Hanging Judge. James Axler
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on the other side of the divide.”
Santee emitted a cracked and whistling laugh. “But both kinds still strangle when they dangle at the end of a rope! You have that in common with your wretched underlings, gentlemen! If you don’t remember that well enough, it may yet fall to me to remind you in the most vigorous possible terms.”
That shut them up. Cutter Dan grinned outright in satisfaction. It tore like talons at the stitches in his face.
Toogood’s smile got a little brittle, but then it came back strong. He was a fat, greasy bastard, but despite that he had at least a little steel in his spine. Cutter Dan reckoned that both the steel and the smarm accounted for why the Judge was willing to suffer Toogood calling himself mayor of Second Chance—when the only power in the ville that amounted to glowing night shit was Santee.
And, of course, his ever-expanding army of sec men. And their boss.
“Both sides are right,” Santee said, after judging the three wealthy villagers had twisted in the wind long enough. “Just as Mr. Toogood said. But we must keep our priorities carefully in order.
“We must and we will continue extending the reach of the rule of law, until one day it extends clear across the Deathlands. But that isn’t the work of a day, or of a year. And if want to extend the long arm of the law, we must above all make sure that its grasp remains inescapable and strong.”
He paused, as if inviting comment. Nobody went for it. They just stared at him and began to sweat visibly.
None of these three could see a single hair past their own self-interest. Santee counted on that fact, as Cutter Dan happened to know. But not one of them was a feeb, either.
The closest thing to one, perhaps, had been Bates. Cutter Dan wasn’t sure the filthy, red-eyed little taint bastard hadn’t done them all a favor by slitting Bates’s throat. The fact might even make Cutter Dan feel generous enough, when he caught up with him—and however long it took, whatever it took, he would catch him—to follow the Judge’s invariant rule that captives had to be returned alive and relatively unharmed to stand trial so that they could be properly hanged. Rather than taking his own unhurried revenge on the coldheart. After all, a lot of things could happen out there in the Wild, beyond the reach of Santee’s hell-black eyes.
Not that Cutter Dan felt comfortable crossing the Judge. He didn’t have any evidence the old bastard had a doomie gift like second sight. Then again, he didn’t have any evidence to the contrary.
“At the same time,” Santee went on, “we cannot allow our grip to slacken on the home front—either in those areas we’ve restored to order or in Second Chance itself. Therefore, I will assign my Chief Marshal to take a picked squad, not to exceed twenty men, to pursue the fugitive Jak Lauren as well as his accomplices and bring them to justice. The rest of my sec men shall concentrate on their control and pacification efforts.”
He looked to Cutter Dan.
“How long will it take you to prepare for your mission, Chief Marshal?”
“Give me two hours.”
OUTSIDE, THEDAY was still cloudy but starting to heat.
Gonna be a muggy bastard, Cutter Dan thought. He took a long step to catch up with the three men who had just left their meeting with the Judge. They were talking among themselves in low, distracted tones.
“Gentlemen,” the chief marshal said, laying a hand on each man’s shoulder. Gein and Myers jumped.
“Just a friendly reminder for you. You might think of the Judge as just a crazy old coot. You have power here too. You’re men of consequence, and Mr. Toogood, here, is even the mayor. But make no mistake. Santee is the law in Second Chance.”
The two he’d grabbed hold of had turned their heads to look back at him. Myers’s face was pale behind his beard, and his eyes were wide in fear. Gein was scowling and looked as if he had been on the point of lighting into Cutter Dan for having the nerve to lay a hand on him. Until the sec boss’s little reminder let the air out of him.
“We understand, Chief Marshal,” Toogood said. He shot a hooded glance at his companion. “And we know it’s for the best. Believe me.”
Cutter Dan gave him a big old smile. “Sure thing, Mr. Toogood.”
His palm hovered by his violated face as he watched them split up and head for their respective homes. Along with the pain, the wound—and especially the stitches—were starting to itch like a bastard.
Cutter Dan dropped his hand to his side. He thought about the man who’d slashed him. He’d had a nasty scar down his face a lot like the one the sec boss was sure he was going to wind up with, though Cutter Dan hadn’t lost an eye, as the coldheart had. Funny how things went like that.
It was going to be even funnier how this would end. He was going to find the one-eyed man and slit his throat.
After Dan made him watch him do things to his friends, of course.
* * *
“GREAT,” MILDRED WYETHmuttered. “Just great.”
Slipping and sliding, she trudged miserably through rain and an endless hedge. Her lone consolation was that the thorns were so huge they were fairly easy to avoid and didn’t stick into her as fast and deep as slimmer ones would. It seemed as if her whole world was Krysty’s backpack ahead of her, and the gray-brown vines that seemed to writhe around her like diabolical tentacles with deceptive green leaves and silver spines.
And the endless drip of rain from a miserable bruise-colored sky.
They were somewhere northwest of Second Chance and not anywhere near far enough away. But they had to avoid the cleared areas around farms and such, especially the roads in and out, as if they were nuke hot spots full of deadly fallout. Those were the first places their pursuers would look for them. Instead, they were following what amounted to a game trail through the tangled, spiky, unnatural growth of the Wild.
“Any idea of where we’re going?” Ricky asked. He was the last one in line, right behind her.
“Like Ryan would tell me,” Mildred said. “But I’m guessing, away from Second Chance, mostly. Watch it, old man!”
The last was snarled at Doc, walking just ahead of her with Krysty. He had let go of a branch Ryan hadn’t hacked from their path, and it had whipped back and almost nailed Mildred in the face. As it was, it sprayed water droplets on her cheek, which didn’t do her any harm but still pissed her off.
“I am sorry,” he said contritely. “I shall try to be more careful. The monotony has distracted me, I fear.”
“Tell me about it,” Mildred said.
Ricky said something from behind her. She wasn’t listening close enough to make it out, so she answered with a grunt. He had begged Ryan to be allowed to take Jak’s place on point. Ryan had shot him down in short order, insisting on walking lead himself.
She liked Ricky well enough, she guessed. He was just a kid, who should have been home with his folks and his sister on Monster Island. Except, of course, that coldhearts had chilled his parents before his eyes, and sold his sister Yami into slavery; he was still looking for her, with an obsessive devotion that might have been comical had it not been so tragic and doomed. He was an engaging little doofus, in his way, the fumbling, eager, perpetually cheerful adolescent instead of the snarly or surly-sulky kind. And yet, when the chips were down, he was surprisingly competent and bone reliable. And there was not a scrap of malice in him.
Sometimes he was in love with Mildred, or at least her boobs. Sometimes infatuated with whatever halfway-presentable woman crossed their path. And he was always totally hung up on the walking thermonuclear warhead of femininity that was Krysty. Lucky for him, Ryan was secure enough in his lead-dog masculinity not to get bent out of shape about it—or just didn’t take a shy, awkward sixteen-year-old seriously as a romantic rival.
Krysty was Mildred’s friend, who accepted