Hanging Judge Read online

  “You take his place. You can help carry the redhead if you have to.”

  “Got it, boss,” the huge man said.

  “Ace, Zerblonski. Anyway, all you need to do is get her to the Martonville road, commandeer a wag. Then you can all ride back to Second Chance in style. Do it, Scovul.”

  “Sir!”

  “Don’t we need to press on right away?” asked Yonas, now Cutter Dan’s second in command. “The others are getting away.”

  “Remember where they’re headed,” he told the one-eyed marshal. “They won’t get far. We can take our sweet time from here. Catch our breath, keep an eye out for the muties. Anyway, you don’t seriously think those boys’ll run off and leave these beauties behind, do you?”

  Yonas shrugged. “Never can tell what’s in a coldheart’s mind, boss. Cowards, all of ’em, anyway.”

  Cutter Dan laughed. “Then you haven’t heard the stories about Ryan Cawdor I have. He’s many things, few of them good. But no one who ever faced him ever called him coward.”

  “I heard tell few who ever faced him lived to tell the tale,” Edwards said.

  Cutter Dan showed the beanpole marshal his brightest, widest smile.

  “Well, we’re just about to change that, then, aren’t we?”

  SOMETHING FLICKERED FAST into Ricky’s left-hand peripheral vision. He barely had time to blink his eye and flinch.

  Sheer reflex made him turn his face to the right, away from the unknown object. That meant that the mutie spear, thrown from concealment in the vines, only grazed his left cheek before streaking by to bury itself in the dirt on the right-hand side of the path.

  Ricky yipped and swung his Webley handblaster that way. He saw nothing.

  “Move,” said J.B., who brought up the rear of the four-man party. Ricky obeyed.

  He hadn’t realized he’d even slowed his pace, much less become rooted to the spot.

  The youth dabbed at his cheek with his left hand. His fingers came away spotted with blood. It was dull, almost rust brown in the twilight.

  Doc glanced back around his pack. “Keep pressure on it,” he advised. “That should give it a chance to clot and stop.”

  Ricky nodded and pressed his fingers hard into his cheek. He ignored the brief sting.

  It had been, best as he could calculate, three hours since they’d gotten chased from the clearing of the shrine. The sun had already passed out of sight behind the tangled briars to their left. The warm wind had started up again, leaching the water from their bodies so that Ricky had to drink frequently from his canteen despite his determination to shepherd his dwindling stock of water.

  After the first two hundred yards, Ryan had had them slow, first to a trot, then to a determined walk. It was clear the sec men weren’t giving chase.

  “Cutter Dan knows we’re not going far without Mildred and Krysty,” Ryan had said.

  “The man’s too clever by half, as my English friends would say,” Doc said, adding sadly, “Would have said.”

  “Nothing worse than a clever sec boss,” J.B. stated. “Not even a stickie with a can of gas and a light.”

  That was when a mutie jumped out of the thicket and slashed at the Armorer with a clawed hand. J.B. leaped nimbly back. The swipe only laid open the tip of his nose.

  “Dark night,” he grunted, then crushed the creature’s narrow skull with an overhand swing of his M-4000’s stock.

  Since that moment they had been shadowed relentlessly by the muties Ricky couldn’t help thinking of as dinosaurs, even if they were covered in feathers. Most of the time they didn’t attack. They just stayed a constant presence, evidenced by chirps and whistles as they communicated with each other, the odd rustle or shaking of the thorns and glimpses of sinuous bodies sliding along the vines or racing along the ground.

  When they did attack, they attacked solo, almost always from the left, now. The spear thrown at Ricky had been an anomaly. The creatures continued to show a marked preference for getting up close and personal with their foes.

  Ricky took his fingers off his cheek and checked them for fresh blood. There wasn’t much.

  “Why aren’t they pressing us harder? The way they swarmed us back at the clearing I thought they were determined to finish us off.”

  “They mostly wanted us to leave, then,” J.B. said. “Now they’re blaster shy. We chilled a lot of them. Hurt a bunch more. If we’re off their special patch of Wild, they’re not as bold.”

  “Is it possible that what are attacking us are young, unfledged warriors,” Doc asked, “seeking individual glory, or perhaps to win full membership in the tribe?”

  “Possible,” Ryan said.

  Ricky was surprised Ryan would comment. As keen a mind as he knew their leader to have, Ricky was often surprised and not infrequently exasperated that Ryan showed so little interest in knowledge for its own sake.

  But when their survival was at stake, Ryan was triple curious. Ricky realized that this whole time Ryan had been driving his mind hard, trying to figure out why the muties kept attacking them, both in order to try to predict some of their moves in advance and to figure out how to make them stop.

  It was better, Ricky realized, than thinking about the fate of his friend Mildred and his life-mate, Krysty. Though once he’d cooled down from his initial panic, Ricky had also seen that Ryan was right, as usual. For now, the captured women were safer than the men were.

  “Which begs the question,” Doc said. “Why do they continue to harry us at all?”

  “Keep us heading the right direction,” Ryan said grimly.

  “And they only chuck crap at us when we slow down,” J.B. said pointedly to Ricky’s back.

  “Sorry!” Ricky’s cheeks flushed.

  Fortunately for him, the game trail had been steadily widening for the last half hour or so. The reason wasn’t hard to work out. Other trails kept joining it from the sides.

  “We need to start scouting for a place to camp for the night,” J.B. called to Ryan.

  “See anything promising?”

  “Nope.”

  “I think mebbe we’re getting near the edge of this mess,” Ryan said. “Sooner or later we’ve got to run out of thicket. The fact so many trails are running together suggests we found a fast way out.”

  “Good,” Ricky said. “It’s getting dark.”

  With a crashing of brush, a mutie burst from the vines, raced several paces across the path, and sprang at Ryan. He flung up his left arm. The creature fastened its teeth on his forearm and kicked its legs off the ground to slash it Ryan’s flank with its double-large killing claws.

  “Fireblast!” Ryan exclaimed. Then he hacked the mutie’s head off with a stroke of his panga.

  The body fell kicking. The jaws continued to hold on to Ryan’s arm. Was it Ricky’s imagination, or did the yellow eyes continue to roll in the severed reptilian head?

  Ryan stuck the knife tip in between the jaws and levered them open. The mutie head fell snapping to the trail.

  “You fit to fight, Ryan?” J.B. called, not sounding particularly concerned.

  Ryan held up his left arm and examined it with his lone eye. “Amazingly, yes,” he said. “Thing’s teeth didn’t even get through the coat. Got a nuke of a bite on it, though.”

  He had never broken stride the whole time, which reminded Ricky that the distance between him and Doc was increasing again. He stirred his legs to close it up quickly, lest one of their shadowers chuck something else at him.

  The teen hoped with all his heart that they were getting close to the edge of the Wild. His legs were about to give out, and he was starting to breathe with a bit of a wheeze.

  Ryan disappeared around a bend in the path. Ricky pushed himself even harder to catch up to Doc so he could see.

  “Not so c
lose,” J.B. called reprovingly. “You don’t want the muties to be able to take you both out by throwing a double-long stick.”

  Ricky slackened his pace slightly. Then he came to the bend and almost stumbled.

  Not forty yards away the Wild stopped. He could see the land open up to either side.

  His heart soared. They were free of the terrible mutie-haunted tangle, and presumably free of their dogged mutie pursuers.

  Then he saw that Ryan had stopped dead, still twenty yards shy of the thicket’s end. He was staring upward. Even past the bulky backpack Ricky could see his shoulders slumped as if in discouragement.

  Then Ricky’s eyes resolved what at first they had not been able to make out due to the deepening evening shadows—and the way they’d focused laser tight in his almost desperate relief that they were nearly out of the woods.

  Out of the woods—or the vines, anyway—sure. But not away free.

  Not by a mile.

  Or, to be more exact, not by the sheer hundred-foot cliff that rose before them like a wall beyond the thicket’s edge.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “You sure this is safe?” Ricky asked. He walked behind Doc, who followed Ryan. J.B. brought up the rear.

  Ryan snorted. “Of course it isn’t safe.”

  “How many times I got to tell you, kid,” J.B. said, in a tone that told Ryan the Armorer was shaking his head, “that there’s no such thing as ‘safe’ in the Deathlands?”

  “Well,” Ricky said, “I meant, comparatively.”

  “Enough!” Ryan said.

  By the last light of the day they made their way along the base of the steep red cliffs that formed an impassable barrier just beyond the northern extremity of the Wild. Dirt had apparently fallen from the cliff, forming low, irregular foothills. Over the years they had acquired coats of grass and other ground cover. Brush grew on and among them, densely in places.

  There were also jumbles of big rocks piled up against the base of the cliffs, here and there. And for some reason the lower part of the red clay wall was pierced irregularly by caves, some mere crawl spaces, some as big as the room of a predark house and high enough for even Ryan or Doc to stand upright in.

  “This is a classic dip-slip formation,” Doc said, as if lecturing a class at Oxford, back in his day. “I surmise the bedrock underlying this clay fractured and was upthrust during the colossal earthquakes following the Third World War.”

  “That’s ace, Doc,” Ryan said quietly. “Now just stow it for later. We don’t know what might be waiting for us up ahead.”

  “I quite understand, my dear Ryan.”

  Ryan glanced back in irritation. Doc looked sheepish and drew a finger across his lips in a zipping gesture. Ryan shook his head and faced forward again.

  He progressed at a cautious walk, his SIG in his right hand. There was abundant concealment and cover both here along the foot of the cliffs, Which was a good thing, since they couldn’t climb the wall anyplace they’d come across yet, and the only alternatives were to walk around exposed or go back to the shelter of the Wild, both of which were definite no-gos as far as Ryan was concerned. And none of the other three had so much as suggested either.

  He stepped over a tiny stream where water trickled from somewhere above in the cliff, hidden now by the rapidly congealing darkness. That was even better luck. They’d refilled their canteens, which were almost down to water vapor from all the fighting and running they’d had to do.

  Of course that kind of luck couldn’t last. They lived in the Deathlands, after all. A person was spared one day only to be chilled the next.

  Ryan spotted two men. One squatted with his back to the cliff, the other stood with his longblaster slung, looking off across the hundred yards or so separating the red clay wall from the scarcely less forbidding wall of thorn vines, as if danger was likely to come from that way.

  Then again, Ryan reckoned, maybe it was. It wasn’t like the Wild’s end was some kind of magic fence to keep the muties and other unfriendly wildlife in. And these were unmistakably Second Chance sec men, so they presumably knew the Wild and its ways better than Ryan did for all his enforced familiarity.

  The thoughts flickered lightning fast through his mind as he snap shot the squatting man. The marshal oofed in surprise then fell over.

  The other man turned toward Ryan. His black eyes were wild in his bearded face as he tried to unsling his bolt-action longblaster. He got tangled up.

  Ryan didn’t care. He gave him a double tap, two shots through the sternum, barely the width of his little finger apart.

  The first man started hollering, whether to raise the alarm or just plain in pain. He fumbled out a Beretta handblaster. Ryan shot him again. The sec man stopped making noise.

  J.B. rushed past him with Ricky hard on his heels. “Cover me!” the Armorer said.

  Ryan was taken by surprise, but he took advantage of the chance to drop the SIG’s partially depleted magazine and insert a full one. Doc stepped up with a swirl of his long black coattails, his LeMat pointed at the brush beyond the clear space where the sec-man sentries had been.

  Quickly, efficiently, J.B. and Ricky stripped the two marshals of their weapons and magazines.

  While they were still looting the pair, Ryan heard crashing from the brush beyond. Hoarse voices shouted in confusion and alarm.

  Without hesitation, or even looking up from his work, J.B. raised his Uzi on its long sling in his right hand and triggered a 3-round burst. Two more followed, one slightly left of the first one, one to the right.

  Now men yelped in alarm. The noise stopped advancing and turned to a thrashing that sounded a lot like diving for cover any which way.

  “Go,” J.B. said to Ricky when they were done. He looked back at Ryan and Doc.

  “You too. Find a place to hole up. If the sec men get too frisky I’ll teach them better. I’ll catch up with you.”

  “Right,” Ryan said.

  Ricky dithered. “But J.B.—”

  Ryan took two long steps forward, grabbed him by a strap on the back of his backpack and started towing him bodily back the way they had come. After a brief moment’s resistance the kid smartened up. He turned to run as fast as he could back along the cliff base.

  “That cave we passed, mebbe a quarter mile back,” Ryan said. “Right after we started out.”

  “Indeed,” Doc said. He matched Ryan stride for stride with his long legs, barely breathing hard. “It offered an excellent stronghold from which to stand off the ruffians.”

  It did. It was one of the larger caves they’d looked into, wider than the entryway, which suggested to Ryan, anyway, that humans might have scooped it out. Doc assured them the geology, much less the time scale, was all wrong for a cave formation.

  Better still, there was a roughly semicircular empty space in front of the entrance, with lots of nice rocks and clumps of scrub to screen the cave mouth.

  From behind Ryan came the snarl of J.B.’s machine pistol. The one-eyed man kept running and never looked back.

  * * *

  “YOU HAVE GOT to be shitting me.”

  Mildred’s words seemed to affect her listeners like a bat to the foreheads. Eyes went wide; jaws went slack.

  Her hands, like Krysty’s, were tied in front of her by rough hemp rope. Securely, worse luck. Chafed wrists was the only outcome of her attempt to loosen the bonds and wriggle free. So she contented herself with sweeping the office with a gaze, which wasn’t hard. It was a cramped, dusty, musty, cluttered little thing. That was part of what honestly surprised her.

  “Language!” the fat, sweating man who stood behind the Judge finally managed to sputter. “Prisoners should show due respect for the power and majesty of this court.”

  “Respect?” Mildred echoed contemptuously.
/>   She thought about spitting on the floor. By the looks of it, she wouldn’t be the first. And some of them had been tobacco chewers, if the stains were any indication. But her daddy raised her to be better behaved than that. Or anyway, better behaved than these people.

  “You claim you’re restoring the United States of America,” she said, “from a crappy, grimy little armpit of an office like this? With a greasy, quivering blubber-butt for a bailiff, and a clump of sec goons who smell like they haven’t changed their pants in six weeks?”

  “Mayor,” the fat guy said. “I’m the mayor of Second Chance. I serve as honorary bailiff to His Honor—”

  “Who’s the biggest joke of all!” she flared, right at the Judge’s thin, haggard, saggy face where he sat behind the desk drumming spider-leg fingers on the one clear spot among the papers. “Some old dude in a black bathrobe who claims to be a judge? Please. A delusional schizophrenic with paranoid visions of grandeur is more like it.

  “I have seen the United States of America, gentlemen. I lived in it. I was raised in it. And let me tell you—the butt-pocket dictatorship you got here in the thicket is not the United States!”

  For a moment she thought she had gone too far. Her origin in the twentieth century was usually kept a deep, dark secret, for her companions’ safety as well as hers. While most of the hatred and rancor that persisted from the ruination of the world in the Big Nuke—which was fair enough, she thought, inasmuch as the bad effects also persisted—was concentrated on the whitecoats, politicians and generals who had produced the disaster, and the mutants who were one of its unfortunate legacies, there was plenty of ill will for plain old twentieth century folks as well. People these days reckoned they shared the blame for blowing up the world and screwing things up so royally.

  They weren’t wrong about that, either, Mildred thought.

  But the fat mayor just smirked, and muttered to himself, “She says we’re crazy.” The Judge just gave a thin smile and drummed his fingers in pistol-shot ripples.

  “Powerful talk,” he said, in a stone-dry yet somehow fervent voice. “You might well give a thought to the position you find yourselves in, ladies.”