James Axler - Wretched Earth

“I guess the war or the quakes knocked down whatever town lay nearby, and storms and scavengers took care of the rest,” Mildred said.

Screw it, she thought. Sometimes it feels good to connect to my own past. Krysty was a genuinely generous person as well as a friend. Mildred would just take advantage of her good nature and impose.

“Of course, most of the storage units must’ve gotten wiped out, too,” she continued. “Only a few dozen are left.”

Those were arranged around three sides of a wide square. The fourth was occupied by the three-story, wooden gaudy house itself, along with a combination water- and watchtower, thirty feet high, beside the dirt road to the main gate beyond. The earth around was stamped flat by generations of feet, tires and hooves, but Mildred guessed the open space had once been a paved parking lot. The gaudy probably stood where the office had been. The storage sheds were still being rented, but mostly by the night—or the hour—as cribs and temporary shelters for wayfarers across the desolate, acid-rain-racked wasteland that had once been the Great Plains.

A fair number of wags were parked in the big open space: Plunkett’s RV, big cargo trucks from the trade caravans and the old school bus, its bright green paint job faded the color of asparagus.

A pair of people appeared in front of them. Krysty tensed at Mildred’s side. Strangers moving to intercept wasn’t a comforting nor a welcoming thing in the Deathlands, but these were nondescript people, a man and a woman dressed in the usual postskydark shabby clothing, but with dark green handkerchiefs knotted over their heads.

“Cthulhu wants you,” the woman said, smiling angelically.

Mildred shuddered. “He can’t have me.”

“He’ll have us all someday, friend,” the tall, skinny man said, beaming. “Come to him now and know the peace of his love.”

“Why do you all wear those green scarves?” Krysty asked. She had instantly relaxed upon recognizing the pair from the twenty or thirty cultists overnighting in the caravanserai.

They seemed harmless, but Mildred said, “Don’t talk to them, Krysty! It only encourages them.”

“Why not?” she asked. “I’m interested in the paths people walk to the truth. Anyway, I want to know.”

“Why, sister,” the woman said, “it represents seaweed.”

“Seaweed?” asked Mildred despite herself. “Seaweed?”

“Why, certainly,” the man said, nodding. “The seaweed that covers our lord Cthulhu’s head as he waits, dead and dreaming, in lost R’lyeh!”

“Praise Cthulhu!” the woman declared, raising fervent eyes toward a sky banded with purple, orange, red and indigo. It was just sunset, though, not any kind of terrible storm coming in. “Cthulhu fhtagn!”

“Dead?” Krysty asked, seeming a bit stunned.

“Dead,” they both said, nodding in unison. “Dead to rise someday.”

Declining the offer of a handout, which seemed to consist of woodcuts on God—or Cthulhu—the two women walked on.

“What an odd belief system,” Krysty said.

Mildred shook her head. “Dang. I never realized just how similar the whole Cthulhu thing was to the Christian mythology.”

“You mean the sect existed during your earlier life?”

“Sort of. Only then they were called the science fiction fans.” She rolled her eyes. “My daddy’d go upside my head, he heard me comparing the two.”

Some of Omar’s staff, or children—to the extent there was a difference—were circling the central yard, lighting torches as darkness fell.

“What’s happening over there?” Krysty asked, pointing.

By the flaring orange torchlight that flickered in a chill, rising breeze, Mildred saw a skinny guy being bounced like a pinball among a group of dusty, mean-looking wag drivers. They were hooting derisively as they thrust him from one to the next. He reeled, unable to get his balance.

Mildred scowled. “They hadn’t ought to do that to a little guy. With glasses.”

Squaring her shoulders, she marched toward the fracas. It didn’t even occur to her to wonder whether Krysty would follow or not. Mildred didn’t care. She hated injustice.

As the little guy was pushed from pillar to post, a bald wag driver stuck out a boot. The victim went sprawling, his glasses flying off his face. Desperately, he shoved himself up onto all fours to scuttle after them.

They’d landed near another knot of jeering, laughing wag drivers. One waited until the skinny guy’s fingers almost reached the glasses before he stepped on the specs and crushed them with a vindictive ankle twist.

“Well, now, look what I gone and done,” he said, showing a gap-toothed grin to his buddies. “Ain’t that a shame?”

Evidently deciding his pal was getting too much of the attention, a larger man with a mop of dirty hair took it up a notch. He stepped toward the scrabbling victim, clearly getting ready to put the boot in.

Mildred grabbed his shoulder. “Here, you got no call to do that,” she said, spinning him.

The predark doctor was a sturdily built woman. In her time she’d been an avid hiker, not to mention an Olympic-class pistol shooter. Since reawakening into the Deathlands she hadn’t exactly slacked off at either pursuit.

But the guy was a head taller than she was, and what little wits he had were fuddled by advanced testosterone poisoning. As he turned, he snarled and punched her hard between the breasts. She reeled backward three steps and sat down hard.

So there she was. And the dirty-haired guy was winding up as if to deliver to her the kick she’d stymied.

Chapter Two

The burly wag driver, who turned out to have a rat’s-nest beard to go along with the hair, did a little stutter step to kick the sitting Mildred. She gave him a hard heel thrust in the nuts. He sat down not far away from her, bent over and clutching himself.

Mildred jumped up. The whole rowdy group converged on her, the little dude with the crushed glasses forgotten.

Suddenly Krysty stood shoulder-to-shoulder with her friend. Her prehensile hair swished around her shoulders, betraying her agitation. It also betrayed the fact that, however beautiful she was, Krysty Wroth was a mutie. Given the sign above the gateway, not to mention the temper of the mob closing in on them, Mildred hoped onlookers would think it was just the breeze stirring her scarlet locks.

“Wait!” Krysty said, holding up her hands. “What’s all this about?”

“Thanks, Krysty,” Mildred said from the corner of her mouth. “But you probably should have stood clear.”

Krysty just smiled at her. That wasn’t the way of any of them, to stand by and watch a friend get stomped. Mildred felt sick at what she might have gotten her friend into.

A wag driver with a Mohawk like a dead squirrel atop his head backhanded Krysty. “Clear out, bitch, or you’ll get what we give her.”

The force of the blow snapped Krysty’s head around. She came back with an overhand right that flattened the man’s long nose against his face with a crunch of breaking bone and cartilage, and blood squirting out each nostril. His eyes rolled up in his skull and he folded to the yard.

With a vicious collective snarl, the man pack closed in around the two embattled women.

Hard arms enveloped Krysty from behind. Hot breath washed down her neck and back. It stank like an overflowed shitter.

“Gotcha!” her captor grunted triumphantly as he tried to hoist her off her feet.

He got more than he bargained for. Krysty brought her knees up and drove a double-booted kick to the jaw of a short, wide wag driver with a faded bandanna tied around his head, hurling him into the crowd. Then she slammed her head back into the face of the man who held her.