Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
“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
