Hanging Judge. James Axler

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      “Nuestra Señora!” Ricky yelped. “The squirrels! They’re burned!” He grabbed both spits and waved the blackened carcasses in the air, trailing streamers of smoke.

      Everyone had forgotten that their dinners were still cooking in the flames, even the vigilant and ever-practical J.B. To Krysty that underlined the seriousness of what had just happened.

      “Burned or not,” Ryan said, “they’re still chow. And I’m hungry.”

      J.B. settled his round specs back in front of his eyes.

      “Me, too,” he added. “But I can’t say I feel easy staying here.”

      “I agree,” Doc said. Jak’s departure had apparently snapped him back to the here and now. “Our enemies’ ire has greatly grown. Or will, as soon as the merchant’s death is discovered. We took a risk by tarrying here. Now that risk has been redoubled.”

      Looking glum, Mildred wrestled down one of Ricky’s arms and pulled off a charred squirrel corpse with a handkerchief wrapped around her hand to protect her from the heat.

      “So we’re going to take off into a trackless tangle of briars, that’s chock full of muties, in the dark,” she said. “Without our scout.”

      Tension and grief had wound Krysty’s hair into a cap of tight curls. She moved alongside Ryan, seeing his features harden.

      For a moment he frowned, and his blue eye blazed with anger. Then the fire faded.

      “No,” he said. “That’d be stupe. We wait for daybreak. It’s likely the Second Chance sec men will, too. If not, sooner or later everybody winds up staring at the stars.”

      “I’d prefer later,” Mildred stated, crunching on a mouthful of squirrel.

      Krysty slid her arm around Ryan’s and laid her head against his shoulder.

      It was all she could do.

       Chapter Four

      “It’s anarchy!” the red-bearded man exclaimed, his high-pitched voice quivering with outrage. “Total anarchy loosed on the land!”

      “Yes, yes, Mr. Myers,” Judge Santee said dismissively. “Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. And so on. Nonsense! It is my sworn mission in life to hold the center—and to extend the circle of blessed order ever outward, until these American states stand united once again! Isn’t that so, Chief Marshal Sevier?”

      Cutter Dan nodded. He was already pissed off way beyond nuke red by the previous day’s events. He didn’t give much of an actual shit about Sonnard Bates getting his scrawny throat slit by random Deathlands scum. But coming on top of the fact that he had lost a prisoner straight off the gallows and had one of his own men wounded and another chilled, Bates’s death was a personal insult to him.

      The fresh cut along the left side of his face burned like a branding iron. He had stitched it up himself the afternoon before, once it came clear the criminals had made their escape and there would be no easy capture of them. By that time, Santee had ordered him to hold off starting pursuit until the Judge himself gave permission. Cutter Dan hadn’t taken so much as a swig of Towse lightning to take the edge off the pain. He reckoned what didn’t kill him made him stronger. An ache that fierce in his head had to be making him triple strong.

      Cutter Dan was not a man to let shit like that stand, even if his job as sec boss didn’t depend on it, as it surely did.

      A smoky woodstove kept down the early morning chill in Santee’s office in the courthouse. It had rained during the night, and the temperature had dropped considerably. A couple of kerosene lamps cast weak light on the pale faces gathered around a desk that had as many books piled on it as the shelves on the walls did.

      “We need to devote our every resource to tracking these desperados down and bringing them to justice!” Myers said.

      “Have you forgotten our plans, Munktun?” asked a small, obsessively neat man with receding black hair, sunken black eyes and a thin black goatee. Cutter Dan knew the neatness hid the fact that he wasn’t particularly clean, even by the standards of the day. And the beard and hair were dyed to hide encroaching gray. “We’ve got to expand our foothold of order, which will in turn provide us the resources to sustain what we have.”

      “But how can we hope to hold on to what we have if such criminals are allowed to flout the law with impunity?” Myers asked. “Much less take over new villes. And restore them to order, of course.”

      “Let it go,” the small man said. “So, they made us look bad. We still have the marshals to enforce our will. The Judge’s will, that is.

      “And if the marshals are all haring off into the Wild in pursuit of these phantoms? What then, Gein? Who will keep the peasan—the citizens of Second Chance in line?”

      “Gentlemen,” Marley Toogood said in an oily voice. “Gentlemen. We’re all on the same side here. Let’s remember our first principles.”

      “Get it while you can?” Myers asked.

      “Never give a sucker an even break?” Gein suggested.

      Toogood laughed. “You’re both right, my friends,” he said. “But the deeper truth—or higher, if you will—is that there are the rulers and there are the ruled. And the members of one class have everything in common with one another—and very little with those 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.

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