James Axler - Wretched Earth

But J.B., who was the group’s armorer and Ryan’s oldest friend, flashed an easy grin. “Lighten up and let a man ease his troubles,” he said. Then, as if to pretend he was talking about himself, he ordered another shot, as well.

Ryan studied his own heavy tumbler a moment and decided he didn’t need any more. He wasn’t normally queasy, but the glass had so many thumbprints on it they appeared to be etched in. Between that and the brown shine eating the lining off his stomach walls like hydrochloric acid, he reckoned he’d feel gut-shot if he kept on. He held a hand over the glass to indicate he didn’t need a refill.

The Skinny One bustled off, returning a moment later to fill Doc’s and J.B.’s glasses from a bottle.

“Besides,” J.B. said, as if he hadn’t been interrupted, “we might wind up somewhere worse. It’s happened.”

A commotion started at the door. A tall, stout man with a florid face and sweeping brown mustache strode in, as proud as a baron. Faces turned to stare.

“Boss Plunkett sure loves to make an entrance,” J.B. muttered.

Plunkett was dressed in expensive if tasteless scavenged clothing: a pink shirt, yellow cravat and a matching vest that strained to contain his paunch; overly tight brown flare-bottom trousers; black, pointy-toed boots shiny as lizard eyes. The companions’ employer had a woman on either arm, one blonde, one black-haired, both looking pretty good, not too hard or shopworn. They were named Tina and Angela. He called them his secretaries, but as far as Ryan and his friends could tell they were just sluts, companions hired to look good on his arm and perform whatever other duties were required.

Behind the big man and his women came Loomis, his bodyguard. He was middle height, with a dark face like the blade of an ax, black hair cut close to his narrow skull, a mustache almost as extravagant as Plunkett’s, and a perpetually unshaved jaw. He wore leather pants and a leather vest, but was shirtless, showing off a chest furred like a black bear’s ass. On one side of a silver-studded belt he wore a big survival knife with a saw-back blade. On the other he carried a chromed .44 Magnum Taurus blaster, which looked to be in good condition.

He gave Ryan a quick, hateful stare as soon as he noticed him. He resented the companions’ presence. He seemed to think it reflected a lack of confidence on his employer’s part, which Ryan reckoned showed Plunkett had more sense than most people would give him credit for.

The fat man immediately began to berate the nearest server, a skinny, pigtailed girl, in a loud voice.

“Stupe,” Jak muttered.

“Yeah, well,” Ryan said. “It’ll be over soon. Soon as we deliver the boss and his mysterious trunks to Sweetwater Junction.”

They’d been three days on the road guarding Tim Plunkett’s corpulent body, his two “secretaries” and an assortment of other flunkies including Loomis. The companions spent most of their time split up among a Toyota Tundra pickup truck that served as a sec wag, a former RV that carried extra bodies and bags, and occasionally the Land Cruiser that was the boss’s personal ride. They’d met Plunkett and his motley crew east of Omar’s at a trading post even farther out in the back of beyond, little more than a shack and an outhouse set too close to a watering hole for comfort. Despite Loomis’s swaggering assurance that he and his pair of assistant sec men, who doubled as roustabouts, could handle anything the wasteland could throw at them, Plunkett was clearly nervous. He’d offered the friends jobs as extra sec before even introducing himself.

They’d tried not to act too eager. They really were running on fumes, with barely the jack to buy water from the sketchy well. They’d had a run of poor luck of late.

“‘Beware yon Cassius,’” Doc quoted sonorously, “‘for he has a lean and hungry look.’”

“Plunkett?” J.B. asked in amazement.

“I think he means Loomis,” Ryan said.

“I do indeed, my dear Ryan,” Doc said. “Our esteemed employer more closely resembles a hog in a silk suit. Though I grant he has a hungry look to him as well, especially when he’s tucking into a hearty repast.”

Doc shook his head. “Swine. I hate swine.” Tears brimmed in his blue eyes. “The sows, the sows—whenever I eat a ham sandwich, I feel vindicated. Vindicated!”

“Easy there, Doc,” Ryan said.

Although he looked to be on the hard end of his sixties, Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner was chronologically only in his thirties. Yet he was enormously old—scary old. He’d been born on Valentine’s Day in 1868, then trawled out of his own time by twentieth-century whitecoats. Doc proved to be a difficult subject, so he was trawled forward in time to the Deathlands. The result, along with premature aging, was that his mind wasn’t clamped down any too hard, and tended to wander at times.

“It was under an evil star that we signed on with Plunkett,” he said now, suddenly focusing.

Ryan scratched his shaggy head. “Not my favorite thing, either,” he admitted. “I don’t know whether it’s something he did, something he’s got in his brain or something he’s got in one of those trunks. But he’s triple-scared somebody’s going to make a play for it, whatever it is.”

“Folks don’t pay like he pays us if they aren’t scared, Ryan,” J.B. said. “You’re right. We’ve done tough jobs before, and always come through ace. Or at least alive, which amounts to the same thing.”

“Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing,” Doc announced. “Eddie Rickenbacker told me that. He was a good lad, if rather on the reckless side.”

Ryan had no idea what Doc was talking about. He decided to let it slide. It wasn’t that he lacked curiosity. But whenever Doc launched into one of his tortured explanations, Ryan’s head hurt.

Just then, with a gust of cold evening air, somebody poked his head through the door and shouted, “Hey, everybody! That big-tit redhead and the black woman are dustin’ it up with a pack of caravaneers!”

Ryan wished he hadn’t passed on that refill. “Time to go.”

* * *

A HARD SHOVE between the breasts sat Mildred Wyeth down hard on her tailbone. The impact sent white sparks shooting up in her brain, and raised tears in her eyes.

How’d I get myself into this? she wondered.

It was a question with several possible answers. In one, she’d been a physician and cryogenics researcher in America at the end of the twentieth century. Complications following routine abdominal surgery had resulted in Mildred being frozen in an experimental cryogenic unit, with the hopes of reviving her in the future.

Then the world ended.

Several years earlier Ryan Cawdor and the others had stumbled across her cryopod and thawed her. She’d been with them since, trapped in a future she definitely hadn’t volunteered for.

But, more immediately…

She and Krysty Wroth had been walking back from where the wags were parked across the compound.

“You know, Krysty,” Mildred said, “it’s weird. Usually these storage places were built in or real near a town of at least some size. So they’d have, like, customers, you know?”

Krysty nodded and smiled absently. Mildred stifled a sigh. Sometimes her companions had little curiosity about the history of their kind and their continent, except insofar as it might lead to plunder or some other more or less tangible advantage. Not even the tall, statuesque woman with the flame-red hair and the emerald green eyes, who had a lively intelligence, imagination and general thirst for knowledge about the world. She, too, was mostly fixed on the present.

Of course, Mildred reminded herself, if you wake up every morning with no way to be sure there’ll be food to eat or water to drink, and that terrible muties aren’t going to kill you or coldhearts rape and enslave you, you might find the concerns of the moment a lot more pressing than some past, so long dead it isn’t even moldy anymore.