Wretched Earth by James Axler Page A

“We’ll take a
detour.”
    “You could join up with us,” Jones said. “Looks like we’ll be
taking a detour ourselves. Safety in numbers and all.”
    The two bicyclists looked at each other. “Thanks,” the woman
called. “But we believe in safety in speed.”
    Without another word they pulled their goggles back down and
began pedaling for all their lean-muscled legs were worth. When they passed Ryan
and the rest they were practically flying.
    “So,” Jones said, watching them fade into the distance, “you
were telling us straight all along. Well, that’ll teach me to believe there’s
anything too strange for this triple-crazed world of ours.”

Chapter Nine
    Dust swirled in a miniature fountain by the side of the
road, mixed with hard, dry snow that had been coming down slowly since Ryan and
friends had said farewell to Jones and his crew.
    The traders had decided to head south. “Where at least it might
be warmer,” Jones had put it. “Also, if we got to take a boat to keep away from
these rotties, Gulf Coast’s closer.”
    The sound of the gunshot reached Ryan where he lay on his belly
behind a scrubby bush, peering through his Navy longeyes. His companions hid out
of sight in a fold in the flat-looking landscape.
    The man running down the road with the loose-limbed stagger of
complete desperation coupled to complete exhaustion staggered back into the
middle of the right-of-way. Thirty yards behind him was a battered pickup truck,
long since gone the color of the plains dirt itself, with a bent-pipe cage
welded over the front bumper. Its bed was full of hooting coldhearts.
    The human prey was dressed in rags and as skinny as finger
bones. He lurched into the road with his hands flopping like flippers. It was
obviously the end of the chase for him.
    The truck hit the runner. The impact flung him ten feet in the
air and forty feet down the roadway. When he landed, he rolled over several
times and lay flopping like a beached fish.
    “Ryan,” Mildred said quietly, through clenched teeth.
    The one-eyed man said nothing.
    “It’s not our fight, Millie,” J.B. said.
    The wag came right up by the flailing, screaming man. It did a
quick U-turn, putting its nose toward the ville and its tailgate toward the
victim. Men wearing green armbands spilled out of the back.
    Laughing and whooping, they tied ropes to both the man’s
ankles. The volume of their merriment went up as the volume of his shrieks did
when they jostled his evidently many broken bones, grinding the ends together in
a perfect storm of pain.
    They leaped back into the bed. The wag accelerated back toward
Sweetwater Junction, just visible as a low brown serration breaking the western
horizon. The victim bounced behind on the road like a screaming puppet.
    “Wonder which side?” Jak said.
    “Does it matter?” J.B. replied.
    “One’s as likely as the other, I reckon,” Ryan said. “It’s how
barons and sec men act.”
    “Not where you came from,” Krysty said.
    “True. Until my brother took over.”
    “But you set Front Royal right in the end.”
    He hunched a shoulder. “That bullet’s long since left the
blaster. Right now we’ve got to see to our own survival.”
    “Might that not best be served by following either set of the
travelers we parted with today?” Doc asked. “Heading north or south, giving wide
berth both to the ville of Sweetwater Junction and its woes and the hapless
swarm of the changed?”
    “That’s how I’d go, I got to admit,” J.B. said.
    “We already jawed this over,” Ryan said. “We go forward with
the plan.”
    “Getting caught in a ville civil war doesn’t seem much better
than getting caught by rotties,” Mildred told him. “Just a longer way of dying
badly. You said it’s none of our concern.”
    Ryan sighed and looked at Jak. “Eyes skinned,” he said.
    The smooth, snow-colored face wrinkled. Ryan knew Jak thought
he might as well remind him to breathe.
    Ryan slipped back to settle