Hanging Judge

by James Axler

  Of course, he’d had a triple-hard sprint of a quarter mile, over and through the twining vines, slipping between the thorns as best he could while he set dozens of tiny fires in the abundant dry, dead growth. He used torches he’d prepared with the container of kerosene that had been among Chally’s and Meg’s parting gifts.

  He’d planted tiny seeds of fire that the wind and readily available nutrition caused to sprout to towering flames with shocking quickness always just right behind Jak’s heels.

  It was a terrible risk, even though he was carefully setting the blazes downwind of him. Nothing could guarantee that a shift in the wind, even a brief one, might not trap him in a pocket of flame and condemn him to the intolerable, howling death he was inflicting on many sec men on the other side of the fire, which had now changed from a wall to a sort of quasi-living wave, surging inexorably east.

  It had been stupe easy to infiltrate back through the waiting ranks of Second Chance marshals on the northern edge of the thicket after his quick reunion with Ryan, J.B., Doc and Ricky. He’d gone out the same way, after all. As dark as it was, it wasn’t remotely a challenge. He was lithe, fast and savvy. This was his task to accomplish.

  Despite the dark, he’d had little trouble just skirting the territory marked out by the strange feathered-lizard muties. Even at night it was easy to spot tribal signs—if you had the eyes for them. Jak did, just as he’d learned his friends had not.

  The chorus of inhuman shrieks rising from the far side of the rolling inferno was music to his ears. The bastards were getting just exactly what they had coming, by his reckoning.

  Mildred, that big predark softie, claimed Jak was hardcore even by Deathlands standards, and perhaps he was. But when the situation called for his hardcore survival skills, they had kept him alive, as well as the others.

  Now Jak was back to doing that again. It just felt right. Felt natural.

  The object he pulled out of his jacket pocket was anything but natural. It was just a little metal box, no bigger than the palm of his hand. It had a little antenna and a big red button. Plus a little toggle in the base, inset so he had to whip open one of his butterfly knives and use the tip to switch it from off to on.

  Like all his other senses, Jak’s nocturnal vision was much keener than his friends’ despite his albinism. More like an animal’s than a man’s. He was proud of that.

  Though he made exceptions for a very few friends—Chally and, he reckoned, Meg, with Ryan and the rest something even more—Jak was not impressed with what he’d seen of humankind. As a rule, he liked animals better.

  Now he was able to make out the dark line of sec men threading their cautious way forward along the base of the Red Wall. Even with the ever-constant threat of the fire he was setting to speed his steps, he’d only just made it in time.

  But he had, and now was the time for some real fun.

  He could easily see the last big knee of red clay between his friends’ encampment and that of Cutter Dan’s blocking force. The leader of the barely visible procession was just about to reach it.

  J.B. and Ricky loved to tinker with machines and other tech stuff. Jak didn’t know anything about it, and cared less.

  What he did know was that the Armorer was as good at that as Jak was good at sneaking and peeking. Jak’s pal Ricky was no slouch, either. Between them, the pair had been scavvying up components and tinkering them into...parts, for weeks. Actually, they were always playing with scavvy in their downtime, when they were repairing or maintaining weapons.

  He’d been able to make one particular set of devices from some of the gifts Chally and Meg had provided Jak before he left the Last Resort. Right when they were needed most.

  Jak held out the little box with the antenna pointing just to the right of the red clay knee.

  “Bastard sec lose,” he said, and pressed the big red button.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  “Come on!” Yonas shouted, waving his longblaster again. “They can’t even shoot us here! It’s too dark! We got their asses!”

  They’d made it about a third of the way from their base in the Wild to the coldhearts’ nest. Though the fire had already swept through the place where Edwards had been lurking, it was still blazing east across the thicket. And from the horrible sounds that continued to peal from that direction, the flames were still consuming sec men and mercies who had been too stupe or laggard to bust out and join the impromptu charge.

  A glance left and right had told the lanky marshal that thirty or forty others had made it out, and also that the main fire and the pockets of blaze it had left in its wake were in prime position to silhouette the straggling line of attackers.

  Having delivered his inspirational yell, the detachment’s boss turned his head forward—and stopped dead in his tracks.

  Edwards saw why: the other group of Second Chance marshals, snaking their way along the cliffs under command of Cutter Dan himself, were suddenly swallowed by a series of giant puffs of smoke and red dust that burst straight out toward the Wild and their advancing comrades.

  Yonas was standing stock still staring when the left top of his head just suddenly flipped off. His head jerked back, spraying blood in the still-faint dawn light and spilling chunks of brain as his body collapsed to lie jerking among the weeds.

  A series of deafening thunder cracks hit Edwards in the face as a stretch of the cliff a good thirty yards long came crashing down, obliterating the Second Chance column in a red clay avalanche.

  * * *

  THE FIRST BLAST caught Ryan by surprise.

  He saw the cloud of smoke, dust and debris blast right out of the cliff like a horizontal volcanic eruption. Then the sound and shock waves hit him.

  The sound was brutal—like a blaster shot right by his ear but magnified a thousand times. The wave hit him in the face like an invisible boot, tugging like hurricane winds at his coat.

  Then it was by, leaving only the ringing in his ears and a rumbling sound as a whole section of the Red Wall fell.

  If Jak had done his job, it was falling right on top of Cutter Dan and his men on their way to attack the companions.

  Radios for communication were too hard to maintain, and batteries were too hard to come by, to make it worthwhile for his companions to carry them, except under unusual circumstances. But a radio remote detonator was dead easy. So J.B. habitually carried at least one he had improvised in his pack. With his apprentice, Ricky, who was even better with electronics than his master was, they’d also managed to put together some tiny, simple radio receivers for setting off explosives.

  All they’d lacked were the blasting caps and explosives. Then Jak had turned up out of nowhere. And whoever he’d been hanging with since he parted company with his friends, he’d made a good enough impression that they gifted him with a packet of blasting caps—and the location of a stash of dynamite. Better was the fact it was recently made; predark dynamite would have long since grown so unstable that thinking about it from across the room would set it off.

  J.B. had been a little freaked out by Jak’s carrying the caps and the sticks of explosive so close together, but since Jak had made it there without spontaneously blowing up, the Armorer figured in the long run it was okay.

  While Jak had snuck out of the little camp to work his incendiary mischief back in the Wild, J.B. and Ricky had slipped off to the east to plant some hastily assembled charges. Then they’d returned to the camp site to prepare to stand off the sec men lurking among the vines.

  Meanwhile, Jak was to try to get into position—just upwind of where he had set the fire line—in time to watch for the marshals’ attack. It was his responsibility to use the radio detonator to trigger the charges J.B. and Ricky had hidden in caves in the red clay cliff when Cutter Dan led his men obliviously into the kill zone. It was a triple-iffy plan, but a more sol
id one required time and bodies they simply didn’t have.

  The blasts had momentarily stunned Ryan. He knew they were coming, or hoped they were. But he couldn’t know precisely when. They were so tremendously powerful that nothing he could have done could have prepared him fully for them, anyway.

  But he never lost consciousness. His focus just...wavered. Momentarily.

  Then it snapped back and he returned to watching the red-earth knee. If any of the sec men had escaped the explosions and landslide, and still somehow had the balls and heart to press the attack, they’d come this way. It was his job to deal with them so there’d be no flank attacks on Ricky, Doc and J.B.

  He was also keenly aware of the two scouts who had flashed through his field of vision and vanished. Of course, after the summary way Ryan had dealt with the trio of mercies who followed them, and the earth-shattering series of explosions that had just swallowed up much if not all of the force they were scouting for, they might well have decided that discretion was the better part of valor and chosen just to bug out while the bugging was good.

  No, Ryan thought. He wasn’t that lucky on his best day. And, if anything, he’d used up all the luck he had coming in the past twelve hours or so, plus enough to last for months to come.

  A dark shadow detached itself from the dawn half-light to his right and flew toward him. Then Ryan rolled violently to his left side, bringing up his longblaster defensively. A dark figure landed on him like a chunk of the great red cliff.

  * * *

  THE SAVAGE MODEL 110 cracked and kicked Ricky’s right shoulder.

  The report wasn’t currently bothering him, but only because his ears were still ringing so badly from the dynamite packets going off moments before. The recoil took some getting used to, though. The .270 Winchester cartridge was way more powerful than the pistol-caliber DeLisle he was accustomed to shooting, and had a sharp recoil for its power. At least, for him.

  A bullet cracked over his head, and he winced, but he still jacked the bolt as the blaster came back down.

  Ricky had fired only a few shots and his shoulder already stung. He wondered if it was separating. He didn’t know what that meant, exactly. He hoped he wouldn’t have to find out.

  To Ricky’s right lay J.B., who was cranking the action of a .30-30 Marlin. He was a decent sniper, but his real role would come when the attackers got close enough for him to take them out with bursts from his 9 mm Uzi machine pistol, which was laid out by his right leg. His Smith & Wesson M-4000 shotgun lay by his left leg, but if the marshals got close enough for that, he, Doc and Ricky were probably as good as staring up at the slowly disappearing stars overhead anyway.

  Doc had scavvied a Remington 700 in 7.62 mm, the same cartridge Ryan’s Steyr Scout used. The old man was normally content with his massive replica LeMat handblaster, but he was a fair shot with a longblaster when he had to be.

  And he did. The bulk of the sec men waiting in the Wild had been flushed out by the blaze Jak set, and now they were coming fast, shooting as they ran.

  The dawn was still not fully blown, but it was no longer cellar dark. The wall of fire had already passed beyond the enemies immediately to the front of the three defenders.

  There were no consecrated priests back in Ricky’s peaceful coastal ville on Puerto Rico’s southern coast, but the self-styled Catholic padre who held sway in the ville hadn’t liked to talk about hell. He said there was a sort of hell on Earth nowadays, after the Big Nuke and skydark. He held that hell was only there to burn the sin out of the very worst, very most deliberately self-lost souls. Like the coldhearts who had destroyed Ricky’s ville, murdered his family before his eyes and carried his adored older sister, Yamile, off to slavery. When Ricky thought about hell at all, which was seldom, he thought those slavers would be in the darkest, hottest corner, burning for all eternity.

  The sounds that had come from the roaring heart of that fire had brought those awful memories to life with a vividness Ricky had never before experienced. He knew he’d experience it over and over now, though. In his dreams.

  If he lived.

  The infernal wave was dwindling, already three hundred yards or so to the east, as the predawn west wind that had propelled it so lethally fast died back. Its orange glare, and the lights of the scattered fires that burned in the blackened tangle its passing had left, combined with the faint but perceptibly growing sunlight to render the attacking sec men as distinct man-like blobs. It was more than enough to shoot by.

  Ricky lined up on the closest man. He was no more than a hundred yards off. He couldn’t make out any details of the man’s face; it was just a gray blur above the darker blur of his body. But just the hunch of his body as he ran told Ricky he was driven by confusion and desperation as much as anything else, as if he didn’t have any idea of what to do right now except charge straight at the foe.

  Just as Ricky squeezed the trigger, the man turned his body right, still running, to fire a shot from the hip from his carbine. Ricky’s 130-grain slug, which he’d aimed for the center of mass, caught his target on the right side of the chest instead, or perhaps in the shoulder, from the way he spun as he went down.

  Ricky was already looking for new targets as he worked the action of his longblaster again. Too many enemies were still on their feet and still coming fast to waste time on a wounded enemy, especially one who’d dropped completely out of sight in front of the gradual slope of fallen dirt that led to the camp.

  From the right came a strobing muzzle flare, seeming disproportionately bright. Bullets kicked up dirt and bits of vegetation right in front of Ricky. Someone was firing a longblaster fullauto at him, and from the sound and the size of the flames, the shooter couldn’t be any farther than fifty yards out.

  Ricky couldn’t help trying to scrunch himself down harder into the ground. The clay was held firmly by the roots of the brush and grasses that screened him, and well compressed by the boots and bodies of the four men who had camped on the ledge for two days. It didn’t give any more than concrete would.

  The blaster’s jittery fire dance ended. Almost immediately it commenced again.

  Now Ricky successfully got control of his brain and body. Mostly. It was enough. He tried to shift aim to the automatic rifleman. From the sound of his weapon, he was shooting the Heckler & Koch G3. J.B. had identified the blaster last sunset, when Cutter Dan used it to call attention to his ultimatum.

  The fresh burst kicked dirt directly into Ricky’s eyes. He cried out, blinking furiously to clear the stinging fragments. Bullets cracked overhead.

  Nuestra Señora, pray for me, he thought. He realized his own most recent shot had given his position away to the shooter.

  The burst ended and a third began. The earth shook beneath Ricky as bullets hit the slope directly in front of him. They began to walk inexorably upward toward him, and his vision was still too tear-misted for him to sight on the man who was about to chill him.

  A nearby longblaster roared and the distant shooter fell back.

  “Even I could see you, lighting yourself up like that, you stupe son of a bitch,” J.B. said in satisfaction.

  “By the Three Kennedys, they’re running!” Doc yelled, his voice crazily exultant. “They’re broken! Flee you caitiff dogs! Flee the wrath to come!”

  The old man cranked off the last three shots in his blaster’s internal magazine. Ricky’s eyes finally cleared up enough to see that Doc was wasting ammo—a cardinal sin in Ryan’s rule book. The Second Chance marshals were, indeed, turning away, mostly racing off to the east as fast as they could, so Ricky couldn’t find it in his heart to blame the old man.

  Now that it looked as if he’d live and all, Ricky realized that what was amazing wasn’t that the sec men broke when they did.

  Given the terrible blazing death they’d so narrowly escaped, and the fate of their commander and d
ozens more of their comrades, and after they’d run straight into blasterfire aimed from a powerful defensive position, it was amazing that they had pressed the attack as long as they had.

  Ricky jumped slightly when J.B. slapped him on the shoulder. He turned to see the Armorer squatting over him and grinning.

  “Time to shift out of here, kid,” J.B. said. “Time to go hunt up Ryan and then head back to Second Chance to rescue Millie and Krysty, since it looks like we’re going to live a little longer.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Dawn light broke against a bright blade and glanced into Ryan’s eye. He smelled sweat and old wool. Two dark eyes glared down at him from a dark, determined face. He had an impression of a hat rolling away on its brim.

  He never knew how he’d spotted the Indian just on the raw, ragged edge of too late to do any good. It might have been peripheral vision—the man had made no more noise than even the loudest daybreak. Or it might just have been a seasoned warrior’s sense for the approach of danger.

  His assailant’s full weight was lying angled across his Scout longblaster. The man had one hand clamped on the weapon and the other raised over his head with the saw-backed KA-BAR-style blade jutting downward.

  Pushing hard with his right boot, Ryan continued with his counterclockwise roll. At the same time, he shoved up forcefully with his right hand, throwing the man off him to the left.

  As he bounced off the clay wall, Ryan jackknifed forward. He managed to get into a kneeling position before his attacker recovered and started to get up. He swung the carbine hard left, trying to slam the man across the side of the head with the buttstock.

  The man caught it with his left hand and held on tight. He threw his weight back down, trying to drag Ryan into reach of his fighting knife.

  Ryan let go of the longblaster, slipped the sling, and jumped to his feet. He drew his panga, simply because his hand was closer to its hilt than to the butt of his SIG and fractions of seconds counted.