Hanging Judge Read online

  “But the rest of us? We’re no slouches, either. We’ve all proved ourselves. And we all say it’s a bad idea.”

  She had come that close to saying “stupe.” While she seldom held back from speaking her mind to the man she loved with all her heart and soul—to say nothing of her body—she reckoned now was the time for tact.

  His face was as hard as flint when it turned to her.

  “What if I decided to go ahead and go anyway?”

  She laughed, genuinely, openly. Because if she wasn’t honest with Ryan, they truly weren’t life partners.

  “Then you’d do what you wanted to do,” she said. “Of course. And we’d back you to the hilt. Of course. Nothing that hasn’t happened before. We remember all too well the times we said to go one way, and you insisted that we go the other, and you were right and we were wrong, and you saved us all.”

  But she couldn’t resist adding, “This just isn’t one of them.”

  For a moment his face stayed stone. Then it didn’t so much soften as move into the crooked, knowing smile she knew and loved.

  “Well—happens you’re right about that, too,” he said. “Trader used to quote an old book that says ‘pride goeth before a fall.’ Pride’s an even more stupid thing to get iced over than jack is.”

  She drew a deep breath and sighed it out, enjoying the way his eye followed the rise and fall of her breasts inside her shirt. Too bad they were too tired to carry that further—and needed too badly to conserve and build up every scrap of energy for whatever fresh hell the next day would bring.

  His grin widened.

  “Now that we’ve got that behind us, what are we going to do tomorrow?” Mildred asked.

  “Keep heading north. Same as we did after we ran the sec men into the centipedes. We heard tell Second Chance is smack dab in the middle of the Wild, more or less. We’ve got no idea exactly where, but we still do know the Wild ends someplace. We’ve been from one end of the continent to the other, from the north to the south. And up till we landed in it, the only thing we knew about this mess was that it was there.”

  He glared around the low fire. “Or am I going to hear backtalk over that, too?”

  The others stared at him fearfully, Krysty included. It was J.B. who chuckled first.

  Ryan cracked a smile. The others joined in the relieved laughter. Maybe too long and too loud. But some things, Krysty knew, a body had to do. Whatever the risks.

  “All right, everyone,” Ryan said firmly, cutting off the hilarity when he reckoned it had gone on long enough. “Time to turn in. J.B., I’ll let you have first watch—just so you and all the rest of you nervous Nellies don’t try to sleep with one eye open worrying I’ll go for a walkabout on my own.

  “If you got to take a piss, do it in the vines. You got to squat, dig a hole and cover it up triple quick. And aim your ass outward!”

  Chapter Eighteen

  The second hard hit Jak felt was the planet, slamming into his shoulders.

  And the third was when Earth collided with the back of his skull, half a heartbeat later.

  He just lay there for a moment, trying to breathe and blink away the bloated green balloons of afterimage that floated behind his eyelids. His whole face ached. He wanted to puke. He lacked even the energy to do that.

  And he had sobered up enough to know with cold-steel certainty that his night was about to get a whole lot worse. For the entire rest of his life.

  His attackers were whooping it up around him. A lucid fragment of his mind recalled with dismay that it had been an especially rowdy night inside the Last Resort. Then the siren song of Jak’s full bladder became too loud to ignore. One of the locals named Bat-Ear Harv was having a birthday. He was a gaudy regular, and he and a group of his buddies were raising the roof.

  Jak’s assailants could blow him to pieces with a wag-chiller rocket without much chance of alerting anybody inside.

  A boot toe pushed Jak’s upturned face one way, then the other. At this range the smell of horseshit was overpowered by the stink of dirty foot. It smelled like cheese that had rotted runny.

  “What’s it feel like, mutie?” Ferd’s voice came from some unscalable height. “Knowing we’re about to bust every bone in that crime-agin-nature body of yours?”

  It was unscalable by Jak in his present, sadly reduced condition, he thought bitterly. Under most circumstances he would have scaled it already, like a monkey on jolt, and be on the fucker’s shoulders laughing as he cut his throat through that ugly-ass neck beard. But he could no more have stirred from the hard, cold ground of Meg’s back lot than he could’ve flown to the moon by flapping his arms.

  The boot raised to hang poised, a foot above Jak’s face. He raged in silent frustration. He could not move. The feeling of helplessness was as black as any he’d ever known.

  Something caught the edge of his peripheral vision. He cut his eyes that way, left.

  He glimpsed a scurry of shadowy motion that seemed to be behind one of the larger, still unidentified shadows standing over him. Then, out of the night, a two-by-four came whistling to crack itself over the back of the wag-man’s head with a noise like a gunshot.

  At least, Jak thought it was the board breaking.

  His boot still in midair, Ferd looked to his right. The end of the board promptly stabbed him in the middle of his face. Jak heard his nose break. This time, the end of the board split clean off, as Ferd staggered back, wailing like a lost dog and clutching his ruined, blood-spewing snout.

  Behind Jak’s head, he heard Jeff curse. The shorter man’s boots crunched on the dirt as he turned to face the sudden, mysterious threat.

  The ability to move was slowly returning to Jak. He managed to crane his head back to see Jeff lunge forward, swinging his right fist in a wild haymaker.

  Jak was in time to see the fresh board end, jagged and splintery, jab him hard in the throat.

  Jeff went down choking, clutching his neck and kicking.

  The last coldheart, the other wag-man whose face Jak still hadn’t seen, started to step over Jak’s body from the albino’s right toward the unseen attacker. Jak grabbed a leg, hugged it close to this chest with both arms and rolled to his left. His weight buckled the knee and sent the man pitching forward.

  His face hit a rapidly rising knee. It snapped back. Then it was snapped hard sideways by a baseball-bat swing of the board. Though they whizzed by fast, Jak noticed the hands that gripped it. Even in the gloom he could tell, from just that flash, they were small, dark and shiny.

  Ferd came roaring back like an angry bear. “You little mutie bitch!” he yelled through the blood that still dripped over his mouth. “I will fuck you up!”

  He lunged for her, swiping with his arms. Jak heard a musical laugh.

  “Missed me!” he heard the kitchen girl sing out.

  Ferd charged after her. Jak saw a skinny, tiny form flit by him. She skipped past Jak’s toes, laughing taunts.

  Focused on the hot-beyond-nuke-red Ferd, she failed to notice the first man she’d clubbed climbing to his feet.

  “Fucking...mutie slut,” he said, his words slurred as if he’d drunk a quart of Towse lightning. “Chill...your taint ass, then ream it.”

  He was shaking his head like a lung-shot buffalo bull as he stood. Apparently the two-by-four hadn’t caved in the back of his skull. Or had, and whatever it had caved in he didn’t use enough to matter. But it had gotten good and scrambled by the blow.

  As the girl deftly sidestepped another screaming charge from Ferd, the man drew a handblaster, cocked it, and aimed it. It was a big 1911-style semiauto, a .45, more than likely. He swung the remade blaster around at the full extension of his right arm, trying to draw bead on the laughing girl.

  Jak knew that the way the two were throwing themselves this way and that in
the dark, the wag-man had as much chance of hitting Ferd as the kitchen girl. Better, as big as Ferd was.

  But Jak was not willing to take the chance. He still felt like what he’d heard J.B. call “hammered dogshit.” His head was spinning one way and his stomach the other, and it felt as if his body and limbs were sausage bags of spoiled milk.

  The wag-man with the blaster sure seemed to count Jak out. He took a two-hand grip on the 1911 as he tried to track his target on her zigzagging course, which seemed to be bringing her closer to the shitter. His feet shuffled as he turned to try bring the weapon to bear.

  He turned away from Jak. The albino’s numb fingers found the hilt of his trench knife. They slipped inside and pulled it free with the blade pointing downward from his fist.

  “Gotcha now, bitch!” the man yelled.

  Jak rolled over and sank the knife into the back of the man’s right knee. He thought he felt it punch through the cartilage and wedge apart the rounded tips of the shin and thigh bones.

  The blade only stopped when it hit the kneecap from the back.

  The blaster went off, almost straight up toward the stars. Joyous rage returned Jak’s strength to him. The wag-man dropped, howling, to that buckled knee. His shrieks rose an octave as Jak tore the blade free.

  The wag-man shrieked even louder as his ruined knee hit the ground, hard. He threw himself onto his left side, dropping the blaster to clutch at his leg.

  Jak threw himself on top of him. As much by feel as sight he crawled up him. Then, sitting astride the man’s upturned right shoulder, he raised the trench knife two-handed, as high as he could reach above his head.

  He intended to stab it into the wag-man’s eye, but the bastard was whipping his head side to side, oblivious to the fact Jak was sitting on top of him and to everything but his own personal world of hurt.

  Instead the clipped tip of the blade took him in the right temple. It punched right on through the bone and the brain beneath.

  As light as Jak was, as weak as he’d felt mere seconds before, the knife punched clean out the far side of the wag-man’s head and pinned it to the dirt.

  Letting go of the hilt, Jak rolled off the twitching chill. He landed hard on his right, with his head toward the shitter.

  A bellow from Ferd made Jak pull his head back to look. He watched as the bearded wag-man put his head down and charged the tiny girl.

  She stood waiting, empty-handed, until he was almost on top of her. Then she jumped to the side.

  Ferd smashed head-on into the shitter door. He split it right down the middle and powered on through. From the additional crashing and splintering Jak heard, he judged the big man had busted up the crapper platform inside, too.

  He rolled onto his stomach and tried to stand up. He managed to get up onto hands and knees. From inside the shitter Jak heard protracted groaning and banging, and more wood splintering.

  Then the noise stopped. A moment later, out strolled the kitchen girl, smoothing back her short hair from her face, which wore a satisfied expression.

  “What happen?” he asked.

  “I jumped on his back till the boards gave way beneath him,” she said. “You might say that he’s in really deep shit, now.”

  He wanted to challenge that outrageous assertion, but then he bent over and started to puke his guts out.

  And his consciousness too, apparently, since he blacked out in the middle of it all.

  * * *

  LUKEWARM WATER SPLASHING his face brought Jak back to the land of the living.

  He wasn’t happy about the fact. His head and body both felt as if they’d been turned inside out. His everything hurt.

  He sat up, coughing and sputtering. His brain seemed to freewheel briefly inside his skull. Somehow he didn’t topple over.

  He forced his eyes open. The yard behind the Last Resort was full of people, and the yellow light of lanterns.

  Meg stood a few feet from him, bent toward him with hands on her tree-trunk thighs and a look of something that resembled concern on her big blunt face.

  “You’ll live, boy, I reckon,” she said, straightening. “Though you might not be double glad of the fact for a spell yet. You look like you been drug through a knothole backward, and smell worse. Tony! Elián! Bring beaucoups more water. We’ve got to sluice him off enough to get him someplace to scrub up proper.”

  Jak looked around the yard. The faces looking back were only lamp-lit blurs. He felt his stomach starting to rebel again and was glad there was nothing left inside it to throw up

  “What...about...Jeff and Ferd?” he croaked.

  Meg put her hands on her wide hips and scowled.

  “Never you mind about them. We’ll take care of them from here. We know how to deal with that kind of wag-trash.”

  “And girl?”

  “I’m fine,” a voice said brightly from his other side. “You are so welcome for my saving your life.”

  He turned and blinked at her. She stood just a couple feet away. For some reason he noticed she was prettier than he’d thought before.

  Maybe it was the way she was grinning at him.

  “And thank you for saving mine.”

  She learned forward and kissed his forehead, which he knew was drenched with sweat and probably things much less pleasant.

  “Ew, Chally!” he heard a young male voice call out.

  Then the world started turning super-fast around him and he fell right out of it. Again.

  * * *

  “WH-WHERE...AM?”

  “I take it that’s how you ask, ‘where am I?’ in that goofy-ass truncated dialect of English you speak. Where are you from, anyway? Mars?”

  Jak turned his head toward the voice. He could feel that his head was on a pillow; softness underlay his body. He took that for a good thing.

  It wasn’t the dirt of the yard, and none of it was hitting him in the eyes. Bonus.

  Speaking of eyes, it occurred to him at last to open his. He saw that he was in the room he’d rented for the night on the second story of the Last Resort. He was on the bed, by the relative position of the door and the table with the single oil-burning lantern on it.

  By its light, Chally was hanging his damp clothes on a rope she’d strung from wall to wall with carved-vinewood pins.

  “No,” he said. “Louisiana.”

  “Well, that’s close. You must’ve made a favorable impression on Meg, for her to spring to clean you and your clothes twice in one day.”

  “Any water? Mouth awful.”

  Chally walked to a small table and grabbed a mug, which she passed to him.

  Jak accepted it gratefully, took a drink, rolled the water around in his mouth, then leaned over and spit into a small waste can. Then he took a long drink, handed over the mug and leaned back.

  He tapped his chest with a finger.

  “Jak.”

  “So they say,” she said.

  She was wearing a dark T-shirt and extremely abbreviated canvas shorts. Her legs were long and actually had a bit of shape. As slim as she was, she wasn’t a total stick figure.

  For some unknown reason, the fact began to interest him.

  “What ’bout...coldhearts?”

  “You don’t want to know,” she said. “Upshot was, Bo paid a wag-man—a local wag-man, none of their trash—to haul them into the Wild and dump them.”

  “Right,” Jak said. “Not want know.”

  “Meg takes her hospitality triple seriously,” Chally said. She finished pinning up the last of his clothes. It was his jacket. She’d wisely chosen to hang it by the bottom, with the sleeves trailing on the floor, to avpoid touching the glass and metal fragments sewn all over it. Splashes of puke clung to the jacket, so Chally sluiced it with a few buckets of water to get the ga
rment clean.

  She turned to him.

  “Meg says that in days like ours, a person has greater need for firm principles than ever. Whatever those principles may be. She’s right.”

  “What...principles?” Jak asked.

  Somehow she caught his drift. “Look out for myself,” she said. “And look out for those who treat me right.”

  She drew her T-shirt up over her head. Her skin was bare beneath. Her breasts were tiny, the nipples little cones that were actually lighter-colored than the rest.

  He felt his eyes widen.

  She was surprisingly worth seeing. She was a skinny young woman, no mistake. Her hips were barely wider than her waist. But her bush was a mysterious and inviting tangle as dark as her gleaming thighs, and her eyes were wide in a breathtakingly beautiful face.

  He would have said the last thing he was ready for was sex. But his cock said otherwise as she swayed toward him by the lamplight.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Ryan heard just the merest scuff of sound from his right. Long before his conscious brain identified as the scrape of leaves on fabric, he dropped to the game trail and yelled, “Ambush! Down!”

  Blasterfire boomed from the thorn vines, so close that the muzzle flare stabbed like a yellow spike right to where Ryan’s right side had been an eyeblink earlier.

  He drew his SIG. He saw a stain-streaked pants leg and a boot on the ground on the other side of the vine-course, not six feet away. He fired two shots at it.

  The tan cloth jerked. A dark spot appeared, an inch above the boot, spreading fast. The sec man screamed, then fell out of Ryan’s line of sight.

  “Don’t shoot, nuke your shriveled balls!” he heard Cutter Dan roar from ahead and to the right. “Take them alive!”

  A couple of shots popped out from the vines Ryan had passed anyway, as the last-to-know types got the message. That was followed by brush thrashing and shouts as Second Chance sec men jumped out of the vines to grapple with the companions on the trail.