Dredd VS Death (17 page)

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 people 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.

"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 turn 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.