Dredd VS Death Page 12

  "Giant?"

  He heard a chorus of snarling sounds over the radio link, coming from somewhere close to Giant, followed by a series of rapid-fire Lawgiver shots. A moment later, the Judge came back on the radio.

  "Sorry, Dredd. For a moment, a couple of the things got closer than they were supposed to. Yeah, no problems here. Zombies I can handle. I was there with you for Judgement Day, remember? It's Death and those other three creeps I'm worried about."

  "Same here," answered Dredd. "Everything else they're throwing at us is just a distraction to keep us busy while they make their next move."

  He was in the elevator now, travelling up from the Tomb to rejoin the effort to take back the prison. Might as well make himself useful, he thought, until they got a fix on the Dark Judges' position. To do that, of course, they really needed...

  "What about Anderson?" he asked, knowing that Giant would easily pick up on the note of anger in his voice.

  "Your guess as good as mine, Dredd. No one's been able to track her down since she broke out of med-bay and boosted that Lawmaster."

  "Wilco, Giant. I'm coming out the elevator now. I'll do what I can down here, until your squads can make it down to meet up with me. You hear anything about Anderson, let me know. Dredd out."

  He exited the elevator and marched along the corridor, the security doors obediently rumbling open in front of him. Sharkey McCann's three accomplice perps were exactly where he had left them and had cuffed themselves to the wall as ordered. They quaked visibly when they saw Dredd coming back towards them again.

  "That's the idea, creeps," he warned them as he strode past. "Just make sure you keep it like that."

  Out in the stairwell, he could hear the snarling and moaning sounds echoing from the levels above. He recognised it from Judgement Day. Zombies, lots of them. And on the move, coming down the building towards where he was. He could hold this stairwell by himself, he knew, as long as his Lawgiver ammo lasted, but how many of the things were there, and how many other ways down that were now standing unguarded?

  Dealing with these creatures would take time, time he didn't have. Not with the Dark Judges on the loose somewhere out there in his city.

  So where the drokk was Anderson?

  Judge Anderson was almost in a trance as she piloted the Lawmaster at speed through the dark and mostly deserted streets of the city's dockside areas. She had switched her radio off some time ago, finding the angry calls from Control demanding that she report her position immediately too much of a distraction while she concentrated her psychic abilities on finding the Church of Death's headquarters.

  She was getting close now, she knew, homing in on the place she had seen in the mind of the vampire thing. She could sense how close she was - just as she could sense that something had gone terribly wrong at Nixon Pen, and that the Dark Judges were free once more.

  She could feel them too, floating somewhere in the psychic ether over the city, sense their hunger and eagerness to begin their sick work again as they looked down at all the life spread out below them. Something was calling them, she could sense that too, a summoning spell of some kind, and she was now using her psi-powers to focus in on it, following it back to its source, just as the Dark Judges themselves were now doing.

  She sped on, entering the maze of warehouse-lined streets clustered around the old dockside district. Dredd hadn't been able to prevent the Dark Judges escaping from their prison. Now it was up to her to stop them taking on physical form again.

  Inside Nixon Pen, the walking dead were on the move. Something was calling them too. Obeying some invisible summons, they left the places where they had died at the fangs of the vampires and flocked out into the corridors and cell-wing landings, crowding the stairwells, some even tumbling down the powerless grav-tubes, in search of a means out into the city beyond. Some were trapped and picked off by Giant and his men as they pushed down through the prison building, retaking it level by level. Others ran into the immovable obstacle of Dredd who had taken up station in one of the lower level stairwells, and was mowing them down by the dozen just as fast as he could reload his Lawgiver. But even he was just one man with just so many bullets, and, just as Dredd had already grimly surmised, there were other stairwells and other exits.

  The zombies flooded out of the prison building in their hundreds, breaking through locked doors and barriers by sheer weight of numbers, passing unhindered through guard posts and security checkpoints left unmanned as more and more Judge-Wardens had been called away from their posts to deal with the rapidly spreading disaster that had enveloped the prison.

  Most of them were still not even cold yet, raised from the dead before the heat could leave their bodies. Most wore the bright yellow uniforms of the iso-cube inmates, marked with prominent target symbols on their front and back, but there were the uniforms of Judge-Wardens amongst them too. Perp or guard, the vampires hadn't discriminated when it came to satisfying their blood-thirst.

  All of them were splattered with gore and bore the marks of the circumstances of their own deaths: clawed-open throats, teeth-ripped jugulars, some even eviscerated or with their rib cages brutally pulled open and chest plates smashed through to expose the empty hole where blood-gorged hearts had hungrily been ripped out. The retrovirus was in their polluted bloodstreams, infecting their nervous systems and replicating within it, bringing them back to life again as these shambling, ravenously hungry creatures, connecting them to the vampire-things which had killed them and infected them with their bite, connecting them further to the figure who had created the vampires, and connecting them finally to the Dark Judge whom the vampire creator ultimately served.

  The zombies poured out of the prison, heading towards the lights of the city beyond, eager to feast on human flesh and spread that infection even further.

  Judge Ashman had graduated from the Academy to make full Street Judge status in 2018. She had still been a cadet when the zombie war known as Judgement Day had happened, and had missed the whole thing. Her class had been amongst those put on alert to join the battle on the West Wall perimeter, bringing desperately needed reinforcements to plug the gaps in the Justice Department defences as they struggled to fight off the massive zombie army encroaching in on the city from the Cursed Earth. In the event, the zombie war had been over before they could go into action, won not on the bloody battle lines along the West Wall borders or in the similar, desperate battles taking place at every other Mega-City on the planet, but in the tunnels beneath the mystic Radlands of Ji, where Dredd and a small, elite band of Judges from all across the world had destroyed the power of Sabbat the Necromancer and broken his psychic control over his deathless hordes.

  Ashman had always wondered what it would have been like to be there on the West Wall in the darkest hours of Judgement Day, fighting off an enemy coming at you in countless numbers; an enemy that shrugged off wounds that would have killed any living human; an enemy which came on mindlessly and relentlessly, never tiring or despairing, its only motivation being the most basic animal impulse to kill and eat its prey.

  Now she was about to find out. She and her partner Farrer were the first Judges to make it through the Death cultists' ambushes and roadblocks, and they were just pulling up on their Lawmasters in front of Nixon Pen when the horde of zombies started flooding through the iso-block's broken gates. Their Sector House Control was in radio communication with Giant and his squads within the prison, and so the two Judges had been warned what to expect when they arrived.

  On the other hand, being confronted by a shambling, howling, flesh-hungry mob of the walking dead was a career first for both young Judges, and it took them some vital moments to adjust to the situation.

  "Holy Jovus!" shouted Farrer, only a few months as a Street Judge after being promoted and transferred over from more sedate duties in the Justice Department's Traffic Division. "There must be hundreds of them! What do we do?"

  "This," answered Ashman, dropping to one knee, taking aim with
her Lawgiver and opening fire with calm, accurate precision at the first ranks of the approaching zombie horde. Farrer hesitated a moment, then followed suit.

  Zombie after zombie fell to the ground, bullet holes drilled through their skulls. As each one fell, though, others instantly came forward to take its place, all of them pushing eagerly forward toward the two Judges.

  "Code 99 Red!" Ashman shouted into her helmet mike, giving the Justice Department emergency code that signalled a Judge in trouble, designed to bring the nearest back-up units scrambling to their assistance. "They're out in the open here at Nixon Pen. We need help down here now!"

  She looked over at Farrer, relieved to see that he didn't seem to be showing any more signs of panic. "How you doing?" she shouted over to him, raising her voice to be heard over the sound of Lawgiver fire and the hungry moans of the zombies.

  "Sure beats being back at Traffic and giving out parking tickets and speeding fines!" he shouted back, blowing the top of the head off a zombie dressed in the shredded remains of a Judge-Warden uniform.

  "Reloading!" he called over to her again, as his Lawgiver gave a warning beep to signal that its magazine was now empty.

  "Covering you," confirmed Ashman, picking off a zombie from her side of the firing line and then rapidly switching her aim over to those on Farrer's front, shredding three of them with a single Hi-Ex shot. A few moments and six more destroyed zombies later, her own Lawgiver gave the same warning alert.

  "Reloading!" she shouted, reaching down to her belt pouch for a fresh magazine. "Covered!" confirmed Farrer, bringing his aim round to return the favour. This time, however, the arrangement didn't quite go according to plan.

  A zombie stumbled forward towards Ashman, taking advantage of the lull in fire from her position. Farrer saw it and nailed it with one shot, but his aim was slightly awry and he only blew off the lower half of its face. His second, hastily fired shot only winged it in the shoulder, while his next two shots, fired in growing panic, both missed it completely.

  The dead thing came on at Ashman, growling hungrily, a mess of blood and juices dripping from the ruined remains of its face. She dropped her Lawgiver with a curse, snatched her daystick from the loop where it hung from her belt and swung it with every bit of strength she could muster. There was a sickening crunch as the blow struck the zombie and it fell lifeless to the ground, its brains dribbling out of its smashed-in skull. Ashman ducked down, trying to scoop her Lawgiver up from the ground, but the flailing hands of several more zombies reached out, trying to grab hers, and she snatched them back quickly, shocked by how close these others had got now. She retreated back, abandoning the precious weapon to the advancing things.

  Things were bad, but a glance over at Farrer's position told her they were about to get a lot worse.

  In trying to cover her, Farrer had been forced to take his fire off the zombies advancing on him, and now they were upon him. He must have switched to Incendiaries as they closed in on him, because several of them were ablaze, something that didn't seem to trouble the mindless things too much as they clustered in on him, hungrily falling upon him.

  "Farrer!" she shouted in anguish, hearing his screams as the zombies started to tear into him with their teeth. The flames covering the bodies of those struck by Farrer's Incendiary shots quickly spread to the others packed in close around them, and soon the whole pile of them would be ablaze. Not that this would be enough to deter them from eating Farrer alive as they all burned away to nothing together.

  Farrer's Lawgiver lay teasingly nearby, knocked aside by a hungry zombie but, like any other Lawgiver, it was coded solely to its owner's palm-print, and Ashman knew it would be as dangerous to her as it would be to any other perp who foolishly tried to pick it up and fire it.

  The zombies were closing in on her too. She turned and ran back towards her Lawmaster, popping a stumm gas grenade as she did so and throwing it behind her back into the midst of the pursuing zombies. Designed to incapacitate and render unconscious rioting citizens, the non-lethal gas would do nothing to walking, reanimated corpses which no longer even had the need to breathe, but Ashman hoped that the thick cloud of white gas that spewed out of the grenade would at least succeed in blinding or confusing them for a few vital moments.

  Her bike! She had to get to her bike. Its twin-linked cannons would make short work of these things, and there was the scatter gun in the bike's saddle holster for more close-up action too.

  She made it onto the bike, was starting up its engine with one hand and pulling the scatter gun from its holster with the other, when the lead zombie grabbed her. She smashed an armoured elbow pad into its decaying face, knocking it away, but plenty more were already closing in. They grabbed for her, their fingers clawing at her body and the pieces of her uniform, the creatures mindlessly unable to distinguish one from the other as they tried to pull her apart. She was dragged off the bike, giving an involuntary wail of despair as she felt herself being pulled down, felt the first teeth bites starting to worry at her flesh. The scatter gun was still in her hand but it was useless, the arm holding it pinned to the ground by the weight of a zombie body.

  She looked and saw the barrel of the gun pointing towards the underside of her bike's fuel tank. A Lawmaster's fuel tank was heavily armoured, but at this extreme close range, and firing into one of its more vulnerable and lesser armoured sections...

  She felt something nuzzling roughly at her throat, and then felt the sharp pain of something biting excitedly into the flesh of her neck. After that, what came next was easy. A defiant curse on her lips, she pulled the trigger of her scatter gun.

  The explosion immolated everything in a five-metre radius around the bike, killing Ashman and more than twenty zombies. The other remaining creatures took little interest in the charred and scattered remains of what only moments ago had been living prey.

  Confused by the explosion and the sudden, disappointing lack of living flesh to consume, the zombie mob began to break up, individuals or groups of the creatures shambling off to begin their own search for more tasty prey. They would spread out into the sector around the prison with alarming speed, and the retrovirus-infected and partially consumed corpses of their victims would rise a few hours after death to join them. For days afterwards, the citizens of Sector 57 would hide behind their doors as the Judges and eager citizen squads of volunteer zombie-killers hunted the creatures down and destroyed them. After that, disappointed by the lack of further targets, some of the more over-enthusiastic volunteer groups of zombie-hunters would ignore the Justice Department's order to disband, preferring to instead turn their guns on any unfortunate citizen who in their opinion looked too suspiciously zombie-like. The last of these renegade zombie-hunter groups would be rounded up by the Judges after the notorious Oliver Street Soup Kitchen Massacre, when the vigilantes would learn that the line "Well, they kinda looked like zombies to us" was not a legitimate excuse for the murders of thirty-seven homeless street bums.

  All this, however, was still to come. Right now, the only thing that mattered was the zombies and their growing hunger.

  In life, Mikey "Swifthands" Liebling had been an expert pickpocket and thief. Known as a "dunk" in Mega-City criminal underworld slang, his favourite hunting grounds had been the city's many large and busy shopperamas and mega-malls. Cube-time was an occupational hazard of his chosen profession, and he had been about halfway through a five-year sentence when the attack on Nixon Penitentiary had happened and to his eternal surprise a vampire had torn through the door of his iso-cube and ripped his throat out. Now, in death, only the vaguest and most fragmentary memories of the circumstances of his life remained in the mind of the zombie-thing which he had now become.

  The thing that had been Mikey Liebling dimly remembered a place near the prison, a place where it had gone before, a place where it had found in plentiful abundance the things he had gone there looking for. As Mikey "Swifthands" Liebling, what it had been looking for back then were crowds of peop
le and plenty of inattentive shoppers who wouldn't even notice that their wallets or cred-cards were gone until minutes after Mikey had struck. The needs of the thing that used to be Mikey Liebling were far different, but something told it that it would still find what it was looking for now in that selfsame place.

  Slowly, acting on the most dimly held trail of memory, he stumbled off on his own, not even noticing as first one and then another zombie mindlessly followed him. Many others wandered off in other directions, following their own random and unknowable impulses, but, by chance or instinct, the greater part of the horde shambled off after Mikey as he mindlessly led them to their night's feast.

  Dredd exited the prison a few minutes later, taking in the situation at a glance. The pattern and number of zombie corpses and the remains of the two dead Judges told him the story of almost everything that had happened out here. Grimly, he bent down over the remains of one of the Judges, picking up the heat-fused badge lying there. The name on it was still barely legible: Ashman.

  He had never known Judge Ashman, but she and her partner had both died bravely, fighting by themselves against overwhelming odds. Too many Judges had died already today as a result of the events at Nixon Pen. As a senior Judge, Dredd would see to it that these two, at least, would receive posthumous commendations for their courageous actions here.

  Going over to the Lawmaster that still remained intact, Dredd used his autokey to open its stowage pod, rummaging through it in search of the spare Lawgiver magazines that every Judge carried with their bike supplies. The battle in the iso-block had left him seriously short of ammunition, and he needed every spare mag he could find. It had been a busy night, and Dredd didn't have to be a Psi-Judge to realise there was probably a lot more to happen yet.

  He clambered onto the Lawmaster, activating his helmet radio as he did so.