The noose was looped around Mal’s neck, the roughness rope scratching his skin.
“Remember Jamie, Mal?” Toby said. “Remember what Bundy and Crump tried to do to him, and would have if you hadn’t come along? Same again, only this time it’s you who’s getting strung up, and you know what? Nobody’s coming. There ain’t no cavalry, no last-minute reprieve. This is your time, Mal Reynolds. Make your peace, if you can, but believe me when I say that hellfire awaits you. You’re gonna burn for all eternity with all them other sinners, and you deserve every second of it, just for what you did to her.”
Before Mal could reply, hands tightened the noose so that the knot was hard against the back of his head and the loop constricted his throat. His airway wasn’t quite cut off, but he could only just breathe and certainly could not speak.
Mindful of the gun in Donovan Philips’s hand, he didn’t squirm or fight. He had no doubt that Philips would gut shoot him if provoked. Even if he did get out of the noose somehow, a wound like that would kill him regardless, and slow. He was alive and well right up until the noose strangled him and his legs stopped kicking. Between now and then, there was always a chance, however slim, that he might still escape. These were the mad calculations rushing through his head: how to prolong the little life remaining to him, how to postpone death until the last possible moment.
The bald man and his accomplice looked to Toby for final confirmation. Toby raised a hand and slashed it down through the air. Mal felt a tugging on the rope. All at once he was rising into the air. It was only a few inches. His feet were still in contact with the cavern floor, but just barely. He teetered on his tiptoes, the noose biting into the underside of his jaw. His vision began to blur. He felt vertebrae in his neck creaking. Breaths came in short, gasping sips of air. This wasn’t going to be a simple lynching, then. It was going to be torture. The vigilantes were going to draw out his death as long as they could.
Their faces floated before him like lurid, gloating balloons. Their cries echoed thickly in his ears, seeming to come from underwater. Mal’s toecaps scrabbled for purchase on the ground. Already his legs were starting to ache from the effort of keeping him standing. Then, all at once, one foot slipped out from under him. The clench of the noose increased. Mal felt his heartbeat pounding in his head as he struggled to regain his balance. Like some ungainly ballerina, he managed to get back up onto the points of both feet. He remained suspended just above the cavern floor, swaying ever so slightly, twisting clockwise and anticlockwise.
He heard some distant, piglike grunting noise and realized it was coming from his own throat.
So this was how it was going to be. This was how it ended. The long, wayward, wild voyage of Malcolm Reynolds, from rumbustious kid to combat-hardened warrior to ship’s captain. Along the way there’d been triumphs, tragedies, and all points in between, but only in the recent-most portion had he found something like contentment. He owed that, he knew, to his crew, that mixed company of lost souls, misfits and renegades. They were a family, of sorts, the kind you made rather than were born into, the kind that came to surround you through twists of fate and a modicum of choice. They drove him mad sometimes but he wouldn’t have had them any different. While he’d held them together as their captain and guided them safely through the ’verse, he’d been doing something right, he decided. Something good. That, set in the plus column of his life, surely balanced out everything — and there was a lot of it — in the minus column.
I’ve heard tell it can take a man up to six minutes to pass out during a short drop hanging, twenty minutes till he’s actually dead.
Sheriff Bundy’s words came to him, unbidden. How many minutes had it been so far? Mal couldn’t even begin to tell. It might only have been two or three, and the rope wasn’t even strangling him fully yet.
He felt the strength in his legs ebbing. He didn’t know how much longer he could hold out. A haze was descending. Any moment now, he was going to sag in the noose, becoming so much dead weight. He hoped he would lose consciousness swiftly, sooner than Bundy’s promised six minutes.
There was a gunshot. From a million miles away. Mal felt himself jerk. He didn’t know what it meant.
It was time to die.
35
Zoë and Jayne hurtled along the tunnel, following the far-off roar of voices. The anger in that sound was palpable. She prayed she and Jayne weren’t too late. No mistake, they were getting closer to where they needed to be, but she couldn’t help thinking there had been too many delays along the way. A delay in Serenity departing from Eavesdown Docks. A delay when the feds boarded. A delay in finding a reliable source of intelligence about Mal’s whereabouts.
That she and Jayne were in the right place was no longer in doubt. Zoë, in fact, had been certain of it as soon as Wash set Serenity down at the mine entrance. Three spacecraft had been sitting there, one of them Serenity’s own shuttle. Another was a yacht, which must have been Covington’s, while the third was a Komodo-class resupply vessel, a war relic with the rust stains and impact pepperings all over the hull to prove it. Parts of it were salvaged from other ships, welded clumsily into place, giving it a patchwork appearance. She guessed it was the vigilantes’ mode of conveyance and felt an odd tug of admiration. Anyone who traveled the ’verse in a flying death trap like that deserved respect. Or locking up in a lunatic asylum.
She and Jayne hastened out of Serenity. Jayne was more mobile than her and moved faster, loping along in limber fashion. Hampered by her bad leg, she struggled to keep up but was determined not to lose ground to the big man. She had her Mare’s Leg; Jayne had Vera and Boo. They were both anticipating a gun battle and, each in their own way, looking forward to it. Zoë was also carrying something else: a remote detonator switch.
While she ran, she pictured Wash and Kaylee in the cargo bay, firing up the forklift. They had their roles to fulfill, and if all went according to plan, there wouldn’t be the need for anything except threats. Not even gunplay.
Yeah, since when did anything ever go according to plan?
She and Jayne burst out of the tunnel into a cavern. Zoë took stock of the situation at a glance. The crowd. The platform. The drilling rig. Mal suspended from a noose, his eyes bulging, his face magenta.
Everyone was too preoccupied to notice her and Jayne’s arrival.
“Jayne?”
“Yeah.”
“Shoot the rope.”
“Why not cut it?”
“There’s a crowd of people between us and Mal. They’ll stop us before we even get close. There’s no time. No other option. Shoot the rope.”
“That’s a hell of a tall order. Fifty yards. Dim light. Rope’s shiftin’ about.”
“Just gorramn do it!”
Jayne braced his legs apart and raised Vera to his shoulder, squinting as he peered down the rifle’s sights. He switched from heavy-caliber cartridge to light, for greater accuracy. He took a breath and let it out slowly, forefinger tightening on the trigger.
If anyone could make the shot, Zoë said to herself, it was Jayne Cobb.
BLAM!!!
Vera roared.
The bullet struck the rope about ten inches above Mal’s head.
“Damn!” Jayne growled.