Wretched Earth

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.’”

“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.

Mildred scowled. “They hadn’t ought to do that to a little guy. With glasses.”

Squaring her shoulders, she marched toward the fracas. It didn’t even occur to her to wonder whether Krysty would follow or not. Mildred didn’t care. She hated injustice.

As the little guy was pushed from pillar to post, a bald wag driver stuck out a boot. The victim went sprawling, his glasses flying off his face. Desperately, he shoved himself up onto all fours to scuttle after them.

They’d landed near another knot of jeering, laughing wag drivers. One waited until the skinny guy’s fingers almost reached the glasses before he stepped on the specs and crushed them with a vindictive ankle twist.

“Well, now, look what I gone and done,” he said, showing a gap-toothed grin to his buddies. “Ain’t that a shame?”

Evidently deciding his pal was getting too much of the attention, a larger man with a mop of dirty hair took it up a notch. He stepped toward the scrabbling victim, clearly getting ready to put the boot in.

Mildred grabbed his shoulder. “Here, you got no call to do that,” she said, spinning him.

The predark doctor was a sturdily built woman. In her time she’d been an avid hiker, not to mention an Olympic-class pistol shooter. Since reawakening into the Deathlands she hadn’t exactly slacked off at either pursuit.

But the guy was a head taller than she was, and what little wits he had were fuddled by advanced testosterone poisoning. As he turned, he snarled and punched her hard between the breasts. She reeled backward three steps and sat down hard.

So there she was. And the dirty-haired guy was winding up as if to deliver to her the kick she’d stymied.

Chapter Two

The burly wag driver, who turned out to have a rat’s-nest beard to go along with the hair, did a little stutter step to kick the sitting Mildred. She gave him a hard heel thrust in the nuts. He sat down not far away from her, bent over and clutching himself.

Mildred jumped up. The whole rowdy group converged on her, the little dude with the crushed glasses forgotten.

Suddenly Krysty stood shoulder-to-shoulder with her friend. Her prehensile hair swished around her shoulders, betraying her agitation. It also betrayed the fact that, however beautiful she was, Krysty Wroth was a mutie. Given the sign above the gateway, not to mention the temper of the mob closing in on them, Mildred hoped onlookers would think it was just the breeze stirring her scarlet locks.

“Wait!” Krysty said, holding up her hands. “What’s all this about?”

“Thanks, Krysty,” Mildred said from the corner of her mouth. “But you probably should have stood clear.”

Krysty just smiled at her. That wasn’t the way of any of them, to stand by and watch a friend get stomped. Mildred felt sick at what she might have gotten her friend into.

A wag driver with a Mohawk like a dead squirrel atop his head backhanded Krysty. “Clear out, bitch, or you’ll get what we give her.”

The force of the blow snapped Krysty’s head around. She came back with an overhand right that flattened the man’s long nose against his face with a crunch of breaking bone and cartilage, and blood squirting out each nostril. His eyes rolled up in his skull and he folded to the yard.

With a vicious collective snarl, the man pack closed in around the two embattled women.

Hard arms enveloped Krysty from behind. Hot breath washed down her neck and back. It stank like an overflowed shitter.

“Gotcha!” her captor grunted triumphantly as he tried to hoist her off her feet.

He got more than he bargained for. Krysty brought her knees up and drove a double-booted kick to the jaw of a short, wide wag driver with a faded bandanna tied around his head, hurling him into the crowd. Then she slammed her head back into the face of the man who held her.

Krysty’s skull was stronger than his jaw was. She felt something crunch at the impact, and he squalled and let her go. She gripped her hands together and turned into him fast, driving the point of her elbow into the pit of his stomach. The air burst out of him.

As he jackknifed, Krysty was already responding to the men rushing in on her. She whipped herself upright, bringing her elbow under the chin of one of them. His jaws clacked together, then he screamed, revealing red teeth that had bitten deeply into his tongue.