by James Axler
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 CHANCE SURE was 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.
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.
* * *
CROUCHED IN A narrow, 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.
&nb
sp; “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.
