Hanging Judge

by James Axler

  Ryan quickly transferred his SIG to his left hand and drew his panga as two sec men clambered onto the main vine and jumped out onto the trail. He shot the farther one in the balls before he landed. The marshal hit and curled around himself into a tight, mewling ball of agony.

  “Bastard!” the other sec man shouted. He tried to piston Ryan in the face with the buttstock of a longblaster. Ryan kicked him back. He jackknifed clean onto his feet with a spasm of effort.

  Recovering his balance, the sec man brought up his weapon as if to shoot. Ryan kicked for the barrel, knocking it skyward. He swung his panga furiously overhand and chopped through the man’s left arm just above the wrist.

  Holding his carbine muzzle up with one hand, the blond sec man stared at the blood gushing in rhythmic spurts from the stump of his other as if completely unable to figure out what was happening.

  Heavy arms grabbed Ryan from behind and pinned his arms to his sides. Breath blew hot down the back of his neck as the unseen marshal hoisted him off the ground with a grunt of effort.

  * * *

  WALKING RIGHT BEHIND Ryan in single file, Krysty was diving for the ground even before the one-eyed man called out his warning.

  As she hit, blaster shots erupted from the vines to her right. They missed, aiming high at a target that was no longer there.

  Then a body flew from the vine tangle to land heavily on top of her backpack, forcing the air from her lungs.

  The extra weight came off momentarily. A hand grabbed the straps on her pack and rolled her onto her back. Then a sec man dropped astride her chest. Leaning forward, he grabbed her elbows and pinned them to the ground.

  He grinned at her through his gray-shot brown beard. His face was very close to hers.

  “Now that I’ve got you,” he said, his breath smelling of booze and rot, “what am I gonna do with you?”

  Savagely she bit him on the nose. Skin tore as he yanked himself free and reared back. Blood sprayed her face.

  Krysty bowed her back, thrusting their combined weight off the game trail with all the strength of her legs, butt and lower back. As her assailant teetered, stunned and off balance, she swung up her legs and clamped them around his neck. She dropped her legs hard, yanking him backward and rolling to the side to throw him off. He landed on his face.

  As he tried dazedly to get up, she drew her snub-nosed handblaster and, holding it in her fist, slammed the butt onto the back of his neck. He went flat and lay moaning and twitching.

  Behind her Mildred was struggling, caught by the arms from both sides. Krysty rolled to a sitting position and shot one man in the leg. As he went down, the other cocked his fist to punch Mildred.

  Doc loomed up behind him. He stabbed the sec man in the face with his rapier. The man screamed shrilly and fell into a thorn vine, clutching his face.

  As he flailed and wailed, Krysty jumped to her feet.

  * * *

  AS THE MAN who had Ryan in a bear hug from behind raised him off the ground, the one-eyed man saw Krysty and Mildred wrestling with sec men. Evidently Ryan had barely walked into the kill zone before some random movement had attracted his attention and scotched the plan. Doc, Ricky and J.B. seemed to be clear of enemies, but didn’t dare shoot for fear of hitting the women.

  The sec man began to squeeze Ryan’s chest. He had one black-furred hand locked on the other wrist. It was quite the reach, given Ryan’s backpack and the depth of his chest, but the sec man managed.

  His unwelcome embrace was like iron. Ryan’s ribs creaked to the strain. His vision began to get fuzzy around the edges as the sec man’s arms tightened like a python constricting a baby. He couldn’t breathe.

  Time to do something about that.

  Ryan’s arms were immovably pinned. His own backpack prevented him doing a reverse head butt into the sec man’s face. He began to struggle furiously and try to pull his arms free.

  When he reckoned everything was lined up nicely, and the man who held him had his full attention focused on his straining upper body, Ryan snapped up his right heel with all his strength.

  His calculations were correct. The back of his boot hammered into the sec man’s nuts.

  The man vented a wheezing gasp, and his right hand slackened its grip on Ryan’s left wrist. He snapped up both his arms. The marshal’s weakened grasp gave way. The arms burst free of the deadly embrace, and Ryan’s boots thudded to the ground.

  He turned right, firing his elbow back, catching the sec man full in the face as he bent over to grab for his crotch.

  Ryan saw that, like him, the man wore a black eye patch. It did not fill him with feelings of camaraderie. He back-kicked the man in the gut.

  The mule kick knocked the sec man sprawling into the skein of vines. He hollered as the long, sharp thorns pierced his back and butt.

  He got control of himself and shouted, “They’re killing us back here, boss!”

  “Right,” Ryan heard Cutter Dan rap out from farther down the narrow, winding path. “Time to take the gloves off. Shoot to wound the coldheart bastards!”

  Sec men spilled onto the path ahead, leveling blasters right at Ryan.

  “Fireblast!” he yelled.

  “Gren out,” J.B. called from behind.

  Gren? Ryan thought, as he started to turn to dive into the vines and take his own chances with the thorns. We don’t have any—

  “Gren!” the secmen screamed as an object arched out of the sky, trailing dirty gray smoke, and struck the ground right at their feet. They turned and started jostling and flailing at one another in their frenzy to escape.

  The tiny smoke trail blossomed suddenly to a giant cloud. It obscured the trail, hiding the frantic sec men from Ryan’s view. He smelled sulfur.

  “Naw,” said J.B. from right behind him. “Just a smokie.”

  Ryan shot him a quick grin.

  “Right,” he said. “Remember we passed a place where the trail forked left, mebbe a quarter mile back? Lead the way there. We’ll go that way!”

  J.B. nodded. He turned and ran past the others, who were holding down warily on the injured and moaning sec men who’d attacked them.

  Ryan glanced back. An intrepid sec man leaped out of the smoke, his dark-blond hair flying, holding a Remington 870 pump shotgun in his hands.

  Ryan shot him through the chest, and the marshal fell back through the smoke screen.

  Then the one-eyed man turned back to his friends. “Go!” he shouted to them, gesturing furiously with the panga.

  A few shots followed the companions, but they were fired blind through the dense smoke of J.B.’s bomb. None came close.

  It took the Second Chance sec men a while to get sorted out and give chase. The fate of the bold dude with the pump riot gun did not encourage any of his buddies to leap right out in his footsteps. Not even Cutter Dan.

  Ryan already knew the sec boss was a hard case, and brave, but not stupe brave. Much like Ryan himself.

  It didn’t encourage him.

  Between his pounding boot heels and his pounding heart, the one-eyed man couldn’t hear when the pursuit started again. When he hoped he was far enough away to risk a look back around his backpack, the trail between the long strands of intertwined thorn vine had meandered into the line of sight so he couldn’t see far enough to tell if Dan and his men were chasing him.

  But he knew they were.

  Mildred’s feet were winging out to the sides as she ran by the time they reached the fork in the game trail. That was a sure sign she was starting to become fatigued, but the Armorer had already jogged up the path, and she followed him with the same dogged determination that had done so much to keep her alive since she was wakened from her cold sleep in Minnesota.

  When Ryan, still bringing up the rear, was a hundred yards up the new trail he called
softly to Krysty, “Pass the word to J. B. to slow down.”

  “I can take it, Ryan,” Mildred gasped.

  “Nuke shit,” Ryan said. “Do as you’re told.”

  The procession slowed to a walking pace. Belying the bravado of her earlier words Mildred at once began to stagger like a miner on a three-day bender. Krysty hastily moved up to help support her.

  Ryan heard voices murmur ahead of him, then Krysty looked back.

  “J.B. wants you to come up and take a look at something.”

  “You just keep going,” he said. “I’ll stay where I am.”

  “He says it’s urgent,” Krysty said. “Don’t worry, lover. I’ll hear the sec men if they start to catch up.”

  He frowned, but nodded. Quickening his pace he moved past the two women.

  The trail was opening into another clearing. J.B. stood at the far side, frowning down at something. It looked almost as if somebody had tried to build a fire out of thinner vines and thorn branches and given up without lighting it. Except it had a hollowed-out front.

  “It’s a shrine,” Ricky said. “Look, there’s feather bundles and little clay figures in it. And a larger one that looks—”

  He stopped and turned an ashen face back to Ryan. “It looks like one of the dinosaur toys my uncle made for me.”

  A hoarse shout of alarm from Doc made Ryan spin as rapidly as his own fatigue—greater than he’d been letting on to himself—and the weight of his pack would allow.

  He saw Krysty standing stock still, her right arm still around Mildred’s back. Her own face was several shades lighter than its usual gorgeous ivory.

  She was staring down at a spear with its tip buried in her left thigh.

  Chapter Twenty

  “Krysty!” Ryan shouted. He lunged toward her, shouldering a startled Doc out of the way.

  He was already too late.

  It was as if boobies had been set off in the vines to both sides of the clearing, blasting out bodies instead of shrapnel, long, sinuous, feathery bodies with long tails and long snouts full of razor teeth. Spears and clubs were clutched in taloned hands. In the blink of Ryan’s eye they filled the space between him and the redheaded beauty.

  He heard his other friends shout in warning and alarm. He only had thoughts for Krysty, the love of his life, who was wounded and who needed him. The rest would have to fend for themselves right now.

  Dino-muties turned toward him and jabbed the air with spears. They opened their long jaws. Inside, their mouths were bright red and full of sawlike teeth. They hissed as if they were angry catamounts.

  Ryan’s survival instincts overrode his concern for Krysty. The muties were being a little too blatant with their threats, meaning they really wanted him to look at them.

  Meaning...

  He snapped his head left. A mutie was bounding at him with big steps of its powerful hind legs. It thrust a spear at him.

  Ryan stepped back with his right foot and pivoted clockwise. His left hand batted the spear just behind the end, steering it safely by his side.

  The dino-mutie was either going too fast to stop, or just intended to get close and finish Ryan with its claws; it kept coming. The one-eyed man swung his left elbow back into the creature’s face.

  The mutie ran right into it. A tick later Ryan realized he might have been sticking his arm into the razor-toothed maw—better than his head, but non-optimal. Instead, it was coming so fast the point of his elbow took it right on the side of the head.

  Ryan heard bones break with a crackle like a big man stepping on a stack of dry twigs. The dino-mutie squawked, fell on its tail, then dropped onto its side kicking feebly. It seemed to be in its death throes.

  Light bones, Ryan thought.

  From behind him he heard the boom of the stub-barreled shotgun mounted on Doc’s LeMat revolver.

  “I have your back, Ryan!” the old man shouted. “J.B. and Ricky are coming!”

  Ryan drew his panga as he looked rapidly left and right. There was no reaching the women; the muties had him blocked. Doc’s handblaster cracked again, firing conventional bullets this time. The thunder of J.B.’s shotgun joined in.

  And still the muties kept pouring from the Wild, jaws snapping, yellow eyes rolling with fury and hate.

  * * *

  THE BUCKSHOT CHARGE from Doc’s short-barreled shotgun, slung beneath the longer barrel of his LeMat revolver, crumpled the mutie in midleap and dropped it like a wing-shot mourning dove. It landed near his right boot.

  He whipped his head left, knowing what he’d see, more of the feathered fiends springing forth from the vines with jaws agape and murder in their yellow eyes.

  He fired four .44 rounds from the revolver’s outsized cylinder. Blood sprayed. The monsters shied away.

  Doc knew they’d rally and come on. Or those behind them would leap pass them to the attack. Seasoned fighter as he had become, since he’d been freed from his thralldom to the horrific Jordan Teague by Ryan and his friends, Doc was already rotating his upper body back to his right.

  Another feathered lizard was jabbing a spear at his back. Doc sidestepped and shot it through the head.

  Turning back and forth with an alacrity that belied his apparent age, Doc blasted the rest of the .44 bullets into the attacking horde. Again they moved back.

  Again they squalled in collective fury and surged forward.

  But Doc was ready for them. He had hurriedly holstered the LeMat, seized his swordstick and whipped out the slim, lethal blade.

  A mutie leaped for him, swinging a section of stout vine branch that had been fashioned into a crude club. It still had six-inch thorns jutting from it.

  Doc deflected it past him with the sword’s sheath. As he did he pivoted left, stabbing the mutie through the neck.

  As it fell, strangling on its own blood, Doc ripped the steel blade out of its feathered throat. Two more muties closed in, poking spears at him. He parried both and feinted at the nearer creature’s eyes.

  Then he wheeled to slash a mutie attacking from behind and cracked another smartly alongside its yellow crest with the swordstick sheath. He began to turn in place, fending and counterattacking, not fast enough to dizzy himself, but fast enough to keep from making his back a target. The fact that it was padded and protected by his own full backpack helped.

  The muties formed a circle around Doc. They darted their heads like serpents at him, hissing and screeching. They poked at him with spears, but none was bold enough to press the attack.

  For the moment. “All right, you feathered devils!” he yelled. “Come at me and be damned to you!”

  And then, to his horror the old man saw Krysty go down.

  * * *

  KRYSTY WAS NOT the sort to freeze.

  Not from fear. Not from horror. Least of all from surprise.

  But that was what she did when the dino-mutie’s spear arced out of nowhere and hit her in the thigh.

  Freezing was the most lethal of the three things that usually happened to a person when danger dropped and adrenaline dumped. Flight and even fight could chill a person, too—because if control was lost when the adrenaline blasted through a person’s veins like the potent drug it was, if a person lost his or her presence of mind, power and speed were gained but judgment and skill were lost. A person was just as likely to trip into something running or run face first into a tree; in combat, a person could flail his or her arms powerfully, but with little focus the blows were laughably easy to dodge and were weak even when they connected.

  But freezing stuck a person square in the kill zone. Dead to rights in the sights of an enemy who already had all the advantage he was likely to need.

  Krysty froze, but only for an instant. Then her survival instinct, her hard-earned skills and most of all her will, with
its strength and determination, kicked in.

  Even as the bushes blossomed with the white-rimmed scarlet flowers of gaping mutie mouths, she yanked the spear out. Blood squirted, the same color as the mouth lining of the attacking creatures. But it wasn’t a serious leak. She knew from the location it hadn’t hit her femoral artery.

  Of course, if it had, all her problems would be over within a few minutes, regardless of what the muties did. Forever.

  She heard Mildred’s blaster bark from her right as she wheeled, spear in hand, to face the dino-creatures attacking from her left. By habit the two women put themselves back to back.

  A mutie darted toward her. It was pure luck that they were far enough into the clearing that the nearest thorn vine tangle was at least a dozen feet away. It made it impossible for the muties to strike from cover. Apparently instinct or bloodlust prevented them from simply showering their prey with spears from the tangle. They wanted to feel blood on their claws and jaws, and taste it spurting hot on their tongue.

  The lead attacker had a slate-blue back that was almost pretty. When it wasn’t reared up, it was surprisingly small, no higher than Krysty’s waist and seemingly not much thicker around than its spear.

  It thrust at her with the weapon. Angrily, she knocked it aside with the spear she’d just plucked from her leg. She kicked the mutie under the chin with her right boot. Its head snapped back and it collapsed as if shot in the head.

  But her own wounded leg buckled. She fell heavily on her buttocks.

  “Krysty!” Mildred called from behind her. She sensed her friend trying to turn to aid her.

  “No!” she shouted. “Eyes forward!”

  She saw Mildred’s arm whip back. Yellow flame flashed from the muzzle of her blaster, pale against a sky screened with high, thin clouds. Muzzle blast slapped Krysty in the face. A mutie shrieked in response and collapsed next to the fallen redhead.

  Krysty rolled her green eyes up to see another mutie snapping at the back of Mildred’s neck from the other direction. Krysty swung the spear in her left hand. The blow was clumsy; by luck more than aim the tip raked the creature across the tongue. It uttered a strangled squawk and snapped its jaws shut.