Hanging Judge

by James Axler

  “Position?” Krysty repeated.

  Mildred glanced at the redhead, who stood at her side, similarly bound. She was beginning to be afraid she’d overplayed her hand—and by extension, her friend’s.

  But Krysty’s strong yet finely structured face was set into a perfect mask of haughty disdain in the feeble light of the one lonely lantern that stank as if it ran on oil squeezed from the asses of syphilitic stickies. She tossed back her fire-red hair. Her flawless emerald eyes fixed Judge Santee with gigawatts of laser death stare.

  “The position we are in is of helpless captives who are condemned in advance to the gallows,” Krysty said. “Just like all the ‘accused’ who fall victim to the insanity you proclaim to be justice. If you fear so much to hear the truth from the likes of us, who are totally in your power, then you are nothing but the lowliest of cowards!”

  Her words rang despite the muffling effects of the shelves of jumbled, crack-backed books. They were so sharp and strident that Mildred imagined she saw the air thicken with dust and mild their impact raised.

  They almost raised her ire too. Powerless? she thought angrily. Speak for yourself, sister. I always have power, however small. Even if it’s just to spit in the executioner’s face as he fits the noose around my neck!

  Then she reconsidered as she figured out what Krysty was doing. Defying the slimy bastards, sure. But also reassuring them that she and Mildred were helpless captives, good little victims who would give their captors no problem at all, which would give them the scope to unleash a world of hurt. With or without the help of their menfolk.

  They’d done it all before, by themselves, when they had to.

  These thoughts were still shooting through Mildred’s mind when one of the sec men who had escorted them—Evrard, his name was, a long drink of water with jet-black hair and pale skin—stepped up and slapped Krysty’s face.

  Her head barely moved, though it was a full-palm blow whose impact cracked like a whip. She didn’t even blink, but her eyes flared even more furiously than before above the red handprint glowing to life on her alabaster cheek.

  “I’ll chill you for that,” she said quietly with absolute conviction.

  Well, there goes the helpless act, Mildred thought. C’est la fucking vie.

  “That was uncalled for, Marshal,” Santee said in tones of brittle annoyance. “When you rise to abuse by vermin, you lower yourself to their level. Place yourself on report. Cutter Dan will deal with you himself when he returns from successfully completing his assignment.”

  As if realizing he’d screwed up big time, the sec man stepped hurriedly back into his place at the bookshelf-lined wall behind Santee. Now he braced to attention even though the Judge couldn’t see him.

  “Yes, Your Honor!” he snapped. Even in the bad light Mildred thought he’d gone a shade paler. And was perhaps showing a hint of green around the gills.

  With another man of Santee’s obvious age. Mildred figured the black-haired bastard would’ve been able to count on Santee forgetting by the time they were all out of the office and it was time to get back to the exacting business of counting his own fingers again. And maybe prying off his shoes to count his blackened, reeking toes as well.

  Not Santee, Mildred knew. He probably remembered every little sight, real or imagined, from the time he was four.

  “Very well,” Santee said, sitting back. “Clearly you are aware of the nature and gravity of your crimes. Just as clearly you feel no remorse for them. So we need protract proceedings no further. I sentence you to death by hanging at a time to be determined by me.”

  Mildred looked at Krysty, who looked at her. The two women grinned.

  “There’s a surprise,” Mildred said. “Anyway, we know you won’t do anything to us until your bully boys bring our menfolk back. Providing they do, of course.”

  Judge Santee leaned forward. His smile was as wicked as anything Mildred had ever seen. And she’d seen her share of wickedness, before she was diagnosed with inoperable cancer back in her original first life, and many times over since she’d been thawed from her long, cold sleep.

  “Oh, they will, Ms. Wyeth,” he said. “They will. Cutter Dan is the best. Of all the coldhearts of the Deathlands, he was the coldest. Set a thief to catch a thief. It is why I recruited him first of all, to be my Chief Marshal, back when I was just setting out on my great work.

  “And as for your time of execution—make no comforting assumptions about the time remaining to you, ladies. To use the term promiscuously, justice will be executed at the time justice decrees. Whether sooner or later, you have no way of knowing. So rest easy with the thought that you could be taken forth and placed in the noose at any time!”

  He leaned back as if exhausted. Something in his manner suggested to Mildred he was eager for a cigarette in classic post-coital style.

  “Now, get them out of my sight. And leave the office door open. The stink of their evil permeates the air!”

  Evrard and his partner hustled forward to grab a woman apiece. Other sec men waited outside in the hall to help escort them to jail. There was no point struggling here, any more than there had been back in the clearing when the sec men suddenly came out of nowhere to surround them, especially not with Krysty’s injured leg. Mildred had been able to browbeat their captors into freeing her hands so she could properly clean and dress the spear wound on the wag trip to Second Chance. All a show of resistance could be was a show, and it could only end with them being more exhausted and battered, and less fit to plot a way to bust loose and bring these self-righteous assholes’ little psycho fairy castle crashing down around their hairy ears.

  She didn’t take Santee’s threat of execution at any sudden random time seriously. He was too big a sadist not to wait to have the whole crew in his power before he started swinging them off the gallows, if for no other reasons than the happy hours he could spend calculating in which order he would make them watch their friends die, so as to inflict the maximum torment on the dwindling number of survivors.

  He’ll hang Ryan last, of course, she thought. And Krysty next to last. Of course, it could be the other way around....

  She pushed hard against the image that sprang into her mind, of the Judge deliberating here in his chambers, with his pants open and his necrotic old pecker in his hand....

  Don’t be too unkind, girl, she thought, as hard hands hustled them out the door. He did call you “young lady.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “Mind if I join you?”

  The soft words didn’t take Jak by surprise. Even well buzzed on a bellyful of Meg’s best homebrew beer, his senses were keen enough to hear the kitchen girl approach.

  Nor was his brain too fogged to appreciate the fact that she’d been making extra noise as she walked between the outbuildings where the shadows lay even deeper than the night. She was smart enough to want to avoid startling Jak at any cost, and yet she was always ready to let Jak feel her tongue’s well-stropped edge whenever he showed any sign of underestimating her. That helped to focus his mind, booze or no.

  He shook his head. He had come out here to stand awhile next to a storage shack, listen to the crickets and clear his spirit, even more than his mind. Jak liked the Last Resort well enough, but he just started feeling cramped and uncomfortable if he stayed between walls for too long a spell.

  The albino needed to breathe outside air, even if it came in the form of a warm, dry wind carrying the unnatural taint of every vile mutie monster in the Wild, which teemed and oozed and slithered in a profusion he’d barely glimpsed. He just needed to breathe air that hadn’t gotten filtered through two dozen sets of not triple-healthy lungs before reaching his. Or his nose.

  She came up beside him. Chally, of course. She had on an olive drab T-shirt that left a hand’s breadth of her flat belly bare, shorts with the ends
rolled up that emphasized the slim length of her legs. It was a usual work getup for her, but Jak appreciated the sight all the same. She looked good, if you actually bothered to see her.

  Somehow, when she was working inside the gaudy, she managed not to be seen or heard or noticed. But whenever she came around Jak, she seemed somehow to make a point that he did notice her and not just become aware of her presence with his preternaturally sharp senses.

  Chally put her back to the wall of the storage shack, resting her shoulders and rump against it. Then she joined him in looking up at the stars. She hadn’t given him so much as a glance.

  “You’ve been coming here for days, now,” she said to the clear sky. “And I still don’t know much about you.”

  “Not like talk much.”

  “That’s a fact. Those’re the most words I’ve heard you string together at one time since I met you, I’m pretty sure.”

  She looked at him then.

  “So what’s the deal, O-white-skinned-man-of-mystery?”

  Jak grunted.

  He intended that as refusal. She took it that way.

  “Oh, well,” she said lightly. “I was gonna spend my break with you. But I’m done playing around with somebody I don’t know thing one about, beyond the not triple reassuring fact he can chill a deer with just a freaking knife. I’ve had the edge taken off by now. I can do without again for weeks. Months. Years. Done it before, and I can do it again. So, if you don’t want the sweet thing anymore....”

  She pushed off from the crude plank wall and started walking back to the gaudy. She twitched her narrow hips as she did. It made her butt cheeks do fascinating things in the tan canvas shorts.

  “No,” he called after her. “Don’t go.”

  The words came out of him like teeth to pliers, but he made himself say them.

  She stopped and glanced back at him over her shoulder.

  “What’s this? You’ve started to rediscover the miracle of human speech?”

  He blinked at her. He wasn’t stupe. Nobody could live even as long as he had, the way he had, if he was a simp.

  But she made him feel stupe, sometimes. It made him mad. But not double mad. Because he knew she didn’t mean to do that, make him feel stupe. Somehow.

  She went to stand beside him again. Right where she’d been, not looking at him. Not touching. But close enough he could feel her heat.

  He started to talk, then. Haltingly, because that was the only way he knew how. He started by describing how he’d grown up in the Cajun country of the southern coast, on the run and fighting back against the stoneheart Baron Tourment, who’d chilled his family and driven him from his home.

  Just naturally that led to him telling about meeting Ryan and the rest. How he was willing to fight Ryan himself, at first, to get to his enemy, and how Ryan and his companions helped him destroy the baron.

  He faltered, then.

  “That’s...it,” he said. “Ran with them years.”

  He felt ice-cold sober now, and hollow inside in a way he couldn’t name.

  “Bastard words,” he said. “See how make feel?

  “It’s not the words,” she said. “It’s what you feel that makes you say them.”

  He looked at her, his eyes widening in alarm. Had he said that out loud? That kind of behavior could get a person chilled when he or she was creepy-crawling around the worst monsters the Deathlands had to offer. Animal, mutie and human.

  “And congratulations,” she added. “You’re starting to communicate like a normal human being.”

  Jak frowned ferociously. He felt as if he ought to take offense.

  He wasn’t sure why, though, once he thought about it.

  “Not get used,” he said.

  She laughed. “That’s my boy! You have a wicked sense of humor, when you put your mind to it. Or, I reckon, when you don’t. When you stop blocking it off, just let it run free.”

  He shrugged. Just because he’d let his tongue run wild for a spell there didn’t mean he had to make a habit of it. Or intended to.

  Mebbe should cut back on drinking, he thought. Like Meg says. Double funny she’d do that, running gaudy bar.

  “So,” Chally said, and she was looking at him now. “Seems like the story’s just beginning. You started running with this Ryan Cawdor and his bunch. For years, right? And now you don’t.”

  She stopped talking. After a moment he realized she’d asked a question without actually asking one. He nodded.

  “It seems you must’ve been pretty tight with them,” she said, “running with the same pack for so long. So, what happened? Why’d you suddenly up and cut loose from them?”

  Jak frowned and ground his teeth. He was frustrated. He wanted to share it with her—to let the whole story out. But he couldn’t.

  It would leave him too open. Too vulnerable. He’d spent his whole life fighting for all he was worth against that feeling.

  Now he felt like he needed a drink. Many, many drinks.

  “Too—many—rules,” he finally gritted out.

  “That’s it?”

  The albino nodded tautly. His stomach was knotting itself up. Mebbe better eat before drink more, he reminded himself. He sometimes just forgot to eat once he got a few beers in his belly. And he felt it in the morning, too, when he woke up both ravenously hungry and feeling like puking up all the food he hadn’t even eaten.

  She sighed theatrically and shook her head.

  “Oh, well,” she said. “I guess a girl’s got to be satisfied with what she gets.”

  She reached up and touched his cheek. He actually shied away from the contact like a frightened horse, but she persisted, moving closer to gently stroke his cheek.

  He decided to let her.

  “Listen,” she said. “I’m proud of you. I know it’s not easy for you to talk. Like, at all. And you did. You opened up to me. At least some.”

  She kissed him on the cheek and stepped back, her eyes shining in the starlight.

  “Seemed as if you needed to. Triple bad. And I reckon there’s more where that came from. But you’ve done more than enough for one night. And I’ve got to get back to work.”

  She stepped back again and promptly skinned out of her T-shirt. The halter she wore beneath came off next. Her nipples stood out from her small, conical breasts, almost quivering with arousal.

  She folded the shirt neatly and placed it on top of a nearby barrel. The halter went on top of it. Jak made a noise low in his throat.

  “But not right away,” she added. Chally opened her shorts and peeled them and her underpants down her skinny but shapely legs. She stepped daintily out of them without letting them touch the ground. She kept her battered sneakers on. The pants joined her other clothes on top of the barrel.

  Then she turned, put her hands high up on the wall, bowed her belly forward as though she were stretching like a cat.

  “But no reason we can’t make the most of the time we’ve got left,” she said. “If you feel like you’re up to it....”

  He showed her how up for it he was.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The sec man thought he was being prime sneaky, Ryan thought.

  His eye focused through the scope of his Scout longblaster, he watched the man creep along behind where the Wild ended as if chopped off by an invisible blade. He was not so successful at the sneaking part.

  Ryan lay screened by scrubby brown growth. It had started to get some green during the rains, but they were days gone by. The warm west wind that had blown more or less steadily since then had kept it dried out.

  The morning was deceptively pleasant. The air was cool. A light breeze blew from the south; by midafternoon, Ryan knew, the warm wind would begin to blow out of the west again. The sky was brilliant b
lue brushed with high, thin, purple clouds.

  The Wild was even more deceptive: a beautiful green blanket stretching as far as the eye could see, rippling gently to the breeze, streaked and swirled according to the odd linear growth pattern of the mutant thorn vines that made it up. It looked like the scenes of parks or the grounds of English manor houses that Ryan had looked at in predark magazines.

  Nothing at all like the hell on Earth it was. Even by the standards of the hell around it.

  Ryan, J.B., Doc and Ricky had been holed up here by the red clay wall for two days. They had water—that was the good news. It trickled down out of the cliffs in a number of different locations.

  The not-so-good news was the food. There wasn’t a lot of game within easy reach. They had some jerky, dried fruit, even a few self-heats. Plus they could live off their own fat for days, even if none of them had much anymore. Not even Ricky, who had started off a pudge and now was as trim as the rest of them from tramping all over the Deathlands.

  The bad news? Everything else. They were well and truly trapped here. The dinos, as Ricky called the feathered muties, walled off the way to the west. A recce by Ryan and Doc had discovered that the fugitives weren’t the only ones who could hole up in the natural cover at the base of the cliffs. The muties only showed themselves enough to let the humans know they were there. They respected their blasters too much.

  But not enough to roll over and let them pass.

  The companions already knew Cutter Dan had men guarding the way east along the cliffs, and the thicket had a large number of Second Chance sec men in it, too, like this incautious one who seemed to be trying to creep up to get a shot with his own longblaster at the defenders.

  The so-called marshals had made a few tries at them. They’d left at least three of their number lying in the open as chills and hadn’t tried any more.

  Time was not on the side of Ryan and his friends. If nothing else, hunger would force the four to venture out. Or, more likely, try to bust out and die in a blaze of glory.