Fear the Darkness (15 page)

"Judges down..." The Judge tried to reach for his fallen Lawgiver, only to see Jeffrey kick it away. "Judges down. Merciful drokking Grud, somebody help me..."

"You shouldn't take the Lord's name in vain," Jeffrey said, standing over him and pointing the AK-47 at his face. "The voice - Uriel - he told me to tell you that." Looking down at the Judge, he saw frightened eyes gazing back at him. It made him feel strong. "You can't intimidate me any more," Jeffrey told him. "'A shape-changing pod person from the planet Dumb-As-Drokk Five'? I bet that doesn't seem so funny to you now, does it?"

"Please," the Judge coughed, blood spluttering from his mouth. "I don't know what you're talking about. Please..."

Kill him, Jeffrey
, he heard the voice in his head, its tone hungry and eager.
He is a sinner. He must be judged.

"I don't have any argument with that," Jeffrey said. He pulled the trigger.

"They'll send others, won't they?" he said afterwards. Gazing down at the body of the Judge, Jeffrey felt curiously lightheaded. I've killed Judges, he thought. Two of them. Everything seemed different now, like he had crossed a line somewhere without even knowing it. "They'll send more Judges. Lots of them. They'll try to kill me. They won't leave me alone. Not now."

Remember I am with you, Jeffrey
, the voice told him.
Remember I am your shield. Your protector. I walk beside you.

"But there's only the two of us," Jeffrey said. "And there's hundreds of Judges in this city. Thousands. How are we ever going to be able to take them all on?"

Silence. The voice said nothing.

"You know what to do, right?" Jeffrey found himself in need of comfort. "Voice... Uriel? You know what to do about the Judges?"

Again, silence.

"Uriel?" Jeffrey was beginning to feel alarmed. "I don't mean to seem ungrateful, but I mean... You do have a plan, right?"

Yes, Jeffrey, I have a plan
, the voice spoke at last. Jeffrey heard a new sound in his head, a strange sound that seemed to echo around inside his mind. It made him uneasy. It was a sound unlike anything he had heard from his guardian angel before.

He could have sworn it was laughter.

TEN

FREEDOM GOT AN AK

"Emergency code ninety-nine red. Repeat: code ninety-nine red. Judges down in futsie incident at Charles Whitman Block. Judges down. All available units please respond!"

"Acknowledged, Control. Psi-Judge Anderson responding. ETA to Whitman: five minutes. Requesting further details. Over."

"Acknowledged, Anderson. Judges down are Ross and Ebden. No ID on the perp yet, but he's reported as armed with a spit gun. Other Judges and med-teams en route to the scene. Will advise you with further details as they become available. Control out."

She had been walking the corridors of the Sector House, letting her mind wander freely as she attempted to track the entity, when she heard the call over the Sector House intercom. Code Ninety-Nine Red. The most foreboding phrase in the entire lexicon of the Justice Department. Even with her case unresolved, there was no way Anderson could ignore it. Nor would she want to. Code Ninety-Nine Red. Judges down. Somewhere, fellow Judges were in trouble. If there was one unwritten rule among the Judges of the Big Meg, it was that a code red meant "drop everything and haul ass to the scene as quickly as possible".

Having retrieved her bike from the Sector House parking bay, Anderson pushed the accelerator as she sped along the meg-ways, skedways and overzooms to her destination. Brando. Nicholson. Hopper. McQueen. The Peter Fonda Memorial Interchange. The names of the streets on the way to Charles Whitman rushed past her while all the time she hoped she was not too late.

"Control to Anderson," her bike radio blared amid the roar of the engine and the whoosh of air. "First backup Judges on the scene at Whitman have made contact with the futsie. Do you want to be patched in to their comms traffic? Over."

"Affirmative, Control. I want to know what we're dealing with."

"Acknowledged, Anderson. Switching channels now."

For a moment the radio crackled with static as the channels were switched. She heard a man whispering. His voice all but drowned out by the brutal
tat-a-tat-tat
of a weapon firing on full automatic somewhere in the background.

"...need more backup!" the voice was hoarse with barely suppressed panic. "McCartney and Hoskins are down. The futsie's a walking arsenal. I'm trying to get behind him but it's like the drokker's got eyes in the back of his-"

There was a scream and the sound of more gunfire. For an instant the radio shrieked out an ear-splitting wail of feedback, then hissed before falling silent.

Dead air.

"Connection's broken." The channel switched back to Sector Control. "We've lost them."

Anderson refused to dwell on whether he meant the connection or the Judges.

"Understood, Control," she said. In the distance she could see "Charles Whitman" written in large letters down the side of one of the blocks ahead of her. "ETA to Whitman now one minute. Do you have a floor number for that last transmission?"

"A call-in from a block resident reporting gunfire puts it at the thirty-eighth. Ross and Ebden were ambushed on thirty-nine so it sounds like the creep's working his way down. More backup is on its way. ETA: three minutes. You may want to wait for them to catch up."

"Negative, Control. I'm going in the second I get there. Anderson out."

"Received and understood. Will advise you as soon as other units arrive. Control out. Oh, and Anderson? Grudspeed."

Vin Meacham. Jeannie Chow. Jerry Kramer. Edie Morales. By the time Jeffrey's murder spree had reached the thirty-eighth floor, he no longer knew the names of the people he was killing. Instead, he had to check the lists of apartment residents posted alongside the elevator station at the floor entrance. The Markhams in Fourteen-A. The Husseins in Eighteen-C. George and Myrtle Kahn in Apartment Twenty-B. Door by door, room by room, bullet by bullet, corpse by corpse: before he was halfway along the thirty-eighth, names had given way to numbers. Soon, the numbers became boring in turn and they too gave way. Ninety-seven. Ninety-eight. Ninety-nine. Upon reaching his hundredth victim he stopped counting, killing without thought of who the person was or how many others he had killed. Once a body was dead, who cared what its name or number was?

He stank of cordite. His arms and shoulders ached. He was covered in blood. He still felt the same dizzying sense of freedom he had experienced when he first started shooting, but with a body count now in triple figures, Jeffrey found he was getting tired. Every time he went inside an apartment and saw the beds in the bedrooms he just wanted to stretch out on one of them and get some sleep, but the voice was insistent. It would not let him rest. Jeffrey's enthusiasm for their joint crusade might be waning, but Uriel's appetite for carnage never seemed to be sated.

The woman in Forty-A
, the voice said in his head.
She is about to make a break for it, Jeffrey. Kill her. Now.

Turning to see a door burst open as a middle-aged woman suddenly ran from her apartment and sprinted toward the elevators, Jeffrey lifted the stump gun by his side and fired. The pellets caught her in the small of her back, sending her tumbling to the floor with a scream.

"Please!" she said, as Jeffrey walked over to her and mechanically pointed the stump gun to fire the other barrel. "No, please! Please don't-"

The stump gun fired. More cordite. More blood splattering up at him as the woman's face disappeared in the blast. Jeffrey didn't like the stump gun. It was noisy. It only carried two rounds - one in each barrel. The recoil was nearly as bad as the Magnum and it made his arms hurt more, but after working his way from door to door along one-and-a-half floors, he was getting short of bullets. He had stuffed all the guns and ammunition from Stan Kowalski's collection he could fit into his overcoat, but there was a limit to how much a man could carry. Jeffrey had to conserve his stocks and use each gun for the task to which it was best suited. The stump gun was for stopping runners. The Magnum for shooting through walls and doors. The other pistols - the Browning and the Colt - he used for the more common or garden shootings when he went into an apartment to kill all the residents. Most of all, he needed to save the AK-47 for the work it did best. Killing Judges.

The Judges. As far as Jeffrey could see they were responsible for most of his problems. It was not that killing them had turned out to be so hard after all; with the voice to help him he could get the drop on them every time. No, it was a question of what the presence of the Judges had done to the citizens of this city. Accustomed to the Judges ruling every aspect of their lives, the majority of the residents of Charles Whitman stayed in their apartments like frightened sheep. Some ran, of course, but they were the exception that proved the rule. As far as Jeffrey could figure it, he had been killing for an hour now - plenty of time for the other people in the block to make a run for it before he could even get to them.

Instead, they waited in their apartments, listening as the sounds of gunfire came inexorably closer, never once considering the fact if they ran for it en masse Jeffrey would have been hard-pressed to kill more than half of them before the others escaped. But they didn't run. They just huddled, frightened, behind doors that could not stop him, waiting for their precious Judges to come and save them. It proved something Jeffrey had always suspected: notwithstanding the fact some of them could cure cancer or build rockets to go up into space or do all kinds of other cool stuff, most people were pretty damned dumb when you came right down to it.

It's a shame more of them don't run, Jeffrey thought. Least that way I wouldn't have so many of them left to kill before I can call it a day. He became embarrassed as he realised no secrets could be kept from the voice. Uriel could hear his thoughts and might well view Jeffrey's flagging interest as an act of betrayal. It made Jeffrey feel guilty. The voice had been so good to him: showing him where the guns were, warning him, helping him against the Judges. Jeffrey might be really tired, but the last thing he wanted to do was inadvertently hurt his guardian angel's feelings.

There are two men in Apartment Thirty-Five-B
. If the voice had heard Jeffrey's thoughts it gave no sign of it.
They practise unnatural and sinful acts on each other every night. Kill them, Jeffrey. Kill them both.

"Sure thing," Jeffrey said breezily, hoping to gloss over his earlier lapse. "I'm getting kind of short of bullets though. Maybe I should go grab the guns from some of those dead Judges and start using them as well?"

No
, the voice said.
Lawgivers have a self-destruct mechanism designed to activate if anyone but its Judge owner tries to fire it. It would blow your hand off, Jeffrey. You have enough bullets. Now, the men in Apartment Thirty-Five-B.

The voice paused. It was longer than the last time when the voice had paused. Longer and
different
. Courtesy of their connection, at some level Jeffrey detected a strange and sudden nervousness on Uriel's part. It was almost as though the voice had become as frightened as the family in Twenty-C, or the woman from Forty-A, or anybody else who had died there today. As though the voice had sensed something coming towards them that caused it unease. Some enemy it had particular reason to fear.

"Voice?" Jeffrey was concerned. "You've gone awful quiet. Is something wrong?"

She is here, Jeffrey
, the voice said.
I hoped she would come to us. It is better to kill her here and now. Away from the lair.
The voice paused again as though conflicting emotions were warring within it. Then, the conflict was ended as fear and uncertainty coalesced into a command spilling over with boiling venom and hatred.

The psi-bitch is here, Jeffrey
, the voice said.
Kill her. Kill her, now!

ELEVEN

THE SHADOW OF ANGELS

It was even worse than she had expected. Standing crouched in a firing stance inside the elevator, her Lawgiver cocked and ready, Anderson looked out as the elevator doors opened on the thirty-eighth floor and saw a scene from a nightmare. There were dead bodies everywhere: the corpses of men, women, even children, lay strewn across the hallway alone or in small untidy heaps and piles like rubbish sacks awaiting collection. Charles Whitman Block had been turned into a slaughterhouse.

She saw dead faces staring up at her with unseeing eyes while their blood covered the floor and walls with drag marks and spatter. She smelt the stench of fresh blood and cordite, and something worse. As she moved from the elevator into the hallway, she felt a rush of emotions hit her as she was exposed to the psychic residue left by the carnage. Every step of the way the last memories and experiences of the bodies before her hung in the air like screaming ghosts: impressions of pain, fear and horror left indelibly imprinted on the victims' surroundings by the violence of their deaths. Above all else, she could feel a question hanging in the air. The same question each of the victims had screamed out in desperation in their minds before their deaths. A question, heavy with despair and incomprehension, which each of them had taken unanswered with them to their graves.

The question: why?

Not for the first time in her life, Anderson found it was a question she could not answer.

She moved further down the hallway, her eyes scanning her surroundings cautiously for signs of danger as she fought hard to prevent herself from being distracted by the waves of raw emotion boiling restlessly in the air about her. The victims' pain was everywhere. It threatened to overwhelm her. With every step she was assailed on every side by the silent testimony of the dead. Flashbacks. She felt stray images and fragments of memories - none of them her own - force their way into her mind. She saw images of terror, grief and loss. Children screaming. Loved ones dying. Pleas for mercy cut off by brutal gunfire. Most of all, she saw a recurring image play through her mind repeatedly. The image of a man wearing an overcoat and carrying a spit gun, his face hidden beneath a mask of congealing blood, seen from a dozen different angles through the eyes of a dozen different victims. The killer. She saw him kicking his way through doors. Firing his spit gun. Writing on walls. Smiling.