies, even arms.

A wag driver grabbed the arm of an elderly man to try to pull the oldie off a comrade. The arm came off in his hands. He stared at it in comic amazement as the changed oldie sank his few remaining teeth into the second wag driver’s neck.

Plunkett and crew were nowhere in sight. Fleeing sluts, guards and customers were blocking the stairs. Ryan began shoving them bodily out of the way. As strong as he was, their fear was stronger. He didn’t make much progress.

Smoke began rolling along the hollows of the ceiling between the beams. The gaudy house was well and truly on fire.

Loomis tumbled down the wooden stairs, wearing only his shiny, black leather pants. “They’re already changing!” he screamed, catching himself on all fours.

Buck-naked and baby-pink, Boss Tim Plunkett lurched down the stairs behind his sec chief. His hairy, fish-pale belly hung low, obscuring his genitals. Blood gushed from his torn-out throat. His voice box and airway were apparently still intact, or mostly so. As he banged from rail to wall and back, clutching his blood-gouting wound with one hand, he kept croaking, “Help me!”

He toppled, to land on his gut with a massive crash.

* * *

SHUDDERING ORANGE FIRE erupted from the combined watch- and water tower, followed a beat later by a roar of full-auto blasterfire. Pressing the hand that held the pistol grip of his M-4000 scattergun to pin his battered hat against his head, J.B. reached with his free hand to snag the back of the man’s flannel shirt Krysty Wroth wore. He dragged her to the ground.

Bullets cracked right over their heads, where their bodies had been an eye blink earlier. Headlights popped as the burst raked the Tundra’s front.

The burst went on, sweeping the length of the big RV. Metal flexed musically.

“Shit!” Krysty exclaimed. That startled J.B. The redhead normally didn’t use bad language.

Then he smelled gasoline and understood why she cussed. Krysty threw herself over him, grabbing him so they both rolled sideways over the cold, trampled earth, away from the fuel-leaking RV. It also took them out of the dubious cover of the wag’s thin-gauge metal walls.

The burst hammered on. Good way to burn out a barrel fast, the armorer in J.B. noted. Inevitably, the bullets struck a spark. The big wag lit up with a fat pillow of blue fire and a low but loud whump.

J.B. felt a wave of heat wash over him as he came to rest on top of Krysty, looking down into her green eyes. He grinned.

“I better climb off,” he said. “Don’t want any misunderstandings with Ryan.”

“Reckon he’d understand,” she said.

The machine gun lashed back across the crowded yard. J.B. could tell humans were getting hit. They fell and stayed down. The triple-strange creatures—the rotties—kept shambling along despite repeated torso strikes.

“Look out!” Krysty gritted. J.B. tipped his face to the ground as bullets stitched right to left not two feet in front of him. Ricochets whined over him, gouts of dirt tapping the front brim of his hat.

“That stupe in the tower’s gonna chill us before the rotties do,” he said.

He heard the bark of a .38 from his left. The muzzle-flare from the tower was cut off. J.B. looked to where the single gunshot had come from.

Mildred knelt on the dirt, her left elbow braced on one knee, her left hand cradling her handblaster.

“You chill the dude, Millie?” he called.

She shook her head. “Like you said, J.B. He was a bigger danger.”

“Wags fucked,” Jak said, coming out of the shed behind J.B. “Tundra chilled. Other—”

He shook his white-maned head in irritation. The burning cargo wag blocked the third vehicle in the shed. It blazed too vigorously for anyone to try to push the big vehicle clear.

Krysty sat up beside J.B. She suddenly whipped her upper body left and shot twice with her snub-nosed Smith & Wesson. Right toward Mildred.

Spinning around, J.B. saw a man with a black pit where one eye should be reel back from where he’d been about to blindside the sturdy woman. Apparently Krysty had hit him in the body, not the head, and he lunged for Mildred.

“Shit!” J.B. yelped. He rolled fast right, trying to clear his own scattergun for a shot at the rottie. It’d be dangerous with Mildred in the way. But if it was really true that if you got bitten by one of these hoodoos, it turned you into one of them…

There weren’t many things in this world that J. B. Dix shied away from. He’d seen his share of scary shit and then some. But he couldn’t stand to think of that happening to Mildred. To any of his friends.

But he wouldn’t make it in time. Seconds slowed as he watched the rottie close in on Mildred, who was lining up a shot on another target and still unaware of her danger. He shouted a warning he knew would come too late.

With a crunch a thin steel blade poked through the man’s head from right temple to left. The rottie went to his knees.

“Touché,” Doc cried. He put a boot to the side of the slack-skinned, veined face and pushed. The creature flopped to its side and lay unmoving.

J.B. scrambled to his feet. A man with an arm swinging from his elbow like a busted gate loomed in front of him, a vomitous reek of rotting flesh.

Whipping up the M-4000, J.B. jabbed the steel-shod butt into the creature’s face. It lurched back two steps, then its head exploded as J.B. reversed the scattergun and fired, eight inches from the bridge of its nose.

“You guys hold them off,” Krysty shouted, stuffing a speed-loader into her snub-nosed handblaster. It held only five shots, a triple-rough disadvantage in a fight like this. “Mildred, come help me get the packs.”

“What do you plan?” Doc asked. He fended off a short-haired changed woman with his rapier and stabbed her deftly through the eye.

“We’ve got to get out of here, fast!” Krysty said. “That’s my plan!”

She and Mildred ducked into the shed.

* * *

AN EYE BLINK before his boss’s nude, bleeding bulk crashed down on him, Loomis took off like a sprinter, almost knocking down Ryan in his mad desire to get out the door.

Two naked women came down the stairway. By their hair Ryan guessed they were the boss’s “secretaries,” Tina and Angela. Their faces were hard to recognize, gray and distorted with some unimaginable passion behind liberal smears of gore. Bottle-blonde Angela’s belly had been cut or ripped open. Purple lengths of intestine trailed out the red, gaping cavity. They were short, their ends ragged, as if the loops had been bitten through.