Wretched Earth. James Axler

      Prologue

      The four of them stood in the darkened vanadium-steel room in the guts of the shattered redoubt: a tall rangy man in a tattered greatcoat; a well-built woman whose hair showed auburn highlights in the backsplash from their lamps off gleaming metal walls; a youth with a mane of long black hair hanging past his shoulders; another youth only a bit older, wearing a patched bomber jacket and glasses.

      The woman played the bluish gleam of her solar-charging flash on the walls of what he took to be a hexagonal chamber. To the kid with glasses the walls looked like glass. What feeble illumination the quartet was able to muster wasn’t enough to let his weak eyes see anything beyond the glass.

      “Shit,” the tall man said. “Nothing in this place. No food, no ammo, no meds. It’s been looted out. I feel like smashing those fancy windows.”

      “What good’ll that do?” the woman asked.

      The tall man shrugged. “Make me feel better.”

      “You can’t,” the youth said.

      The others looked at him, their eyes glinting faintly. He quailed a little under the pressure of their gaze. His own light, a dingy yellow at best, faded to thirsty-man-piss color as he momentarily forgot to keep pumping the little flywheel generator with the palm of his hand, which ached from the constant squeezing.

      The tall man raised a fist as if to backhand him.

      “Step back, Drygulch. He may know something,” the woman said.

      “Yeah,” the tall man said, sneering. “He knows a lot of crap. It’s all he’s good for.”

      The youth in the glasses actually rallied at that. He did know stuff. He was endlessly curious, always seeking to learn more. And he had a memory like a miser’s fist.

      “Let him talk,” the woman said. She wore a homemade leather jacket, the collar of which was lined with silver wolf hide. A belt held up her khaki trousers and the flapped holster for her remade .45 handblaster. “He does know stuff.”

      “Whatever you say, Lariat,” Drygulch agreed, scratching at his cap of hair, which looked like short, tight curls of silver-frosted copper wire. “What’s on your mind, Hamster?”

      “It’s Reno,” he insisted. He didn’t even know how the older man had gotten hold of his hated childhood nickname.

      “Whatever,” Drygulch said. He wasn’t a bad type. He didn’t dislike Reno so much as he liked poking at him.

      Reno swelled inside with the warmth that came from Lariat’s acknowledgment of his value to them. To her. He held on desperately to the hope that someday the auburn-haired adventuress would realize his real worth, and return the fiercely burning love he harbored for her.

      “That’s some kind of armored glass,” he said. “Your wrecking bar’d just bounce off. So would bullets, so forget all about shooting at the walls.”

      Drygulch’s badlands face crumpled even more than it had to start with. But he lowered the revolver in his right hand. His left held up a kerosene lantern whose smoke filled the room with an oily smell.

      “This is a triple-bust,” the tall man growled. “We’re wastin’ our time.”

      “No, my friends,” said the young man who was the party’s fourth member. He wore a long, plaid flannel shirt over holey jeans. The soles of his ancient, pointy-toed cowboy boots were held on by thin pieces of leather, sewed around when wet and allowed to tighten into place as they dried. He carried a well-worn M-1 carbine. “There is treasure down here, I tell you. I have seen it with my own eyes.”

      “Then why didn’t you lead us right to it without dicking around?” Drygulch asked.

      The black-haired kid’s name was Johnny Hueco. He wasn’t one of them. He was a local who’d fast-talked the trio into hiring him to guide them into the busted-open redoubt, where he claimed he knew where to lay hands on a baron’s ransom in prime scavvie.

      “Because we wanted to make sure nothing was going to jump on our backs when we walked all fat, dumb and happy past doors without checking what was behind ’em,” Lariat said. “Also because we wanted to make sure we didn’t miss anything worth hauling out of here. So step back off the trigger, Drygulch.”

      “We got to hurry,” Johnny Hueco said, shifting his weight uneasily from foot to foot. “Things come out at night. Or in.”

      That was why the bunch he’d been with when they’d stumbled onto this place, in what once was western Kansas and was now triple hard core Deathlands, hadn’t stripped the redoubt of its fabulous treasure. So he said. Something had jumped them in the dark. Only Johnny got out alive, and only because he was closest to the door.

      And because whatever it was had been too busy eating his friends, his new companions reckoned. Not that they held it against him. Loyalty was as good as jack or ammo in the Deathlands. Because it was so rare.

      When muties or monsters attacked, sometimes all you could do was bug out, and stickies take the slow. Like jack or ammo or white lightning, loyalty could run out.

      “Lead on, then,” Lariat said.

      Johnny led them back out into the broad main corridor. Their footsteps chased each other up and down the bare metal walls like small frightened creatures.

      “Shouldn’t there be some kind of padding on the floors?” Reno asked. Their boot soles crunched on drifted dirt leavened with some kind of coarse material that didn’t seem quite like rock.

      “Rats ate it,” Johnny said. “Hate rats.”

      “I dunno,” Drygulch said. “Roast ’em just right, they can be mighty tasty. If they ain’t been eatin’ too much fresh shit or old chills.”

      Reno licked his lips, suddenly remembering how ravenous he was. He hadn’t eaten since they broke camp in the watery, greenish-orange light of dawn.

      It wasn’t just his wits and his packrat memory that had sustained him through a brutal childhood. There were the rats, too. Where people were, rats thrived. To the perpetually starving Hamster, the ones that had been feasting off shit and dead people tasted just fine.

      “Here, what’s this?” Lariat said. She strode up beside Johnny.

      They stopped. Lariat shone her flashlight at the wall, where a large white sign with red lettering had been bolted: Danger—Restricted Area—Authorized Laboratory Personnel Only.

      Drygulch read the sign slowly. “Okay, what’s that mean?”

      “It means we’re not supposed to be here,” Johnny said.

      “I know that, ass face. I’m not stupe. I mean, what’s it mean here?”

      “It means there’s valuable stuff inside,” Lariat said.

      “What if there’s something living in there?” Reno asked, hustling to catch up. He didn’t think his friends would cut him out on any ace scavvie they found. He just didn’t like to leave too much to chance.

      It was cold in here—as above, so below. Topside, the plains were dusted with light dry snow that eddied in the wind. Despite that, Reno’s skin prickled as if sunburned.

      He hoped it wasn’t caused by rads from fallout from the old ground-burst