Hanging Judge. James Axler

you don’t talk about throwing us out!” Mildred said.

      Ryan scratched his cheek. “Nobody’s talking about throwing anybody out. Jak’s been separating himself from the rest of us. I reckon mebbe he thinks it’s time to make that official.”

      “Well, Jak has gone off on his own in the past,” Doc said. “Of course, he did rejoin us, after tragedy claimed his family in the former New Mexico territory.”

      “You’re not helping, you old coot!” Mildred flared. “Anyway, New Mexico was a state, not a territory.”

      “Before that it was a territory,” Doc said mildly. “And it’s no longer either. QED.”

      Krysty noticed he finished on a vague note. In the firelight his blue eyes took on an unfocused look. Krysty guessed the mention of Jak losing his family had reminded Doc of losing his own and steered his mind toward wandering off through the mists of memory once more.

      Mildred was glaring at Doc. Krysty decided that if she started yelling at him the emotional escalation was liable to do more damage than the distraction would help.

      “Jak,” she said, trying not to sound as urgent as she felt. “What about you?”

      “Look out for companions,” he said sullenly. “Scout. Guard. Eyes. Ears.”

      J.B. took off his glasses and polished them. “We’ve long since come to rely on Jak to recce, and that’s a fact,” he said. “We are pretty deep into unknown territory right now to cut him loose. And that’s without taking the muties in this giant tangle of thorns into account.”

      “He’s right,” Krysty said.

      “We got along ace without him before,” Ryan replied. “We can do it again.”

      “Ryan, please,” Krysty begged. “Get him to stay.”

      “Jak’s been intent on walking his own road for a long time. I’m done with trying to stand in his way.”

      As the others tried to defuse the situation, Krysty had watched from the corner of her eye as Jak had lowered his head farther. Now he gave his head a quick shake and straightened.

      “Fine,” he said, still not looking back. “Want gone. Going.”

      He walked out of the yellow circle of the firelight and into the thorny embrace of the Wild.

      With her heart sunk to the bottom of her stomach, Krysty stood staring at the place where he had disappeared.

      No one spoke.

      “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