Dredd VS Death (4 page)

Statistics said that sixty per cent of citizens were likely to suffer some form of serious mental breakdown some time in their lives, mostly due to the pressure of twenty-second century life as it was lived in Mega-City One. They even had a term for it - Future Shock Syndrome - and the kook cubes were full of the plentiful evidence of its virulence and widespread adoption.

Statistics said that fifty-three per cent of citizens were afraid of being murdered by their neighbours. Maybe with good reason, though, since another survey also suggested that seventy-seven per cent of citizens - including, simple arithmetic suggested, many of the respondents from the other survey - actually had given serious thought at least once to the idea of murdering whoever was living next door to them.

It was the Big Meg, the craziest and most violent city on Earth, home to four hundred million citizens, every one of them a potentially violent criminal, and Grud help her, she loved every over-populated, crime-ridden, polluted and blood-stained square metre of it.

Looking down from the penthouse level of the two hundred storey apartment block, she could see the stacked snarl of megways, skeds, overzooms, underzooms, pedways and shoppo-plazas that passed for the Mega-City One street system. It was times like this that she missed those streets the most, missed being a Street Judge and being out there on patrol, dealing with all the madness and mayhem the city had to throw at you.

Boredom was the biggest problem for her now. More than twenty years with the Department, and every minute of that time she had always been busy doing something. She had money, of course - the fortune she inherited from her father more than ensured that, unlike the rest of the ordinary cits, she'd never have to worry about where her next cred was coming from - but like a lot of other cits she had had to deal with the boredom.

Setting herself up as a Private Investigator after she had left the Justice Department hadn't been her idea, but she had to admit that it was a gruddamned good one. Her connections within the Department gave her more leeway than that afforded to others in her profession, and, while it would never beat the buzz of having to quell a full-scale block war after pulling an energy sapping, sixteen-hour double shift of street patrol, it was better than sitting in your luxury apartment all day painting your nails and watching the tri-d, which is what she figured most of her neighbours seemed to do.

Since she didn't have to work for the money, she tried to pick and choose her cases, sifting through the run-of-the-mill surveillance, insurance fraud and employee-vetting jobs that came walking in through her office door. She passed a lot of these kind of jobs on to some of her competitors, only keeping on the cases that interested her. The ones that involved the stuff that slipped through the cracks of the Justice Department's attention, the ones that made her feel she was still doing some good for someone. She had an office downtown, close to City Hall, but a lot of the time she preferred to work out of her apartment.

Which was what she was supposed to be doing now, she reminded herself guiltily as she called up a number on her phone. It rang, and was immediately answered by an auto-message program. DeMarco gave a silent prayer of thanks. As a Judge, the security of the badge and uniform had always allowed her to erect a professional barrier between her and the cits she dealt with. As a cit herself, she was still learning about how to deal with people in emotional distress.

"Hello? Mrs Caskey? It's Galen DeMarco. As I promised a few days ago, I'm calling to give your progress report on what I've found so far. I've talked to some of Joanna's friends at her college, and, according to them, she had got involved in some college fringe society that calls itself the 'Friends of Thanos'. I did a little digging on these creeps, and found that..."

She checked herself here, trying to work out an easy, sympathetic way to tell a mother that her daughter had probably run off to join a cult of death-worshipping loons.

Damn it, she thought to herself. Why did the Academy learning program have more than fifty compulsory courses on combat techniques and only one brief one on Cit Relations?

"Well, uhhh... I have reason to believe that they're maybe connected in some way to a group you might have heard about on the vid-news recently, a group called the Church of Death. I'm not sure, but it's possible she might be with them... It's possible some boy she met might have persuaded her to join. I'm looking into it now, and I've already got a few leads I want to follow up about this cult, maybe even be able to track them down. Don't worry, Mrs Caskey, whatever you've heard on the tri-d about these people, it's probably just the usual exaggerated vid-news stuff. I'll contact you in a few days, by which time I'm fairly sure I'll have some good news about your daughter."

She hung up, thinking that maybe the Academy of Law training wasn't so bad after all, since at least it taught you how to lie with conviction to the cits. She had some leads on this Death cult alright, but her gut feeling was that these Church of Death creeps were a cut above your usual Mega-City One lunatic fringe/apocalypse cult bunch of wackos.

She had a lot to do now, she knew, but she couldn't help looking out the window at the city again and wonder, for what was maybe just the twentieth time that day, where Dredd was, and what he was doing right now.

TWO

Judge Dredd's fist smashed into the perp's face, spreading most of his nose across his face and making a trip to the iso-block med-unit for some dental reconstruction surgery a likely event in this creep's immediate future.

One of the perp's buddies used the moment for his advantage, slipping around Dredd and trying to blindside him. The Judge turned and pivoted as the perp came at him with a pig-sticker blade. Dredd swung his daystick twice, swiftly. One sharp crack of reinforced plasteel on bone broke the wrist of the creep's weapon-hand and sent the knife skittering across the rough rockcrete surface of the alleyway. The second caught him neatly on the top of the skull and booked him a place in an iso-block med-unit alongside Creep Number One.

Creeps Number Three, Four, Five and Six looked slightly disconcerted about this. They hung back for a moment, weighing up the odds. Creep Number Four, with slightly fewer disfiguring facial tattoos than the rest of the gang, was maybe the brains of this particular outfit, and the others seemed happy for him to do all their collective, half-witted thinking for them.

"Don't matter what the name on that badge says!" he shouted, weighing up the odds, doing all the necessary mental arithmetic and still coming up with very definitely the wrong answer. "There's one of him and four of us, and he can't take us all. Get him!"

They rushed at him together. Dredd's Lawgiver was in its boot holster, within easy reach, but he made no move to draw it. None of these punks were packing guns, and so far there didn't seem to be any just cause for the use of deadly force against them.

Besides, he thought to himself, it had been a slow day so far, and he could probably do with a workout.

Creep Number Five hit the ground first, taking a plasteel-reinforced Judge's boot to the groin and a daystick blow to the temple. Creep Number Three followed swiftly, courtesy of a knock-out punch to the jaw. Creep Number Four drew back, looking like he was having second thoughts about the whole thing. Dredd gave him something else to think about instead: a daystick jab to the solar plexus which sent him reeling to the ground, winded, the follow-up kick from a boot swiftly reintroducing the perp to the violently regurgitated remains of his synthi-fries and Grot Pot lunch of only a few hours ago.

If Creep Number Four was the brains of the outfit, then Creep Number Six must have fancied himself as the brawn, throwing himself at Dredd with a savage roar. Dredd bent slightly, caught him in the ribs with the hard edge of his eagle-shaped shoulder pad and used the creep's own momentum against him, judo-throwing him over his shoulder and sending the perp face-first into the surface of the wall behind him. The pattern of the rough brickwork, now stamped deep into the skin of the unconscious thug's face, made an interesting new addition to the mosaic of ugly tattoo markings already there.

With the six perps lying unconscious or groaning on the ground around him, Dredd finally relented and lifted his foot from the back of the original perp - Creep Number Zero, he supposed he should call him - who had been lying there helpless, hands cuffed behind his back and pinned to the ground by Dredd's foot, during the entire fight.

"Control - Dredd. Seven for catch wagon pick-up, Mohammed Alley, just off Spinks and Foreman."

"Wilco, Dredd," came the crackling reply over his helmet radio. "What are the charges?"

Dredd looked at the seven subdued figures around him. "Six of them on Attempted Judge Assault - five years." Dredd paused, looking at the six groaning, bleeding perps lying around him. "Tell the catch wagon crew there'll be no problem figuring out which ones they are. The other one..."

Dredd looked round at the colour-splashed and still-wet graffiti wall decor behind him.

"Scrawling - one year's cubetime."

Scrawling was a common enough Mega-City crime, Dredd knew, and Sector House Chiefs were required to order regular crackdowns on it in some of the worst-hit areas. Dredd had made thousands of arrests for scrawling in his years on the streets, and this one had at first seemed no different from the rest when he had come across an illegal scrawler - Creep Zero - still at work on his latest graffiti masterpiece at the mouth of the alley.

What had been unusual, though, was when Creeps One to Six turned up to dispute Dredd's arrest of their buddy. Scrawl wars were common amongst the city's street gangs, with gangs leaving provocative scrawl-tags on their rival's turf and then protecting their own gang territory - often with lethal force - from reprisal scrawl attacks in return. Gang members protecting their gang's scrawl artists wasn't that uncommon, but what was very much out of the ordinary was a gang willing to do the same thing if it meant attacking a Judge.

Especially if that Judge happened to be Judge Joe Dredd.

Dredd looked again at the scrawl design the scrawler had still been working on when he arrested him. He saw a cartoon depiction of a familiar-looking ghastly figure, a figure which Dredd knew all too well, but which the scrawler would only have seen in brief and heavily Justice Department-censored news-vid images. The figure, a grinning ghoul wearing a crudely imagined parody of a Judge's uniform, was surrounded by a chemically treated fluorescent paint halo of glowing black energy. Written beside it, in large and still unfinished letters, was a single stark message: "DEATH LIVES!"

Despite the cartoon crudeness of the thing, despite the mundane setting of a typically grubby and garbage-strewn Mega-City alleyway, there was something strangely unsettling about the image, almost as if the scrawler had subconsciously tapped into some greater hidden reservoir of fear and dread.

Sensing he was onto something, Dredd bent over the nearest prone body, ignoring the injured perp's groans of pain as he quickly searched him. Like all the other gang members, the perp's clothes were uniformly black, but, beneath the fresh dye marks, Dredd could still see the evidence of the ganger's original and quite different gang colours. Likewise, while his arms bore traditional juve gang tattoos - Dredd recognised them as belonging to the Sid Sheldon Block Big Spenders Crew - the ones on his face were most recent, and different from the gang tattoos. Flaming skulls, vampire bats, clawed hands coming out of graves and similar cartoon-gothic imagery seemed to be the predominant style here.

Standing back up, he reactivated his helmet radio link.

"Control - Dredd. Extra to that last call: possible evidence tying my perps into these Church of Death creeps."

"That's a check. We've been seeing more and more of this amongst the sector juve gangs. Could just be the latest passing street gang fad."

"Or it could be something else, Control," growled Dredd. "Fads don't make gangers attack Judges the way these punks tried to attack me. Slap a mandatory extra five years onto all their sentences for membership of an illegal organisation, and have them all run through the interrogation cubes to find out what they know. It's time we came down hard on these Death cult freaks."

"Wilco, Dredd..." responded the voice of Control, before suddenly assuming a more urgent tone. "Just got something coming in. Armed assault at the Bathory Street med-supply warehouse. Judge Giant on the scene and requesting assist from any nearby units!"

Dredd looked at the seven subdued perps around him. Bathory Street was only five blocks from here, just off Ingrid Pitt Plaza, and it would take him less than a minute to secure his perps for catch-wagon pick-up. Cuffed together, and with most of them already beaten unconscious, he didn't figure it likely they would be going anywhere before the catch wagon crew arrived.

"Wilco, Control. On my way."

Judge Giant didn't believe in vampires.

Which was not to say he'd not witnessed some freaky stuff in his time as a Judge, of course. Even as a cadet, during the darkest days of Necropolis he'd faced off against no less a creep than Judge Mortis. And then there had been the whole Judgement Day thing, with the dead - yeah, the freakin' dead - rising from the grave and forming into one big zombie army to try and destroy everything and everyone. Since then, he had seen or heard about all kinds of weird stuff - tribes of werewolves in the Undercity, alien monsters with acid for blood attacking the Grand Hall of Justice - but he still didn't believe in vampires.