Hanging Judge
“Assaulting an officer of the peace,” Cutter Dan said, shaking his head. “That’s a capital offense, you taint.”
“We take him back for the Judge to string up, Dan?” Hammer asked.
“Not this trip. We travel light. We gotta catch these coldheart pricks.”
A gunshot cracked. The kid’s head jerked to the side as a dark spray gushed out the temple. He fell across his father’s cooling corpse.
“Why’d you go and waste a good round on the taint, Yonas?” Cutter Dan asked the marshal with the eye patch, and a smoking Ruger Old Army .44 in his hand.
“It’s just black powder, C.D.,” Yonas said, gesturing with the handblaster.
“Bullets cost jack,” Cutter Dan said. “So do caps and even the powder. Oh, well, smokeless or smoke-pole, can’t ever get the bullet back in the blaster.”
Like their now-deceased menfolk, the two female captives showed an age split that hinted strongly they were mother and daughter. Oddly enough, the mother was the better-looking of the two, with dirtwater blond hair streaming like waterweeds down her back and big jugs in her homespun dress. She was sturdy in the hips but not any kind of sow. The daughter had a crossed eye and a hint of black mustache, though otherwise she was put together pretty decent. She was slim built but clearly hadn’t missed many more meals than her mother. Apparently being traders had worked out well for them.
Until today, anyway.
The mother had been hanging on to her daughter as if holding her up out of the mud, while they both carried on. Now with her left arm still circling her daughter’s sob-convulsed shoulders, her right hand dived inside her voluminous skirts.
It came up with a dingy-looking Davis .380 hidie handblaster, which rose to aim square at Cutter Dan’s broad chest.
But the first motion had triggered the sec boss’s bowstring-taut danger sense. Before her little pistol came to bear his Smith & Wesson 627 slid out of its holster and spoke first.
She reeled back as the .357 Magnum jacketed hollowpoint slug took her in the chest. Because she didn’t go down or drop the piece right away, he shot her twice more. Her knees finally gave way.
Shaven-headed Belusky stepped up behind the girl and caught her in a bear-hug from behind before she could collapse all over her chilled mom.
“Who’s wastin’ good ammo on road trash now, Cutter Dan?” he asked, grinning beneath his blond mustache. “And modern smokeless cartridge, too.”
“Shut your pie hole, Belusky. I already used my knife. As you would’ve noticed if all the blood hadn’t run to your two-inch hard-on.”
The sec man’s grin never flickered. “Might not be long, Danny boy,” he said. “But wide? Lord, is it wide!”
“You call yourselves lawmen!” the daughter screamed from his unfriendly embrace. “But you’re nothing but a bunch of murdering coldhearts!”
“Yeah, well,” Cutter Dan said, emptying the cylinder, with its three spent casings and three live rounds, into a palm. “We are the law hereabouts, see? So the law’s what we say it is.”
“Us and Judge Santee,” Scovul called from the back of his horse, which was so used to blasterfire it hadn’t even reacted to the shots, loud as they were. The two plugs hitched to the wag were sure tossing their heads and rolling their eyes, though. But with the handbrake set, they weren’t going anywhere. “And since he ain’t here—”
“See, the boys’n’me have suffered an emotional blow, recently,” Cutter Dan told the distraught girl. “And we’re naturally frustrated because the criminals who wronged us have so far managed to elude justice. So it’s just natural we need to let off a little steam.”
“And you had to go and chill the better-looking snatch, C.D.,” Hammer said. “Even if she was an oldie.”
Dan laughed. “Not like the bitch left me much choice there, did she? But I tell you what. Just for that you can take your place last in line.”
“But why are you doing this?” the cross-eyed girl shrieked.
“Some folks’re resisting the rightful restoration of law and order under us and Judge Santee,” Dan said, stuffing both the loose cartridges and empties in a pocket and reloading his handblaster from a speedloader. “So we gotta provide ’em object lessons in the terrors of living under all this anarchy.”
He snapped shut the cylinder of his beefy stainless-steel blaster. Then he smiled at the girl.
“Just think of it as doing your patriotic duty. Everybody’s gotta make sacrifices.”
Holstering his blaster he began unbuttoning the fly of his jeans.
“Today is yours. Get her stripped and bent over the wag box, boys. Time to dispense some justice, American style!”
* * *
“FIREBLAST,” RYANSAID.
The giant hog glared blood and death at him and gouged deep grooves in the red dirt of the stream-bank with a sharp black hoof. It stood a good four feet high at the peak of its back, which was topped with bristles like ten-penny nails. Its body had to be as long as Ryan was tall or longer. Its jowly head was the size of a beer keg, and it brought back memories of the horrible hogs they had faced a while back in Canada.
All of the companions had blasters, but Ryan’s Steyr Scout was the only one in the bunch with a lost child’s chance in a scalie nest of dropping the monster in a single shot. It was slung across his shoulder, and he knew that those huge feral porkers could move like a high-power bullet when they dug in and launched themselves.
As one this old and bad and mean surely would, the instant its little bloodshot eyes saw any of them make a move.
Ryan had just resolved to draw his SIG Sauer P-226 and try for the hog’s beady eyes anyway when he saw a stirring in the leaves of the vines near the immense creature.
A living wave of scuttling shapes boiled from the vines at the top of the cut. They closed on the hog from both sides. The centipedes climbed up one another’s segmented bodies, forming a sort of living pyramid.
Too late, the hog realized the danger. It began grunting furiously. It shook its massive head and stamped with its hooves. Its jaws and tusks shredded the many-legged creatures and sent parts and yellow ichor spraying in all directions.
“Well, now, that’s a mite unusual,” J.B. observed mildly.
The hog began to squeal like a steam-train whistle as the monster arthropods’ mandibles began to find ways through its dense fur to rip into its hide.
Ricky raised the fat barrel of his longblaster to aim at the beast, now all but completely invisible beneath the surging brown bodies. Ryan promptly grabbed it and twisted it skyward.
“But I was going to put it out of its misery!” the youth protested.
“Not this time, son,” J.B. said. “The fact it’s fighting back is mostly what’s putting those little monsters out of ours.”
For a moment the Ricky’s dark eyes blazed rebelliously, then he swallowed and nodded.
“Right,” he said hoarsely.
Ryan let go of the blaster. Ricky obediently turned it to the side, making sure the muzzle never covered his friends on the way.
“Compassion always loses to survival,” Mildred said. “Welcome to the Deathlands, kid.”
“Time to haul ass downstream,” Ryan told them. “Those bastards aren’t our only problem.”
Ricky yelped shrilly. Ryan turned to see a giant centipede that had apparently decided it was too late for the raw-pork feast and jumped down from the vines on the bank above, clutching Ricky’s right arm with its hundred talons. It sank its huge hooked jaws into the exposed skin of his forearm.
“Oh, my God!” Mildred yelled.
Ricky whipped his arm to the side. The centipede flew away, to hit the bare clay slope on its back. As it slid down, J.B. destroyed its head with a blast of buckshot from his M-4000.
Ryan didn’t say a word to his friend about the ammo expenditure. J.B. was the Armorer. He was more sensitive about all things blaster than even Ryan was. If he thought this merited a shell, it did.
Mildred sprang for the stricken youth.
“Hold still,” she said, her voice surprisingly calm despite her burst of frantic activity. “Hold your arm down by your side.”
Numbly Ricky obeyed. He continued clutching the DeLisle’s foregrip with his left hand. His olive face had already gone an unhealthy ashy-yellow.
“Going down,” he said.
His eyes rolled up in his head and he collapsed into Mildred’s arms.
Chapter Seven
Jak ran with the pronghorn, filled with exhilaration.
After several moments the yellow, antelope-like creatures left him quickly behind, bounding across the flat Deathlands plain with graceful bounds.
He slowed to a stop, laughing, as he bent, panting, with his hands on his thighs. He watched the pronghorn bounce up and down as they dwindled across the vast flat. The red soil had begun to dry and fracture in the sun after just a couple of days without rain. Tufts of green grass sprouted from the fissure lines, as did a few white-and-yellow Deathlands daisies.
He might not be able to keep up with the beasts, but it felt good to run. And run free.
He was a child of the Louisiana bayous. He had grown up wild and hard, a feared and successful freedom fighter—or terrorist, depending on which side you viewed it from—from childhood on. And this flat, arid land was no more similar to the environment he’d grown up in than the rubble-choked streets of some urban nukescape.
But he felt at home here. Or almost, anyway. He felt alive when he was on the loose in nature. He often felt confined in villes.
Being able to run and be free of responsibilities and rules lifted a tremendous weight from his shoulders. It made him feel as if he could breathe again, for the first time in a long while.
He felt a twinge, somewhere inside him. He decided he was just hungry.
Jak’s T-shirt was soaked through. He stripped it off, then laid it across his white shoulders to keep them from burning. The pronghorns’ butts disappeared into the heat haze on the far western horizon.
He glanced up into a surprisingly cloudless sky whose blue was without pity, though not as threatening as the orange and yellow clouds that usually took it over. The sun was past zenith but still plenty high. He had lots of time to hunt or gather food before dark.
Even if this wasn’t his sort of country, Jak just seemed to have a knack for living off it.
Laughing softly, he turned and began walking back to where he’d cached his jacket and pack.
Life was good.
* * *
“OURLIFESUCKS,” Mildred said.
Even though Ryan, Krysty, J.B. and Doc were bearing the brunt of Ricky’s deadweight as they carried him, his blasters and backpack down the cut, the physician’s short legs made it hard to keep up with her friends. She was busy holding up Ricky’s arm to examine it, without raising it as high as his heart, to try to keep the mutie centipede’s venom as localized as possible. But she still had to examine the wound, because in a case like this seconds could count.
If it wasn’t too late already. She felt her face flush and the sweat roll down her back—not just from all the frenzied exertion in a humidity-drenched atmosphere that was starting to heat up despite the clouds and rain, but at the prospect of losing another member of her small and tight-knit family.
From behind came sounds too terrible to describe as the huge black jaws of the swarming centipedes devoured the hapless monster hog.
“Is the lad still alive?” Doc asked anxiously.
“So far,” Mildred answered. “Still breathing, still got a pulse. Both pretty strong.”
Ricky’s arm was completely relaxed in her grasp. The other hung loosely, hand dragging in the tiny stream underfoot as they splashed downhill.
“He just seems to be unconscious,” she stated.
“All right,” Ryan said. “I think we can stop here.”
The other companions did so with minimal awkwardness. Mildred glanced up to find herself and her friends at the bottom of a ravine. The walls were maybe fifty or sixty feet high and steep red clay. They were crowned with the dense tangles of the Wild.
The bottom, though, widened considerably from what they’d first come down. They had reached a small canyon, of sorts. There was enough room to get out of the stream, which had widened and deepened considerably from other gullies feeding into it, as the runlet they had followed did.
Gratefully, Ryan and the others set Ricky on a relatively flat, grassy bank. The rain had stopped completely, though the sky was still the color of bullets overhead. Mildred relinquished her grasp on the poisoned boy’s arm long enough for the others to extricate him from his backpack and slung rifle. Then they rolled him onto his back, and she knelt at once beside him.
Ryan came and hunkered across him from Mildred. “What have we got?” he asked.
She thumbed open the half-closed lids of Ricky’s brown eyes. “No dilation of the pupils. Strong, steady respiration, same as before. Pulse still strong. Temperature seems normal.”
She took her fingers from his neck and stretched his wounded arm out from his side. Then, bending close, she examined the bite.
“Huh,” she said. “No signs of inflammation except a little bit around the actual puncture wounds. No discoloration.”
She looked up at Ryan. The others had gathered around, as well, in a circle of concern.
Except the Armorer. She frowned in sudden irritation with the man. The kid was his apprentice, so to speak, and he couldn’t even be bothered—
Then she caught him in the corner of her eye. He was standing to the side, his Smith & Wesson shotgun in his hands, keeping a lookout while the others focused on their injured friend. It wasn’t lack of concern for Ricky that kept him apart. It was concern for his companions.
“Mildred, what is it?” Krysty asked in alarm. “Is he—”
She shook her head. “I think he’s fine,” she said. “Like I say, he just seems to be out cold.”
“What about the venom?” Ryan asked.
“Beats me,” she said. “I gotta warn you, I’m not a toxicologist. But there are certainly none of the gross signs of hemolytic toxin present. Nor of neurotoxins, though I’m on way shakier ground here. At least, not the sorts that cause death or serious nerve damage.”
“His eyelids are fluttering,” Doc said, bending over with his hands on his skinny thighs.
“Does that mean he just fainted?” Ryan asked.
“Don’t be too hard on him, Ryan,” Krysty said, laying a hand on his shoulder. “I’d be triple upset if one those things bit me.”
“I’m pretty sure there’s more to it than that,” Mildred said. The supine boy was beginning to stir. He moved his head slightly. “He didn’t seem freaked out or anything. Not enough that he was going to faint from fear. He seemed mostly taken by surprise and then—boom. Out like a light.”
Ricky’s lips moved. No sound came out. His jaw worked.
“Let’s get him some water,” Mildred said, reaching for a canteen.
“Are you sure that is wise, in his state?” Doc asked.
“No,” she replied, unscrewing the lid. “Like I said, I’m not a poison specialist. And neither are you, you old coot. I don’t see any reason to let him get dehydrated, here. Help me hold his head up so we don’t choke him, Krysty.”
With the redhead’s help Mildred trickled a few drops of water into Ricky’s barely open lips. He coughed, spit, shook his head vigorously. His eyes shot open.
“What?” he demanded. He looked wildly up at the others. “What are you all staring at?”
“Seems like it’d be pretty obvious,” J.B. said from the side.
“What? Oh. Sorry.” Ricky sat suddenly upright. “Nuestra Señora, that thing bit me!”
“Yes, it did,” Ryan said. “And you keeled right over like you’d been shot.”
“I—I did? Wait—where are we, anyway? What happened?”
“Someplace safe,” Krysty told him.
“Safe enough,” Ryan said. “For the moment.”
“What did you feel?” Mildred asked.
Ricky asked for more water. Mildred held the canteen up to his lips for a swallow, then let him take hold of it and drink some more.
“Well, it stung like a bast—like fire,” he said when he’d drained half the container. “It kind of gave me a jolt. And I felt like there was something else, like an edge to it, almost. Like when you get stung by an ant, you can tell you’ve been poisoned, if only a little, you know?”
“Yeah,” Mildred said. “Go on.”
“Well, my arm started to go numb. And I started feeling really cold. My stomach got woozy, my head started to spin, my vision seemed to get dark around the edges. Then, well, next thing I remember was waking up here on the grass.”
Ryan stood up. “Reckon he’s gonna live?” he asked Mildred.
“Afraid so,” she said.
“The centipede’s venom must produce some kind of soporific effect,” Doc said.
“Like some sort of knockout dose,” Ryan suggested.
“Seems so,” Mildred said. “Pretty fast acting, though.”
“Muties,” Krysty stated simply.
“I guess.”
“How do you feel, kid?” Ryan asked. “You fit to fight?”
“Don’t really know,” Ricky said thoughtfully. Then he grinned at Ryan. “But I bet I can walk and carry my pack. That’s what you’re really asking, isn’t it, Ryan?”
Ryan grinned. “Reckon so.”
He leaned down and, gripping Ricky forearm to forearm, pulled him to his feet.
“And that’s what we need to do,” he said. “Move. For one thing, there’s no way of knowing whether some of those bastard centipedes might’ve missed out on the pork banquet and decided to come looking for us. Plus, while this gives us a nice handy route to try to get clear of this damn mutant thorn tangle, it’s also a natural highway for everything else big and bad.”
“Including our friends from the ville,” J.B. said.
Mildred and Krysty helped Ricky get his pack up and onto his back.
“Speaking of that unfortunate swine,” Doc said, looking speculatively back up the way they’d come, “I cannot help wondering...if the outsized centipedes’ bite produces instant unconsciousness, why did the hog continue to struggle and squeal for so long?”
“Don’t ask me,” Mildred said. “I’m barely a people doctor, in the way I so often need to be. I’m certainly not a bug doctor.”
“Dear lady, while those creatures are unquestionably arthropods, they are, equally unquestionably, not of the class of Arthropoda that constitutes the insects.”
She fixed him with a furious glare. “They have nasty, segmented chitinous bodies, too many legs and they bite,” she said. “They’re bugs.”
“Less talking,” Ryan admonished sternly. “More walking.”
“Yes, sir,” Mildred said.
* * *
“HOWFARDOES this thing go on, anyway?”
At the question, Krysty glanced back over her shoulder at Ricky, who bringing up the rear. He was staring up at the heights above the tangle of miniature canyons by which they made their way through the Wild.
“How would I know?” Ryan said from the lead. “Not like we got any reliable maps of this country.”
“Rumor in the last ville we stopped at before Jak’s adventure says the thicket’s expanding,” Krysty said. “Or trying to. The cook I talked to at the eatery said it keeps running up against the drought and acid-rain-prone belts of the Deathlands. So far, they’re winning. But it’s double big.”
“If we could take the roads we could be clear in a day,” Mildred grumbled. “Two, max.”
“We’d be hanging by the necks in front of Judge Santee’s courthouse before sunset the first day,” J.B. said.
“Aside from that.”
She glanced up again. The thorn vines showed no signs of thinning, either up the walls of the ravine or ahead, as far as the eye could see.
The route they were taking was fast only in comparison to creeping along snaky game trails through the Wild or trying to hack their way through by main force. It wasn’t a practical thing to do for very long, in any event. The ground underfoot was muddy and mucky, and it clutched at Mildred’s boots despite the grass roots holding it more or less together.
“Shit,” she murmured, mostly to herself.
“I know,” Krysty agreed sympathetically.
“I know it’s stupid,” Mildred said, still keeping her voice way down, “but still I can’t help wondering if we’d be having quite this much trouble if, well, you know....”
“How can you say that?” Krysty asked. “You know Ryan does all he can—all anyone can, and then some—to keep us alive!”
“Yeah, I know, Krysty. Sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
But I do, she thought, more miserable even than before. I was looking for someone or something to blame for us being in shit this deep. But it’s nobody’s fault. Except the asshole politicians and whitecoats who blew up the world and made this mess.
She heard Krysty sigh gustily.
“I’m sorry, Mildred. I shouldn’t have bitten your head off like that. The fact is, deep down—I wonder too, sometimes. And that’s why I reacted the way I did. Overreacted.”
“We all have our skills, but Ryan can do anything,” Mildred said. “At least, it feels like he can. Anything we’ve ever needed him to do to pull us through, he’s done.”
She shook her head, setting her beaded plaits to swinging.
“But, well—”
“He can’t do everything at once,” Krysty admitted. “And even he’d admit, Jak’s a better scout than he is. Just as J.B.’s handier with blaster-smithing. Though I wouldn’t try to pin down Ryan on the whole Jak thing just this particular instant—”
“Look out!” Ricky screeched from the rear of the procession. Belatedly he added the useful part. “Ryan, down!”
Chapter Eight
“And the only possible sentence is death!” Marley Toogood finished, making his voice ring.
Though the day was dreary, with more low, gray clouds spewing a miserable drizzle, his heart soared. Something about being able to proclaim those words, loud and proud, to the assembled citizens of Second Chance and Judge Santee’s nascent empire, and hear the moans of despair and the increasingly desperate pleas for mercy from the four condemned men and women standing with nooses around their necks, just made a man’s heart naturally soar.
He heard the creak and grind as the hangman threw the lever. Four traps snapped open under four sets of feet.
“Oh, please, no, not my baby, too—”
The sound of necks snapping was like the ripple of blasterfire from a firing squad, which was also a satisfactory way to send off evildoers, Toogood thought. But it cost more money, even for black-powder blasters. And also the Judge was a traditional sort of man, with a strong fondness for the gallows as a symbolic statement of community principles.
And, of course, a way of making sure that anybody who disagreed with him too strongly on pretty much any subject at all sooner or later found himself swinging from one.
The crowd issued a joint sigh of sorts. Toogood looked around sharply. The sec men on duty monitoring the area didn’t seem to notice any particular offenders.
The louts get slack when Cutter Dan is out of the ville, he thought. Ah, well. We can hardly recruit men of higher caliber to do what is, after all, a menial chore.
Santee pushed himself out of his chair, stood to his full skeletal height and shambled inside. He moved with a purpose. Knowing a little about the state of his internal affairs from the Judge’s house servants, whom Toogood was careful to bribe just the right amount, the mayor suspected Santee’s bowels had been struck with the sudden urge to make one of their infrequent and irregular movements. It wouldn’t do for a man of Santee’s dignity to soil his trousers in front of the whole ville, after all.
“So, how long will it be before the chief marshal catches those coldheart scumbags and gets back to his real job, Marley?” asked one of his fellow town fathers. They had risen from their seats on the dais and stood beneath umbrellas.
“You’re asking the wrong man, Gein,” he said. He pulled out his handkerchief to wipe sweat and rain from his broad expanse of forehead—broad, signifying a powerful, thinking brain behind it, of course.