Wretched Earth

by James Axler

  Jak shot J.B. a quick glance. When no veto came he slipped up the stairs. They were warped and old, like the planks that made up the rest of the structure. Over the worse odors J.B. started to smell the resin of lumber cut in the none-too-distant past. As an ex-trader himself he reckoned it had cost a bundle to build this vantage point.

  Jak went up the wooden steps with no more sound than a shadow. Mildred followed with exaggerated care.

  Instantly, a board creaked beneath her combat boot. She froze.

  J.B. squeezed her shoulder. The men up top had quit arguing. Now the sounds of harsh laughter rolled down the stairwell. There was no hitch in the noise from above to indicate anybody had heard the plank groan.

  Jak poked his head up to give the second floor a quick check. Then he vanished up the stairs. He had surveyed the third floor and clearly found nothing threatening before his companions reached the second.

  Their new employer had told them the ailing baron Jeb had built the structure as a watchtower. The floors between ground and top existed solely to keep the two apart. Glancing quickly around the second story, J.B. confirmed it was empty of everything but dust and darkness.

  Jak waited on the stairs, poised just below the opening to the top floor. J.B. avoided looking directly at the light coming through. He didn’t want to foul up his night vision.

  From his pants pocket he took a compact little mechanism, a striker based on an ancient wheel lock design that he’d cobbled together himself out of scavvied gear and metal bits filed to shape and tempered. From the pocket of his leather jacket he took a bulky object whose dark surface gleamed slightly in the light of the unseen lantern. It was a glazed ceramic jug of about a pint capacity. A fused cap had been sealed into it with wax.

  Seeing it, Jak slipped back down the stairs and stood to one side. He drew his big Python. His job now was guarding J.B.’s and Mildred’s backs. Very soon the shattering noise the big Magnum blaster made would be the least of anybody’s concerns.

  J.B. went up the stairs softly, with Mildred right behind him. He didn’t make much noise, he reassured himself. He wasn’t that much bulkier than Jak, nor was he much taller, although he knew that to look at him, “stealth” wasn’t the word that jumped into someone’s mind ahead of anything else. But he had a wealth of experience creepy-crawling. He wasn’t as good as Jak; only the darkness itself was.

  Just shy of the rectangle of orange light in the jet-black overhead, he stopped. He stuck the fuse end into a handy little cup in his striker, which insured quick ignition even in a stiff wind. J.B. pressed the release. A soft whir, a smell of burning powder, and then the fuse was hissing and spitting out tiny sparks.

  Mildred holstered her blaster and covered her ears, mouth open.

  J.B. waited a beat to make sure the fuse had lit properly. Aside from being a man who believed and lived the axiom measure twice, cut once, he found there was little more embarrassing than having an enemy relight your bomb and pitch it back at you.

  Well and truly lit, the fuse emitted a shower of sparks. He stuck his hand up through the opening and gave the bomb a little push, sending it rolling along the plank floor toward the middle of the room.

  He ducked back down and imitated Mildred, feeling more than hearing the grumble of the pot bumping across the uneven floorboards. A young male voice said, “What the fuck is—?”

  A heavy boom cut him off. It wasn’t a terribly sharp sound, and seemed somehow to have more push than volume. All the same it momentarily scrambled J.B.’s hearing, despite how he clasped hands to his ears.

  He knew it would. Even as a dragon’s breath of hot gas rushed over them from the opening, he unlimbered his shotgun. Then, without a backward glance, he went up through the hole.

  * * *

  AS USUAL MILDRED WAS knotted with anticipation from the moment J.B. produced the little home-built hand grenade. Her imagination started playing horribly vivid films, like those driver-safety movies they’d made her watch in driving school, of the many, many things that could go wrong. She had spent enough time as an emergency-room intern to have very explicit visions. To say nothing of the horrors she’d witnessed since reawakening.

  The explosion muffled her hearing, just before J.B. hurried up the stairs. As she drew her own handgun, she felt a flash of gratitude that the ringing in her ears muted not only the roar of his burly blaster, but the screams already pealing from the tower like a warning bell.

  Though inclined to describe herself as built more for comfort than speed, Mildred could move swiftly and agilely when it was called for. She popped out of the hole almost the instant the Armorer’s boot soles cleared it.

  He went right; she wheeled left. They both knew the drill.

  She had her ZKR thrust out before her. It was a target-style weapon; she was a target shooter, an Olympic competitor in her day, which of course, here and now, was as remote as the dinosaurs. But she had forgotten nothing of her skills. In this not-so-brave new world she had learned new ones—such as close-quarters fighting.

  Not that there was much threatening in the eyeless crimson mask that screamed endlessly at her, sounding faraway and almost dreamlike, from a ragged black hole. The bursting charge had been surrounded by nails and other bits and pieces of jagged metal scrap. The black powder was more likely to burn one badly than do much damage with actual blast, even in enclosed quarters. It was the little extras that made the difference.

  Stepping left to clear the opening, she put a blue hole between where her assailant’s eyes had been. Her hands felt numb to the ZKR’s kick. Her ears barely registered the gunshot.

  She was already turning to scan the rest of the room. A figure lay slumped against the wall nearest the fountain. Seeing no one else at first glance, Mildred kept him covered. He didn’t stir; she judged he had been the recipient of J.B.’s first double 0 buck blast.

  A table was upended against one wall, legs sticking out into the little room. From behind it reared the third man. He was screaming. He had blood flowing down his cheeks like muttonchops, Mildred saw as she swung up her handblaster. His eardrums had burst and bled. But the table evidently had shielded him from the brunt of blast and shrapnel.

  The Sharp sec man held a big Peacemaker-type single-action revolver. He tried to raise it to shoot J.B., right across the table from him. With horrified certainty Mildred knew she wasn’t going to get a bullet into the survivor in time to stop him from shooting her lover.

  But the little man in the fedora had the reflexes of a puma. He skipped forward and smashed the butt of the Smith & Wesson shotgun into the blood-whiskered face. Mildred’s slowly returning hearing caught bone crunching and the squeal of breaking teeth.

  The kid toppled backward, right out the unglazed east window. Mildred heard him shout. His cries cut off abruptly, then came back two octaves higher and triple-loud as he thrashed on the dirt street in a paroxysm of torment from shattered bones.

  The screams stopped again. Leaning his head out, J.B. spoke a single syllable. “Jak.”

  She nodded. No more need be said.

  J.B. turned back and grinned at her. She gasped. He had a light spray of red across his right cheek and temple.

  Seeing her reaction, he reached up, touched himself then glanced at his fingers.

  “It’s not mine,” he said.

  “Oh, John!” He allowed her to capture him in a brief, fervent embrace. Then he gently but decisively pushed her clear.

  “Watch my back now.
Got some work to do.”

  * * *

  HAMMERING AT THE DOOR brought Ryan awake with his SIG-Sauer in hand.

  Beside him, Krysty rolled off the bed. He leaped to his feet on the other side and stepped away, covering the door with his handblaster as Krysty, kneeling on the far side, did the same. Lying on his pallet at the foot of the bed, Doc groped for his bulky LeMat.

  “What?” Ryan called. They slept in a guest room on the third floor of Miranda Sharp’s palace. After the easy and showy success the friends had handed her, she was inclined to treat them double-well.

  “Baron says come quick,” the young sec man said through the door. What was his name?

  “What is it, Hedders?” Krysty called.

  “Trouble,” the youth said.

  Five minutes later, fully dressed and fully armed, the three were ushered into the Baron’s frou-frou parlor on the bottom floor. Ryan reckoned it was a good sign nobody tried to relieve them of their weapons. Then again, it could have been fear on the part of the underlings assigned the task. Or given what he’d seen of this outfit, and Jacks’s for that matter, just plain sloppiness.

  While Hedders seemed afraid of them, or perhaps life in general at this point, he wasn’t treating them as enemies. So there was that.

  Baron Miranda was wrapped in a light blue silk gown that didn’t quite contain her. The top half of her full right breast was clearly visible when she turned to the side, as were flashes of dark bush beneath the indifferently tied belt. Nothing could contain the fury that darkened her fine features. Her unbound hair was a wild black cloud. Ryan half expected to see blue static discharges crackle through it like lightning in a thunderhead.

  “The bastards!” she exclaimed when the three stepped in. “They have stolen back the tower!”

  “See?” It was Jenkins, all but hopping out of his skin with eagerness, like a teen boy about to get his first blow job. “I told you they’d fuck up! You shouldn’t trust these bastard outlanders!”

  Colt Sharp sat on a chair behind his mother. He’d stuffed himself into a shirt and trousers and socks, but no shoes. His pudgy young face looked sleepy and concerned.

  “Ma, it isn’t true!” he said. “They did what you asked them to. It’s not their fault your—the sec men couldn’t hold the tower!”

  Seeing anger flare in her face when the youth spoke, Ryan was afraid the outburst had broken it for them. He tensed.

  Take out that bastard Jenkins first, he thought, snapping into contingency-planning mode. Then Hedders, though Krysty or Doc can likely handle him. Then mebbe grab Miranda for a hostage—

  But the baron only stroked her son’s cheek fondly. “You’re right, querido,” she said.

  She turned to Jenkins, whose excitement had morphed into sullen resentment, which Ryan judged was a usual state for him.

  “The outlanders have indeed done just as I asked them,” she said. “Others have failed me in allowing the tower to fall back into Jacks’s bloodstained hands. No doubt they have paid with their lives for their incompetence, which is a good thing for them.”

  She paused to smile, as if contemplating the awful things she would have done to the men supposed to hold the tower for her, had any of them been stupe enough to survive.

  “Now, Leroy, dear boy,” Miranda purred, “you have your chance to shine in your baron’s eyes. Go and recapture the tower for me. Show me what you can do.”

  He snapped to attention and threw a sharp salute. “You got it, Baron!” he said, flashing an evil grin at Ryan and his friends.

  Miranda’s smile grew fangs. “And may God have mercy if you cannot hold it this time, chico. Because I will not!”

  * * *

  SMILING IN TRIUMPH, Leroy Jenkins surveyed the carnage on the top floor of the wooden sniper tower. Granted, at least half came from his own men. He’d had two killed and four wounded retaking the tower. But this was war. You didn’t make omelets without breaking eggs. Even your own.

  He was bare-armed and his head was wrapped with a rolled bandanna, after an old-days poster he’d seen as a kid of Rambo. He didn’t feel the cold. He was way too hyped on blood and victory.

  “Send up the flare,” he ordered one of his troops. He didn’t know his name. Why bother with names? They were just worms. Disposable.

  That was how a real power guy thought. A baron. He practiced thinking like a baron. Because he’d be one someday. When that hot-ass bitch Miranda finally gave in all the way to his manliness. She’d marry him, and then he’d have the power.

  And she better not talk to him then the way she did now. Not if she liked having teeth.

  One of his wounded men was still screaming as comrades carried him back to the Sharp side of the square on a stretcher. Jenkins thought about shouting an order to chill him to shut his pussy ass up. The new order was going to need strong men, not babies. But he decided not to bother.

  He drew in a deep breath instead, cold and bracing and full of the smells of spilled blood and burned powder. Well, and piss and shit, too. But a real man got used to those things.

  “All right, you outland trash,” he said aloud. “I showed the baron how it’s really done. Your asses are next!”

  “Hey, Leroy.” A voice floated up from the floor below.

  “It’s Captain Jenkins to you, jackhole!”

  “Hey, Captain, they left a crate down here. Looks like it’s whiskey!”

  He grinned. Nothing sweeter than drinking to their victory with their dead enemies’ hooch.

  “What are you waiting for? Open it up and see what’s inside.”

  There was a bright light and a big noise.

  The explosion of two pounds of predark moldable plastic explosive launched Jenkins right out through the plank roof of the tower, a moment before the overpressure blew the top two floors completely apart. When he broke free into the open air, he was measurably shorter than the six-foot-four he’d started his brief, memorable flight as, owing to the upper half of his cranium being flattened like a slug mushrooming against bone and all.

  To compensate, he was dazzlingly aflame as he arched through the sky of Sweetwater Junction, to land with a hiss and a steam cloud right in the midst of the public fountain.

  * * *

  AT THE HARD RAP OF AN explosion Coffin jumped and went to the sitting room window. Throwing caution to the winds, he ripped open the curtain.

  J.B. smiled at the glow that lit the sky to the north. He closed his hand around the fistful of jack Jacks had just pressed into it, and savored the feel.

  “You were right,” the rogue sec boss said around a stub of cigar. He stood beside the Armorer’s chair. It was a double-comfy chair. “The stupes actually fell for your booby. Not ten minutes after they retook the damn tower.”

  Huddled beside J.B. in a comforter, Mildred only shook her head. Jak had headed to bed as soon as the group reported in to Jacks and his advisers. J.B. wasn’t triple-thrilled about having them split up, but the albino teen could take care of himself. So could J.B. and Mildred, for that matter.

  Fortunately, Jacks’s grandmother had retired, too, before word came that Miranda’s goons had grabbed the tower right back.

  Exactly as J.B. had told Jacks they would.

  “Truth is,” the Armorer said, “what really surprised me was your own boys actually obeyed orders not to open the damn crate.”

  “You gonna let him talk to you like that in your own parlor, Gate?” Coffin asked. “Don�
�t let yourself get played for a fool.”

  Jacks laughed sourly. “I was thinking that same thing, myself.”

  He pulled up an ottoman upholstered in red-and-gold silk and sat at J.B.’s elbow.

  “We need to talk,” he said.

  “We’re listenin’,” J.B. replied.

  * * *

  THE RATTLE OF WINDOW GLASS from a powerful but distant blast roused Ryan from sleep. He sat up in bed, chuckling.

  “My, my,” Doc said from his pallet. “That was a potent explosion. Perhaps even what my captors would have termed overkill.”

  “Mebbe J.B. overplayed this one,” Krysty said, lying on her side close to Ryan. “Won’t we need that tower to fight the rotties?”

  He shrugged. “If we do, we can build it up again. At least put up scaffolding. Important thing now is getting in a position where we stand a chance against the bastards.”

  “J.B. knows what he’s doing, I guess.” Krysty sounded unconvinced. “I hope we all do.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “So your side didn’t buy it, either?” Ryan asked.

  J.B. shook his head. “Not for a second.”

  The six of them huddled together around a lone candle burning on a crate in a root cellar beneath yet another Sweetwater Junction house abandoned during the recent troubles. This was their first reunion since splitting up days before, to make their separate ways into the ville. It was an emotional one.

  Even Ryan felt relief and an effusive warmth at having the companions back again. Plus a certain ache that they’d have to split up again in a matter of minutes.

  Setting up the meeting had been simple. They had used terse handwritten notes, hidden in locations revealed by simple marks cut into walls—a blaze language Jak had taught them all from his old guerrilla days in the bayou country. The marks appeared accidental, so no one else gave them a second glance. Much less understood their import if they did.