Hanging Judge

SCARRED FOR EXISTENCE

In the Deathlands, the game of survival offers no reprieve. There’s nothing to win in nuke-blasted America except the chance to fight another day. Still, Ryan Cawdor and his fellow travelers hope for sanctuary…somewhere. Until they find it, they face each dawn as if it’s their last. Because it just might be.

DEVIL’S COURT

Justice is a damning word in what used to be called Oklahoma, thanks to a sadistic baron known as the Hanging Judge. Crazy, powerful and backed by a despotic sec crew, the judge drops innocents from the gallows at will. When Jak narrowly escapes wearing his own rope as a necktie, a rift among the companions sends them deep into the mutie-infested wilderness outside the ville. Separated and hurting, time is running out for the survivors to realize they’re stronger together than they ever could be alone—before a ruthless madman brings them to the end of their rope.

“We heard how you did the dirty on us.”

“Yeah,” Jeff added. “How you snuck around and tricked us into whaling on each other. You taints sure stick together. You must have your own mutie code like us wag dudes have our bro code. High five, Ferd!”

“High five, Jeff! And the bro code says that now we have to make you pay. We’re gonna stomp you good, and bust your filthy mutie bones.”

Belatedly Jak made a move for the knuckle-duster hilt of his trench knife. He realized now that he’d drunk himself to the edge of oblivion. Under other circumstances, he’d already have sliced open Jeff’s paunch, dropped his intestines onto the tops of his mud-splattered boots.

Instead his hand seemed to move, not like a striking sidewinder, but as if he were trying to punch somebody underwater.

But the fist that filled his vision first with a black moon and then bright exploding stars moved like nuking lightning.

Hanging Judge

James Axler

I am an American; free born and free bred, where I acknowledge no man as my superior, except for his own worth, or as my inferior, except for his own demerit.

—Theodore Roosevelt,

1858–1919

THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance.

There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs in the balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness.

But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to nature’s heart despite its ruination.

Ryan Cawdor: The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities.

Krysty Wroth: Harmony ville’s own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the strength of tempered steel. Her premonitions and Gaia powers have been fostered by her Mother Sonja.

J. B. Dix, the Armorer: Weapons master and Ryan’s close ally, he, too, honed his skills traversing the Deathlands with the legendary Trader.

Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn from his family and a gentler life in 1896, Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn’t have imagined.

Dr. Mildred Wyeth: Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is not much lighter. Restored from predark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.

Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend.

Dean Cawdor: Ryan’s young son by Sharona accepts the only world he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.

In a world where all was lost, they are humanity’s last hope.…

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Title Page

Quote

THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Copyright

Chapter One

“You, Jak Lauren, have been found guilty of the following crimes,” the fat man on the scaffold intoned.

Marley Toogood wasn’t talking to Jak, who stood on the trapdoor with the rough rope of the noose, still untightened, chafing his bare skin where it hung around his neck. The fat man stood to one side up at the front, addressing the crowd of spectators looking uncomfortable and unhappy in the periodic drizzle from low-hanging, leaden clouds. Jak’s white hair clung to his head and neck, and the soaked-through shoulders of his T-shirt,

“Pillage, arson, murder, terrorism, treason, disorderly conduct...”

“Ooh, look at that one,” muttered a woman in the front row, whose shapeless hat mirrored her shape in a rain-soaked dress made out of sacks. “He’s so dangerous looking!”

“I don’t know,” the woman next to her whispered back. “I think he’s good looking. For a mutie, I mean.”

The woman was much the same as her companion, only a bit taller and wider. She smelled more strongly of onions, too.

Jak growled at her. Both women flinched gratifyingly. So did most of the other townspeople in the front row.

“...destruction of property belonging to the United States of America, and being a mutie.” The fat man lowered the piece of paper from which he had been reading, now soaked almost to transparency, with a look of satisfaction smeared across his broad, wet, bearded face.

“Not mutie!” Jak snapped.

“And for speaking disrespectfully to authority,” the fat man added.

He crumpled his paper and stuffed it in a pocket of his patched suit coat. It had been made for a man much smaller than he was, and the right sleeve was starting to come loose at the seams.

Jak didn’t know nuke about tailoring, but his ruby-red eyes didn’t miss much.

The fat man cleared his throat. Then, waving his stubby arms, he launched into a speech about the importance of the public watching justice in action and restoring the nation through displaying the awful majesty of the state.

Jak tuned him out. The noose was around his neck. His wrists were bound behind him with rough rope. It had been tied skillfully enough that all he got for trying to work his wrists loose was bloody, abraded skin. The U.S. Marshals, as the sec men of the ville named Second Chance liked to style themselves, clearly got lots of practice tying people up.

But it was not in Jak’s nature to just give up. His every sense was wound tight to respond to the least clue—something, anything—that might lead to a possibility of escape.

Even if he failed, he would be content if he managed to take some of the bastards with him. That would be ace, too.

“What the glowing nukeshit is wrong with Toogood?” grumbled one of the men seated in the bleachers behind the scaffold and in front of the solid-built stone courthouse at the ville’s center. “Why does he always insist on lowering himself like this? And why does he insist on going on so rad-blasted long?”

There were three of them together back there, Jak knew, plus one empty chair waiting for the fat rich bastard when the speechifying ended and the hanging began. The four were the ville’s leading citizens, main backers of the man who was the baron of Second Chance in everything but name.

“Wrap it up, Marley,” a second man called. “Why do these events have to be made mandatory, anyway? It costs us all plenty in lost time from the laborers. At the very least, couldn’t we cut the schedule back to once or mebbe twice a week, or better, just one big hanging party?”

“What’s the matter, Mr. Myers?” a voice sounding like a crow’s called from the stands. It came from Jak’s left side. “You’d want to cheat the public of the moral lessons provided by regular public executions? With the country in its deepest time of crisis? You walk mighty close to sedition, there. But, by all means, keep talking—if you’d like to join this scapegrace with a noose around your neck!”

And he burst out laughing like a crazy man, which he was.

Only a crazy man would think of calling a sad little ville in the middle of a huge thicket of mutant thorn-bushes that was swarming with monsters “the restored United States,” even if he had managed to conquer a couple of neighboring villes.

Judge Phineas Santee ruled his vest-pocket Deathlands empire with an iron fist. And the iron fists of Chief Marshal Cutter Dan Sevier, the tall sec boss whom Jak knew stood now at the Judge’s shoulder—and the fists, truncheons and blasters of Cutter Dan’s marshals.

The rich citizens shut up. Jak glanced over a shoulder. The one on the far right—Bates, his name was, Jak knew too well—was a skinny cuss, whose neck stuck up like a celery stalk from the sweat-and grease-stained, buttoned-up collar of his shirt. He hadn’t said anything.

Instead, he was examining Jak’s camouflage jacket, with the bits of glass and metal sewn into it. Like Jak’s weapons, his many knives and his Colt Python .357 Magnum handblaster, it had been claimed as a prize by Bates. The man had tried to cheat Jak at his trading post outside town—and then called Jak a criminal when the albino called him on it. Bates turned his head and tossed the jacket back to an employee. The man fielded it gingerly; a couple of marshals who responded to the dustup at Bates’s store had cut their hands trying to come to grips with Jak. They had grabbed the albino by the collar and had their fingers slashed by bits of razor blades.

Jak smiled at the memory. But briefly. If he got chilled here, his first regret would be not settling his score with that chicken-neck bastard.

The beefy hand of Santee’s chief executioner grabbed the back of Jak’s head and turned his face firmly forward.

“No rubbernecking, taint,” the huge man rumbled. Jak swore to himself that he would let the guts out of that big belly, even if he had to come back from the dead to do it.

As Toogood’s speech finally seemed to start winding down, the sound of hooves splashing in the layer of red water standing on the dense clay mud of Second Chance’s main street reached Jak’s ears. Accompanying that sound was the jingle of harness and the creak of a wooden wag.

He flicked his eyes to a pair of horses pulling a lightly built wag. It was driven by a man with slumped shoulders and a slouch hat turned down to let the rain fall off the brim before his face. The women were swaddled in black clothes and big hats. They wept and wailed loudly, their voices barely muffled by the huge bouquet of flowers each of them clutched to her face.

Jak knew those voices.

He kept the recognition off his face. He’d spent his life having as little to do with other people as humanly possible. But the times he had dealt with others had taught him well to keep his feelings hidden. Even the past few years with his own companions, and they were the closest thing to family he’d really ever known, except for a brief interlude in the southwest that ended in tragedy.

The crowd noticed too. Elbows nudged; heads turned.

“What’s this?” Judge Santee exclaimed. “Who are you people? What do you mean by this?”

“Stop there!” Cutter Dan barked.

The wag obligingly halted, roughly twenty yards from the crowd and the cordon of sec men that kept them cowed in place. A couple of marshals moved toward it as if to investigate.

“Spare this poor boy!” the taller of the women cried.

“Spare him his life,” the shorter, stocky woman added.

“Not a chance,” Santee called. His voice did carry, even if it more screeched than boomed, the way his sec boss’s did. “The quality of mercy is not strained. And it has no place in the administration of justice!”

Jak could tell the Judge was smiling. Santee smiled a lot. He was well equipped for it: he had a face like a skull with a wet sheet shrunk to the front of it and giant teeth that he frequently showed off in a thin-lipped smile.

“And now, let justice be delayed no longer! Mr. Beemish, execute the sentence!”

The executioner reached his bare, burly arm toward the lever that would spring the trapdoor beneath Jak’s feet and drop him until the noose brought him up short by snapping his neck. At least the Judge didn’t believe in letting victims of his unique brand of justice dangle and strangle, like some barons did.

The shorter woman stood up in the wag box. “Not a fucking chance!” she shouted.

She hurled the bouquet as far as her strong arm could. It fell amid the crowd. Before the bouquet even hit, the other woman did the same.

Like the first, her bouquet left a trail of smoke white against the gray, leaking sky.

“It’s a bomb!” Toogood shrieked in a high-pitched voice. He turned and dived off the back of the scaffold as the bouquets erupted in clouds of dense, choking smoke.

* * *

WITHAHEAVEof his shoulder, Ryan Cawdor yanked the quick-release lever J.B. Dix and his apprentice in mischief, Ricky Morales, had rigged for the horses.

As smoke boiled out of the concealed bombs, he glanced quickly back to see Krysty Wroth and Mildred Wyeth take their seats and hunker down, trying to make themselves the smallest possible targets in case any of the sec men got twitchy trigger fingers. They were both plucking at their dark, voluminous skirts, to prevent the fabric wrapping them up and interfering with their role in the next stage of the plan.

Which was escape. Ryan saw Doc Tanner pounding up the street toward them on an eye-rolling black horse. He led two more animals, saddled and ready for the women to ride out of the ville.

Ryan turned his head forward. He gathered himself and jumped onto the back of the right-hand horse that had, until a moment ago, been hitched to the front of the wag.

Screaming people rushed out of the smoke in all directions. They were completely freaked by the sudden, choking smoke. Following them were Santee’s marshals, swearing and waving clubs and blasters, trying to corral them and herd them back to watch the hangings like good little citizens.

Ryan booted his mount, which lunged forward. Its companion came along, since Ryan held a long lead rein attached to its bridle. He urged the animals straight into the impenetrable wall of smoke.

A sec man lurched in front of him. He was trying to bat the smoke away with a hand holding some kind of wheel gun. His face was bright red, and he bellowed orders for the fleeing citizens to stop.

His blue eyes got wide as he saw Ryan and two horses bearing down on him. Ryan’s mount knocked the man down to its left and kept on going.

The other horse trampled right over the screaming figure.

Ryan held his breath as he plunged into the smoke. He felt people bumping into him but no more went down.

The smoke thinned. Mildred had dropped her bomb in the middle of the crowd. Fortunately, Krysty, with her longer arm and greater strength, had gotten her loaded bouquet right on target: the base of the gallows, which was enfolded in its own thick cloud of billowing white.

None of the marshals remained at the scaffold’s base. Whether they were off trying to chase down the audience, or shielding their lord and master with their bodies, Ryan didn’t know nor care. They were out of his way.

He reined in the horses right next to the nearest leg of the gallows. Pausing only to tie the reins around the upright, he scrambled up onto the platform. The wooden planks boomed beneath his feet as he rose.

The smoke up there was thinner, it was still enough to tickle his throat and make his single eye water. But he could see through it. After a fashion.

Well enough to see a giant bare-chested executioner, choking and hacking, yank the catch for the trap beneath Jak’s feet.

Chapter Two

Ryan sprang forward, already knowing he was too late.

But Jak wasn’t standing on the now open trapdoor. Cunning as always, the skinny albino had sidestepped. The trapdoor had swung down and left him standing safe and sound.

The executioner goggled at him. Jak gave him a big grin, then he gave him a hard kick to the groin. The burly man bent over and staggered toward the back of the podium.

A series of thunderclaps boomed. Black-powder charges—big firecrackers—improvised by J.B. and Ricky had started blowing up in the wag bed. Krysty and Mildred had triggered them as they escaped with Doc.

A fresh wall of smoke rolled forward over the gallows. Through it, Ryan could just make out furious, confused motion in the viewing stand. He heard sec men yelling to one another to get the Judge to safety.

Not his concern. So long as they weren’t paying attention to him. The executioner managed to start cranking himself back upright. Ryan stepped to him and gave him a straight right that squashed his already often-busted nose and splashed his slab cheeks and brutal mouth with blood. He toppled backward through the smoke.

Turning back, Ryan drew his big panga. He kept the broad blade honed razor keen. It parted the hangman’s rope like rotted predark cloth.

Jak showed his teeth in a wolf’s grin and bobbed his head in thanks. He was never much for talking.

Ryan jerked a thumb. “Horses,” he said.

A big fist came out of a swirl of dirty-gray smoke right behind Jak and stretched him facedown on the planks. A man stepped into view. He was taller than Ryan’s six-two by about an inch, and built along the same lines: lean muscled, wide across the shoulders, narrow across the waist and hips.

He frowned when he saw Ryan. He had a big square face with prominent cheekbones. His lips were thin, his eyes merciless blue. A red, white and blue armband was tied around his big right biceps in its faded blue shirt sleeve.

“What the nuke do you think you’re doing?” he demanded. “Don’t you know who I am?”

At Ryan’s feet Jak stirred and moaned.

“You’re called Cutter Dan,” Ryan said. “You’re a major coldheart in these parts.”

The other man laughed. “Is that what the no-account trash drifters tell each other in the outlands? I’m the law, now—the Judge’s strong right hand.”

Ryan rushed him. The self-proclaimed marshal was wearing a piece, a heavy-frame Smith & Wesson revolver of some sort. But instead of drawing the blaster he whipped a big Bowie knife out of its sheath with his right hand.

He blocked Ryan’s overhand cut with the flat of his blade. For all the one-eyed man’s strength and the panga’s greater weight, the sec boss held him off.

Cutter Dan’s free hand snatched for the wrist that held the panga as the Bowie disengaged with a ringing hiss of steel on steel. Ryan jumped back, avoiding not only the grab but a gut-cutting sweep of the foot-long blade.

The sec boss sprang forward, slashing high and low, pressing Ryan hard. Though the panga’s length made up for Cutter Dan’s reach advantage, its relative heaviness meant that the Bowie was faster.

The bastard was good, Ryan realized. He feinted high, but before he could strike for Cutter Dan’s left side his opponent launched another sideways cut of his own. Ryan sucked in his gut hard and bowed his back.

The Bowie’s tip sliced a line of fire across his belly.

The smoke was clearing. He heard shouts from the grandstand as the sec men hustling off the bigwigs spotted something going down on the gallows. Time was blood, Trader used to say—and if it was, Ryan had just suffered an artery cut.

He launched the most savage attack he had in him, trying to power the taller man down as quickly as possible. Steel rang on steel as Cutter Dan parried every stroke. Ryan didn’t dare take the long, looping cuts that would take maximum advantage of the panga’s crushing power; the other man would cut him to bits. Ryan gave up little, if anything, in strength to his larger foe.

But big, bad Cutter Dan was wicked fast. He slammed the flat of his Bowie against the flat of the descending panga and steered the hefty chopper out and past to his own right.

He had opened Ryan to a chilling stroke.

Then he roared as if in surprised pain. For just half a second he froze.

It was all Ryan needed. He raised the panga and slashed Cutter Dan downward across the face.

As he followed through, he saw that Jak, still prone on the scaffold, had managed to sink his teeth into Cutter Dan’s right calf above his combat boot.

The sec boss reeled back, his face exploding in blood. With no more time to waste, Ryan kicked him off the back of the gallows. He reached down and yanked Jak to his feet by his left arm.

“Come on!” he shouted. He towed Jak to the front of the gallows where he’d hastily tied the horses. He swung down onto one. Jak sprang aboard the other. His hands were still tied behind his back, but he was a fairly skillful horseman who could steer his mount with his knees.

They rode hard eastward down the street.

* * *

SECOND CHANCESUREwas a sorrowful sort of dump, J.B. Dix thought, as frightened locals stampeded past him. He’d be glad to see the last of it.

The ville’s buildings were mostly predark framed stucco, and only desperate and haphazard measures seemed to keep them standing against a century and more of bad weather and rot. The rest were shanties slapped together out of badly cut planks and random scavvied material. The only structure in the ville that didn’t look like a hard look would blow it away was the gray stone courthouse, and the sturdy brick-and-block annex built onto it to house the population of prisoners that fed the ever-hungry gallows out front.

Lurking in a recessed doorway west along the street from the gallows, J.B. watched in satisfaction as the smoke billowed out from under the canvas that covered the wag bed. Doc was by the smoking wag on horseback, seeing to the getaway of Krysty and Mildred, who’d pulled off the diversion without a hitch. J.B.’s next job would commence directly.

The companions had had less than forty-eight hours from the time they’d watched a bruised and bloodied Jak being dragged out of a trading post on the ville’s outskirts by a quartet of burly sec men—who weren’t looking much better themselves—to whip together the makings of their diversion.

The wag had dropped into their laps as they withdrew into the nearby forest to regroup and plot in the gathering dusk. They’d hit a road where a six-legged catamount was still eating the guts out of the capacious overall-covered belly of the wag’s former occupant.