Hanging Judge

“You know everything that goes on in the courthouse,” the fussy and diminutive man said.

Toogood laughed. “You give me far too much credit, my friend.”

“I’m worried,” said the sturdy Myers, frowning beneath bushy red eyebrows at the crowd, sullen as the ville folk ambled away to get back to their daily duties under the watchful eyes of a dozen sec men. “We’re spread too thin. If only we had let the coldhearts and the filthy mutie they stole from justice get away scot free, instead of weakening our sec force! Just look at these shiftless scoundrels. They’re just waiting for the opportunity to pull us down like wolves and tear us apart.”

“Why else do you think I just sent off a foursome at once, gentlemen?” cawed a familiar voice from behind them.

They snapped their heads around to see Judge Santee sheltering inside the open door of the courthouse and silently laughing at them.

“What better way to remind them who’s in charge, eh?” the Judge said. “Make an impression! Justice is not to be denied!”

He smiled unpleasantly. It occurred to Toogood to wonder if he’d ever seen the man smile any other way.

“Perhaps you gentlemen would be wise to take such lessons to heart, before you walk quite so perilously close to sedition. Wouldn’t you agree?”

And cackling openly he turned and vanished into the darks depths of his lair.

Myers’s bearded jowls shook as he vented a shuddering breath. “Brrr. The man’s unnerving sometimes.”

“We, of course, appreciate fully how fortunate we are to find ourselves in Judge Santee’s strong and capable hands,” Toogood said loudly. “Of course, none of us harbor any thoughts but those of complete loyalty to our Judge and his vision!”

He winked one eye furiously at his fellow grandees.

“Of course!” Gein piped up. He nudged Myers in the well-padded ribs with his elbow.

“Oh, very well,” the stockier man said. Then more loudly, he added, “Of course I know that the Judge’s decisions are wise!”

“Better, gentlemen,” Toogood said, nodding and beaming vigorously.

“The real shame is that this snipe hunt is slowing up our schedule for restoring the rule of law to nearby villes,” Gein said, in far more subdued tones. “Once we start consolidating our grip—that is, consolidating the rule of law and of the United States—we’ll have no trouble bringing in enough recruits to keep the rabble in their proper places.”

“For now, we must agree to disagree, Donnell,” Myers said.

He turned to Toogood. “What’s the next ville due for reintegration into our United States, Marley?”

Toogood frowned as he thought about the question. “I’m not privy to strategy,” he said, and officially that was true. “That’s for the Judge and Cutter Dan to decide. But I believe it’s the ville of Esperance, to the southwest.”

“Ugh,” Myers said. “A real nest of vipers and freethinkers. I know we rely on trade with them. All the more reason to bring them to heel. I can’t say I’ll be sorry to be able to free my employees from their pernicious influence and example.”

“See, Munktun?” Gein proclaimed. “We’ll make a believer of you yet!”

“Perish the thought,” Myers said.

* * *

THEFACTTHATRyan only had one eye severely restricted his peripheral vision. But, as he marched in the lead of his companions, he kept his head constantly turning, like a one-eyed tomcat in a ville back alley. Even before Ricky shouted his warning, he’d spotted the missile arcing toward him from the dense mutie growth atop the high wall to the left.

His mind registered that it was a spear. Then it passed through the place where he would have been walking and embedded itself in the red clay bank to his right.

He threw himself forward into the stream. He had been carrying his Scout longblaster. Now he held it up as he belly flopped clear to the bottom of the shallow running water. Then, rolling rapidly to his right, he brought the weapon to his shoulder and pointed toward where the spear had come from.

He saw a creature gazing back down at him from the edge of the braid of thick, spiky vines. At first he thought it was another mutie animal, an outsized lizard of some sort, or mebbe a bird. It was about four feet tall, with a black-banded gray face and an off-white, streaked belly. It had a crest of turquoise feathers. He couldn’t see more of it for the growth.

Then he noticed the thing had something like a bandolier slung across its chest. It looked as if it had bags and pouches attached to it, and a knife in a beaded sheath.

A second one appeared, with an arm cocked back to throw another spear.

By this point Ryan had his longblaster pointed in the right direction. He caught a flash picture through the ghost-ring iron sights mounted beneath the scope and gave the trigger a compressed speed break. The lightweight rifle bellowed and bucked. When Ryan pulled it back online, both inhuman faces were gone.

“They’re on both sides!” Ricky shouted. “What are those things?”

“Trouble,” Ryan yelled, rolling on his back in the stream and jackknifing to stand back up by the sheer power of his gut muscles. “They’re not just animals! They got hands and weapons.”

Muzzle blasts buffeted Ryan’s ears as his friends opened up. He hoped they were picking their targets. They couldn’t afford to just bust caps, lost in the Wild like this.

He got his boots beneath him and, first things first, quickly sidestepped. It got him out of the stream, onto soft and slightly slippery, but still more reliable footing, and also shifted him out of the target zone for any other arm-launched missiles that might heading his way.

The vines atop both walls rustled with a seethe of drab-colored bodies, as the lizard muties appeared to throw stuff and duck back out of sight. After the first one missed Ryan, few spears seemed to be coming their way. The muties seemed not to want to waste their prime weapons. Mostly what came raining down on Ryan and his companions was hefty chunks of vine, many with long thorns still attached, tumbling end over end.

He slung his Scout and drew his handblaster. Now that the enemy knew he and the others could hit back he wasn’t going to get many good shots. If he was going to waste ammo he preferred to burn the lighter, easier-to-come by 9 mm than the 7.62 mm his Scout used.

To his relief the others had stopped their brief flurry of fire as they realized they were just busting caps. Now they were concentrating on spotting objects thrown their way, ducking and dodging, or batting them aside.

Ryan looked quickly around. When in an ambush, he remembered, Trader always advised the best thing to do was assault right into it.

The problem with that was, the most obvious way to do it in this case was to charge straight up one of the steep and wet-slick clay walls of the little canyon, which would almost certainly turn into a particularly grubby and arduous type of suicide. Likewise, charging straight ahead the way they’d been heading might send them straight into the heart of the nest. Or whatever the lizards lived in.

“Back the way we came,” he yelled. “Triple fast! J.B., take the lead. I got the rear.”

With his short, bandy legs, the Armorer was unlikely to set a pace that any of them couldn’t keep, and risk falling behind—fatally. Even Mildred could keep up with him.

“What about the centipedes?” Mildred demanded.

“Let’s all try to stay alive long enough to get back to them,” Ryan called back. “We can sort that out then.”

For the first few moments, as Ryan trotted along the stream bank, he thought their attackers would be content to let them just back out of their domain. The hail of vine chunks tapered off rapidly.

Then he had to yell a warning as another spear came zipping down from the right bank.

Chapter Nine

“Why would we help you?” one woodcutter demanded.

Cutter Dan stood facing the two men, rubbing the side of his face. Then he snatched his hand away. The cut the coldheart bastard had given him had far from truly healed, and it itched like blazing blue death.

“Fair question,” he said.

He turned slightly, drew his big handblaster, and shot the man’s partner through the belly. He fell, clutching his ruptured guts, screaming and kicking at the bare red dirt yard of the ramshackle shack.

“Now,” Cutter Dan said, turning back to the first man, whose sandy-bearded face was slack with shock and white behind its soot and grime. “I sure hope you know the Wild hereabouts better than this gentleman, my friend. What’s your name?”

The man’s thick, callused hands quivered in the air by his shoulders as he looked down at his black-bearded companion. The man’s screams had turned to a visceral bubble of pain and sorrow.

Cutter Dan cocked his handblaster with his thumb. “I asked you a question.”

“Uh, Torrance. Sir.”

“All right, Torrance. Now you see why you should help us, right? If you do, I don’t shoot you in the belly, too. Painful way to die. Believe me, I’ve seen it happen a lot.”

He tapped the often-broken bridge of the man’s nose with the muzzle of his Smith & Wesson 627. The man’s pale green eyes blinked rapidly at the still-stinging heat of the blaster barrel.

“And since I’m in such a generous mood,” the sec boss went on, “I’ll even put your friend here out of his misery as a bonus. But only if you help.”

The man drew in a long, shuddery breath.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll help you. Now, please. Take care of poor Elliott.”

“Right. Wise choice, Torrance.”

He was a man of his word. A man was nothing if he wasn’t as good as his word. He holstered the Smith & Wesson and drew his trademark Bowie knife. Stooping, he cut the wounded man’s grimy, stubbly neck to the backbone with a single swift cut.

Torrance fainted. Maybe it was the arterial spray of his best friend’s blood splashed across the shins of his faded jeans.

Cutter Dan wiped his big blade carefully on the chill’s black coat. As he straightened, he sheathed it again.

He looked down at the prostrate form of their new guide and shook his head.

“I hope he’s not going to be such a lightweight on the hunt,” he said.

“Mebbe he just don’t like the sight of blood,” Scovul stated.

“Well, that could be a problem, too. Seeing as the object of this expedition is the shedding of blood. Though not too much, at least when it comes to our fugitives. We need to take ’em back to the Judge in presentable shape and not too drained out.”

Yonas laughed. “Well, if he does turn out to be a weakling, you can always chill him, too, boss.”

Cutter Dan shook his head.

“We got severely limited time for these kinds of games, fun as they are,” he said. “Now, somebody throw a bucket of water over this simp and rouse him up. Those scofflaw coldhearts aren’t going to hang themselves.”

* * *

RYANSPOTTEDANOTHERmutie standing up out of the thicket on the left. It held a spear poised to throw. Ryan snapped two quick shots at it from his P-226. He mostly intended to make it duck and spoil its aim. But he saw blood squirt from the left side of its narrow chest. It dropped the spear and fell squalling into the green tangle.

“Ryan!”

It was Ricky, shouting from right behind his back—meaning, ahead of him in line. By sheer reflex Ryan jumped left and forward into the shallow brook.

A spear brushed his pack. Another mutie uttered a gargling cry from atop the bank to Ryan’s right. Then it came half tumbling, half sliding down the bare red slope.

As Ryan watched it fall, he heard the clack-clack as Ricky threw the bolt of his silenced DeLisle. It really was silent—the action working was far louder than the actual shot had been.

That was old news. Ryan was far more interested in the creature descending toward him in an increasing tangle of limbs. It was bigger than he thought. The body was the size of a big dog or a small man. Its tail was about as long, bringing it to roughly nine feet in length, total. The reason he’d thought it smaller was that it seemed built to carry its body horizontally, not upright like a human.

Its body wasn’t bare skin or scales, either. It was covered with what looked like small feathers, judging from the way the mud made it spike up. The creature came to rest with big taloned feet in the air. The feet did have scales, yellow ones, and each sported a single, much bigger claw higher than the rest. The open mouth was full of knife-tip teeth. The wide-open eye staring Ryan’s way was yellow.

“Wow,” Ricky breathed. “With teeth and claws like that, why would they even need spears?”

He yelped as Ryan hopped toward him and caught him with a powerful sidekick in the hip. It threw the boy sprawling in the wet grass.

“Why’d you—?” Ricky began to yell in outrage even before he stopped sliding on his side. Then his eyes got big and his mouth shut as another spear stuck into the grass right where he’d been standing.

“They need spears to throw at stupes like you who stand there making targets of themselves,” Ryan said, turning and loosing a shot. The spear caster ducked out of sight. “Now, move!”

The shower of hurled objects continued as J.B. led them back up the ravine, less dense, but containing more of the metal-tipped spears. Ryan saw flashes of the strange lizardlike creatures moving fluidly through the growth at the tops of the walls. He suspected their powerful, clawed hind feet gave them the ability to run along the thicker vines.

He could hear them chirping and screeching at one another. It was like being hunted by a cross between a wolf pack and a flock of crows.

The companions couldn’t outrun their mutie pursuit, it seemed. But they were thinning it out. The pursuers were getting strung out along the cliffs. And the companions were popping occasional shots their way to make things as rough on them as possible.

Ryan guessed that was likely why the muties had started throwing their precious spears again—to keep their prey from getting away. Those that missed—all of them so far, anyway—they could easily come back and retrieve later, when this was done one way or another.

“We’re going this way, Ryan!” he heard Mildred call.

He looked around. J.B. was leading the group up a gully that joined the main line from the northeast. To his relief he judged they were still well shy of the place where they’d left the monster centipedes to devour the wild hog alive.

“Right,” he said. He turned and started running to catch up to his friends, who had pulled away. Watching their back trail was suddenly no longer the top priority.

Seeing that their prey had veered away from half their pursuers, the feathered-lizard muties chittered in rage. J.B. suddenly stopped and turned to his left, his Uzi in his hands.

“Up the bank,” he called to the others. “Lay down some righteous cover fire.”

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