Dredd VS Death (27 page)

Death reeled back, spitting teeth and curses. If his claws hurt as they went into Dredd's flesh, it was little compared to how much they hurt as they were ripped back out again. The entire shoulder and arm and a good part of Dredd's chest were shot through with white-hot needles of pain. The lawman hauled himself to his feet, fighting off the wave of nausea that welled up inside him. He couldn't allow himself to succumb to it, not when Death was still a threat. His gun-hand was useless, so he scooped up his Lawgiver with his left hand instead.

Death came lurching straight back at him. Dredd's Hi-Ex shot caught him square in the chest, blowing him backwards and knocking him to the floor of the conveyor belt.

They were only a few metres from the end of the belt now. After that, there was nothing but the drop into the corpse-grinding machinery. Death was starting to draw himself up again, his chest blown open but the rest of his body otherwise intact. Dredd ran at him, not giving him a chance to decide how to react.

Dredd leapt upwards, grabbing the bottom rung of the overhanging maintenance ladder with his one good arm, swinging both legs out as he did so to catch Death full in the face with the soles of both Judge boots.

"How about it? Any famous last words for me?" asked Dredd, as Death flew backwards over the end of the conveyor belt. Any answer he might have had come back with was lost in the whirring thunder of the machinery below, machinery which was designed to render the human form - even one possessed by the spirit of a Dark Judge - down into its most basic constituent elements.

Dredd hauled himself painfully up the ladder, not sure he was going to have the strength to make it to the top. From long experience, he knew he was going to be spending a lot of recuperation time in a speedheal machine after this.

"Dredd!"

Goddard's voice. Dredd gratefully grabbed the hand wearing a Judge glove reaching down towards him. A few seconds later, he was being pulled back up to the safety of the overhead catwalk.

"Teague?" he asked.

"The Meds have got him. They say he should pull through. Where's Death?"

Dredd glanced down into the churning machinery below. "He got recycled."

He activated his helmet radio. "Anderson - Dredd. Scratch Death off the list, at least for the moment."

"Copy that, Dredd. I got a sudden psi-flash when he hit the grinders. Trust me, you really don't want to know what his last words actually were, but you can be sure they were about you."

Two Med-Judges came running up, concern written all over their faces. Dredd waved them away in annoyance. In forty years on the streets, he'd been shot, stabbed, beaten, blown up and burned to within a centimetre of his life almost more times than he could remember. Whatever his injuries were this time, they could wait.

"He's out there in spirit form again. Any idea where he's heading now?" Dredd asked Anderson.

"The Undercity," came the reply. "That's all I could pick up from him before I lost contact again. I think Fear's down there too, with the missing Psi-cadets. I'm picking up a trace of their psi-presence. I'm on my way now to the Gate 38 Undercity entrance. How soon can you meet me there?"

Dredd thought of his injuries. Sensation was gradually returning to the shoulder where Death's fingers had penetrated his flesh. As sensations went, the lancing bolts of pain he was now experiencing there wasn't exactly what you would call comforting. Clearly, the smart thing to do would be to get his injuries fully checked out in a Sector House med-bay before he did anything else.

"Meet you there in twenty," he told Anderson.

FIFTEEN

The Undercity. The ruins of Old New York, abandoned and forgotten. A festering blight which Mega-City One's original architects had dealt with by simply building over the top of it, burying the decaying streets in a vast rockcrete shell which served as part of the foundations of the shining future city they erected above it.

The Undercity may have been abandoned, but that did not mean it was uninhabited. Criminals often sought refuge in its sheltering darkness from the prying eyes of the Justice Department. As refuges go, though, the Undercity was one fraught with dangers all of its own, for its derelict buildings and eternally dark alleys were home to mutants, outlawed cults, tribes of troglodyte cannibals and sinister outcasts from the city above.

When Judges could no longer serve on the streets, many chose to take the Long Walk, bringing law to the lawless regions that bordered Mega-City One. It was often a matter of locker-room debate amongst Street Judges about whether the wild, mutie-inhabited rad-deserts of the Cursed Earth were any more dangerous and challenging as a Long Walk choice of destination than that dismal, sunless place directly beneath the streets they patrolled every day.

Dredd and Anderson had both been in the Undercity before, and its eerie ghost town streets and crumbling, derelict twentieth century buildings and remains of skyscrapers held little that they hadn't encountered before.

"More troggies in front of us," commented Anderson casually, registering the dim shapes moving in the gloom ahead of them, just beyond the furthest fringes of their flashlight beams.

"I see 'em," answered Dredd. "Nothing to get worried about. Light's usually enough to scare them off. If that doesn't work, the sight of a Lawgiver or a Judge badge will do the trick. They know better to mess with us."

Anderson ducked sharply, barely avoiding the axe weapon that was hurled at her from out of the shadows in front of them.

"You were saying?" she asked, bringing her Lawgiver up to bear as the troggies rushed at the two Judges.

They were in the area known as Central Park, having followed what had once been Park Avenue north from where they had entered the Undercity at Gate 38. Anderson didn't know what Central Park had been like back in the days of Old New York, but now it was an overgrown, tangled maze of petrified, leafless trees and weird thorny vegetation that still somehow managed to thrive down here in the absence of natural light. It wasn't the kind of place you chose to enter unless it was strictly necessary. Anderson was tracking Death's trail, following his psychic spoor. The Dark Judge's disembodied spirit had passed this way, and recently too. Which meant Dredd and Anderson had to follow him in there too.

Dredd levelled his M2000 Widowmaker. He was just about to fire - at this range, the gun would wreak carnage amongst the charging troggies - when Anderson suddenly knocked his gun barrel aside.

"Wait, there's another way!" she shouted, changing the shell selector switch on her Lawgiver and firing the gun up into the air.

The flare shell exploded in the darkness overhead, bathing the whole scene in eerie, brilliant luminescence. The troggies, the spectrum of their vision atrophied through generations of life in the lightless depths of the Undercity, screamed as one and turned and fled, their hands shielding their sensitive, light-damaged eyes.

Dredd lowered his gun and looked at Anderson. "Didn't know you had a soft spot for troggies, Anderson. My way would still have been better. At least then they wouldn't have had a chance to regroup and come back for another shot."

"It wasn't their fault, Dredd," explained Anderson. "They're just simple, scared creatures. You were right when you said that normally they would be too afraid of us to attack, but something made them. I sensed it just as they attacked, and it was almost as if they were possessed by their own terror. Their minds were filled with nothing but-"

"Fear?" said Dredd. "With a capital F?"

Anderson nodded gravely. "Looks like Death and Fire weren't the only ones to pick up a few new tricks this time around."

The troggies tactic hadn't worked, so next time the Dark Judges used their other remaining servants. A few minutes further on, as Dredd and Anderson cleared a thicket of petrified trees, they were attacked by what must surely have been the last of the vampires and Church of Death fanatics.

This time around, Anderson wasn't so concerned about preventing a bloodbath.

Volleys of Heatseekers from her and Dredd unerringly sought out and found the warmer human bodies of the cultists amongst the lines of vampires. After that, with the cultists taken care of, the two Judges could both go to town on the remaining undead.

Anderson switched Lawgiver mags, loading one filled with nothing but Hi-Ex and Incendiary shells. Lawgiver special rounds might be expensive, but Anderson didn't think that Accounts Division would be querying the cost of any excessive use of them in this particular firefight.

In the space of a few seconds, three vampires exploded apart under the impact of multiple Hi-Ex rounds, while the same number were transformed into stumbling, screaming mannequins of flame by Incendiary hits. Over on his side of the battle, Dredd was doing plenty to keep up his share of the kill tally. The M2000 kept up a steady rate of fire, obliterating anything that came within five metres of Dredd's position.

Despite the carnage that was being inflicted upon them, however, the bloodsucking freaks just kept throwing themselves forward. They were probably psychically controlled too, Anderson realised, but why were Fear and Death throwing their remaining followers at her and Dredd in such a reckless, suicidal fashion?

A glance at the torch-lit area beyond the scene of the battle quickly told her the answer. She didn't immediately recognise the standing stone structure erected there, but she recognised its purpose, and she could clearly sense the strong psychic vibrations emanating from the shimmering patch of darkness between the pillars of the central stone arch. Even as she watched, she saw a group of figures hurrying towards it. The disembodied spirit of Death was with them, her psi-senses told her, and so were four other distinctive psi-presences.

"Dredd!" she shouted in warning. "They've opened up a gateway to Deadworld! That's where they're taking the Psi-cadets!"

"Cover me!" Dredd shouted, running forward, blowing apart the first vampire trying to stop him. Anderson dropped to one knee, gripped her Lawgiver in two hands and began picking off targets, Hi-Ex blasting anything that looked likely to get close to her fellow Judge.

Dredd, still running, drew his Lawgiver. The M2000 was good enough for the kind of work it was designed for, but he was a Street Judge, and a Lawgiver was his stock in trade. Bullets spat out at him from amongst the standing stones; armed cultists left behind to guard the gateway. Dredd picked them off with ease; all the suicidal determination and crazed religious fanaticism in the world was no substitute for Academy of Law training, where a cadet's marksmanship training began at age five.

The last cultist fell to the ground, and Dredd was in amongst the stones now. He was approaching the gateway when a shape amongst the surrounding darkness detached itself from the shadows and flowed towards him.

Alerted by her senses a scant split-second earlier, Anderson managed to shout out a warning. The shape hissed in anger and hurled something at her. Anderson cried out in pain, and fell to the ground as she felt the mantrap device's jagged metal teeth bite into her leg, penetrating right through to the bone. Dredd spun round, instinctively firing several shots into the shadow shape's central body mass, and then the most mysterious of the Dark Judges was upon him. And, for the second time in his life, Dredd found himself gazing into the face of Fear.

The first time had been almost twenty years ago. He had been a younger man then, of course, completely sure of himself and his abilities, afraid of nothing, free of any of the doubts and fears that came with age.

And now? What was he afraid of now, when he had once taken the Long Walk into the Cursed Earth after losing faith in the justice system he'd served all his life? When he knew that he was no longer irreplaceable, when he knew that the Justice Department had a whole new series of clones sharing the same bloodline as him coming through the Academy?

Death? No. Everyone died, and death had been an ever-constant factor through his life, for as long as he could remember. He did not fear death, he knew.

Failure. That was what Dredd was secretly afraid of now, and that was what he saw there in the terrible black void within Fear's open helm.

He saw his city defeated and destroyed in a thousand different ways. He saw its walls crumble, and the teeming millions of howling, vengeful muties pour through into the city beyond. He saw a city ruled by a hundred different versions of lawlessness, but in all these visions the end result was the same: its citizens, free to do what they wanted, falling upon each other in a murderous display of the very worst aspects of unfettered human nature. He saw times when the place where Mega-City One stood was nothing more than a vast smoking crater or a dead landscape of nuked-out ruins. He saw the city empty and abandoned, its giant towers slowly crumbling to dust, with no clue as to what happened to its vanished inhabitants. He saw his city under occupation by its enemies, its citizens brutalised and enslaved.

He saw all this, and in every vision he knew what he saw had happened because he hadn't been there to stop it. One day, death, old age or bad luck would catch up with him, and then Mega-City would fall.

Fear hissed in satisfied pleasure as he sensed Dredd's worst nightmares bubbling to the surface. At last, he had found something that this most stubborn of sinners was afraid of. It was all Fear needed to push the door open further into Dredd's mind and flood it with sensations of pure, unadulterated terror. In moments, the sinner would be lying dead at Fear's feet, his eyes stretched wide in final horror at the things the Dark Judge had unleashed into his mind, and then Fear's triumph would be complete.