Читать книгу Wretched Earth - James Axler - Страница 10

Chapter Two

The burly wag driver, who turned out to have a rat’s-nest beard to go along with the hair, did a little stutter step to kick the sitting Mildred. She gave him a hard heel thrust in the nuts. He sat down not far away from her, bent over and clutching himself.

Mildred jumped up. The whole rowdy group converged on her, the little dude with the crushed glasses forgotten.

Suddenly Krysty stood shoulder-to-shoulder with her friend. Her prehensile hair swished around her shoulders, betraying her agitation. It also betrayed the fact that, however beautiful she was, Krysty Wroth was a mutie. Given the sign above the gateway, not to mention the temper of the mob closing in on them, Mildred hoped onlookers would think it was just the breeze stirring her scarlet locks.

“Wait!” Krysty said, holding up her hands. “What’s all this about?”

“Thanks, Krysty,” Mildred said from the corner of her mouth. “But you probably should have stood clear.”

Krysty just smiled at her. That wasn’t the way of any of them, to stand by and watch a friend get stomped. Mildred felt sick at what she might have gotten her friend into.

A wag driver with a Mohawk like a dead squirrel atop his head backhanded Krysty. “Clear out, bitch, or you’ll get what we give her.”

The force of the blow snapped Krysty’s head around. She came back with an overhand right that flattened the man’s long nose against his face with a crunch of breaking bone and cartilage, and blood squirting out each nostril. His eyes rolled up in his skull and he folded to the yard.

With a vicious collective snarl, the man pack closed in around the two embattled women.

Hard arms enveloped Krysty from behind. Hot breath washed down her neck and back. It stank like an overflowed shitter.

“Gotcha!” her captor grunted triumphantly as he tried to hoist her off her feet.

He got more than he bargained for. Krysty brought her knees up and drove a double-booted kick to the jaw of a short, wide wag driver with a faded bandanna tied around his head, hurling him into the crowd. Then she slammed her head back into the face of the man who held her.

Krysty’s skull was stronger than his jaw was. She felt something crunch at the impact, and he squalled and let her go. She gripped her hands together and turned into him fast, driving the point of her elbow into the pit of his stomach. The air burst out of him.

As he jackknifed, Krysty was already responding to the men rushing in on her. She whipped herself upright, bringing her elbow under the chin of one of them. His jaws clacked together, then he screamed, revealing red teeth that had bitten deeply into his tongue.

She caught a glimpse of Mildred. Surrounded, the stocky black woman had turned into a whirling dervish of fists, boots and elbows. She was peaceful by nature but could fight when she had to. And years of Deathlands living had taught her to hold nothing back. She was giving her attackers all they wanted and a double load more.

Krysty didn’t regret stepping in to help Mildred. The woman was too softhearted and shouldn’t have intervened. Krysty understood intellectually that Ryan was right about the need to keep out of fights that weren’t theirs, no matter how her own compassionate nature rebelled. But there were times when bad behavior had to be resisted.

Whatever the cost.

Her arms were grabbed from both sides. She sagged toward the closer assailant, who had caught her right arm. Cocking her knee, she turned and fired her left leg back in a powerful kick that caught the man who held her other arm between navel and crotch. It knocked his legs out from under him, and he slammed into the merciless ground face-first.

Krysty swung back around, driving her left knee toward the groin of the man who still held her arm. He twisted his own hips. And her knee drove hard into the big muscle of his thigh. It had to have hurt like rad fire, but he grinned in triumph that she’d missed pulping his balls, and made to grab her with his other hand.

She got her foot down, turned back and, grounding her powerful legs, pistoned a blow against his ribs. Bone cracked like a pistol shot. He gasped and sagged.

Another man was already closing in from behind. Krysty snapped her left leg straight back, then whipped it up and around. Her heel thwacked the new attacker’s left cheek and spun him away.

There were too many of them; she and Mildred could never win. But Krysty put that knowledge from her mind and gave herself totally over to fighting.

* * *

A TALL MAN IN A JACKET with tarnished silver studs and frayed gray patches spun toward Ryan, and away from an ill-considered attack on Krysty, which had earned him a wheel kick in the cheek.

He almost stumbled into Ryan. “I’m gonna teach that bitch,” he said. “Get my back!”

He wheeled to charge the flailing, fighting redhead. Recalling a lesson from Trader, back in the day, Ryan folded his right hand into what the cagey old man had called a “phoenix-eye fist,” with the forefinger knuckle protruding, braced by the thumb. It wasn’t a shot Ryan had had many opportunities to make. He was interested to see how it would pan out.

It panned out ace. Grabbing the wag driver’s shoulder, Ryan dug a brutal uppercut into the man’s right kidney, putting plenty of hip twist and leg drive into the short, sweet, savage stroke. The guy squeaked like a stepped-on deer mouse and slumped to the ground. There he curled up into a knot of pain and lay mewling and drooling into the hardscrabble dirt.

“What seems to be the problem here?” Ryan said, raising his voice.

Nobody paid any attention. Instead, peristaltic waves of mob closed in and over the two women. Setting his jaw, Ryan prepared to wade in.

A colossal boom roared out behind him, and a garish yellow-white flash lit the whole courtyard.

Everybody froze, then pale, surprised faces turned in Ryan’s direction.

But they weren’t gazing at him. He looked around to see Doc standing tall in his frock coat, grinning hugely. Bluish smoke trailed from the shotgun tube fixed beneath the barrel of his enormous LeMat wheel gun.

“Now that I have your attention, boys,” Doc called in a surprisingly hearty voice, “I yield the floor to Ryan Cawdor.”

To Ryan’s left, Jak stood with his .357 Magnum Colt Python revolver aimed at the mob. J.B. had checked his Smith & Wesson M-4000 shotgun at the gaudy door, as Omar’s rules required. But he’d drawn the mini-Uzi from beneath his leather jacket, and held it leveled from his hip.

Several wag drivers yipped in alarm and danced as hot buckshot rained down on them. Doc’s shotgun had enough punch to take off a man’s face or chop up his guts at arm’s length. But fired straight up it didn’t throw the double-0 balls high enough to do more than give a whack when gravity inevitably brought them back down.

Ryan didn’t draw his own SIG-Sauer handblaster. He didn’t want to escalate the situation.

All the wag drivers started talking at once. The LeMat’s volcanic roar had knocked the fight out of them. Now they were all tripping over one another to explain how they were just having themselves some fun with this skinny kid for talking crazy, and then these bitches came and jumped them… .

Krysty moved forward to help Mildred, who in turn was helping the skinny little dude holding a well-crushed pair of specs in one hand. He was the worse for wear.

The wag drivers paid no attention to them. They seemed to have had a bellyful of the two wild women.

“All right,” Ryan snapped. “The fun’s over. Nobody’s chilled yet.”

He swept the crowd with his lone ice-blue eye. “What do you say we keep it that way?”

The wag drivers looked at one another. He could read their thoughts plainly on their faces and in the set of their shoulders, without need of any mutie mind powers, which he surely didn’t possess. This wasn’t fun anymore. He suspected for those who’d come to grips with Mildred and Krysty, it had stopped being fun considerably earlier.

He frowned at Mildred. “This was your doing.”

It wasn’t a question.

Though she was bent over from the exertion and a fair amount of pummeling, she straightened and braced her shoulders. “They were beating up this poor skinny kid for no reason. Kicking him around like a soccer ball.”

Ryan shrugged. “Not our business. Minding other people’s is a good way to wind up staring at the sky.”

“Fine. You didn’t have to back me up, anyway.”

“Yes, we did, Millie,” J.B. said mildly. He still had his Uzi out, in case some of the mag drivers got frisky again. “You know we’ve got to back each other’s plays. That’s why Ryan doesn’t want you jumping into every swollen river to save every stranded calf. You know what I mean.”

“Why, John,” the stocky woman said, her deep brown eyes lighting, “that’s almost poetic!”

Ryan raised a brow and looked at Krysty, who shook back her scarlet hair.

“She did what she thought was right, Ryan. So did I.”

He felt a hand pat his shoulder, and glanced back to see Doc’s prematurely aged face hanging over him.

“Give it over, Ryan,” the old man said. “This is a fight you can only lose. Especially if you win.”

Ryan was about to retort that the statement made no sense, then it hit him that it made total sense.

“All right,” he said. “That bullet’s out of the muzzle of the blaster, anyway. Say goodbye to your stray and let’s head back inside. No point freezing our asses off in this wind when the stove’s hot inside.”

“Can’t he come with us?” Mildred asked.

The kid hung back. His narrow face was puffy and turning color. “Truth is,” he said, “I’m not even supposed to be here. Me and my friends were attacked. Lost everything.”

“That why those slaggers were thundering on you?” J.B. asked.

The kid shook his head. He had a shock of dark hair like an untended garden, and prominent ears. “No. I was trying to warn them.”

“Warn?” Jak asked. “What about?”

The youth shook his head again. “You’ll just start hitting me, too. And anyway, I better go.”

“I say we bring him inside with us,” Mildred said. “I’ll pay for him out of my share of what we got for the job.”

Ryan frowned. As was standard practice, Boss Plunkett had given them half their pay in advance. Nobody was going to do bodyguard work on credit; nobody was going to hire guards and give them all their jack before they’d guarded their share of body. People who did either weren’t even triple-stupe, they were chills. And it was handsome pay. Handsome enough that Ryan and the others came close to taking for granted Plunkett would try to stiff them at trail’s end. But they’d burn that bridge after they crossed it.

It wouldn’t be the first time a boss had tried to stiff them. But if Ryan had anything to say about it, it’d be the last time this particular one tried.

“Millie, you—”

“Don’t ‘Millie’ me, John! It’s my share, and I can do with it what I choose!”

“Three days ago we were almost down to boiling the straps of our packs for sweat soup!”

“That’s about where I find myself now,” the newcomer said. “Sorry. I’m Reno.”

“Yeah,” Ryan said.

“I will kick in,” Doc said. “We are flush for the moment. I for one am willing to pay for the entertainment of a good tale, if nothing else.”

“Pay too,” Jak said. “Want warning.”

“Shouldn’t he be happy enough to take the fact we saved his life as payment?”

“He’s in a hard place,” Mildred said. “We’ve been there ourselves. Recently.”

“I know,” Ryan said. “That’s why we’re working for that fat bastard Plunkett, in case you forgot.”

“Anyway,” she went on, “hasn’t the notion ever occurred to you that if you help a stranger down on his luck, someday when you’re down on your luck a stranger might help you?”

Ryan stared at her. So did J.B. and Jak.

“Drawing a blank here,” the Armorer said after a moment.

“That a stranger might help another out of kindness, or even deferred self-interest,” Doc said gently to the black woman, “is a concept alien to our friends’ experience.”

As a usual thing, the two got along like cats and dogs. But there were times when refugees from their own times stuck together against their thoroughly modern comrades.

“It’s a good practice, Ryan,” Krysty said, “even if it’s hard for you to see.”

“Oh, for shit’s sake,” Ryan said, throwing his hands up in the air. “When did we become a rolling charity? Fuck it. Bring the bastard.”

He turned—and ran into a barrier: yet another skinny girl, this one on the cusp of puberty, in a long shapeless frock, with red pigtails and an excess of freckles.

“My daddy sent me out,” Loretta said. “Ain’t no shooting allowed in the caravanserai.”

“Tell your daddy it was an accident,” Ryan said. “We’re…sorry.”

The girl bobbed her pigtails and vanished inside.

Krysty patted Ryan’s shoulder. “There, now,” she said, smiling. “That didn’t hurt, did it?”

Ryan rubbed his bristly jaw. “Kinda.”

Another figure moved to intercept them by the door. “Cthulhu saves,” said a roly-poly man with a green hankie tied around his head, extending a woodblock leaflet.

“Best step back, son,” J.B. told him in a not unfriendly way. “He’s not on hand to save you.”