Dredd VS Death (3 page)
Although Death could not actively commune with his brothers, he knew that they felt as he did. Within his prison, Fire blazed with angry, vengeful rage. Next to him, Fear writhed in agitation, his spirit twisting in on itself. On his other side, Mortis's restless spirit-shape formed and reformed itself, prowling round the borders of its prison, endlessly testing the strength of the walls and psychic wards which had been put in place to contain him.
Of them all, only Death was at relative peace. While the others raged and turned their anger on themselves and the seemingly unbreakable walls of their prisons, he watched. And waited.
And now, perhaps, his patience was being rewarded.
Death recognised their new gaoler, the Psi-Judge. He had been here before, and Death, probing subtly and tentatively at the edges of the man's mind, had sensed the interesting possibilities within. There was weakness within this one, Death understood, weakness that could be exploited to his advantage. The man had gone away again, as they always did, but Death had waited patiently for his return, silently laying his plans.
In the city beyond were the special ones, the ones who knew the Dark Judges for what they truly were - liberators, come to free all from the sinful burden of life - and who were eager to help Death and his brethren in their glorious task. Death had encountered several such special ones, and had put his mark upon them, knowing that one day he might have need of them. That day was soon, he knew now, and his call had already gone out to them.
Secret acolytes in the city beyond this place, and now a weakness here amongst their guardians. Yes, now he had everything he needed.
Patience, brothers, he whispered silently to the occupants of the other three cells. Soon we will be able to begin our great work anew. Soon, Necropolis will be ours once more.
Eyes, red and hungry, blazed at her from out of the darkness. She tried to move, to draw her Lawgiver, but the darkness around her was a living, sentient thing. It wrapped itself around her, snagging her limbs, dragging her down.
She felt herself falling, down into the dark. From above her came the angry, cheated snarl of whatever had been pursuing her.
She hit the ground with a clattering impact. She felt dust on her face, smelt withered, ancient decay and felt something dry and brittle beneath her fingers. Opening her eyes, she saw she was lying on a carpet of bones. Raising her head, she saw the litter of bones - human remains, she noticed, seeing identifiable skulls and bone shapes amongst the graveyard detritus - stretching out as far as she could see. The vague tombstone shape of vast buildings, cracked and ruined, loomed up out of the surrounding gloom. There was something horribly familiar about the whole scene.
Deadworld, she wondered to herself, remembering her past experiences in the nightmare world which had given birth to the Dark Judges?
Or Necropolis maybe, she asked herself, noticing with growing disquiet how much the surrounding buildings resembled the familiar outlines of Mega-City One?
No, none of these things, something whispered inside her. Not something from the past. Something from the future, something dreadful that had yet to happen...
Pulling herself to her feet, she heard a chorus of menacing growls from the nearest of the buildings. Backing off, she heard more of the same sounds from the buildings behind her. And from those to her left, and then her right.
Surrounded on all sides, she checked the ammo counter on her Lawgiver and waited for whatever was out there to come to her.
She didn't have to wait long. From out of the buildings they came, a black wave of shadow figures, snarling and hissing at her in hungry anticipation. She opened fire with her Lawgiver, firing off quick controlled bursts as per Academy of Law standard training. The bullets tore into the ranks of the shadow things, giving rise to an outraged chorus of howls of pain and anger. A dozen or more of the things tumbled to the bone-littered ground, to be fallen upon mercilessly and ripped apart by the others swarming close behind.
Despite the carnage, the others came right on at her, swift and relentless. As they closed in on the Judge, heedless of the Lawgiver bullets tearing through unnatural flesh, they merged into one great shadow-shape, a black and red collage of maddened, hunger-filled eyes and crimson-dripping fangs.
They bore down on her, dragging her to the ground, and the last conscious thing she remembered before the red veil descended was the sensation of talon-like fingers raking into her and sharp, needle-like teeth worrying at her flesh.
After that, there was only the darkness, and the overpowering smell of freshly spilled blood.
My blood
, she thought, awakening with a shuddering start. The thin synthi-satin sheets of the bed were soaked with perspiration; the short vest she wore - definitely not Department-approved, which was probably why she wore it - clung to her sweat-soaked skin.
Coming out of the nightmare, it took her a moment to remember where she was: the small and predictably Spartan temporary quarters assigned to her within the dorm-wing of Psi-Division Headquarters. Closing her eyes, she received a few brief but gruesome mental after-images of the nightmare she had just experienced.
"Grud on a greenie, that was a doozie," she murmured to herself as she leaned forward to flick-activate the intercom control on the panel set into the wall beside the bed. Instead, she hit the wrong switch, and made the room's small tri-d screen activate into sudden and noisy life.
"...it's Fluffy, darling... he's dead!" bellowed the voice on the tri-d, making Anderson look up with an involuntary start. She saw a husband-and-wife pair of citizens, both of them straight out of the usual dumb vidvert Central Casting, by the looks of things, crying and cradling the white-furred corpse of something she assumed was supposed to be a dead rabbit. At that moment, the vid-generated background of an ordinary city block apartment wiped away, and a tall, rather intense-looking man in a spotless white lab coat stepped into shot, smiling in a supposedly disarming but actually rather scary manner at the camera.
"Dr Dick Icarus, chief scientist from EverPet! What are you doing here?" exclaimed the wife character in a way that probably made the vidvert director wish he'd gone for digitally generated actors after all.
"I'm here... for Fluffy!" declared the freaky mad scientist type, brandishing a syringe filled with an alarming-looking, glowing green liquid, and quickly injecting the noxious stuff into the dead pet. Almost instantaneously - because vidvert airtime didn't come cheap, naturally - the animal sprung back to life and went hopping off out of shot.
"He's alive! But HOW???" shrieked the wife-actor in amazement, no doubt seeing a dazzling career ahead of her in walk-on roles in middle-of-the-night graveyard slot soap-vids.
"It's all thanks to this," boasted the wacko in the lab coat, holding the syringe and its contents up to camera. "EverPet's revolutionary new Pet Regen Formula. That's right! Now there's no need for death to part you from your most beloved animal companions. For only a small monthly fee, and regular injections of Pet Regen, EverPet can bring your furry little family members back to life. So dial 555-REGEN and resurrect your pet tod-"
"Bringing dead pets back to life... only in the Big Meg," Anderson muttered, hurriedly switching off the tri-d before what was shaping up to be a predictably dumb and irritatingly catchy musical jingle started playing. Second time lucky, she activated the intercom.
"Psi-Control - Anderson. Just picked up something. Could be a pre-cog flash, maybe a big one."
The answering voice on the radio-link was politely sceptical. "You sure about that, Anderson? We've got more than thirty other Psi-Judges asleep in the dorms, not to mention the full-time pre-cogs down in the Temple, and none of them are interrupting my duty shift to report on picking up anything. You sure it wasn't just some REM sleep phantom bogey stuff?"
Anderson fought to keep her temper under control. "You know my rep, Control. You're not talking to some rookie Psi straight out of the Academy. I know the difference between a nightmare and a genuine pre-cog flash."
"Okay," sighed the voice of Control. "You want me to log this as a possible pick-up. We both know the routine. Tell me what you thought you picked up, starting with surface impressions first."
Anderson closed her eyes, bringing her psi-powers to focus on the images still burning in her brain. A moment's concentration, a careful sectioning off of the various areas of her mind to prevent random and subconscious psi-spill from polluting the memory of the images she had picked up, and then she was ready to replay the nightmare she had just experienced.
"I see blood, Control. Lots of blood."
"I mean, just what the drokk is it with these so-called 'Church of Death' freakoids, anyway? The Big Meg is what I like to call a broad church, with room for all kindsa wackos, freaks, gomers, spazheads and nutjobs, sure, but there's still gotta be some limits, ain't there? Now, all you regular listeners out there know that good ol' Drivetime Sam ain't no bigot - except when it comes to muties, Alientown freaks, Juggernaut fans, stuck-up Brit-citters, assorted Euro-cit trash, those big-mouthed domeheads from Texas City, Luna-cit weirdos and especially those dirty Sov-Blokers - but usually I say 'live and let live'. Except in the case of these Death cult creeps.
"You know the freaks I'm talking about, right? Loons that paint their faces like skulls, dress up like it's Halloween and worship - yeah, you heard me right, I said WORSHIP - Judge Death and his three fellow extra-dimensional freakshow buddies? That sound SANE? That sound LEGAL? That sound like the kind of thing we should encourage our innocent young people to get into, when they could be out there getting into juve gang rumbles, taking illegal narco-tabs, setting fire to winos or doing any of the other traditional things the juves of today get up to?
"'Of course not, Sam,' I hear you say, 'that's why the Judges are rounding these freaks up as soon as they appear.' Which is fine by ol' Drivetime Sam, but I say we should all be doing our part too. You know any of these wackos, you think some of your neighbours might be perverted sickos who have a shrine to the Dark Judges hidden in their apartment, then there's only one thing to do. Let the Judges know about it. Dial 1-800-KOOKCUBE, and tell 'em Drivetime Sam told ya to do it.
"Okay, so that's the Rant of the Hour slot and our statutory public information obligations taken care of for the time being, so now it's back to our usual mix of travel-time news, made-up stuff about the private lives of vid-celebs and phone-in chat with you, the dumb, feeble-minded and pathetically attention-seeking ordinary cits of Mega-City One. First on the line is Chuck Cheedlewidge, who we understand is some dweeb who wants to tell us that the weird growth on his neck has started channelling the spirit of the late Chief Judge Goodman. Ooowww boy, now where did I put that kook cube num-"
Galen DeMarco switched off the radio with a curse that would surely have earned her a verbal reprimand from any of her old Sector House shift commanders. Like millions of other citizens, she couldn't stand arrogant, opinionated shock jock creeps like Drivetime Sam. Then again, like millions of other citizens, she also couldn't help tuning in to hear what he was going to say next.
"So much for all those dull citizenship classes they made me take," she said to herself. "If I really wanted to blend in with the rest of the population, all I had to do was listen to the meatheads on talk radio."
She looked out the series of wide bay windows that lined one entire wall of her apartment, relishing the spectacular view it gave her across the central core sectors of MegEast. In the distance, behind the towering bulks of Sax Rohmer Block and the DaneTech Building, one could just catch a glimpse of the Statue of Judgement standing guard near Black Atlantic Customs and Immigration, while off to the east the afternoon sun reflected brightly off the gilt-metalled giant eagle facade of the Grand Hall of Justice. Clustered for tens of kilometres around it were a host of other Justice Department ancillary facilities, including the Academy of Law, Psi-Division HQ and the Tech 21 labs, as well as City Hall, the glittering stratoscraper headquarters of nearly every giant mega-corp company worthy of the name, and several of the most elite and exclusive luxy-blocks and conapt buildings in the entire city. When foreigners thought of Mega-City One, this was the sector they thought of: the soaring, gigantic-beyond-belief buildings, the colourful, teeming millions of citizens and the seemingly never-ending number of fads and crazes which these citizens invented to occupy their time, and the dominating and ever vigilant presence of the Justice Department. Right outside her window was a snapshot of all the allure, glamour and splendour of the biggest, craziest and most powerful Mega-City on the face of twenty-second century Earth.
The reality, DeMarco knew, was nowhere near so exciting and exotic. Over on the West Wall, on the city's border with the Cursed Earth, the Department fought what was practically a non-stop war against the hordes of muties who tried every night to get into the city. There were areas of the city, most notably parts of City Bottom or some slum sectors such as the notorious Pit, where the Judges had all but ceded control to perp gangs that were more like small standing armies than criminal groups - not that anyone in the Department would ever officially acknowledge this. Eighty-seven per cent of the population was unemployed, and too many of them chose some form of lawbreaking as an alternative pastime. The cits invented new crimes faster than the Judges could pass laws to deal with them. The city's iso-cubes were full to bursting, the kook cubes even more so.
