SCARRED FOR EXISTENCE

In the Deathlands, the game of survival offers no reprieve. There’s nothing to win in nuke-blasted America except the chance to fight another day. Still, Ryan Cawdor and his fellow travelers hope for sanctuary…somewhere. Until they find it, they face each dawn as if it’s their last. Because it just might be.

DEVIL’S COURT

Justice is a damning word in what used to be called Oklahoma, thanks to a sadistic baron known as the Hanging Judge. Crazy, powerful and backed by a despotic sec crew, the judge drops innocents from the gallows at will. When Jak narrowly escapes wearing his own rope as a necktie, a rift among the companions sends them deep into the mutie-infested wilderness outside the ville. Separated and hurting, time is running out for the survivors to realize they’re stronger together than they ever could be alone—before a ruthless madman brings them to the end of their rope.

“We heard how you did the dirty on us.”

“Yeah,” Jeff added. “How you snuck around and tricked us into whaling on each other. You taints sure stick together. You must have your own mutie code like us wag dudes have our bro code. High five, Ferd!”

“High five, Jeff! And the bro code says that now we have to make you pay. We’re gonna stomp you good, and bust your filthy mutie bones.”

Belatedly Jak made a move for the knuckle-duster hilt of his trench knife. He realized now that he’d drunk himself to the edge of oblivion. Under other circumstances, he’d already have sliced open Jeff’s paunch, dropped his intestines onto the tops of his mud-splattered boots.

Instead his hand seemed to move, not like a striking sidewinder, but as if he were trying to punch somebody underwater.

But the fist that filled his vision first with a black moon and then bright exploding stars moved like nuking lightning.

Hanging Judge

James Axler

I am an American; free born and free bred, where I acknowledge no man as my superior, except for his own worth, or as my inferior, except for his own demerit.

—Theodore Roosevelt,

1858–1919

THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance.

There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs in the balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness.

But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to nature’s heart despite its ruination.

Ryan Cawdor: The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities.

Krysty Wroth: Harmony ville’s own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the strength of tempered steel. Her premonitions and Gaia powers have been fostered by her Mother Sonja.

J. B. Dix, the Armorer: Weapons master and Ryan’s close ally, he, too, honed his skills traversing the Deathlands with the legendary Trader.

Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn from his family and a gentler life in 1896, Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn’t have imagined.

Dr. Mildred Wyeth: Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is not much lighter. Restored from predark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.

Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend.

Dean Cawdor: Ryan’s young son by Sharona accepts the only world he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.

In a world where all was lost, they are humanity’s last hope.…

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Title Page

Quote

THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Copyright

Chapter One

“You, Jak Lauren, have been found guilty of the following crimes,” the fat man on the scaffold intoned.

Marley Toogood wasn’t talking to Jak, who stood on the trapdoor with the rough rope of the noose, still untightened, chafing his bare skin where it hung around his neck. The fat man stood to one side up at the front, addressing the crowd of spectators looking uncomfortable and unhappy in the periodic drizzle from low-hanging, leaden clouds. Jak’s white hair clung to his head and neck, and the soaked-through shoulders of his T-shirt,

“Pillage, arson, murder, terrorism, treason, disorderly conduct...”

“Ooh, look at that one,” muttered a woman in the front row, whose shapeless hat mirrored her shape in a rain-soaked dress made out of sacks. “He’s so dangerous looking!”

“I don’t know,” the woman next to her whispered back. “I think he’s good looking. For a mutie, I mean.”

The woman was much the same as her companion, only a bit taller and wider. She smelled more strongly of onions, too.

Jak growled at her. Both women flinched gratifyingly. So did most of the other townspeople in the front row.

“...destruction of property belonging to the United States of America, and being a mutie.” The fat man lowered the piece of paper from which he had been reading, now soaked almost to transparency, with a look of satisfaction smeared across his broad, wet, bearded face.

“Not mutie!” Jak snapped.

“And for speaking disrespectfully to authority,” the fat man added.

He crumpled his paper and stuffed it in a pocket of his patched suit coat. It had been made for a man much smaller than he was, and the right sleeve was starting to come loose at the seams.

Jak didn’t know nuke about tailoring, but his ruby-red eyes didn’t miss much.

The fat man cleared his throat. Then, waving his stubby arms, he launched into a speech about the importance of the public watching justice in action and restoring the nation through displaying the awful majesty of the state.

Jak tuned him out. The noose was around his neck. His wrists were bound behind him with rough rope. It had been tied skillfully enough that all he got for trying to work his wrists loose was bloody, abraded skin. The U.S. Marshals, as the sec men of the ville named Second Chance liked to style themselves, clearly got lots of practice tying people up.

But it was not in Jak’s nature to just give up. His every sense was wound tight to respond to the least clue—something, anything—that might lead to a possibility of escape.

Even if he failed, he would be content if he managed to take some of the bastards with him. That would be ace, too.

“What the glowing nukeshit is wrong with Toogood?” grumbled one of the men seated in the bleachers behind the scaffold and in front of the solid-built stone courthouse at the ville’s center. “Why does he always insist on lowering himself like this? And why does he insist on going on so rad-blasted long?”

There were three of them together back there, Jak knew, plus one empty chair waiting for the fat rich bastard when the speechifying ended and the hanging began. The four were the ville’s leading citizens, main backers of the man who was the baron of Second Chance in everything but name.

“Wrap it up, Marley,” a second man called. “Why do these events have to be made mandatory, anyway? It costs us all plenty in lost time from the laborers. At the very least, couldn’t we cut the schedule back to once or mebbe twice a week, or better, just one big hanging party?”

“What’s the matter, Mr. Myers?” a voice sounding like a crow’s called from the stands. It came from Jak’s left side. “You’d want to cheat the public of the moral lessons provided by regular public executions? With the country in its deepest time of crisis? You walk mighty close to sedition, there. But, by all means, keep talking—if you’d like to join this scapegrace with a noose around your neck!”

And he burst out laughing like a crazy man, which he was.

Only a crazy man would think of calling a sad little ville in the middle of a huge thicket of mutant thorn-bushes that was swarming with monsters “the restored United States,” even if he had managed to conquer a couple of neighboring villes.

Judge Phineas Santee ruled his vest-pocket Deathlands empire with an iron fist. And the iron fists of Chief Marshal Cutter Dan Sevier, the tall sec boss whom Jak knew stood now at the Judge’s shoulder—and the fists, truncheons and blasters of Cutter Dan’s marshals.

The rich citizens shut up. Jak glanced over a shoulder. The one on the far right—Bates, his name was, Jak knew too well—was a skinny cuss, whose neck stuck up like a celery stalk from the sweat-and grease-stained, buttoned-up collar of his shirt. He hadn’t said anything.

Instead, he was examining Jak’s camouflage jacket, with the bits of glass and metal sewn into it. Like Jak’s weapons, his many knives and his Colt Python .357 Magnum handblaster, it had been claimed as a prize by Bates. The man had tried to cheat Jak at his trading post outside town—and then called Jak a criminal when the albino called him on it. Bates turned his head and tossed the jacket back to an employee. The man fielded it gingerly; a couple of marshals who responded to the dustup at Bates’s store had cut their hands trying to come to grips with Jak. They had grabbed the albino by the collar and had their fingers slashed by bits of razor blades.

Jak smiled at the memory. But briefly. If he got chilled here, his first regret would be not settling his score with that chicken-neck bastard.

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

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.

As Ricky hastily backpedaled, he slung the DeLisle and drew his Webley revolver.

A sec man appeared in the mouth of the passageway. Ricky shot him in the shoulder and he reeled back, yelling that he’d been hit.

Something hard hit the backs of Ricky’s lower legs. He tumbled backward over it. As he fell onto the foul-smelling, slimy dirt, the mustached sec man sidestepped with his semiauto blaster leveled.

The only thing that saved Ricky from instant death was the fact that the marshal wasn’t looking for a target on the ground. Ricky knew his reprieve wouldn’t last. He tried to get his Webley up and around in time, but there was no hope.

From just beyond where he had fallen Ricky heard two quick crashing sounds. The sec man jerked and fell. Ricky saw a dark, wet patch already appearing on the front of his tan shirt.

“What the nuke are you playing at, boy?” Ryan demanded. “You eager to find out what it’s like having dirt hit you in the eyes?”

Ricky managed to disentangle himself from the upturned wheelbarrow that had tripped him. Its wheel was missing. He scrambled to his feet.

“You told me not to chill anybody—”

“Unless it was necessary,” Ryan finished. “I’d say not getting a faceful of lead is necessary.”

“Is Jak with you?” Ricky asked as they headed toward the far end of the narrow alley.

“He rode right off into the weeds with his hands tied behind him,” Ryan said. “Forget about it. Right now we need to power out of here so we don’t wind up on the rad-blasted gallows ourselves.”

Chapter Three

“Where the nuke did you go?” Ryan demanded.

Krysty looked at Jak. The albino had stepped into the circle of yellow glow cast by their campfire in a tiny clearing in the middle of a thorn thicket tangle in the Wild as casually as if he’d just gotten back from stepping away to piss.

“Got weapons back,” Jak said. He was wearing his camouflage jacket once again. “What cooking?”

“Squirrel,” Mildred said. “What’s it look like?”

Jak shied away from the fire and the several small, skinned forms browning on spits over it.

“Squirrels not mutie?” he asked.

“Not as far as I know,” Mildred said. “I know for sure that they didn’t have two assholes each or anything like that.”

The sturdy, black, predark physician was testier than usual this night. Everyone had been on edge wondering where Jak was and whether their elaborate and risky rescue plot had been all for nothing. It didn’t help that Ryan had spent the hour since they made camp at the agreed-upon rendezvous site pacing like a tethered wolf.

Neither did it help that the night and the dense thorn-studded growth around them was alive with furtive motion, strange cries and the occasional glowing eyes.

“Answer the question,” Ryan grated.

“Did,” Jak said, sticking out his jaw mulishly. “Got stuff.”

He meant his weapons, jacket and shoes, Krysty knew. He had cached his pack in a place where the others would be sure to see the special secret marker, before haring off on his own mission and getting himself caught by the Second Chance sec men. It was waiting for him beside the others’ right now.

Ryan narrowed his eye.

“Where and how?”

Jak just glared at him.

“Jak,” Krysty said. “Why not tell him?”

“Went to rich guy’s store. Broke in, cut throat, got my stuff back. Paid bastard.”

“Nuking hell!” Ryan said. “You left us waiting here while you pursued your personal vengeance. And if he was the one who was fondling your jacket by the gallows, he’s one of the ville’s big shits. If they weren’t gunning for us before, they sure as burning nuke death are now.”

“Easy, lover,” Krysty told him. “I think we made enough of an impression on the Judge and his sec men that we need to be moving on to new territory soon, regardless.”

Ryan shook his head. “Jak, what you’ve been doing for the past few weeks, ever since Heaven Falls, has really started sticking in my craw. You always want to head out on your own. Sometimes we’ve been on the firing line because of it.”

“Restless, but look out for all,” Jak protested.

Ryan strode over to Jak and got in the smaller man’s face. “Is that what you were just doing?” he demanded, looking down on him. “Because it sure looks to me like what you were doing had nothing to do with keeping the group safe. You were making the situation worse.”

“Owed rich guy,” Jak said. “Paid.”

“Mebbe if you’d consulted with the rest of us,” J.B. offered, “we could have all come up with a plan together. We took some pretty hairy risks saving your skinny ass from that noose today.”

“Not to mention putting in a big load of work,” Mildred added.

Ricky rose to his feet.

“Guys, guys,” he said, holding up his hands. “Please, can’t we all just step back and calm down?”

Ryan and Jak turned to him and each shot out an arm tipped with an extended finger at him. “Back off,” they said as one.

Doc put a hand on Ricky’s shoulder.

“A valiant try, lad,” he said, pressing him back down. “And see? At least you have induced a moment of harmony between them.”

The two men returned to glaring at each other.

“However brief,” Doc added sadly, sitting back in his own spot.

Krysty came up behind Ryan, deliberately cracking a twig under her heel. His senses weren’t as inhumanly keen as Jak’s, but that didn’t mean they weren’t better than most people’s. As wired as he was right then, she did not want him to perceive that someone was sneaking up on him.

She placed a hand on his shoulder. He tensed as if to shake her off, but he didn’t.

“Let’s put this behind us,” she said in her most soothing voice. “Or at least put it aside. We should be safe enough here tonight, but we’re still in dangerous territory. And we’re all in this together.”

“That’s the problem,” Ryan said. “Jak’s been playing lone wolf more and more as the days go by. As if he’s too fast to run with the rest of the pack.”

He glanced back at her.

“And we’re always in dangerous territory. You know that.”

Jak’s face had been getting more and more twisted up, and his ruby eyes blazed redder the whole time Ryan spoke. Now he clenched his fists.

“You saying I not care ’bout companions?” Jak yelled.

Even Ryan took a step back at that. Mebbe not, Krysty thought, from the young albino’s spittle-spraying vehemence, as much as the fact that Jak was so violently boiling-over emotional that he’d almost spoken a complete sentence.

But Ryan wasn’t backing down. That was not what the man did.

“That’s how it looks to me,” he said, dead level. “That’s the way you’ve been acting.”

For a moment Krysty feared Jak would stab Ryan. Or try to.

Then she thought he was going to cry.

He shook himself like a wet dog. “All right.”

Jak walked over to the backpacks, picked up his and shrugged into it.

“Gone.”

He started to walk away, into the wild night.

“Wait!” Mildred jumped to her feet. “What’s gotten into you two? You can’t be serious about this.”

Jak stopped.

“I’m serious as a ground burst,” Ryan said. “I can’t speak for Jak.”

“Are you really talking about breaking up the group? Really?” Mildred pressed.

“I’m talking about doing what needs to be done to keep us alive,” Ryan said. “Same as always.”

“But—we’re, we’re like family. We look out for each other. That is what keeps us alive.”

“Jak hasn’t been looking out for us lately, in case you haven’t been paying attention. He’s been running off on his own, getting into trouble and dragging the rest of us in.”

Jak pulled his head down between his hunched shoulders, but he stayed in place as if frozen.

“He made a mistake, Ryan,” Krysty told him. “We all do that. We all have, we all will again.”

“And 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 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

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.

“What about fire?” she yelled.

“Rain!” Krysty and J.B. shouted back in unison. It had slowed to a faint drizzle that brushed Krysty’s face with deceptively gentle cool, scarcely more substantial than fog. But it had been falling for an hour or two this day, and there had been plenty more over the past few days. The thicket was well soaked, even the ample number of obviously dead and dried-out strands, which continued to do their part for the plant colony’s collective defense with their still-wicked thorns.

Except it didn’t take Krysty’s special connection with Gaia the Earth Mother to know there was nothing remotely natural about this giant jungle of thorns.

In a moment everyone had a clubbing weapon—or in Ryan’s case, a knife whose fat chopping blade could double as a club. For a few moments there was nothing but the sound of grunting and impacts.

The attack slackened, not because their losses had discouraged the giant centipedes, but because for a moment the supply ran low.

“What now, lover?” Krysty asked Ryan.

“We move.”

“Where?” Mildred probed.

“Keep heading the way we were going,” Ryan said. “Until we run into something better.”

“Down”

It was Doc.

“This unnatural vegetation prefers the higher ground, you will have noticed.”

“Yeah,” J.B. said. “He’s right. When we come in the stuff was all on top of the ridgelines. Made the whole place seem less of a mess than it is. But we’re on the flat right here, Doc. Where’s ‘down’?”

“Water,” Krysty stated.

Her companions didn’t dare take their eyes off the surrounding vegetation, where occasional glimpses of shiny, flat brown forms scuttling along vines showed that the mutie centipedes hadn’t forgotten about them. But they all gave Krysty a fast, puzzled glance.

“It runs downhill,” she explained, nodding downward. “Look.”

The slow rain had fallen long enough to outrun the dense clay soil’s capacity to absorb it. Water had begun to pool around their boots. Red-brown water trickled off to the right of the way they had been heading when the horrible creatures attacked.

“Right through the thickest part of the vines,” Ryan said. “Ace.”

He turned and began hacking at the strands with his panga.

Instantly the tangled growth came alive around them with racing, many-legged forms. “Here we go again,” Mildred said.

Krysty moved to put herself as close to Ryan’s left shoulder as she could without interfering with his attack on the vines. She glimpsed J.B. doing the same on his right. Mildred came up alongside him and Doc was next to Krysty. Finally, Ricky completed the circle.

Only just in time. Dozens of the enormous centipedes swarmed them. High and low they struck at the embattled humans.

For a timeless moment all was sweat, gasping for breath and effort. And always the elemental, gut-twisting fear of giant bugs and of the unnatural.

Krysty and her friends held off the two-foot-long arthropods, but just barely. She felt her own strength flagging, her arm speed slowing.

A centipede leaped for her face. Wielding her club with both hands, she was just too slow to slap it away. She had to duck her head to the side. Her sentient, motile hair was taut against her head, keeping the creature’s many waving legs from snagging in it as it flew past.

The mutie landed on J.B.’s backpack and promptly began to slither upward toward the brim of his battered fedora.

Biting her lip, the redheaded woman reached her left hand, grabbed the centipede near its tail-segment, and hurled it far off into the thicket.

“Krysty!” Ricky yelled, his voice breaking in panic.

She already knew what provoked the boy’s scream. She could feel the pinpricks of sharp, chitinous legs as the monsters ran up the legs of her jeans.

“Fireblast!” she heard Ryan grunt at the same time.

She had to use her hands to rip the quartet of centipedes away. One of them bit for her hand with two-inch mandibles. It missed, but she imagined she could see drops of venom glistening like dew from their tips as she backhanded the creature off her and stamped it furiously with her boot.

“What’s wrong?” J.B. asked Ryan.

“Vine’s too thick and too green. Won’t cut.”

“There seem to be a lot more of them closing in on us,” Ricky reported nervously.

There was also the problem that the mutie centipedes were hard to chill. Stomping them, however hard and often, seemed only to slow them for the length of time it took the creatures to extract themselves from the mud. Even cutting them in pieces didn’t always work: large segments attached to a head could still run—and bite.

But Ricky was right. The thicket around them rustled and twitched with bodies rushing on many hard, crooked legs. It was just a matter of time until one of them bit somebody.

And then not much time before lots of them started biting everybody.

“Everyone down,” J.B. said. As usual the Armorer didn’t raise his voice. But it had an extra edge to it.

“But—” Ricky was frozen, confronting a carpet of the awful arthropods on the ground right in front of him.

Doc tackled him from behind. The two went down with a splash of red-brown water and a compound squeal of centipedes squashed by their combined weight.

Krysty was already flopping down. She gritted her teeth as she felt claws digging through her hair as a centipede scaled her head. She felt actual pain as well as horror; her hair, unlike normal hair, was alive and contained nerve endings.

A savage crack stabbed her ears. Accompanying it came what felt like a line of hard force passing over her fast from right to left. The centipede’s legs plucked futilely at her hair as the unseen force plucked it away.

She recognized the sound of a high explosive detonating; the force was the shock front of its dynamic overpressure expanding over her. Apparently it had hit the low-slung creature just right to carry it away—probably rearing up to look for exposed skin to strike.

Through the loud ringing in her ears she heard Ryan roar, “Up! Go!”

She thrust herself up out of the muck, despite the combined weight of her well-muscled body and the well-stuffed pack on her back. She got a boot under her and sprang to her feet. Then she reeled and just managed to catch herself. The shockwave had affected her inner ear and scrambled her balance.

The first thing she saw was Doc, his white hair standing out wildly from his head, helping to drag Ricky to his feet by a handful of his rucksack. Though he looked to be in his sixties—and was around a century older than that, to go by his birthday—Doc had lived roughly the same number of years as Ryan. But the whitecoats’ experiments that had trolled him from his own time had also prematurely aged him—and affected his sanity, though sporadically these days.

But despite his feeble appearance, Doc was fairly strong and durable.

The centipedes had fallen back again. Krysty glanced toward Ryan and saw several lying on their backs waving their innumerable claw-tipped legs in the air. Apparently they didn’t like the shockwave.

Ryan had pushed between the shattered ends of the main vine. She saw at once why it had resisted all his massive strength, determination, and hyper-adrenalized fury. It was at least as big around as one of his thighs.

Now he was whaling two-handed with his panga at the spiky growth beyond the gap. As Krysty looked he vanished from sight.

“Everybody follow!” J.B. shouted, then he vanished, too.

Because Mildred happened to be closer to the gap, she beat Krysty through it despite her shorter legs. But just barely. Then Krysty plunged between the splintered vine stumps and the hastily cut-up tangle beyond.

The ground suddenly sloped away beneath her. The thin top layer of clay mud acted like oil beneath her boot soles. She lost all purchase, fell on her rear and slid down into a gully they hadn’t even seen was there, thanks to the exuberant growth of the vines that had hemmed them in.

At the bottom ran a thin trickle of a stream. Ryan was on his feet; J.B. bounced right up beside him. He still clutched his inevitable fedora to his head with his right hand.

He helped Mildred up as Krysty slid down into the tiny stream with a splash. “What the hell did you do, John?” Mildred demanded.

As Krysty stood, still a little dizzy, she saw the Armorer give Mildred a quick grin.

“I happened to have a quarter-block of C-4 stashed away in case of emergency,” he said. “I always say, there’s few problems in life that can’t be settled by a proper application of high explosives.”

Doc slid down on his heels, surprisingly nimble, his stork legs bent and the black coattails of his frock coat flapping. Ricky followed far less gracefully, sliding on his belly, raising quite a pink-slurry wave.

“Tsk, tsk,” Doc said, bending down to grab a strap on Ricky’s backpack and haul him sputtering out of the water. “Young people these days have so little fortitude.”

“It’s not fortitude,” Ricky said, spitting out water. “It’s bad luck. I tripped, okay? Nuestra Señora! Cut me some slack, here.”

Krysty took quick stock of their new surroundings. As they had seen before, the narrow gulch was clear of the thorn vines. It ran down, none too steeply, toward her left, when her back was to the blown-up section. Vaguely northwest, she reckoned.

“Uh, guys,” Ricky said. “We got a new problem.”

She turned to see the youth pointing a mud-dripping arm up the small ravine.

Up toward the top of the cut, not thirty yards away, a gigantic hog stood glaring at them with enraged red pig eyes and shaking a head full of tusks like rusty sickles.

Chapter Six

“Nothin’, boss,” Scovul called. The black marshal was riding his black gelding back down the road through the thicket. Its white-stockinged feet were kicking up geysers of thin red mud at every step.

“No way they took the road,” the chief deputy marshal said. “We’da caught ’em up by now, sure as shit.”

Cutter Dan grunted. “Ace.”

His two trackers were half Choctaw and Wild raised. They had confirmed that the scumbags who rescued the white-skinned mutie from Judge Santee’s justice had headed west initially. But they hadn’t made it away with enough horses to carry all of them; Mort and Old Pete had found several of the animals grazing near an old burned-out farmhouse that the thicket hadn’t reclaimed yet. The wag was abandoned there, too. They might’ve piled the extra perps into it, but would never have been able to outpace the swift mounted pursuit they surely knew would follow.

He turned back to the miserable cluster of people standing in the rain by their horse-drawn covered wag with their hands up.

“Can we go now, Marshal?” the older man asked. “Whoever you’re looking for, you gotta know by now we had nothin’ to do with ’em.”

In a way it was a relief they had headed off into the Wild. Had they had enough horses and just kept riding west down the road, they’d’ve cleared the mutie thicket in a day or two. Then the odds of Cutter Dan and his sec men ever catching up with them would have become small, indeed. Bashing through the thorn vines would take them days.

It was a pain in the ass following them, of course. Old Pete and Mort would pick up their trail eventually. But Cutter Dan’s posse couldn’t move much quicker than they could. If they could even go as quick.

“Marshal,” the bearded wagoneer said. “Can we please be on our way? Or at least let us put our hands down. My arms are getting tired. And the womenfolk are bound to catch their death, standing out here in the drizzle like this—”

Without even a glance his way, Cutter Dan drew his huge Bowie knife, flipped it into the air, caught it by its tip and threw it. Hard.

He heard a thunk. The wag dude’s words trailed off.

Cutter Dan looked at him then and nodded. The fat blade had caught the bearded man right in the chest, with enough velocity to punch through his sternum and cut his heart in two. The trader coughed once and collapsed like an empty sack.

The women screamed. The younger man yelled, “Pa!”

He jumped to cradle the older man’s head in his lap, plopping his skinny rear right down in the road mud. The older man’s eyes were rolled up in his head. Instant chill.

“You still got the touch, C.D.,” his deputy drawled.

The women clung to each other and screamed. The younger trader raised a reddened face running with tears. His mousey hair was plastered to his head. His features were all knotted up like a gaudy-man’s bar-rags.

“You bastard!” he shrieked at Cutter Dan. “You murdered my pa in cold blood!”

In a wave of reddish spray he hurled himself off the roadway at the sec boss, his fingers clawed. Cutter Dan met him with a hard boot heel to the chest. The younger man flew backward, landing in an even bigger splash within a foot of where he’d started out.

“Assaulting an officer of the peace,” Cutter Dan said, shaking his head. “That’s a capital offense, you taint.”

“We take him back for the Judge to string up, Dan?” Hammer asked.

“Not this trip. We travel light. We gotta catch these coldheart pricks.”

A gunshot cracked. The kid’s head jerked to the side as a dark spray gushed out the temple. He fell across his father’s cooling corpse.

“Why’d you go and waste a good round on the taint, Yonas?” Cutter Dan asked the marshal with the eye patch, and a smoking Ruger Old Army .44 in his hand.

“It’s just black powder, C.D.,” Yonas said, gesturing with the handblaster.

“Bullets cost jack,” Cutter Dan said. “So do caps and even the powder. Oh, well, smokeless or smoke-pole, can’t ever get the bullet back in the blaster.”

Like their now-deceased menfolk, the two female captives showed an age split that hinted strongly they were mother and daughter. Oddly enough, the mother was the better-looking of the two, with dirtwater blond hair streaming like waterweeds down her back and big jugs in her homespun dress. She was sturdy in the hips but not any kind of sow. The daughter had a crossed eye and a hint of black mustache, though otherwise she was put together pretty decent. She was slim built but clearly hadn’t missed many more meals than her mother. Apparently being traders had worked out well for them.

Until today, anyway.

The mother had been hanging on to her daughter as if holding her up out of the mud, while they both carried on. Now with her left arm still circling her daughter’s sob-convulsed shoulders, her right hand dived inside her voluminous skirts.

It came up with a dingy-looking Davis .380 hidie handblaster, which rose to aim square at Cutter Dan’s broad chest.

But the first motion had triggered the sec boss’s bowstring-taut danger sense. Before her little pistol came to bear his Smith & Wesson 627 slid out of its holster and spoke first.

She reeled back as the .357 Magnum jacketed hollowpoint slug took her in the chest. Because she didn’t go down or drop the piece right away, he shot her twice more. Her knees finally gave way.

Shaven-headed Belusky stepped up behind the girl and caught her in a bear-hug from behind before she could collapse all over her chilled mom.

“Who’s wastin’ good ammo on road trash now, Cutter Dan?” he asked, grinning beneath his blond mustache. “And modern smokeless cartridge, too.”

“Shut your pie hole, Belusky. I already used my knife. As you would’ve noticed if all the blood hadn’t run to your two-inch hard-on.”

The sec man’s grin never flickered. “Might not be long, Danny boy,” he said. “But wide? Lord, is it wide!”

“You call yourselves lawmen!” the daughter screamed from his unfriendly embrace. “But you’re nothing but a bunch of murdering coldhearts!”

“Yeah, well,” Cutter Dan said, emptying the cylinder, with its three spent casings and three live rounds, into a palm. “We are the law hereabouts, see? So the law’s what we say it is.”

“Us and Judge Santee,” Scovul called from the back of his horse, which was so used to blasterfire it hadn’t even reacted to the shots, loud as they were. The two plugs hitched to the wag were sure tossing their heads and rolling their eyes, though. But with the handbrake set, they weren’t going anywhere. “And since he ain’t here—”

“See, the boys’n’me have suffered an emotional blow, recently,” Cutter Dan told the distraught girl. “And we’re naturally frustrated because the criminals who wronged us have so far managed to elude justice. So it’s just natural we need to let off a little steam.”

“And you had to go and chill the better-looking snatch, C.D.,” Hammer said. “Even if she was an oldie.”

Dan laughed. “Not like the bitch left me much choice there, did she? But I tell you what. Just for that you can take your place last in line.”

“But why are you doing this?” the cross-eyed girl shrieked.

“Some folks’re resisting the rightful restoration of law and order under us and Judge Santee,” Dan said, stuffing both the loose cartridges and empties in a pocket and reloading his handblaster from a speedloader. “So we gotta provide ’em object lessons in the terrors of living under all this anarchy.”

He snapped shut the cylinder of his beefy stainless-steel blaster. Then he smiled at the girl.

“Just think of it as doing your patriotic duty. Everybody’s gotta make sacrifices.”

Holstering his blaster he began unbuttoning the fly of his jeans.

“Today is yours. Get her stripped and bent over the wag box, boys. Time to dispense some justice, American style!”

* * *

“FIREBLAST,” RYANSAID.

The giant hog glared blood and death at him and gouged deep grooves in the red dirt of the stream-bank with a sharp black hoof. It stood a good four feet high at the peak of its back, which was topped with bristles like ten-penny nails. Its body had to be as long as Ryan was tall or longer. Its jowly head was the size of a beer keg, and it brought back memories of the horrible hogs they had faced a while back in Canada.

All of the companions had blasters, but Ryan’s Steyr Scout was the only one in the bunch with a lost child’s chance in a scalie nest of dropping the monster in a single shot. It was slung across his shoulder, and he knew that those huge feral porkers could move like a high-power bullet when they dug in and launched themselves.

As one this old and bad and mean surely would, the instant its little bloodshot eyes saw any of them make a move.

Ryan had just resolved to draw his SIG Sauer P-226 and try for the hog’s beady eyes anyway when he saw a stirring in the leaves of the vines near the immense creature.

A living wave of scuttling shapes boiled from the vines at the top of the cut. They closed on the hog from both sides. The centipedes climbed up one another’s segmented bodies, forming a sort of living pyramid.

Too late, the hog realized the danger. It began grunting furiously. It shook its massive head and stamped with its hooves. Its jaws and tusks shredded the many-legged creatures and sent parts and yellow ichor spraying in all directions.

“Well, now, that’s a mite unusual,” J.B. observed mildly.

The hog began to squeal like a steam-train whistle as the monster arthropods’ mandibles began to find ways through its dense fur to rip into its hide.

Ricky raised the fat barrel of his longblaster to aim at the beast, now all but completely invisible beneath the surging brown bodies. Ryan promptly grabbed it and twisted it skyward.

“But I was going to put it out of its misery!” the youth protested.

“Not this time, son,” J.B. said. “The fact it’s fighting back is mostly what’s putting those little monsters out of ours.”

For a moment the Ricky’s dark eyes blazed rebelliously, then he swallowed and nodded.

“Right,” he said hoarsely.

Ryan let go of the blaster. Ricky obediently turned it to the side, making sure the muzzle never covered his friends on the way.

“Compassion always loses to survival,” Mildred said. “Welcome to the Deathlands, kid.”

“Time to haul ass downstream,” Ryan told them. “Those bastards aren’t our only problem.”

Ricky yelped shrilly. Ryan turned to see a giant centipede that had apparently decided it was too late for the raw-pork feast and jumped down from the vines on the bank above, clutching Ricky’s right arm with its hundred talons. It sank its huge hooked jaws into the exposed skin of his forearm.

“Oh, my God!” Mildred yelled.

Ricky whipped his arm to the side. The centipede flew away, to hit the bare clay slope on its back. As it slid down, J.B. destroyed its head with a blast of buckshot from his M-4000.

Ryan didn’t say a word to his friend about the ammo expenditure. J.B. was the Armorer. He was more sensitive about all things blaster than even Ryan was. If he thought this merited a shell, it did.

Mildred sprang for the stricken youth.

“Hold still,” she said, her voice surprisingly calm despite her burst of frantic activity. “Hold your arm down by your side.”

Numbly Ricky obeyed. He continued clutching the DeLisle’s foregrip with his left hand. His olive face had already gone an unhealthy ashy-yellow.

“Going down,” he said.

His eyes rolled up in his head and he collapsed into Mildred’s arms.

Chapter Seven

Jak ran with the pronghorn, filled with exhilaration.

After several moments the yellow, antelope-like creatures left him quickly behind, bounding across the flat Deathlands plain with graceful bounds.

He slowed to a stop, laughing, as he bent, panting, with his hands on his thighs. He watched the pronghorn bounce up and down as they dwindled across the vast flat. The red soil had begun to dry and fracture in the sun after just a couple of days without rain. Tufts of green grass sprouted from the fissure lines, as did a few white-and-yellow Deathlands daisies.

He might not be able to keep up with the beasts, but it felt good to run. And run free.

He was a child of the Louisiana bayous. He had grown up wild and hard, a feared and successful freedom fighter—or terrorist, depending on which side you viewed it from—from childhood on. And this flat, arid land was no more similar to the environment he’d grown up in than the rubble-choked streets of some urban nukescape.

But he felt at home here. Or almost, anyway. He felt alive when he was on the loose in nature. He often felt confined in villes.

Being able to run and be free of responsibilities and rules lifted a tremendous weight from his shoulders. It made him feel as if he could breathe again, for the first time in a long while.

He felt a twinge, somewhere inside him. He decided he was just hungry.

Jak’s T-shirt was soaked through. He stripped it off, then laid it across his white shoulders to keep them from burning. The pronghorns’ butts disappeared into the heat haze on the far western horizon.

He glanced up into a surprisingly cloudless sky whose blue was without pity, though not as threatening as the orange and yellow clouds that usually took it over. The sun was past zenith but still plenty high. He had lots of time to hunt or gather food before dark.

Even if this wasn’t his sort of country, Jak just seemed to have a knack for living off it.

Laughing softly, he turned and began walking back to where he’d cached his jacket and pack.

Life was good.

* * *

“OURLIFESUCKS,” Mildred said.

Even though Ryan, Krysty, J.B. and Doc were bearing the brunt of Ricky’s deadweight as they carried him, his blasters and backpack down the cut, the physician’s short legs made it hard to keep up with her friends. She was busy holding up Ricky’s arm to examine it, without raising it as high as his heart, to try to keep the mutie centipede’s venom as localized as possible. But she still had to examine the wound, because in a case like this seconds could count.

If it wasn’t too late already. She felt her face flush and the sweat roll down her back—not just from all the frenzied exertion in a humidity-drenched atmosphere that was starting to heat up despite the clouds and rain, but at the prospect of losing another member of her small and tight-knit family.

From behind came sounds too terrible to describe as the huge black jaws of the swarming centipedes devoured the hapless monster hog.

“Is the lad still alive?” Doc asked anxiously.

“So far,” Mildred answered. “Still breathing, still got a pulse. Both pretty strong.”

Ricky’s arm was completely relaxed in her grasp. The other hung loosely, hand dragging in the tiny stream underfoot as they splashed downhill.

“He just seems to be unconscious,” she stated.

“All right,” Ryan said. “I think we can stop here.”

The other companions did so with minimal awkwardness. Mildred glanced up to find herself and her friends at the bottom of a ravine. The walls were maybe fifty or sixty feet high and steep red clay. They were crowned with the dense tangles of the Wild.

The bottom, though, widened considerably from what they’d first come down. They had reached a small canyon, of sorts. There was enough room to get out of the stream, which had widened and deepened considerably from other gullies feeding into it, as the runlet they had followed did.

Gratefully, Ryan and the others set Ricky on a relatively flat, grassy bank. The rain had stopped completely, though the sky was still the color of bullets overhead. Mildred relinquished her grasp on the poisoned boy’s arm long enough for the others to extricate him from his backpack and slung rifle. Then they rolled him onto his back, and she knelt at once beside him.

Ryan came and hunkered across him from Mildred. “What have we got?” he asked.

She thumbed open the half-closed lids of Ricky’s brown eyes. “No dilation of the pupils. Strong, steady respiration, same as before. Pulse still strong. Temperature seems normal.”

She took her fingers from his neck and stretched his wounded arm out from his side. Then, bending close, she examined the bite.

“Huh,” she said. “No signs of inflammation except a little bit around the actual puncture wounds. No discoloration.”

She looked up at Ryan. The others had gathered around, as well, in a circle of concern.

Except the Armorer. She frowned in sudden irritation with the man. The kid was his apprentice, so to speak, and he couldn’t even be bothered—

Then she caught him in the corner of her eye. He was standing to the side, his Smith & Wesson shotgun in his hands, keeping a lookout while the others focused on their injured friend. It wasn’t lack of concern for Ricky that kept him apart. It was concern for his companions.

“Mildred, what is it?” Krysty asked in alarm. “Is he—”

She shook her head. “I think he’s fine,” she said. “Like I say, he just seems to be out cold.”

“What about the venom?” Ryan asked.

“Beats me,” she said. “I gotta warn you, I’m not a toxicologist. But there are certainly none of the gross signs of hemolytic toxin present. Nor of neurotoxins, though I’m on way shakier ground here. At least, not the sorts that cause death or serious nerve damage.”

“His eyelids are fluttering,” Doc said, bending over with his hands on his skinny thighs.

“Does that mean he just fainted?” Ryan asked.

“Don’t be too hard on him, Ryan,” Krysty said, laying a hand on his shoulder. “I’d be triple upset if one those things bit me.”

“I’m pretty sure there’s more to it than that,” Mildred said. The supine boy was beginning to stir. He moved his head slightly. “He didn’t seem freaked out or anything. Not enough that he was going to faint from fear. He seemed mostly taken by surprise and then—boom. Out like a light.”

Ricky’s lips moved. No sound came out. His jaw worked.

“Let’s get him some water,” Mildred said, reaching for a canteen.

“Are you sure that is wise, in his state?” Doc asked.

“No,” she replied, unscrewing the lid. “Like I said, I’m not a poison specialist. And neither are you, you old coot. I don’t see any reason to let him get dehydrated, here. Help me hold his head up so we don’t choke him, Krysty.”

With the redhead’s help Mildred trickled a few drops of water into Ricky’s barely open lips. He coughed, spit, shook his head vigorously. His eyes shot open.

“What?” he demanded. He looked wildly up at the others. “What are you all staring at?”

“Seems like it’d be pretty obvious,” J.B. said from the side.

“What? Oh. Sorry.” Ricky sat suddenly upright. “Nuestra Señora, that thing bit me!”

“Yes, it did,” Ryan said. “And you keeled right over like you’d been shot.”

“I—I did? Wait—where are we, anyway? What happened?”

“Someplace safe,” Krysty told him.

“Safe enough,” Ryan said. “For the moment.”

“What did you feel?” Mildred asked.

Ricky asked for more water. Mildred held the canteen up to his lips for a swallow, then let him take hold of it and drink some more.

“Well, it stung like a bast—like fire,” he said when he’d drained half the container. “It kind of gave me a jolt. And I felt like there was something else, like an edge to it, almost. Like when you get stung by an ant, you can tell you’ve been poisoned, if only a little, you know?”

“Yeah,” Mildred said. “Go on.”

“Well, my arm started to go numb. And I started feeling really cold. My stomach got woozy, my head started to spin, my vision seemed to get dark around the edges. Then, well, next thing I remember was waking up here on the grass.”

Ryan stood up. “Reckon he’s gonna live?” he asked Mildred.

“Afraid so,” she said.

“The centipede’s venom must produce some kind of soporific effect,” Doc said.

“Like some sort of knockout dose,” Ryan suggested.

“Seems so,” Mildred said. “Pretty fast acting, though.”

“Muties,” Krysty stated simply.

“I guess.”

“How do you feel, kid?” Ryan asked. “You fit to fight?”

“Don’t really know,” Ricky said thoughtfully. Then he grinned at Ryan. “But I bet I can walk and carry my pack. That’s what you’re really asking, isn’t it, Ryan?”

Ryan grinned. “Reckon so.”

He leaned down and, gripping Ricky forearm to forearm, pulled him to his feet.

“And that’s what we need to do,” he said. “Move. For one thing, there’s no way of knowing whether some of those bastard centipedes might’ve missed out on the pork banquet and decided to come looking for us. Plus, while this gives us a nice handy route to try to get clear of this damn mutant thorn tangle, it’s also a natural highway for everything else big and bad.”

“Including our friends from the ville,” J.B. said.

Mildred and Krysty helped Ricky get his pack up and onto his back.

“Speaking of that unfortunate swine,” Doc said, looking speculatively back up the way they’d come, “I cannot help wondering...if the outsized centipedes’ bite produces instant unconsciousness, why did the hog continue to struggle and squeal for so long?”

“Don’t ask me,” Mildred said. “I’m barely a people doctor, in the way I so often need to be. I’m certainly not a bug doctor.”

“Dear lady, while those creatures are unquestionably arthropods, they are, equally unquestionably, not of the class of Arthropoda that constitutes the insects.”

She fixed him with a furious glare. “They have nasty, segmented chitinous bodies, too many legs and they bite,” she said. “They’re bugs.”

“Less talking,” Ryan admonished sternly. “More walking.”

“Yes, sir,” Mildred said.

* * *

“HOWFARDOES this thing go on, anyway?”

At the question, Krysty glanced back over her shoulder at Ricky, who bringing up the rear. He was staring up at the heights above the tangle of miniature canyons by which they made their way through the Wild.

“How would I know?” Ryan said from the lead. “Not like we got any reliable maps of this country.”

“Rumor in the last ville we stopped at before Jak’s adventure says the thicket’s expanding,” Krysty said. “Or trying to. The cook I talked to at the eatery said it keeps running up against the drought and acid-rain-prone belts of the Deathlands. So far, they’re winning. But it’s double big.”

“If we could take the roads we could be clear in a day,” Mildred grumbled. “Two, max.”

“We’d be hanging by the necks in front of Judge Santee’s courthouse before sunset the first day,” J.B. said.

“Aside from that.”

She glanced up again. The thorn vines showed no signs of thinning, either up the walls of the ravine or ahead, as far as the eye could see.

The route they were taking was fast only in comparison to creeping along snaky game trails through the Wild or trying to hack their way through by main force. It wasn’t a practical thing to do for very long, in any event. The ground underfoot was muddy and mucky, and it clutched at Mildred’s boots despite the grass roots holding it more or less together.

“Shit,” she murmured, mostly to herself.

“I know,” Krysty agreed sympathetically.

“I know it’s stupid,” Mildred said, still keeping her voice way down, “but still I can’t help wondering if we’d be having quite this much trouble if, well, you know....”

“How can you say that?” Krysty asked. “You know Ryan does all he can—all anyone can, and then some—to keep us alive!”

“Yeah, I know, Krysty. Sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

But I do, she thought, more miserable even than before. I was looking for someone or something to blame for us being in shit this deep. But it’s nobody’s fault. Except the asshole politicians and whitecoats who blew up the world and made this mess.

She heard Krysty sigh gustily.

“I’m sorry, Mildred. I shouldn’t have bitten your head off like that. The fact is, deep down—I wonder too, sometimes. And that’s why I reacted the way I did. Overreacted.”

“We all have our skills, but Ryan can do anything,” Mildred said. “At least, it feels like he can. Anything we’ve ever needed him to do to pull us through, he’s done.”

She shook her head, setting her beaded plaits to swinging.

“But, well—”

“He can’t do everything at once,” Krysty admitted. “And even he’d admit, Jak’s a better scout than he is. Just as J.B.’s handier with blaster-smithing. Though I wouldn’t try to pin down Ryan on the whole Jak thing just this particular instant—”

“Look out!” Ricky screeched from the rear of the procession. Belatedly he added the useful part. “Ryan, down!”

Chapter Eight

“And the only possible sentence is death!” Marley Toogood finished, making his voice ring.

Though the day was dreary, with more low, gray clouds spewing a miserable drizzle, his heart soared. Something about being able to proclaim those words, loud and proud, to the assembled citizens of Second Chance and Judge Santee’s nascent empire, and hear the moans of despair and the increasingly desperate pleas for mercy from the four condemned men and women standing with nooses around their necks, just made a man’s heart naturally soar.

He heard the creak and grind as the hangman threw the lever. Four traps snapped open under four sets of feet.

“Oh, please, no, not my baby, too—”

The sound of necks snapping was like the ripple of blasterfire from a firing squad, which was also a satisfactory way to send off evildoers, Toogood thought. But it cost more money, even for black-powder blasters. And also the Judge was a traditional sort of man, with a strong fondness for the gallows as a symbolic statement of community principles.

And, of course, a way of making sure that anybody who disagreed with him too strongly on pretty much any subject at all sooner or later found himself swinging from one.

The crowd issued a joint sigh of sorts. Toogood looked around sharply. The sec men on duty monitoring the area didn’t seem to notice any particular offenders.

The louts get slack when Cutter Dan is out of the ville, he thought. Ah, well. We can hardly recruit men of higher caliber to do what is, after all, a menial chore.

Santee pushed himself out of his chair, stood to his full skeletal height and shambled inside. He moved with a purpose. Knowing a little about the state of his internal affairs from the Judge’s house servants, whom Toogood was careful to bribe just the right amount, the mayor suspected Santee’s bowels had been struck with the sudden urge to make one of their infrequent and irregular movements. It wouldn’t do for a man of Santee’s dignity to soil his trousers in front of the whole ville, after all.

“So, how long will it be before the chief marshal catches those coldheart scumbags and gets back to his real job, Marley?” asked one of his fellow town fathers. They had risen from their seats on the dais and stood beneath umbrellas.

“You’re asking the wrong man, Gein,” he said. He pulled out his handkerchief to wipe sweat and rain from his broad expanse of forehead—broad, signifying a powerful, thinking brain behind it, of course.

“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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