Hanging Judge

“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.