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The beefy hand of Santee’s chief executioner grabbed the back of Jak’s head and turned his face firmly forward.
“No rubbernecking, taint,” the huge man rumbled. Jak swore to himself that he would let the guts out of that big belly, even if he had to come back from the dead to do it.
As Toogood’s speech finally seemed to start winding down, the sound of hooves splashing in the layer of red water standing on the dense clay mud of Second Chance’s main street reached Jak’s ears. Accompanying that sound was the jingle of harness and the creak of a wooden wag.
He flicked his eyes to a pair of horses pulling a lightly built wag. It was driven by a man with slumped shoulders and a slouch hat turned down to let the rain fall off the brim before his face. The women were swaddled in black clothes and big hats. They wept and wailed loudly, their voices barely muffled by the huge bouquet of flowers each of them clutched to her face.
Jak knew those voices.
He kept the recognition off his face. He’d spent his life having as little to do with other people as humanly possible. But the times he had dealt with others had taught him well to keep his feelings hidden. Even the past few years with his own companions, and they were the closest thing to family he’d really ever known, except for a brief interlude in the southwest that ended in tragedy.
The crowd noticed too. Elbows nudged; heads turned.
“What’s this?” Judge Santee exclaimed. “Who are you people? What do you mean by this?”
“Stop there!” Cutter Dan barked.
The wag obligingly halted, roughly twenty yards from the crowd and the cordon of sec men that kept them cowed in place. A couple of marshals moved toward it as if to investigate.
“Spare this poor boy!” the taller of the women cried.
“Spare him his life,” the shorter, stocky woman added.
“Not a chance,” Santee called. His voice did carry, even if it more screeched than boomed, the way his sec boss’s did. “The quality of mercy is not strained. And it has no place in the administration of justice!”
Jak could tell the Judge was smiling. Santee smiled a lot. He was well equipped for it: he had a face like a skull with a wet sheet shrunk to the front of it and giant teeth that he frequently showed off in a thin-lipped smile.
“And now, let justice be delayed no longer! Mr. Beemish, execute the sentence!”
The executioner reached his bare, burly arm toward the lever that would spring the trapdoor beneath Jak’s feet and drop him until the noose brought him up short by snapping his neck. At least the Judge didn’t believe in letting victims of his unique brand of justice dangle and strangle, like some barons did.
The shorter woman stood up in the wag box. “Not a fucking chance!” she shouted.
She hurled the bouquet as far as her strong arm could. It fell amid the crowd. Before the bouquet even hit, the other woman did the same.
Like the first, her bouquet left a trail of smoke white against the gray, leaking sky.
“It’s a bomb!” Toogood shrieked in a high-pitched voice. He turned and dived off the back of the scaffold as the bouquets erupted in clouds of dense, choking smoke.
* * *
WITHAHEAVEof his shoulder, Ryan Cawdor yanked the quick-release lever J.B. Dix and his apprentice in mischief, Ricky Morales, had rigged for the horses.
As smoke boiled out of the concealed bombs, he glanced quickly back to see Krysty Wroth and Mildred Wyeth take their seats and hunker down, trying to make themselves the smallest possible targets in case any of the sec men got twitchy trigger fingers. They were both plucking at their dark, voluminous skirts, to prevent the fabric wrapping them up and interfering with their role in the next stage of the plan.
Which was escape. Ryan saw Doc Tanner pounding up the street toward them on an eye-rolling black horse. He led two more animals, saddled and ready for the women to ride out of the ville.
Ryan turned his head forward. He gathered himself and jumped onto the back of the right-hand horse that had, until a moment ago, been hitched to the front of the wag.
Screaming people rushed out of the smoke in all directions. They were completely freaked by the sudden, choking smoke. Following them were Santee’s marshals, swearing and waving clubs and blasters, trying to corral them and herd them back to watch the hangings like good little citizens.
Ryan booted his mount, which lunged forward. Its companion came along, since Ryan held a long lead rein attached to its bridle. He urged the animals straight into the impenetrable wall of smoke.
A sec man lurched in front of him. He was trying to bat the smoke away with a hand holding some kind of wheel gun. His face was bright red, and he bellowed orders for the fleeing citizens to stop.
His blue eyes got wide as he saw Ryan and two horses bearing down on him. Ryan’s mount knocked the man down to its left and kept on going.
The other horse trampled right over the screaming figure.
Ryan held his breath as he plunged into the smoke. He felt people bumping into him but no more went down.
The smoke thinned. Mildred had dropped her bomb in the middle of the crowd. Fortunately, Krysty, with her longer arm and greater strength, had gotten her loaded bouquet right on target: the base of the gallows, which was enfolded in its own thick cloud of billowing white.
None of the marshals remained at the scaffold’s base. Whether they were off trying to chase down the audience, or shielding their lord and master with their bodies, Ryan didn’t know nor care. They were out of his way.
He reined in the horses right next to the nearest leg of the gallows. Pausing only to tie the reins around the upright, he scrambled up onto the platform. The wooden planks boomed beneath his feet as he rose.
The smoke up there was thinner, it was still enough to tickle his throat and make his single eye water. But he could see through it. After a fashion.
Well enough to see a giant bare-chested executioner, choking and hacking, yank the catch for the trap beneath Jak’s feet.
Chapter Two (#ub114d30f-1870-5368-849a-7649d3a357f0)
Ryan sprang forward, already knowing he was too late.
But Jak wasn’t standing on the now open trapdoor. Cunning as always, the skinny albino had sidestepped. The trapdoor had swung down and left him standing safe and sound.
The executioner goggled at him. Jak gave him a big grin, then he gave him a hard kick to the groin. The burly man bent over and staggered toward the back of the podium.
A series of thunderclaps boomed. Black-powder charges—big firecrackers—improvised by J.B. and Ricky had started blowing up in the wag bed. Krysty and Mildred had triggered them as they escaped with Doc.
A fresh wall of smoke rolled forward over the gallows. Through it, Ryan could just make out furious, confused motion in the viewing stand. He heard sec men yelling to one another to get the Judge to safety.
Not his concern. So long as they weren’t paying attention to him. The executioner managed to start cranking himself back upright. Ryan stepped to him and gave him a straight right that squashed his already often-busted nose and splashed his slab cheeks and brutal mouth with blood. He toppled backward through the smoke.
Turning back, Ryan drew his big panga. He kept the broad blade honed razor keen. It parted the hangman’s rope like rotted predark cloth.
Jak showed his teeth in a wolf’s grin and bobbed his head in thanks. He was never much for talking.
Ryan jerked a thumb. “Horses,” he said.
A big fist came out of a swirl of dirty-gray smoke right behind Jak and stretched him facedown on the planks. A man stepped into view. He was taller than Ryan’s six-two by about an inch, and built along the same lines: lean muscled, wide across the shoulders, narrow across the waist and hips.
He frowned when he saw Ryan. He had a big square face with prominent cheekbones. His lips were thin, his eyes merciless blue. A red, white and blue armband was tied around his big right biceps in its faded blue shirt sleeve.
“What the nuke do you think you’re doing?” he demanded. “Don’t you know who I am?”
At Ryan’s feet Jak stirred and moaned.
“You’re called Cutter Dan,” Ryan said. “You’re a major coldheart in these parts.”
The other man laughed. “Is that what the no-account trash drifters tell each other in the outlands? I’m the law, now—the Judge’s strong right hand.”
Ryan rushed him. The self-proclaimed marshal was wearing a piece, a heavy-frame Smith & Wesson revolver of some sort. But instead of drawing the blaster he whipped a big Bowie knife out of its sheath with his right hand.
He blocked Ryan’s overhand cut with the flat of his blade. For all the one-eyed man’s strength and the panga’s greater weight, the sec boss held him off.
Cutter Dan’s free hand snatched for the wrist that held the panga as the Bowie disengaged with a ringing hiss of steel on steel. Ryan jumped back, avoiding not only the grab but a gut-cutting sweep of the foot-long blade.
The sec boss sprang forward, slashing high and low, pressing Ryan hard. Though the panga’s length made up for Cutter Dan’s reach advantage, its relative heaviness meant that the Bowie was faster.
The bastard was good, Ryan realized. He feinted high, but before he could strike for Cutter Dan’s left side his opponent launched another sideways cut of his own. Ryan sucked in his gut hard and bowed his back.
The Bowie’s tip sliced a line of fire across his belly.
The smoke was clearing. He heard shouts from the grandstand as the sec men hustling off the bigwigs spotted something going down on the gallows. Time was blood, Trader used to say—and if it was, Ryan had just suffered an artery cut.
He launched the most savage attack he had in him, trying to power the taller man down as quickly as possible. Steel rang on steel as Cutter Dan parried every stroke. Ryan didn’t dare take the long, looping cuts that would take maximum advantage of the panga’s crushing power; the other man would cut him to bits. Ryan gave up little, if anything, in strength to his larger foe.
But big, bad Cutter Dan was wicked fast. He slammed the flat of his Bowie against the flat of the descending panga and steered the hefty chopper out and past to his own right.
He had opened Ryan to a chilling stroke.
Then he roared as if in surprised pain. For just half a second he froze.
It was all Ryan needed. He raised the panga and slashed Cutter Dan downward across the face.
As he followed through, he saw that Jak, still prone on the scaffold, had managed to sink his teeth into Cutter Dan’s right calf above his combat boot.
The sec boss reeled back, his face exploding in blood. With no more time to waste, Ryan kicked him off the back of the gallows. He reached down and yanked Jak to his feet by his left arm.
“Come on!” he shouted. He towed Jak to the front of the gallows where he’d hastily tied the horses. He swung down onto one. Jak sprang aboard the other. His hands were still tied behind his back, but he was a fairly skillful horseman who could steer his mount with his knees.
They rode hard eastward down the street.
* * *
SECOND CHANCESUREwas a sorrowful sort of dump, J.B. Dix thought, as frightened locals stampeded past him. He’d be glad to see the last of it.
The ville’s buildings were mostly predark framed stucco, and only desperate and haphazard measures seemed to keep them standing against a century and more of bad weather and rot. The rest were shanties slapped together out of badly cut planks and random scavvied material. The only structure in the ville that didn’t look like a hard look would blow it away was the gray stone courthouse, and the sturdy brick-and-block annex built onto it to house the population of prisoners that fed the ever-hungry gallows out front.
Lurking in a recessed doorway west along the street from the gallows, J.B. watched in satisfaction as the smoke billowed out from under the canvas that covered the wag bed. Doc was by the smoking wag on horseback, seeing to the getaway of Krysty and Mildred, who’d pulled off the diversion without a hitch. J.B.’s next job would commence directly.
The companions had had less than forty-eight hours from the time they’d watched a bruised and bloodied Jak being dragged out of a trading post on the ville’s outskirts by a quartet of burly sec men—who weren’t looking much better themselves—to whip together the makings of their diversion.
The wag had dropped into their laps as they withdrew into the nearby forest to regroup and plot in the gathering dusk. They’d hit a road where a six-legged catamount was still eating the guts out of the capacious overall-covered belly of the wag’s former occupant.
Fortunately the big cat wasn’t hard to chill. A quick shot from Ryan’s Steyr Scout Tactical longblaster coupled with a blast of buckshot from J.B.’s Smith & Wesson M-4000 had knocked it right off its prey, snapping and hissing. A panga hack to the back of its neck had stilled it.
It had taken a lot of doing to make a plan and complete preparations to carry it out before the justice meted out by Judge Santee—whose fame had spread for miles around—took its speedy course. They boosted what they could from isolated farmhouses. Some things they simply walked in and purchased from the same general store where Jak had gone off by his stupe self and come to grief. At least damp brush, which served a key role in turning the wag into a giant smoke bomb, wasn’t in short supply there in the Wild, as the locals called it.
Now, as Doc and the two women went racing back up the street unscathed, J.B. allowed himself a nod at a job of work well done.
He heard a powerful commotion from the other side of all that smoke, which totally filled the rutted dirt street and rolled over the roofs of adjacent buildings.
Suddenly a knot of grim-looking men wearing the red, white and blue armbands burst out of the smoke. A couple waved handblasters. Others carried clubs. They were all shouting at the fleeing ville folk to get back where they belonged.
Still staying half hidden in the doorway, J.B. pivoted and fired a burst from his mini-Uzi from the hip. It kicked up splashes of rainwater on the packed clay soil of the street, where it had barely begun to sink in. Pink streaks appeared on the sec men’s pants legs as they shied away from the impacts.
They threw up their arms in front of their faces. J.B. knew that was reflex, if triple stupe.
He fired two more 3-round bursts into the ground at their feet. That was enough for them. They turned and sprinted back into the dense smoke.
Ryan had told him not to chill anyone unless he had to. J.B. accepted that because of the dictum of his and Ryan’s old boss and mentor, Trader, no chillin’ for the sake of chillin’, and because it made sound sense not to piss off the local sec men any more than strictly necessary.
He just hoped they didn’t come to regret passing on the opportunity to thin the herd a little.
* * *
CROUCHEDINAnarrow, stinking space between two sagging predark buildings, Ricky Morales watched Jak and Ryan ride past, east down the street and out of the ville. Residents fleeing the smoke bombs and confusion by the gallows scattered before them like quail.
Ricky moved back and held his longblaster behind his body in shadow. No point in getting spotted and ratted out to the sec men of the crazy man known as the Judge. It might seem strange to think of people disobeying the Judge’s orders to look to do the man a service. But among the many things Ricky had learned since joining Ryan Cawdor’s band and leaving his home island of Puerto Rico, high on the list was to be careful whom he trusted.
And strangers—especially strangers who might be looking to get back in the good graces of authority after disobeying in panic—weren’t high on the list of trustworthy souls.
Those thoughts flew fast through his mind by reflex—pure survival. At once his body flooded with a warm sensation of relief. His best friend, Jak, had been rescued from certain death!
A trio of sec men burst out of the smoke. One shouted, pointing after the pair of men rapidly riding away. Another threw a lever-action longblaster to his shoulder.
It was a stupe trick, Ricky thought, taking the shot, but Ryan had told him in no uncertain terms to avoid killing unless it was absolutely necessary.
Now he got a flash picture over the iron sights of his DeLisle carbine’s fat barrel. His finger squeezed the light trigger, smooth and fast. The longblaster gave a cough and the buttplate thumped against his shoulder.
The barrel jerked to the side. Ricky heard a clang of copper-shod .45-caliber bullets on a blued-steel barrel. The self-proclaimed marshal yipped a curse and dropped the blaster as if it was hot.
The others stopped in their tracks and stared at him. “What?”
“I think somebody shot my piece!”
Ricky had immediately thrown the bolt to chamber a fresh round when his first shot went downrange. The smooth Enfield action and Ricky’s long practice made it incredibly fast. He fired another bullet in front of the boots of the marshal closest to him, who had an impressive bandit mustache.
“Hey!” the third sec man shouted, pointing. “I saw something. He’s in that alley!”
The first man was staring at his longblaster as if still trying to figure out what was going on. Ricky’s shot might have bent the barrel. The other two immediately opened fire with handblasters.
Ricky ducked back into the narrow walkway as bullets sang by. A ricochet moaned by his ear.
Have I done enough? he wondered. Have I done my job? Ryan and Jak got away clean.
