Dredd VS Death Page 13

  "Giant - Dredd. What's the situation?"

  "Not good, but getting better, Dredd. We've retaken the top thirty levels, and we've probably already seen the worst of the opposition we're going to encounter. Besides, given a choice between us and those vampire creeps, most of the perps in here would prefer us any day. They know we're the only thing that's going to protect them from the vamps and they're surrendering to us whole levels at a time."

  "Back-up?"

  "On its way, thank Grud. They'll be here any minute to secure the lower levels and prevent any more of these creeps getting out."

  "You'll have to manage with a couple of units less when they get here," Dredd told Giant. "I need them to deal with these zombie things."

  "Understood, Dredd. Any idea where they went?"

  "Working on it now. Dredd out."

  Dredd rode off at a slow pace along the prison's approach road. He flicked on the bike's front-mounted powerful UV beamer, flooding the area in front of the bike with ultraviolet light. Since they were dead, the zombies would generate nothing in the way of body heat as their bodies eventually cooled to room temperature , but it had been less than an hour since most of them had died, and there were hundreds of them grouped together en masse, so Dredd figured they had to have left some kind of heat trace behind him.

  He was right. The UV beam revealed the faint but discernable marks of hundreds of pairs of feet on the ground in front of him. They were heading in a disorganised pattern away from the prison and towards the more populated areas of the city, but at a point a hundred or so metres on, there was an abrupt break in the pattern. Some continued on towards the pinnacles of the city blocks in the distance, but the greater part of the zombie tracks broke away from the main skedway, taking a side-road instead. Dredd followed those ones, accelerating off in pursuit. Even before he saw the bright, gaudily coloured sign pointing the way ahead to the large and equally gaudily coloured building in the near distance, he already knew where the zombies were heading.

  "Control - Dredd. Be advised: large group of zombies, estimated several hundred strong, on their way to the Winnie Ryder Mega-Mall. Am in pursuit."

  TEN

  Judge Anderson turned her stolen bike onto the dark, warehouse-lined street, recognising it immediately as being the same as the one she had seen in the mind of the vampire. The psychic summoning call which she had been following up to this point was overpoweringly strong this close to its source, and it was with a real mental effort that she finally managed to wrench her mind separate from it. She didn't need any psi-powers now, just plain old Judge's instincts, and her first act was to switch on her bike radio to report in.

  As soon as she did, the urgent-sounding voice of Control came flooding through to her. "...repeat, Control to Anderson, call in your location and situation immediately. This is a direct order from the Chief Judge. You must respond immediately, Anderson!"

  Oh Grud, she thought to herself. Well, I knew I was going to get into trouble when I started out on this thing.

  "Control - Anderson," she started, cutting off Control's immediate angry response. "Have located the Church of Death HQ. They're on Jack Kevorkian Street, down in the old Black Atlantic dockside district. Get everything you've got rolling and on its way here fast. My hunch is the Dark Judges are going to be putting in a surprise guest appearance down here any minute now."

  "Understood, Anderson. Maintain position and wait until back-up units are-"

  "Jovus, didn't you here me, Control? I'm talking about the Dark Judges! They're going to be here any moment. This is the place where they'll get new bodies again, and if that happens then Grud help us all. No time to wait for back-up - I'm going in now!"

  She broke off radio contact again, cutting off Control's expected objections in mid-sentence.

  Roaring along the street, she saw two figures on the road ahead of her. They were both wearing robes marking themselves as members of the Church of Death, and both were armed. Guards, posted to keep a lookout on the street outside.

  "Well, so much for trying to sneak in the quiet way, Cass," she told herself as she saw them pointing in alarm towards her and unslinging their spit guns.

  She didn't have her Lawgiver, and the scatter gun was too unreliable firing at this range from a moving Lawmaster.

  "Bike cannons it is then," she decided, hitting the weapons' firing switch.

  Thirty millimetre armour-piercing cannon shells chewed up the road surface, cutting a line directly towards one of the guards. The line reached him and suddenly he wasn't there any more, disappearing in a spray of blood and bullet-shredded clothing.

  The other guard was running for her, opening fire with his gun. Anderson crouched low on her bike, as bullets whistled over her head. She'd been shot already today, and had no intention of having it happen to her again. Still, there was another problem to deal with. The street ended in a dead-end, which Anderson was now rapidly approaching on a speeding Lawmaster.

  Time to kill two birds with one stone, she thought, wrenching the handlebars, hitting the brakes and throwing the big bike into a controlled braking skid. The Lawmaster hurtled sideways in a wide skid manoeuvre, slamming at speed into the gunman. He flew through the air, slamming into the wall at the end of the street some twenty metres away. By the time what was left of him had messily slid down the surface of the wall to land on the ground, Anderson had already dismounted from the now stationary bike and was sprinting towards the warehouse building that housed the cult's headquarters.

  Another cultist emerged from the doorway, raising his gun to fire at her. Anderson didn't even bother with the scatter gun in her hands, and let fly at the creep with a powerful psi-blast right into the centre of his cerebral cortex. The gunman hit the ground as if he'd been pole-axed, lying there drooling, with a glazed and stunned expression on his face. In direct breach of Psi-Div regulations, Anderson hadn't even tried to regulate the strength of the blast she'd hit him with, and the after-effects of the attack would be unpredictable. The creep could wake up in a couple of hours with a raging migraine, he could wake up in a couple of days with the mental age of a small child or he could lapse into a persistent vegetative state and never wake up again at all. With so much at stake, with the Dark Judges on the loose again, Anderson frankly didn't care which way it went for the Death-worshipping freak.

  Scatter gun at the ready, Anderson charged into the lair of the Church of Death. And her psi-senses screamed at her in warning, telling her the Dark Judges had already arrived ahead of her.

  DeMarco was still waiting for the right moment to make her move. A sick feeling of growing dread inside her kept on telling her that she'd probably already missed her chance.

  Maybe she should have done the good cit thing after all, and just called the Judges much earlier on, before she'd slugged that guard and dragged his unconscious body into a nearby alleyway, stripping and cuffing him before putting on his Death cultist robes and just walking into the place wearing them, mingling unnoticed among the other Death worshipper freaks.

  Or maybe she should have done something when the ceremony started and they'd brought out Joanna Caskey.

  The ceremony was taking place in the central warehouse area. The windows of the large room had all been blacked out and the walls covered with black and red drapes, embellished in gold and silver with what DeMarco assumed were supposed to be arcane, magical symbols. The only real source of illumination in the place came from the numerous tall, black candles around the room, and most of these were clustered in what was obviously supposed to be an altar area on the elevated stage at the front of the room. So far, so run-of-the-mill hokey occult mumbo-jumbo, DeMarco decided; half the sectors in the city probably had hidden set-ups like this, bored cits looking for some kinky, illicit thrills by dressing up in these mad monk outfits and mumbling some cod-Latin gibberish before stripping off and getting down to the real point of the exercise.

  However, it was when they dragged the girl out that things started to t
urn deadly serious.

  They had drugged her with something, that much was plain to see, and she had lain down all too placidly on something that was clearly and gruesomely supposed to be a sacrificial altar. There were four other similar slabs there too, two of them on each side for the sacrificial altar, and with a stone column with more occult markings upon it standing at the head of the altar. There were four other shroud-covered figures lying upon the slabs beside the altar. From where she was standing amongst the Death worshippers at the rear of the congregation, DeMarco couldn't make out anything of the bodies under those shrouds, although she couldn't help but notice the reverence with which any cult members up there on the altar platform treated the four figures lying there whenever they came near them.

  If DeMarco was having any thoughts about slipping quietly away and alerting the Justice Department to what was going on now, these were swiftly ended when the doors to the place were sealed and two long lines of cloaked and hooded figures were marshalled into place on either side of the main congregation. DeMarco didn't much care for the sound of snarling and growling coming from beneath those hoods, and she liked it even less when the hoods came off and she saw the shockingly feral faces of the fanged, white-skinned things beneath them.

  The vampires - DeMarco couldn't really think of any other term to describe them - hemmed the congregation in, leading them in the droning chant begun by the priest figure on the altar platform. The priest stood over the altar, a gleaming black, horned skull in one hand - the remains of some kind of Cursed Earth mutie specimen, DeMarco imagined - and a curved-bladed dagger in the other. DeMarco didn't like the look of that at all, and realised that she was going to have to do something about this.

  She had been edging slowly forward for a while now, taking advantage of the darkness and the semi-trance state into which many of the congregation members seemed to have entered to slip forward surreptitiously, row by row, creeping towards the front. There were over a hundred of them and only one of her, and all she had was her pistol held inside her robes and her training as a Judge, but she had a job to do, and she wasn't going to stand by and watch these sick freaks kill an innocent girl.

  Up until now, DeMarco still wasn't completely worried. If worse comes to worst, she told herself, she was going to use her first shot to save the girl from whatever they had planned for her, and then use the rest of the clip to kill as many of these creeps as she could. It was only when the four spirit-shapes started materialising in a greasy cloud of dripping, dark-coloured vapour in the air above the altar platform that she finally realised just how far out of her depth she was here.

  "Yes!" the four voices hissed in unison. "Complete the ceremony. Give us flesh once more!"

  The air was charged with psychic power. The congregation's chanting was nearing its frenzied climax. The vampire things prowling round the sides of the room were filled with a terrifying anticipation and excitement. Unable to control itself any longer, one of them leapt upon a member of the congregation, hungrily tearing out his throat. Several more of the creatures rushed to join the feast, and their eager snarling and the scent of freshly spilled blood only added to the highly charged atmosphere inside the place.

  The priest stepped forward, raising his dagger. DeMarco slipped her pistol out from her robes, mentally drawing a bead on him as she raised the weapon to fire. Two in the chest, one in the head, she decided, and then everything else for the creeps around her. The dagger in the priest's hand began to descend. DeMarco's finger began to tighten on the trigger.

  There was a loud gunshot explosion from behind her - a scatter gun shot, DeMarco's Judge training instantly told her - and the doors there crashed open. Two more scatter gun blasts sent the cultist guards there flying through the air.

  "Justice Department! Party's over, freaks!" shouted a commanding female voice.

  "Andersssson!" the four things hovering in the air above the altar hissed as one, their voices full of hatred. And something else too, DeMarco detected. There was fear there too.

  "Kill her!" they ordered their followers. "Finish the ceremony. Give us flesh!"

  The priest raised the dagger once more, getting ready to strike. DeMarco beat him to it, putting two slugs into his chest, as promised. The one intended for his head instead found its way into the big creep in front of her, who had turned and tried to grab her as she began firing.

  There were more scatter gun blasts from behind her, together with the screams and howls of dying cultists and vampires. Whatever Anderson was doing back there, she was going about it the right way. DeMarco pushed forward through the throng of panicked cultists, trying to get to the figures on the altar platform. She pistol-whipped one cultist who tried to block her way and delivered a swift kick into the crotch of the next creep who came running at her with the same idea. The rest of the time she simply cleared a path through with her pistol, firing blindly into the bodies of any robed figures that stood before her.

  Somewhere in the distance, above the sounds of the melee, she thought she could hear the sounds of Judge sirens. Lots of Judge sirens, in fact. Help was on its way and closing fast. DeMarco just hoped she could stay alive long enough for it to matter.

  Incredibly, the priest creep was on his feet again, still holding the knife and staggering determinedly towards the girl on the altar. Ignoring for a few vital seconds everything else going on around her, DeMarco took careful aim again and put two more slugs into his back. Her gun clicked on empty the third time she pulled the trigger.

  The creep was still staggering forward, but he had lost the knife now.

  "Yes, serve us," the spirit-shapes commanded him. "Be our sacrifice. With your own life's blood, make us flesh again."

  The priest pitched forward with the last of his strength, throwing himself forward against the stone column. As he touched it, smearing the blood from the bullet wounds in his chest across its surface, the spirits of the four Dark Judges gave a hellish shriek of triumph. The stone suddenly seemed to suck the life out of the figure clinging to it. Sorcerous energy crackled forth from it, touching first the disembodied spirits of the Dark Judges and then down into the four forms beneath the shroud covers. The spirits of Death and the others flowed with the energy stream, allowing them to take possession of the corpses their devoted followers had so carefully prepared in advance for them.

  It all happened with surprising speed. One moment, Death and his super-creep pals were floating about in the air in spirit-form, and the next the four corpses on the slabs were rising up with preternatural speed and an awful, unnatural stillness. The shrouds of Death and Fear fell to the ground at their feet. The one covering Fire fell away in burning fragments. That covering Mortis simply rotted away into stinking, mildewed pieces in seconds.

  There they stood, reborn again: Death, Fear, Fire and Mortis. The four Dark Judges, who had expunged all life on their own world and had come to this one to do the same here.

  One of the Death cultists clambered eagerly up onto the platform, throwing himself down to kneel, hands clasped in supplication, at the feet of Death. "Master!" he begged. "Grant me eternal existence. Let me join you there in the glorious realm beyond life and death!"

  "With pleasure, sinner," cackled Death, sinking his hands seamlessly through the shell of the man's skull and squeezing its contents with his clawed fingers. The cultist fell dead at the monster's feet, the frozen expression of pain and horror on his face suggesting that the experience had been somewhat different from what he had hoped.

  "Don't be shy, sinners. Who's next?" Death asked with an inviting leer, looking round, his cold, inhuman gaze finally settling on DeMarco. She wanted to reach for the spare ammo clip she had on her, load it into her pistol and empty it into the thing in front of her, but found she couldn't.

  She couldn't do anything, in fact: move, scream, call for help or turn her gaze away. All she could do was stare back into that ghoulish caricature of the face of a Judge, as Death loomed up towards her.

 
"NO!"

  It was Anderson's voice, and there was real power in it, enough to break whatever psychic spell Death could cast over his would-be victims. With a shock, DeMarco realised that it hadn't been Death that had been moving, it had been herself, shuffling unwillingly and unconsciously towards him to receive his twisted sentence of judgement.

  Death looked up, all interest in DeMarco forgotten as he saw his old nemesis come running towards him. There were other Judges arriving on the scene too, crowding in through the door behind her, and DeMarco could hear the distinct heavy engine thrumming of at least one large h-wagon circling above the building. But the Dark Judges had sightless eyes for only one person here.

  "Anderssson," hissed Death. At his gestured command, one of the vampires hurled itself at her. She blew its head off in mid-air with a scatter gun blast and kept on moving.

  "Anderssson," gloated Fear, throwing one of his vicious mantrap weapons into her path. Another scatter gun blast sent it flying out of harm's way, and still she kept on moving.

  "Anderssson," blazed Fire in hatred and raised his burning trident weapon, sending out a blast of supernatural flame. Anderson twisted out of the way and the blast struck behind her, consuming several panicked Death cultists and reducing them to charred scarecrows in seconds.

  Anderson strode forward, firing the scatter gun, and the weapon's high velocity shot load tore into the Dark Judges' bodies. Their Church of Death servants had done their work well, and each of the creatures was dressed in an exact replica of their familiar uniform, which themselves were grotesque, twisted parodies of the uniforms worn by Mega-City One Judges. DeMarco watched as Death slid one long, bony hand down to his version of a Judge's utility belt, reaching for the object attached there, reaching for what looked like a-

  "Teleporter!" shouted Anderson in angry warning to the other Judges following in behind her. "For Grud's sake, shoot them. Stop them before they can teleport away!"