Judge Dredd (18 page)

Dredd pulled himself up, stared at the Judge Hunters dropping from the ceiling, blasting through the wall, following the drill the way they’d trained to do, fast and quick and clean. One, two, three . . . maybe more outside but only three in here.

Dredd threw himself at half a wall as gunfire stitched a pattern at his feet. A visored figure came right at him, firing an ugly weapon black as night. Dredd pulled Junior Head-Dead’s revolver from his belt, squeezed the trigger and fired. Lead struck the visor, glanced off the armored plastic and whined off into the air. The Hunter paused a fraction of a second, thrown off his guard. Dredd came in low. The gun clattered to the ground. Dredd raised up, jerked the Hunter’s helmet off his head, and slammed it across the man’s jaw.

He heard the sound behind him, knew there were two. Picked up the Judge Hunter’s gun, fired it in a circle an inch above the ground. The first man stopped, stared at his leg and went down. Dredd swung his weapon by the barrel, and smashed the Hunter’s face. He glanced at the Hunter he’d shot in the foot. The man cursed him and started up again. Dredd kicked him soundly in the head.

Okay, three. Everybody down. He swept the weapon around the room to make sure.

Fergie walked out of the corridor, clutching half a brick in his hand.

“You’re not going to finish ’em off? Why the hell not?”

Dredd looked at him. “Because I’m innocent, remember?”

Fergie shrugged. “Yeah, I remember. So? You think those groons give a damn about that?”

“Thanks for jumping in,” Dredd said. “I appreciate the help.”

“Hey, I was
ready,
you know? You were terrific, man. I said to myself, I said, ‘Fergie, you can hop in the ring and finish these guys, but if you do, you’re going to knock Dredd’s timing off. You’re gonna’—
shiiiit, Dredd!”

Dredd swung around in a blur. The Hunter was up on his knees, finger on the trigger of his weapon. His head exploded in a shower of red. Dredd stared at the man in the doorway, a dark silhouette against the stars. The Remington hanging from his hand, the long duster coat . . .

“Fargo?”
Dredd took a cautious step forward. Maybe he was tired, maybe it was somebody else.

Fargo showed him a weary grin. “Welcome to Cursed Earth, Joseph. Hell of a place we’ve created out here. I guess hell’s the right word, all right.”

Fargo glanced at the dead Hunter, then looked back at Dredd.

“I’d like to say I felt something for him. I’d like to, but I don’t.” He studied Fergie a moment, decided he was too tired to ask who Dredd’s companion might be.

“I don’t guess I’m who I was when I came out here. I don’t think anyone
could
be. You have any water, Joseph? I ran out half a day ago.”

“Yes, sir. Sit down. Please.”

Dredd nodded at Fergie. Fergie searched the room, and came back with two glass jars of water. Fargo took a healthy swig, letting the liquid trickle down his chin.

“Tastes good.” He leaned back, took off his hat and wiped his brow. He looked about the room and smiled.

“A little irony, I guess. You and me and the others winding up here.”

“Sir?” Dredd raised a brow.

“Don’t know where you are, do you? Those columns, that piece of carving up there . . . This is a courtroom, Joseph. Or used to be. That, part of a face, what’s left of it. Up there?”

“Yes, sir.” Dredd agreed, though he wasn’t certain what he could or couldn’t see.

“That’s the blind lady. Justice. Before your time. Mostly before mine, too. She treated everyone the same. No favors, no secrets. A jury of ordinary people. Hard to believe
that
one, but it’s true. They decided. Not us. We should never have taken the law out of their hands.”

Dredd shook his head. “You had to. You brought order out of chaos.”

“That we did. Solved a hell of a lot of problems. And
created
more than we knew how to handle.”

He saw Dredd’s confusion, and laid a hand on his arm. He seemed to hesitate, lost for a moment in thought.

“I never thought we’d be sitting here together. Or that I might have the chance to tell you what I could never tell you before. To be a Judge, to decide the fate of thousands of lives during your career, I think that’s . . . too much power in one man’s hands. Too much, Joseph. For me, you, any man.”

He looked right at Dredd. Dredd read the doubt in the old man’s eyes, the sorrow and regret, the pain of recalling a past that was written in the stone of lost years.

“I once tried to compensate for that,” he said. “To strike some kind of balance, to eliminate the mistakes we might make, to put Justice beyond the possibility of error. We tried to . . . to create the perfect Judge. We called it Janus.”

Dredd frowned. “I don’t understand, sir. I’ve never heard that name before.”

Fargo shook his head. “No, no you haven’t. It was forty years ago, Joseph. To create the perfect Judge, DNA samples were taken from all members of the Council. The samples were analyzed and studied. One was chosen for the Janus project. Mine. It was then refined again and again. Altered to enhance the best qualities and screen out the worst. Weaknesses. Frailties. Any physical or mental characteristics that might obstruct the purpose of the project. We . . . we created you, Joseph.”

Dredd’s breath caught in his throat.
“Me?
Sir, that couldn’t be. I—”

“Listen to me.” Fargo shook his head. “Let me finish this.”

“I had real parents. I wasn’t made by any . . .
project!”

“Yes, you were, Joseph.”

“No!”

“Joseph . . .”

Dredd gripped Fargo’s arm. “My parents were killed. When I was just a kid. They told me at the Academy.
You
told me!”

“It was a lie.”

“I have a
picture
of my parents!”

“You have a fake, a lie.” Fargo shook him off.
“We lied to both of you!”

“Both of—both of who?”

Fargo wouldn’t look at him. “There was another person created in that experiment. But something went wrong. Terribly wrong.”

Dredd blinked in sudden understanding. “I have a
brother?”

“Yes.”

“And what went wrong with him? Is he dead, did he die?”

“He didn’t die. You were best friends at the Academy. Inseparable. Both of you star pupils. Then he . . . turned. Went bad. We didn’t know until then. We created one perfect Judge, and another who genetically mutated into the perfect criminal.” Fargo stopped. “And for his crimes . . . you judged him.”

Dredd came to his feet, fists clenched at his sides.
“Rico?
You let me judge my own brother and never
told
me!”

“I couldn’t, Joseph. You were like a son to me.”

“A
son!”
Dredd’s hand swept out and grabbed the water jar from Fargo, shattered it against the wall. The parched earth drank the precious fluid at once.

“Rico had to be killed,” Fargo said. “To protect you. To protect the city.”

“To protect
yourself,
you mean.”

“Yes. That’s true. God help me, I cannot deny that. I did it for myself, for all of us, for—”

“Wait, wait . . .”

It struck him, then, like a physical blow, real and so suddenly clear it nearly brought him to his knees.

“Rico. He’s not dead.” He stared at Fargo. “Rico’s still alive.”

Fargo looked at his hands. “No, he’s not dead, Joseph. He’s alive. I signed the order myself. He’s in Aspen Prison. Special quarters there. I couldn’t—I couldn’t destroy him, whatever he was. He’s part of me. Part of you.”

Dredd struck his fist against the wall. “Damn it,
don’t you see it?”
He gripped Fargo’s shoulders. “I didn’t kill Hammond.
He
did. It was his DNA that convicted me.
Our
DNA. It was Rico. I don’t know where the hell he is right now, but he’s not in Aspen Prison!”

“Oh, Joseph, Joseph . . .”

All the color drained from Fargo’s face. He looked at his hands, as if he might make the whole thing go away.

“How, though? How could he . . .” He looked up at Dredd. “Griffin. It has to be. There’s no one else. He’s deceived us both. Sent us both to hell and brought Rico back.”

“The Janus project.”

“Yes. Of course.” Fargo’s eyes went cold. “He’s going to do it. He’s going to activate the project, open up that box of horrors again.”

Dredd shook his head. “No. He won’t. Griffin can’t do anything without Rico. We get to Rico and we stop Griffin cold.”

“Joseph—”

“Sir. I
will
stop him. There are ways to get into Mega-City, we both know that.”

“It’s not that easy. You don’t
know,
Joseph.”

“I know I can sit on my butt in this pesthole and die!” Dredd’s voice clattered off the walls. “I know I will
not
do that, sir. He took my badge away from me. That’s all I ever had, and I will get it back!”

Fargo slowly pulled himself to his feet. Dredd thought he looked every one of his years. Dust filled the lines of his face, a map of his long days of service, of giving himself to a cause he was no longer sure had been a just cause at all.

What of all those years now?
Dredd wondered.
What had it come to, his faith in the system, in himself?

Dredd had never imagined he could look at this man with any feelings except those of respect, devotion. Fargo had been like a father to him, the only father he’d ever known. Now, with the twisted irony of truth, he knew that Fargo
was
his father, in blood as well as name. And with that realization came the shadow of doubt, the confusion of love and hate—rage, sadness, despair.

Dredd felt the heat rise to his face, the heat of sudden shame. Emotion of any kind had always troubled him deeply, and now those emotions battled with one another, clashed like dark and angry stormclouds in his head. That terrible conflict paralyzed him with doubt. He wanted to turn away, be anywhere but here. He wanted to reject his father for what he’d done . . . to go to him, tell him he understood, that he, himself, felt the torment of the decision this man had been forced to make. Right or wrong, he had followed his heart, served in the best way he could . . .

And as he watched the old man in the long duster coat, watched him as he looked out at the cold night stars as if he sensed Dredd’s thoughts, as if he knew that he, too, was being judged, judged by the son he had created, loved, and finally betrayed, as Dredd watched his father’s tall silhouette, another shadow rose, stirred, brought itself up on its haunches, came out of the dark with the quickness, with the awesome blurring speed of a snake, striking before Dredd could move, before the message of danger could flash from his senses to his brain.

Mean Machine screamed, a high-pitched senseless babble of sound, a hymn of joy and death. Fargo sucked in a single breath. His arms and legs went rigid, his head snapped back, his hat slid across his face. Mean Machine’s blade arm ripped through Fargo’s back, lifting him off the ground.

Fergie sat far away from the ruins, alone out in the night. He didn’t like it out there. It scared the hell out of him to be alone in the dark. But it didn’t scare him half as much as staying back there. Not after what had happened, not after what he’d seen. Sitting out here with the scorpions and centipedes and the god-awful spiders bigger than his head was better than being back there. Better than being in that building with Dredd.

“T
his is Duncan Harrow with the news . . .

“I’m sure most of you were watching less than twenty minutes ago when we interrupted our programming to bring you a bulletin on the explosion at Blue Quad Heights’ Mega-City Bank. Reports have been confused and scattered, with conflicting stories of a daring daytime robbery, a utilities explosion and the crash of an inter-city shuttle. Judge squads and Mediks are on the scene. An area between Nine-hundred-fifty-seventh Street and Nixon Avenue has been sealed off tight. And while authorities are
not
answering questions, this reporter has obtained an interview with a source close to the disaster scene.

“Here, in an exclusive story, are the facts as we know them behind the explosion in the heart of Mega-City’s exclusive Blue Quad Sector. At nine-thirty-five this morning, just thirty-eight minutes ago, an All-Judges call reported Citizen Unrest in Blue Twelve. According to our sources, a squad of seven Lawmaster-mounted Judges arrived on the scene at the Mega-City Bank. Minutes later, four more Street Judges reported in at the site. The Judges entered the bank in what is reported as a standard intervention wedge. Only seconds later, an explosion ripped through the building, sending flaming debris into the street. While we don’t wish to anticipate official word on this incident, early reports indicate that all eleven of the Judges are casualties, as well as an undetermined number of bank employees and Citizens. At least four stories of the bank were destroyed, as well as a number of public and commercial vehicles in the streets nearby.

“Death tolls already mount into the hundreds, and many severely- and critically-wounded persons have been admitted to area hospitals . . .

“Ah, yes—here it is, our first video coverage of the disaster from our News-Drone unit over the scene. There are the . . . remains of the entrance to the bank. You can see isolated fires still burning in the building. There is a . . . a Judge Emergency Van, I believe, and I believe there are at least a dozen vehicles, including a ground shuttle, destroyed there in the street. That’s all the video we have at the moment, but there’ll be more as additional news units arrive.

“Let me say that since officials have
not
issued a statement, we have no indications at this time of the cause of this explosion. We’ll be going into the Hall of Justice now, where Willi Cupp is standing by. Willi . . . ?”

“D
uncan Harrow here with a special bulletin . . .

“Only moments ago, tragedy struck again in Mega-City. This time, unknown perpetrators struck at the heart of the social order. At two minutes after one this afternoon, an explosive device of undetermined strength detonated in the Street Judge locker room, deep inside the Hall of Justice itself. There are no casualty reports as yet, but an anonymous spokesman at the scene has reported that the death toll will almost certainly be high. The device exploded moments after the mid-day shift change, a time when the locker room is normally filled with personnel coming on duty, as well as those just finishing their tours.