Hanging Judge

by James Axler

  Then it seemed he stumbled, almost as if drunk.

  The huge, burly man fell on his face. A dark pool began to spread out over the planks around him.

  The rebels from the crowd gained the platform.

  Toogood didn’t wait any longer. Uttering a yelp of despair, he turned and jumped off the rear of the scaffold.

  He twisted his left ankle sorely when he landed but scuttled off toward the nearest cover as if nothing had happened.

  WISH I’D GOT a decent crack at that bastard Judge, Mildred thought. She twisted open the bolt of the longblaster and slammed a fresh cartridge home.

  She was perched on the flat roof of a two-story building a block west of the gallows, on the far side of the street from the courthouse. It gave her a nice clean shot at the gallows and the semicircle of sec men holding the crowd in place around it. But, to her intense annoyance, it didn’t offer an unobstructed line of fire to the box behind—where Santee and his partners in crime were sitting.

  The plan, such as it was, hadn’t allowed much leeway for scouting for an ideal sniper’s nest. Or any scouting at all. They had to rely on the locals’ knowledge of their own ville, which was fine; she figured they knew the damn place. But it left little margin for error if Suazo had thought to hide some of the newly arrived sec men in case of trouble.

  And trouble had come to Second Chance. No question about that. The $64,000 Question was whom it was going to be the most trouble for.

  Santee’s sec men hustled him out of the VIP box and into the courthouse without giving Mildred anything resembling a shot. When she switched aim over the open sights back to the box itself, she didn’t see any targets. She wondered what had happened to the pair of plutocrats who’d been perched there.

  One of the people who’d climbed up onstage, as it were, turned forward and flung her broad-brimmed hat away. It was Sharleez.

  “People of Second Chance,” she cried. “Now is the time for your ville to live up to its name! Rise up and throw off the chains of those who so cruelly oppress you!”

  It was a bold move, if a foolhardy one. But Mildred guessed now was the best time to try to get as many of the citizens as possible to throw in with the insurrection. Not just the ones still milling around on the street by the gallows, mostly looking to get away without being spotted, but the ones undoubtedly watching and listening from behind closed doors and shutters. And the hundreds more cowering indoors throughout the ville, willing to defy the order to turn out to watch their innocent neighbors and friends be hanged, but too scared to take any more direct action.

  Mildred expected shots from Santee’s crowd control detail to knock Sharleez right off her soapbox. Then she saw they were too occupied with actually trying to control the crowd. Even the ones who hadn’t been jumped from behind by revolutionaries who’d infiltrated the audience were now grappling with the majority of onlookers who were simply trying to get the hell out of there.

  “Shit,” Mildred said. She kept looking for targets, but there was too much confusion. Too many bodies were in the way.

  The two approaching mobs were getting close to the gallows now. Mildred guessed that only a few people in either bunch had much stomach for a direct fight. The others were going along on the basis of feeling safety in numbers—like any mob.

  Krysty was with the one coming in from the east. Though she wore a bandanna over her head to prevent the sec men from recognizing her distinctive flame-red hair, she was walking with the aid of a cane and had a ginormous bloody bandage wrapped around the thigh of her left leg, which was a complete fake. Her leg still pained her, she said, but it had healed up well enough for her to get around on it unaided. It wasn’t likely to open up and start bleeding again. The blood had come from a spare rooster bound for the stewpot.

  Word had naturally gotten out about Krysty’s miraculous feat in breaking the prisoners out of Santee’s jail. The story had also gone around how she’d fought against Cutter Dan’s marshals to the very last, and had only been captured because she took a mutie spear to the thigh. Krysty and Sharleez had both thought they could play up those tales to help put some steel in the spines of their would-be street rioters.

  Mildred looked back toward the struggle between the sec men and citizens around the gallows. Then she found out what had happened to at least one of the rich ville folk who’d been next to Santee. She heard a rebel who was helping free the noosed hostages cry a warning to Sharleez. She turned her head to see the little, fussily neat dude—Gein, she heard he was called—pop up and point a blaster at the firebrand’s back.

  Mildred swung her longblaster toward him, already knowing she’d be too late to do anything but avenge Sharleez. But the young woman wheeled rapidly. She had the Beretta M9 they’d taken from the leader of the sec squad they’d trapped the night before last.

  She emptied the blaster in Gein’s direction. He fell back into the box, discharging his own piece harmlessly into the air. Sharleez didn’t seem to be a very good shot, and exhibited lamentable trigger control. But this time, at least, she’d gotten the job done.

  Mildred was starting to feel antsy. She still hadn’t got off a shot since the one that had dropped the fat bastard of an executioner.

  But what really made her skin creep was the thought that kept ringing in her head: This is too easy.

  And as if that thought had been a self-fulfilling prophecy, from up the street she heard longblasters being rack and shots fired.

  Near Krysty, limping proudly along at the head of the mob, people began to fall to the ground, writhing.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  “Take cover!” Krysty shouted, as blasterfire ripped into the crowd from the courthouse.

  The red-haired beauty lost no time following her own advice. She dropped her cane and raced for the buildings on the south side of the street. She drew her revolver, a Ruger Security Six taken from an ambushed sec man.

  Shots spattered the street. A woman right in front of Krysty gasped and fell. Krysty ran past her. She hated not being able to help, but she wouldn’t be a help if she took a bullet too.

  Her goal here, and Mildred’s, was to do what they could to get themselves, their men and their friends free of the clutches of Judge Santee and his murderous sec men. Everything else was a side issue.

  People were breaking into the buildings across the main street from the courthouse. The generally dilapidated state of the structures helped. Krysty spotted a window without glass and dived through.

  The floor was mildew-splashed, warped hardwood. Dust and mold hung thick in the air from others who had barged in through the doors and windows ahead of her. Now they huddled by the baseboards, some still clutching ax handles and hoes they’d carried in brave defiance of Santee and his law. They didn’t seem so brave now.

  But then, neither did Krysty. And Sharleez had insisted she get one of the few blasters. Mainly because she knew how to use one better than almost anyone in the ville who wasn’t already a sec man.

  Shots occasionally cracked and whined in through the empty windows. The rotting walls would barely slow down a well-thrown rock, much less a bullet. But the marshals followed the usual pattern of shooting at openings when no actual targets presented themselves.

  Krysty risked a quick look over the sill. The blasterfire was coming from the barricaded steps and upper windows of the gray stone courthouse across the street. Before she ducked she saw sec men dumping sandbags across the wide doorway to provide better cover. The jail annex—which Krysty now knew wasn’t stout redbrick at all, but some kind of fake covering over cinder block—had no external windows, which meant the sec men couldn’t shoot out of it.

  The street was clear except for bodies that were rolling back and forth and moaning, and ones that lay still. The rest of the crowd of several dozen who had accompanied Krysty during the march toward the gal
lows had found shelter of their own. Or had simply run away.

  The plan, such as it was, had been to try to lure Suazo’s marshals into a battle in the streets. Sharleez and the volunteers who scaled the scaffold had been willing to expose themselves to close range blasterfire in order to keep Santee and his protectors in the open. Like the short-haired young firebrand, the others had lost close family members to those gallows, and with them at least some of their will to live. Though she hadn’t said so, Krysty also knew Sharleez was hoping to get a shot at the Judge herself, and if that cost her her life, she reckoned it was worth it.

  The sec men in the courthouse were numerous and cagey about popping up to shoot and then quickly ducking. If she had been a crack handblaster shot like Mildred, Krysty might have been able to pick off some of them. As it was, she was reluctant to waste any of her handful of cartridges on targets she had scarcely any hope of hitting.

  But nobody had counted on the Judge, who certainly projected the image of a man who cared about nothing but his obsession for watching people hang by the neck until dead, showing such a brisk regard for the sanctity of his hide. Krysty suspected that his Messianic complex was really the passion that ruled him, and the mass-murder thing was more by way of a hobby.

  So now the plan had gone completely to shit. The mob from the east was completely dispersed and suppressed, including Krysty, at least for the present.

  A young man holding a pickax risked a look around the frame of the busted-in door. A shot promptly hit him in the eye and dropped him. Some of the others in the room moaned.

  Now it’s up to Mildred and the rest to save the situation, Krysty thought. Or we’re all in for a really long day.

  * * *

  MOST OF THE crowd that had been standing listlessly before the gallows had run off. Not that Mildred could blame them. The sec men were too preoccupied wrestling with the insurgents who’d struck from concealment among the onlookers to pay any attention to them.

  Now that the bystanders had dispersed, the sec men quickly broke free and fell back into a clump. The ones who hadn’t drawn blasters did so now. They then retreated back beneath the gallows to stand off their former assailants as well as the mob now racing to join them. Two sec men and four of the rebels were down.

  Mildred smiled. “Thanks for the targets, boys,” she said, raising the longblaster and aiming. She picked a kneeling figure, lined him up in her iron sights and squeezed the trigger.

  The man’s head jerked as his muscles spasmed in response to the bullet punching through his chest. He fell forward. Mildred wasn’t a longblaster woman by preference, but she knew her way around one. And she knew how to shoot.

  The other sec men didn’t realize the shot had come from above. They yelled angrily and delivered a withering volley right into the faces of the mob coming at them from the west.

  The rioters screamed and fell back. It looked to Mildred as if only a few were hit, but that didn’t matter. The members of the mob, angry though they were, weren’t tacticians. Few of them were even brawlers. And nobody was eager to get chilled, ever.

  The grand adventure of freedom didn’t seem so magic and alluring when somebody you’d known all your life was suddenly on the ground next to you, huddled in a ball of doomed, intolerable agony around a gutshot.

  Meanwhile, Sharleez and four of her co-conspirators were still atop the gallows. The placement of the VIP box and the angle kept the defenders in the courthouse from being able to sweep the gallows with their fire. The prisoners had long been freed, and had understandably taken the opportunity to climb down the thirteen steps and hightail it out of there. That had left the five rebels unsure exactly how to proceed. So Sharleez had waved her blaster, which to Mildred’s annoyance had the slide locked back in indication the fool girl hadn’t reloaded it, and shouted inspiring slogans at the crowd. Her companions punched the air with their fists and cheered.

  But now, with the sec men right beneath them and shooting at their friends, they found something meaningful to do. At a command from Sharleez one yanked the lever Mildred had prevented the executioner, now well on his way to ambient temperature, from grabbing. The four spring-loaded traps promptly snapped downward. One comically hit a sec man square in the face and knocked him on his butt.

  Sharleez’s four companions, all young men, promptly dropped down through the traps to do battle with the knot of sec men. The last paused momentarily to hold up a hand to stop Sharleez from joining them. He evidently said something convincing, because she turned away from the traps, back toward the front of the scaffold. The youth let himself down to start milling his fists with furious ineffectualness at the embattled sec men.

  “Well, shit,” Mildred said. There went her nice, neat targets.

  Much of the crowd was starting to coalesce again a couple blocks from the action—a block west of Mildred’s own vantage point. That was unusual. Mostly when a group broke and ran the way they had from that first fusillade, they kept on running until they were exhausted. Or found what they thought was a promising place to dig a hole, crawl in and pull it in after them.

  These people are seriously pissed, she thought. And they actually seemed to be responding favorably to Sharleez hopping up and down and waving encouragingly at them from the gallows. She did cut a brave figure, Mildred had to admit. If a person was susceptible to that kind of romantic nonsense.

  She’d seen it get too many people killed, herself.

  Some of the crowd started back toward the gallows and the melee beneath it, only to start going down again as fresh blasterfire pummeled them from an unexpected direction.

  Mildred looked up to see sec men crouched on the roofs of a couple of buildings on the south side of the street, next to the courthouse. They were firing on the crowd with an assortment of longblasters.

  That was a bad sign. If the ville folk lost their nerve, they were done for the day. But at least Mildred had targets again. She shifted her Winchester hunting rifle around, lined up the sights on a man in a gray and black plaid shirt with an SKS, and shot him through the torso.

  The sec men initially had no idea where the chill shot had come from. They were at a height disadvantage that made it harder to see her, since the roofs they were on were one story. They kept shooting down into the crowd. Some of the ville folk, however, realized that if they hugged the building fronts on the south side of the street, the sec men couldn’t shoot at them.

  As they ran for cover, Mildred picked off another marshal. One of the others spotted her. He yelled and pointed. Longblasters were raised to spit yellow fire at her through the dawn half light.

  As shots cracked by her, Mildred shot the bright boy who’d seen her through the neck.

  A weird moaning cry made her look back toward the gallows. A figure appeared as if from nowhere behind Sharleez. Mildred got the impression of a tall, wide-shouldered man whose big square face was a mask of dried blood, and whose blond hair was half dyed pink from blood and red mud.

  She swung her longblaster toward him. Before she could draw a bead, the man was behind Sharleez. The rebel leader was so caught up in cheering her followers on, despite the prime target she was making of herself, that she didn’t respond initially to the desperate warnings being shouted at her.

  It was quickly too late. The tall blood-smeared man locked a brawny arm around her throat and held a humongous knife to her cheek.

  “All right, you traitor scum!” he hollered in a voice that overrode the chaos, the shouts and groans and screams and even the blasterfire. “I’m Cutter Dan, back from hell to teach you bastards the meaning of pain! Now throw down your weapons and surrender or the bitch loses an eye.”

  Mildred started to back away from her position by the roof rampart so she could try to line up a shot on the mysteriously manifesting sec boss with minimal risk of being hit by fire from the snipers on the lower rooftop
s. But the bastard was cunning about ducking behind his hostage to spoil a rescuer’s shot.

  Sharleez’s laudable fighting spirit wasn’t doing her any favors. She fought back furiously, kicking wriggling, batting at the sec boss’s arms and face, which made it was even harder to shoot her captor without hitting her.

  Mildred glanced back to the sec men below her on the roofs across the street. She didn’t want to get so hypnotized by a futile attempt to save Sharleez that she gave one of those boys a chance to nail her. She liked the girl well enough, but in the end, she was just another random encounter in an endless string that stretched across the Deathlands and around the world. Not one of Mildred’s family.

  She swept the roofs with a quick look. There were seven shooters by her count, four on the building to the west, which was slightly higher than the other, though still much lower than Mildred’s vantage point.

  Except—suddenly there were five on one roof, three on the other. A figure reared up behind a sec man who was kneeling to fire a riot gun, snapping its fists to out the sides from the sec man’s throat.

  Blood flew in a sheet, out over the edge of the roof to fall in fine red rain on the street. As the sec man collapsed, Mildred saw the figure who had slit his gullet clearly. A slight figure, with a camouflage jacket and a bone-white face under long white hair.

  Her heart jumped. Jak!

  The albino turned to the next sec man in the firing line. The man glanced over and momentarily froze in surprise as he saw his buddy slumping bonelessly over the edge of the roof. Jak waded into him in a double whirl of his knives. More blood flew.

  Another sec man spun to blast Jak with a lever-action longblaster. Mildred shot him through the cheek. His face exploded in a shower of blood, bone and teeth.

  Jak turned to another foe, dancing deftly forward to put the sec man’s body between him and the man’s last remaining companion.

  And down the street out of the west rode four new arrivals on horses.