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  SCARRED FOR EXISTENCE

  In the Deathlands, the game of survival offers no reprieve. There’s nothing to win in nuke-blasted America except the chance to fight another day. Still, Ryan Cawdor and his fellow travelers hope for sanctuary…somewhere. Until they find it, they face each dawn as if it’s their last. Because it just might be.

  DEVIL’S COURT

  Justice is a damning word in what used to be called Oklahoma, thanks to a sadistic baron known as the Hanging Judge. Crazy, powerful and backed by a despotic sec crew, the judge drops innocents from the gallows at will. When Jak narrowly escapes wearing his own rope as a necktie, a rift among the companions sends them deep into the mutie-infested wilderness outside the ville. Separated and hurting, time is running out for the survivors to realize they’re stronger together than they ever could be alone—before a ruthless madman brings them to the end of their rope.

  “We heard how you did the dirty on us.”

  “Yeah,” Jeff added. “How you snuck around and tricked us into whaling on each other. You taints sure stick together. You must have your own mutie code like us wag dudes have our bro code. High five, Ferd!”

  “High five, Jeff! And the bro code says that now we have to make you pay. We’re gonna stomp you good, and bust your filthy mutie bones.”

  Belatedly Jak made a move for the knuckle-duster hilt of his trench knife. He realized now that he’d drunk himself to the edge of oblivion. Under other circumstances, he’d already have sliced open Jeff’s paunch, dropped his intestines onto the tops of his mud-splattered boots.

  Instead his hand seemed to move, not like a striking sidewinder, but as if he were trying to punch somebody underwater.

  But the fist that filled his vision first with a black moon and then bright exploding stars moved like nuking lightning.

  Other titles in the Deathlands saga:

  Encounter: Collector’s Edition

  Gemini Rising

  Gaia’s Demise

  Dark Reckoning

  Shadow World

  Pandora’s Redoubt

  Rat King

  Zero City

  Savage Armada

  Judas Strike

  Shadow Fortress

  Sunchild

  Breakthrough

  Salvation Road

  Amazon Gate

  Destiny’s Truth

  Skydark Spawn

  Damnation Road Show

  Devil Riders

  Bloodfire

  Hellbenders

  Separation

  Death Hunt

  Shaking Earth

  Black Harvest

  Vengeance Trail

  Ritual Chill

  Atlantis Reprise

  Labyrinth

  Strontium Swamp

  Shatter Zone

  Perdition Valley

  Cannibal Moon

  Sky Raider

  Remember Tomorrow

  Sunspot

  Desert Kings

  Apocalypse Unborn

  Thunder Road

  Plague Lords (Empire of Xibalba Book I)

  Dark Resurrection (Empire of Xibalba Book II)

  Eden’s Twilight

  Desolation Crossing

  Alpha Wave

  Time Castaways

  Prophecy

  Blood Harvest

  Arcadian’s Asylum

  Baptism of Rage

  Doom Helix

  Moonfeast

  Downrigger Drift

  Playfair’s Axiom

  Tainted Cascade

  Perception Fault

  Prodigal’s Return

  Lost Gates

  Haven’s Blight

  Hell Road Warriors

  Palaces of Light

  Wretched Earth

  Crimson Waters

  No Man’s Land

  Nemesis

  Chrono Spasm

  Sins of Honor

  Storm Breakers

  Dark Fathoms

  Siren Song

  Hanging Judge

  I am an American; free born and free bred, where I acknowledge no man as my superior, except for his own worth, or as my inferior, except for his own demerit.

  —Theodore Roosevelt,

  1858–1919

  THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

  This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance.

  There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs in the balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness.

  But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to nature’s heart despite its ruination.

  Ryan Cawdor: The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities.

  Krysty Wroth: Harmony ville’s own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the strength of tempered steel. Her premonitions and Gaia powers have been fostered by her Mother Sonja.

  J. B. Dix, the Armorer: Weapons master and Ryan’s close ally, he, too, honed his skills traversing the Deathlands with the legendary Trader.

  Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn from his family and a gentler life in 1896, Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn’t have imagined.

  Dr. Mildred Wyeth: Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is not much lighter. Restored from predark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.

  Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend.

  Dean Cawdor: Ryan’s young son by Sharona accepts the only world he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.

  In a world where all was lost, they are humanity’s last hope.…

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter One

  “You, Jak Lauren, have been found guilty of the following crimes,” the fat man on the scaffold intoned.

  Marley Toogood wasn’t talking to Jak, who stood on the trapdoor with the rough rope of the noose, still untightened, chafing his bare skin where it hung around his neck. The fat man stood to one side up at the front, addressing the crowd of spectators looking uncomfortable and unhappy in the periodic drizzle from low-hanging, leaden clouds. Jak’s whi
te hair clung to his head and neck, and the soaked-through shoulders of his T-shirt,

  “Pillage, arson, murder, terrorism, treason, disorderly conduct...”

  “Ooh, look at that one,” muttered a woman in the front row, whose shapeless hat mirrored her shape in a rain-soaked dress made out of sacks. “He’s so dangerous looking!”

  “I don’t know,” the woman next to her whispered back. “I think he’s good looking. For a mutie, I mean.”

  The woman was much the same as her companion, only a bit taller and wider. She smelled more strongly of onions, too.

  Jak growled at her. Both women flinched gratifyingly. So did most of the other townspeople in the front row.

  “...destruction of property belonging to the United States of America, and being a mutie.” The fat man lowered the piece of paper from which he had been reading, now soaked almost to transparency, with a look of satisfaction smeared across his broad, wet, bearded face.

  “Not mutie!” Jak snapped.

  “And for speaking disrespectfully to authority,” the fat man added.

  He crumpled his paper and stuffed it in a pocket of his patched suit coat. It had been made for a man much smaller than he was, and the right sleeve was starting to come loose at the seams.

  Jak didn’t know nuke about tailoring, but his ruby-red eyes didn’t miss much.

  The fat man cleared his throat. Then, waving his stubby arms, he launched into a speech about the importance of the public watching justice in action and restoring the nation through displaying the awful majesty of the state.

  Jak tuned him out. The noose was around his neck. His wrists were bound behind him with rough rope. It had been tied skillfully enough that all he got for trying to work his wrists loose was bloody, abraded skin. The U.S. Marshals, as the sec men of the ville named Second Chance liked to style themselves, clearly got lots of practice tying people up.

  But it was not in Jak’s nature to just give up. His every sense was wound tight to respond to the least clue—something, anything—that might lead to a possibility of escape.

  Even if he failed, he would be content if he managed to take some of the bastards with him. That would be ace, too.

  “What the glowing nukeshit is wrong with Toogood?” grumbled one of the men seated in the bleachers behind the scaffold and in front of the solid-built stone courthouse at the ville’s center. “Why does he always insist on lowering himself like this? And why does he insist on going on so rad-blasted long?”

  There were three of them together back there, Jak knew, plus one empty chair waiting for the fat rich bastard when the speechifying ended and the hanging began. The four were the ville’s leading citizens, main backers of the man who was the baron of Second Chance in everything but name.

  “Wrap it up, Marley,” a second man called. “Why do these events have to be made mandatory, anyway? It costs us all plenty in lost time from the laborers. At the very least, couldn’t we cut the schedule back to once or mebbe twice a week, or better, just one big hanging party?”

  “What’s the matter, Mr. Myers?” a voice sounding like a crow’s called from the stands. It came from Jak’s left side. “You’d want to cheat the public of the moral lessons provided by regular public executions? With the country in its deepest time of crisis? You walk mighty close to sedition, there. But, by all means, keep talking—if you’d like to join this scapegrace with a noose around your neck!”

  And he burst out laughing like a crazy man, which he was.

  Only a crazy man would think of calling a sad little ville in the middle of a huge thicket of mutant thorn-bushes that was swarming with monsters “the restored United States,” even if he had managed to conquer a couple of neighboring villes.

  Judge Phineas Santee ruled his vest-pocket Deathlands empire with an iron fist. And the iron fists of Chief Marshal Cutter Dan Sevier, the tall sec boss whom Jak knew stood now at the Judge’s shoulder—and the fists, truncheons and blasters of Cutter Dan’s marshals.

  The rich citizens shut up. Jak glanced over a shoulder. The one on the far right—Bates, his name was, Jak knew too well—was a skinny cuss, whose neck stuck up like a celery stalk from the sweat-and grease-stained, buttoned-up collar of his shirt. He hadn’t said anything.

  Instead, he was examining Jak’s camouflage jacket, with the bits of glass and metal sewn into it. Like Jak’s weapons, his many knives and his Colt Python .357 Magnum handblaster, it had been claimed as a prize by Bates. The man had tried to cheat Jak at his trading post outside town—and then called Jak a criminal when the albino called him on it. Bates turned his head and tossed the jacket back to an employee. The man fielded it gingerly; a couple of marshals who responded to the dustup at Bates’s store had cut their hands trying to come to grips with Jak. They had grabbed the albino by the collar and had their fingers slashed by bits of razor blades.

  Jak smiled at the memory. But briefly. If he got chilled here, his first regret would be not settling his score with that chicken-neck bastard.

  The beefy hand of Santee’s chief executioner grabbed the back of Jak’s head and turned his face firmly forward.

  “No rubbernecking, taint,” the huge man rumbled. Jak swore to himself that he would let the guts out of that big belly, even if he had to come back from the dead to do it.

  As Toogood’s speech finally seemed to start winding down, the sound of hooves splashing in the layer of red water standing on the dense clay mud of Second Chance’s main street reached Jak’s ears. Accompanying that sound was the jingle of harness and the creak of a wooden wag.

  He flicked his eyes to a pair of horses pulling a lightly built wag. It was driven by a man with slumped shoulders and a slouch hat turned down to let the rain fall off the brim before his face. The women were swaddled in black clothes and big hats. They wept and wailed loudly, their voices barely muffled by the huge bouquet of flowers each of them clutched to her face.

  Jak knew those voices.

  He kept the recognition off his face. He’d spent his life having as little to do with other people as humanly possible. But the times he had dealt with others had taught him well to keep his feelings hidden. Even the past few years with his own companions, and they were the closest thing to family he’d really ever known, except for a brief interlude in the southwest that ended in tragedy.

  The crowd noticed too. Elbows nudged; heads turned.

  “What’s this?” Judge Santee exclaimed. “Who are you people? What do you mean by this?”

  “Stop there!” Cutter Dan barked.

  The wag obligingly halted, roughly twenty yards from the crowd and the cordon of sec men that kept them cowed in place. A couple of marshals moved toward it as if to investigate.

  “Spare this poor boy!” the taller of the women cried.

  “Spare him his life,” the shorter, stocky woman added.

  “Not a chance,” Santee called. His voice did carry, even if it more screeched than boomed, the way his sec boss’s did. “The quality of mercy is not strained. And it has no place in the administration of justice!”

  Jak could tell the Judge was smiling. Santee smiled a lot. He was well equipped for it: he had a face like a skull with a wet sheet shrunk to the front of it and giant teeth that he frequently showed off in a thin-lipped smile.

  “And now, let justice be delayed no longer! Mr. Beemish, execute the sentence!”

  The executioner reached his bare, burly arm toward the lever that would spring the trapdoor beneath Jak’s feet and drop him until the noose brought him up short by snapping his neck. At least the Judge didn’t believe in letting victims of his unique brand of justice dangle and strangle, like some barons did.

  The shorter woman stood up in the wag box. “Not a fucking chance!” she shouted.

  She hurled the bouquet as far as her strong arm could. It fell amid th
e crowd. Before the bouquet even hit, the other woman did the same.

  Like the first, her bouquet left a trail of smoke white against the gray, leaking sky.

  “It’s a bomb!” Toogood shrieked in a high-pitched voice. He turned and dived off the back of the scaffold as the bouquets erupted in clouds of dense, choking smoke.

  * * *

  WITH A HEAVE of his shoulder, Ryan Cawdor yanked the quick-release lever J.B. Dix and his apprentice in mischief, Ricky Morales, had rigged for the horses.

  As smoke boiled out of the concealed bombs, he glanced quickly back to see Krysty Wroth and Mildred Wyeth take their seats and hunker down, trying to make themselves the smallest possible targets in case any of the sec men got twitchy trigger fingers. They were both plucking at their dark, voluminous skirts, to prevent the fabric wrapping them up and interfering with their role in the next stage of the plan.

  Which was escape. Ryan saw Doc Tanner pounding up the street toward them on an eye-rolling black horse. He led two more animals, saddled and ready for the women to ride out of the ville.

  Ryan turned his head forward. He gathered himself and jumped onto the back of the right-hand horse that had, until a moment ago, been hitched to the front of the wag.

  Screaming people rushed out of the smoke in all directions. They were completely freaked by the sudden, choking smoke. Following them were Santee’s marshals, swearing and waving clubs and blasters, trying to corral them and herd them back to watch the hangings like good little citizens.

  Ryan booted his mount, which lunged forward. Its companion came along, since Ryan held a long lead rein attached to its bridle. He urged the animals straight into the impenetrable wall of smoke.

  A sec man lurched in front of him. He was trying to bat the smoke away with a hand holding some kind of wheel gun. His face was bright red, and he bellowed orders for the fleeing citizens to stop.

  His blue eyes got wide as he saw Ryan and two horses bearing down on him. Ryan’s mount knocked the man down to its left and kept on going.

  The other horse trampled right over the screaming figure.

  Ryan held his breath as he plunged into the smoke. He felt people bumping into him but no more went down.