Dredd VS Death (26 page)

Wedging herself beneath the console to prevent herself suffering a similar fate, she shouted into her helmet radio, praying that the Justice Department units waiting outside could hear her voice over the roar of the vortex blasting around the chamber.

"It's Anderson. I've destroyed Fire's body, but his spirit is still going to escape. It's going to be coming out the air vents on the Smokatorium roof any second. If there's any h-wagons in the vicinity, get them there pronto. Tell the pilots to use their underside airlocks. Evacuate the air from the airlock then hover over the vents and pop the airlock hatch as soon as Fire comes out. The sudden vacuum should suck him right in. It worked before, during Necropolis. Let's see if it works again."

She crawled out from under the console, anchoring herself securely to it as she disengaged the fan rotor control. The tornado force wind died away almost instantly. A few seconds later, Anderson gratefully received the message she had been waiting for over her helmet radio.

"That's a roj, Anderson. Manta Tank Four reports it's got Fire in the bag. Word's just come through that Giant has got Mortis under containment too, over at Clooney Memorial.

Two down, two to go. Anderson found herself almost giving a silent prayer of thanks. Cruel and capricious, contrary and whimsical though they may be, the gods of Mega-City One were being relatively charitable today. As bad as the carnage had been so far, it could still have been a lot worse if all four Dark Judges remained on the loose.

"Any word yet on the other two?"

"Death's turned up at Resyk. Dredd's there now."

Resyk was five sectors away. Anderson knew that, even if she left now on a fast-travelling h-wagon, she would still get there too late to be of any help there. Dredd would have to handle Death without her, but if anyone could deal with the most dangerous and unpredictable of the Dark Judges, it would be Joe Dredd.

"Copy. Any sign of Creep Number Four?"

"Judge Fear? Nothing so far, not since he hit the Academy of Law. Looks like he's gone completely to ground."

Indeed he had, quite literally.

Fear was down there in the darkness beneath the city, preparing the way for what was to come next. Through the psychic links that connected all four Dark Judges, he already knew of the defeat of at least two of his brethren, but it was only a temporary setback, at worst. Soon his work here would be complete. Then the power of the Dark Judges would be multiplied many times over, and they would at last be able to bring justice to this city and then the sinful, life-filled world beyond.

He had gathered others down here in the darkness to aid him. Some were their would-be servants from the city above, the humans and the transformed Hungry Ones, who all foolishly believed that they would be joining Fear and his brethren in the dark new world they would soon be creating. Others were the simple, debased things that lived down here in the Under-Place already. Fear had found their primitive minds surprisingly and pleasingly easy to control. Seized by terror, possessed by a mind-numbing dread of the Dark Judge, they made useful enough slaves for the moment, but, like all of the Dark Judges' other erstwhile servants, they would be judged along with all the others when the time came.

Fear watched as his servants and slaves hauled the final plinth into position, bringing it into carefully judged alignment with the others. Nearby, the Hungry Ones held the moaning, terrified figures of the four kidnapped Psi-cadets. The vampires growled softly to themselves in irritation, their blood thirst held in check only by the all-powerful command of the Dark Judge.

There was the other prize too, although Fear barely recognised it as being the same human who had served them so faithfully in engineering their escape from their prison. Fear almost cackled aloud to himself at the idea that this wretched thing had thought itself worthy of being elevated to the same status as he and his brethren. The foolish mortal's desire for life-beyond-death was motivated purely by a terror of dying. Yet how could dying be something to be avoided, when death was the natural state to which all living things should be despatched to as quickly as possible?

Still, thought Fear, there were interesting possibilities in this new form their servant had created for himself. These human forms he and his brethren inhabited, even when strengthened by the power of the Dark Judges' psychic possession, had too often proven to be too fallible for the great work at hand.

Perhaps, he mused, they would find a use for the corpse when the portal was opened and the business of judging this world began in true earnest.

FOURTEEN

If the business of Resyk was death, as the facility's slogan proudly proclaimed, then it was certainly a claim that Judge Death had taken seriously. By Dredd's estimation, by the time he and the other Judges arrived there, the undead creep had already slaughtered his way through most of the staff of the entire day shift, as well as the crews of several meat-wagons making deliveries to the place, and also four separate and well-attended funeral parties there to see their loved ones off on their final journey along the Resyk conveyor belt.

Dredd and the others had burst in on the fourth of these funeral parties, a mass event for sixteen victims of the recent Minogue Sisters conflict, just as Death was consoling one grieving window in his own unique way.

"No need to thank me, sinner," he hissed, laughing as he thrust one skeletal hand into her chest and squeezed her heart dry. "You'll be with him again soon enough."

Dredd caught his old foe's attention with three Lawgiver rounds through the head and chest. His fourth shot shattered the teleporter device hanging from Death's belt, destroying it with just the same intent as Anderson's earlier ploy.

"Now you're going nowhere, creep, except back to the place you escaped from," Dredd told him.

Death hissed angrily, discarding the lifeless corpse still held firm in his grip. Anderson had already found out that the Dark Judges were again exhibiting some unnerving new abilities this time around. Now Death was about to prove that Anderson's experience with Fire was no fluke. At a single gesture from Death, the lids flew off the row of coffins against the far wall where the corpses would be loaded down onto the conveyor belt below, and the bullet-riddled bodies of the sixteen block war combatants climbed out to attack the nearest living things around them.

"Just a taste of what is in store soon enough for you all, sinners!" Death hissed as the reanimated corpses hungrily charged at the terrified mourners.

Dredd didn't know how far Death's newfound zombie-making abilities extended, but the tactic had already achieved its immediate purpose. While the attention of Dredd and the other Judges was on the zombies, Death had already made his escape from the room.

"Teague and Goddard - with me!" Dredd shouted to the two Judges nearest him. "The rest of you - take care of the situation here!"

Dredd was already running through the door, pursuing Death along the catwalk that ran along the length of the huge processing hall, following the conveyor belt below and the corpses stacked up on it on their progress towards the Resyk grinders. Teague and Goddard came running along behind Dredd, both of them good back-up men whom Dredd knew he could depend on against a perp as dangerous as Death. All three Judges snapped off shots at Death. Lawgiver rounds punched into the Dark Judge's lifeless body, doing little to no real damage but keeping the pressure up on the fleeing figure.

Suddenly and without any warning, Death turned and went on the offensive. He reached out and, with one skeletal hand, snapped off a two-metre length of steel tubing from the guard rail of the walkway. The amount of force needed to do this was impressive, showing the supernatural strength hidden within the Dark Judge's deceptively emaciated and cadaverous frame. What Death did next was even more impressive.

He hurled the steel pole like a javelin, sending it hurtling towards his pursuers. Dredd ducked, barely avoiding the missile as it flew past him at near bullet-like speed. Judge Teague, following in close behind, wasn't so fortunate or agile. The pole struck him full in the chest, impaling itself through him, and he collapsed to the ground with almost a metre of blood-slicked metal jutting out of his back.

His partner Goddard grabbed at him before his body could slip under the guard rail and fall onto the conveyor belt below.

"Call for med-assistance and stay here with him until it arrives," Dredd ordered grimly, knowing that Death had just further successfully whittled down the odds against him, promising himself that Teague was going to be the very last of Death's victims today.

Time to bring this chase to an end, decided Dredd, firing off a brace of Hi-Ex shells at the fleeing figure in front of him. Death eluded all of them, as Dredd suspected he would, but the Dark Judge hadn't been his primary intended target.

The shells exploded into the grillwork of the walkway in front of Death, blowing it apart. Suddenly there was nothing supporting that end of this section of the walkway, and so, with loud groan of rending metal, it collapsed from beneath Death's feet.

The Dark Judge plummeted, spilling onto the Resyk conveyor belt. A second or two later, Dredd landed on the same belt, about twenty metres behind him, having jumped from the walkway to continue the chase.

Death rose to his feet, snarling: "Fool! You still think you can defeat me?"

"Willing to give it my best shot, creep," countered Dredd, raising his Lawgiver.

Before he could fire, through, he felt something scrabbling against the material of his Judge boot. Looking down, he saw one of the corpses there hungrily trying to gnaw its way through the toe of his boot. A Standard Execution round through the crown of the corpse's skull put paid to that idea, but now more reanimated cadavers were rising up all around Dredd on the conveyor belt.

More proof of Death's newfound zombie-making ability. They came at Dredd, snarling and clawing, all of them hissing at him in an eerily familiar voice.

"Fool! You cannot stop me now!" gloated one of them, just before Dredd blew its head off with a burst of Lawgiver fire.

"Give up, you have already lost!" mocked another, as a kick from Dredd sent it flying off the conveyor belt and into the giant metal rollers that kept the whole mechanism churning along.

"Why struggle when the end is inevitable?" suggested another, shrugging off the blows that Dredd pounded into its dead face. "Soon Mega-City One will be judged. Equal justice for all, that is what we will bring."

The corpse collapsed, lifeless, back to the ground as Dredd delivered a blow powerful enough to drive its nose bone back into the decayed mush of its brain. For every zombie that fell, though, at least another one rose up to take its place. They threw themselves at Dredd remorselessly, clawing and biting at him, tearing away shreds of both his uniform and the skin underneath as they tried to drag the Judge down by sheer weight of numbers.

Dredd shot, punched and bludgeoned his way through all of them, showing the same indomitable, die-hard determination that had kept both him and his city alive so many times before.

Suddenly, there were no more zombies in front of him. Only Death himself awaited, and Dredd barely had time to react as the leader of the Dark Judges lunged at him. Dredd knocked aside the clawed hand that might otherwise have squeezed the life out of his heart. The important thing, he knew, was to keep Death's hands away from him, and for this he brought his daystick into play, weaving it in the air between him and his old foe, using its weighted tip to parry away any of Death's sudden, darting attacks.

Equally important, Dredd knew, was to keep Death distracted, so that he didn't realise what was happening behind him, and just how close they were getting to the end of the conveyor belt.

Dredd had rarely been this close to his ancient enemy, and the stench from Death's lifeless, decaying flesh was almost overpowering. The most dangerous of all the Dark Judges literally reeked of evil and death, souring the air around him, tainting everything that came into contact with him.

Death lunged forward again. Dredd hit him a daystick blow to the side of neck that would have killed anything living, but this time Death's attack was in deadly earnest, and he didn't retreat back again. His long, thin fingers darted out, sinking through the armour of Dredd's shoulder pad to penetrate through into the flesh beneath. To Dredd, it felt like being stabbed by five burning icicles of frozen venom. His whole right arm blazed with pain and then went completely numb. His Lawgiver dropped from fingers suddenly rendered senseless and he fell to the ground, the numbness creeping slowly into the rest of his body.

Death bore down on him, his other hand poised to push into Dredd's chest to find and close on his heart.

"Hurts, doesn't it?" cackled the Dark Judge, flexing his fingers inside the meat of Dredd's shoulder, exploring the contours of the bones and muscles in there. If he was expecting any cries of pain from Dredd, he was to be disappointed. "Don't worry, though. Your pain and sin will soon be at an end."

Death's other hand hovered over Dredd's heart. He leered down at his old enemy, their faces only centimetres apart. "Any famous last words?"

"Yeah, creep - eat helmet!"

Dredd's head shot up, the armoured crown of his Judge's helmet smashing into Death's grinning visage. Bone shattered, teeth went flying. As viciously brutal head-butts went, it was a move worthy of Mean Machine Angel himself.