Hanging Judge

by James Axler

  “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, THE DAY 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.

  “We understand, Chief Marshal,” Toogood said. He shot a hooded glance at his companion. “And we know it’s for the best. Believe me.”

  Cutter Dan gave him a big old smile. “Sure thing, Mr. Toogood.”

  His palm hovered by his violated face as he watched them split up and head for their respective homes. Along with the pain, the wound—and especially the stitches—were starting to itch like a bastard.

  Cutter Dan dropped his hand to his side. He thought about the man who’d slashed him. He’d had a nasty scar down his face a lot like the one the sec boss was sure he was going to wind up with, though Cutter Dan hadn’t lost an eye, as the coldheart had. Funny how things went like that.

  It was going to be even funnier how this would end. He was going to find the one-eyed man and slit his throat.

  After Dan made him watch him do things to his friends, of course.

  * * *

  “GREAT,” MILDRED WYETH muttered. “Just great.”

  Slipping and sliding, she trudged miserably through rain and an endless hedge. Her lone consolation was that the thorns were so huge they were fairly easy to avoid and didn’t stick into her as fast and deep as slimmer ones would. It seemed as if her whole world was Krysty’s backpack ahead of her, and the gray-brown vines that seemed to writhe around her like diabolical tentacles with deceptive green leaves and silver spines.
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  And the endless drip of rain from a miserable bruise-colored sky.

  They were somewhere northwest of Second Chance and not anywhere near far enough away. But they had to avoid the cleared areas around farms and such, especially the roads in and out, as if they were nuke hot spots full of deadly fallout. Those were the first places their pursuers would look for them. Instead, they were following what amounted to a game trail through the tangled, spiky, unnatural growth of the Wild.

  “Any idea of where we’re going?” Ricky asked. He was the last one in line, right behind her.

  “Like Ryan would tell me,” Mildred said. “But I’m guessing, away from Second Chance, mostly. Watch it, old man!”

  The last was snarled at Doc, walking just ahead of her with Krysty. He had let go of a branch Ryan hadn’t hacked from their path, and it had whipped back and almost nailed Mildred in the face. As it was, it sprayed water droplets on her cheek, which didn’t do her any harm but still pissed her off.

  “I am sorry,” he said contritely. “I shall try to be more careful. The monotony has distracted me, I fear.”

  “Tell me about it,” Mildred said.

  Ricky said something from behind her. She wasn’t listening close enough to make it out, so she answered with a grunt. He had begged Ryan to be allowed to take Jak’s place on point. Ryan had shot him down in short order, insisting on walking lead himself.

  She liked Ricky well enough, she guessed. He was just a kid, who should have been home with his folks and his sister on Monster Island. Except, of course, that coldhearts had chilled his parents before his eyes, and sold his sister Yami into slavery; he was still looking for her, with an obsessive devotion that might have been comical had it not been so tragic and doomed. He was an engaging little doofus, in his way, the fumbling, eager, perpetually cheerful adolescent instead of the snarly or surly-sulky kind. And yet, when the chips were down, he was surprisingly competent and bone reliable. And there was not a scrap of malice in him.

  Sometimes he was in love with Mildred, or at least her boobs. Sometimes infatuated with whatever halfway-presentable woman crossed their path. And he was always totally hung up on the walking thermonuclear warhead of femininity that was Krysty. Lucky for him, Ryan was secure enough in his lead-dog masculinity not to get bent out of shape about it—or just didn’t take a shy, awkward sixteen-year-old seriously as a romantic rival.