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“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 (#ulink_0c4a056e-6d3d-5a6f-bbf8-c77553cb8f44)
“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.
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 and did not judge her, and would never think of using her beauty as a weapon against the shorter, stouter, plainer woman—“darker” didn’t mean much in this here and now. Krysty never hesitated to use her looks against enemies—any more than any of them would hesitate to use any weapon that came to hand. She was as tough as leather and resilient as spring steel. But even though she could be as hard as need be to protect herself or a loved one, nothing ever touched her core of pure sweetness.
J.B. was Mildred’s partner; the two were lovers of long standing. She knew he was anything but cold and bloodless, although he often came across to outsiders that way. He could be ruthless, with a cold practicality that sometimes eclipsed Ryan’s. But she knew him as a good man.
Whatever that meant anymore. She felt he was good. Just as she felt that, down deep, they all were. It was enough.
It had to be.
Doc was a trickier case. The old coot exasperated her with his vagueness and his outmoded courtliness and sometimes otherworldly ideas. And yet she was uncomfortably aware—more than she had been in a long time—of the fact that his origin in time wasn’t much further removed from her day than Mildred’s was from the bizarre thrown-together family she and Doc now shared. And though she would, from a standing start, deny she could ever have much in common with his Victorian ideas, no matter how liberated they were for his time, the brutal fact was, the global devastation of the megacull and skydark created a far sharper and deeper disconnect than anything that separated Doc’s day from Mildred’s.
They were both strangers in this strange land. But because his attitudes were shaped by a far harder world to survive than the one she had grown up in, she might be the greater stranger here. And that, she realized to her acute discomfort, made her short with him. She, in a bizarre way, envied the tormented old man.
The real reason the family had split, of course, was that Jak and Ryan had clashed. Mildred wasn’t even sure what the conflict was about, not really. She guessed it had to be one of those male things.
But questioning Ryan’s judgment seemed the worst of alternatives to her. He was the force that held them together. He, more than anyone, had kept them alive.
And yet...he was the older of the two. He also hadn’t spent most of his life running around the bayou like a feral child raised by the gators. Couldn’t he have handled it a bit differently?
And what good had second-guessing anyone ever done for her, Mildred wondered? Even second-guessing herself? And what’s more—
The boom of the stub-barreled shotgun stuck beneath the main barrel of Doc’s gigantic LeMat revolver snapped her out of her tail-chasing reverie.
A shiny, leathery, many-legged horror the size of a flattened-out house cat flew through the air right toward her face, with giant insect mandibles open wide.
Chapter Five (#ulink_9e284696-c8f6-5dea-b0dd-295baa9c6f05)
Jak, crouched high off the ground on a gray-brown vine thicker than his arm, studied what his snare had caught him for dinner.
He wrinkled his nose in disgust. The thing thrashing in the noose that had trapped its hind leg was obviously a rabbit. Kind of. But no rabbit Jak had ever seen had been that shade of black, with gray streaks and rolling orange eyes. Nor had one ever had an extra orange eye, pushed up its head about an inch from the normal right one.
Mutie.
He looked left, looked right. There was no sign of danger in the tangle of thorn-studded vines with black-green leaves, just drizzle falling from a low-hanging sky and the low buzz of insects.
And the rumble in his stomach. He hadn’t eaten for a couple of days now. The sec men in charge of Second Chance’s well-populated jail hadn’t wanted to waste food on a prisoner they were fixing to string up right away. And when he caught up with his friends—
He shook his head. No point thinking about that. Or them. They were part of the past. He was sadly walking away from all that, now.
But he couldn’t outpace his hunger. He looked at the struggling rabbit and sighed.
Tainted or not, the creature’s flesh wouldn’t poison him. Hopefully.
ATTHESHATTERINGroar from Doc’s blaster, Krysty spun, drawing her short-barreled Smith & Wesson 640 as she turned.
She saw Doc pointing his LeMat off the trail—such as it was—through the thorn vines across his body to his left. Blurring motion drew her vision back, where she saw something about two feet long and shiny brown flying through the air at Mildred’s face. Then Ricky stepped up from the rear of the file holding his longblaster by the barrel to whack the thing right out of midair with the butt.
From ahead of Krysty, J.B.’s shotgun went off with a less apocalyptic noise than Doc’s.
“They’re all around us!” she heard Ryan holler. “Close up, people. Watch each others’ backs.”
She heard a sinister rustle from close behind her and she whipped her head around.
A multilegged horror jumped at her. She batted it with the hand that held the blaster. It squealed and went cartwheeling away back into the tangle.
Dozens more of the things ran along the thick vines, flowing around the thorns, gripping with their many legs.
J.B. closed up with her, blasting a jumping centipede into a viscous yellow spray.
“Cease fire,” Ryan said from right behind him. “Got more bugs than we got bullets.”
Krysty looked at the snub-nosed revolver in her hand and winced. It carried five shots. Even with the speedloaders uncomfortably sitting in the pockets of her worn jeans, it took a relatively long time to recharge it.
“What do we fight with?” she yelled, kicking away a pair of the monsters scuttling toward her legs.
“That works,” J.B. said.
“Not well!” shouted Mildred, stamping on one. “Shit! They’re hard to kill!”
Ryan hacked away a three-foot section of vine that had six-inch thorns but no leaves. He handed it to Krysty.
She accepted it, hefted it, gave him a grateful grin. Spinning, she whacked a centipede that was rearing off a vine and was preparing to strike at her head. The weapon felt like a good ax handle and worked the same way, cracking chitin with a crunch and spinning the thing into the thicket.
“Circle up!” Ryan snapped.
The companions shifted to put themselves back to back, shoulder to shoulder. Krysty knew intuitively and at once why: it made it hard for the horrors to get on their flanks—or worse, behind them.
“Are they poisonous?” Ricky asked, clutching his DeLisle by the fat suppressor that enclosed the barrel.
“Try not to find out,” Ryan said. He was dividing his attention between hacking the centipedes into writhing, goo-oozing segments and cutting branches like the one he’d given Krysty. He threw one to Ricky. It bounced off the boy and landed at his feet.
“Don’t screw up your blaster, kid,” he called. “It’s for shooting, not hitting.”
“Not mine,” J.B. said with a wicked grin. He was holding his M-4000 by the barrel, the same way Ricky held his weapon. The synthetic stock already dripped with yellow gore. “Made for this kind of fandango.”
Mildred caught her section of vine just in time to close her eyes and take a mighty home-run swing that knocked two leaping monsters away. One broke apart into three segments, its hooked legs waving frantically as it vanished into the thicket.
