Sweet Justice (2 page)

Her mind was being torn from her body. Her own screams mingled now with the other Scream, and for a moment she saw something else, she saw through the woman’s eyes.

Anderson’s mind was a jumble of images, of ghosts dancing in ether. She looked hard into this ether and made out a shape. Something dark. Something big and dark was moving, unsteadily, towards her. Something glinted on the face of the dark thing. Something caught the light and glinted. For a heartbeat the reflected light illuminated something yellow... The thing was closer now. It was black or blue. The face caught the light again. No. It wasn’t a face. It was something in front of the face. Something the face was wearing. A visor, on a helmet. And above the visor a badge. A yellow badge on a helmet.

A Judge’s helmet.

A STATE OF WAR

Omar’s expression was crumpled and peculiar, as though every tiny muscle in his face was trying to pull in opposite directions. The Chief Judge’s left eyelid flickered once. Just once.

‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that, Omar.’

‘That’s what Anderson said. The Alphabet Killer’s a Judge. I know it’s crazy but Anderson isn’t usually
that
far off the mark.’

‘Listen, we’re all under a lot of strain. Only today I saw a gang of juves pelting a med squad with acid bombs. If we suggest that the Alphabet Killer is one of
us
we’ll have a state of war.’

‘Yes, Chief Judge... I understand...’

The Chief Judge leaned forward, her voice softening.

‘Oh, but off the record, Omar... let Anderson follow the lead.’

AGNESS BLAGG

The Scream was like a tune playing a few rooms away. It was always there, though sometimes she forgot about it. She tried to home in on it, tried to glean more information from it, but she came to understand that she would have to wait. The Scream came to her. She did not go the the Scream.

While she waited she went through the computer files to see how many Mega-City blocks ended in –ESS. In all there were 739. She started sifting through them, hoping that if she came across the right one she would recognise it.

She’d been working on this half an hour when the first Alphabet Killing of the evening was reported.

Anderson visited the body in the mortuary, hoping to pick something up. The victim’s name was Agness Blagg and she had been found near Dudley Moore Bungalows. Anderson had seen plenty of gore in her time, but this horrified her. And Judge Monk, standing nearby, saw it.

‘Don’t let it get to you, Anderson,’ he said. ‘It’s just another stiff. Dead is dead, however you got there.’

Anderson turned as Monk was leaving with another Judge. He cracked some lousy joke but Anderson didn’t hear it. All she heard was a scream, like a living thing, wild and monstrous, terrible and terrified.

As Judge Monk walked away, the Scream faded.

‘Who found the body?’ she asked the attendant.

‘Why, those two. Judges Monk and Lord. Lord looked a little shook-up but Monk, boy, he sure can take it on the chin. D’you know what the boys say ’bout Monk? They say he’s as tough as...’

‘...Old Dredd. Yeah, so I heard.’

Anderson was already running out of the slab room.

THE BIRTHDAY BUTCHER

It was all there on the files. You just had to be looking for it. Judge Monk had reported the first Alphabet Killing and the mortuary attendant had been sufficiently horrified by the corpse to have made a note of it... and of Monk’s lack of emotion.

And there was more on his personal record.

A very terrible thing had happened to Monk. He’d been called to his original home one day to find his father murdered. His father had been the sixth victim of the notorious Birthday Butcher, a killer who claimed 28 lives before he was finally caught.

The Birthday Butcher was in fact a sub-hume called Nathan Bones who, as a child, never received birthday presents from his sub-hume parents. One day, Nathan’s anger and resentment boiled over and he went on his killing spree. For 28 nights he killed a selected person; a person whose birthday it was. A few film companies made movies out of Nathan’s killing spree.

The description of the Birthday Murders read like a horror story but one thing caught Anderson’s attention. Monk’s father had been impaled on metal-spiked birthday candles, which were subsequently set alight.

Agness Blagg had suffered a similar fate.

JUDGE DREDD

Omar wasn’t alone. The Chief Judge and Judge Dredd were with him in his office. Anderson burst in.

‘Omar! C.J.! I’ve cracked it! I know who did it!’

Dredd, Omar and the Chief Judge looked straight back at Anderson without saying a word. Anderson gulped in air and said, ‘It’s Judge Monk. Judge Monk is the Alphabet Killer!’

‘That’s very interesting, Anderson,’ said the Chief Judge. ‘Because Dredd has just apprehended the Alphabet Killer... and he most certainly is
not
Judge Monk.’

‘You’ve... arrested...’

‘The Alphabet Killer. That’s right, Anderson. Caught the creep as he was going for his third stiff of the night.’

Anderson stood in dazed stupefaction as Dredd told her about the Alphabet Killer, who was nothing but a low-lifer called Angelo Christie who had wanted to get rid of his brother.

Christie had hit upon the idea of killing 25 people as well as his brother, so the Judges would look for a psychotic methodical killer instead of someone who plugged his brother because he couldn’t stand his guts.

Christie had got hooked on murder, though, and just couldn’t stop. A dormant sadistic streak was awakened and the killings just went on and on, long after the original purpose of them, to deflect suspicion from his slaying of his brother, had been forgotten.

Apart from his job on the zoom-tube allowing him quick access to every part of the city, there was no special reason why Christie had evaded the law for so long. He was just a non-entity who got lucky. Which was unlucky for his 990 victims.

‘Now,’ said the Chief Judge, when Dredd had finished. ‘Would you like to repeat what you said about Judge Monk?’

The Scream hit Anderson with so much force she staggered. She saw the woman and her three children. And she saw the woman’s mouth. And she heard the Scream. For the first time, she really heard the Scream.

‘Where’s Monk? WHERE IS HE?’

JUVE ABUSE

Anderson’s bike sped through the night-time streets of Mega-City One and the flashing neon lights were glowing like phantom faces: the woman, the three juves...

‘Monk,’ she said aloud, as the Scream grew...

She had found the place on Omar’s Grid-Vid. Monk had called in a few minutes earlier with a report of more Juve Abuse. They were throwing fire-bottles at Judges again. Monk was going to clear them off. That was in Enderby Square. Three streets away from Enderby Square was a place called Burgess Block.

---ESS BL---

Every traffic noise now seemed part of the Scream. How could she have been so blind? In the distance she saw the tall grey building that was Burgess Block. She recognised it from her dream. The Scream grew louder, more terrible, like a living thing. Only now she knew that the Scream was not coming from the woman.

The Scream was coming from Judge Monk.

A CHINK OF LIGHT

‘Filthy, stinkin’ juves! Don’t you think we’d
like
to get our hands on that maniac?’

The back of Monk’s hand struck one of the juves across the face. The juve fell, then scampered to his feet and ran off with his brothers.

‘Foul-mouthed brats. Chucking bottles... You shoulda seen what
I’ve
seen!’

The three juves ran down the alley into the arms of their mother. They were all around the age of ten.

Monk lumbered after them, clumsily drawing his gun. The mother, pulling the children close to herself, saw the Judge and started backing away. Until she felt a cold wall touch her shoulders.

A chink of light glinted on Monk’s helmet’s visor and he saw his father, lying dead in the dining room. He saw the Alphabet Killer’s victims, lying dead in some foul alley, and he saw these filthy juves and their mother, cowering before him. And somehow it all seemed to be the same thing. Somehow they were
all
to blame.

The blood pounded hot and wild inside his head as he moved closer and raised his gun. It would be good to shoot them, to blow them away. It would be good to hit back, to avenge his father after all this time...

‘Monk!’

As Monk turned, Anderson drove her fist into the side of his neck, just below his left ear. It was a blow that, delivered correctly, would bring down the biggest man.

‘Why did you hit me, Anderson?’ Monk asked, smiling.

Then he fell over.

Later, Anderson sat back and relaxed. The Scream was gone from her mind now. Things were back to normal – or at least Mega-City One’s equivalent of normal. Monk was in a Psycho-Cube. He’d never be a Judge again, but at least he wasn’t up for murder.

‘All those years putting on the Tough-Guy image, scared of showing the slightest weakness, took their toll. Something had to break, though Monk couldn’t see it,’ said Anderson. She was in C.J.’s office with Omar, Dredd and the Chief Judge herself.

‘But,’ said Omar, ‘Monk’s
subconscious
mind knew. It had a pre-cog of what was going to happen, and it tried to get help, to stop Monk committing murder. So it contacted Anderson...’

‘Yeah. Monk must be a latent Psi himself,’ said Anderson. ‘Only I misread the Scream at first. Thought it was the terror of being murdered, not the terror of being the
murderer
. And that description of the candles threw me. Didn’t think that the Alphabet Killer might have seen those old Birthday Butcher movies...’

Dredd clonked his large boot onto the floor, preparatory to standing. He snorted.

‘Another cry for help, huh?’

Anderson smiled.

‘A
scream
for help, actually. And
you
shouldn’t be so sure of yourself. You saw what happened to Monk... and you know what the boys used to say about
him
...’

‘What did they say?’

‘That he was tough as Old Dredd... How tough is
that
, Joe?’

DIARY OF A MAD CITIZEN

By Alan Grant,
2000 AD Annual 1986

‘Hey You, Joe Normal! Reckon Future Shock Couldn’t Happen to You? Well, You’re Wrong! It Can Strike Anyone at Anytime, I Know... I’ve Been Thereeee!’

January 19
^th
2107

Something very peculiar happened today.

I rose slightly earlier than usual, to catch the Kenny Kark Morning Spectacular on my holo-vid before venturing out on my weekly jaunt across city to Orinoko’s. I’m not really very fond of Kenny Kark – to be frank, he makes me sick – but watching his show every week adds to my sense of occasion. It helps make my Thursdays special.

I compounded the feeling of celebration by having an extra bowl of Tokyo Joe’s Synthi-Soy Soyflakes. ‘Not a single natural ingredient’ it says on the packet. I seem to remember my mother telling me that when she was a kid they had real soy soyflakes. She...

But I don’t want to talk about my mother now. I don’t want to talk about Kenny Kark, either, except to note that his last guest was a fat lady who’d had her face biosculptured into that of a goldfish. I reckon she has star quality, and if betting wasn’t illegal I’d bet my kneepad she makes it big before the end of February.

On second thoughts, I wouldn’t bet my kneepad. I mean, I still think fatty’ll strike it rich – but my kneepad’s far too precious for me to risk it on the fortunes of fishface. Not precious in a financial sense, you understand – it’s just a plain black number with faded diamante GOG lettering, and although it’s 17 years old now it wouldn’t fetch more than a couple of hundred creds on the Classique Pad Market. But it’s worth a lot more to me; me and that pad have seen 17 years worth of life together, hard times and worse times. And like they say on the Brain Tape ads: ‘The tapes cost 100 – but memories are priceless.’ How true (although I’ve seen Brain Tapes discounted to 59.90 on the Block Mall).

As the Kark Show ended, I pondered my next move. The journey from my apartment door to the lift is without doubt the most dangerous part of my weekly odyssey. That’s not to say that the rest of the trip is without its dangers – the Uptown/Downtown Zoom Underpass Pedway, for instance, was voted Top Mugger’s Haunt in a recent phone-in, and the crumbling chem-pools along the Reclaim Zone are always claiming innocent victims. However, it is a Justice Dept. statistical fact that 50% of all criminal violence is inflicted either within the victim’s home, or between his home and his Block Exit.

When I tell you that I live in the Gary Coleman Block, you’ll understand my apprehension. Gary Coleman Juves are reputed to be amongst the nastiest, foulest and toughest in the city. I sometimes wonder if they’re waging some kind of vendetta or holy war against me, so numerous have the incidents become. But I suppose it makes statistical sense: there are 58,000 people living in Gary Coleman, and it stands to reason that some of them are going to be pestered more than others. And when you consider that dozens of families never leave their apartments, that must lower the odds even more in favour of any particular individual being chosen as a target.

I peered out through my door’s Exterior Viewer. The corridor appeared to be empty. A good omen. I unlocked and unbarred the door’s triple-security locks and slid out into an alien world. The walls are hidden under a constantly-changing sea of graffiti, chief amongst which are various Juve boasts: GC JUVES RULE, SLINKY KILLS TOASTIES, POWER TO THE SUB-TEENS! and the like. Of course, there’s a fair smattering of adult slogans, too. It’s a funny thing about graffiti – no matter how fast the Block scrubber squads work, they never seem to be able to keep up with the scrawlers’ prolific output. Even when Citi-Def post round-the-clock sentries, the graffiti still appears, almost as if it grew there of its own accord. Now, I paused long enough only to record the fact that someone had scrawled NITCHY IS A FINK in large day-shine letters all over the door, then sprinted for the lifts at the end of the corridor.