Hanging Judge

by James Axler

  Triple strange things out in the Wild. The old adage rang through his brain. He didn’t want to know what caused that.

  But late afternoon?

  “How long was I out?” he demanded.

  “Three, mebbe four hours,” Scovul said.

  “Nuke shit. So, the slowcoaches caught up?”

  “Yep,” Yonas told him. “We brung up the packs, as well.”

  “Score one for us. Everybody fit to fight?”

  Scovul exchanged nervous looks with Yonas. “Not exactly,” the man with the eye patch said. “We had two chills back at the farmhouse. McCawber and Jones. Also, Sammels and Rico were wounded.”

  “Wounded.”

  “Walking wounded,” Scovul said. “More or less. We sent them back to Second Chance with Bennett and Brown for escorts, see about getting some replacements sent out.”

  “Santee’s gonna love that,” Yonas said.

  Cutter Dan grunted. “Well, he’s not here. And when we bring back the fugitives for him, all will be forgiven. So, I take it the pursuit was not continued?”

  “Not, uh, in your absence,” Scovul said. “Sir.”

  “And Rico and Sammels may have been hit by friendly fire.”

  “We seriously got to work on fire discipline,” Cutter Dan said, shaking his head. “Later. For now, let’s go hunt up a stream, set up a perimeter and get ready to bed down for the night.”

  “We’re not going after them now?” Yonas asked.

  “After they got a three-hour head start? Mebbe four?” The sec boss shook his head. “We’ve run enough for one day. Reckon they have, too. We still got Mort and Old Pete with us, right?”

  “Yo,” Mort called.

  “And me, sir,” said the timid voice of the woodcutter.

  “Great. So, we can pick up their trail again in the morning. We will run these criminal scum to earth, gentlemen.” He smiled. “Matter of fact, I do believe I have a plan to do it.”

  * * *

  “ANOTHER,” JAK SAID, pushing the empty beer mug across the bar.

  “Don’t you think mebbe you should throttle back a spell?” Meg asked. “Mebbe pace yourself.”

  “What? Bartender got conscience?”

  She shrugged. “Let’s just say we look to be establishing a mutually profitable relationship. I can use a reliable meat hunter. Last one got et by the tiger. And I can sell the hides to a tanner in Second Chance, split the proceeds. Plus you’re rapidly becoming a valued, or anyway valuable, customer. So, easy does it, okay?”

  Jak frowned. His brain was wrapped in a pleasant fog. His body seemed filled with warmth. But something in her words penetrated.

  “Do business Second Chance?” he said belligerently. “Santee?”

  “Hey, we do what we got to in order to survive, like everybody else. The Judge is a bastard. If he weren’t quite so far away, he probably woulda tried to swallow us up by now with that blood-drinker sec-man army of his. And if that happens, nobody’s gonna be safe up here. But rad-blast it, one of the things holding him back is that he needs us as bad as we need him.”

  “Crazy man,” Jak said firmly.

  “Won’t argue with you there. But he’s a shrewd old nuke head, even if his soul is blacker’n a stickie’s. It’s mebbe a fine line, between the crazy and the shrewd, but so far he’s managed to walk it pretty good.”

  “Regret,” he said. “Will regret.”

  “Yeah. No doubt. I regret a lot of things in this life, and hope to live to regret a power more. Though if Santee has his way, I admit, I’m likely to end my days kicking my heels at the end of a rope sooner rather than late.”

  Remembering an earlier subject that was near and dear to his heart, Jak tapped his mug on the knife-gouged, cigarette-burned bar.

  “More.”

  “Your funeral,” she said, shaking her head. She took the mug and filled it with a ladle from a keg.

  “Do yourself a favor, though,” she said, pushing it back at him. “Take it and go get soused at your usual table.”

  “Why? Not good enough drink bar?”

  “Ace by me,” she said levelly. “Double worse than you drink at this bar, eight days out of ten, easy. But you’re making yourself conspicuous, sitting right here. Not everybody comes in here is a reasonable person. Not everybody who come in that way leaves in the same condition. And I had you sized up as a man who preferred not to draw much attention to himself.”

  Jak grunted. He started to raise the mug to his lips, then a cagy feeling stole over him. Instead he picked it up with both hands and, cradling its welcome coolness carefully to his chest, tottered back toward his habitual place in the dark—but not darkest—corner of the barroom.

  He had a weird prickling sensation, as if someone was watching him. He looked around furtively.

  But he didn’t see anyone or anything that appeared threatening, just the girl he’d helped out, whatever her name was. Molly, Charly, some shit like that. She was kneeling on the floor with her coal scoop and a whiskbroom, cleaning up the usual slops. But she also seemed to be looking at him in a disapproving way.

  At the table he hoisted the mug in salute to her. Beer slopped over his hand. He cursed softly and put the beer down on the table in a hurry. Then he sat in the chair with his back to the angle of the walls and settled down to drink in peace and seclusion.

  And screw Carli, or whatever her name was, and anybody else who didn’t like it.

  * * *

  VERY CAREFULLY, JAK stepped down the stoop of the Last Resort’s back exit.

  This one was at the other end of the yard from the kitchen and the rack where Cho’s little helpers had expertly skinned and cleaned and butchered the doe responsible for the amount of jack now burning a hole in the pocket of Jak’s old jeans, despite the considerable amount he’d already drunk up.

  The reason was his current destination: the five-hole shitter out back.

  It didn’t smell bad. Even with a load of Meg’s potent house brew aboard, sloshing in his belly and taking the edge off his senses, he would’ve been far more aware of that than a normal ville rat or Deathlands wayfarer. But Meg kept the cesspit limed and the shitter and its surroundings policed up as scrupulously as she did the interior of her gaudy.

  People didn’t get sick in the bayous where Jak had grown up. Not much, anyway. Things had been different, triple different, in the old days—back before the days of blood and fire, and then the long, cold night blew it all to dreck. He remembered Doc and Mildred telling him all about it: people got sick all the time back then.

  But then the whitecoats and the generals blew up the world. Epidemics, natural and man-made, had chilled billions—more than the bombs and the quakes and the riots and the starvation. More than the skydark, even.

  Those who could get sick and died had got sick and died. It had all been just that simple.

  But even this day there were exceptions. Sometimes those man-made plagues busted loose again, by accident or some evil madman’s design—there were reasons whitecoats were disliked and distrusted more than muties.

  And, more to the point, the ancient rule hadn’t changed: don’t shit where you eat.

  Doc and Mildred moaned and complained aplenty about the woeful state of personal hygiene in the modern era. And most folk were not careful about keeping clean.

  But if you got too careless, with your shit or with your food—and in particular if they got too jumbled up with each other—food poisoning or infection would still chill you, sure as a bullet but often as slow and painful as a gutshot.

  At least, that’s what Jak’s friends told him. Ryan and the companions—Mildred, Doc. His pal Ricky. Krysty, who was just so damn painfully beautiful he couldn’t let himself think about it too much right now. J.B. Even Ryan. They had been all right. They h
ad been family. It was too bad that hadn’t worked out after all that time.

  But now he was free, he thought. Running like a wolf. That was better, right?

  As all of that played in his mind, Jak was tottering across the bare, tramped-down dirt toward the plank shack with the crescent moon cut out of the door. And the beer continued to surge and gurgle from one side of his stomach to the other.

  That was what brought him out into this warm, dry west wind. Now he felt a pressing need to return some of that beer to nature, which he reckoned was the cycle of life, right there. Right there. It was the way he was meant to live, right? Natural?

  “Going somewhere, mutie?”

  Suddenly a gigantic shadow loomed up, blocking his path to the john like a wall of darkness.

  “Remember me?” the voice asked.

  Jak almost did. He’d heard that voice before. Somewhere, somewhen. He took another tentative step forward.

  The hulking shadow stepped forward, too. A gleam of light from a second-story window splashed across the side of an unappealing face, revealing features with pores you could stick a fingertip in, a bloodshot boar-hog eye, a nasty snaggle-toothed sneer and a curly brown neck beard.

  Alarm thrilled through Jak’s body. And his sluggish brain. He might have lost his edge, somehow. But his survival instinct was too tight-strung not to feel plucked and be vibrating at a high frequency by the situation he’d somehow fallen into.

  He looked around, ready to bolt to safety.

  But Neckbeard had brought friends. At least three, all much bigger than Jak, not that that was hard.

  The man right behind him looked familiar, too. With the light, such as it was, behind him Jak couldn’t make out his features. But he was shorter than the first man, and Jak had seen the way he held himself and the way he moved before.

  That was the sort of detail Jak had learned to spot, when he was Jak the hunter, the White Wolf.

  “Yeah, you know us. And we know you now, don’t we, Ferd?”

  “True as toasted toads, Jeff,” the first man said. “True as toasted toads.”

  “What the nuke does that even mean?” growled one of the shadow hulks who hemmed Jak in from left and right. He couldn’t make out their features, either. But he could sure smell them. They were at the other end of the rail from Meg and her gaudy in the cleanliness department.

  “It means we heard all about how you did the dirty on us the other night, when we was fixing to play with that little mutie gal,” Ferd said.

  “Yeah,” Jeff added. “How you snuck around and tricked us into whaling on each other. Us bros. Typical mutie taint shit, sneakin’ and trickin’ like that. You taints sure stick together. You must have your own mutie code, like us wag-dudes have our bro code. High five, Ferd!”

  “High five, Jeff. And the bro code says now we have to make you pay. We’re gonna stomp you good, and bust all your filthy mutie bones. Then, before we dump your busted mutie ass in the shit pool, mebbe we’ll let you watch us have some fun with your nasty taint girlfriend.”

  Belatedly Jak made a move for the knuckleduster hilt of his trench knife. He knew now that he’d drunk himself this deep into rad dust. Under any other circumstances he’d already have unzipped Jeff’s belt-hanging paunch, dropped his intestines in greasy purple ropes down his stained canvas pants onto the tops of his horseshit-crusted boots.

  Instead, his hand seemed to move, not like a striking sidewinder, but as if he were trying to punch somebody underwater.

  But the fist that filled his vision first with a black moon, and then bright exploding red and white stars, moved like nuking lightning.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Why are we stopping?” Mildred asked.

  Squatting in the clearing in the thorn vines, Krysty glanced at her friend. The low, smokeless fire made of dead undergrowth burned with pale yellow and blue flames. They cast a faint unhealthy light across Mildred’s pensive, round face.

  “I mean, shouldn’t we just be pushing on? We know those dogs are hot on our trail now. And there’s a limit to how many mutie rabbits even Ryan can pull out of a hat to save us, next time they catch up with us.”

  As was so often the case, Krysty had no idea what her friend was talking about, though she’d used the hats and rabbits thing before. But she clearly caught her drift.

  “How’re your legs, Mildred?” asked Ryan, who was pacing along the firelight’s fringe, by the thorny fence that mostly hemmed in the open space. “Looked a mite shaky by the time we stopped.”

  Mildred dropped her face and scowled ferociously at the fire.

  The thicket rustled in a brisk evening breeze. Krysty sensed it was warm and dry, though the thicket mostly screened them from it here. She smelled the drying vegetation—abundant, but with some off scent, some taint that spoke of its mostly unnatural origin.

  The spiky vegetation rustled with lots of other noises, too, and reverberated with unearthly cries and sometimes blood-freezing screams. Everybody tried their best to ignore those noises, but she also noticed they seemed to be keeping their eyes’ focus soft, to give them the maximum chance of reacting in time if something jumped out of the vines at them. As J.B. and Ryan had taught.

  “We need rest,” Ryan said. “That’s pretty much the story, there.”

  Ricky looked up. “Mebbe they gave up after those giant centipedes swarmed them,” he suggested brightly.

  J.B. chuckled. He sat cross-legged next to Mildred, but he had his back turned to the fire, outward from the circle of companionship. He was tinkering up something involving loose black powder and some sheets of heavy, rough hemp paper, modern made, that he’d turned up somewhere the last few weeks.

  “Not a chance,” he declared, never looking up. “They probably didn’t even lose a chill, any more than we did.”

  “But those Second Chance sec men aren’t in any better shape than we are,” Ryan said. “Bet on that. We’re loaded down pretty heavy, but we do this every day. Not run, but carry the same loads and sometimes worse, mile after mile. They don’t. And while they obviously ran light on the chase, they need their own supplies to catch up to them now, before they keep after us. They’ll rest the night. They’ve got no choice. We don’t either, not really. So we rest, too. Best we can.”

  As if to point out the truth behind that last statement, a terrible noise broke out from somewhere to the east of them. There was snarling, squealing and crashing, and the sound of heavy bodies slamming into the ground. Something big was out there fighting something else big.

  Though Krysty couldn’t see anything directly, no sign of the huge bodies involved in the life-or-death struggle, it was making the thicket shake violently on that side of the clearing. The unseen monsters could be no more than a handful of yards away.

  “Shouldn’t we, like, go somewhere else?” Ricky asked.

  “Naw,” J.B. said. “We’re here, they’re there. That’s the way we want it, right? And we got no idea what else is out there.”

  “Except more bad things?” Ricky said.

  “Exactly.”

  Ryan smiled a hard, mean smile. “There’s another reason to sit tight until it gets light.”

  But he stopped and stood, watching the vibrating vines, his Scout in his hands, as if his single eye could bore a hole through the intervening growth and the night like a sapphire laser, to illuminate what awful menaces were threatening the companions’ safety. Krysty actually started to get a little nervous at his unusual fixation; usually he kept his head and his eye in constant motion, always checking the whole of their surroundings for danger.

  Then she noticed J.B. had lifted his head from his work and was calmly turning it left and right. He was scanning for other danger while his best friend and leader concentrated on the most obvious threat.

  He noticed Krysty�
��s attention, gave her a slight smile and tip of his hat. Then he went back to looking everywhere for signs of other, less obvious danger.

  Even I forget what an incredible team those two make, she thought. What a team we all make. Which meant the Jak-shaped hole inside her suddenly felt bigger and emptier than ever....

  The fight ended suddenly with a deafening, high-pitched yipping receding to the northeast, accompanied by the sound of splintering thigh-thick vines. Krysty’s keen ears detected a second set of crashes and thuds as the other monster pursued its equally monstrous foe.

  As the noises dwindled and became lost in the general background, which had pretty much died away during the ruckus but now promptly came back, Ryan looked at his friends with a thoughtful frown.

  “I should at least do a little recce through the vines around us,” he said. “See what other bad news waiting to happen we might have right around us.”

  “No,” everybody said at once.

  “We can’t afford to lose you, Ryan,” J.B. said. “That’s the fact, plain and simple.”

  “I could take somebody along,” he protested. “Mildred or Ricky.”

  “I’m not going out in those damned thorns in the pitch black!” Mildred said.

  J.B. slapped her thigh. “She’s right. Now is not the best time to be dividing our forces. I agree with you, it’s lightning-strike odds the marshals will try to make a move on us tonight, and nowhere near enough chance to risk trying to move on. But, same token, where’s the gain of stumbling around though the thicket? It’s like Ricky said, we know there’s bad things out there. We don’t need to be givin’ them a crack at picking us off easy—one at a time or two.”

  “Might it be wise not to overlook our proximity to the tribe of those curious feathered-reptile muties?” Doc asked mildly. His glasses made his eyes look huge. “They are certainly not operating under the same constraints our merely human pursuers are. Do we want to increase our chances of bringing ourselves to their notice, by additional movement?”

  Still Ryan looked mulish. Krysty sighed and got to her feet.

  She walked to him and laid a hand on his arm. “They’re right, lover,” she said. “Step back from the trigger of the blaster—and your pride. We know you’re brave and able. That’s because we know you’re what’s kept us alive these many years, more than anything else.