Hanging Judge Read online

  “Look what we have here,” another voice said from behind the squad leader. A sixth man stepped in beside him. He was a short, trim dude with round glasses and a sandy goatee. He also had a supercilious smirk and was shaking in his head in mock consternation.

  “Some people never learn,” he said. “Sharleez, Sharleez. Haven’t you got it through your thick skull that justice always wins? Or at least, Judge Santee does.”

  “Kreg. You bastard,” Sharleez almost spit.

  “Round ’em up, boys,” the squad leader ordered. “This’ll keep the Judge happy for days, having this many assholes to swing off. And it’ll bust the neck of this discontent bullshit for good and all.”

  The longblaster-armed quartet began to spread out around the room. The conspirators put up their hands. A couple wept openly.

  “Sharleez, what have you done to us?” asked the man who’d been talking about the whip hand and who held it.

  “That one,” Red Beard said suddenly, pointing to Mildred. “With the beaded braids. She’s one of the coldheart gang that masterminded the jailbreak.”

  He smirked at her.

  “You won’t be cheating the Judge’s justice a third time,” he said. “You’re going from here right straight to the scaffold.”

  Mildred gave him her best defiant glare. It was all she could do under the circumstances. A sec man with a Mini-14 maneuvered to come up behind her chair.

  “Yes, Sharleez, what have you done?” Kreg Modeen asked, shaking his head again. “Looks like you’ve gone and brought death and destruction on your little traitor pals.”

  “Looks to me as if you’re the one doing that,” the firebrand snarled.

  He chuckled. “I knew you were naive, Sharleez,” he said. “But I honestly never thought you’d be so triple stupe as not to warn the rest of your little wannabe-revolutionary friends to take care of me. Or at least avoid me. And look what happened. They led me right here. They actually invited me to this little seditious sit-down, can you imagine that?”

  Sharleez smiled at him sweetly as a scattergun-armed sec man approached to restrain her.

  “But I did warn them about, you, Kreg,” she said.

  He frowned uncomprehendingly.

  “Nuke shit!” yelled the squad leader. “It’s a trap!”

  “No shit, Sherlock,” Mildred said, and back-kicked the chair into the shins of the sec man behind her.

  A trapdoor opened in the ceiling. Krysty dropped from the attic above. Her full 150 pounds of muscle and fury landed astride the shoulders of the red-bearded marshal and crumpled him to the floorboards.

  Mildred stooped as she spun, grabbing up the hickory ax handle she’d stashed under her chair. The sec man behind her had doubled over at the sudden pain in his shins, the barrel of his blaster pointed at the floor.

  Mildred wound up a baseball swing and smashed him across the face with her ax handle. He staggered back, dropping the blaster.

  She moved quickly to snatch it up. The sec man was still on his feet, clutching his bleeding face with one hand and moaning. Mildred hit him again one-handed, breaking his hand and dropping him. Then she let the club fall and turned to cover the room with the Ruger.

  Krysty had her powerful thighs clamped tight on the sec squad leader’s head. She rolled sideways forcefully. Mildred winced as she heard his neck snap.

  She’d seen Krysty do that move before. It always got to her, actually made her neckbones ache in sympathy, though sympathy was the last thing a coldheart sec man piece of drek like that deserved.

  Other people had appeared behind the other sec men, one from an ancient empty wardrobe, more from other doors into the room. Mildred saw a shotgun-armed sec man turn in time to catch the business end of an ax—this time complete with head—square in the side of his face. He went down with a scream and almost instantly began to strangle on his own blood.

  Two of the would-be resistance types Sharleez, Alyssa and Mildred had been giving their pitch to had jumped the other shotgunner and were grappling with him. They’d already twisted the weapon so his finger wasn’t on the trigger and the barrel was pointed toward the ceiling. Their moves could use work, the physician thought briefly, but they had good instincts.

  The other rifleman was already down. Niles, the bushy-haired guy with the weak stomach they’d busted out with Alyssa, gave Mildred a thumbs-up with the hand that wasn’t holding a bloody baseball bat.

  Kreg Modeen stood staring in utter paralyzed shock...until Sharleez stepped up to him and kicked him in the balls.

  He doubled over. Krysty reared up behind him, her sentient hair waving around her head. She trapped his arms from behind in a double arm lock and yanked him upright.

  He was groaning and dribbling thin oatmeal-like puke down his goatee. His glasses had been knocked askew.

  Then he shrieked at a glass-shattering pitch as Sharleez, smiling horribly, stepped up and slit his throat. It was the swift dispatch of a traitor.

  Mildred heard a scuffling behind her. Her heart jumped in her throat, and she looked hastily around.

  Damn! she thought. Forgot to make sure the dude I clubbed was out for the count.

  He was trying to push himself up out of the pool of blood that had flooded out of his head. The floor looked as if a bucket of blood had tipped over. With his other hand he was trying to get something out from behind his back, doubtless a weapon of some sort.

  “Coldheart bastards,” he gasped. “Set us...up.”

  “That’s right, bunky boy. Ax?”

  Ted, the sturdy Asian man who had finished the job he had started on the shotgun sec man, was standing across the room holding his ax and looking bemused beneath all the blood spatter. When Mildred held up her hand, he snapped out of it and tossed the ax to her.

  She caught it with her left hand, ignoring the gore and clumps that clotted its head as some of it dropped onto her hand. She laid the longblaster at her feet and turned back to the wounded sec man.

  His hand was coming from behind his back, fast. But Mildred was already in motion. She just had time to register that he’d pulled out a nasty little black Beretta hidie when her overhand chop split his skull clear to his maxillary bones.

  Her stomach turned over when she heard a wet, heavy plop behind her. Once a person had heard someone’s intestines fall onto a hardwood floor, the sound was never mistaken for anything else.

  She wrenched the ax free. No need for a follow-up shot this time. She didn’t need to be a medical professional—and at least semipro killer—to know he didn’t need another. She stooped to scoop up the little handblaster that lay by his lifeless fingers.

  Nice piece, she thought, turning it over in her hand. It was a Beretta Bobcat, Model 21, with a tip-up barrel. A classic. Too nicely made for a shit caliber like .25 ACP, she thought, which she quickly confirmed it was.

  She stuck it in a pocket and picked the Ruger back up. Only then did she turn.

  Mildred saw blood flood down the front of Kreg Modeen’s shirt and his intestines were coiled on the floor. Sharleez had slit the man’s throat, but it wasn’t enough; she had also decided to eviscerate him.

  Krysty dropped him to the floor, then she staggered back against a wall, and slid down to sit shaking her head wearily.

  “All good?” Mildred asked.

  “Sec men are all chills,” Niles reported. This time the blood and even the guts didn’t seem to faze him at all.

  “Coming in,” a voice called from the back of the house. A young woman appeared from the door to the kitchen.

  “No one’s watching the place from outside,” she reported.

  “Arrogant bastards,” Mildred said.

  “I told you,” Sharleez replied. She was standing looking down at Modeen’s corpse with an unreadable expression on her face.

 
; Mildred guessed there was history there, a story Sharleez wasn’t telling. But Mildred and Krysty would never find out, and it didn’t matter now.

  “Anybody hurt?” she asked the room.

  “I don’t think so,” Alyssa said. She had picked herself up from diving to the floor and crawling under her chair when the balloon went up, which as far as Mildred was concerned was a perfectly serviceable response and spoke well of her. Nobody was sizing her up as the rough-and-tumble type.

  That was why she was part of the bait of the trap, rather than the jaws.

  Aside from her, Sharleez, Krysty, Niles and naturally Mildred, no one else who’d been at the confab had a clue about what was going down. A couple of people huddled on the floor, moaning and weeping. Another guy stood by the wall shaking his head and muttering, “So much blood....” over and over again.

  But there were the two, a young man and a young woman, who had successfully disarmed the other scattergun sec man and gotten him to the floor. Somebody had cut his throat for him, too, Mildred noted dispassionately. The paunchy, balding, meek-looking middle-aged man who had brained the other rifleman with a heavy wooden chair then beat him to death, now sat backward in it over his victim, slumped in physical and probably emotional exhaustion.

  Well, Sharleez, Krysty and I have got ourselves at least a few more front-line fighters, she thought. Along with the ones who helped spring the ambush. That’s a start, anyway.

  “Strip the bodies of anything valuable,” Sharleez commanded. She sounded as brisk and businesslike as if she’d gone to grad school for this sort of thing. She was currently kneeling to clean her Bowie knife, using the shirt of the sec-squad leader whose neck Krysty had broken. “There’re a couple handcarts in the alley out back. Niles and Ted will show you where. Load the sec men into them and cover ’em with the old blankets out there. We’ll wheel them into the Wild and dump them for the coyotes and the mutie centipedes.”

  She didn’t specify who was to do what, other than the bushy-haired kid and the Asian-looking man who were to show them where to take the bodies. But several of them immediately got busy tossing the fallen sec men. Amazingly, one of the women who’d collapsed stopped crying her guts out, got up off the floor and got to rifling the pockets of the man Ted had axed like a pro.

  “What about that one?” asked the older man over the back of his chair. He nodded his balding head at Kreg Modeen’s eviscerated husk.

  Sharleez stood up and sneered. “Leave him. Mebbe when they find this place they’ll think all the blood came from him. If not...” She shrugged.

  Ice cold, Mildred thought, not altogether approvingly. Well, looks as if the long-suffering citizens have got themselves a true coup leader. Whether that’s good for the ville in the long run or not is...not our problem.

  She walked over to Krysty, who was still sitting by the wall, looking dazed.

  “How you doing, hon?” she asked. “Fit to fight?”

  Krysty looked up at her and smiled weakly. “No,” she said, taking hold of the forearm Mildred stretched to help her up. She did most of the work to stand, which was a good thing, since Mildred could never have lifted her with just one arm. “But it looks like I’ll live.”

  Mildred lifted her friend’s arm over one shoulder to help prop her up. Then she smiled around the slaughterhouse the meeting room had so abruptly turned into.

  “And that, boys and girls,” she announced, “is how you get blasters when you don’t have them.”

  “They’re not gonna fall for that trick again,” Ted called from the direction of the back door.

  “They won’t have to,” Sharleez said. “Now, let’s get out of here before someone comes looking for their lost little lambs and sees us.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Ryan snapped awake to a short, low whistle that might have been a birdcall.

  It wasn’t. He already knew that. He opened his eye to see J.B. hunkered down a few feet away, just enough to one side of the cave mouth to avoid being silhouetted against the mauve sunset light.

  The one-eyed man sat up scratching his head. The others had insisted he take a break and catch some sleep. He’d resisted, even though he was the one always harping about how missing sleep when you didn’t have to was as good as loading bullets in your enemies’ blasters. Trader taught him that.

  And the others had been right. Even two hours did him a lot of good.

  If all that was left was to go out fighting—and it looked that way—he wanted to give it his all and make sure he took as many of the bastards with him as possible on the last train west.

  “What’d I miss?”

  “Nothing much,” J.B. said. “A bunch of movement down there in the weeds. No doubt about it. Cutter Dan’s pulling in a load of reinforcements from somewhere.”

  J.B. paused to glance out. Just smart habit, checking surroundings, especially entries and exits. All that was visible was the purple sky and a few puffy orange and pink clouds.

  “Ricky dropped a couple scouts sneaking around. Clean head shots, both times. They’re scoping out the most-protected lines of attack.”

  Ryan grunted a brief laugh. “Didn’t find them, then.”

  “Not those two.”

  Ryan picked up his Scout and stood. “Time to go spell the kid, I reckon. Doc, wake up.”

  The old man stretched and yawned where he lay on his coat on the hard-packed clay floor. “Morning already? How time flies when I lie beside you, Emily, my love.”

  Ryan shook his head. His jaw clenched slightly as he looked away. Sometimes Doc wandered away through the swirling, chaotic mists of his memory, reliving the nightmare of his captivity in the hands of a sadistic baron, or the equally heartless whitecoats of Operation Chronos or, as now, the lost, loving family the whitecoats had ripped him away from....

  It didn’t matter, Ryan told himself. The old man was just waking up. And when the bullets started to crack past their ears, he always snapped back to the here and now right sharp.

  If he didn’t, well, it probably didn’t matter much in the long run.

  Ryan stepped out into the twilight. The west wind blew fairly strong, warm and dry. It smelled of the lush growth of the Wild. It carried a strange tang that served to remind him that the pretty, swirly green blanket down there was anything but inviting and anything but natural. As if a reminder were needed.

  Suddenly bullets were striking dust and chips off the rocks at the front of the little ledge in front of the cave. They howled as they ricocheted past Ryan’s ears.

  Even though the angle was plainly wrong for any to hit him, Ryan flung himself face-first in the dirt. J.B. joined him, as Doc did a moment later.

  Ryan crawled forward to where Ricky lay with his back against a red rock, clutching his DeLisle to his chest like a teddy bear.

  The burst stopped. Ryan risked a quick look over cover.

  He saw what he expected to see: nothing. Just the slope below, dotted with rocks and brush and carved with little channels by the water leaking perpetually out of the base of the Wall, and a ways off the blank edge of the Wild, itself as sharp as a wall.

  “They got themselves some serious ordnance,” Ryan said.

  “Sounds like an automatic rifle,” J.B. replied. “Not a machine gun. Or even a BAR.”

  He frowned as he thought about it. “I’m thinking G3 by the sound. Dark night, I hate those German longblasters. Got a way sharper recoil than a 7.62 mm has any right to have. Only nastier piece I ever shot in that class was a Remington 742 semiauto carbine. And that bastard was a full-on .30-06.”

  Ryan scratched his cheek. The hair on his cheeks was starting to move past the stubble stage into outright beard territory. He’d had other things on his mind than shaving the last day or two.

  “They’re sending us a message,” he said. />
  “So what is it a preface to?” asked Doc, who’d crawled up alongside the others.

  “Glad you could join us,” J.B. said with a grin.

  “Cawdor!” The voice boomed out from below, and echoed along the cliff face. “I know you hear me. Answer!”

  “Cutter Dan,” J.B. said. “Shoulda seen that coming.”

  “I hear you,” Ryan yelled back. He did not poke his head up. He was not that stupe. “You ready to surrender?”

  “You mean you’re offering?”

  Ryan barked a laugh. “I mean you. We got you and your blood drinkers right where we want you.”

  A moment passed, then Cutter Dan laughed. He had a pretty fair volume on that, too.

  “Keep telling yourself that. You got until sunup. You can decide to do the right thing, save yourselves a mess of pain and worrying and messy dying, and just give yourselves up to face justice. If you don’t, I got a hundred men surrounding you now, all of ’em armed for bear and hungering for a share of the bounty on your varmint hides!”

  * * *

  “KRYSTY.”

  The red-haired woman stirred. She was awake now, but her body was reluctant to leave the bed in the steeple of what had been a predark church. Not because it was so comfortable, but because she was still so exhausted, even after sleeping most of the previous day.

  She sat up reluctantly. “What is it?” she asked, brushing the hair back off her face and looking out the window. The dark gray sky was clear. The sound of crickets came in through the open window.

  That reassured her, in a way. The former church, and current resistance safe house, lay outside the main part of Second Chance. Much of the ville did, which accounted for its housing a larger population than Krysty had expected from the generally sorry straggle of buildings they’d seen when they freed Jak.

  “Got trouble,” Mildred said. She stood silhouetted in the doorway.

  “Nobody’s about to attack us, though, right?” she said.