Fear the Darkness (6 page)

Time was when that was good enough, he thought. Time was when a chief warder's judgement was respected, instead of being second-guessed all the time. I run a tight ship, and I make sure those under my command are good men. After what's been happening over the last two weeks, suddenly none of it counts for drokk, and you know with five prisoners dead it's only a matter of time before those bastards in SJS start looking for somebody to carry the can. Somebody senior enough to put all the blame on. Somebody like me.

Sykes felt queasy and realised he was getting nervous. For a man accustomed to facing the threat of violent death every day, it was a strange sensation, but he knew it was a feeling he might have to get used to if prisoners kept dying on his watch.

Don't let it happen again, he thought, surprised at his own desperation. Don't let there be another incident. Not tonight.

He could only hope to Grud someone was listening.

Eighteen years, thought Leland Barclay, lying on a bunk in one of the Sector House's holding cubes. And it ain't even like I killed anybody. Eighteen years. What the hell kind of minimum sentence is that?

It had all seemed so easy when Arnie Coogan first came to him with the idea for the heist. They had been sitting in Leland's apartment, watching reruns of old Jetball games on the Tri-D, when Arnie had started talking about how much money the kneepad-mart in their block mall must be making every night. "A couple of smart guys like us, we could take the place down no problem," Arnie said. "Five minutes in and out, and we'd have enough of a score that we'd never need to work again."

Strictly speaking, neither of them worked. Not legal jobs, anyway. Leland and Arnie were professional looters and had been for six years. Whenever some crisis blew up, the two of them would hotfoot it to the scene, break into the shops and steal anything they could lay their hands on while the Judges were otherwise occupied. Riots, block wars, terrorist attacks, disasters, invasions - there was always something going on somewhere in the Mega-City enabling them to make a decent living. But while Leland had been content with his lot, Arnie had been a man with bigger ambitions.

"Think about it, Leland," Arnie had said. "We do one heist and get some real money. Then, we use it as seed money. I know a guy who deals stookie. It's fast turnaround and high profit. We buy in with him, we could double, even triple our investment inside a month. Six months, and we'll be millionaires! After that we could go legit, maybe buy ourselves a nightclub or one of them dream palaces. You know what they say about money: the first million's the hardest part. To start it off, all we need are a couple of masks and some hardware. Stump guns, if we can get 'em. They say they're good for intimidation. We wrap 'em up in gift paper so when we go into the mart it looks like we're just carrying presents. Then, five minutes in and out. It'll be a piece of cake."

I should've never listened, Leland thought glumly. Looting was nice safe work. Why'd I have to let myself get talked into doing an ARV?

The heist had gone smoothly enough. They'd gone in, shown their guns and that was pretty much it. After they had cracked the manager in the nose for talking back, nobody else had tried anything stupid; the staff and the customers had done what they were told, no problem. He and Arnie had even managed to grab themselves some nice-looking kneepads as well as the money. It had been the perfect job. Until, as they were leaving the store exactly four minutes and forty-nine seconds after they'd entered it, Arnie had to go and flap his fat mouth.

"See, Leland?" Arnie had said. "A piece of cake, just like I told you. Now you can afford to get your wife that boob job just like you've always wanted."

At the time, he had thought nothing of it. It was only when a Judge kicked in the door while Leland was counting his cut in his apartment that it occurred to him maybe the heist hadn't gone so smoothly after all.

"How did you find me?" Leland had asked, staring down the bore of the Judge's Lawgiver and thinking it looked big enough to swallow him whole.

"How'd you think, genius?" the Judge replied. "Audio on the surveillance cameras at the pad-mart picked up your partner calling you 'Leland'. That, and the fact your wife wasn't too well-endowed. How many guys you think fit that profile and happen to live in the same block where the robbery took place? Piece of cake. Now, give up your partner's name without me having to take you back to the Sector House for interrogation and I'm prepared to go easy on you. Minimum sentence."

The whole damn thing was Arnie's fault anyway, Leland thought as he lay on the bunk staring at the ceiling. If the dumb bastard had kept his mouth shut, I wouldn't be in this mess, so I squealed on him.

Sadly, Arnie had refused to see things that way. When the Judge had brought him out of the block in cuffs and he saw Leland already chained to a holding post on the street waiting for him, Arnie had gone crazy. He'd kicked and bit and screamed so much the Judge driving the Catch Wagon had put him in a gag and restraints. The real shame of it was that he and Arnie had been friends ever since they were juves. Although, however Leland looked at it now, he had to figure their friendship was over.

Serves the asshole right, he thought. And it ain't like they wouldn't have caught up with him eventually anyway. Only thing I regret is not thinking to ask the Judge what the minimum sentence was. Eighteen years! So much for going easy on me. Damn Judges. You just can't trust 'em.

Leland was in a holding cube in Sector House 12, waiting for a transport to take him to the iso-block where he'd be spending the next eighteen years of his life. The second they had come into processing and the Judges had removed his gag, Arnie had started screaming again, telling anybody who would listen his partner was a rat. The warders had put Leland in his own private cube instead of the holding pens, probably figuring he would be safer that way.

So this is what a holding cube looks like, he thought. A bunk, a sink, a shower and a toilet: that's about it for the furnishings. Oh, and a surveillance camera to watch my every move. I guess an iso-cube will look pretty much the same, and I got to spend eighteen years in one. Grud. It might as well be a life sentence.

The lights went off, plunging the windowless cube into darkness. Must be time for lights out, Leland thought. I didn't think I was supposed to be staying here long enough to have to bed down for the night.

Leland Barclay
, he heard a voice say nearby, the sound of it nearly making him jump out of his skin. Someone was in there with him! Leland sat up in his bunk in panic. He couldn't see anything. Frightened, he pulled his legs up onto the bunk with him like a child scared of the bogeyman. Leland sat and listened, ears straining to hear the sounds of movement or breathing. But there was only the voice again, its tone low and quiet.

Leland Barclay
. The sound, a barely audible murmur.

Leland Barclay
. A strange voice, malign and knowing.

Leland Barclay
. A whisper in the darkness.

It is time to be judged...

Grud, Chief Warder Sykes thought as the lights went out and the Custody Command Room fell into sudden darkness. It's happening again.

The emergency lights kicked in, bathing the room and the holding pens beyond it in a dim blue light. The chief warder was already on the move. He put his helmet on and grabbed a torch from a rack as he headed for the door.

"Chief!" he heard Mullins call after him from the comms console. "Tek-Bay reports a power outage across the entire Sector House. Backup generators are out as well. We've got emergency lights and comms operating off battery supplies and that's about it."

"Tell them we need power down here now," he said, halfway through the door. "Priority code: eight five seven alpha one. The second they get any kind of power source back online, they're to route it through to us. Tell them Sector Chief Franklin authorised it personally."

"Roger, chief. You want me to radio Murcheson in holding and tell him to instigate emergency procedures?"

"I'll tell him. I'm already on my way."

As he stepped outside into the corridor, the emergency lights faded, returning the world to darkness. Turning on his torch, Sykes moved quickly past the holding pens. Everywhere, he could hear the muttering voices of the caged perps around him, angry, complaining, calling out for light. Then, seeing the glow of more torches ahead of him, he found Murcheson waiting at the end of the corridor with half a dozen other Judges in riot gear.

"Holding pens secure and all warders accounted for, chief," Murcheson said, gesturing with his own torch towards his men. "We were about to check the cubes. I had Cates break out a couple of crowbars, just in case."

There was a scream in the distance, the voice of a man in pain, echoing shrilly through the corridor. A breathless animal sound that spoke of agony and torment.

"It's coming from the holding cubes," Sykes yelled as he ran. "Kenner, Johannson, stay here and guard the pens. The rest of you with me, and bring those crowbars."

The screaming grew louder, rising to a shrieking falsetto as Sykes pushed his way into the holding cube area with Murcheson and the others.

"It's coming from Cube Two-Thirteen," Murcheson said. "Try the door."

"No good," Sykes said, tapping his override code into the door's keypad. "There's no power for the locks. We'll have to force it open."

Two Judges forced their crowbars into the small gap between door and jamb and tried to lever it open. At first, the door held; then, as Sykes and the others joined them in their labours, the door started to shift.

"It's starting to move," Murcheson said, grunting with effort. "I can feel it."

The screaming stopped. They pushed harder until finally, straining with herculean effort, the Judges began to force the door open.

"Almost there," Murcheson said, then recoiled, nearly falling over Sykes in his haste to step back from the cube. "Oh drokk! That smell..."

Sykes smelt the sickening stench of burnt flesh. Shining his torch into the cube, he saw a pall of smoke hanging into the air. Stepping into the cube he heard retching behind him as Murcheson vomited. Sweeping the beam of his torch through the haze, he saw what had become of the man in Cube Two-Thirteen and felt his gorge rising.

"Sweet Grud," he heard someone whisper. "They burned the poor bastard alive. Just like the others."

His body charred and blackened by fire, the dead man sat on the bunk with his knees against his chest, his head back and his mouth frozen open as though in a silent scream. The bunk, the sheets, even the man's clothing were all undamaged; the fire that killed him had burnt only his flesh.

The overhead lights flared back into life and Sykes saw something that told him all his worst fears had been realised. The killer had struck again, leaving a message in the shape of a word scrawled on the cube wall beside the corpse. A word that seemed to mock them.

The word was
Judged
, written in blood.

THREE

UNWELCOME ALLIES

Considering some of the things that could happen to a missing child in Mega-City One, Judge Kelland Whitby had to figure the Durand case had turned out better than expected. Emerging from the Undercity with Himmie in tow, Whitby and Anderson had taken the boy back to Billy Friedkin Block for a tearful reunion with his parents. The kid had seemed fine - though Anderson had given him a quick psi-scan before they got to Friedkin just to be on the safe side. If there had been one problem, it was that Whitby had found it difficult to look the boy's parents in the face when they thanked him for returning their son to them. Caught up in the moment, their eyes still shining with tears of joy, they kept calling him a hero. It seemed wrong, somehow. Feeling uncomfortable, not quite knowing how to tell them Anderson had saved their kid solo, Whitby had made his excuses and left as soon as he could. A hero. Right now he felt about as far from that exalted state as a man could get.

All I did was trail around after Anderson and get my ass handed to me by a demon, he thought as he made his way down in the block elevator. If it hadn't been for her, both me and the Durand kid would be dead by now. Anderson was the hero, not me.

It was an emotion he was used to, the feeling that he was forever trailing in the wake of heroes. Even though five years had passed since he had graduated from the Academy of Law, Whitby still found himself beset by doubts every time he hit the streets. He hid it well, of course - he had to, or his watch commander would have busted him back to citizen fast enough to make his head spin. Whitby made a point of showing he could break heads and chase down perps with the best of them, but no matter how well he did his duty, it was never enough. He found it impossible to escape the nagging doubt he did not have what it took to be a Judge.

Dredd. Giant. Hershey. Not to mention Anderson herself. These were the names talked about in the Sector House locker rooms. Judges like that cast a long shadow. Each one was a legend in the city, looked up to by citizens and their fellow Judges alike. When Whitby had been a cadet, the Judge-tutors at the Academy had talked about those same Judges, presenting reviews of some of their cases as examples of the standards the cadets would be expected to meet when they became Judges themselves. Now, through a quirk of fate, Whitby had worked a case with one of these legends. Granted, they had cracked the case and Himmie Durand had been saved, but pleasing as that outcome was, in every other aspect Whitby had found the entire night to be a dispiriting experience. One night working alongside Anderson, and it seemed to him all his secret fears were confirmed.

Maybe I'm just not good enough, he thought bleakly. You work with somebody like Anderson and you see just how far you are from making the grade. All night, no matter what happened, she didn't so much as bat an eyelid. The Undercity, the cultists, the demon: she took them all in her stride. It was like nothing could faze her, and you don't get that from being psychic. You don't learn it in the Academy. She's a Judge. A real Judge. It's a knack, an attitude. Maybe it's something you're born with but, whatever it is, I just don't seem to have it.