Wretched Earth by James Axler Page B

hellish light showed through the boards of the ceiling over
the barroom. Sparks fell like glowing rain. A bald man stumbled toward Ryan,
extending a clawed hand from which the little finger had been bitten. The wound
had stopped bleeding. Ryan shot him in the face almost casually, so horribly
fascinated was he by what was happening on the stairs.
    He felt no strong urge to try to rescue his employer. The big
man was a sure chill anyway, with that neck wound. Not to mention that Reno’s
crazy talk about victims rising again as one of the changed if the rotties
chilled them was looking pretty plausible here.
    With a sound like a melon being dropped, Boss Plunkett’s head
split open. Amazingly, his naked limbs continued to twitch, and he moaned in
dismay. Tina clawed briefly, then peeled back a section of skull with scalp
attached.
    With a superhuman effort the huge man reared to his knees,
reaching a pudgy arm toward Ryan.
    “Help me,” he mouthed.
    Then he stiffened and his eyes rolled up in his beet-red face.
Tina had plunged a long-nailed hand into his opened cranium and scooped up a
juicy handful from his until-then-living brain. She mashed it against her
wide-open mouth, getting as much blood and dough-colored brains on her face as
inside.
    Plunkett plopped forward, unmoving.
    Chewing, Tina looked at Ryan. Her eyes were as white as milky
marbles, yet had a terrifying intensity. Without thinking, he raised his
SIG-Sauer, swiftly braced and flash-aimed, and shot her through the
forehead.
    She slumped. Her partner stayed astride Plunkett’s pale fat
back and began to greedily stuff fistfuls of brains into her mouth.
    With a roar, the ceiling caved in over the bar.
    “Time to go,” Ryan said. He turned and dashed back into the
night’s cold but welcoming embrace.

Chapter Five
    The caravanserai yard was a hell full of the struggling
damned. Bodies thrashed. The doomed screamed as rotties bit great chunks out of
living human flesh. Across the yard Ryan saw the former Boss Plunkett’s big RV
burning merrily. He made for it at a run, as if it were a beacon.
    He shot a woman covered in human blood when she lunged from his
right to bite him. A skinny adolescent boy, not Locke or anyone Ryan had seen
before, blocked his path. He drew his panga and hacked at the youth’s head. The
kid fell. Whether he stayed down or not Ryan never knew. He wasn’t about to hang
around to watch.
    He reached his friends. J.B. was holding a tall man’s head and
shoulders against the side of the burning wag, where yellow flames enveloped
them. The man continued to paw at the Armorer as if nothing unusual was
happening, his sleeves yellow wings of flame.
    Ryan shot the man through the head. He collapsed into a
flaming, stinking heap as J.B. leaped clear.
    “Quit fucking around, J.B.,” Ryan said. “We got to shake off
the dust of this place.”
    Krysty had her back to a shed, fending off an attacker with a
trenching shovel from a wag’s emergency kit. Ryan hacked the rottie across the
back of the neck. He folded.
    Doc stuck the tip of his rapier through the eyeball of an
approaching rottie. Behind him, Mildred held a baseball bat cocked should anyone
get past him. Jak danced around with a big trench knife in his hand, easily
evading swipes from a bearlike foe and awaiting an opening to dart past and stab
him in the back of the head.
    “We need a ride out, and fast,” Ryan said.
    “Easier said than done, Ryan,” J.B. answered. “Seeing as how
our wags are either in flames or blocked in.”
    Krysty ran to Ryan and gave him a quick hug. She had been
rooting around inside the wag with the shot-up engine block. The ax handle she
held was stained with blood at the tip. He kissed her quickly on the cheek, then
pulled free to point back across the yard.
    “There’s our ride,” he said. “Right there.”
    “That’s those damn Cthulhu cultists’ bus,” Mildred said. “They
might have something to say about our hitching a