Wretched Earth

“Plunkett?” J.B. asked in amazement.

“I think he means Loomis,” Ryan said.

“I do indeed, my dear Ryan,” Doc said. “Our esteemed employer more closely resembles a hog in a silk suit. Though I grant he has a hungry look to him as well, especially when he’s tucking into a hearty repast.”

Doc shook his head. “Swine. I hate swine.” Tears brimmed in his blue eyes. “The sows, the sows—whenever I eat a ham sandwich, I feel vindicated. Vindicated!”

“Easy there, Doc,” Ryan said.

Although he looked to be on the hard end of his sixties, Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner was chronologically only in his thirties. Yet he was enormously old—scary old. He’d been born on Valentine’s Day in 1868, then trawled out of his own time by twentieth-century whitecoats. Doc proved to be a difficult subject, so he was trawled forward in time to the Deathlands. The result, along with premature aging, was that his mind wasn’t clamped down any too hard, and tended to wander at times.

“It was under an evil star that we signed on with Plunkett,” he said now, suddenly focusing.

Ryan scratched his shaggy head. “Not my favorite thing, either,” he admitted. “I don’t know whether it’s something he did, something he’s got in his brain or something he’s got in one of those trunks. But he’s triple-scared somebody’s going to make a play for it, whatever it is.”

“Folks don’t pay like he pays us if they aren’t scared, Ryan,” J.B. said. “You’re right. We’ve done tough jobs before, and always come through ace. Or at least alive, which amounts to the same thing.”

“Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing,” Doc announced. “Eddie Rickenbacker told me that. He was a good lad, if rather on the reckless side.”

Ryan had no idea what Doc was talking about. He decided to let it slide. It wasn’t that he lacked curiosity. But whenever Doc launched into one of his tortured explanations, Ryan’s head hurt.

Just then, with a gust of cold evening air, somebody poked his head through the door and shouted, “Hey, everybody! That big-tit redhead and the black woman are dustin’ it up with a pack of caravaneers!”

Ryan wished he hadn’t passed on that refill. “Time to go.”

* * *

A HARD SHOVE between the breasts sat Mildred Wyeth down hard on her tailbone. The impact sent white sparks shooting up in her brain, and raised tears in her eyes.

How’d I get myself into this? she wondered.

It was a question with several possible answers. In one, she’d been a physician and cryogenics researcher in America at the end of the twentieth century. Complications following routine abdominal surgery had resulted in Mildred being frozen in an experimental cryogenic unit, with the hopes of reviving her in the future.

Then the world ended.

Several years earlier Ryan Cawdor and the others had stumbled across her cryopod and thawed her. She’d been with them since, trapped in a future she definitely hadn’t volunteered for.

But, more immediately…

She and Krysty Wroth had been walking back from where the wags were parked across the compound.

“You know, Krysty,” Mildred said, “it’s weird. Usually these storage places were built in or real near a town of at least some size. So they’d have, like, customers, you know?”

Krysty nodded and smiled absently. Mildred stifled a sigh. Sometimes her companions had little curiosity about the history of their kind and their continent, except insofar as it might lead to plunder or some other more or less tangible advantage. Not even the tall, statuesque woman with the flame-red hair and the emerald green eyes, who had a lively intelligence, imagination and general thirst for knowledge about the world. She, too, was mostly fixed on the present.

Of course, Mildred reminded herself, if you wake up every morning with no way to be sure there’ll be food to eat or water to drink, and that terrible muties aren’t going to kill you or coldhearts rape and enslave you, you might find the concerns of the moment a lot more pressing than some past, so long dead it isn’t even moldy anymore.

“I guess the war or the quakes knocked down whatever town lay nearby, and storms and scavengers took care of the rest,” Mildred said.

Screw it, she thought. Sometimes it feels good to connect to my own past. Krysty was a genuinely generous person as well as a friend. Mildred would just take advantage of her good nature and impose.

“Of course, most of the storage units must’ve gotten wiped out, too,” she continued. “Only a few dozen are left.”

Those were arranged around three sides of a wide square. The fourth was occupied by the three-story, wooden gaudy house itself, along with a combination water- and watchtower, thirty feet high, beside the dirt road to the main gate beyond. The earth around was stamped flat by generations of feet, tires and hooves, but Mildred guessed the open space had once been a paved parking lot. The gaudy probably stood where the office had been. The storage sheds were still being rented, but mostly by the night—or the hour—as cribs and temporary shelters for wayfarers across the desolate, acid-rain-racked wasteland that had once been the Great Plains.

A fair number of wags were parked in the big open space: Plunkett’s RV, big cargo trucks from the trade caravans and the old school bus, its bright green paint job faded the color of asparagus.

A pair of people appeared in front of them. Krysty tensed at Mildred’s side. Strangers moving to intercept wasn’t a comforting nor a welcoming thing in the Deathlands, but these were nondescript people, a man and a woman dressed in the usual postskydark shabby clothing, but with dark green handkerchiefs knotted over their heads.

“Cthulhu wants you,” the woman said, smiling angelically.

Mildred shuddered. “He can’t have me.”

“He’ll have us all someday, friend,” the tall, skinny man said, beaming. “Come to him now and know the peace of his love.”

“Why do you all wear those green scarves?” Krysty asked. She had instantly relaxed upon recognizing the pair from the twenty or thirty cultists overnighting in the caravanserai.

They seemed harmless, but Mildred said, “Don’t talk to them, Krysty! It only encourages them.”

“Why not?” she asked. “I’m interested in the paths people walk to the truth. Anyway, I want to know.”

“Why, sister,” the woman said, “it represents seaweed.”

“Seaweed?” asked Mildred despite herself. “Seaweed?”

“Why, certainly,” the man said, nodding. “The seaweed that covers our lord Cthulhu’s head as he waits, dead and dreaming, in lost R’lyeh!”

“Praise Cthulhu!” the woman declared, raising fervent eyes toward a sky banded with purple, orange, red and indigo. It was just sunset, though, not any kind of terrible storm coming in. “Cthulhu fhtagn!”

“Dead?” Krysty asked, seeming a bit stunned.

“Dead,” they both said, nodding in unison. “Dead to rise someday.”

Declining the offer of a handout, which seemed to consist of woodcuts on God—or Cthulhu—the two women walked on.

“What an odd belief system,” Krysty said.

Mildred shook her head. “Dang. I never realized just how similar the whole Cthulhu thing was to the Christian mythology.”

“You mean the sect existed during your earlier life?”

“Sort of. Only then they were called the science fiction fans.” She rolled her eyes. “My daddy’d go upside my head, he heard me comparing the two.”

Some of Omar’s staff, or children—to the extent there was a difference—were circling the central yard, lighting torches as darkness fell.

“What’s happening over there?” Krysty asked, pointing.

By the flaring orange torchlight that flickered in a chill, rising breeze, Mildred saw a skinny guy being bounced like a pinball among a group of dusty, mean-looking wag drivers. They were hooting derisively as they thrust him from one to the next. He reeled, unable to get his balance.