Dredd VS Death (10 page)

"Whatever," grumbled Burchill, going back to his book again.

"
A Judge's first weapon is not his Lawgiver or his boot knife or his daystick
," he read. "
It is his Judge badge, and the natural authority it gives him...
"

Oh brother, Burchill thought to himself. Old Stony Face might still be Mega-City One's greatest lawman bar none, but when it came to writing, he'd all the slick prose style of the late, great Mayor Dave the orang-utan.

Within his prison, the spirit of Judge Death hissed to itself in silent pleasure. Yes, this one was pleasingly weak, not even aware of Death's growing control over his deep-buried subconscious. He saw only what Death wanted him to see and nothing more.

Death was pleased. Equally pleasurable had been the event he'd just detected from afar. Since the time he had first come to judge the sinners of this place, his fate and that of the psi-witch Anderson had always been intertwined. He still rankled at the memory of his imprisonment within her, trapped by the frightening power of her mind, unable to escape her comatose body, the two of them put on display together in a museum, of all places.

The memory of that first defeat, that first humiliation, still fuelled his hatred against this city and the sinful life that teemed within it. It was this connection between them that had allowed Anderson to defeat him and his brothers several times since, but that connection worked both ways. Just as Anderson could sense him, so too was he sometimes psychically aware of her, even while he was imprisoned down here, weakened and disembodied.

Her aura was like a distant glimmer of light in the darkness of his thoughts, torturing him with the knowledge that she still existed, despite all his attempts over the years to extinguish that light forever.

Now, though, the light was faint. Barely perceptible and unusually dim. She was not dead, he sensed, or at least not yet, but her life force had been seriously diminished. Perhaps for good, he hoped.

His servants in the city beyond this place had done well. Anderson was no longer a threat to he and his brethren, which meant that those same servants were now ready to take the final step.

The spirits of his foul companions writhed in psychic restlessness, demanding to know when they would be free.

Soon, brothers
, he whispered to them in a voice that only those who had passed beyond life and death could ever know.
Very soon now. I promise.

Hershey resisted the urge to yawn. They had almost reached the end of the Council session, which was traditionally Kook Time, when the Council discussed what Hershey secretly called AOOC.

Any Other Outstanding Crap.

Last on the Kook Time agenda was a concern about some new bio-product that had come onto the marketplace a few months ago. Med-Division had given it a clean bill of health and approved the patent, but there had been a number of complaints about it from the citizens. For reasons that Hershey still wasn't quite sure about, no one at Justice Central had been able, or perhaps cared enough, to make a decision about what to do, and so the case had gradually risen up through the hierarchy of the Department until the Council of Five, which regularly debated issues vital to the security and existence of a city of over four hundred million people, found itself now arguing about a novelty medical treatment for raising pet animals from the dead.

Only in the Big Meg, thought Hershey, using a Street Judge's customary dismissive opinion on all the weirdness and craziness that passed for daily life in Mega-City One.

"After the events of Judgement Day, we're aware of many citizens' objections to the idea of a product which brings dead flesh back to life," Hershey said, gesturing towards the computer file compilation of the several tens of thousands of complaints they'd received from the citizens about the EverPet adverts that had been running for weeks on the tri-d networks, "but we have Med-Division's most stringent assurances that the treatment only works on the simpler nervous systems of animals like common household pets, and definitely not on human beings."

"Quite so," nodded the representative from Med-Division. "We went down to Resyk and pulled dozens of corpses off the conveyor belts there and dosed them with increasingly huge quantities of the Pet Regen formula. We got nothing so much as a twitch from any of them. And besides," he added a hint of a smile, "a chemically reanimated cat, budgerigars or goldfish isn't quite in the same league as an army of millions of flesh-eating zombies knocking on the gates of the West Wall."

"My thoughts too," agreed Hershey, glad that the issue looked like it was going to be quickly resolved. "Any other comments?"

"Well, there are the fiscal benefits to consider too," volunteered Accounts Judge Cranston, pouring over the tables of carefully prepared statistics he'd brought with him. "Besides the standard twenty-five per cent sales tax charged on the product, there's also the extra income we'll derive from the necessary re-issuing of new pet licences."

"Meaning what, exactly?" Ramos asked, showing the same kind of impatience as Hershey.

Cranston shuffled through his beloved piles of paperwork. "Well, the cost of a general pet licence is one hundred credits, with some of the more dangerous or alien pet types also requiring an annual additional inspection fee on top of that. In all cases, however, a pet licence becomes legally null and void when the animal dies. If a pet owner then wants to use this product to bring their beloved creature back to life..."

"Then they'll have to buy a new licence," Niles smiled, instantly seeing where Cranston was going. "And the Department in effect will receive double the licence money for the same animal."

"Indeed!" beamed Cranston, making quick-fire calculations on his desktop analyser. "So, with fifteen million, three hundred thousand and twenty-seven pet licences currently issued, and assuming that at least ten to fifteen per cent of pet owners might take advantage of this product, we can probably expect to accrue additional revenues somewhere in the region of..."

Hershey, however, had already heard all she needed or wanted to. "Enough to settle the issue, I imagine. Unless anyone has any other points, we'll assume the Pet Regen product is allowed to remain on sale - for the time being?" She looked around the room, seeing only nods of agreement and gratefully brought the Council meeting to an end for another week."

"Very well, then. If there's no other business to be discussed..."

"Just one item," interrupted a new voice from the other end of the room. All heads turned to see Dredd standing in the council chamber doorway. The Council of Five meetings were supposed to take place in closed session, with no one permitted to enter without the Chief Judge's permission. A guard of armed Judges was posted in the corridor outside, to make sure of this. Dredd, however, was always a special case. There seemed to be an unofficial and unspoken understanding, established many administrations ago, that Dredd had automatic and unrestricted access to the Chief Judge whenever he required it.

When Dredd spoke, Hershey knew from long experience, it paid for Chief Judges to pay attention to what he had to say. She sat back in her chair, signalling for her old street patrol partner to continue.

"What's the official Department policy on vampires?" he asked.

SIX

Anderson struggled and fought against the darkness that surrounded her. She was back in the nightmare world she had seen in her earlier precog vision - only this time it was much, much worse.

She was running through the empty streets of the city again, her feet crunching gruesomely on the carpet of bones which littered the ground. From all around her, she heard the growling and snarling of the vampire creatures. At first she thought they were hunting her, but then she realised they had no interest in her.

There were thousands of them, maybe even tens of thousands. The vampires were flooding through the city streets like a living tide of darkness, converging on one central point. In the distance, Anderson could see their destination: a vast prison tower, forbidding and impenetrable. The teeming creatures threw themselves at its walls, tearing at the seamless stonework with their claw-like hands, gnawing madly at it with their bare fangs. Teeth shattered against dense, unyielding stone. Taloned fingers were shredded down to the bone, but still the creatures persisted in their crazed task.

Their toil and mindless sacrifice finally paid off. A crack appeared in the blood-smeared surface of the wall, then a second. The creatures redoubled their efforts, tearing eagerly at the weakened stonework with a renewed fervour. The cracks widened, vast blocks of masonry tumbled out of place...

There was a scream of hellish triumph from within the breached prison tower, echoed a moment later from the snarling throats of the thousands of creatures gathered around its base. A wave of darkness poured out through the breach, accompanied by the overpowering stench of pent-up decay and corruption.

There were presences within that darkness, the fetid feel of their psychic auras so sickeningly familiar to Anderson. Four voices, so terribly familiar also, hissed in unison: "At lassssst. Now the great work continuessss. Thisss time, there will be no esssscape for thosssse guilty of the ultimate crime - the crime of life!"

The brief but urgent series of beeps from the devices monitoring Anderson's vital signs was enough to bring the med-bay orderly over in a hurry to where the unconscious patient lay on the bed of the speedheal machine. Anderson was out of danger now, but her body still needed time and rest to allow the speedheal procedure to go to work on her injuries, and so she was still under sedation.

The orderly leant in close to study the readings on the monitor beside the bed. She frowned, seeing a sudden momentary spike in the patient's brain activity. That shouldn't be happening, not with the sedatives that had been administered, and under the technology the speedheal machine used to accelerate the body's healing own healing processes. Still, she thought to herself, Anderson was a Psi-Judge, wasn't she, and who knew what went on in the minds of those frea-

She jumped back suddenly, dropping the tray of instruments she had been carrying, as Anderson's hand snatched out and grabbed her by the wrist.

Anderson's eyes fluttered open, which should have been nearly impossible, considering how much sedation she was under. She locked eyes with the Med-Div auxiliary, her grip tightening on the frightened woman's wrist. Using strength she shouldn't by any rights have at the moment, she pulled the orderly closer, her lips forming half-mumbled, slurred words, every one of them taking a supreme effort of will to get out as she struggled against the black walls of near-unconsciousness which still pressed in on her from every side.

"Nixon Penitentiary... D-Dark Judges... Tell Dredd, warn the Chief Judge... before it's too late..."

"Vampires?" asked Hershey doubtfully, looking at the naked corpse of the thing lying on the autopsy slab in front of her.

They were in a forensics lab deep within the Grand Hall of Justice. This was where Dredd had had the remains of the perps from the Bathory Street med-repository attack brought for examination, and whatever the Forensics Teks had found had been enough for him to bring the Chief Judge down here in person.

The corpses of the perps killed by Dredd and Giant were spread out on various autopsy slabs around the large room, with various combined teams of Tek- and Med-Judges working over them. Hershey had received Dredd's verbal report of what happened down there on Bathory, and had heard all about how hard it had been to truly kill any of the perps. Hi-Ex, Incendiary and rapid-fire had been the order of the day, it seemed. The corpse on the slab in front of her, the top half of its skull clinically removed by a Standard Execution round from Dredd's Lawgiver, was definitely one of the more presentable pieces of evidence that Dredd had given the lab technicians to work with.

"Yes, most assuredly. Not that they seem to be the kind of things that sleep in coffins and have any kind of unlikely aversion to sunlight, garlic or random religious symbols - but they're definitely vampiric in nature," Tek-Judge Helsing beamed, using a forensics tool to proudly show off the most interesting details of the specimen on the slab in front of them. Helsing was a typical forensics Tek, probably more at ease poking through the innards of some horribly mutilated corpse than in talking to real, live people. His complexion was only a ghost of a shade darker than that of the bloodless thing on the autopsy slab, and he looked like he probably spent his every waking moment under the thin, antiseptic light of the windowless forensics labs.

"Look here," he indicated, drawing back the corpse's lips to reveal its unnaturally long and sharp fang teeth. "And here too," he added, lifting up one of the corpse's hands and displaying the long, cruel talons that passed for the fingers there.

"Plenty of Bite Fighters get fancy dental work jobs like that, to give them an advantage in the ring," noted Hershey, "and we've seen the combatants in underground bash'n'slash fights coming back from the Hong Tong chop shops with surgically altered hand weaponry just like that."

"These aren't surgical alterations," said Helsing. "They're the result of some kind of massively accelerated bio-evolutionary change."

"Mutants, then?"