Wretched Earth by James Axler Page A

hat.
    “That stupe in the tower’s gonna chill us before the rotties
do,” he said.
    He heard the bark of a .38 from his left. The muzzle-flare from
the tower was cut off. J.B. looked to where the single gunshot had come
from.
    Mildred knelt on the dirt, her left elbow braced on one knee,
her left hand cradling her handblaster.
    “You chill the dude, Millie?” he called.
    She shook her head. “Like you said, J.B. He was a bigger
danger.”
    “Wags fucked,” Jak said, coming out of the shed behind J.B.
“Tundra chilled. Other—”
    He shook his white-maned head in irritation. The burning cargo
wag blocked the third vehicle in the shed. It blazed too vigorously for anyone
to try to push the big vehicle clear.
    Krysty sat up beside J.B. She suddenly whipped her upper body
left and shot twice with her snub-nosed Smith & Wesson. Right toward
Mildred.
    Spinning around, J.B. saw a man with a black pit where one eye
should be reel back from where he’d been about to blindside the sturdy woman.
Apparently Krysty had hit him in the body, not the head, and he lunged for
Mildred.
    “Shit!” J.B. yelped. He rolled fast right, trying to clear his
own scattergun for a shot at the rottie. It’d be dangerous with Mildred in the
way. But if it was really true that if you got bitten by one of these hoodoos,
it turned you into one of them…
    There weren’t many things in this world that J. B. Dix shied
away from. He’d seen his share of scary shit and then some. But he couldn’t
stand to think of that happening to Mildred. To any of his friends.
    But he wouldn’t make it in time. Seconds slowed as he watched
the rottie close in on Mildred, who was lining up a shot on another target and
still unaware of her danger. He shouted a warning he knew would come too
late.
    With a crunch a thin steel blade poked through the man’s head
from right temple to left. The rottie went to his knees.
    “Touché,” Doc cried. He put a boot to the side of the
slack-skinned, veined face and pushed. The creature flopped to its side and lay
unmoving.
    J.B. scrambled to his feet. A man with an arm swinging from his
elbow like a busted gate loomed in front of him, a vomitous reek of rotting
flesh.
    Whipping up the M-4000, J.B. jabbed the steel-shod butt into
the creature’s face. It lurched back two steps, then its head exploded as J.B.
reversed the scattergun and fired, eight inches from the bridge of its nose.
    “You guys hold them off,” Krysty shouted, stuffing a
speed-loader into her snub-nosed handblaster. It held only five shots, a
triple-rough disadvantage in a fight like this. “Mildred, come help me get the
packs.”
    “What do you plan?” Doc asked. He fended off a short-haired
changed woman with his rapier and stabbed her deftly through the eye.
    “We’ve got to get out of here, fast!” Krysty said. “That’s my
plan!”
    She and Mildred ducked into the shed.
    * * *
    A N EYE BLINK before his boss’s
nude, bleeding bulk crashed down on him, Loomis took off like a sprinter, almost
knocking down Ryan in his mad desire to get out the door.
    Two naked women came down the stairway. By their hair Ryan
guessed they were the boss’s “secretaries,” Tina and Angela. Their faces were
hard to recognize, gray and distorted with some unimaginable passion behind
liberal smears of gore. Bottle-blonde Angela’s belly had been cut or ripped
open. Purple lengths of intestine trailed out the red, gaping cavity. They were
short, their ends ragged, as if the loops had been bitten through.
    Black hair flying, Tina flung herself on her boss’s wide, hairy
white back. He thrashed feebly. It amazed Ryan he could move at all, at the rate
he was bleeding out. Tina grabbed his head and, despite the thickness of his
bull-like neck, began to bang his head against a stout square stair post.
Angela, not inconvenienced in the least by her missing viscera, joined right in,
gnawing her boss’s head as her partner rhythmically pounded it into the
wood.
    A