Hanging Judge

by James Axler

  “It is a pity we had no chance to explore for a clear path out of the Wild,” Doc said.

  “I’m thinking about all the nice deer meat we had to leave drying in the shed back there,” Mildred said.

  “Bullet won’t ever come back, once it leaves the blaster, Millie,” J.B. called. “We’ve left better behind.”

  “I know,” Mildred replied, now back in a more characteristic mood. “I hope the damned sec bastards choke on it.”

  A high-pitch crack sounded just to the right of them. The thump of a blastershot a beat later confirmed what Ricky’s educated ears had already told him: a high-powered longblaster bullet had just busted through the sound barrier on its way past them.

  “That was fast,” J.B. remarked, still casual. He turned, held his machine pistol up over his head with both hands and triggered a burst back up their trail.

  “That ought of remind them what they have waiting for them,” he said, lowering the piece.

  “All right, everybody,” Ryan called. “Time to power out of here.” He took off running into the Wild.

  * * *

  THE FRESHLY CHILLED deer lay on her back by the brook with her legs in the air. Expertly Jak cut her belly open from butt to breastbone. Then he set about field dressing her by removing her innards. It was slippery, bloody work, but work he was well accustomed to. He had stripped off his jacket and shirt before getting down to it.

  She was a small whitetail doe, about ninety-five or a hundred pounds. The weight was manageable for dragging back to Esperance, where Cho’s kitchen staff could hang it to skin it, finish cleaning the body cavity and butcher it proper. Assuming Meg bought it off him, which he reckoned was a good bet, indeed. It was prime quality venison. The gaudy owner did enough restaurant biz she’d recognize that as well as he did. Or, at least, her cook would.

  He didn’t have to make a second cut in the windpipe; that had been how he’d taken her, waiting for her and the small herd to come to drink, confirming she had no fawns with her, stalking close and springing. It was surprisingly easy to chill a deer with just a knife, if you knew how to do it. Jak had been doing it since he was a pup.

  The secret was in the stalk, and that was just what he was best at. Not even Ryan had the skill to get close enough to a wild, awake deer to grab it and slash its throat, Jak knew.

  He widened the incision. Reaching in, he pulled out the liver and heart. The lungs he tossed into the vines along with the steaming guts. The predators and scavengers in the Wild needed to eat too, and he was in no position to choose whether that was muties or natural creatures like coyotes. It didn’t really matter to him. It was the way things were, the way the world worked. The parts needed to come out fast after the chill, or they’d quickly turn the meat so rotten foul no one would touch it. Not unless the person wasn’t much shy of Death’s open door, anyway. He sure wasn’t going to drag the not-inconsiderable mass of offal along with him back to the Last Resort.

  He took a special watertight cured-skin pouch out of his belt, where he was carrying it this day, and placed the liver inside to eat later. The heart he set aside on some clean grass. He’d eat that raw on the march. It tasted good and would give him strength and energy to drag the carcass.

  That done, he washed the knife in the stream. He quickly splashed his arms and upper torso to get most of the blood off. He hated the sticky way it felt drying on his skin. He put away the knife and pulled his shirt and jacket on again.

  Finally, he took a length of rope from his belt. He tied the doe’s hind feet together. He recovered the heart and set off for Esperance.

  He took a big bite. Blood ran down his chin, still warm from the whitetail’s recent life.

  Nothing like the first bite of fresh, warm heart to cap off the natural satisfaction of a successful hunt.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Argh!”

  Krysty turned back at Ricky’s strangled call.

  “It’s those nuke-withered things again!” he shouted, waving his left arm furiously. A wide, flat shape a foot and a half long flew off end over end into the Wild, frantically waving its many hooked legs. “No! You can not bite me again, you puke!”

  “Great,” Mildred said. “I knew this would happen. I tried to tell you, Ryan. You were heading us right back to these slithering little bastards.”

  Still trotting in tail-end Charlie position, just behind the still half-panicked Ricky, J.B. chuckled.

  “You reckon he didn’t know that, Millie?”

  Ryan held up a hand for attention and slowed his pace. Krysty narrowed her eyes. He had deliberately kept them to a rapid trot out of consideration for the slower members of the party, especially Ricky and Mildred. Longer-legged Krysty could keep up at full speed. Surprisingly, given his ancient and battered appearance, so could stilt-legged Doc Tanner. J.B. was no sprinter, but he could keep up the fastest pace he could muster, well past the point where even Ryan’s tongue was hanging out.

  Mildred and Ricky were audibly puffing. They’d been fleeing at least an hour from their enemies. Krysty felt sure the pace Ryan had set them had thinned the ranks of active pursuers. Santee’s self-proclaimed marshals didn’t seem the type who got much aerobic exercise in the course of their daily duties of terrorizing and oppressing beat-down ville folk and farmers.

  But there was a hard core hanging close behind them. Too close. At the last twist of the path between the vine skeins they were currently following, Krysty had caught sight of the man who ran at the head of the pack, not forty yards behind J.B.

  She’d never seen him before, but she recognized him right off from Ryan’s description: Cutter Dan, the Boss Marshal himself. He was built along the same wolf lines as Ryan, with long muscled legs, narrow waist, and broad chest and shoulders. And from the grim smile she’d made out on his square, not-unhandsome features—below the long scar Ryan’s panga had left—he seemed to be made of similar stuff to the man called One Eye Chills in campfire tales across the length and breadth of the Deathlands—and beyond.

  He could’ve taken a shot at them then, maybe even hit someone if he was a steady enough hand with his big revolver. Or, for that matter, could’ve been carrying a longblaster.

  The fact he hadn’t, and wasn’t, had implications that Krysty tried hard not to think about.

  “Sweet suffering Christ, Ryan!” Mildred almost hissed. “Why’re you slowing down? They’re going to be all over us. Oh, not you little fuckers, too.” And she broke off to stomp furiously on a pair of the giant mutie centipedes that had scuttled out to scrabble at her boots with their pincers.

  Ryan looked back over his shoulder and grinned.

  From too close behind them Krysty heard a sudden deep-voice exclamation of surprise—and anger.

  * * *

  “OH, FOR FUCK’S sake, no!”

  They leaped at Cutter Dan from a spot on the game path where thorns gouged his wide shoulders from both sides. What seemed like dozens of the mutie centipedes waved their horrible feelers and held their sideways jaws wide open.

  He tried to bat them off as he ran. He could hear Mort’s boots drumming not far behind him. The oldie Choctaw tracker had bowed out of the chase. Cutter Dan knew some of his marshals had dropped out, too. He was lucky if he had half a dozen more close enough to do any good when he got into a place he thought they could pounce on their prey with maximum chance of taking them alive and at least relatively unpunctured.

  He was going to have a few choice words to say to the stragglers after these coldhearts were caught. The possibility they might not catch them was something he refused to let into his mind.

  But though he was what the stern Deathlands granny who had raised Cutter Dan would have called more back than leg, the younger Indian kept up with the longer-limbed chief marshal.

  Cutter Dan shouted in disgust as a mu
tie bug landed on top of his head. He felt its claws scratching his scalp and tangling in his hair. He reached up, grabbed it by the revolting butt, which managed to feel both leathery and slippery at the same time, peeled it off and threw it blindly away.

  The sec boss had heard stories of the monster centipedes, of course. He hadn’t been sure whether to believe them. Travelers in from the wasteland told some pretty tall tales, no matter which wasteland that happened to be—Cutter Dan had knocked around a goodly portion of the Deathlands himself before discovering his true destiny as Judge Santee’s strong hammer hand. But he knew as well as anybody that the Wild harbored some strange things, of which the fabled outsized centipedes were far from the strangest.

  He had to slow down for fear he’d trip over a root or stray thorn branch and fall. That’d be fatal right off, he knew well. The sec boss tried to bat the things away from his arms, chest and legs. He kicked the many-segmented bodies flying when he could.

  Then he felt a sharp sting on his left wrist.

  He brought the heel of a clenched right fist down hard on the horror that clung with dozens of claws to his other forearm, its mandibles sunk into his flesh. Its ugly, venom-laden mandibles. Yellow juice and goo and a sort of squeak were squished right out of the monster by the impact. Its legs spasmed mindlessly and released their death grip on his arm.

  The chief marshal’s head suddenly began to spin, as blackness swallowed up his vision from outside to in.

  “Fuck me,” he said, as the world went away.

  * * *

  RYAN HEARD SHOUTS of consternation from behind. Too close behind.

  The sec men were running unencumbered by packs. He took for granted they’d be carrying nothing more than blasters, bullets and water. As he’d told Cutter Dan that day he’d cut his face for him, he’d heard the name before. He had a reputation as a stoneheart of brains and skill as well as guts. He would have had his troops cache their packs before he deployed them to attack the half-decayed farmhouse where he thought he’d run his quarry to ground.

  By contrast, Ryan and company were struggling under the full weight of their gear, and they weren’t all pronghorn fleet at the best of times. The Second Chance sec men should have run them down and blasted them half an hour ago.

  That they hadn’t confirmed Ryan’s surmise: the crazy old Judge who ruled the ville, Santee, had given orders they be brought back alive. Ryan had a fair idea what sort of threats he backed those orders up with, too. The man was clearly single-mindedly obsessed with hanging as many human ornaments as possible on his gallows tree.

  Not that Cutter Dan’s reputation made him out to be any better to cross.

  So the chief marshal had closed on his intended victims, waiting for the inevitable moment he could jump them and capture them.

  That was, of course, why Ryan had decided to take his companions back to revisit their many-legged old friends, the centipedes.

  He turned promptly along the next break in the vine wall to his right. He’d try to pick a path north, hopefully clearing the feathered mutie lizards’ territory, and make their way out of the Wild by the shortest route he could find.

  He heard more yells, and at least one voice screaming in pants-shitting panic, from the pack on their heels.

  Ryan grinned into the wind of his passage and the hot dry breeze that blew through the thicket, rustling the thorn branches and starting to make the dead vines and fallen leaves underneath them crackle.

  He glanced back over his shoulder. Krysty caught his eye. She flashed him her gorgeous smile and a thumbs-up.

  Mebbe we’ll get out of this with all our parts, he thought. At least we still got them all attached so far.

  * * *

  “SO, YOU CHILLED that by yourself?” Meg asked.

  She stood in the yard by the kitchen door at the back of her sprawling, two-story gaudy, her hands on her broad hips. The expression on her blunt face was far from welcoming. But so far as Jak could tell, that’s the way it always looked.

  He nodded.

  “Use that fancy handblaster of yours?”

  He shook his head. “Knife.”

  “He’s tellin’ truth, Chief,” Cho said, pointing a sausage-sized finger at the dangling carcass.

  The kitchen boss stood next to the gaudy owner, wearing an apron over jeans and a T-shirt. She had jet-black hair tied back in a bun so tight it looked as if the skin was fixing to split along the line of her high, wide cheekbones. She had Asian eyes and a pale-brown complexion. She was built along similar lines to her employer, but where Meg’s face and form suggested a barrel, the chief cook put Jak more in mind of an adobe brick.

  Her assistants had strung the doe up by the neck from a scaffold that stood outside the back door for just such a purpose. They huddled behind their leader’s ample cover, a couple of local kids who looked at Jak as if he were a starving Bengal tiger.

  There was one, at least, stalking the Wild. He’d seen the unmistakable prints. They had escaped from zoos, along with a lot of other exotic animals, back during the Big Nuke. Like some of them, tigers had done well for themselves in the brave new world, even pulling through skydark....

  The tiger was probably as content to steer clear of humans as Jak was content to steer clear of it. There was plenty of game for both. The big striped bastard probably didn’t give two shits if it ate taint meat.

  Neither did the other things that had left tracks, as large as the tiger’s or larger, that Jak couldn’t identify.

  “Where’d you take it?” Meg asked.

  “Couple miles west.”

  He judged she didn’t need to know it had been right in the northern fringes of the Wild, this side of the Red Wall, the giant escarpment that put a sudden end to the northwestern edge of the mutie thicket. He might have been a hunter and a fighter, not a businessman, but he hadn’t stayed alive this long without knowing how to drive a halfway-decent trade.

  She scowled. “Mutie?”

  He shook his head.

  “Nope,” Cho said. “I can tell by looking. Looks plenty healthy. Second year doe, I reckon. Hang it a few days, we can sell the meat for plenty.

  Meg sighed and gave her cook a disgusted look. “Way to help me drive a hard bargain.”

  Cho shrugged. “Not my department, boss.”

  Meg grunted. She turned back to Jak. After a brief haggle they settled on a price both thought was fair. Or anyway, mutually unfair, which was all a body could really ask for.

  “One question, kid,” she said.

  He didn’t bridle at being called “kid” the way he normally would. He was pleased enough she’d accepted his explanation that he was an albino, not a mutie, so he wasn’t going to quibble.

  “You planning on staying?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “All right. Before you drink in my saloon, much less sleep in one of my beds, you’re gonna get cleaned up. I got standards.”

  He frowned. She sighed again.

  “All right. I’ll throw in a bath free of charge—not like water’s hard to come by hereabouts. And I’ll get your clothes washed half price. Even throw in some loaner clothes to wear while your duds’re drying, which shouldn’t take long, the way this wind keeps blowing in from the west. Like it comes clean out of the desert, it’s so dry.”

  Jak thought about it a moment, then he grinned and nodded. He immediately began to strip down.

  “One more thing,” Meg said. “You do that over there behind the shed. Any of my customers pop a squint at your skinny white hide and underparts, they’re liable to reckon they’re already far gone into the deetees and don’t need to buy any of my rotgut!”

  Chapter Sixteen

  His eyes snapped open.

  By what had to be late-afternoon light, to go by color and angle, the fir
st thing they saw was a Malpais face like a lava flow beneath a green turban. A pair of eyes, black and shiny as polished obsidian buttons, twinkled just visible in the middle of its many deep folds.

  “Bad news,” the face said in a cracked and guttural voice. “He’s still alive.”

  “Takes more than a few mutie bug bites to chill me, you crusty old fuck,” Cutter Dan said.

  He almost regretted the words as soon as he’d said them. Old Pete had proved himself mighty useful on this trip out, and there was that old touchy Indian pride thing. But though being knocked out had mebbe weakened his judgment—momentarily—it didn’t soften his vanadium-steel core a whit. Cutter Dan was a man who looked forward, not back.

  He felt a pang from the left side of his face. Well, mostly, he mentally amended.

  Old Pete didn’t take offense. At least, he didn’t show it, which Cutter Dan knew well was not the same thing. But the old man laughed, which was at least a good sign.

  “Spirits saving you for a more fitting fate,” Old Pete said. “Mebbe hanging from your own gallows, huh?”

  Cutter Dan tried to keep his frown from showing too much. He forced a smile.

  “Mebbe,” he said.

  He sat up, batting away the hands that pushed forward to help him. His head freewheeled briefly. He rode it out.

  The sec boss looked around. “Where are we?” he demanded. “We didn’t backtrack, did we?”

  “We didn’t want to leave you for the centipedes,” Scovul stated, sounding worried and contrite.

  “Not that the thought didn’t cross our minds,” added Edwards, who sounded neither.

  “Ace,” Cutter Dan said. “You’re still with us.”

  He got to his feet. They were in a cleared space about twenty feet wide. The grass underfoot was beaten down, he saw by the late-afternoon light. But not as if by the random trampling boots of the dozen plus men he saw around him. More as if it had been flattened in a corkscrew pattern, working from the center out.