Hanging Judge Read online

  She prayed the young woman had the sense and the presence of mind to do it, and also the fortitude not to hurl when she saw the mess Krysty had made of herself, the walls and floor, and not least, the Second Chance marshal.

  When Sharleez stepped out of the cell a moment later, Mildred was holding the key ring stretched out toward her in her left hand and the Beretta stretched out in the right toward the door at the end of the corridor. The sec men had a squad room with half a dozen bunks toward the front of the jail. Mildred did not want any unpleasant surprises.

  Sharleez had her lips clamped shut just as firmly when she looked up from the twitching chill on the floor to Mildred. But she was already reaching for the keys.

  “Find your friends,” Mildred commanded tersely. “Open the cell. Let them out. No questions.”

  Sharleez asked none. She took the keys, clutching them carefully in both hands, as if afraid they might suddenly try to wiggle free like a captive salamander, and stepped across the corridor to the door. She did try to avoid as much of the spilled blood and dough-colored brains as she could.

  Mildred glanced at Krysty. Her friend still stood with eyes squeezed tightly shut. Her hands were clenched into fists.

  Sharleez started sorting through the keys. Her hands were shaking so badly she kept losing her place and having to start over. Mildred tried not to roll her eyes.

  The clock was ticking here. Krysty in this state was like a flare. She could burn like this for only a very short time, then she would abruptly burn out.

  “This is real,” Sharleez said, to the jingle of the keys on the ring and the impotent clunking when she finally got one stuck in the lock only to find it didn’t do the deed. “This is happening. Not just some condemned-person fantasy run out of control. We’re starting an avalanche here. We’ll have to make our move in a day. Mebbe two. And what will we do without weapons?”

  “You got weapons,” Mildred said. It struck her as more productive than snapping at the young woman. “You just have to be aware of them.”

  “Against sec man blasters? We can’t have blasters. The marshals can do spot checks anytime, with the penalties for refusing to let them on your premises the same as being caught with one!”

  “Yeah, and let me guess what that penalty is. There are plenty of ways we can fight without blasters, and plenty of ways to get blasters. And now, we really do need to move this along....”

  She was amazed that the guards in the front of the jail hadn’t responded yet. Apparently they were used to random noises, even loud ones, coming from the cells at night. It couldn’t possibly last, though.

  “Got it!” Sharleez said. Mildred’s knees almost gave way in relief as she heard the key turn and the lock open.

  Sharleez yanked the door open so hard she almost fell over backward. A man came out quickly, then stopped. He turned and threw up in the cell.

  “Gross!” Mildred heard a woman exclaim from behind.

  “Enough!” she snapped. She wondered why she had been bothering keeping her voice down; Krysty had made enough noise ripping that damn door down to wake the equestrian statue of Ulysses S. Grant a block away. “These all your friends?”

  A woman was holding the shoulder of the stooped over puking man. Another man quickly slipped past them into the corridor.

  “Those two in there,” Sharleez said. “I know this one, too, but he’s not one of us.”

  “What about us?” a voice called from another cell-door window. Others took up the cry in an increasingly desperate clamor.

  Mildred had no idea why the sec men still hadn’t checked on the commotion. She now suspected they just thought the prisoners had found some annoying new way to make noise and hoped Evrard could handle it so they wouldn’t have to interrupt their sleep or their card games or whatever to come help out.

  “Give him the keys,” Mildred told Sharleez.

  To the extra man, she said, “Open the other cells and let the prisoners out.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because a woman with a blaster told you to, dumb ass!”

  “Do it, Ed,” Sharleez said, pressing the ring decisively into one of his hands before he could bolt. “Or I swear on my father’s grave I will hunt you down and make you sorry.”

  Ed took the keys and, still juggling the heavy ring, went as fast as he could to the next door down. Apparently he was even more terrified of Sharleez’s vengeance than he was of a crazy black woman who’d just threatened to shoot him. Well, they already knew the young woman was a spitfire. It was time to see if they saw her as a leader.

  Mildred looked at Krysty. She was still as rigid as an over-inflated tire and looked as likely to explode at any moment.

  “Quickly,” the redhead gritted.

  Usually when she embodied the power of Gaia the Earth Mother Krysty did not talk. Mildred wasn’t sure whether this was a good sign or not.

  “Get your friends back in our cell,” Mildred told Sharleez, “and stand the hell out of the way.”

  “But how will we get out?” the newly freed woman asked. She was a slight young woman with long, straight blond hair. She was helping to the steady the man, who had a bush of curly dark hair atop his head. He still wasn’t too steady on his pins. “The front’s swarming with armed sec men!”

  “No problem,” Mildred said. “If you do what I say now.”

  Sharleez grabbed her female co-conspirator’s wrist, and the blonde grabbed the arm of the woozy dude. Sharleez towed them back into the cell like a Mississippi tugboat with a couple of barges.

  Krysty followed. She was walking stiff-legged now, like Frankenstein’s monster in the movies. She was holding out against the exhaustion, the inevitable crash and burn that followed the burst of power and energy she expended after calling upon Gaia.

  When the Gaia power ebbed, it took with it all of Krysty’s strength, and even her consciousness. It left her completely helpless for a period of hours, sometimes as much as a day or more.

  Hold out, Krysty, Mildred pleaded silently.

  The door at the end of the hall was yanked open. “What in the name of Satan’s wide-open asshole is all this nukin’ noise ab—”

  A short, stocky sec man with a dirty-blond neck beard stopped midstep and midword as his eyes took in the utter bloody chaos in the hall. They quickly focused on the hole in the muzzle of the blaster Mildred had taken off his pal.

  She shot him dead between the eyes. He dropped right in the door. She heard startled exclamations from outside and cranked off half a dozen more quick shots. It was a waste of ammo, sure, but she wanted the sec men to flinch and stayed flinched for a spell.

  They wouldn’t for long, regardless. But maybe long enough.

  “Mildred?” she heard Sharleez’s voice tentatively say as she bolted for the door. “Krysty? What—oh, my God!”

  Mildred came around the door in time to see Krysty grip the outer window and pull a four-foot-wide section right out of the cinder-block wall.

  She dropped the fragmenting section, which was taller than she was, onto the ground in a cloud of its own dust and lesser debris. Then she collapsed into the same cloud as if she’d been shot through the brain.

  “Krysty!” Sharleez screamed. She hadn’t struck Mildred as the screamer type, but given the circumstances, Mildred was willing to make allowances.

  She risked a quick glance back down the hall. A white face was poking around the jamb of the open door. Mildred snapped a shot that way, but she deliberately aimed high so as not to hit any of the yipping, frantic prisoners whom Ed had dutifully released into the corridor and freedom.

  “Good luck hanging on to it,” Mildred murmured on their behalf.

  She strode toward the hole in the wall. Outside the street was black. Judge Santee, or his favored plutocrats, apparently didn’t believe in
wasting fuel on things like street lighting. Unless, presumably, there was a good old after-dark hanging-bee going on.

  “Right,” she said crisply to the three liberated resistance members, as if by adopting a businesslike, reasonable tone she could make them accept what they’d all just witnessed as reasonable. Or, at least, not freak right out.

  Mildred bent over the now-unconscious Krysty. She was sprawled prone on the rubble, showing no more life or muscle tone than an empty burlap sack.

  “Let’s each grab an arm, and then Sharleez you guide us to the nearest safe place you can. Now.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, the three obeyed.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Jak heard the door open.

  Then he heard a soft footfall inside his small, neat room. Something was set down right beside the door.

  He didn’t look up or stir at all from where he lay facedown on the scratchy wool blanket covering his bed. He knew who it was. He had heard her coming down the hall.

  “You’re going,” Chally said. It wasn’t a question.

  He sighed and pushed himself up. Then, turning, he swung his legs over the edge and sat up.

  “Why say that?”

  “You are, aren’t, you?”

  Jak looked down at his jeans.

  “Why I go?”

  “Because your friends are in danger.”

  “No friends.”

  “Yes, friends.”

  She came and sat down on the hardwood floor a few feet away, facing him with her knees drawn up. Her skin shone almost like metal in the light of the oil lamp.

  “Listen,” she said. “You’re a lone wolf by nature, sure. You even told me your enemies called you the White Wolf when you were just a kid—when you’ve never even told me your real name. You grew up hunting solo because you had to. You had nobody else you could rely on when that baron took your family from you. No one you could trust. Except yourself.

  “But a wolf’s true nature is as a pack hunter. And you found yours. Found people you could trust. People who trusted you. You got a taste of pack life. Now you’ll never feel complete without it.”

  He glared at her.

  “What you know ’bout it?”

  She shrugged. “Only what you’ve told me. And what I know about the world, from books and also from listening to people who’ve seen a lot more of it than I have.”

  Jak looked away. He was so angry right now he was honestly afraid of what he would do to her if he looked at her.

  And that wasn’t what he did. He didn’t pretend to be a good man—scarcely thought of it, even less than Ryan and the others did. A person did what he had to to survive.

  But a man didn’t raise a hand against a friend unless survival hung on it. And maybe not then.

  “You found friends,” she said, and his shoulders hunched up. It was as if she could read his mind. He didn’t like the feeling. “Real friends. You stayed by their sides for years, and they stayed by you. I don’t know what happened out there, after they busted you off crazy man Santee’s gallows. Yeah, we all figured that out really quick. Those of us here in the Last Resort, anyway. And, like Meg says, we got no use for the Judge and his stonehearts.

  “Anyway. Something happened out there in the Wild. You split from them, but it wasn’t big enough to break you apart forever.”

  He turned a glare on her, but she failed to wither beneath it.

  “How know?” he asked, his voice barely more than a whisper.

  “Because when you heard what was happening to them, you poured out the whiskey you paid for, the good stuff that Meg imports all the way from the Cumberland range, and you came straight here to lie down like you’d taken sick and haven’t touched a drop to drink since you got here. So that means the news hit you hard. Way too hard for people you’d kicked the habit of caring about.”

  He looked down at his hands, flexed the fingers.

  “Mebbe,” he said, in what passed for a more normal tone with him.

  She sighed heavily.

  “Listen, Mr. White Wolf. One way or another, we’re done now. It’s over between us.”

  Jak frowned at her. Not because he was mad anymore. He didn’t know what he felt, other than confused.

  It was her turn not to look him in the eye. It struck him how rare that was, in the time they’d spent together. Usually her gaze was right up in his, challenging, teasing.

  “I’m starting to feel afraid,” she said. “Afraid I’ll never feel complete without you. And that can’t happen.”

  She looked back at him, her eyes shining with tears she refused to shed.

  “I won’t need you. I won’t let myself need anybody. That’s not a way to live. Not in this awful world we live in. But I reckon—not in any world, ever. Because if I need you, and feel I can’t live without you, then I am weak and you are strong. And you can only feel contempt for me in my weakness, somewhere deep down in your soul.”

  She shook her head. “And I can only feel contempt for myself, which would come out as resentment against you, double sure. I’ve seen it happen, plenty of times. So either you’ve got to leave me, or I’ve got to leave you.”

  She stood up fast.

  “If you stay here, you won’t be the man I’m falling for, anyway. You’ll just be another sopping-bar-rag loser who’s afraid to live the life he was intended to!”

  His eyes met hers.

  “Yeah,” he said. This time his voice was firm.

  Chally sighed again. A shudder passed through her body. She shook her head once, quickly.

  “Right. I knew that.” She smoothed her short hair back away from her face. “We both knew that. I just needed to run my mouth until you decided to face the fact.”

  He stood up and started for the door. She stopped him with a hand to his chest, inside the open front of his dangerously sharp jacket.

  “Not so fast, cowboy. I brought a few things for you.”

  “Things?”

  She turned back and stooped to pick up a day pack she had set down by the door when she stepped inside.

  He briefly regretted leaving Chally behind, but he had no strong emotional ties to her. She was a nice girl, and had saved his life, but she had just been a pleasant diversion. Jak knew that, even though the young woman had felt more.

  Now he burned with the urgency to go. His companions needed his help. And he had to set things right with Ryan.

  She straightened, turning, and handed it to him. Jak almost dropped it. It was heavier than it looked.

  “Careful, there,” she told him. “Don’t want to drop that.”

  “What in?” he asked.

  “Just a few things Meg and I threw together. Some pronghorn pemmican we made, to keep you going for a spell without having to take the time and energy to forage for food. Plus a few little things Meg picked up over the years. Things we’re triple sure you’ll find a use for. Or your friends will.”

  He opened the pack just a little and glanced inside. His eyebrows rose.

  “Why?” he asked her.

  “Well, for starters, Meg’s taken something of a shine to you. I have too, mebbe a little.

  “More to the point, you’re going to go help your friends. That means you’re going to hurt Cutter Dan and his stoneheart sec men. And that hurts Judge Santee. Did we mention we don’t much care for them up here? You hurt them hard enough, they’ll have to forget all about trying to strong-arm us and take us over. At least for a year or two.”

  She smiled.

  “And I think you’re just the man to hurt them that hard. You and your friends.”

  A slow grin spread across his face. He nodded, then slung the small pack over his back.

  Chally stepped away from him. She tipped her head t
o one side and looked coyly at him from the corners of her big, dark eyes.

  “You want—” she ran the back of a finger down between her breasts “—me one more time?”

  He shook his head.

  “Okay,” she said, and stepped out of his way.

  He went to the door and opened it.

  “At least just tell me your name.”

  He looked at her.

  “Jak,” he said, and walked out the door.

  * * *

  “SHARLEEZ IS RIGHT,” Alyssa, the blonde young woman, said to the circle of skeptical faces. “We have to act quickly. The Judge and his men will leave us no choice.”

  They were gathered in a well-preserved old house. It was one of the better ones in the generally sorry ville, with hardwood floors and a pitched roof that was patched enough to keep the rain out. It had clearly been lived in recently, and just as clearly was untenanted now. Mildred felt mild curiosity as to why. But she knew enough about life—and more to the point, death—in the Deathlands to really want to know.

  Mildred, Alyssa, Krysty and Sharleez sat facing ten current and prospective resistance members. Some sat in wooden chairs or rusty folding metal ones. Others stood.

  Most of them had dubious expressions on their faces.

  “If the Judge’s men move,” asked an earnest man, who looked young despite the way his neat, dark hair was receding from his forehead, “what can we do about it? They hold the whip hand.”

  “Maybe not,” Mildred said.

  “Mebbe so,” called a voice from the foyer. “In fact, we definitely do.”

  A tall man with a neat red beard and a red, white and blue armband on the sleeve of his blue, yellow and white plaid flannel shirt strode authoritatively into the room. Though he wore twin handblasters on his hips, he wasn’t holding one.

  The four Second Chance marshals who suddenly appeared to flank him in pairs sure were. Two held semiauto longblasters, two pump shotguns.

  They had the plotters dead to rights.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Mildred had jumped to her feet, as had Alyssa, Sharleez and several others. The new members of the circle had terrified looks on their faces.