by James Axler
“The people, Your Honor. The citizens of Second Chance. And I do, as well.”
“And by what right do you and these...people see fit to level your demands on me?”
“Not on you, Judge. On justice. If we can pay with our lives for violating the law, at least we deserve to know clearly what the law is!”
The Judge settled his gaunt frame back a little more deeply in his chair. Toogood was aware of Lovato and Keynes, the two sec men on duty in the office, lurking in the darkness by the shelves of jumbled, dusty books.
“If you’re not doing anything wrong,” Santee said, in a perfectly reasonable-sounding voice. “You don’t have anything to worry about. Do you, Mr. Down?”
Toogood felt a droplet of sweat break free from his hairline, sadly in retreat, to run a tickling trail down the right side of his forehead. Judge Santee was taking this apparent defiance far more calmly than Toogood ever could have anticipated. It almost seemed he respected the millwright for having the courage to present his case to his face.
Rad-blast the man for his unpredictability, he thought. He really is cracked.
“But what is wrong?” Down asked. “When a citizen steals something, or attacks someone, that citizen is put to death, regardless of provocation.”
“It’s acts that matter in this world,” the Judge said. “Not excuses. Crimes.”
“Yet when one of the bosses sends their henchmen to take something that belongs to a citizen by force—or when they beat a laggard worker so severely that he dies—they never seem to be punished. Why is that?”
Santee’s shoulders hunched. Toogood could tell that he was frowning.
“What are you doing here, Down?”
It was the voice of the small, fussy Gein, striding into the office. Toogood let out a long, slow breath and secretly smiled.
“I came as fast as I could, Your Honor,” the mayor’s fellow leading light said. “Is this man bothering you? I apologize if he is. He’ll be dealt with most strictly!”
“Mr. Down and I are discussing the abstract concept of justice,” the Judge said. “He was raising some most interesting points....”
“Justice? But justice is a flexible concept, Your Honor. Perhaps you can see your way clear to leniency in this case—”
“Justice!” Santee slammed his hand down on his desk so hard the stacks of books jumped fractionally off it, and a cloud of dust rose up. “Flexible?”
He shot to his feet.
“The very nature of justice is that it be inflexible,” the Judge thundered. “Not swaying this way and that, like a willow in the wind. What this tormented land requires is nothing but the most rigid form of justice to set things right! Is that what this is all about? To try to weaken my justice, to make it bend? Never!”
He was almost trembling with wrath as he turned to Down.
“Guards,” he said. “Take this man out and hang him straightaway. We will show him how unyielding the true justice is!”
The two looming marshals pushed away from the musty shelves, grabbed the blond man and marched him out of the office.
“Your Honor, please!” Gein said. “How am I supposed to run my mill without him? What about the grain?”
“You’ll find a way, Mr. Gein,” Santee said with brittle humor. “Men like you always do. Or are you questioning my justice as well?”
“N-not at all, Judge Santee! I’d never dream of such a thing.”
Toogood came around the desk to lay a comforting arm on Gein’s shoulder.
“Come on, Donnell,” he said. “I’ll buy you a drink.”
The little man looked at him, then nodded almost convulsively.
It’s the least I can do, Toogood thought, behind a smile that widened quite genuinely, after your timely arrival forestalled a most inconvenient outbreak of rationality.
Toogood intended to be the only power of consequence in this new empire, after only the Judge himself. So he worked, subtly, step by step, to undermine his rivals. He almost felt grateful to that skinny little albino mutie for solving the Bates problem for him at a stroke.
It would have been a shame if all the time and effort he’d devoted to persuading Down to approaching the Judge had come to nothing.
I do so hate waste, Toogood thought.
Chapter Eleven
“Can’t stay here too long.”
“Why not, John?” Mildred asked.
The Armorer stood looking out the window of the former living room of what she would have considered a modern ranch-style home. Perhaps a tract home—although, if it had been part of a development, the Big Nuke and the Wild had long since devoured all other remnants of it. The glass had been broken out so completely that no trace remained, in the frames or even on the concrete floor. The carpet had long since rotted away except for some dried and sorry-looking clumps here and there.
“We’ve got water and food,” Ricky pointed out. He sat with his back against the wall, cleaning his DeLisle, which he had stripped down on a small tarp in front of him.
J.B. turned away from the window. Outside the shadows of sunset had pretty much overtaken the small clearing that remained outside the house as the Wild claimed it.
“Somebody’s going to find us here,” he said. “Sooner or later. Emphasis on sooner.”
“Affirmative,” Ryan agreed.
He bit the word off even shorter than usual. He was pacing a groove in the concrete floor. Krysty had insisted not just on taking her solo turn on watch outside, but on actively patrolling the perimeter. Ryan was a little concerned, not because Krysty was incapable of staying alert to potential trouble, but because of all the muties they’d encountered. There was a possibility that if they attacked she would be overwhelmed. He’d wisely kept his mouth shut.
“It seems not unlikely the lizard creatures already know where we are,” Doc said. “Even though we saw no signs of pursuit once we discouraged them from chasing us across that ravine, they might readily have shadowed us here. Or tracked us after the fact. We are not that far from where last we saw them.”
Ryan grunted.
“Tactful, Doc,” Mildred said.
He looked at her with genuine puzzlement. “What did I say?”
“So, what do we call them?” Ricky asked, a little too loudly and brightly.
Everybody looked at him. He blushed and dropped his eyes.
“I mean, those feathered muties. They were like lizards and everything. But they weren’t scaly.”
“They do have scales,” Ryan said. “On their feet, anyway.”
“They look like those velociraptors from the Spielberg movie, Jurassic Park,” Mildred said.
“I saw that vid, once, home in Front Royal,” Ryan said. “But those were dinosaurs. They had scales, not feathers.”
“I say we call ’em dinos anyway!” Ricky said. “Dino muties!”
This time he didn’t flinch when everybody looked at him.
“I loved dinosaurs when I was a little boy,” he said, a little defiantly. “Tío Benito made me toy ones of wood, based on the picture books we had. They do look like little dinosaurs.”
Mildred shrugged. “Good as anything.”
“Dino muties, lizards, scalies.” Ryan shrugged. “Whichever way, it doesn’t load us any blasters. Call them what you want.”
The house looked as if much of it had fallen down or been otherwise destroyed before its most recent set of occupants. Before them, Mildred mentally amended. It was a typical late twentieth-century frame stucco house. She was surprised it hadn’t melted away entirely, given the abuses it had to have endured, particularly heavy downpours, lashing winds and the occasional acid rain. What remained showed signs of repeated patching and shoring up, with everything from warped planks to sheets of corrugated metal to lengths of wh
at had to be Wild thorn-vine trunks. Or whatever you called the central stem of a vine. She wasn’t a plant doctor any more than she was an entomologist.
The roof had a few holes in it that hadn’t been patched. Most likely, she reckoned, they’d happened after its last inhabitants had abandoned it for whatever reason. A few bullet holes in the walls of the three usable rooms suggested one possibility. But the gaps in the roof didn’t seem to make much difference. The rain had stopped, and a warm northwest wind had blown steadily since they forted up here the day before.
“Seems like we should stay as long as we can,” Mildred said. “Water well still works.”
It also showed so sign of pollution that their severely limited means could detect. Ryan’s and J.B.’s rad counters had detected no signs of fallout.
“Plus there’s the game trail nearby.” Ricky had bagged a young whitetail buck not thirty yards from the house the previous day. The meat was hung bagged in a plastic sheet down the well to keep it cool. J.B. and Ricky had rigged up a drying rack on the roof where animals couldn’t get at it, so they could try to make some of it into jerky. Mildred thought that was pretty optimistic. She suspected the guys did too. No doubt there were flying predators around. But it was better than not trying, no doubt.
“If they do find us we can defend the place, easy,” Ricky said enthusiastically.
Wordlessly, his mentor and idol J.B. pointed to the bullet holes in the thin walls. Ricky’s face fell and his shoulders slumped. He looked so doleful Mildred was torn between feeling sorry for him and the urge to bust out laughing.
“He’s not wrong, though,” Ryan said. He was still pacing the floor like a caged wolf. “Leastways, not all the way wrong. Better to shoot from concealment without much cover than from none. And it’s a better grade of both than we’d get out in the brush.”
He scratched his jaw. The fast-growing blue-black bristles of his beard crackled audibly.
“Anyway, if those birds or lizards or bird-lizards or whatever the nuke they are had anything better than spears to shoot at us, they would have. Walls’ll give us some protection against those. Even walls like these. And the muties are smart enough not to like what happens when they try wading into blasterfire.”
“Yeah,” Mildred said. “I wish stickies were that smart. Or smart in that way, anyway. They can be pretty damned cunning sometimes.”
“‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,’” Doc quoted. “Let us neither think of nor invoke those vile creatures, until and unless they too arrive to afflict us.”
“You afraid that if we speak their name they’ll appear?” she asked, laughing. “Come to think of it, they pretty much are devils, aren’t they? Or close enough as may be. So it seems you got a point for once.”
“Those sec men from Second Chance have blasters,” J.B. said. “Unless you reckon they’ve given up chasing us.”
“Zero chance,” Ryan replied. “And the longer we stay here, the more likely it is they’ll stumble onto us.”
“You think they get out in this awful stuff often enough to get that familiar with the Wild?” Ricky asked. “They seem way too ville-bound for that. Like they’re just typical sec men, no matter what fancy name they call themselves by.”
“We know they get out on the roads,” J.B. said. “We had to hide from them once or twice when we were fixing to spring Jak, in case you’ve forgotten that little detail.”
“Well, sure,” Ricky replied. For all his overt hero-worship of J.B.—and Ryan—and general shyness, the youth could be pretty brash sometimes. Usually when he thought he was right about something. “But that’s not the same thing as being willing to go out and get poked by thorns.”
“The lad has a point,” Doc said.
“Yeah,” Ryan agreed. “But that doesn’t mean they can’t rustle up local folks as guides.”
Ricky looked shocked. “But who’d help them? Nobody likes the marshals. We could tell that even without talking to anybody.”
“People they paid,” Ryan said. “People they threatened.
“People whose loved ones they got held hostage,” J.B. added. He stuck a hand up under his fedora and scratched his head. “It’s a bad old world we live in, boy. You’ve still got a lot to learn about that.”
That struck Mildred as a trifle excessive, given that Ricky had seen his mother and father murdered literally before his eyes. But the youth sighed and nodded.
“I know. Everyday I think about poor Yami. I try to imagine what’s become of her and I—well, I just can’t.”
“Perhaps that’s just as well,” Doc said, a faraway look coming into his pale blue eyes. “Perhaps you’d be wiser not to try at all.”
“Then why stay here, Ryan?” Mildred asked. “I mean, if they’re going to find us anyway.”
“We could use a rest,” he said. “Whatever we can store up before setting out again, I judge we need to do so. And along with making for halfway-decent defenses against the lizard muties, if and when they do decide to try us on again, the walls and roof give us a pretty safe place to sleep. Make it hard for random muties or natural predators—presuming that’s what eats those whitetails—to come on us and started gnawing on our faces while we sleep.”
Mildred thought about the glistening, venom-dripping mandibles of the giant centipedes biting her face and shuddered.
“So long as we don’t get trapped inside here,” J.B. pointed out.
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “Well, that’s another reason not to stay longer than necessary. And yeah, I know I just said we need to stay a spell. And we got no way to know for sure when not enough becomes too nuking much.”
“You never know the difference between too little and too much until it’s too late,” J.B. stated.
Mildred looked at him quizzically. “Did Trader say that?”
Trader was a legend in his time, but he was an aphoristic son of a bitch, too, as Mildred knew from the brief spell they’d run with him when he turned up years after he’d vanished. Ryan and J.B. were always quoting one saying of his or another.
But J.B. just showed her a puzzled frown. “No, Millie,” he said. “I did. Just now.”
“Problem is,” Ryan went on, “I’m not eager to just go wandering around this rad-blasted living barbed-wire fence at random. We got some idea what kind of unfriendly wildlife calls this shithole home. The natives we run into don’t love us, either. And we don’t know what kind of territory they claim, or even where it is—we might’ve just been spotted by scouts, who called for reinforcements to bushwhack us. Nor do we have any idea where the Second Chance sec men are. I don’t like the idea of leaving such shelter as we have here only to blunder right into more of that kind of trouble. Not to mention kinds of trouble we don’t even know about yet.”
“You mentioned scouts,” Krysty said, opening the front door and walking in. “And that’s what it sounds like we need.”
Ryan grinned at her. “Thought you were on patrol. You eavesdropping on us?”
“There’s no glass in the windows,” she said sweetly, “and your voice carries, unless you make an effort for it not to. Mebbe you feel a little more secure here than you should?”
“Mebbe. What were you trying to say about us needing a scout?”
“We need someone to recce. You yourself were complaining about the lack of it, a moment ago. We need to go out and see what’s out there. Some of us, or all of us.”
“But how’s that different from, you know, blundering around until we run into something big and bad that wants to eat us?” Ricky asked. Then his eyes got round and he blushed, realizing that he might have said more than he should. Again.
“That’s why I suggest some of us should go,” Krysty said. “It’s easier to stay stealthy when it’s not all sev—all six of us traipsing through the undergrowth together. So mebbe two
of us need to start heading out on recce patrols.”
“I don’t like splitting us up like that,” Ryan said, jutting his jaw mulishly. “Not when we got two sets of enemies hunting us, could snap on us together like jaws on a trap at any moment. We’ve been unlucky enough.”
Krysty looked him dead in the eye. “What alternative do we have, lover?”
In the silence that followed, Mildred got to her feet.
“Sooo,” she said, drawing her ZKR 551 target revolver and opening the cylinder to check the load. “Looks as if it’s my turn on sentry duty. Y’all have fun.”
And ignoring a strangled protest from Ricky—whose turn it really was—she walked out the door into the early evening.
Chapter Twelve
“He’s not a mutie,” the Last Resort’s stout proprietor, Meg, said to the burly, boozed-up customer across the bar from her. “He’s an albino. Dumb ass.”
Jak smiled slightly as he walked away from the bar, carrying his mug of bitter local brew.
The Last Resort was above average for a gaudy, the way Esperance was above average for a ville. The plank floor was covered in sawdust, which helped Meg’s efficient staff keep the grosser messes scraped up, including the odd drunk who wound up passed out on it. You could pass out on a table, but if you flopped on the floor, out the door you went.
You might find yourself propelled by the oil-drum-shaped gaudy owner and chief barkeep herself, or by her main bouncer, a colossal Osage named Bo with a scalp lock and a propensity for scary red face paint. They also enforced the establishment’s strict no-fighting policy, with or without the aid of a lead-loaded truncheon or two. In the two nights he’d been drinking there Jak hadn’t seen any blasters drawn at all, though plenty of the patrons openly carried them, including Jak. That suggested to him that anybody brandishing a blaster got squelched even faster and more finally than brawlers did.
That was fine with Jak. He preferred to use his own .357 only when he had to.
He sat at what he’d quickly picked as his customary table. He put his back to the corner and sipped his brew. The place didn’t smell too much like puke or piss, which was saying something to a man with a nose as keen as Jak’s.
