Wretched Earth

by James Axler

  “Nothin’ personal. Just has to be done.”

  Movement from the window caught J.B.’s eye as he jacked the slide. He spun and blew off the top of a blue-faced head right outside.

  Then he turned to run out the door.

  * * *

  WHEN HE CAME INTO the square and sighted the sign that read Itomaru’s Wood Works, J.B. reckoned he’d made it.

  Whether it was just bad luck or one of those unpredictable flashes of cunning that hit some of the rotties from time to time, he’d never know. But as J.B. crossed the street toward the shop, at least ten of the creatures rotties suddenly surrounded him.

  The shells J.B. had loaded would punch through wooden walls pretty readily. He didn’t want to risk shooting in the direction of the building where his friends were sheltering. Despite his lack of size, he had some speed built up, and decided to put his head down and try to power through.

  He shouldered a couple of changed aside—they didn’t exactly have lightning reflexes—but then he was yanked to a stop. A rottie had seized the collar of his jacket.

  If the creature had the wits or the luck to yank it down over his arms and pin them, J.B. would’ve been chilled right there. Or worse.

  Instead the Armorer used his momentum to twist in his attacker’s grasp. He pivoted and slammed the shotgun’s butt into the decaying face.

  The rottie let go, but the others closed in on J.B., pressing in from all sides. Blue hands grabbed him.

  He stuck the scattergun’s muzzle up under a rottie’s chin and pulled the trigger. The blast ripped the whole front of the changed man’s head off, and the body dropped.

  A pair of hands grabbed the barrel. J.B. struggled for control. Though she had superhuman strength, the changed woman lacked eyes. It hadn’t stopped her homing in on his warm human flesh, however.

  He felt the terrible nuzzle of a corroded face against his cheek. A monster behind was trying to bite him!

  With a terrific adrenal surge he yanked himself away from the questing jaws. But the eyeless rottie kept bony hands clamped on the scattergun’s barrel. Stinking arms as strong as barrel hoops encircled J.B.’s body. He turned his head and saw open jaws with a rotting, blue-black lump of tongue between them descending toward his face.

  Blue brows and forehead suddenly blew out in a rancid black eruption. J.B. flinched, shutting tight his mouth and eyes against the reeking gobbets of cold corruption resulting.

  He heard the thunder of a second longblaster shot. The rottie’s hands abruptly released their death grip on his shotgun.

  J.B. flailed furiously with it, not trying to bust heads, just to knock the horrors off him. He wasn’t a squeamish man, nor prone to panic. But right this instant he was as close to losing his mind to sheer terror as he ever had been.

  He heard a third booming blast from a high-powered longblaster. A bullet drilled the head of the rottie right in front of him crosswise. The way to the porch of the carpenter’s shop, the front door, safety, lay clear.

  As J.B. rabbited forward, he saw Ryan perched on the tin roof of the building just west of the shop. He had apparently hopped from roof to roof from the crudely rebuilt sniper tower. A rottie mob stood beneath him, faces eagerly raised, pawing the air like puppies standing up against a fence, begging for meat.

  Ryan paid them no heed. His single blue eye was locked on his embattled friend. He held his Steyr in his left hand and his SIG in his right. The 9 mm handblaster was flashing yellow flame in J.B.’s direction.

  Ryan was shouting something the Armorer couldn’t hear.

  Suddenly three more rotties lurched into J.B.’s path. With survival on the line right now he couldn’t worry about his backstop. He poked the shotgun toward a decaying rib cage and fired, hoping the blast would take the rottie down, and that the wasted body would stop the .33 caliber pellets from traveling on to hurt one of his friends.

  The creature reeled back. The other two got between J.B. and the door. Rotting fingers rasped at J.B.’s right sleeve. He was out of Ryan’s line of fire now. There was no help for him. He smashed in the teeth of one of the beings blocking the way. From the corner of his eye he saw the rottie he’d blasted lunging back, to claw at J.B.’s face.

  The door burst open. A double-bit ax hit the creature in the side of the head with such force that his femurs broke and speared out through decomposed and desiccated skin.

  A silver flash went by J.B.’s face to the right. He heard the ringing of an aluminum bat on a rottie’s skull. Then hands—warm human hands—grabbed him and yanked him into a warm room that smelled of wood chips.

  From behind him he heard Doc Tanner say, “Not wanted here!” That was followed by the disproportionately huge roar of the tiny stub of shotgun beneath the main barrel of Doc’s LeMat handblaster. The door squeezed the weird yellow glow from outside down to nothing and closed with a slam.

  J.B. collapsed, panting, next to the heavy worktable in the middle of the room. Mildred flung her arms around his neck.

  “Thanks,” he wheezed, patting her arm. “Now ease up a bit before you choke me, Millie!”

  * * *

  A SPATE OF ACID RAIN hit Ryan as he leaped from the gutter of the tin roof he was on to the roof of the carpenter’s shop. It stung the exposed backs of his hands and the tip of his left ear. He could hear his hair sizzle. Smell it, too.

  Nonetheless, he managed to catch himself on the corrugations of the metal roofing sheets. The stock of the Steyr, which he had slung once he heard J.B. hustled inside, slammed him in the left butt cheek.

  It didn’t dislodge him. He scrambled up and over, to slide down to the porch on the south side. It was roofed in tin sheeting, as well.

  Rotties milled in the street outside the shop. At least a dozen wandered across the square. Drops of acid rain sizzled and smoked on Ryan’s long coat. Can’t stay here long or I’ll fry, he thought.

  He drew his SIG with his left hand and his panga with his right, then stepped to the edge of the roof and jumped into the street.

  Ryan shot a rottie in the head even before he landed. His boots hit; his legs flexed. Then rising he spun, slashing savagely with the heavy blade. The blow took the legs right out from under a rottie.

  The one-eyed man got onto the porch by the main window. It was stoutly shuttered, just the way it was supposed to be. The door was blocked by a solid mass of the changed.

  The ones in the street came toward him. They stared at him with their vacant, questing eyes. Hands reached; mouths opened.

  He fired a couple of shots before they got too close. Then, roaring his rage, Ryan hacked at arms and blue gaping faces.

  The shutter to his right slammed open. An arm snaked around his neck from inside. He froze. Had the rotties gotten in with his people? But the skin of the arm beneath his chin was smooth and warm and didn’t stink of death. Instead it had a familiar, welcome smell.

  Krysty hauled him in through the window as if he were a child. As his boot heels thumped on the floor, somebody yanked the shutter shut.

  No sooner was it fastened than a blue fist punched through, to grope about blindly.

  With a hawklike scream of fury Krysty let go of Ryan. She grabbed up her ax and, with a one-handed swing, severed the arm just this side of the elbow.

  “Bill Itomaru, you should be ashamed,” a voice said from under the table, beside which Ryan sprawled on his butt. “Such shoddy workmanship!”

  There was a little, round-bellied guy in an undershirt and
work apron stretched out beneath the worktable. He had a lantern jaw with a straggly fringe of beard.

  “What are you staring at?” he demanded.

  “Fuck you, Brad.”

  Ryan looked around to see a wiry little guy with long white hair pulled into a ponytail behind a dome of bare skull. He had an ax, which he used two-handed to amputate another arm that reached in through the breached shutter.

  “If you don’t like it here, you can go outside with them!”

  A blue face appeared at the hole in the shutter. It gazed in with a blank, impassive gray eye that reminded Ryan of a shark’s. Doc, stripped to his stained white shirt, lunged forward and thrust the tip of his sword through the eye.

  Relentless fists hammered at the front door, the shuttered windows. Nails raked loudly on wood. Similar noises came from other rooms. Dust flew from the door. Ryan heard wood creak as it started to give way.

  “This could be a problem with our plan, friends,” Doc said, drawing back out of grabbing-range of the hole in the window. At once a third arm reached in to grope ineffectually. “The rotties must have been a long time without eating, I suspect. If that is so, their hunger is reaching a crescendo. It is driving them into a feeding frenzy!”

  “Still rather be in here with them out there than outside with them,” J.B. said.

  Holding her ax in her left hand, Krysty hugged Ryan fiercely with her right arm.

  She yelped and jumped back. “Gaia! That stings! You’ve got acid all over your coat!”

  “I’ll get water,” Bill Itomaru said. “Sluice that stuff off you.”

  Ryan shrugged out of his coat and jumped to his feet. “Fireblast! The rain! Hear it?”

  Downpour rattled on the metal roof like falling gravel.

  “Comes down hard,” Jak said.

  “Hope it doesn’t eat a hole in the damn roof,” said Brad Sinorice, the erstwhile gaudy owner, from beneath his table.

  “My roof is the least of my worries,” the carpenter said. “They’ll bust in soon. Five minutes, max.”

  “Mebbe not,” Ryan said.

  Another arm was stuck in the hole in the shutter. Ryan aimed a little up and right and fired a double-tap, and two more ugly, mustard light beams stabbed through the gloom of the shut-up shop when the arm slithered back out the hole.

  “Ryan, what are you doing?” Krysty yelled when he jumped forward and pressed his eye to it.

  He saw rotties in the street with the rain pelting down on them. As he watched, a shriveled hulk of a man rolled dead eyes up in a melting face. The decomposed flesh was sluicing off his skull and arms like melting wax. His knees gave way and he fell forward to lie on his face, smoking.

  All around the rotties were sizzling, smoking, melting. Falling.

  “Scope it out!” Ryan yelled, dancing back just in time to avoid a mostly skeletal hand slashing for his face.

  He hacked the hand off with his panga. Doc moved up beside him. He shot the blue face that appeared in the window next, then risked a quick look out.

  “By the Three Kennedys!” he exclaimed. “The acid rain destroys them!”

  He stepped back. “I have rarely seen even the most concentrated acid rain act with anywhere near such alacrity on living tissue. Apparently their corrupted flesh is especially susceptible to it.”

  “English,” Jak said sourly.

  “He means the acid rain melts them triple-fast,” Mildred said.

  J.B. stepped to the other window. Despite Mildred’s warning, he rose up on tiptoe to peer through where a sliver of ocher light betrayed a crack in the shutter.

  “He’s right,” the Armorer said. “Only rotties still on their pins are the ones hammering to get in. Porch’s metal roof’s keeping the acid off them. All the ones in the street are down.”

  Ryan looked around at the others. “Everybody fit to fight?”

  His friends nodded.

  “What do you have in mind, young man?” the carpenter asked in alarm.

  Ryan had holstered his SIG again and gone to the door. His friends formed up to flank him.

  “This,” he said, yanking it open.

  If long-dead faces could show surprise, those of the three rotties right outside did. J.B. stepped to Ryan’s right. His shotgun blast smashed into an open mouth and tore the head clean off, from the stained and jumbled teeth of the lower jaw up. To Ryan’s left, Jak’s Python erupted. Ryan felt the side blast of hot gas and particles hit his cheek and clatter off his eye patch.

  It didn’t stop him from putting the sole of his boot to the belly of the middle rottie and kicking him into the street.

  Acid hissed as it took the changed man. Drying, half-decayed flesh dissolved and dripped from his hands and face as he raised them toward the tortured yellow sky. He fell over backward, wreathed in smoke.

  “Time for your showers, ladies and gentlemen!” Doc shouted, stepping past Ryan as Jak slipped out the door and to the left. “Let the sky’s tainted waters wash this town clean of all your evil!”

  Epilogue

  “I wish we had a fire,” Mildred said, rubbing her arms. “It’s wicked cold out here.”

  She squatted in such shelter as the four-foot cut offered from the nighttime prairie wind. The others hunkered around her, except for Ryan and Krysty, who stood side by side atop the bank, gazing south toward the ville they’d fled two hours before.

  “Not so cold as things’d be hot in Sweetwater Junction,” J.B. said.

  “But we saved their asses!” Mildred exclaimed. “We could have stayed. We would’ve been heroes! Shoot, Ryan, you were officially sec boss and everything!”

  The tall, dark figure silhouetted against the stars seemed to stiffen slightly. “Don’t remind him,” Krysty said. She slid her arm around his narrow waist.

  The acid rainstorm had passed; the skies had cleared. Inspection had shown that if acid had fallen or flowed in this spot, it had long since sunk into the sand.

  “Bound to be questions raised ’bout what happened at the east gate,” J.B. said, squatting at Mildred’s side.

  “You mean to the east gate, don’t you, John?”

  “That, too.”

  Like a white wolf on its haunches, Jak hunkered not far away, content to simply sit and rest with a hunter’s patience. Doc, who had drifted away from this plane of reality—not that Mildred could blame him this time—not long after they slipped away from the ville, sat on the sand humming the same tune he’d hummed the past hour.

  Krysty sighed. “Couldn’t we have worked something out, lover?” she asked.

  “You know we couldn’t,” Ryan said. “We all talked this out before. Why jaw about it now?”

  “Cold,” Jak said by way of explanation. The others looked at him in surprise. He was the last among them to speak up at all, much less in defense of jawing.

  The acid rain had washed away the entire rottie horde, leaving little more than piles of stained bones littering the streets, and the long rise east toward Ten Mile as far as the eye could see. The crazy gambit had paid off. By blowing open the gates and drawing out the bulk of the swarm, they had ensured they’d be caught in the rain, rather than remnants finding shelter somehow.

  Ryan didn’t know then and didn’t know now where the changed might have found shelter in this treeless waste. He just knew that whatever kind of creature Lariat had turned into, he didn’t want to leave her the least little slice of a chance.

  Inside the ville a few rotties had managed to get in out of the rain. They’d retained sufficient wit and will to break into buildings to esca
pe the acid bringing final death to the unquiet corpses. But they hadn’t been able to hide long from the search parties that set out to hunt them once the lethal rain stopped.

  Reconnaissance by Baron Sharp’s horse patrols reported no sign of rotties anywhere around Sweetwater Junction. Just scoured skeletons.

  The one thing they didn’t find was a trace of the auburn-haired woman in her leather jacket. Mildred bought into the consensus that the woman once known as Lariat, the rottie queen, had been melted to bones out there with her ghastly flock.

  The ville’s mood had been madly euphoric. Everybody was utterly beaten down physically, as the companions themselves were. But they still gave themselves over to a wild celebration.

  Mildred had to admit they had plenty to celebrate. Not only the victory over the changed, but an end to the civil war that had so ravaged their ville.

  Somewhere out in the night a coyote yipped. A shrill chorus of barks and howls answered it. Life went on out there. Somehow knowing that reassured her.

  “Never would have worked out,” Ryan said. “You all know it as well as I do. All the good cheer and glorious feelings were ace. As long as they lasted. Along about the time the ville folks start feeling their hangovers they’ll start remembering how many of their own we left staring at the sky. Then the bad feelings would start. And then they’d start measuring us for Miranda’s old killing poles outside the ville.”

  He stretched, then sighed and put his arm around Krysty.

  “But yeah,” he said softly. “It’d be nice to kick off our boots and put our feet up for a spell. Hell, yeah.”

  “Did we win?” Mildred asked.

  “Huh?” Ryan said.

  “Alive,” Jak said.

  “That’s not what she meant.” Ryan scratched the stubble on his right cheek. “All I can say is, reckon so.”

  “You reckon so!” Mildred exclaimed. “Is that really enough? You were the one who said we absolutely had to stop the rottie plague for good and all. Did we stop it? Absolutely?”