Wretched Earth. James Axler
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Lariat’s .45 bucked and roared and vomited yellow flame three times, fast. The horror squealed and tumbled into a forward roll that carried it into the far wall.
Johnny stood with his back to the doorway. His lean, handsome face stretched to accommodate a mouth that had become a yawning oval of fear. He held his little carbine halfway to his shoulder as if to shoot at the second creature that had come through.
Then his expression grew strangely curious. Reno heard a sound like somebody stepping on a ripe gourd.
A claw like the first mutie’s suddenly burst through Johnny’s chest. Blood fountained out around it, but didn’t hide the fact that it was way bigger than the one the other rat thing sported. The clawed arm lifted Johnny off the floor. He screamed and flailed his limbs mindlessly. The M-1 carbine cracked with deafening shots, sending ricochets howling around the adventurers.
“Time to go!” Lariat yelled, as a tumbling round glanced off Reno’s shoulder.
Drygulch jumped up and ran. Lariat raced after him, firing her handblaster back into the infinite blackness of the inner doorway. Backpedaling into the corridor, Reno started to warn his boss that she might hit their guide.
Then he asked himself why that would be a bad thing.
* * *
“LET ME LOOK AT IT,” Reno said.
Drygulch held his wounded arm away. “No. It’s fine. Leave me ’lone.”
The last of their jackrabbit stew boiled in a cast-iron kettle on a little break-down aluminum tripod over a campfire of driftwood and dried weeds. Some flakes of what Lariat claimed was sage bubbled in the mix.
The stew smelled to Reno like stinkbug ass. He guessed it would taste worse. But after this day a good case of the running shits would only be appropriate. Anyway, he was hungry enough to eat a stinkbug’s ass. A whole pot of stinkbug asses.
But by the sick yellow light of the flames, he made out something disturbing. Reddish inflammation, shot through with nasty dark discoloration, crept up the man’s lanky arm from his bandaged hand.
Lariat pronounced the stew done. Drygulch refused any, which right there showed he was in bad shape. Reno ate his share with relish. It was definitely better than stinkbug ass. If not much else.
When nothing remained that his spoon could catch, Reno licked his bowl. Then he scrubbed it with dirt and a handful of crackly, dry bunchgrass. As he stuffed his hobo tool and bowl in his pack, Lariat motioned him aside.
The night sky was full of stars. An orange moon hung near the western horizon. Wind quested restlessly through sere grass. Most of the light snow that had fallen earlier had melted away.
“So what do you think he’s got?” she asked.
Reno shrugged. “Dunno. Won’t let me look at it.”
“I can hear you,” Drygulch said. “Got no call talking about me in the third person like I was a…a rock or somethin’. Insultin’.”
“Well, if some damn fool hadn’t gone and stuck his hand in his pack and gotten cut to shit on broken glass, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” Lariat said.
“I was tryin’ to find out if them prion vials was okay after I landed on ’em!”
“And found out the hard way you’d busted most of them.”
“We got a few intact, Lariat,” Reno said. He hated disputes. He knew how quickly nasty could erupt. When that happened it was usually him who wound up getting the bad end of the ass-wiping stick. “Oughta be able to get something for them, if we find the right whitecoats.”
“I can do that,” she said. Then, taking Reno by the arm, she urged him a little farther outside the circle of faint firelight. And more important, out of the aggrieved Drygulch’s earshot.
“Could it mebbe be gangrene?” she asked.
“Too soon,” Reno said. “Could be blood poisoning, though.”
He glanced uneasily back at the tall man, who had slithered into his bedroll and deliberately lain down with his back to his comrades as well as the fire.
“I wonder if those prions have anything to do with his condition,” Reno said softly.
“Doesn’t much matter if the stupe won’t let us look at it,” Lariat said in a tone that suggested it didn’t much matter to her if he did. “He doesn’t wake up in the morning, we’ll know something was wrong.”
* * *
COMMOTION ROUSED RENO from a wondrous dream of soft sheets and blow jobs.
He sat up. By the vagrant red gleam of the low coals they’d kicked the fire into before bedding down, he saw Drygulch thrashing in his sleeping bag. He moaned like an animal in distress.
“Drygulch?” Reno asked tentatively.
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