Dredd VS Death (21 page)

No, the contents of that syringe represented his life's work. Everything he had strived for since the scales had been lifted from his eyes during the time of Necropolis was held within the dark, swirling liquid inside the syringe.

He picked it up, pushed the needle into his skin and pressed the injection switch. The liquid flooded into him, mixing with his bloodstream, the retrovirus molecules instantly attaching themselves to his blood cells, beginning the rapid process of reprogramming his DNA in preparation for what was to come.

The final stage would be death itself, the virus spreading to infect every cell in his body, going to work on his necrotized flesh. Icarus had a range of chemical substances that would bring on his own death quickly and painlessly. Many of them were the same Justice Department-approved compounds used in the city's chains of euthanasia clinics. Still, none of them seemed quite appropriate, Icarus felt. For his death, for rebirth and transcendence to the state of eternal undeath, something more dramatic than mixes of toxic chemicals was called for, surely?

As if on cue, the radio intercom on his desk buzzed.

"A Justice Department h-wagon landing outside. There's a Judge getting out of it."

"Just one?" asked Icarus, puzzled.

"Just one, answered the Death cultist in charge of security at the facility. "It looks like it might be Dredd."

Dredd! Icarus's mind thrilled at the news. How appropriate, he thought. Fate was obviously at work here. Dredd was death incarnate. The biggest mass murderer on the planet, the man who had pressed the button on East Meg One and consigned hundreds of millions of people to nuclear oblivion, the man who had given the brutally necessary order that would condemn billions more people to death during Judgement Day.

Yes, how appropriate, Icarus decided. This was destiny, this was fate. This was clearly how things were meant to happen.

"Stop him," Icarus ordered over the radio, knowing that there was no way the defenders he had left would ever be able to stop Dredd, even if he was on his own. "Make sure he doesn't get to the lab."

Yes, Dredd would come here, and Icarus would allow Dredd to kill him and elevate him to his destiny.

And then, after that?

Icarus was distracted for a moment by another barrage of angry fists pounding on the thick vault doors behind him. He smiled, thinking of the creatures contained behind those doors. Vampires, newly created and still filled with the worst after-affects of the virus flowing now through their veins.

So let Dredd come, Icarus smiled. After he had fulfilled his purpose and sent Icarus on the path to his destiny, he would find his supposed victory to be very short-lived indeed.

TWELVE

Dredd exited the h-wagon at a sprint. He'd been on duty now for over twenty hours, which wasn't completely unusual for him, but in that time he'd fought a couple of dozen vampires, battled his way through the middle of a prison riot, missed preventing the escape of the Dark Judges by the skin of his teeth, single-handedly taken on a couple of hundred zombies and commanded the clean-up op at the Ryder Mall which had saved the lives of hundreds of cits.

Even by his standards, it had been an eventful day - and it wasn't over yet.

Now, though, he could feel the exhaustion starting to build up in his body. He'd been a Judge for over forty years, and had pushed himself to the very limits of human endurance just about every day of every one of those years. His body was a machine, crafted from fifteen years of the toughest training on Earth at the Academy of Law, honed to near-perfection from four decades patrolling the streets of the biggest, most dangerous and crime-ridden city on the planet.

But even the best machines start to wear out after a while, Dredd knew. The Justice Department knew it too, and they'd already lined up his replacements, clones from the same precious bloodline as himself. The first of them was already on the streets. How long did Dredd have left, people secretly wondered within the Department? How long could he keep on pushing himself at the same rate that he had sustained for so many years?

For as long as necessary, Dredd told himself. For as long as his city still needed him.

He'd downed some standard-issue pep tabs in the h-wagon to fight off the worst of it, and from long experience he knew they'd keep him alert and on his feet for another six hours or so.

Long enough to stop the Dark Judges and save his city? Grud only knew, but Dredd hoped it would be enough.

Through the speakers in his helmet, Control fed information through to him straight from the files held in the giant MAC computer system at the Grand Hall of Justice.

"Icarus, Dick. Real name: Martins, Vernon. Born 2078, Betty Boothroyd Maternity Med. Graduated Meg U, class of 2101, first class honours in Biochemistry. Employed as biochemist at DaneTech Industries, 2102-2115. Specialist field of research: Longevity and age retardation."

Dredd was at the doors to the lab facility, using his override card to open the doors as the calm voice of the Justice Department's anti-crime super-computer continued to feed him information.

"Left to establish own company, 2015. EverPet Corporation. No criminal record. Admitted for psycho-cube observation, 2112-13, following death of wife and daughter in citywide Necropolis disaster of 2112."

A spell in the kook cubes. That caught Dredd's attention. Not that Martins, or Icarus, or whatever he wanted to call himself, was unique in that respect. Necropolis was like an open wound in the city's psyche; sixty million citizens had died, and tens of millions more had suffered severe mental trauma, filling the city's psycho-blocks to maximum capacity for years afterwards. Some had recovered sooner than others. Clearly, the psycho-cube docs had thought Martins/Icarus was one of them, but now Dredd knew different.

Using MAC's resources, he'd uncovered a lot on the h-wagon ride out here. All the information had been there all along, for anyone who wanted to go digging for it. Dredd knew that, with over four hundred million citizens to watch over, the Justice Department couldn't keep a close eye on all of them, but there were enough anomalies in the records to have maybe raised at least a few questions in someone's mind.

EverPet's financial records were a revelation. The Pet Regen product was a commercial success, but the company was still trading at an enormous loss. Their public accounts records showed huge large amounts of money being ploughed into unspecified "research projects". Using MAC's high-powered analytical abilities, Dredd had quickly found out what that really meant.

Money had been transferred to overseas accounts and then shifted back into the city in the guise of charitable donations to various minor religious organisations, all of which, Dredd suspected, would quickly be revealed as mere fronts for the Church of Death. Other funds had been siphoned off to set up the facility Dredd was about to enter now, even though there was no official record of the place in the list of the company's property holdings.

A secret lab, hidden away from the prying eyes of the Justice Department. A biochemist with a history of mental disorder, connections to the Church of Death and whose research speciality was the reanimation of dead tissue.

Didn't need forty years on the streets to put this one together, Dredd figured.

Icarus, for whatever reasons of his own, had funded the Church of Death, created its vampire shock-troopers, freed the Dark Judges and caused the deaths of a lot of cits and Justice Department personnel. The mood he was in now, Dredd would be happy now to just put a few Standard Execution rounds into the murdering creep at the first provocation, and let some of the big brains down at Justice Central figure out all the hows and whys of whatever it was Icarus was hoping to achieve from all this mayhem.

"Help you, sir? I'm afraid this facility is closed to the general public, but if you want a tour of the main EverPet labs, then our Citizens Relations office will be happy to arrange it. Their office hours are 0900 to 1700, and you can contact them on-"

Dredd silenced the security droid in the foyer with a single Armour Piercing shot, instantly transforming it into just so much expensive junk. Another shot silenced the alarm that had started shrieking as soon as his first gunshot rang out. His override card took care of the second and more serious set of security doors, and then he was through and into the lab complex proper.

The h-wagon Dredd had rode in on was a command model, with a fully equipped mobile armoury of Justice Department standard-issue weaponry. Dredd hadn't been shy about helping himself to whatever he thought he was going to need. When he exited the h-wagon, he had been carrying enough weaponry to fight a small block war all on his own.

Beyond the doors, a group of Death cultists were waiting for him. High on hate and eager for death, they charged down the corridor towards him, firing off indiscriminate volleys of bullets at him. Dredd raised his Lawgiver and introduced them to the gun's rapid fire setting, giving them an object lesson in what tight, accurate bursts of fire were all about.

Four of them hit the ground in as many seconds, Resyk-bound. Dredd popped a stumm grenade and let the rest of the survivors share its contents out amongst themselves. Respirator down, Dredd strode on through the midst of them. Choking and retching, completely incapacitated by the effects of the gas, Dredd knew none of these creeps were going anywhere in a hurry. One of them still managed to rise staggering to his feet. Dredd slammed him hard in the face with the butt of his Lawgiver. The creep ate floor, fast and sudden. Next stop for him would be a med-unit to fix his broken nose, busted teeth and severe concussion, before the Judge-Wardens threw his deranged butt into an iso-cube for the next twenty years or so.

Dredd strode on. A chorus of snarls and growls warned him what was waiting for him round the next corner. Dredd figured that Icarus's retrovirus didn't do much for IQ and common sense when it came lying patiently in ambush. He also figured that, since they had been voluntarily infected with the virus, Icarus's vampire-things were, to all intents and purposes, legally dead. That being the case, they weren't entitled to the same legal rights as any ordinary, decent citizen that still had a pulse, and hence Dredd's next actions weren't governed by the regulations that normally applied in matters relating to the correct use of the proper and legal amount of force to be applied in carrying out his judicial duties.

And besides, he reminded himself... both the retrovirus and the Dark Judges were clear and present dangers to the lives of everyone in Mega-City One, meaning that any extra-judicial force he chose to employ was officially permitted under the terms of the Security of the City Act. Short version: no arrest, no warning shot, no shooting to wound. These creeps were going straight to Resyk.

Dredd reached for the first of the surprises he'd taken from the h-wagon armoury, popping the safety caps and timer fuses on them and throwing them almost casually round the corner. The explosions came just a second later, but Dredd had already moved into the cover of the near wall to avoid the dual waves of flame and shrapnel that came roaring round the corner.

A vampire, completely bathed head to foot in fire, came staggering round the corner. The phosphor chemicals from one of Dredd's grenades had already burned away its eyes and face, but somehow it could still sense his presence. It turned and came charging towards him, screaming in rage and pain. A moment later, anything that was left of it was decorating the walls, floor and roof of the corridor, liberally distributed there by the Hi-Ex shot Dredd had calmly snapped off.

Round the corner waited more evidence of the aftermath of the phosphor and fragmentation grenades that Dredd had just used. The shredded and burning remains of several more - Dredd estimated at least four - vampires littered the place. One of them, its lower body torn away by shrapnel, its remaining upper half charred and burning, still managed to summon up the strength to start crawling towards him, making a hideous mewling sound as it scrabbled at his Judge boots with its burning claws. Dredd put two Standard Execution rounds through the top of its head and carried on.

It was at the next corridor junction that he started to run into trouble. He was just finishing mopping up the combined group of vampires and cultists who had foolishly imagined they could lure him into some kind of crossfire ambush there. He'd picked off the first few of them with shots from his Lawgiver, demolishing one of the barricades they'd been sheltering behind with a double-blast of Hi-Ex. Heatseeker hotshots had flushed the remaining cultists out of hiding. The vamps, whose inhumanly low body temperature barely registered with the Heatseeker warheads' targeting systems, Dredd took care of with one of the other weapons he was carrying, hosing them down with a spread of rapid-fire explosive shell fire from the Colt M2000 Widowmaker.

The M2000, a replacement for the old Lawrod weapon in providing Judges with some additional heavier firepower for on-the-street use, had first come into widespread service during Judgement Day. It had proved highly effective then against zombies, so Dredd didn't see why vampire targets would prove any more resistant to its devastating effects.

He wasn't wrong. The vampires disintegrated bodily under the impact of the volleys of high-calibre shotgun shells. One of them, which had come at Dredd with an industrial las-burner, was blown clear across the corridor by the impact of the shells into its body, hitting the far wall with a sick, wet splat.