Dredd VS Death (23 page)

Dredd's Lawgiver and M2000 roared together, their combined firepower blasting into the first few rows of vampires, picking them up and hurling their bullet-shredded bodies back into the ranks of those following on closely behind.

Dredd's marksmanship was almost as good with his left hand as it was with his right, and he kept up the punishing hail of fire with both weapons. The M2000 was difficult to control one-handed, but at this range, and with the weapon's devastating area of effect, all he really had to do was keep it trained on the general area of the open vault door, forcing anything that tried to come through that doorway to pass through the barrier of gunfire. His Lawgiver was in his left hand, picking off any vampires that managed to make it relatively unscathed through the curtain of Widowmaker fire. Vampire after vampire was knocked back, screaming and hissing, by the combined fire of both weapons, but there were still many more vampires in the vault than Dredd's guns had bullets for, and he was fast using up the magazines in both of them.

The M2000 was the first to run dry. With its final shot, it hit an enraged vampire that it had already hit at least once before, flaying its flesh even further and hurling it once more back into the vault with the others. Dredd dropped the weapon, knowing he didn't have the time to reload it. He emptied his Lawgiver of its remaining Incendiary shells, firing them into the mass of bodies in the vault's doorway, buying himself a few more seconds as the vampires retreated back, hissing and snarling, from the wall of flame that was now between him and them.

He reached for the weapons pack holding the last of the ordnance he had brought with him from the H-wagon. He activated it with a flick of a switch and threw it into the vault, throwing himself at the heavy vault door as he did so, slamming into it hard and using every bit of his strength and body weight to push it shut. Slowly, painfully, it swung shut. For one terrible moment, a mere hand's breadth before it sealed shut again, Dredd felt the weight of the vampires hurl against the other side of the door, threatening to push it back wide open again in seconds, but a moment later the device he'd thrown into the vault went off, and all that remained after that was the terrible roaring sound from beyond the doors.

A second after that, Dredd pushed the door fully shut, the door's seals engaged and the vampires were trapped amidst the inferno now raging inside.

Dredd had grabbed the thermal bomb as soon as he had seen it in the h-wagon armoury, intending to use it as a weapon of last resort in case Death and the other three super-creeps showed up at Icarus's labs. They hadn't dropped by to pay their respects to their liberator, but, as it turned out, the thermal bomb had still come in handy after all.

Detonating inside the thick-walled vault, it had immediately raised the temperature inside the place to well over three thousand degrees. The air beyond the reinforced doors would have ignited instantly, and everything combustible in there would be reduced to ash long before the oxygen supply had been burned up. Dredd could feel the heat radiating through the thick metal of the door, and knew that the clean-up crews would probably need to use las-burners to cut through into the vault afterwards, since the heat inside it now would almost certainly have melted and fused the door workings.

He didn't care. The Teks and Meds could come and take what evidence they needed from the wreckage of the labs, but, as far as Dredd was concerned, Icarus and his vampires were now one less problem to deal with tonight.

Satisfied the vampires were destroyed, he stepped away from the door, speaking into his helmet radio.

"Control - Dredd. Clean-up crews required at the Icarus labs. Tell Chief Judge Hershey the vampire outbreak has been cut off at source now."

"Roger, Dredd. And Icarus?"

Dredd glanced at the corpse lying on the floor nearby. Was it his imagination, or had the corpse somehow changed in the last few minutes? It looked different somehow, larger and strangely swollen. Despite that, he was still clearly dead. Something else for the Teks and Meds to look into, Dredd supposed.

"As dead as Judge Cal," Dredd replied. "Make sure the clean-up crew get him properly bagged and tagged. I want him delivered to Helsing at Justice Central Forensics for a full autopsy. Any word on Death and the other three creeps yet?"

"Plenty. They've hit random points across the city four times now, but every time we got there they teleported away. They seem to have split up after the first attack and are operating solo, which is a new strategy, but the death count is already reaching block war level. We've got a confirmed sighting of Mortis at Clooney Memorial - Giant's on his way there now - and Anderson's picked up a psi-flash hunch that something might be about to happen at the Churchill Smokatorium. She's heading there herself."

"And the other two? Death and Fear?"

"Nothing yet, Dredd. We've got every spare badge we've got out on the streets, and a citywide alert's been given. If they turn up anywhere, you'll know about it as soon as we do."

It was the overpowering psychic stink of pure evil that alerted every Psi-Judge in the Academy of Law to Fear's presence in the building as soon as he teleported in. And it was the sound of the cadets' frantic screaming, mere seconds later, that alerted everyone else.

Tutor Judges came running in response as word spread throughout the building that something terrible was happening in one of the dorms reserved for Psi-Judge cadets. They hammered uselessly on the door of the dorm, unable to break it down. Fear had sealed it using one of his mantrap weapons, and it would need more than brute strength to overcome the device's mysterious psychic properties.

Meanwhile, for several long and terrible minutes, the Dark Judge was able to run amok in the dorm, with thirty young and helpless Psi-Judge cadets trapped in there with him.

The sealed door finally succumbed to a fusillade of Lawgiver fire and the combined psychic efforts of three Psi-Judge Tutors. What they found when they charged in, Lawgivers at the ready, was something from their worst nightmares. Fear was gone, teleporting away again, but leaving behind him the slaughtered remnants of an entire class of Psi-cadets.

However, it would be several minutes later, after Judge Tutors had finished the grim task of compiling a roll call of the dead, that the most terrible thing of all would be discovered. Four of the cadets were missing. A search of the entire Academy was ordered, but it was already clear to all what had happened to them.

Fear, for whatever twisted reasons of his own, had taken them. The four cadets were in the clutches of the Dark Judges.

THIRTEEN

Anderson had almost to be restrained from jumping out the hatch of the h-wagon while it was still in mid-air above the Smokatorium. Anxious and impatient, she forced herself to wait as it came into land, her feet hitting the ground only seconds after the tarmac there had been heat-scorched by the after-blast from the h-wagon's underside thrusters.

There were Judges everywhere, cordoning off the Smokatorium building from the rest of the city.

"Rosen?" she asked the nearest officer. He pointed to a harassed-looking female Judge nearby, who was issuing orders on the radio from the back of a Pat-Wagon. Anderson strode over to her.

"I'm Anderson," she told her. "What's the situation?"

Rosen looked at her for a moment. Anderson didn't need to use her telepath abilities to know what she was thinking. Anderson's reputation - as a troublemaker, as a maverick, as the best Psi-Judge the Justice Department had, as the woman who had saved the city from the Dark Judges several times before - preceded her everywhere she went within the Department.

"He's inside," Rosen said. "Somewhere in the main Smokatorium hall levels. He ported in while we were still evacuating the place."

"Casualties?" Anderson asked.

Rosen grimly nodded her head. "Too Gruddamn many, cits and Judges. It would have been a lot worse, though, if your warning hadn't reached us. There's still some cits trapped in there, we think, but we got everyone else out." She paused, looking at Anderson. "We were ordered to wait for your arrival. You're here, so what do we do now?"

She's scared, thought Anderson. She probably hasn't been on the streets more than five years. She must be good to have made it to Tac Watch Commander this early in her career, but she's too young to have been with the Department during Necropolis. She's never met the Dark Judges before, all she knows about them are the bogey man stories she's probably heard about them at the Academy - and now she's scared about facing the reality behind those stories.

"Just secure the area while I go in and get him," Anderson told her.

"On your own?" Rosen asked, doubtfully.

Anderson knew exactly what Rosen was thinking. There were now several dozen Judges on the scene. Leaving aside those needed for crowd control duty, that still left more than enough to provide Anderson with all the back-up she would ever need.

"If you give him the space to use that flame weapon of his, Fire's the most lethal of all the Dark Judges," Anderson told her. "He can kill fifty of us just as easily as one with that thing. No point losing any more people than we have to. Besides, I've handled all four of these creeps before. One of them on his own shouldn't be too much trouble."

The last comment was said with half a smile. Anderson looked around. "Now all I need to do is find a gun to use."

At Rosen's signal, a Tek-Judge handed her a Lawgiver. "Straight from Tek-Div central armoury, already programmed to your palm-print. It arrived just before you did."

Anderson smiled and took the weapon, testing its feel and weight. It gave a series of coded bleeps, its built-in micro-computer acknowledging her palm-print signature and signalling that it was now in the hands of its rightful owner. She checked the ammo counter, seeing that it was already fully loaded. She had a feeling she was going to need every one of those shots, and all the other ones in the spare magazines she was now cramming into her belt pouches.

"You heard about what happened at the Academy of Law?" asked Rosen.

Anderson nodded. The news had reached her while she was still en route aboard the h-wagon. Four Dark Judges individually on the loose, and now four Psi-cadets taken, not to mention the massacre of the rest of their class. The problems just kept multiplying.

The snatching of the four cadets was a new and worrying tactic. The Dark Judges didn't take prisoners or hostages, not before now; the only thing they were interested in was spreading death to every living thing that came into contact with them. So what did they need the cadets for, and why specifically Psi-cadets?

With a heavy feeling of foreboding, Anderson guessed she would probably find out the answer soon enough. Assuming she survived the coming encounter with Fire.

She hefted her Lawgiver and looked at Rosen. "Okay, I'm ready."

People were always jealous that he had a real, honest-to-grud, genuine job, Ernesto Kopinski knew. He wasn't so sure, though. Of course, it was a real job, not some airy-fairy pretend kind of job like that dumb jerk of a brother-in-law of his had.

Standing around all day pretending to be a shop dummy, what kind of a job was that for a grown man? Ernesto's job was different. It required skill, application, dedication, not to mention several tedious days of introductory training. It served a useful purpose, to the city and his fellow citizens, and, most importantly of all, it couldn't be done just as well by an inanimate object, unlike the so-called job that dumb jerk of a brother-in-law of his had.

Which still didn't mean that it didn't suck.

He crawled forward through the low-roofed tubeway, his thick armoured boots splashing through the bubbling acidic gruel that swirled around his ankles. More of the same kind of gruesome organic gunge dripped from the leaking pipes overhead, splattering on the acid-proof material of his protective hood and overalls. The pressure tanks on his back hissed and gurgled, and he adjusted the pressure gauge on the barrel of his sprayer gun accordingly. His task was to crawl around down here all day, clearing blockages in the run-off pipes and sluiceways leading out from the main fat-rendering tanks overhead. Strictly speaking, it was really a job best performed by maintenance droids, but the dripping acids and metal-corroding fumes made that an expensive proposition and so, bearing in mind Mega-City unemployment was still running at over 87%, it was far cheaper and easier to use human workers.

The business of Resyk was death. Or, more specifically, the breaking down and recycling of human organic material as the corpses of dead cits were delivered to Resyk from all over the city. Once here, they were reduced to their most useful base constituents for later use in a bewilderingly large array of commercial products and substances. Resyk ran day and night, and only the very richest citizens who could afford interment in a private cemetery - or, for the truly rich and dying, a place in cryo-facilities such as Forever Towers - could avoid that final trip along the Resyk corpse disassembly conveyor belts. "We use everything except the soul!" was the proud boast of Resyk management, and there was a steady belief amongst Mega-citizens that the scientists in Resyk R&D were working on ways to remedy even that little oversight.

None of this, however, was at the forefront of Ernesto Kopinski's thoughts right at this moment. All he wanted to do was clear this new blockage, finish his shift and get the drokk out of here with the minimum of acid burns or inhaling of too many of the toxic fumes.