Wretched Earth

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.

“Guards have been reporting movement out in the night,” Krysty said. The land lay clear for anywhere from fifty to a hundred yards all around the perimeter wall. Omar’s crew kept it swept of brush or anything else unwelcome visitors could hide behind. Or use as cover from blasterfire. “They think they’re human.”

“Could be starting at shadows,” Ryan said, grunting as he hauled on a boot. “Mebbe they heard your pal Reno’s scary stories.”

The skinny bespectacled guy had pitched his bedroll next door with J.B. and Mildred. If Mildred was going to take in strays, she was going to have to take care of them herself. And J.B. would have to deal; Ryan grinned a little at the thought.

Krysty shook her head. She squatted next to him, ready to spring into action at an eye blink’s notice.

“Don’t think so, lover.”

From outside they heard voices raised. She looked around.

“Now what?” Ryan said.

Krysty shook her head. She straightened, and they both walked out the open bay door into the yard.

The first thing they saw was eight or ten of the wag drivers. They were roaring drunk, standing in a ring passing bottles around. Fortuitously, they were on the far side of the compound from where Boss Plunkett’s wags were parked. They seemed to be engaged in some kind of roughhousing.

From over by the gate they heard voices raised. “But Maw,” a male voice, high and near cracking with adolescence, called in protest. “She was just a little girl, wandering out there all alone in the dark. Leon said weren’t no harm in letting her in.”

The bucktoothed kid was a twig of about thirteen, all nose and Adam’s apple. Omar’s wives had dropped uncountable girl children—at least, Ryan hadn’t been able to count them all. But they seemed to have produced only two boys—this one, Locke, and eight-year-old Paco.

Leon was one of Omar’s guards. The Fat One looked at the big man, who shrugged. “She acted scared,” he said.

“Little girl?” asked J.B., emerging from the neighboring shed. “What’s going on?”

“Probably nothing,” Ryan said.

“Nothing?” Reno echoed, fumbling to adjust his glasses on his nose. “They didn’t let anyone in, did they?”

“Appears that they did.”

“They’re crazy! It could be one of them!”

“Where is this little girl?” Mildred asked, hugging herself tightly beneath her generous breasts and not looking thrilled at being rousted out of a relatively warm bedroll. Her breath came in puffs of condensation.

“Ryan,” Krysty said, “those men again—”

The wag drivers were hooting in rising merriment. Only the fact the Fat One was busy reading Locke the riot act prevented her from jumping on them for making noise at this hour, Ryan reckoned. That was against Omar’s rules, too.

Then the circle opened a bit and Ryan saw that the wag drivers were pushing around a girl with pigtails. For a moment he thought it was one of the host’s daughters. But he quickly dismissed that; if they could stand up, the wag drivers weren’t that drunk. He remembered how Locke claimed he and Leon had admitted a lone little girl.

Now the wag drivers were bouncing her around the way they had Reno earlier in the evening.

“What is it with these assholes?” Ryan asked.

“Ryan,” Krysty said, “we’ve got to do something.”

“No,” he amended, “no, we don’t. We’ve got our hands full now. Let Omar’s people deal with it. What we have to do is get back to sleep. Plunkett’s going to want us hustling tomorrow.”

Jak was frowning. “Girl not look right.”

“What?” Ryan said. He had headed back to bed. Now he turned to look once more.

The sky was clear overhead, but the pitiless stars didn’t cast enough light to see by. Nor did the lantern light seeping through the gaudy house windows. Still, it struck Ryan that the little girl did move strangely, as if she were stiff, somehow. And was it a trick of the light, or did her face appear gray?

“What’s going on out here?” Omar himself, shaved-headed, ferociously mustached, stood in the doorway to the barroom. He wore his inevitable apron and held his sawed-off scattergun in his big blunt hands. He wasn’t shy about raising his voice regardless of the hour.

The wag drivers ignored him. One of them blew kisses at the teetering, silent child, then he leaned toward her, puckering his lips.

“Gimme a kiss, little girl,” he said.

As if shot from a catapult, she sprang at him. Her arms flew around his neck. She pressed her mouth to his in what looked like a kiss.

“Jesus God! That’s plain wrong,” Mildred said. “Get him away from her!”

The wag driver screamed. He reared up, batting frantically at the child, who continued to cling like a pigtailed monkey.

She turned her head to look at Ryan and his companions. Her eyes were sunken pits. A dark stain was smeared all around her mouth, and dark liquid ran freely down her chin.