James Axler - Wretched Earth

“So how do you come to know all this about these…rotties?” Ryan asked.

Reno shook his head. “Don’t know all about them. Sorry. I know way too much. But not all. We were scavvies, like I said. My friends Lariat and Drygulch and I. A few nights ago they hit us where we were camped.”

“So you were the only one who got away?” J.B. asked. Mildred looked at the Armorer narrowly, trying to divine whether he was trying to equate the kid’s survival to cowardice. It was a fine line in the Deathlands. Nobody liked somebody who’d run out on his partners when the shit hit. Yet nobody survived any length of time without being ready to just run when the odds got too bad. She still had little idea where the line lay. She suspected it was pretty subjective.

But Reno shook his head. “No. We all got away. But one of my friends got bit. That night while we were sleeping, Drygulch changed. He jumped on Lariat and bit her. That’s when I ran. And came within a hair of running right into the rest of these—what’d you call them? Rotties?”

He grimaced. Mildred reckoned he was trying to smile. “Good a name as any, I suppose.” She wondered why nicknames for muties in Deathlands all ended with ie.

“Pardon my asking,” Doc said. “But how do they come by these numbers? These are desolate lands, barely inhabited.”

Far away from reality as the old man could wander, he could be as focused as a microscope. Usually he stayed here and now when danger threatened. Or when, as now, his curiosity was aroused.

“It’s a big country, Doctor,” Reno said. “Look around. There’s fifty, sixty people staying here tonight, and mebbe twenty live and work here full-time. If you shake out all the folks who live in a hundred-mile radius you can get a mighty crowd, even in hard core Deathlands like these.”

Ryan’s lips tightened, as if he didn’t like the way the skinny kid’s words tasted. Mildred thought she detected something a little off about the tale herself.

And so what? she asked herself. In the Deathlands, everybody has secrets. We have secrets.

Back in her day they used to talk about how valuable information was. Talk about the information economy replacing the economy of everyday physical things. In the end physical reality had reasserted itself with a bloody vengeance. Yet information or its lack could get you chilled. Like any other resource.

She wanted to remind Ryan of that. She suspected it would only make things worse.

“Sounds crazy,” Jak said. But Mildred could see white around his ruby irises, and his fine nostrils were flared like a winded horse’s. He was spooked by talk about the walking dead. He had been raised in the bayous of the South, steeped in superstition. Except who could say what was superstitious these days when so many fantastic—and horrible—things stalked the land?

“Please,” Reno said hollowly. “You have to believe me. We need to either get ready to defend this place, or get out of here while we still can!”

That seemed to make an impression even on Ryan. Before Mildred could more than catch his eye, a fresh commotion came from the direction of the stairs.

Boss Plunkett and some of his retinue lumbered down from the upper stories, where the luxury accommodations were located, and where the gaudy house part of the caravanserai’s trade was carried out. The boss had changed into a satiny purple dressing gown that looked suspiciously as if it had started life more than a century before as a bedsheet. He had a bottle in one hand, a cigar in the other, and his arms draped like beef boughs over the necks of his “secretaries.” Two of the gaudy sluts accompanied them. Loomis followed close behind, glaring around at the other bar customers as if ready to take a bite out of anyone who got within range. As always, he put Mildred in mind of a Village People wannabe.

Plunkett swept his boiled-ham face around the room. It reddened slightly when he caught sight of Ryan and friends. He turned to mutter something to his personal sec man.

As the Nuke Red Hot One squired Plunkett and his female satellites to a table, which she cleared of caravaneers with one flinty look, Loomis swaggered over to the companions’ table. He was hitching at his tight black leather pants as he came. Mildred didn’t even want to think about what that might imply about what had just been going on in the boss’s private room above.

Loomis stopped a few feet away and thrust his unshaved face at Ryan like a challenging canine. “Boss says he wants to talk to you, Cawdor,” he said. He jabbed a thumb back over his shoulder. “Now.”

Behind the round lenses of his glasses, J.B. narrowed his eyes at the man. For him that was about as good as cussing Loomis out loudly. Mildred squeezed his leg under the table.

“Be back,” Ryan said laconically, rising. He turned and looked at Loomis. The sec man stood glaring up at him for half a minute. Then, realizing he wasn’t going to win any staring contests with the taller man, he turned and led the way back to their boss’s table.

* * *

“WHAT THE HELL are you playing at, Cawdor?” Plunkett bellowed as Ryan came up. “You ain’t gettin’ paid to sit on your asses listenin’ to fairy stories. Get out there and guard my shit, before these convoy scum steal me blind!”

Ryan took his time answering. He and his friends had taken Plunkett’s jack. The one-eyed man felt bound to see a job through once accepted, if it was at all possible without throwing away the lives of his companions. He was tempted to give their current boss a second mouth to bellow through, between, say, chins two and three. But it was bad form, and he didn’t want to do it unless he really had no choice.

Anyway, it wasn’t as though the boss’s abusive bluster was news.

Besides, there was an off chance the fat man would pay the balance owed at the end of the trail, just as he said he would. That in itself was worth keeping him alive. For now.

“Right,” Ryan said. “We’ll do that.” He glanced at Loomis. “Startin’ to smell bad in here, anyway.”

He turned back to his party. He doubted the sec man had the stones to jump him. And if he did, Ryan was certain he’d read it in the faces of his friends, all of which were turned to watch him.

He got back to the table without incident, noticing the caravaneers drinking in the bar seemed to let their eyes slide away from him like oil drops on a hot pan. The cultists, too.

Fine, he thought. It saved complications if they were afraid of him. Omar had a strict rule against anyone who wasn’t Omar chilling anybody inside the adobe outer walls of the compound.

“Let’s go,” Ryan said. “Boss says it’s time to get back to work.”

“Ryan—” Mildred started.

“Yeah, okay,” he said. “He can stay with us.”

“Thank you!” Reno said. “You won’t regret this.”

“Don’t get ideas,” Ryan said. “We’ll probably chill you in the morning.”

* * *

RYAN CAME AWAKE all at once, as he usually did.

He was instantly aware of a presence leaning over him in the cold darkness of the cinder-block hut. Something was tickling his upturned face.

It was Krysty’s hair.

“There’s something going on,” she said as soon as his eye opened.

Ryan sat up. He slept in the shed where Plunkett’s sec wag was parked. Krysty would’ve slept alongside, but had her turn on watch. J.B. and Mildred had the shed with the boss’s personal wag. The RV was parked outside the structures. Jak and Doc slept in it.

“What?” Ryan asked as he picked up his 9 mm SIG-Sauer P-226 handblaster and his eighteen-inch panga from where he had them laid close to hand. He tucked them away in appropriate places and started to pull his boots on. Apart from them he slept in his clothes.