Читать книгу Hanging Judge - James Axler - Страница 10

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.