Wretched Earth

Chapter Three

“So let me get this straight,” Doc said across the barroom table. “There is an infestation of these strange creatures that is coming this way. And they eat people.”

“Cannie muties,” Jak said. He was turning one of his throwing knives across the back of a white hand, knuckle to knuckle. “No big.”

The kid Mildred had rescued from the mob shook his head. “Not muties,” he said. “They’re…sick. And you can catch what they got.”

“What do you mean?” J.B. asked.

“They’re not mutants. They’re normal people who have changed. They’ve turned into mindless, soulless monsters who hunger for human meat. For us. There are hundreds, man. And they’re following right behind me!”

He was getting worked up. He stood half out of his chair. “You’ve got to believe me! Somebody’s got to do something!”

Sitting protectively beside him, Mildred took the tattered sleeve of his plaid shirt and tugged him back down. Though she never would’ve admitted it to her friends, she was trying her damnedest not to laugh. The poor crazy kid talked like somebody from a B horror movie.

“So, not muties,” Jak said. “Just cannies. Seen cannies. Killed cannies.”

“You don’t understand,” Reno said. His face worked as if the muscles were trying to pull themselves apart beneath his grayish skin. “They’re worse than any cannies you’ve seen. Worse than you can imagine.”

“We’ve seen some pretty rough ones,” J.B. said.

“And our imaginations are quite expansive,” Doc added, though not unkindly.

He might be half out of his mind some of the time, and lots of his attitudes struck Mildred as more neolithic than Victorian, but overall he was closer to her conception of what a normal human being was like than these born Deathlanders. Krysty showed at least flashes of compassion. But even she, with her unquestionably big heart and spirit, could surprise Mildred.

“They’re triple-hard to kill,” Reno said. “At least as bad as stickies. They don’t feel pain, see. It’s like they’re…dead. Walking chills. They even start to rot. But it doesn’t slow them down. Oh, no. They move like lubed-up lightning, some of ’em.”

Mildred looked at her friends. She could tell they were thinking the caravaneers were right. This was crazy talk. She wasn’t so sure. The young man had clearly seen something that frightened him terribly.

“And here’s the worst part,” the youth went on. “If they bite you, you become one of them. If they chill you, you rise again as one of them. Unless you’re lucky enough they just eat you alive. Once somebody gets bitten, you have to chill them right away. Right now. Because it’s only a matter of time before they change, too!”

The little bubble of silence that surrounded the table after that pronouncement seemed to repel the raucous chatter that filled the saloon. At a breath of cold, relatively fresh air from outside, Mildred turned to look at the door, relieved for the break.

The leader of the Cthulhu cultists, Brother Ha’ahrd, swept in. She was sure the name was really Howard, but that was how the ever-ebullient prophet introduced himself, and how his followers reverently pronounced his name. He was of middle height, a tad taller than J.B. His face had clearly been broad even before age started to turn it shapeless and run it down over his neck. Iron-gray hair hung down the back of his dark green robe. He alone of the believers wore no headcloth.

He smiled and loudly greeted the Nuke Red Hot One, who was seating customers at the moment. She smiled back. The Fat One was bustling to the kitchen with a big galvanized metal tub full of dirty crockery. The Skinny One still worked the bar. Omar himself was nowhere to be seen.

Mildred took advantage of the break to study Ryan for his reaction to all this.

Frowning slightly, he turned to Reno, who was fumbling in a little sorry-ass backpack that, judging by its shape, held mostly nothing. The kid unfolded a fresh pair of eyeglasses, these with bat-wing frames, and fitted them experimentally in front of his watery blue eyes.

“Where’d you get those, Reno?” Mildred asked.

He shrugged. “When I’m scavvying, I always keep my eyes peeled for unbusted pairs that’re close to what I need,” he said, smiling shyly and half-apologetically. “Only way I can see anything.”

“So how do you come to know all this about these…rotties?” Ryan asked.

Reno shook his head. “Don’t know all about them. Sorry. I know way too much. But not all. We were scavvies, like I said. My friends Lariat and Drygulch and I. A few nights ago they hit us where we were camped.”

“So you were the only one who got away?” J.B. asked. Mildred looked at the Armorer narrowly, trying to divine whether he was trying to equate the kid’s survival to cowardice. It was a fine line in the Deathlands. Nobody liked somebody who’d run out on his partners when the shit hit. Yet nobody survived any length of time without being ready to just run when the odds got too bad. She still had little idea where the line lay. She suspected it was pretty subjective.

But Reno shook his head. “No. We all got away. But one of my friends got bit. That night while we were sleeping, Drygulch changed. He jumped on Lariat and bit her. That’s when I ran. And came within a hair of running right into the rest of these—what’d you call them? Rotties?”

He grimaced. Mildred reckoned he was trying to smile. “Good a name as any, I suppose.” She wondered why nicknames for muties in Deathlands all ended with ie.

“Pardon my asking,” Doc said. “But how do they come by these numbers? These are desolate lands, barely inhabited.”

Far away from reality as the old man could wander, he could be as focused as a microscope. Usually he stayed here and now when danger threatened. Or when, as now, his curiosity was aroused.

“It’s a big country, Doctor,” Reno said. “Look around. There’s fifty, sixty people staying here tonight, and mebbe twenty live and work here full-time. If you shake out all the folks who live in a hundred-mile radius you can get a mighty crowd, even in hard core Deathlands like these.”

Ryan’s lips tightened, as if he didn’t like the way the skinny kid’s words tasted. Mildred thought she detected something a little off about the tale herself.

And so what? she asked herself. In the Deathlands, everybody has secrets. We have secrets.

Back in her day they used to talk about how valuable information was. Talk about the information economy replacing the economy of everyday physical things. In the end physical reality had reasserted itself with a bloody vengeance. Yet information or its lack could get you chilled. Like any other resource.

She wanted to remind Ryan of that. She suspected it would only make things worse.

“Sounds crazy,” Jak said. But Mildred could see white around his ruby irises, and his fine nostrils were flared like a winded horse’s. He was spooked by talk about the walking dead. He had been raised in the bayous of the South, steeped in superstition. Except who could say what was superstitious these days when so many fantastic—and horrible—things stalked the land?

“Please,” Reno said hollowly. “You have to believe me. We need to either get ready to defend this place, or get out of here while we still can!”

That seemed to make an impression even on Ryan. Before Mildred could more than catch his eye, a fresh commotion came from the direction of the stairs.

Boss Plunkett and some of his retinue lumbered down from the upper stories, where the luxury accommodations were located, and where the gaudy house part of the caravanserai’s trade was carried out. The boss had changed into a satiny purple dressing gown that looked suspiciously as if it had started life more than a century before as a bedsheet. He had a bottle in one hand, a cigar in the other, and his arms draped like beef boughs over the necks of his “secretaries.” Two of the gaudy sluts accompanied them. Loomis followed close behind, glaring around at the other bar customers as if ready to take a bite out of anyone who got within range. As always, he put Mildred in mind of a Village People wannabe.

Plunkett swept his boiled-ham face around the room. It reddened slightly when he caught sight of Ryan and friends. He turned to mutter something to his personal sec man.

As the Nuke Red Hot One squired Plunkett and his female satellites to a table, which she cleared of caravaneers with one flinty look, Loomis swaggered over to the companions’ table. He was hitching at his tight black leather pants as he came. Mildred didn’t even want to think about what that might imply about what had just been going on in the boss’s private room above.

Loomis stopped a few feet away and thrust his unshaved face at Ryan like a challenging canine. “Boss says he wants to talk to you, Cawdor,” he said. He jabbed a thumb back over his shoulder. “Now.”

Behind the round lenses of his glasses, J.B. narrowed his eyes at the man. For him that was about as good as cussing Loomis out loudly. Mildred squeezed his leg under the table.

“Be back,” Ryan said laconically, rising. He turned and looked at Loomis. The sec man stood glaring up at him for half a minute. Then, realizing he wasn’t going to win any staring contests with the taller man, he turned and led the way back to their boss’s table.

* * *

“WHAT THE HELL are you playing at, Cawdor?” Plunkett bellowed as Ryan came up. “You ain’t gettin’ paid to sit on your asses listenin’ to fairy stories. Get out there and guard my shit, before these convoy scum steal me blind!”

Ryan took his time answering. He and his friends had taken Plunkett’s jack. The one-eyed man felt bound to see a job through once accepted, if it was at all possible without throwing away the lives of his companions. He was tempted to give their current boss a second mouth to bellow through, between, say, chins two and three. But it was bad form, and he didn’t want to do it unless he really had no choice.

Anyway, it wasn’t as though the boss’s abusive bluster was news.

Besides, there was an off chance the fat man would pay the balance owed at the end of the trail, just as he said he would. That in itself was worth keeping him alive. For now.

“Right,” Ryan said. “We’ll do that.” He glanced at Loomis. “Startin’ to smell bad in here, anyway.”