Wretched Earth

“All right,” Ryan snapped. “The fun’s over. Nobody’s chilled yet.”

He swept the crowd with his lone ice-blue eye. “What do you say we keep it that way?”

The wag drivers looked at one another. He could read their thoughts plainly on their faces and in the set of their shoulders, without need of any mutie mind powers, which he surely didn’t possess. This wasn’t fun anymore. He suspected for those who’d come to grips with Mildred and Krysty, it had stopped being fun considerably earlier.

He frowned at Mildred. “This was your doing.”

It wasn’t a question.

Though she was bent over from the exertion and a fair amount of pummeling, she straightened and braced her shoulders. “They were beating up this poor skinny kid for no reason. Kicking him around like a soccer ball.”

Ryan shrugged. “Not our business. Minding other people’s is a good way to wind up staring at the sky.”

“Fine. You didn’t have to back me up, anyway.”

“Yes, we did, Millie,” J.B. said mildly. He still had his Uzi out, in case some of the mag drivers got frisky again. “You know we’ve got to back each other’s plays. That’s why Ryan doesn’t want you jumping into every swollen river to save every stranded calf. You know what I mean.”

“Why, John,” the stocky woman said, her deep brown eyes lighting, “that’s almost poetic!”

Ryan raised a brow and looked at Krysty, who shook back her scarlet hair.

“She did what she thought was right, Ryan. So did I.”

He felt a hand pat his shoulder, and glanced back to see Doc’s prematurely aged face hanging over him.

“Give it over, Ryan,” the old man said. “This is a fight you can only lose. Especially if you win.”

Ryan was about to retort that the statement made no sense, then it hit him that it made total sense.

“All right,” he said. “That bullet’s out of the muzzle of the blaster, anyway. Say goodbye to your stray and let’s head back inside. No point freezing our asses off in this wind when the stove’s hot inside.”

“Can’t he come with us?” Mildred asked.

The kid hung back. His narrow face was puffy and turning color. “Truth is,” he said, “I’m not even supposed to be here. Me and my friends were attacked. Lost everything.”

“That why those slaggers were thundering on you?” J.B. asked.

The kid shook his head. He had a shock of dark hair like an untended garden, and prominent ears. “No. I was trying to warn them.”

“Warn?” Jak asked. “What about?”

The youth shook his head again. “You’ll just start hitting me, too. And anyway, I better go.”

“I say we bring him inside with us,” Mildred said. “I’ll pay for him out of my share of what we got for the job.”

Ryan frowned. As was standard practice, Boss Plunkett had given them half their pay in advance. Nobody was going to do bodyguard work on credit; nobody was going to hire guards and give them all their jack before they’d guarded their share of body. People who did either weren’t even triple-stupe, they were chills. And it was handsome pay. Handsome enough that Ryan and the others came close to taking for granted Plunkett would try to stiff them at trail’s end. But they’d burn that bridge after they crossed it.

It wouldn’t be the first time a boss had tried to stiff them. But if Ryan had anything to say about it, it’d be the last time this particular one tried.

“Millie, you—”

“Don’t ‘Millie’ me, John! It’s my share, and I can do with it what I choose!”

“Three days ago we were almost down to boiling the straps of our packs for sweat soup!”

“That’s about where I find myself now,” the newcomer said. “Sorry. I’m Reno.”

“Yeah,” Ryan said.

“I will kick in,” Doc said. “We are flush for the moment. I for one am willing to pay for the entertainment of a good tale, if nothing else.”

“Pay too,” Jak said. “Want warning.”

“Shouldn’t he be happy enough to take the fact we saved his life as payment?”

“He’s in a hard place,” Mildred said. “We’ve been there ourselves. Recently.”

“I know,” Ryan said. “That’s why we’re working for that fat bastard Plunkett, in case you forgot.”

“Anyway,” she went on, “hasn’t the notion ever occurred to you that if you help a stranger down on his luck, someday when you’re down on your luck a stranger might help you?”

Ryan stared at her. So did J.B. and Jak.

“Drawing a blank here,” the Armorer said after a moment.

“That a stranger might help another out of kindness, or even deferred self-interest,” Doc said gently to the black woman, “is a concept alien to our friends’ experience.”

As a usual thing, the two got along like cats and dogs. But there were times when refugees from their own times stuck together against their thoroughly modern comrades.

“It’s a good practice, Ryan,” Krysty said, “even if it’s hard for you to see.”

“Oh, for shit’s sake,” Ryan said, throwing his hands up in the air. “When did we become a rolling charity? Fuck it. Bring the bastard.”

He turned—and ran into a barrier: yet another skinny girl, this one on the cusp of puberty, in a long shapeless frock, with red pigtails and an excess of freckles.

“My daddy sent me out,” Loretta said. “Ain’t no shooting allowed in the caravanserai.”

“Tell your daddy it was an accident,” Ryan said. “We’re…sorry.”

The girl bobbed her pigtails and vanished inside.

Krysty patted Ryan’s shoulder. “There, now,” she said, smiling. “That didn’t hurt, did it?”

Ryan rubbed his bristly jaw. “Kinda.”

Another figure moved to intercept them by the door. “Cthulhu saves,” said a roly-poly man with a green hankie tied around his head, extending a woodblock leaflet.

“Best step back, son,” J.B. told him in a not unfriendly way. “He’s not on hand to save you.”