Wretched Earth

Chapter Four

Stiff-legged in horror, the wag drivers backed away from their stricken friend. They weren’t quick enough. The little girl jumped on the nearest man’s back and sank her teeth in the side of his neck.

“Shit!” Reno shrieked. “She’s one of them!”

“What the fuck?” Ryan said.

Someone was hollering from the watchtower. “Stand back! Stand away from the gate there or I’ll shoot!”

Wag drivers pried the little girl off their second stricken buddy and dashed her to the ground. Omar was striding toward them, shotgun in his fist. His body language suggested he wasn’t sure who to shoot first.

“Start the wags,” Ryan told his companions. “It’s time to go.”

“What about Plunkett?” J.B. asked.

“I’ll get him,” Ryan said grimly.

He’d scarcely started walking toward the gaudy when Krysty screamed, “Ryan!”

Instinct made him look left, away from where the warning cry had come from. A man lurched toward him from the shadows between sheds.

He moved hunched over, his face thrusting forward, his arms dangling. One cheek had been torn off, exposing teeth on his upper jaw. The wound didn’t bleed. His skin was gray in the faint light, his eyes white marbles.

At Krysty’s cry Ryan had drawn his handblaster. Bracing it with both hands, he fired two quick shots through the center of the man’s chest.

They were good hits. He saw them hit, punching through ragged plaid flannel over the sternum. One or both had to have penetrated the man’s heart. But rather than slowing, he put on a surprising burst of speed.

“Don’t let it bite you!” Reno screamed.

Ryan gave the onrushing thing a front thrust-kick to the sternum. The creature reeled back three steps, then with unwavering determination charged forward again.

As much from habit as anything else, Ryan punched a third bullet through its forehead. The creature folded obediently as a dead man should, and lay still.

“Head shots work!” Ryan shouted as he sprinted toward the main building.

Around him people spilled from the sheds and the gaudy house itself. The yard was filling with bodies, confusion and noise. People screamed. Shots popped.

At the front gate the Fat One didn’t seem to quite grasp what was going on. With Locke and Leon trailing behind, she walked toward the center of the yard, waving her flabby arms and shouting for everyone to cease firing.

The little girl, the lower half her face painted with the blood of her victims, jumped up, apparently unhurt. She darted toward the large woman. The Fat One saw her and dropped to her knees. Holding her arms wide, she cried, “Come to me, child! Run!”

The girl did. When she was ten feet from the kneeling woman her head exploded. The decapitated body flopped forward almost to the horrified woman’s feet.

Stopping by the door to let a knot of panicky people out, Ryan looked back over his shoulder. Mildred was lowering her blocky ZKR 551 target revolver from a one-armed shooting stance. He caught a gleam of torchlight on tears streaming down her cheeks.

The Fat One squalled in outrage and jumped to her feet. “That wasn’t a little girl anymore!” Reno yelled, jumping in front of Mildred as if to shield her from the wrath of Omar’s heftiest wife.

From somewhere came the cry “They’re over the wall!”

More of those creatures, men and women but not men or women, moved with unnatural hitching gaits through the crowd in the yard. Ryan thrust his way into the gaudy house, breasting a stream of half-naked sluts screaming as they raced out.

The first thing that hit him when he entered was an eye-searing stink of smoke. It was more than the potbellied stove could possibly account for unless the chimney had gotten blocked. He took a wild flying guess that wasn’t the case.

Behind the bar the Thin One flailed vigorously at three no-longer-human opponents with an aluminum baseball bat. It made musical thunking sounds as it bounced off bone lightly padded by muscle or skin, off joints and skulls. Family members, employees and patrons wrestled with enemies whose skin, bluish in the lantern light, was cratered with running open sores. Some were missing big chunks from their bodies, even arms.

A wag driver grabbed the arm of an elderly man to try to pull the oldie off a comrade. The arm came off in his hands. He stared at it in comic amazement as the changed oldie sank his few remaining teeth into the second wag driver’s neck.

Plunkett and crew were nowhere in sight. Fleeing sluts, guards and customers were blocking the stairs. Ryan began shoving them bodily out of the way. As strong as he was, their fear was stronger. He didn’t make much progress.

Smoke began rolling along the hollows of the ceiling between the beams. The gaudy house was well and truly on fire.

Loomis tumbled down the wooden stairs, wearing only his shiny, black leather pants. “They’re already changing!” he screamed, catching himself on all fours.

Buck-naked and baby-pink, Boss Tim Plunkett lurched down the stairs behind his sec chief. His hairy, fish-pale belly hung low, obscuring his genitals. Blood gushed from his torn-out throat. His voice box and airway were apparently still intact, or mostly so. As he banged from rail to wall and back, clutching his blood-gouting wound with one hand, he kept croaking, “Help me!”

He toppled, to land on his gut with a massive crash.

* * *

SHUDDERING ORANGE FIRE erupted from the combined watch- and water tower, followed a beat later by a roar of full-auto blasterfire. Pressing the hand that held the pistol grip of his M-4000 scattergun to pin his battered hat against his head, J.B. reached with his free hand to snag the back of the man’s flannel shirt Krysty Wroth wore. He dragged her to the ground.

Bullets cracked right over their heads, where their bodies had been an eye blink earlier. Headlights popped as the burst raked the Tundra’s front.

The burst went on, sweeping the length of the big RV. Metal flexed musically.

“Shit!” Krysty exclaimed. That startled J.B. The redhead normally didn’t use bad language.

Then he smelled gasoline and understood why she cussed. Krysty threw herself over him, grabbing him so they both rolled sideways over the cold, trampled earth, away from the fuel-leaking RV. It also took them out of the dubious cover of the wag’s thin-gauge metal walls.

The burst hammered on. Good way to burn out a barrel fast, the armorer in J.B. noted. Inevitably, the bullets struck a spark. The big wag lit up with a fat pillow of blue fire and a low but loud whump.

J.B. felt a wave of heat wash over him as he came to rest on top of Krysty, looking down into her green eyes. He grinned.

“I better climb off,” he said. “Don’t want any misunderstandings with Ryan.”

“Reckon he’d understand,” she said.

The machine gun lashed back across the crowded yard. J.B. could tell humans were getting hit. They fell and stayed down. The triple-strange creatures—the rotties—kept shambling along despite repeated torso strikes.

“Look out!” Krysty gritted. J.B. tipped his face to the ground as bullets stitched right to left not two feet in front of him. Ricochets whined over him, gouts of dirt tapping the front brim of his hat.

“That stupe in the tower’s gonna chill us before the rotties do,” he said.

He heard the bark of a .38 from his left. The muzzle-flare from the tower was cut off. J.B. looked to where the single gunshot had come from.

Mildred knelt on the dirt, her left elbow braced on one knee, her left hand cradling her handblaster.

“You chill the dude, Millie?” he called.

She shook her head. “Like you said, J.B. He was a bigger danger.”

“Wags fucked,” Jak said, coming out of the shed behind J.B. “Tundra chilled. Other—”

He shook his white-maned head in irritation. The burning cargo wag blocked the third vehicle in the shed. It blazed too vigorously for anyone to try to push the big vehicle clear.

Krysty sat up beside J.B. She suddenly whipped her upper body left and shot twice with her snub-nosed Smith & Wesson. Right toward Mildred.

Spinning around, J.B. saw a man with a black pit where one eye should be reel back from where he’d been about to blindside the sturdy woman. Apparently Krysty had hit him in the body, not the head, and he lunged for Mildred.

“Shit!” J.B. yelped. He rolled fast right, trying to clear his own scattergun for a shot at the rottie. It’d be dangerous with Mildred in the way. But if it was really true that if you got bitten by one of these hoodoos, it turned you into one of them…

There weren’t many things in this world that J. B. Dix shied away from. He’d seen his share of scary shit and then some. But he couldn’t stand to think of that happening to Mildred. To any of his friends.

But he wouldn’t make it in time. Seconds slowed as he watched the rottie close in on Mildred, who was lining up a shot on another target and still unaware of her danger. He shouted a warning he knew would come too late.

With a crunch a thin steel blade poked through the man’s head from right temple to left. The rottie went to his knees.

“Touché,” Doc cried. He put a boot to the side of the slack-skinned, veined face and pushed. The creature flopped to its side and lay unmoving.

J.B. scrambled to his feet. A man with an arm swinging from his elbow like a busted gate loomed in front of him, a vomitous reek of rotting flesh.

Whipping up the M-4000, J.B. jabbed the steel-shod butt into the creature’s face. It lurched back two steps, then its head exploded as J.B. reversed the scattergun and fired, eight inches from the bridge of its nose.

“You guys hold them off,” Krysty shouted, stuffing a speed-loader into her snub-nosed handblaster. It held only five shots, a triple-rough disadvantage in a fight like this. “Mildred, come help me get the packs.”

“What do you plan?” Doc asked. He fended off a short-haired changed woman with his rapier and stabbed her deftly through the eye.

“We’ve got to get out of here, fast!” Krysty said. “That’s my plan!”

She and Mildred ducked into the shed.

* * *

AN EYE BLINK before his boss’s nude, bleeding bulk crashed down on him, Loomis took off like a sprinter, almost knocking down Ryan in his mad desire to get out the door.

Two naked women came down the stairway. By their hair Ryan guessed they were the boss’s “secretaries,” Tina and Angela. Their faces were hard to recognize, gray and distorted with some unimaginable passion behind liberal smears of gore. Bottle-blonde Angela’s belly had been cut or ripped open. Purple lengths of intestine trailed out the red, gaping cavity. They were short, their ends ragged, as if the loops had been bitten through.

Black hair flying, Tina flung herself on her boss’s wide, hairy white back. He thrashed feebly. It amazed Ryan he could move at all, at the rate he was bleeding out. Tina grabbed his head and, despite the thickness of his bull-like neck, began to bang his head against a stout square stair post. Angela, not inconvenienced in the least by her missing viscera, joined right in, gnawing her boss’s head as her partner rhythmically pounded it into the wood.

A hellish light showed through the boards of the ceiling over the barroom. Sparks fell like glowing rain. A bald man stumbled toward Ryan, extending a clawed hand from which the little finger had been bitten. The wound had stopped bleeding. Ryan shot him in the face almost casually, so horribly fascinated was he by what was happening on the stairs.

He felt no strong urge to try to rescue his employer. The big man was a sure chill anyway, with that neck wound. Not to mention that Reno’s crazy talk about victims rising again as one of the changed if the rotties chilled them was looking pretty plausible here.

With a sound like a melon being dropped, Boss Plunkett’s head split open. Amazingly, his naked limbs continued to twitch, and he moaned in dismay. Tina clawed briefly, then peeled back a section of skull with scalp attached.

With a superhuman effort the huge man reared to his knees, reaching a pudgy arm toward Ryan.

“Help me,” he mouthed.

Then he stiffened and his eyes rolled up in his beet-red face. Tina had plunged a long-nailed hand into his opened cranium and scooped up a juicy handful from his until-then-living brain. She mashed it against her wide-open mouth, getting as much blood and dough-colored brains on her face as inside.

Plunkett plopped forward, unmoving.

Chewing, Tina looked at Ryan. Her eyes were as white as milky marbles, yet had a terrifying intensity. Without thinking, he raised his SIG-Sauer, swiftly braced and flash-aimed, and shot her through the forehead.

She slumped. Her partner stayed astride Plunkett’s pale fat back and began to greedily stuff fistfuls of brains into her mouth.

With a roar, the ceiling caved in over the bar.

“Time to go,” Ryan said. He turned and dashed back into the night’s cold but welcoming embrace.

Chapter Five

The caravanserai yard was a hell full of the struggling damned. Bodies thrashed. The doomed screamed as rotties bit great chunks out of living human flesh. Across the yard Ryan saw the former Boss Plunkett’s big RV burning merrily. He made for it at a run, as if it were a beacon.

He shot a woman covered in human blood when she lunged from his right to bite him. A skinny adolescent boy, not Locke or anyone Ryan had seen before, blocked his path. He drew his panga and hacked at the youth’s head. The kid fell. Whether he stayed down or not Ryan never knew. He wasn’t about to hang around to watch.

He reached his friends. J.B. was holding a tall man’s head and shoulders against the side of the burning wag, where yellow flames enveloped them. The man continued to paw at the Armorer as if nothing unusual was happening, his sleeves yellow wings of flame.

Ryan shot the man through the head. He collapsed into a flaming, stinking heap as J.B. leaped clear.

“Quit fucking around, J.B.,” Ryan said. “We got to shake off the dust of this place.”

Krysty had her back to a shed, fending off an attacker with a trenching shovel from a wag’s emergency kit. Ryan hacked the rottie across the back of the neck. He folded.

Doc stuck the tip of his rapier through the eyeball of an approaching rottie. Behind him, Mildred held a baseball bat cocked should anyone get past him. Jak danced around with a big trench knife in his hand, easily evading swipes from a bearlike foe and awaiting an opening to dart past and stab him in the back of the head.

“We need a ride out, and fast,” Ryan said.

“Easier said than done, Ryan,” J.B. answered. “Seeing as how our wags are either in flames or blocked in.”

Krysty ran to Ryan and gave him a quick hug. She had been rooting around inside the wag with the shot-up engine block. The ax handle she held was stained with blood at the tip. He kissed her quickly on the cheek, then pulled free to point back across the yard.

“There’s our ride,” he said. “Right there.”

“That’s those damn Cthulhu cultists’ bus,” Mildred said. “They might have something to say about our hitching a lift.”

Planting the blade of his panga under his right arm, Ryan switched magazines in his SIG. He didn’t much worry about getting gore on his coat. It wasn’t the first time and wouldn’t be the last.

“Doesn’t mean we got to listen,” he said. “Follow me. Wedge formation.”

Without looking to see if his companions would follow—because he knew from long experience they would—he set off at a trot for the battered, faded-green bus. It had a snowplow blade up front and chicken wire over the windows, most of which lacked glass.

Cultists surrounded the school bus, trying to hold off the moaning horde by pushing at them with their bare hands. They were determined and vigorous enough to manage it for now.

The concentration of warm food drew the changed.

Ryan passed Brother Ha’ahrd, who was surrounded by a phalanx of followers, including a few former wag drivers that seemed to have undergone a last-minute conversion in the face of overwhelming, mind-frying horror. He was loudly preaching a doctrine of love and forbearance and waiting on the will of the Great Old Ones. The rotties didn’t seem to be listening. They were more interested in eating his head.

Which meant most of the shambling freaks were focused on something other than the approach of Ryan and friends from the rear. He heard a couple shots pop off behind him, and the thwack of stout ash wood on a skull, accompanied by a grunt of effort and triumph from Mildred. Apparently a few of the freaks still tracked them.

Ryan didn’t look back. Unless somebody screamed for his help, his job was clearing the way.

He waded into the mob of rotties surging toward the bus door, where three cultists had linked arms to keep them out. Ryan hacked at the backs of necks and skulls as if the changed were a stand of brush he was trying to cut a trail through.

A woman turned a blood mask to snarl at him and he shot her between the eyes. He sensed a presence on his right and whipped the butt of his SIG around to squash a changed man’s nose in a spray of dark fluid. The rottie staggered back. An eye blink later Doc’s slim rapier impaled the creature through both temples like an apple on a skewer.

A burly rottie, obviously a changed wag driver, bare-chested and with a short Mohawk, spun to bare his teeth and spread his arms to seize the one-eyed man. Ryan hammered him between the eyes with the SIG’s butt, then shot him in the forehead as he staggered back.

The rotties pulled down the two women and one man barring the door. As the cultists futilely screamed and thrashed, the rotties homed in on them. Ryan kicked at the flailing tangle until the way was clear, then rushed into the school bus with his friends at his heels.

A stout woman in a robe sewn together from burlap bags barred their way. “Stop! There’s no room in here for anyone but believers!”

Ryan was about to rebut her with a copper-jacketed 9 mm bullet where it would do the most good when Krysty grabbed his arm from behind.

“Wait!” she yelled. “She’s right!”

The cultist was. Ryan looked around the bus to see the seats and aisles jammed with refugees. Not all of them looked as if they belonged to Brother Ha’ahrd’s flock, or at least had started the day that way. Still, the practical puzzle was insoluble: even shooting the reticent wasn’t likely to drive these people out into the blood-smeared rottie mob.

“Up!” he heard Jak call.

“Say what?” Ryan turned to see Jak disappearing up the first window behind the door.

Ryan jumped back outside. After even momentary exposure to the relative warmth inside the bus, generated by close-packed bodies and humid panting breath, the chill hit him like a slap. As did the stench of burning petrocarbons, human flesh and hair, and spilled intestines.

“Follow Jak!” Ryan yelled. He stooped to grab one of Krysty’s calves. J.B. grabbed the other, and the two men boosted the woman high enough to scramble onto the roof after the albino youth.

Stabbing, slashing, shooting only when utterly necessary, Ryan and Doc helped the cultists stave off the rotties while Mildred and J.B. quickly passed the packs up to Krysty and Jak atop the bus. Then Ryan and J.B. gave Mildred a boost, and Doc. Finally, Ryan stood facing out, while J.B. scaled him like a monkey and clambered up.

The changed surged forward. Unfeeling hands reached out for Ryan, blood-spilling mouths gaping wide to consume his flesh.

* * *

MILDRED HAD BARELY got her bearings atop the ice-cold metal roof of the bus when another stout woman wearing the Cthulhu cult’s flowing robes and head scarf came bustling up alongside the baggage that had been strapped onto a rickety roof rack.

“You can’t come up here!” she snapped. “This is for believers only—”

“Gaia forgive me,” Krysty said. She kicked the stout woman off the roof.

Mildred felt her brows climb up her forehead. Krysty looked back at her and shrugged.

“Move your broad butt, woman!” yelled a familiar voice from behind. Mildred turned a furious glare on J.B., whose head popped up over the roof edge like a curious prairie dog’s.

“John,” she said, “you and me are going to talk.”

But she shifted aside to make way for him as a great cry went up from the cultists below.

“Brother Ha’ahrd!” a voice screamed.

Ryan looked past the rotties closing in on him to see the long-haired prophet knocked off his feet by a surge of creatures who had overwhelmed his guards. Cultists stampeded off the bus, bowling over the rotties in their path in their zeal to rescue their guru.