Wretched Earth

Lariat appeared out of the darkness. She’d been on sentry duty. Johnny Hueco’s M-1 carbine was tipped back over her shoulder.

“Drygulch?” she said.

He uttered a strangled noise somewhere between a cough and a scream, then spasmed so hard his back arched clear off the ground. His fingers raked frozen soil, then he fell back silent and still.

After he stayed that way for a full minute, Lariat said, “That can’t be good.”

Reno skinned out of his sleeping bag and started pulling on jeans encrusted with dirt.

“Lariat, be careful,” he said.

“Why?” she asked. “Poor slagger’s chilled.”

She prodded Drygulch with the toe of a boot.

With an inhuman snarl he sat up. His face was a strange gray in the ember light, cheeks sunken, the lips drawn back from his teeth. A network of dark lines spread across his face as if his veins were right beneath the skin and filled with ink. His eyes burned like coals in black-painted cups.

Lariat jumped back in alarm. “Drygulch?” she whispered.

He thrashed, as if the bedroll were a mutie monster whose clutches he was trying to escape.

“Get back!” Reno shouted. “Get away from him! He isn’t right!”

“Drygulch, you’re scaring me—”

Bursting free at last from the sleeping bag, Drygulch uttered an eerie moan and pounced on Lariat like an angry mountain lion.

Chapter One

“Gig sucks,” Jak Lauren complained.

The crowded barroom of Omar’s Triple-Fine Caravanserai and Gaudy reeked of spilled beer, spilled sweat and the faint tang of spilled blood.

At least, Ryan Cawdor thought, leaning on the hardwood bar with a protective hand on the handle of a mug of beer, I can’t smell puke. Much.

“Reluctant as I am to condone, and thereby encourage, what may be a new nadir of our young associate’s articulation, I fear I most heartily concur with the sentiment,” Dr. Theophilus Tanner said. He had to shout to make himself heard over the din of drunken conversation, riotous laughter and tinkling of a gap-toothed and out-of-tune upright piano.

The piano, inexplicably painted canary-yellow, was played by a girl of about twelve with freckles, pigtails, a homespun dress and at least a little skill. Those who thought her musical talents deficient were well-advised to keep their opinions behind their teeth, if they liked having teeth. The girl, Sary-Anne, was one of the innumerable children claimed by the tavern keeper and his three wives.

Omar kept a hickory cudgel in a leather holster down his leg to bust the heads of the obstreperous, not to mention the teeth of the hypercritical. A similar holster down the other leg carried a sawed-off, double-barrel scattergun for the especially hard to convince.

As gaunt as a crane, Doc Tanner perched next to Ryan on a bar stool of stout raw planks hammered together, with some sawdust-filled burlap for a “cushion.” The tails of his frock coat hung down almost to the loose sawdust that covered the warped wooden floor.

He raised a tumbler of what the bartender sold as “whiskey,” and which Ryan was sure was just shine colored brown with he-didn’t-want-to-know-what. For a moment Doc studied its contents, which would probably have still been murky had the glass been clean and the light better than the glow of a few kerosene lanterns strung strategically around the crowded barroom. Strategically so that none of the patrons could get too good a look at the goods on tap. Then, with a convulsive heave, the ancient-looking man grabbed the heavy glass in both hands and tossed the shot down his throat. Immediately, his body quivered.

“Mother’s milk,” Doc said. His long, silver-white hair seemed to have gotten wilder. His seamed face hitched into a sad smile, and his blue eyes took on a faraway look.

“You know it’s not like we had a choice,” their shorter companion said. The man in the leather jacket and battered fedora adjusted the glasses on the bridge of his nose. “Our point of arrival was picked clean, and we all got a nasty addiction to eating, which we have to tend to.”

“Point of arrival” was J. B. Dix’s way of saying “redoubt” when unfriendly ears might be listening to their conversation. Located in redoubts, deep beneath the earth, was a network of functioning six-sided matter-transfer units with armaglass walls color-coded for identification. These mat-trans units gave potential access to sites dotted not just all over North America, but the rest of the world, as well.

“Can hunt,” Jak said, tossing down his beer. He was a teenager with a mane of long hair as white as snow. The color of his skin matched his hair. He was an albino, and still cranky over the dispute that had met his initial attempt to enter the caravanserai.

The sign over the round arch over the gate through the high mud-brick wall that surrounded the compound read No Muties. Fortunately, Omar himself, eventually summoned by one of his sons, understood that albinism wasn’t a mutie trait, and allowed Jak to enter.

Their employer, Boss Tim Plunkett, had complained loudly at the delay the whole while. There were reasons why Jak said the gig sucked.

“That’s your answer to everything, Jak,” J.B. said, taking off his glasses and wiping them clear of condensation with a shirttail. “We can hunt, yeah. If you don’t mind living on about half an irradiated lizard a week, which is all even you could come up with in this sorry-ass place.”

“We’ve done jobs before,” Ryan said. “Didn’t always care for all of them. But we did them and moved on. Like J.B. says, we have to eat.”

“Could leave,” Jak said stubbornly. He meant go back to the mat-trans and jump out.

A woman as tall as Ryan and skinny as a chicken bone came up, carrying a tray with empty mugs of grimy glass and chipped ceramic. Despite stringy blond hair and a thin face without much to boast of by way of a chin, she wasn’t bad to look at. If he wasn’t deeply in love with a gorgeous redhead who was off somewhere with the other member of their party, predark freezie Mildred Wyeth, Ryan might’ve eyed the blonde with some interest after hard days on the trail. Plenty of the caravanserai customers were doing so—the wag drivers in their leather and weird hairdos, with hard voices and harder eyes, and even the mild-mannered cultists who were traveling west in a green school bus, all wearing scarves over their heads that were tied beneath their chins like bonnets.

As far as Ryan knew, she wasn’t available for that kind of service to anyone but Omar himself. That was because she was one of the caravanserai owner’s wives, known only and unsurprisingly as the Skinny One. Omar’s other wives, the Fat One and the Nuke Red Hot One, were somewhere out of the picture, although Ryan thought he could make out Red’s voice, which had a notable edge to it, carving a new bunghole in one of the kitchen help for spilling stew.

The Skinny One had arrived to see if they needed refills. Doc ordered another shot, which made Ryan’s already thin lips tighten until they almost vanished. Doc sometimes had a tenuous grip on the here and now. The one-eyed man didn’t see that he needed to kill his brain cells with any more rotgut.

But J.B., who was the group’s armorer and Ryan’s oldest friend, flashed an easy grin. “Lighten up and let a man ease his troubles,” he said. Then, as if to pretend he was talking about himself, he ordered another shot, as well.

Ryan studied his own heavy tumbler a moment and decided he didn’t need any more. He wasn’t normally queasy, but the glass had so many thumbprints on it they appeared to be etched in. Between that and the brown shine eating the lining off his stomach walls like hydrochloric acid, he reckoned he’d feel gut-shot if he kept on. He held a hand over the glass to indicate he didn’t need a refill.

The Skinny One bustled off, returning a moment later to fill Doc’s and J.B.’s glasses from a bottle.

“Besides,” J.B. said, as if he hadn’t been interrupted, “we might wind up somewhere worse. It’s happened.”

A commotion started at the door. A tall, stout man with a florid face and sweeping brown mustache strode in, as proud as a baron. Faces turned to stare.

“Boss Plunkett sure loves to make an entrance,” J.B. muttered.

Plunkett was dressed in expensive if tasteless scavenged clothing: a pink shirt, yellow cravat and a matching vest that strained to contain his paunch; overly tight brown flare-bottom trousers; black, pointy-toed boots shiny as lizard eyes. The companions’ employer had a woman on either arm, one blonde, one black-haired, both looking pretty good, not too hard or shopworn. They were named Tina and Angela. He called them his secretaries, but as far as Ryan and his friends could tell they were just sluts, companions hired to look good on his arm and perform whatever other duties were required.

Behind the big man and his women came Loomis, his bodyguard. He was middle height, with a dark face like the blade of an ax, black hair cut close to his narrow skull, a mustache almost as extravagant as Plunkett’s, and a perpetually unshaved jaw. He wore leather pants and a leather vest, but was shirtless, showing off a chest furred like a black bear’s ass. On one side of a silver-studded belt he wore a big survival knife with a saw-back blade. On the other he carried a chromed .44 Magnum Taurus blaster, which looked to be in good condition.

He gave Ryan a quick, hateful stare as soon as he noticed him. He resented the companions’ presence. He seemed to think it reflected a lack of confidence on his employer’s part, which Ryan reckoned showed Plunkett had more sense than most people would give him credit for.

The fat man immediately began to berate the nearest server, a skinny, pigtailed girl, in a loud voice.

“Stupe,” Jak muttered.

“Yeah, well,” Ryan said. “It’ll be over soon. Soon as we deliver the boss and his mysterious trunks to Sweetwater Junction.”

They’d been three days on the road guarding Tim Plunkett’s corpulent body, his two “secretaries” and an assortment of other flunkies including Loomis. The companions spent most of their time split up among a Toyota Tundra pickup truck that served as a sec wag, a former RV that carried extra bodies and bags, and occasionally the Land Cruiser that was the boss’s personal ride. They’d met Plunkett and his motley crew east of Omar’s at a trading post even farther out in the back of beyond, little more than a shack and an outhouse set too close to a watering hole for comfort. Despite Loomis’s swaggering assurance that he and his pair of assistant sec men, who doubled as roustabouts, could handle anything the wasteland could throw at them, Plunkett was clearly nervous. He’d offered the friends jobs as extra sec before even introducing himself.

They’d tried not to act too eager. They really were running on fumes, with barely the jack to buy water from the sketchy well. They’d had a run of poor luck of late.

“‘Beware yon Cassius,’” Doc quoted sonorously, “‘for he has a lean and hungry look.’”