James Axler - Wretched Earth

“Warn?” Jak asked. “What about?”

The youth shook his head again. “You’ll just start hitting me, too. And anyway, I better go.”

“I say we bring him inside with us,” Mildred said. “I’ll pay for him out of my share of what we got for the job.”

Ryan frowned. As was standard practice, Boss Plunkett had given them half their pay in advance. Nobody was going to do bodyguard work on credit; nobody was going to hire guards and give them all their jack before they’d guarded their share of body. People who did either weren’t even triple-stupe, they were chills. And it was handsome pay. Handsome enough that Ryan and the others came close to taking for granted Plunkett would try to stiff them at trail’s end. But they’d burn that bridge after they crossed it.

It wouldn’t be the first time a boss had tried to stiff them. But if Ryan had anything to say about it, it’d be the last time this particular one tried.

“Millie, you—”

“Don’t ‘Millie’ me, John! It’s my share, and I can do with it what I choose!”

“Three days ago we were almost down to boiling the straps of our packs for sweat soup!”

“That’s about where I find myself now,” the newcomer said. “Sorry. I’m Reno.”

“Yeah,” Ryan said.

“I will kick in,” Doc said. “We are flush for the moment. I for one am willing to pay for the entertainment of a good tale, if nothing else.”

“Pay too,” Jak said. “Want warning.”

“Shouldn’t he be happy enough to take the fact we saved his life as payment?”

“He’s in a hard place,” Mildred said. “We’ve been there ourselves. Recently.”

“I know,” Ryan said. “That’s why we’re working for that fat bastard Plunkett, in case you forgot.”

“Anyway,” she went on, “hasn’t the notion ever occurred to you that if you help a stranger down on his luck, someday when you’re down on your luck a stranger might help you?”

Ryan stared at her. So did J.B. and Jak.

“Drawing a blank here,” the Armorer said after a moment.

“That a stranger might help another out of kindness, or even deferred self-interest,” Doc said gently to the black woman, “is a concept alien to our friends’ experience.”

As a usual thing, the two got along like cats and dogs. But there were times when refugees from their own times stuck together against their thoroughly modern comrades.

“It’s a good practice, Ryan,” Krysty said, “even if it’s hard for you to see.”

“Oh, for shit’s sake,” Ryan said, throwing his hands up in the air. “When did we become a rolling charity? Fuck it. Bring the bastard.”

He turned—and ran into a barrier: yet another skinny girl, this one on the cusp of puberty, in a long shapeless frock, with red pigtails and an excess of freckles.

“My daddy sent me out,” Loretta said. “Ain’t no shooting allowed in the caravanserai.”

“Tell your daddy it was an accident,” Ryan said. “We’re…sorry.”

The girl bobbed her pigtails and vanished inside.

Krysty patted Ryan’s shoulder. “There, now,” she said, smiling. “That didn’t hurt, did it?”

Ryan rubbed his bristly jaw. “Kinda.”

Another figure moved to intercept them by the door. “Cthulhu saves,” said a roly-poly man with a green hankie tied around his head, extending a woodblock leaflet.

“Best step back, son,” J.B. told him in a not unfriendly way. “He’s not on hand to save you.”

Chapter Three

“So let me get this straight,” Doc said across the barroom table. “There is an infestation of these strange creatures that is coming this way. And they eat people.”

“Cannie muties,” Jak said. He was turning one of his throwing knives across the back of a white hand, knuckle to knuckle. “No big.”

The kid Mildred had rescued from the mob shook his head. “Not muties,” he said. “They’re…sick. And you can catch what they got.”

“What do you mean?” J.B. asked.

“They’re not mutants. They’re normal people who have changed. They’ve turned into mindless, soulless monsters who hunger for human meat. For us. There are hundreds, man. And they’re following right behind me!”

He was getting worked up. He stood half out of his chair. “You’ve got to believe me! Somebody’s got to do something!”

Sitting protectively beside him, Mildred took the tattered sleeve of his plaid shirt and tugged him back down. Though she never would’ve admitted it to her friends, she was trying her damnedest not to laugh. The poor crazy kid talked like somebody from a B horror movie.

“So, not muties,” Jak said. “Just cannies. Seen cannies. Killed cannies.”

“You don’t understand,” Reno said. His face worked as if the muscles were trying to pull themselves apart beneath his grayish skin. “They’re worse than any cannies you’ve seen. Worse than you can imagine.”

“We’ve seen some pretty rough ones,” J.B. said.

“And our imaginations are quite expansive,” Doc added, though not unkindly.

He might be half out of his mind some of the time, and lots of his attitudes struck Mildred as more neolithic than Victorian, but overall he was closer to her conception of what a normal human being was like than these born Deathlanders. Krysty showed at least flashes of compassion. But even she, with her unquestionably big heart and spirit, could surprise Mildred.

“They’re triple-hard to kill,” Reno said. “At least as bad as stickies. They don’t feel pain, see. It’s like they’re…dead. Walking chills. They even start to rot. But it doesn’t slow them down. Oh, no. They move like lubed-up lightning, some of ’em.”

Mildred looked at her friends. She could tell they were thinking the caravaneers were right. This was crazy talk. She wasn’t so sure. The young man had clearly seen something that frightened him terribly.

“And here’s the worst part,” the youth went on. “If they bite you, you become one of them. If they chill you, you rise again as one of them. Unless you’re lucky enough they just eat you alive. Once somebody gets bitten, you have to chill them right away. Right now. Because it’s only a matter of time before they change, too!”

The little bubble of silence that surrounded the table after that pronouncement seemed to repel the raucous chatter that filled the saloon. At a breath of cold, relatively fresh air from outside, Mildred turned to look at the door, relieved for the break.

The leader of the Cthulhu cultists, Brother Ha’ahrd, swept in. She was sure the name was really Howard, but that was how the ever-ebullient prophet introduced himself, and how his followers reverently pronounced his name. He was of middle height, a tad taller than J.B. His face had clearly been broad even before age started to turn it shapeless and run it down over his neck. Iron-gray hair hung down the back of his dark green robe. He alone of the believers wore no headcloth.

He smiled and loudly greeted the Nuke Red Hot One, who was seating customers at the moment. She smiled back. The Fat One was bustling to the kitchen with a big galvanized metal tub full of dirty crockery. The Skinny One still worked the bar. Omar himself was nowhere to be seen.

Mildred took advantage of the break to study Ryan for his reaction to all this.

Frowning slightly, he turned to Reno, who was fumbling in a little sorry-ass backpack that, judging by its shape, held mostly nothing. The kid unfolded a fresh pair of eyeglasses, these with bat-wing frames, and fitted them experimentally in front of his watery blue eyes.

“Where’d you get those, Reno?” Mildred asked.

He shrugged. “When I’m scavvying, I always keep my eyes peeled for unbusted pairs that’re close to what I need,” he said, smiling shyly and half-apologetically. “Only way I can see anything.”