Hanging Judge
Fortunately the big cat wasn’t hard to chill. A quick shot from Ryan’s Steyr Scout Tactical longblaster coupled with a blast of buckshot from J.B.’s Smith & Wesson M-4000 had knocked it right off its prey, snapping and hissing. A panga hack to the back of its neck had stilled it.
It had taken a lot of doing to make a plan and complete preparations to carry it out before the justice meted out by Judge Santee—whose fame had spread for miles around—took its speedy course. They boosted what they could from isolated farmhouses. Some things they simply walked in and purchased from the same general store where Jak had gone off by his stupe self and come to grief. At least damp brush, which served a key role in turning the wag into a giant smoke bomb, wasn’t in short supply there in the Wild, as the locals called it.
Now, as Doc and the two women went racing back up the street unscathed, J.B. allowed himself a nod at a job of work well done.
He heard a powerful commotion from the other side of all that smoke, which totally filled the rutted dirt street and rolled over the roofs of adjacent buildings.
Suddenly a knot of grim-looking men wearing the red, white and blue armbands burst out of the smoke. A couple waved handblasters. Others carried clubs. They were all shouting at the fleeing ville folk to get back where they belonged.
Still staying half hidden in the doorway, J.B. pivoted and fired a burst from his mini-Uzi from the hip. It kicked up splashes of rainwater on the packed clay soil of the street, where it had barely begun to sink in. Pink streaks appeared on the sec men’s pants legs as they shied away from the impacts.
They threw up their arms in front of their faces. J.B. knew that was reflex, if triple stupe.
He fired two more 3-round bursts into the ground at their feet. That was enough for them. They turned and sprinted back into the dense smoke.
Ryan had told him not to chill anyone unless he had to. J.B. accepted that because of the dictum of his and Ryan’s old boss and mentor, Trader, no chillin’ for the sake of chillin’, and because it made sound sense not to piss off the local sec men any more than strictly necessary.
He just hoped they didn’t come to regret passing on the opportunity to thin the herd a little.
* * *
CROUCHEDINAnarrow, stinking space between two sagging predark buildings, Ricky Morales watched Jak and Ryan ride past, east down the street and out of the ville. Residents fleeing the smoke bombs and confusion by the gallows scattered before them like quail.
Ricky moved back and held his longblaster behind his body in shadow. No point in getting spotted and ratted out to the sec men of the crazy man known as the Judge. It might seem strange to think of people disobeying the Judge’s orders to look to do the man a service. But among the many things Ricky had learned since joining Ryan Cawdor’s band and leaving his home island of Puerto Rico, high on the list was to be careful whom he trusted.
And strangers—especially strangers who might be looking to get back in the good graces of authority after disobeying in panic—weren’t high on the list of trustworthy souls.
Those thoughts flew fast through his mind by reflex—pure survival. At once his body flooded with a warm sensation of relief. His best friend, Jak, had been rescued from certain death!
A trio of sec men burst out of the smoke. One shouted, pointing after the pair of men rapidly riding away. Another threw a lever-action longblaster to his shoulder.
It was a stupe trick, Ricky thought, taking the shot, but Ryan had told him in no uncertain terms to avoid killing unless it was absolutely necessary.
Now he got a flash picture over the iron sights of his DeLisle carbine’s fat barrel. His finger squeezed the light trigger, smooth and fast. The longblaster gave a cough and the buttplate thumped against his shoulder.
The barrel jerked to the side. Ricky heard a clang of copper-shod .45-caliber bullets on a blued-steel barrel. The self-proclaimed marshal yipped a curse and dropped the blaster as if it was hot.
The others stopped in their tracks and stared at him. “What?”
“I think somebody shot my piece!”
Ricky had immediately thrown the bolt to chamber a fresh round when his first shot went downrange. The smooth Enfield action and Ricky’s long practice made it incredibly fast. He fired another bullet in front of the boots of the marshal closest to him, who had an impressive bandit mustache.
“Hey!” the third sec man shouted, pointing. “I saw something. He’s in that alley!”
The first man was staring at his longblaster as if still trying to figure out what was going on. Ricky’s shot might have bent the barrel. The other two immediately opened fire with handblasters.
Ricky ducked back into the narrow walkway as bullets sang by. A ricochet moaned by his ear.
Have I done enough? he wondered. Have I done my job? Ryan and Jak got away clean.
As Ricky hastily backpedaled, he slung the DeLisle and drew his Webley revolver.
A sec man appeared in the mouth of the passageway. Ricky shot him in the shoulder and he reeled back, yelling that he’d been hit.
Something hard hit the backs of Ricky’s lower legs. He tumbled backward over it. As he fell onto the foul-smelling, slimy dirt, the mustached sec man sidestepped with his semiauto blaster leveled.
The only thing that saved Ricky from instant death was the fact that the marshal wasn’t looking for a target on the ground. Ricky knew his reprieve wouldn’t last. He tried to get his Webley up and around in time, but there was no hope.
From just beyond where he had fallen Ricky heard two quick crashing sounds. The sec man jerked and fell. Ricky saw a dark, wet patch already appearing on the front of his tan shirt.
“What the nuke are you playing at, boy?” Ryan demanded. “You eager to find out what it’s like having dirt hit you in the eyes?”
Ricky managed to disentangle himself from the upturned wheelbarrow that had tripped him. Its wheel was missing. He scrambled to his feet.
“You told me not to chill anybody—”
“Unless it was necessary,” Ryan finished. “I’d say not getting a faceful of lead is necessary.”
“Is Jak with you?” Ricky asked as they headed toward the far end of the narrow alley.
“He rode right off into the weeds with his hands tied behind him,” Ryan said. “Forget about it. Right now we need to power out of here so we don’t wind up on the rad-blasted gallows ourselves.”
Chapter Three
“Where the nuke did you go?” Ryan demanded.
Krysty looked at Jak. The albino had stepped into the circle of yellow glow cast by their campfire in a tiny clearing in the middle of a thorn thicket tangle in the Wild as casually as if he’d just gotten back from stepping away to piss.
“Got weapons back,” Jak said. He was wearing his camouflage jacket once again. “What cooking?”
“Squirrel,” Mildred said. “What’s it look like?”
Jak shied away from the fire and the several small, skinned forms browning on spits over it.
“Squirrels not mutie?” he asked.
“Not as far as I know,” Mildred said. “I know for sure that they didn’t have two assholes each or anything like that.”
The sturdy, black, predark physician was testier than usual this night. Everyone had been on edge wondering where Jak was and whether their elaborate and risky rescue plot had been all for nothing. It didn’t help that Ryan had spent the hour since they made camp at the agreed-upon rendezvous site pacing like a tethered wolf.
Neither did it help that the night and the dense thorn-studded growth around them was alive with furtive motion, strange cries and the occasional glowing eyes.
“Answer the question,” Ryan grated.
“Did,” Jak said, sticking out his jaw mulishly. “Got stuff.”
He meant his weapons, jacket and shoes, Krysty knew. He had cached his pack in a place where the others would be sure to see the special secret marker, before haring off on his own mission and getting himself caught by the Second Chance sec men. It was waiting for him beside the others’ right now.
Ryan narrowed his eye.
“Where and how?”
Jak just glared at him.
“Jak,” Krysty said. “Why not tell him?”
“Went to rich guy’s store. Broke in, cut throat, got my stuff back. Paid bastard.”
“Nuking hell!” Ryan said. “You left us waiting here while you pursued your personal vengeance. And if he was the one who was fondling your jacket by the gallows, he’s one of the ville’s big shits. If they weren’t gunning for us before, they sure as burning nuke death are now.”
“Easy, lover,” Krysty told him. “I think we made enough of an impression on the Judge and his sec men that we need to be moving on to new territory soon, regardless.”
Ryan shook his head. “Jak, what you’ve been doing for the past few weeks, ever since Heaven Falls, has really started sticking in my craw. You always want to head out on your own. Sometimes we’ve been on the firing line because of it.”
“Restless, but look out for all,” Jak protested.
Ryan strode over to Jak and got in the smaller man’s face. “Is that what you were just doing?” he demanded, looking down on him. “Because it sure looks to me like what you were doing had nothing to do with keeping the group safe. You were making the situation worse.”
“Owed rich guy,” Jak said. “Paid.”
“Mebbe if you’d consulted with the rest of us,” J.B. offered, “we could have all come up with a plan together. We took some pretty hairy risks saving your skinny ass from that noose today.”
“Not to mention putting in a big load of work,” Mildred added.
Ricky rose to his feet.
“Guys, guys,” he said, holding up his hands. “Please, can’t we all just step back and calm down?”
Ryan and Jak turned to him and each shot out an arm tipped with an extended finger at him. “Back off,” they said as one.
Doc put a hand on Ricky’s shoulder.
“A valiant try, lad,” he said, pressing him back down. “And see? At least you have induced a moment of harmony between them.”
The two men returned to glaring at each other.
“However brief,” Doc added sadly, sitting back in his own spot.
Krysty came up behind Ryan, deliberately cracking a twig under her heel. His senses weren’t as inhumanly keen as Jak’s, but that didn’t mean they weren’t better than most people’s. As wired as he was right then, she did not want him to perceive that someone was sneaking up on him.
She placed a hand on his shoulder. He tensed as if to shake her off, but he didn’t.
“Let’s put this behind us,” she said in her most soothing voice. “Or at least put it aside. We should be safe enough here tonight, but we’re still in dangerous territory. And we’re all in this together.”
“That’s the problem,” Ryan said. “Jak’s been playing lone wolf more and more as the days go by. As if he’s too fast to run with the rest of the pack.”
He glanced back at her.
“And we’re always in dangerous territory. You know that.”
Jak’s face had been getting more and more twisted up, and his ruby eyes blazed redder the whole time Ryan spoke. Now he clenched his fists.
“You saying I not care ’bout companions?” Jak yelled.
Even Ryan took a step back at that. Mebbe not, Krysty thought, from the young albino’s spittle-spraying vehemence, as much as the fact that Jak was so violently boiling-over emotional that he’d almost spoken a complete sentence.
But Ryan wasn’t backing down. That was not what the man did.
“That’s how it looks to me,” he said, dead level. “That’s the way you’ve been acting.”
For a moment Krysty feared Jak would stab Ryan. Or try to.
Then she thought he was going to cry.
He shook himself like a wet dog. “All right.”
Jak walked over to the backpacks, picked up his and shrugged into it.
“Gone.”
He started to walk away, into the wild night.
“Wait!” Mildred jumped to her feet. “What’s gotten into you two? You can’t be serious about this.”
Jak stopped.
“I’m serious as a ground burst,” Ryan said. “I can’t speak for Jak.”
“Are you really talking about breaking up the group? Really?” Mildred pressed.
“I’m talking about doing what needs to be done to keep us alive,” Ryan said. “Same as always.”
“But—we’re, we’re like family. We look out for each other. That is what keeps us alive.”
“Jak hasn’t been looking out for us lately, in case you haven’t been paying attention. He’s been running off on his own, getting into trouble and dragging the rest of us in.”
Jak pulled his head down between his hunched shoulders, but he stayed in place as if frozen.
“He made a mistake, Ryan,” Krysty told him. “We all do that. We all have, we all will again.”
“And you don’t talk about throwing us out!” Mildred said.
Ryan scratched his cheek. “Nobody’s talking about throwing anybody out. Jak’s been separating himself from the rest of us. I reckon mebbe he thinks it’s time to make that official.”
“Well, Jak has gone off on his own in the past,” Doc said. “Of course, he did rejoin us, after tragedy claimed his family in the former New Mexico territory.”
“You’re not helping, you old coot!” Mildred flared. “Anyway, New Mexico was a state, not a territory.”
“Before that it was a territory,” Doc said mildly. “And it’s no longer either. QED.”
Krysty noticed he finished on a vague note. In the firelight his blue eyes took on an unfocused look. Krysty guessed the mention of Jak losing his family had reminded Doc of losing his own and steered his mind toward wandering off through the mists of memory once more.
Mildred was glaring at Doc. Krysty decided that if she started yelling at him the emotional escalation was liable to do more damage than the distraction would help.
“Jak,” she said, trying not to sound as urgent as she felt. “What about you?”
“Look out for companions,” he said sullenly. “Scout. Guard. Eyes. Ears.”
J.B. took off his glasses and polished them. “We’ve long since come to rely on Jak to recce, and that’s a fact,” he said. “We are pretty deep into unknown territory right now to cut him loose. And that’s without taking the muties in this giant tangle of thorns into account.”
“He’s right,” Krysty said.
“We got along ace without him before,” Ryan replied. “We can do it again.”
“Ryan, please,” Krysty begged. “Get him to stay.”
“Jak’s been intent on walking his own road for a long time. I’m done with trying to stand in his way.”
As the others tried to defuse the situation, Krysty had watched from the corner of her eye as Jak had lowered his head farther. Now he gave his head a quick shake and straightened.
“Fine,” he said, still not looking back. “Want gone. Going.”
He walked out of the yellow circle of the firelight and into the thorny embrace of the Wild.
With her heart sunk to the bottom of her stomach, Krysty stood staring at the place where he had disappeared.
No one spoke.
“Nuestra Señora!” Ricky yelped. “The squirrels! They’re burned!” He grabbed both spits and waved the blackened carcasses in the air, trailing streamers of smoke.
Everyone had forgotten that their dinners were still cooking in the flames, even the vigilant and ever-practical J.B. To Krysty that underlined the seriousness of what had just happened.
“Burned or not,” Ryan said, “they’re still chow. And I’m hungry.”
J.B. settled his round specs back in front of his eyes.
“Me, too,” he added. “But I can’t say I feel easy staying here.”
“I agree,” Doc said. Jak’s departure had apparently snapped him back to the here and now. “Our enemies’ ire has greatly grown. Or will, as soon as the merchant’s death is discovered. We took a risk by tarrying here. Now that risk has been redoubled.”
Looking glum, Mildred wrestled down one of Ricky’s arms and pulled off a charred squirrel corpse with a handkerchief wrapped around her hand to protect her from the heat.
“So we’re going to take off into a trackless tangle of briars, that’s chock full of muties, in the dark,” she said. “Without our scout.”
Tension and grief had wound Krysty’s hair into a cap of tight curls. She moved alongside Ryan, seeing his features harden.
For a moment he frowned, and his blue eye blazed with anger. Then the fire faded.
“No,” he said. “That’d be stupe. We wait for daybreak. It’s likely the Second Chance sec men will, too. If not, sooner or later everybody winds up staring at the stars.”
“I’d prefer later,” Mildred stated, crunching on a mouthful of squirrel.
Krysty slid her arm around Ryan’s and laid her head against his shoulder.
It was all she could do.
Chapter Four
“It’s anarchy!” the red-bearded man exclaimed, his high-pitched voice quivering with outrage. “Total anarchy loosed on the land!”
“Yes, yes, Mr. Myers,” Judge Santee said dismissively. “Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. And so on. Nonsense! It is my sworn mission in life to hold the center—and to extend the circle of blessed order ever outward, until these American states stand united once again! Isn’t that so, Chief Marshal Sevier?”
Cutter Dan nodded. He was already pissed off way beyond nuke red by the previous day’s events. He didn’t give much of an actual shit about Sonnard Bates getting his scrawny throat slit by random Deathlands scum. But coming on top of the fact that he had lost a prisoner straight off the gallows and had one of his own men wounded and another chilled, Bates’s death was a personal insult to him.
The fresh cut along the left side of his face burned like a branding iron. He had stitched it up himself the afternoon before, once it came clear the criminals had made their escape and there would be no easy capture of them. By that time, Santee had ordered him to hold off starting pursuit until the Judge himself gave permission. Cutter Dan hadn’t taken so much as a swig of Towse lightning to take the edge off the pain. He reckoned what didn’t kill him made him stronger. An ache that fierce in his head had to be making him triple strong.
Cutter Dan was not a man to let shit like that stand, even if his job as sec boss didn’t depend on it, as it surely did.
A smoky woodstove kept down the early morning chill in Santee’s office in the courthouse. It had rained during the night, and the temperature had dropped considerably. A couple of kerosene lamps cast weak light on the pale faces gathered around a desk that had as many books piled on it as the shelves on the walls did.
“We need to devote our every resource to tracking these desperados down and bringing them to justice!” Myers said.
“Have you forgotten our plans, Munktun?” asked a small, obsessively neat man with receding black hair, sunken black eyes and a thin black goatee. Cutter Dan knew the neatness hid the fact that he wasn’t particularly clean, even by the standards of the day. And the beard and hair were dyed to hide encroaching gray. “We’ve got to expand our foothold of order, which will in turn provide us the resources to sustain what we have.”
“But how can we hope to hold on to what we have if such criminals are allowed to flout the law with impunity?” Myers asked. “Much less take over new villes. And restore them to order, of course.”
“Let it go,” the small man said. “So, they made us look bad. We still have the marshals to enforce our will. The Judge’s will, that is.
“And if the marshals are all haring off into the Wild in pursuit of these phantoms? What then, Gein? Who will keep the peasan—the citizens of Second Chance in line?”
“Gentlemen,” Marley Toogood said in an oily voice. “Gentlemen. We’re all on the same side here. Let’s remember our first principles.”
“Get it while you can?” Myers asked.
“Never give a sucker an even break?” Gein suggested.
Toogood laughed. “You’re both right, my friends,” he said. “But the deeper truth—or higher, if you will—is that there are the rulers and there are the ruled. And the members of one class have everything in common with one another—and very little with those on the other side of the divide.”
Santee emitted a cracked and whistling laugh. “But both kinds still strangle when they dangle at the end of a rope! You have that in common with your wretched underlings, gentlemen! If you don’t remember that well enough, it may yet fall to me to remind you in the most vigorous possible terms.”
That shut them up. Cutter Dan grinned outright in satisfaction. It tore like talons at the stitches in his face.
Toogood’s smile got a little brittle, but then it came back strong. He was a fat, greasy bastard, but despite that he had at least a little steel in his spine. Cutter Dan reckoned that both the steel and the smarm accounted for why the Judge was willing to suffer Toogood calling himself mayor of Second Chance—when the only power in the ville that amounted to glowing night shit was Santee.
And, of course, his ever-expanding army of sec men. And their boss.
“Both sides are right,” Santee said, after judging the three wealthy villagers had twisted in the wind long enough. “Just as Mr. Toogood said. But we must keep our priorities carefully in order.
“We must and we will continue extending the reach of the rule of law, until one day it extends clear across the Deathlands. But that isn’t the work of a day, or of a year. And if want to extend the long arm of the law, we must above all make sure that its grasp remains inescapable and strong.”
He paused, as if inviting comment. Nobody went for it. They just stared at him and began to sweat visibly.
None of these three could see a single hair past their own self-interest. Santee counted on that fact, as Cutter Dan happened to know. But not one of them was a feeb, either.
The closest thing to one, perhaps, had been Bates. Cutter Dan wasn’t sure the filthy, red-eyed little taint bastard hadn’t done them all a favor by slitting Bates’s throat. The fact might even make Cutter Dan feel generous enough, when he caught up with him—and however long it took, whatever it took, he would catch him—to follow the Judge’s invariant rule that captives had to be returned alive and relatively unharmed to stand trial so that they could be properly hanged. Rather than taking his own unhurried revenge on the coldheart. After all, a lot of things could happen out there in the Wild, beyond the reach of Santee’s hell-black eyes.
Not that Cutter Dan felt comfortable crossing the Judge. He didn’t have any evidence the old bastard had a doomie gift like second sight. Then again, he didn’t have any evidence to the contrary.
“At the same time,” Santee went on, “we cannot allow our grip to slacken on the home front—either in those areas we’ve restored to order or in Second Chance itself. Therefore, I will assign my Chief Marshal to take a picked squad, not to exceed twenty men, to pursue the fugitive Jak Lauren as well as his accomplices and bring them to justice. The rest of my sec men shall concentrate on their control and pacification efforts.”
He looked to Cutter Dan.
“How long will it take you to prepare for your mission, Chief Marshal?”
“Give me two hours.”
OUTSIDE, THEDAY was still cloudy but starting to heat.
Gonna be a muggy bastard, Cutter Dan thought. He took a long step to catch up with the three men who had just left their meeting with the Judge. They were talking among themselves in low, distracted tones.
“Gentlemen,” the chief marshal said, laying a hand on each man’s shoulder. Gein and Myers jumped.
“Just a friendly reminder for you. You might think of the Judge as just a crazy old coot. You have power here too. You’re men of consequence, and Mr. Toogood, here, is even the mayor. But make no mistake. Santee is the law in Second Chance.”
The two he’d grabbed hold of had turned their heads to look back at him. Myers’s face was pale behind his beard, and his eyes were wide in fear. Gein was scowling and looked as if he had been on the point of lighting into Cutter Dan for having the nerve to lay a hand on him. Until the sec boss’s little reminder let the air out of him.