Dredd VS Death Read online

  With a sickening realisation, Anderson knew in an instant what these freaks were up to. She broke off the psi-contact, snapping back to the reality of what was still happening to her right this moment. The sucker's hands were still around her throat, burning into the material of her uniform, strangling her. She felt herself start to black out. From somewhere far away, but somehow coming swiftly closer, she heard an urgent roaring sound...

  She threw herself backwards off the saddle, taking her attacker with her, hurling themselves both off the Lawmaster a split second before it crashed into the front of the huge jugger-transporter, the sound of the impact as the Lawmaster was smashed apart momentarily drowning out the blaring roar of the giant vehicle's batteries of warning horns.

  Falling backwards at a 100 kph or more, it was times like this Anderson wished she had paid more attention to the Department regs about the compulsory wearing of helmets. She desperately twisted in mid-air, putting her attacker's body between her and the road surface now rushing up towards them, figuring she might as well let him hit it first.

  It worked, mostly.

  They hit the ground and rolled for fifty metres or so, the rough surface of the sked making them pay for every bone-breaking, skin-shredding metre. The creature took the worst of it, as Anderson had hoped, but at least it didn't have to worry about being on fire anymore. Not when most of its burning skin had been scraped off along the way.

  Anderson fared better, her uniform and protective pads saving her from the very worst of the variety of injuries on offer.

  She came to rest on the edge of the sked's hard shoulder, still conscious, and started counting the damage. A couple of ribs were gone, and she suspected one of them might have punctured a lung, judging from the white-hot spears of agony she felt every time she took a breath. Her left leg was bent back at a decidedly unpleasant angle, and she didn't need to try to pick up any pre-cog visions to see some serious time spent hooked up to a speedheal machine in her immediate future.

  The pain was bad, real bad. She knew some psi-tricks to block a lot of it out, but they would have to wait. The most important thing now was to let everyone else know what it was she had seen inside the mind of that creature.

  She was just reaching down for the communicator stored in her utility belt when the hand, charred and almost fleshless, reached out to grab her.

  The creature, incredibly, was still alive. Its body was smashed, its skin was burnt away from it in huge, terrible patches, yet it still wouldn't accept the inevitable and just roll over and die. It was crawling up the length of her body, making a horrible, hissing, gurgling sound from its ruined throat.

  Pinned to the ground, weak from pain, Anderson was helpless to stop it. Her Lawgiver was long gone, knocked from her hand as they fell from the back of the bike, and probably now crushed beneath the wheels of the jugger-transporter. Which only left her with...

  Ignoring the screaming pain from her broken leg, she reached down for the boot knife secreted there. Her hand found it just as the creature pressed itself down at her throat. Its mouth hung slackly open, revealing the jutting fangs there. Anderson's hand flashed up, stabbing the knife's blade right between the thing's open fangs.

  Psi-Judges were equipped with silver-bladed boot knives as standard these days. Anderson didn't know what this fiend was or where it came from, but she was pretty hopeful that this might finally be enough to kill it. Silver blade or no silver blade, ramming the point of a boot knife right through the roof of its mouth and straight up into its brain was sure to have some kind of effect.

  It did. The creature gave a choking cry and fell forwards across her, its fangs closing around the hilt of the knife still gruesomely jutting out from between its clenched jaws.

  Using almost the last of her rapidly failing strength, Anderson painfully pushed the thing off her and reached in desperation towards the communicator lying on the ground nearby.

  A black, nauseous wave of unconsciousness rushed up towards her. She struggled to hold it off for a few more precious moments. She had to radio in what she knew... Had to let the rest of Justice Department know what was about to happen...

  Had... to...

  She heard sirens in the distance, coming closer. Her fingers brushed against the hard casing of the communicator. Her vision swam. And dimmed.

  The back-up squad found her less than two minutes later. She was unconscious, lying in a spreading pool of her own blood. The first Judge on the scene gingerly knelt over her, feeling for a pulse and relieved to find one, weak though it was.

  "Control - Varrick. Med unit urgently required down here on Joey Ramone. Alert anyone who needs to know - Psi-Judge Anderson's down and in a bad way."

  "Wilco, Varrick. Med assist on its way."

  "Hold on, Anderson. Help's coming," Varrick said gently to the near-comatose Psi-Judge. Two years ago that had been him, lying bleeding into the ground of a block plaza after being caught in the crossfire of a juve gang rumble, and he knew from experience how much it meant to hear a friendly voice or just to know somehow that someone's there with you, watching out for you, while you're lying there helpless and injured.

  He reached down to take her hand, noticing as he did so that she had her back-up communicator held in it. Her finger was on the call switch, although she'd passed out before she could activate it.

  FIVE

  "Hey, what was that?"

  Burchill looked up in irritation from the book he was reading, his concentration broken by the sudden sound of Meyer's voice. Dull as it was, Dredd's Comportment was supposed to be required reading for any Street Judge.

  Despite the mood of breezy nonchalance Burchill affected whenever he was on duty down here, he hated this posting, and seriously resented having to come back to the Tomb for another three months of sitting here doing nothing.

  Which was why he had put in a request for permanent reassignment to something a little more interesting than guard duty in the Tomb, once this latest three-month stint was up. Something like open patrol assignment, say, maintaining a visible Psi-Division presence on the city streets and giving psi-specialist back-up to the ordinary Judge on patrol.

  Which meant he'd have to undergo a series of revaluation tests at Psi-Div HQ, to see if he was suitable for more responsible duties.

  Which meant having to brush up on his knowledge of Street Division and the way the Street Judges operated.

  Which he couldn't do, if Meyer kept on drokking interrupting him.

  "What?" he said testily.

  Meyer indicated the instrument panel in front of her. "The needle on Containment One. Did you just see it move?"

  Sighing in undisguised irritation, Burchill laid down the book and looked at the matching instrumentation on his own duty station. There were huge and expensive batteries of delicately calibrated electronic sensor devices trained on the four containment capsules on the other side of the no-go line. Much of it was designed to measure or detect any kind of psi-activity on the part of the four beings imprisoned in those capsules. If Spooky, Creepy, Sparky and Bony were up to anything, it was supposed to register on these instrumentation panels.

  Which it never did, because nothing - absolutely nothing at all - of any interest ever happened down here in the Tomb.

  "Nothing here," he answered. "You sure you didn't just imagine it?"

  Meyer didn't look amused. "Check the log record," she ordered. "You know how the regs work."

  Burchill punched up the sensor readings for the last few minutes, giving an unimpressed grunt in response to what he saw. "Okay, so there was a tiny micro-spike on One, forty-three seconds ago, but nothing to get your panties wound up about. Less than point-three of a psi-joule. Despite what the Tek-heads say, you know how random some of this junk is. One of the perps in the cells a hundred levels above has himself a real hot erotic dream one night, and sometimes the instruments down here pick it up. Satisfied?"

  "Not yet. You still know what regs say. I need you to do a psi-check."
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  Now Burchill was getting really irritated. Despite the flippant names he gave them, the four things in those containment cells seriously creeped him out sometimes, and he really hated having to do what he was now required to do.

  He sat back in his chair, closed his eyes, doing his best to empty his mind of the usual mental clutter as he brought his psi-abilities into focus. He reached out, overcoming the instinctive mental recoil from the sheer evil power of the things on the other side of the no-go line and, for the briefest possible moment, scanned the psi-activity within the chamber, looking for anything out of the ordinary. He hated doing this. What made it even more unnerving was knowing that Meyer, sitting across from him, had her hand on the grip of her Lawgiver, ready to draw it and put a Standard Execution round through his brainpan at the first sign that he had become possessed or psychically controlled by any of the occupants of the containment units.

  After a few moments, he opened his eyes again, seeing Meyer looking at him intently.

  "Anything?" she asked, the tension clear in her voice.

  "Not a thing," he replied. She stared at him hard for a few moments more - like maybe she's expecting me to start spouting tentacles or levitate into the air with my head spinning round in circles on my shoulders, he asked himself, incredulously? - and then visibly relaxed, bringing her hand up from under the desk where her Lawgiver was secured.

  "With these creeps, it's always best to be sure," she said, perhaps in way of partial apology.

  "Whatever," grumbled Burchill, going back to his book again.

  "A Judge's first weapon is not his Lawgiver or his boot knife or his daystick," he read. "It is his Judge badge, and the natural authority it gives him..."

  Oh brother, Burchill thought to himself. Old Stony Face might still be Mega-City One's greatest lawman bar none, but when it came to writing, he'd all the slick prose style of the late, great Mayor Dave the orang-utan.

  Within his prison, the spirit of Judge Death hissed to itself in silent pleasure. Yes, this one was pleasingly weak, not even aware of Death's growing control over his deep-buried subconscious. He saw only what Death wanted him to see and nothing more.

  Death was pleased. Equally pleasurable had been the event he'd just detected from afar. Since the time he had first come to judge the sinners of this place, his fate and that of the psi-witch Anderson had always been intertwined. He still rankled at the memory of his imprisonment within her, trapped by the frightening power of her mind, unable to escape her comatose body, the two of them put on display together in a museum, of all places.

  The memory of that first defeat, that first humiliation, still fuelled his hatred against this city and the sinful life that teemed within it. It was this connection between them that had allowed Anderson to defeat him and his brothers several times since, but that connection worked both ways. Just as Anderson could sense him, so too was he sometimes psychically aware of her, even while he was imprisoned down here, weakened and disembodied.

  Her aura was like a distant glimmer of light in the darkness of his thoughts, torturing him with the knowledge that she still existed, despite all his attempts over the years to extinguish that light forever.

  Now, though, the light was faint. Barely perceptible and unusually dim. She was not dead, he sensed, or at least not yet, but her life force had been seriously diminished. Perhaps for good, he hoped.

  His servants in the city beyond this place had done well. Anderson was no longer a threat to he and his brethren, which meant that those same servants were now ready to take the final step.

  The spirits of his foul companions writhed in psychic restlessness, demanding to know when they would be free.

  Soon, brothers, he whispered to them in a voice that only those who had passed beyond life and death could ever know. Very soon now. I promise.

  Hershey resisted the urge to yawn. They had almost reached the end of the Council session, which was traditionally Kook Time, when the Council discussed what Hershey secretly called AOOC.

  Any Other Outstanding Crap.

  Last on the Kook Time agenda was a concern about some new bio-product that had come onto the marketplace a few months ago. Med-Division had given it a clean bill of health and approved the patent, but there had been a number of complaints about it from the citizens. For reasons that Hershey still wasn't quite sure about, no one at Justice Central had been able, or perhaps cared enough, to make a decision about what to do, and so the case had gradually risen up through the hierarchy of the Department until the Council of Five, which regularly debated issues vital to the security and existence of a city of over four hundred million people, found itself now arguing about a novelty medical treatment for raising pet animals from the dead.

  Only in the Big Meg, thought Hershey, using a Street Judge's customary dismissive opinion on all the weirdness and craziness that passed for daily life in Mega-City One.

  "After the events of Judgement Day, we're aware of many citizens' objections to the idea of a product which brings dead flesh back to life," Hershey said, gesturing towards the computer file compilation of the several tens of thousands of complaints they'd received from the citizens about the EverPet adverts that had been running for weeks on the tri-d networks, "but we have Med-Division's most stringent assurances that the treatment only works on the simpler nervous systems of animals like common household pets, and definitely not on human beings."

  "Quite so," nodded the representative from Med-Division. "We went down to Resyk and pulled dozens of corpses off the conveyor belts there and dosed them with increasingly huge quantities of the Pet Regen formula. We got nothing so much as a twitch from any of them. And besides," he added a hint of a smile, "a chemically reanimated cat, budgerigars or goldfish isn't quite in the same league as an army of millions of flesh-eating zombies knocking on the gates of the West Wall."

  "My thoughts too," agreed Hershey, glad that the issue looked like it was going to be quickly resolved. "Any other comments?"

  "Well, there are the fiscal benefits to consider too," volunteered Accounts Judge Cranston, pouring over the tables of carefully prepared statistics he'd brought with him. "Besides the standard twenty-five per cent sales tax charged on the product, there's also the extra income we'll derive from the necessary re-issuing of new pet licences."

  "Meaning what, exactly?" Ramos asked, showing the same kind of impatience as Hershey.

  Cranston shuffled through his beloved piles of paperwork. "Well, the cost of a general pet licence is one hundred credits, with some of the more dangerous or alien pet types also requiring an annual additional inspection fee on top of that. In all cases, however, a pet licence becomes legally null and void when the animal dies. If a pet owner then wants to use this product to bring their beloved creature back to life..."

  "Then they'll have to buy a new licence," Niles smiled, instantly seeing where Cranston was going. "And the Department in effect will receive double the licence money for the same animal."

  "Indeed!" beamed Cranston, making quick-fire calculations on his desktop analyser. "So, with fifteen million, three hundred thousand and twenty-seven pet licences currently issued, and assuming that at least ten to fifteen per cent of pet owners might take advantage of this product, we can probably expect to accrue additional revenues somewhere in the region of..."

  Hershey, however, had already heard all she needed or wanted to. "Enough to settle the issue, I imagine. Unless anyone has any other points, we'll assume the Pet Regen product is allowed to remain on sale - for the time being?" She looked around the room, seeing only nods of agreement and gratefully brought the Council meeting to an end for another week."

  "Very well, then. If there's no other business to be discussed..."

  "Just one item," interrupted a new voice from the other end of the room. All heads turned to see Dredd standing in the council chamber doorway. The Council of Five meetings were supposed to take place in closed session, with no one permitted to enter without the Chief Judge
's permission. A guard of armed Judges was posted in the corridor outside, to make sure of this. Dredd, however, was always a special case. There seemed to be an unofficial and unspoken understanding, established many administrations ago, that Dredd had automatic and unrestricted access to the Chief Judge whenever he required it.

  When Dredd spoke, Hershey knew from long experience, it paid for Chief Judges to pay attention to what he had to say. She sat back in her chair, signalling for her old street patrol partner to continue.

  "What's the official Department policy on vampires?" he asked.

  SIX

  Anderson struggled and fought against the darkness that surrounded her. She was back in the nightmare world she had seen in her earlier precog vision - only this time it was much, much worse.

  She was running through the empty streets of the city again, her feet crunching gruesomely on the carpet of bones which littered the ground. From all around her, she heard the growling and snarling of the vampire creatures. At first she thought they were hunting her, but then she realised they had no interest in her.

  There were thousands of them, maybe even tens of thousands. The vampires were flooding through the city streets like a living tide of darkness, converging on one central point. In the distance, Anderson could see their destination: a vast prison tower, forbidding and impenetrable. The teeming creatures threw themselves at its walls, tearing at the seamless stonework with their claw-like hands, gnawing madly at it with their bare fangs. Teeth shattered against dense, unyielding stone. Taloned fingers were shredded down to the bone, but still the creatures persisted in their crazed task.