Dredd VS Death (25 page)

Even so, what he had intended to do still worked. Mortis reeled backwards and through the open doorway behind him. Giant slammed a fist into the door-seal switch, not stopping to beat out the flames that were eating into the material of his armour and bodysuit until he was sure the door had slid securely shut.

He stared through the transparent material of the door, watching Mortis burn. Most of the Dark Judge's clothing and unnatural flesh had burned away now, leaving little more than a skeleton covered in flame. Still, he wasn't ready to die yet and staggered forward, pressing one burning, skeletal hand against the transparent wall of the room he was in. His rattling hiss of fury increased sharply in volume as the material of the wall stubbornly refused to yield to his decaying touch.

"Reinforced glasteel, freak. Supposed to be able to last for centuries, maybe even longer. Maybe if you tried long enough you could rot through it, but I don't think you've got the time to do that, have you?"

Mortis's body was already starting to collapse, too much of it eaten away by the flames to allow him to sustain it any longer. He abandoned it with a final, whistling shriek, his spirit flowing out of it as it crumpled to the ground to form a small pyre of burning bones.

Mortis's spirit-form prowled round the borders of the room, restlessly seeking a way out, hurling itself against various portions of the floor, ceiling and thick glasteel walls. Giant laughed at its growing fury.

"Oh yeah, and it's airtight too, didn't I tell you that? You're in a quarantine cube. They use them to keep suspected contagious disease cases in isolation until they know what they're dealing with. That's what you are, freak: a disease. And now I've got you where you belong, in quarantine."

Watching the furious contortions the thing behind the glasteel walls was now going through as it relentlessly and futilely sought an escape from its new prison, Giant reached for his radio.

"Control - Giant. I need a Psi-Judge squad to Clooney Memorial. I've got Mortis trapped here in spook form. Tell them there's no rush, I don't think he's going anywhere else in a hurry right now."

One down, three to go, thought Giant. He wondered how Dredd and Anderson were doing with their own super-creep Dark Judge freaks.

As another blast of supernatural fire blazed out towards her, Anderson dived for cover. She hoped Dredd and Giant were doing better than her.

She rolled past the shrunken and flame-blacked corpses of another row of smokers and popped up out of cover to snap off another few Lawgiver shots at Fire. Not that it would do any good, she reminded herself.

Every time she encountered the Dark Judges, they always brought something new to deal with, some new, never-revealed-before ability or power they could use to counter the Judges' best efforts to track them down and destroy them. In the past, it had been teleporters, psychic possession, mind control, the ability to body-hop when their own bodies were destroyed and then to rise up again in the flesh of the next nearest corpse. This time, though, Fire had found a brand new trick of his own and, by Grud, was it a doozie.

He could use the unnatural heat of the supernatural flames which permanently surrounded him to vaporise bullets before they could strike him. Incendiaries were useless against this particular Dark Judge, of course. Falling back on what had worked against him before, Anderson had fired off several rounds of Hi-Ex shells as soon as she caught sight of him within the main Smokatorium hall - only to see them vaporised as they struck the shimmering heat barrier around him. Every Standard Execution round she had fired since had gone the same way, either vaporised instantly or ineffectually striking Fire in the form of little more than a thin spray of molten droplets. Now, as the Dark Judge hunted her through the smog-filled, corpse-strewn interior of the Smokatorium, Anderson began to suspect she was in serious trouble.

She had borrowed a helmet from one of the Judges outside. Its respirator and visor provided some protection from the poisonous, choking fumes of nicotine and tar that surrounded her, but her eyes still stung from the effects of the thick cigarette smoke that hung heavy in the air of the place. Anderson always knew she would probably die in the line of duty one day, most likely at the hands of a major-league perp like one of the Dark Judges. Except she had figured it would probably be Death that would do the honours, not Fire. And she had always imagined her death as taking place somewhere a lot more glamorous than a city Smokatorium.

There were several Smokatoriums in the city, being the only places in Mega-City One where citizens were legally allowed to smoke. Anderson could never see the attraction in the filthy habit; there were enough unpleasant and hazardous things that could happen to you in this city without deliberately poisoning your body with the after-effects of inhaling burning tobacco. The circumstances in a Smokatorium, where smokers sat in rows wearing protective suits and smoking tobacco products through filter mouthpieces fitted into the air-sealed helmets they wore, made the whole thing look even less attractive than it already was, but the Smokatoriums were still very popular. Dedicated and die-hard smokers still flocked to them to smoke everything from the finest, hand-rolled cigars from the Cuban Wastes to the cheapest brands of Brit-Cit cigarettes. Only in a Smokatorium was smoking legal, and the money generated in the hefty smoking taxes imposed on everyone using them was always a welcome addition to the city's financial coffers.

Now the lifeless smokers sat in rows where they had died. With visibility poor due to the thick, choking cigarette smoke that filled the place, and with all sound muffled by the head-enclosing helmets worn by all smokers, many of them had probably never even known what had hit them as Fire stalked from room to room, incinerating everyone he found in all of them with fiery blasts from his trident weapon.

Justice Department med-programs and health education vidverts always stressed that smoking killed. Now the proof of that was here in abundance in the Churchill.

"Good to see you again, Anderson," cackled Fire. "Looking for a light?"

Anderson dodged again, narrowly avoiding another fire blast that struck the wall behind her, setting it instantly ablaze.

There were now numerous blazes burning throughout the building, some of them spreading rapidly, all of them started by the Dark Judge's deadly trail of destruction through the place. Idly, Anderson wondered if that meant she was still going to burn to death even if she managed to defeat Fire, and then decided that she would probably still be long dead by the time there was any danger of the building burning to the ground.

Even more idly, she wondered why the building's fire control systems hadn't kicked in by now. After all, Smokatoriums were just one big fire hazard, so surely there must be...

Fwooosh!

She barely moved in time, as the hungry tongues of supernatural fire licked out towards her. She rolled away from them, feeling the flames caressing her back and legs, imagining her skin start to blister even under the heat-retardant material of her uniform.

She sprang back up and ran, snapping off several Heatseekers at the Dark Judge, knowing that they would have no difficulty in locking on to him, just as she knew that they would probably be almost completely useless against him.

Fire laughed as the tiny, buzzing heat-seeking bullet missiles vaporised harmlessly in the heat-shimmering air in front of his flaming skull face. His laughter was dry and crackling, like the sound of hungry licks of flames.

"Anderson, always so fast and so fortunate. But how long can you stay that way? You have to remain fortunate all the time. I only have to get fortunate once."

He stalked forwards across the wide space towards her, swishing his trident impatiently in front of him, tracing patterns of fire in the air.

He's been toying with me, Anderson realised, but now the game was coming to an end and Fire was clearly intent on closing in for the kill. Anderson instinctively backed off away from him, realising with a sick feeling that she was being herded into a corner with no other means of escape.

Desperately, she looked around her, looking for a way up. All the exits were behind Fire, as was a window looking into a small control room. No way out that way, since the only way out of the control room was a locked door leading back into the Smokatorium hall.

And yet... there was something about that small room that drew Anderson's attention back to it again.

A control room, but a control room for what?

Something - a hunch or intuition - told her to glimpse upwards towards the roof of the high-ceilinged chamber. As soon as she did, she knew she had found a way to defeat Fire, and she was moving even before she had consciously started to formulate the plan that was about to save her life and put paid to at least one of the Dark Judges.

Fire brandished his trident and a column of flame leapt from it, chasing after Anderson as she ran. Heat splashed against the wall behind her, melting the surface of the wall's material, leaving a burning map of the direction of Anderson's sprint as it chased after her along the wall, always lagging a few precious moments behind her.

Anderson fired off a series of shots. Fire laughed in malign satisfaction at what he thought was a sign of growing panic in the mind of the Psi-Judge, since none of the shots came anywhere near him. In fact, Anderson had hit absolutely everything she had been aiming at.

The first few shots shattered the viewing window of the control room, making things a lot easier for Anderson for the moment when she would hurl herself through it a few seconds later. The last shot - a Rubber Ricochet - hit the tiny panel set into the wall on the far side of the chamber, shattering the glass panel over it and hitting the large red emergency switch beneath the glass.

Not bad shooting, Cass, Anderson congratulated herself as she leapt through the smashed control room window and tumbled across the console inside, hearing the Smokatorium's sprinkler mechanism finally kick in response to her activation of the building's fire control systems.

Water gushed down, smothering the fires here and elsewhere throughout the building. Judge Fire walked through the downpour, giving off a cloud of hissing steam as the falling droplets of water noisily vaporised as soon as they came into contact with the flames of his body. The flames he produced did seem noticeably diminished by the effects of the sprinkler downpour, but they were supernatural in origin, and Anderson doubted that anything could completely douse them as long as Fire's spirit remained in possession of its host body.

Fire laughed as he stalked closer. "Foolish Anderson, did you really think this would have any effect at all?"

Anderson waited before replying, carefully measuring Fire's progress towards her. She was trapped inside the control room, with nowhere inside it to take cover. One blast from Fire's trident weapon would obliterate everything inside the small room. If Anderson had misjudged anything at all, she knew she probably only had a few seconds to live.

"No, creep," she answered, grabbing hold of the big lever handle on the control console in front of her. "I did it so you wouldn't guess that I was really planning to do this."

She hauled on the lever, her action instantly rewarded by the ominous sound from the chamber roof of something large and heavy powering up. Fire hesitated and then looked up. Anderson didn't know if Dark Judges could actually visibly express panic and alarm, but she supposed that this must be what she was seeing now, as Fire saw what was happening up there in the chamber roof.

Each day after it closed, the Smokatorium underwent a rigorous cleaning process, a giant rotary fan in the ceiling of the main chamber sucking the nicotine-choked air out of the entire building and into a series of rooftop filters where it was cleansed and purified of all traces of tobacco taint before being safely expelled out into the general atmosphere of the city. That was what the huge fan-blades now spinning with increasing speed up there in the chamber roof were usually used for. Now Anderson had them in mind for a completely different purpose entirely.

As far as she could see, as the air began to swirl round the chamber in a rapidly growing vortex, Fire was going to immediately do either one of two things. One of them still meant almost immediate certain death for Anderson.

Instead, he did the other, reaching down to the teleporter device on his belt instead of aiming his trident and blasting Anderson to oblivion. His burning fingers reached out to activate the device, but Anderson was already firing her Lawgiver. She had flicked the shell selector to Armour Piercing, hoping that the solid, diamond-hard titanium bullet would have more chance of making it through the slightly diminished hazard of Fire's heat aura. It was a gamble, but a calculated one.

The bullet hit and shattered the teleporter device before the Dark Judge could activate it. His screaming hiss of anger was lost amidst the growing hurricane roar of the effects of the giant fan mechanism overhead. Fire vengefully raised his trident to send a scouring, fiery blast into the control room, but it was already too late. The weapon was pulled from his hand by the force of the wind vortex that now filled the chamber and went flying upwards towards the spinning blades. A second or two later, Fire followed it, sucked up into the fan's hungry mouth along with all the other loose material in the chamber. Corpses, charred fragments of corpses, the litter of ash and hundreds of cigarette ends: all of it went tumbling upwards into the blades. The last Anderson heard of Judge Fire was his unholy shriek of rage as his body passed through the fan rotors and was dashed to pieces by the spinning blades.