Dredd VS Death (9 page)

Its whole interior ablaze, including its driving compartment, the vehicle swerved violently across the lanes of the sked. A flailing figure covered head to toe in flame fell out of the still-open side door and hit the surface of the road with a sickening crunch. Anderson followed the vehicle on its careering course, hitting her bike sirens to alert all oncoming traffic of the danger, although the sight of the fiercely burning and out-of-control vehicle was surely enough to make the driver of any oncoming vehicle sit up and take notice.

Suddenly, without warning, something detached itself from the flame-filled furnace that was now the van's rear compartment. It was a human figure, covered in fire. It leapt - flew, almost - from the rear of the van, covering the nearly ten-metre gap between the burning van and Anderson's position in an astounding feat of strength, landing on the bullet-scarred front of the Lawmaster with a bone-jarring impact.

Anderson recoiled back in her saddle in disbelief, finding herself staring into the inhuman eyes of the thing as it launched itself upon her. Most of its clothes were burnt away by the fire which crawled over almost all of its body, and Anderson could clearly see the gaping holes on its torso from the wounds inflicted by the bike cannon shells and her two Lawgiver shots. It was the same freak she had already shot twice in the chest.

It leapt across the front of the bike at her, forcing her to relinquish control of the bike's handlebars as she brought an arm up to block a lunging bite from that fang-filled mouth. With her onboard computer knocked out by a lucky bullet hit, the Lawmaster was now effectively out of control.

The monstrosity locked its hands round her throat, pressing forward eagerly toward her. Her nostrils were filled with the stench of burning meat, and she could feel the heat from the flames starting to blister those portions of her skin that weren't protected by the fire-resistant material of her uniform.

The thing's face - Anderson no longer thought of her attacker as now being anything remotely human - loomed up in front of her, only centimetres away from her own. Its red eyes bored into her with a terrible intensity. For a moment, Anderson involuntarily brushed minds with the thing, tasting the hunger and hatred which consumed it. There was something else there, something hidden at the back of its mind...

She focussed her psi-talent, pushing violently through the repellent barrier of the creature's hunger-thoughts and into the remnants of the ravaged mind beyond. In that briefest of moments, she plundered what she could from the creature's own memories. She saw the gleaming antiseptic surfaces of a high-tech laboratory... a dingy warehouse front, possibly somewhere down at the Black Atlantic docks, judging by the pollution haze hanging in the air...

She pushed in still further.

Some kind of religious ceremony, heads bowed in fear and awe before some kind of altar... A figure speaking on a vid-screen, its face hidden from view, its voice sending a thrill of fearful obedience through the mind of the thing...

Further. Still further. Not memories now, images of events still to happen.

Doors opened to reveal huge caches of weapons, eager hands reaching in to snatch up what they can... Dozens of creatures identical to the thing Anderson was now fighting crammed into the compartments of hov-transporters, a sense of almost unbearable hunger and eagerness running through them as they neared their destination... A set of schematics marked with a 'Justice Department: Highly Classified' security notification... Guard tower points, security bypass procedures, level after identical level of corridors lined with small cube-like room... Cells... An iso-block?

With a sickening realisation, Anderson knew in an instant what these freaks were up to. She broke off the psi-contact, snapping back to the reality of what was still happening to her right this moment. The sucker's hands were still around her throat, burning into the material of her uniform, strangling her. She felt herself start to black out. From somewhere far away, but somehow coming swiftly closer, she heard an urgent roaring sound...

She threw herself backwards off the saddle, taking her attacker with her, hurling themselves both off the Lawmaster a split second before it crashed into the front of the huge jugger-transporter, the sound of the impact as the Lawmaster was smashed apart momentarily drowning out the blaring roar of the giant vehicle's batteries of warning horns.

Falling backwards at a 100 kph or more, it was times like this Anderson wished she had paid more attention to the Department regs about the compulsory wearing of helmets. She desperately twisted in mid-air, putting her attacker's body between her and the road surface now rushing up towards them, figuring she might as well let him hit it first.

It worked, mostly.

They hit the ground and rolled for fifty metres or so, the rough surface of the sked making them pay for every bone-breaking, skin-shredding metre. The creature took the worst of it, as Anderson had hoped, but at least it didn't have to worry about being on fire anymore. Not when most of its burning skin had been scraped off along the way.

Anderson fared better, her uniform and protective pads saving her from the very worst of the variety of injuries on offer.

She came to rest on the edge of the sked's hard shoulder, still conscious, and started counting the damage. A couple of ribs were gone, and she suspected one of them might have punctured a lung, judging from the white-hot spears of agony she felt every time she took a breath. Her left leg was bent back at a decidedly unpleasant angle, and she didn't need to try to pick up any pre-cog visions to see some serious time spent hooked up to a speedheal machine in her immediate future.

The pain was bad, real bad. She knew some psi-tricks to block a lot of it out, but they would have to wait. The most important thing now was to let everyone else know what it was she had seen inside the mind of that creature.

She was just reaching down for the communicator stored in her utility belt when the hand, charred and almost fleshless, reached out to grab her.

The creature, incredibly, was still alive. Its body was smashed, its skin was burnt away from it in huge, terrible patches, yet it still wouldn't accept the inevitable and just roll over and die. It was crawling up the length of her body, making a horrible, hissing, gurgling sound from its ruined throat.

Pinned to the ground, weak from pain, Anderson was helpless to stop it. Her Lawgiver was long gone, knocked from her hand as they fell from the back of the bike, and probably now crushed beneath the wheels of the jugger-transporter. Which only left her with...

Ignoring the screaming pain from her broken leg, she reached down for the boot knife secreted there. Her hand found it just as the creature pressed itself down at her throat. Its mouth hung slackly open, revealing the jutting fangs there. Anderson's hand flashed up, stabbing the knife's blade right between the thing's open fangs.

Psi-Judges were equipped with silver-bladed boot knives as standard these days. Anderson didn't know what this fiend was or where it came from, but she was pretty hopeful that this might finally be enough to kill it. Silver blade or no silver blade, ramming the point of a boot knife right through the roof of its mouth and straight up into its brain was sure to have some kind of effect.

It did. The creature gave a choking cry and fell forwards across her, its fangs closing around the hilt of the knife still gruesomely jutting out from between its clenched jaws.

Using almost the last of her rapidly failing strength, Anderson painfully pushed the thing off her and reached in desperation towards the communicator lying on the ground nearby.

A black, nauseous wave of unconsciousness rushed up towards her. She struggled to hold it off for a few more precious moments. She had to radio in what she knew... Had to let the rest of Justice Department know what was about to happen...

Had... to...

She heard sirens in the distance, coming closer. Her fingers brushed against the hard casing of the communicator. Her vision swam. And dimmed.

The back-up squad found her less than two minutes later. She was unconscious, lying in a spreading pool of her own blood. The first Judge on the scene gingerly knelt over her, feeling for a pulse and relieved to find one, weak though it was.

"Control - Varrick. Med unit urgently required down here on Joey Ramone. Alert anyone who needs to know - Psi-Judge Anderson's down and in a bad way."

"Wilco, Varrick. Med assist on its way."

"Hold on, Anderson. Help's coming," Varrick said gently to the near-comatose Psi-Judge. Two years ago that had been him, lying bleeding into the ground of a block plaza after being caught in the crossfire of a juve gang rumble, and he knew from experience how much it meant to hear a friendly voice or just to know somehow that someone's there with you, watching out for you, while you're lying there helpless and injured.

He reached down to take her hand, noticing as he did so that she had her back-up communicator held in it. Her finger was on the call switch, although she'd passed out before she could activate it.

FIVE

"Hey, what was that?"

Burchill looked up in irritation from the book he was reading, his concentration broken by the sudden sound of Meyer's voice. Dull as it was, Dredd's
Comportment
was supposed to be required reading for any Street Judge.

Despite the mood of breezy nonchalance Burchill affected whenever he was on duty down here, he hated this posting, and seriously resented having to come back to the Tomb for another three months of sitting here doing nothing.

Which was why he had put in a request for permanent reassignment to something a little more interesting than guard duty in the Tomb, once this latest three-month stint was up. Something like open patrol assignment, say, maintaining a visible Psi-Division presence on the city streets and giving psi-specialist back-up to the ordinary Judge on patrol.

Which meant he'd have to undergo a series of revaluation tests at Psi-Div HQ, to see if he was suitable for more responsible duties.

Which meant having to brush up on his knowledge of Street Division and the way the Street Judges operated.

Which he couldn't do, if Meyer kept on drokking interrupting him.

"What?" he said testily.

Meyer indicated the instrument panel in front of her. "The needle on Containment One. Did you just see it move?"

Sighing in undisguised irritation, Burchill laid down the book and looked at the matching instrumentation on his own duty station. There were huge and expensive batteries of delicately calibrated electronic sensor devices trained on the four containment capsules on the other side of the no-go line. Much of it was designed to measure or detect any kind of psi-activity on the part of the four beings imprisoned in those capsules. If Spooky, Creepy, Sparky and Bony were up to anything, it was supposed to register on these instrumentation panels.

Which it never did, because nothing - absolutely nothing at all - of any interest ever happened down here in the Tomb.

"Nothing here," he answered. "You sure you didn't just imagine it?"

Meyer didn't look amused. "Check the log record," she ordered. "You know how the regs work."

Burchill punched up the sensor readings for the last few minutes, giving an unimpressed grunt in response to what he saw. "Okay, so there was a tiny micro-spike on One, forty-three seconds ago, but nothing to get your panties wound up about. Less than point-three of a psi-joule. Despite what the Tek-heads say, you know how random some of this junk is. One of the perps in the cells a hundred levels above has himself a real hot erotic dream one night, and sometimes the instruments down here pick it up. Satisfied?"

"Not yet. You still know what regs say. I need you to do a psi-check."

Now Burchill was getting really irritated. Despite the flippant names he gave them, the four things in those containment cells seriously creeped him out sometimes, and he really hated having to do what he was now required to do.

He sat back in his chair, closed his eyes, doing his best to empty his mind of the usual mental clutter as he brought his psi-abilities into focus. He reached out, overcoming the instinctive mental recoil from the sheer evil power of the things on the other side of the no-go line and, for the briefest possible moment, scanned the psi-activity within the chamber, looking for anything out of the ordinary. He hated doing this. What made it even more unnerving was knowing that Meyer, sitting across from him, had her hand on the grip of her Lawgiver, ready to draw it and put a Standard Execution round through his brainpan at the first sign that he had become possessed or psychically controlled by any of the occupants of the containment units.

After a few moments, he opened his eyes again, seeing Meyer looking at him intently.

"Anything?" she asked, the tension clear in her voice.

"Not a thing," he replied. She stared at him hard for a few moments more - like maybe she's expecting me to start spouting tentacles or levitate into the air with my head spinning round in circles on my shoulders, he asked himself, incredulously? - and then visibly relaxed, bringing her hand up from under the desk where her Lawgiver was secured.

"With these creeps, it's always best to be sure," she said, perhaps in way of partial apology.