Wretched Earth. James Axler

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 lift.”

      Planting the blade of his panga under his right arm, Ryan switched magazines in his SIG. He didn’t much worry about getting gore on his coat. It wasn’t the first time and wouldn’t be the last.

      “Doesn’t mean we got to listen,” he said. “Follow me. Wedge formation.”

      Without looking to see if his companions would follow—because he knew from long experience they would—he set off at a trot for the battered, faded-green bus. It had a snowplow blade up front and chicken wire over the windows, most of which lacked glass.

      Cultists surrounded the school bus, trying to hold off the moaning horde by pushing at them with their bare hands. They were determined and vigorous enough to manage it for now.

      The concentration of warm food drew the changed.

      Ryan passed Brother Ha’ahrd, who was surrounded by a phalanx of followers, including a few former wag drivers that seemed to have undergone a last-minute conversion in the face of overwhelming, mind-frying horror. He was loudly preaching a doctrine of love and forbearance and waiting on the will of the Great Old Ones. The rotties didn’t seem to be listening. They were more interested in eating his head.

      Which meant most of the shambling freaks were focused on something other than the approach of Ryan and friends from the rear. He heard a couple shots pop off behind him, and the thwack of stout ash wood on a skull, accompanied by a grunt of effort and triumph from Mildred. Apparently a few of the freaks still tracked them.

      Ryan didn’t look back. Unless somebody screamed for his help, his job was clearing the way.

      He waded into the mob of rotties surging toward the bus door, where three cultists had linked arms to keep them out. Ryan hacked at the backs of necks and skulls as if the changed were a stand of brush he was trying to cut a trail through.

      A woman turned a blood mask to snarl at him and he shot her between the eyes. He sensed a presence on his right and whipped the butt of his SIG around to squash a changed man’s nose in a spray of dark fluid. The rottie staggered back. An eye blink later Doc’s slim rapier impaled the creature through both temples like an apple on a skewer.

      A burly rottie, obviously a changed wag driver, bare-chested and with a short Mohawk, spun to bare his teeth and spread his arms to seize the one-eyed man. Ryan hammered him between the eyes with the SIG’s butt, then shot him in the forehead as he staggered back.

      The rotties pulled down the two women and one man barring the door. As the cultists futilely screamed and thrashed, the rotties homed in on them. Ryan kicked at the flailing tangle until the way was clear, then rushed into the school bus with his friends at his heels.

      A stout woman in a robe sewn together from burlap bags barred their way. “Stop! There’s no room in here for anyone but believers!”

      Ryan was about to rebut her with a copper-jacketed 9 mm bullet where it would do the most good when Krysty grabbed his arm from behind.

      “Wait!” she yelled. “She’s right!”

      The cultist was. Ryan looked around the bus to see the seats and aisles jammed with refugees. Not all of them looked as if they belonged to Brother Ha’ahrd’s flock, or at least had started the day that way. Still, the practical puzzle was insoluble: even shooting the reticent wasn’t likely to drive these people out into the blood-smeared rottie mob.

      “Up!” he heard Jak call.

      “Say what?” Ryan turned to see Jak disappearing up the first window behind the door.

      Ryan jumped back outside. After even momentary exposure to the relative warmth inside the bus, generated by close-packed bodies and humid panting breath, the chill hit him like a slap. As did the stench of burning petrocarbons, human flesh and hair, and spilled intestines.

      “Follow Jak!” Ryan yelled. He stooped to grab one of Krysty’s calves. J.B. grabbed the other, and the two men boosted the woman high enough to scramble onto the roof after the albino youth.

      Stabbing, slashing, shooting only when utterly necessary, Ryan and Doc helped the cultists stave off the rotties while Mildred and J.B. quickly passed the packs up to Krysty and Jak atop the bus. Then Ryan and J.B. gave Mildred a boost, and Doc. Finally, Ryan stood facing out, while J.B. scaled him like a monkey and clambered up.

      The changed surged forward. Unfeeling hands reached out for Ryan, blood-spilling mouths gaping wide to consume his flesh.

      * * *

      MILDRED HAD BARELY got her bearings atop the ice-cold metal roof of the bus when another stout woman wearing the Cthulhu cult’s flowing robes and head scarf came bustling up alongside the baggage that had been strapped onto a rickety roof rack.

      “You can’t come up here!” she snapped. “This is for believers only—”

      “Gaia forgive me,” Krysty said. She kicked the stout woman off the roof.

      Mildred felt her brows climb up her forehead. Krysty looked back at her and shrugged.

      “Move your broad butt, woman!” yelled a familiar voice from behind. Mildred turned a furious glare on J.B., whose head popped up over the roof edge like a curious prairie dog’s.

      “John,” she said, “you and me are going to talk.”

      But she shifted aside to make way for him as a great cry went up from the cultists below.

      “Brother Ha’ahrd!” a voice screamed.

      Ryan looked past the rotties closing in on him to see the long-haired prophet knocked off his feet by a surge of creatures who had overwhelmed his guards. Cultists stampeded off the bus, bowling over the rotties in their path in their zeal to rescue their guru.

      Ryan had caught a break.

      Not a man to waste an opportunity, Ryan holstered his panga and handblaster, spun around and jumped as high as he could. Krysty and J.B. caught hold of his outstretched arms and hauled him up on top of the bus as if he were a child.

      “After all this trouble we could ride inside now,” Mildred said peevishly. She knelt on the heaped baggage, making fast their own packs. Doc squatted to one side, reloading his revolver as calmly as if he were out for a morning stroll outside his home in nineteenth-century Vermont.