Wretched Earth

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.

Ryan had caught a break.

Not a man to waste an opportunity, Ryan holstered his panga and handblaster, spun around and jumped as high as he could. Krysty and J.B. caught hold of his outstretched arms and hauled him up on top of the bus as if he were a child.

“After all this trouble we could ride inside now,” Mildred said peevishly. She knelt on the heaped baggage, making fast their own packs. Doc squatted to one side, reloading his revolver as calmly as if he were out for a morning stroll outside his home in nineteenth-century Vermont.

Ryan shook his head emphatically. “Just as glad to ride up here,” he said. “Rotties get inside—”

Screams pealed out the door. “Shit!” J.B. said, leaning out to peer over. “They are!”

“Grab legs!” Jak called. Without waiting to see if anybody responded, he got down on his knees at the front end of the bus roof. While the few cultists and other refugees who had also sought safety up there looked on dumbly, Krysty and Mildred jumped to grab the youth’s ankles as he let himself topple forward.

An instant later Ryan heard the roar of Jak’s .357 Magnum Colt Python.

* * *

FEELING KRYSTY’S AND Mildred’s grips strong on his ankles, Jak let himself almost smack face-first into the cold windshield of the bus, using his right palm at the last moment to keep from breaking his nose.

Beyond the glass, which remained unfogged due to the icy air streaming in the open door, he saw the look of terror on the driver’s face, rendered more comic by being upside down: the saucer eyes, the mouth a screaming O below a bearded chin.

The driver had good reason to scream. He was trying to hang on to the wheel, probably to keep from getting pulled out of his seat, and batting with his right arm at a rottie who was trying to bite his head. Other rotties had got themselves jammed in the door in their lust for human flesh and hot blood.

Jak pressed the vented muzzle of his blaster against the glass near the first rottie’s head and pulled the trigger. The Magnum blaster kicked itself away from the windshield as the glass collapsed inward. He let his arm straighten to ride out the recoil; he hadn’t been able to brace properly, and expected the reaction.

Inside, the bus driver stared in even greater horror at his attacker. The back of the changed woman’s head had been blown off. The guy was staring through her mouth at the other rotties still struggling to break free and get at him.

The half-headed rottie collapsed. People in the bus were screaming and leaning over at least one person who’d been hit by the 125-grain hollowpoint slug, which hadn’t expended all its energy blowing the rottie’s head apart. Jak took in the fact without emotional reaction. These were no friends of his, nor enemies, either. So why care?

With the window glass gone he had clear shots at the rotties in the door. Grabbing the Python’s grips with both hands, he fired three shots as fast as he could. Two of the creatures went down at once, shot through the forehead. The third reeled back with her lower jaw torn away. Instantly, hands grabbed her from behind and threw her to the ground as furious cultists surged in, bearing their injured leader.

Jak turned to the driver. “Drive,” he said, gesturing with his Python for emphasis.

Eyes all but popping free of his lean, ashen face, the driver put the wag in gear and hit the gas.

* * *

A BLOOD-STREAKED GRAY head appeared over the rear end of the bus roof as the vehicle took off with a jerk. Kneeling on the cool metal, Ryan had unstrapped his Steyr from the top of his backpack and cracked the bolt to make sure the weapon was loaded. He put a hand down briefly to steady himself against the sudden acceleration, then whipped the longblaster’s butt to his shoulder and fired.

The head disappeared. Whether he’d destroyed the brain or not Ryan didn’t know. The 7.62 mm bullet might have caught the creature in the shoulder. It didn’t matter as long as the thing didn’t get up here.

“Everybody all right?” Ryan shouted, hanging on to the jury-built luggage rack as the bus wheeled in as tight an arc as it could toward the compound exit. “Sing out.”

“Yes,” Krysty called.

“I’m here,” J.B. said.