Dredd VS Death (12 page)

As guard duties went, this was one of the dullest, but at least it got you outside.

"Hey, at least on the West Wall, your job's to stop creeps breaking in. All we do here is-" began Kiernan, only to be cut off by Sprange's alert-sounding tone.

"Hold it, Solly. You picking this up?"

Kiernan glanced at the scanner screen in his turret console, and looked up into the darkening evening sky for confirmation of what the scanner showed him.

"Check. A hov-transporter, a big one judging by the scanner readings, inbound our way. We expecting any more perp deliveries tonight?"

"Not according to what I know. Hold on, I'll check with Control. Those munceheads in Perp Transfer are always doing this to us. You ask me, they're the ones who should be finding out what it's like to go on West Wall duty, not chumps like you..."

Kiernan waited, watching the hov-transporter coming towards them. It was in restricted air-space now, and this was just about the point when it should be hitting its retro-jets to slow down to land while signalling in to them with the correct recog-code.

It was doing none of these things. Instead, if anything, it seemed to be increasing its speed. And so were the two identical craft coming in right behind it, on the same approach course.

"They're not Justice Department flyers, and they're not responding to hails!" warned Sprange, bringing his turret round to bear.

Kiernan fumbled to do likewise, losing precious seconds as he got the unlock code wrong on his weapon's auto-targeter. By the time he had got his weapon activated it was too late. He looked up in horror as the first hov-transporter came straight at him. Whoever was in the cockpit must be some kind of madman, Kiernan realised, because the pilot wasn't even trying to bring it in on retro-jets; instead, he was simply going to crash-land the transporter on the roof. Kiernan's last act was to press the firing controls on his turret weapon, sending a long line of explosive shells into the nose of the lumbering hov-transporter, raking the cockpit and blowing apart anyone seated there.

It didn't matter, just as Kiernan had already sickly realised. Gravity and the vehicle's own momentum would finish what the pilot had started.

The transporter hit the roof of the prison in a shower of sparks and screeching metal, belly-flopping right across the wide area of the landing pad and smashing into Kiernan's turret, ripping it right off its mountings and hurling it over the far edge of the roof.

Sprange, in the other turret, fared better, at least for a while. He concentrated his fire on the second flyer coming in, riddling its cargo compartment with armour-piercing shells and destroying a power-feed to the underbelly grav-lifters. Stricken, the transporter dropped out of the sky on a downwards trajectory that ended with it pile-driving itself into the body of the iso-block some thirty levels below. Amazingly, many of those creatures inside the transporter would survive the impact. Unfortunately, the more human occupants of the hundreds of iso-cubes on those levels would not, and many were crushed or burned to death as the transporter's engines drove it deep into the structure of the building.

Alarms were going off all over the building. Up on the roof level, the third transporter was coming in to make the same kind of makeshift landing as the first. Sprange concentrated his fire on it, aiming for the engines and trying to cripple or destroy it before it could land. He was still firing when he noticed the dark figures streaming out of the wreck of the first craft down. He didn't know who these freaks were or why they were attacking a heavily defended maximum-security iso-block, but he was just about to show them what a dumb proposition that was.

He spun the gun turret round towards them, bringing his targeting scope to bear and switching the fire selector on both guns to rapid-fire wide dispersal. These babies could cut up armoured steel like it was synthi-cheese, and Sprange couldn't wait to show these chumps what they could do to a packed mass of human bodies.

Before he could fire, however, the door behind him was wrenched off its hinges and dozens of clawed hands reached in to violently pull him out of the gun turret. He was borne aloft into the midst of the baying pack of creatures there, screaming as he realised what was about to happen to him.

The monstrosities descended on him eagerly, claws and teeth hungrily tearing into his flesh. They had been waiting a long time for this. The serum the master provided staved off the worst of the blood thirst that consumed them, but it was nothing in comparison to a taste of the real thing.

"Rocking Jovus, what was that?!"

Mayer and Burchill had felt the impact of the transporter crashing into the iso-block, although this deep underground it had registered as little more than a faint rumbling tremor. Even that, however, had been more than enough to break the eerie, perpetual calm of the Tomb.

Seconds later, alarm lights started flashing on their consoles. Mayer flicked switches on her comms board, trying to raise someone in the prison levels above to find out what was going on, but no one seemed in too much of a hurry to answer. She flicked through channels, getting back only static in answer to her calls. Finally, she found an open frequency - someone's helmet radio was broadcasting, even if they themselves weren't talking - and she could pick out identifiable sounds. What she heard didn't exactly thrill her.

It was gunfire, and the frantic sounds of human panic.

She drew her Lawgiver. "Stay alert," she told Burchill, "I think there's some sort of prison riot going on above."

She locked her gaze on the thickly armoured slab of the sealed elevator door, the only means in or out of the Tomb. You needed about ten different security codes to even begin to think about getting into that thing up there on the surface, never mind starting it up and using it to come down here. As added security back-up, every metre of the elevator shaft was monitored, and anyone trying to climb down it surreptitiously would trip a dozen or more alarms and run into a seriously nasty surprise at a point about halfway down, where the hidden robot sentry guns were located.

"Stay alert," she repeated again to Burchill. "Until we know what's happening up there, we assume anything coming out that elevator is going to be bad news."

Burchill barely heard her. The Psi-Judge's attention was fixed on the four containment cubes on the other side of the line, and he stared at them in unnatural concentration... as he listened to the voices whispering inside his head.

The recently deceased Judge-Warden Kiernan would have been very unhappy if he could see the events unfolding throughout Nixon Penitentiary at the moment. However else you might want to describe it - chaotic, gruesome, a murderous bloodbath - you certainly couldn't describe it as being boring.

Senior Judge-Warden Scholker and his riot squad, en route to the rooftop h-wagon landing pad, would be the first to agree with that. As far as Scholker was concerned, all hell seemed to be breaking loose inside his beloved Nixon Penitentiary. Some kind of large flying vehicle had crashed into the iso-block, causing several fires and major casualties on levels 54 to 57. The impact and subsequent fires had also damaged the security systems in the prison, and Scholker was getting confusing reports about armed perps being loose on some of those floors, although where these perps came from, no one could yet figure out, since they didn't seem to be inmates. He had been on his way to the section affected by the crash, with the firm intention of busting heads and restoring order, when he got the call to head to the roof level instead. The turret crews there had reported engaging incoming aerial targets, but nothing had been heard from the Judge-Wardens on duty up there since.

Scholker fumed in impatience and tightened his grip on the stock of his scatter gun as he watched the level numbers tick past on the elevator control panel display. No creep was going to get away with mounting a mass break-out attempt - if that was really what they were dealing with here - on Nixon Pen. Especially not on his shift.

"Get ready," he growled to his squad. "Whoever's up there, we'll give 'em-"

That was all he said, before the doors rumbled open and the tide of vampire creatures which had been waiting for the elevator's arrival swept in at them with a howl of ecstatic glee. Scholker's finger couldn't even close on the trigger of the scatter gun before a vampire ripped his throat out with one sweep of its claws.

With Scholker and his squad obligingly bringing the large transport elevator up to where they were lying in wait, the vampires now had a means of entry down into the rest of the iso-block. They swept into the place, more than two hundred of them, shrugging off Lawgiver bullets and scatter gun shots, killing everything in their path. Some, overcome by blood-thirst and the temptation of having so much prey trapped helplessly all around them, broke into cube after cube, feeding on the defenceless and terrified inmates they found inside. Most of them, though, retained sufficient self-control and presence of mind to follow out their master's instructions.

Guard points were overwhelmed, control rooms seized, security systems destroyed or sabotaged. As they were slaughtering their way down through the levels of the prison, those vampires which had been aboard the second hov-transporter and had survived its crashing impact into the building were doing likewise.

In a way, Sprange had done the Church of Death a big favour. Starting from the levels where the transporter had hit the building, they were able to reach the iso-block's main control centre on level 45 far quicker than had been anticipated. After breaking into the place and killing the command staff there, they were able to bypass the security codes and open every iso-cube door in the prison at a point far earlier than had been expected, way back when this crippling attack had first been planned.

Sherman "Sharkey" McCann didn't like being locked up. In truth, he didn't like most things, but most of all he didn't like Judges, which was why he had kept killing them. He'd killed six of them - although a couple of them had been those wannabe Judges who drove the catch wagons and did all the cleaning up after the real Judges had finished doing their law stuff, so Sharkey wasn't too sure if they really counted - before the drokkers caught up with him.

Sharkey hadn't liked getting caught, and had liked being shot even less. He'd taken three Lawgiver shots, one in the arm and two through the chest, and the Med-Judges had fitted him out with a crappy paper lung after one of those shots in his chest had royally messed up one of the perfectly good human lungs he'd had all his life. Still, Sharkey took quiet pleasure in the fact that the Judges hadn't been able to kill him, not even with three Lawgiver slugs. Better still, it had been Dredd himself that had pulled the trigger on those shots. Sharkey knew that the rest of the Judges were secretly afraid of him, 'cause otherwise why would they have had to call in their top lawdog to bring him in?

Yeah, he took three shots from Dredd, and he still wouldn't lie down and die for them.

Not that Sharkey liked Dredd much either. Dredd had shot him. It was because of Dredd that he was in here, with this crappy paper lung that didn't work properly, that gave Sharkey a pain in his chest every time he took a breath, never mind what the Med-Judges said about the pain all being in his head. Sharkey knew the pain was real, and every time he took a breath and felt it cutting into him, it made him think of Dredd.

Oh man, but there was one lawdog Sharkey would like to add to his score. He fragged Dredd, and he knew he wouldn't ever hear any more sniggering behind his back from the other cons about how he wasn't really such a big, bad Judge-killer 'cause some of the badges he scragged weren't real Judges.

This was what Sharkey was thinking, and wasn't really that much different from what Sharkey was normally thinking, when the hov-transporter had hit the iso-block about ten levels above where his cell was. Sharkey's cube didn't have a window - like everyone knew, only narks or rich creeps who could bribe the Judge-Wardens got cubes with windows - so he didn't see the rain of burning wreckage from the crash tumbling down the outside of the building. But he sure felt the impact and he sure heard every gruddamned alarm in the place going off right afterwards.

After that there had been a lot of screaming and shouting, and then a heap of gunshots, and then just a whole lot more screaming. Looking out the tiny aperture in his cube door, Sharkey hadn't been able to see or figure out much of what was supposed to be going on, even if he did fleetingly see some freak in a Halloween monster mask run down the corridor outside. Which just didn't make much sense at all to Sharkey.

It was a little while after then that there was a familiar-sounding clunking noise, and Sharkey's cube door swung open. Sharkey stepped forward and peered cautiously out into the corridor. It turned out that Sharkey's wasn't the only cube door to have been opened, 'cause there was everyone else in the corridor standing there and peering out just like Sharkey was.

Best of all, the only guard in sight was the dead one slumped against the wall at the end of the corridor. Sharkey moved fast, getting to the Judge stiff before anyone else and helping himself to whatever he had.

Sharkey knew enough to leave the stiff's Lawgiver in its holster - try pulling the trigger on that sweet little package and you can kiss your flipper goodbye - but he was happy to help himself to the scatter gun.

Satisfying himself that the weapon was in working order - Grud, but it felt good to have a gun in his hand again after all these years - Sharkey looked up, seeing the faces of his crew looking expectantly at him. Some of the other cons, the ordinary Joe cits doing the kind of joke cube-time that you counted in months instead of years or even decades, stayed in their cubes, too afraid of what was happening, but Sharkey's crew knew what the score was.