Psykogeddon (5 page)

A number of responses crossed Dredd's mind, largely concerned with the subject of eggs, issued to grandmothers for the sucking of, but he never got the chance to speak, because it was at that point that the body of Leon Gregor Sturlek reached out and clutched at him with a crabbed hand.

"Drokk!" Dredd was caught completely off balance. Grud alone knew there were ways these days that a body could live on in some form after apparent physical death, but there had been no sense whatsoever that this creep Sturlek was still alive and any kind of threat.

There was still no sense of something living. No sense of possession, of the sort that had once caused so many problems to Mega-City One at the hands of the dead-raiser, Sabbat. And yet the body was still, for some strange reason, managing to move.

Dredd stumbled and recovered. The clutching hand fell away from him as though, having achieved its purpose, clutching was no longer necessary.

The body of Sturlek hung slumped and silent, dead as it had been.

Then the head jerked up again.

The chest and lungs hitched and spasmed, air sucking through the holes blown in them. The throat convulsed and the muscles around the mouth twitched. It was as though something had taken control of the body, somewhat ineptly, and was using it to move only those parts of it that it had to and nothing more.

The mouth worked, the tongue spasming within it, modulating air blown up from ruined lungs and a malfunctioning throat.

"Isss noghreal..." the body of Sturlek said. "Isss a choghpy of whassgh reelgh an so noghingh counts likgh issa reelghing... isss whasagh maghin ussagh doo..."

"What?" said Dredd.

The body slumped again into inertia, like a puppet with its strings cut. Whatever had animated it had gone. Dead meat once again - and this time, hopefully, finally dead.

The Manta had drawn level with Dredd. A hatch gull-winged open in its side.

"We're taking the body into Med-Division," Dredd told the Tactical Response Judges inside. "I want them to run every test they've got. There's something strange happening here, stranger than usual even for Crazy Season, and I'm going to find out what."

TWO

"
If I were to answer the following question: 'What is slavery?' and I should answer in one word, 'Murder!' my meaning would be understood at once. No further argument would be required to show that the power to take from a man his thought, his will, his personality, is a power of life and death, and that to enslave a man is to kill him. Why, then, to this other question: 'What is property?' may I not likewise answer 'Theft'?
"

- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Qu'est-ce que la Propriété?

In his plush apartments in the Shangri La Towers, Barnstable Wheems surfaced into consciousness, knitting his sense of self together from the desiccated, aching skeins of a hangover.

Possession of alcohol was, of course, illegal in Mega-City One under the Antisocial Behaviour Statutes, but the prohibition was not actively enforced save in a Crime Blitz, when it was added to the total of crimes the luckless target had committed. And if your number came up for a Crime Blitz, you'd be going down no matter what happened.

Besides, if you paid enough, you could obtain a wide variety of Synthahols, chemically altered and constantly re-modified to give all the effect while escaping Justice Department detection entirely.

It was knowing such tricks, keeping one step ahead of the Law - often on a second-by-second basis - that allowed one Barnstable Wheems to make his living as a lawyer.

There were any number of those among the hideously wealthy - with the accent on the
hideous
- who would pay through the nose to prevent their activities throwing a blip on the Justice Department sonar. All you had to do was try not to mind how slimy your hands got in the taking of it.

And that, in the end, was the reason why he drank. Genuine article or not, the booze blunted the sense of worthlessness and selling out.

The clients treated him like dirt - at best like the high-priced equivalent of a sewerage maintenance technician, a mere functionary doing a necessary but repugnant job.

Still, at least the money meant that he could afford to live here in Shangri La Towers, the most expensive hab-blocks in the city. Glorified servant quarters the homes on this particular level of Shangri La might be, but they were big and luxurious, and he had them to himself. That put him above 99.999 per cent of a city-state population forced to scrape a living in any bolt-hole it could find.

He'd made them nice, filling them with such genuine antiques as had survived the Rad Wars and which he could afford. Waking up safe here in his home made up for almost anything.

Having put himself together to the point where we could face getting out of bed in the morning, Wheems stretched and, for the first time, actually opened his eyes.

When the world falls down around your ears, there are a few moments when the mind simply and flatly fails to register the fact.

The blood was everywhere. The room seemed drenched in it.

That was actually an exaggeration, which some cool and oddly dispassionate part of his mind told him. The human mind is just wired-up, on the fundamental level, to throw up all kinds of panic-flags at the sight of loose blood.

It isn't as bad as it seems, calm thread of consciousness told him. Just the standard spray-and-spatter of a single living creature stabbed brutally to death, no more than that.

Every other part of Barnstable's mind seemed to have shorted itself out, as though an iron spike had been driven through it. So when the personal comms-unit by the bed began to peal, he reached out and activated it automatically.

The virtual screen flashed the message: "NO INCOMING VISUAL SIGNAL", and went back into standby mode. The receiver-bead floated from its port and positioned itself by Barnstable's ear, where it would remain, wherever he moved, until the connection was cut.

"Hey, listen up," said a voice from the receiver-bead. Male, casual and friendly. The sort of voice, attached by the usual means, to a sympathetic ear you could tell your troubles to. "You've just this second realised that under normal circumstances you like people to see this really fine and tasteful place where you live, so you set your receiver to send visuals by default. That means I can see everything you can, even if you can't see me. All that blood.

"Now, I'm telling you not to worry about that, for the moment at least. I'm not going to be calling the Justice Department, and for a number of technical reasons I'm not going to bother going into, there is absolutely no way the Judges can be monitoring this call. Do you understand me?"

There was an edge to the voice, however. Not so much an edge of authority or command; more that it was simply, casually and sympathetically telling you how the world was going to be.

Barnstable tried to reply, but the voice overrode him:

"Aside from that," the voice said, "you're in a minor form of post-traumatic shock, what with waking up to see all that blood and all. Your mental switchboard's jammed with questions and possible scenarios. Just breathe easy and we'll clear things up a little, yes?

"First things first. You're wondering if you've been wounded in the night - maybe in a home invasion or the like - and you're still, somehow, at the point of not feeling it. You're wondering if you're in hysterical denial or some such, that when you can finally bring yourself to look down you'll see the ruin of your chest with a knife still sticking in it.

"You don't have to worry about that, either. The blood isn't yours. Except for trace-contamination, which we'll get along to in a minute, never fear.

"For the moment, look at the trail it makes, through all that wreckage that suggests a violent struggle. Through the door and into the bathroom...

"I'd go in there and have a look, if I were you. Watch your bare feet on the broken glass from that overturned antique jukebox full of classic static-blips from the Two Thousand and Tens - we wouldn't want to add any more direct contamination to the scene, now would we?

"And here we are at, well, let's be honest, what we might as well call the meat of the matter.

"It's quite amazing, really, what you can do with sufficient time and effort. You'll notice that, in certain respects, certain details have been left eminently identifiable.

"This is not some random individual who will not be missed. This is a personage who was quite well-known, in life, and who is known to be in personal contact with yourself. The disappearance will be noticed, make no mistake about that..."

Barnstable Wheems stared at the mess in his bathroom.

"How could you...?" he managed at last. "How were you able to...?"

"In case you're wondering," said the voice from the receiver-bead, "these are not the remains of a clone. A clone does not have all the cumulative imperfections and adaptations that are acquired by the phenotypical act of living. "This is the genuine and definitive article. And the physical evidence linking you to the death is incontrovertible. Look at your hands, please."

Wheems looked down at the barely healing scratches on his hands. He simply hadn't noticed them before, his mind being on other things.

"Acquired during the struggle," said the voice, "to all intents and purposes, and one of the more salutary sources for your contamination of the scene. Justice Department Forensics Division is quite capable of distinguishing between that and the contamination caused simply by living there, in the home where you happen to live. As I said, all the evidence matches."

Barnstable's experience as a lawyer came, somewhat belatedly, into play.

"Yes, okay," he said desperately, "that might be true, but the Judges have other ways of getting to the truth. Security-scans and psych-profiles, Birdie lie-detectors... Something out there, something along the line, will show I didn't do this.

"You have witnesses - I don't know - who say they saw me running into her in a synthi-milk bar and the two of us leaving together. I can prove they're lying. If holo-surveillance shows it, I can prove it's been doctored. Something, somewhere in the world will prove I didn't do this for the simple fact that I didn't, and whoever you are, you can't control the entire world."

"Who's to say that we can't?" said the voice, somewhat smugly. "All right. Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that we can't. Such things are secondary evidence - the sort of things that you help clients to avoid in your work. That simply doesn't matter in this case.

"People like you are not, to be frank, first on the guest list for the annual Judges' Ball. We're willing to risk that the Justice Department will assume that you've somehow managed to beat the secondary evidence, and go with the open and shut case in front of them. Want to bet on that?"

For all his faults, Barnstable Wheems still held onto a breath of the romantic idealism that had, years ago, spurred him to become a lawyer. In addition, of course, to the potential for acquiring drokkloads of cash for not much actual work.

The fight for
justice,
as opposed to the Justice of the Department, still held an attraction for him. And whatever else it was, his current situation was a romantic's dream. Hero wakes up with a dead body, accused of a murder he didn't commit, forced to fight and clear his name, armed with only his wits in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.

And just think of the name he'd make, let alone the compensation, if he could fight such a case and win!

"Of course," said the voice, "if it looks like you're going to get anywhere in proving your innocence, we'll simply kill you stone cold drokking dead. Extremely painfully, for preference."

"Oh," said Barnstable Wheems. There was that.

"All right," he said at last. "What do you want from me?" And because, after all, for all his vestigial romantic idealism, he was still a lawyer: "And what do I get out of it?"

"What you get out of it is that we send a very thorough cleaner to spirit the inconvenient evidence away - just not so far away that we won't be able to lay our hands on it, you understand? I think you'll be pleased with his work. We call him Mister Hand.

"As for what we expect in return, in the next few days, possibly the next few hours, you'll be offered a job of work which, under ordinary circumstances, your first inclinations would be to refuse, for the simple reason, frankly, that nobody in his right mind would accept. There will be no mistaking the job in question. You are expected, simply, to do that job and succeed."

"And, uh, if I were to fail?" asked Barnstable Wheems, even though he knew what the answer would be. It was just the way the script in this situation went.

"Does the phrase 'dead as day-old dog shit' mean anything to you?" asked the voice. "Bit of an anachronism on a number of levels, I'll admit, what with the fact of dogs as such not existing any more... ah yes, I see that it does.

"Good afternoon, Mr Wheems. You'll never know who I am."

Back in the bedroom, the wall-mounted comms unit briefly sparked as an EMP erased any signal-resonance trace of the call.

In the bathroom, the receiver-bead dropped to the floor, where it would subsequently be quite thoroughly whisked away by Mister Hand.