Dredd VS Death (2 page)

He never could remember how long he had wandered the city for, or how he had managed to survive. He imagined he must have found food from somewhere, scavenged from the many derelict city blocks or shopping precincts, for the hunger pangs were not such a problem anymore. Deep down, he knew he had probably gone mad. But what did it matter, he reasoned to himself, when the whole city had also gone mad?

He glimpsed other wanderers like himself, other survivors and scavengers, but warily stayed clear of them. Several times, he saw larger groups of survivors, on one occasion several hundred strong, but always he hid until they had passed by. One of these groups spotted him and called out to him, urging him to come back and join them, but he kept on running. They were doomed, he knew. They had the invisible mark of death upon them - he had seen it clearly in the faces of the nearest of them - and he had no wish to join their fate.

On another occasion, a Judge patrol spotted him. Vernon didn't know why, but he knew that the Judges were part of what was going on in the city. He had taken off running as soon as he saw them. The Judges had chased after him, firing at him with their Lawgivers, but Vernon had managed to lose them somewhere in the darkness of the Hel Shapiro Underway. Bored with the chase, the Judges had given up and gone into the nearest building, looking for easier targets. Even from several kilometres away, Vernon had heard the gunfire from their weapons as they roamed at whim from apartment to apartment and level to level within the massive city block.

On that occasion, he had been fleeing from gunfire, but it would be the same kind of sound which ultimately led him to the moment of glorious rebirth, when he was to discover where his own new destiny lay.

He heard them from afar: rippling bursts of gunfire, tight and coordinated. There were always plenty of gunfire sounds in the city, but something about these seemed different in a way he could not explain. Carefully, going against every new instinct he had developed surviving on his own on the city's devastated streets, he crept towards the sound, drawn in by something invisible yet undeniable.

He found his destiny in Whitman Plaza. The surface of the square had been violently ripped up, transformed into a series of giant craters which were now being used as mass graves. There were Judges everywhere, herding in groups of citizens in their hundreds, barking harsh orders at them, lining them up in neat rows at the lips of the craters and then sending their lifeless corpses tumbling down into the burial pits amidst crashing volleys of Lawgiver fire. Some of the people in the mass graves were still alive, and an occasional laughing Judge would fire into the pits with rippling bursts, making the corpses piled down there dance and jerk as the high-velocity Lawgiver bullets tore through them. Those they missed were left to die, suffocating beneath the weight of the new layers of corpses that soon fell down to join them.

Vernon picked a path across these burial pits, drawn inexorably towards something in the centre of the square. Judges were all around him, but none saw him. Death was everywhere around him too - in the dismal, tainted air he breathed, in the lifeless, bloodied mass of flesh he crept across - but something or someone had decided that he was to be spared from it all. Taking up a position at the edge of one of the craters, crouching down to stifle the dying moans of one of the bodies he was standing on, he looked upon the figures that had drawn him on to this place.

They were standing in the centre of the square, surrounded by their Judge servants. Hover vehicles known as h-wagons, restless and lethal, circled overhead, standing guard over the new masters of Mega-City One.

There were four of them, and Vernon knew instantly who - what - they were, as soon as he saw them.

Death. Fear. Fire. Mortis.

The four Dark Judges. Creatures from another dimension, the news-vid reporters had said, with a thrill of fear in their voices. Twisted, evil entities who had decided that all crime was committed by the living, and that, hence, the greatest crime of all was life itself. They had wiped out all life on their own world and had then discovered a means to cross the dimensions to find Mega-City One. Twice before, the city had come under attack from them, with thousands of citizens losing their lives, but each time the human Judges of the Justice Department had fought back and defeated them, seemingly destroying them for ever.

But, like some creature from an old horror-vid, the Dark Judges refused to die and would return again, each time seemingly more deadly than ever. Now they were back once more, and this time killing not thousands but millions. The entire city was theirs, and they would not rest until they had killed every living thing in it.

Judges, seemingly under some kind of twisted mind control, were moving amongst the columns of captured citizens, randomly pulling people aside and herding them forward to be personally judged by the four creatures. Terrified citizens were herded in groups of a hundred or more into a smouldering crater, where Judge Fire immolated them en masse with blasts of lethal, supernatural fire from his burning trident.

His three brothers stood waiting as their Judge servants brought their unwilling subjects forward to them. The creatures had been busy, Vernon could see. Pairs of Judges carried off the lifeless remains of those who had been selected to be personally judged by the Dark Judges, and the pits set aside for each of the Dark Judge's victims were all nearly full.

Pleading and sobbing, each citizen was brought forward in turn to meet their fate at the hands of one of the Dark Judges. The Judges attending Mortis wore their helmet respirators down, Vernon noticed, to fend off the decayed stench from the rot-corrupted flesh of his victims, while even from this distance he could clearly see the frozen looks of sheer terror on the unnaturally twisted features of the victims of Judge Fear.

But it was Judge Death above all who captured Vernon's attention.

He stood like some regal overlord, his Judge servants making his victims kneel on their knees before him as they were brought forward to be judged.

'Rejoice, sinners! Soon you will be free from the crime of life, and the burden of your terrible guilt will be gone!' he hissed as each was made to kneel before him, before reaching down almost as if to bestow a blessing upon them. His claw-like hands melted seamlessly through flesh and bone, passing mysteriously through organs and innards until they unerringly found the heart, before those same long, inhuman fingers closed around the vital organ and squeezed all life from it.

The victims fell dead at his feet, the same look of horror and fear stamped into all their faces. Instantly, each corpse was picked up and tossed into the nearby pit, before the next victim was dragged forward to meet the same fate.

Vernon was awestruck by what he saw. Here was something far more than a supernatural bogeyman, the extra-dimensional fiend of the old news-vid reports. Here was a creature beyond life and death, an unholy, blasphemous god; terrible in his glory, undying, immortal, a taker of lives and guardian of the secrets of what lay beyond death. Had Vernon been one of those the Judges were bringing before Death, he would have fallen to his knees willingly and without being forced, in voluntary submission to this most glorious and terrible of creatures.

Death paused in his work, looking up as though suddenly sensing something amiss. From behind the iron grille of his helmet, undead eyes gazed out in search of what it may be. He gave a low hiss of irritable displeasure as his gaze picked over the thousands of corpses in the craters surrounding him. He did not like to be disturbed in his work, not when there were still so many sinners waiting to be judged.

Vernon cringed in terror, pressing himself into the tangle of cold, lifeless flesh beneath him as he felt Death's eyes searching him out, inexorably finding the spark of treacherous life amidst the otherwise pleasing landscape of death. The icy grip of fear took hold of Vernon's body as Death's gaze fell upon him and, horribly, he felt the creature's long, cold fingers picking through his mind, almost as if he were physically kneeling before him to receive the Dark Judge's lethal blessing.

His body convulsed and the beating of his heart slowed... and stopped. For a moment, he knew what it was to stand on the very edge of the abyss of death, and then the fingers withdrew, and the gaze of Death was lifted from him. Whatever Death had found in the mind of one helpless and terrified human had pleased him.

Death withdrew his deadly tendrils from Vernon's soul with a long, low hiss of satisfaction and turned his attention back to the business at hand. 'The crime is life... the sentence is death,' he ritually intoned and, seconds later, another corpse joined the thousands of others in the burial pits.

Vernon crept away, still only dimly aware of the significance of what had just happened. Death had found him, had judged him - and had found him worthy of something other than extinction.

There was something more though, something the Dark Judge had left within him. If he closed his eyes and concentrated, Vernon imagined he could just see it, a slick, hard, black pearl planted amongst the living tissue of his brain.

He had been marked by the Dark Judge. Marked not for death, but for life. For a purpose that was yet unknown to him, but which he already knew he would faithfully and devoutly carry out when the time came, for he knew that if he did Death's bidding, then he would be suitably rewarded.

'I don't want to die,' he intoned to himself as he crept away again. I don't want to die. Not now, not ever. I don't want to die.'

MEGA-CITY ONE, 2122

ONE

"Anything happen while I've been away?" Burchill asked, helping himself to a few generous gulps from Meyer's cup of now lukewarm synthi-caf.

Meyer sighed in unhappy resignation. Being a Judge-Warden wasn't exactly the most exciting duty in the Justice Department, and keeping watch over the things they kept down here in the Tomb wasn't exactly the choicest duty posting in the Division, but it was having to work with jerks like Burchill that was the worst thing about this job. Worse even than the mind-numbing boredom and the extra creep-out factor of the nature of the... things encased within the crystalline cube-prisons only a few steps from where Meyer sat at the duty-console.

"Nothing much," she told the smug Psi-Judge. "You're welcome to watch the vid-logs, if you want. We've got the whole of the last eighteen months since you were last here still on file. Not much to see, I'll grant you, but I think maybe Sparky might have done something like blink or change the flicker pattern of his flames a month or two ago."

Burchill snorted into the cup of synthi-caf. "Sparky! It was me that christened him that, you know that? Sparky, Spooky, Creepy and Bony, that's what I called 'em one night, a year or two ago. Glad to see it's caught on while I've been away."

Meyer bristled in irritation again. Psi-Judges were notoriously highly strung, and other Judges were expected to cut them a little extra slack, but Burchill was just an annoying creep. Duty regs said that there must always be a Psi-Judge on duty in the Tomb, to protect against any dangerous psychic activity from the things imprisoned down here, but the Psi-Judges selected for the job were rotated every three months since there were concerns about the effects on a Psi's mind of long-term exposure to the creepy vibes generated by the four detainees held in the Tomb. It had been a year and a half since Burchill had been on Tomb duty - or "spook-sitting", as he called it - and Mayer didn't think that was nearly long enough.

"Yeah, ain't you just the Department comedian?" she commented, the sarcasm bare in her voice. "And, hey, by the way, feel free to finish the rest of my synthi-caf, why don't you?"

"Thanks. Don't mind if I do," laughed Burchill, draining the last of the contents of the plasti-cup.

"No! Don't you d-" began Meyer, way too late, as the Psi-Judge casually flipped the empty cup over his shoulder, throwing it towards the thick red warning line painted on the floor behind him, which divided the underground room into two distinct halves.

On one side of the line were the duty-consoles for the two Judges - one experienced Judge-Warden and one Psi-Judge - which Tomb regs required to be at all times on duty here, as well as the elevator entrance back up to the surface. On the other side of the no-go line were the four entities imprisoned within the Tomb.

Even before the plasti-cup had crossed the line, hidden sensor devices buried within the walls of the chamber had detected the movement and were tracking the object's progress. As soon as it entered the no-go area marked by the line, multiple sentry guns placed at various points around the chamber opened fire, using precise telemetry data fed to them by the room's remote sensors.

The cup was instantly vaporised, struck by several laser beams simultaneously. All that remained of it was a fine residue of ash, which drifted slowly down to settle on the ground on the forbidden side of the red line.

Meyer cursed, and punched a button to open up her duty log. "Thanks a lot. Now I'm going to have to make a report on that."

Burchill laughed, and settled down into his seat in his duty-post across from her. "Hey, look at it this way: at least I've given you something to do now, which makes a change down here."

From behind the substance of the crystalline barrier, from behind the walls which had imprisoned him and his brethren for too long, Death watched his captors. The failure of their great work, the collapse of their grand vision of the Necropolis, had been a galling experience. And defeat at the hands of their old enemies, Dredd and Anderson, had been even more so. The destruction of their physical bodies, the entrapment of their ethereal spirits within these crystal prisons, where they were almost completely cut off from each other and unable to plan the continuation of their holy work, all this was bad enough, but worst of all was seeing sinners so close by - sinners guilty of the worst crime of all, the crime of life - and being unable to bring due punishment upon them.