Psykogeddon (31 page)

The Morlocks had seemed quite sad to seem him go. Then again, that might have simply been due to the demolition charges he'd left behind in their encampment when he went.

In any case, the brief Undercity sojourn had given him time to contemplate his options, if not actively brood upon them. He could escape off to the stars again, but his short time out in space had left him heartily sick of it. That might have seemed a little odd, he supposed, given his Puerto Luminan origins, but the point was that Puerto Lumina had been an entirely human colony - however inhuman the conditions had become. There simply weren't enough people, human people, out there in space itself to keep him amused. And amusing himself with alien life forms just hadn't been the same.

Showing so much as his face in Brit-Cit wasn't even an option, let alone attempting to resume his previous position of power. Well, there were other cities. The main thing had been to simply get out of Mega-City One.

After a somewhat tortuous route that had involved a sub-orbital commercial jump-canister, a stolen flier and a gun smuggler's hovercraft, Drago San had arrived on
Leviathan
, and had gained entrance by the time-honoured method of defenestrating one of the Clan guardsmen, posted on one of the more peripheral pontoons, and relieving him of his weapons and identification. The decided advantage of a paraplegic floater, when set to simply serve as a replacement for legs, was that it was utterly silent.

Time to keep his head down for the moment, Drago San decided, memorising the body's Clan-markings for the time when it might be appropriate to assume them himself. Take the time to learn how things work around these parts, and then, who knew? There might just be a first-strike missile-system here on
Leviathan
with his name on it.

Dredd was back on the street, shaking down his senses. His vision was coming in just that little bit too sharp and bright. He had no idea if this was the result of the nerve-regeneration Med-Division had given him, or because of his new-model cybernetic eyes. There had been several generations of upgrades, apparently, since the last time he'd had them replaced.

Sector Nine seemed subdued in the aftermath of the Psyko-Block's psycholeptic pulse. It wasn't that there were less crazies around, Dredd knew, because the number that had been pulled down by Judges when they had flipped out had hardly made a dent.

The secondary effect of the influence that had turned people, briefly, into homicidal maniacs was to leave them with the unconscious and fundamental conviction that their acts, while under the influence, had in some sense not been real. Even confronted with the hard - or, rather, in most cases, the soft and sliced up - evidence of the bodies, they had been unable to comprehend that it mattered in any real sense. It was like a blind spot in their heads.

There were killers out there now who had killed and then just simply got on with their lives without giving it a second thought. Too many to catch by normal means. There were plans, apparently, to issue a questionnaire with one of the questions reading, "Did you brutally murder someone last week?" - in the hope that people would tick the yes-box without thinking or caring about it. What the drokk, it might work.

Dredd gunned his Lawmaster down a slipway and through a junction, noticing that all the traffic he encountered was being actively and somewhat pointedly on its best behaviour. Even though the whole point of a Judge's uniform was to signify the job rather the man, there was something about him that citizens recognised and responded to. Said response, basically, was that of having the fear of Grud forcibly inserted.

People didn't exactly fall over themselves to tell Dredd jokes, but he seemed to recall one about how the Queen of Brit-Cit - or Little Britain, or whatever it had been called when they'd had a Queen - thought the world smelled of fresh paint, because ten yards ahead of her there was always a man with a fresh pot and a brush.

It was gratifying in one sense, he supposed, to see people showing such respect for the Law around him, but on occasion it could get tedious. Every person in the world was committing a crime, of course, however minor, if you decided to make it your business to go after them. But go down that route too far and you would end up thinking in terms of that drokking story about jaywalkers and kneecaps.

"Anything for me, Control?" he said into his comms pickup. "You know, anything you think might be important enough for a Judge of my, quote, calibre, unquote?"

Rockets on the subject of leaving him out of the action, on the basis that he was too important, had been duly delivered. This made the fact that Control wasn't currently streaming him crime-data a little bit worrying.

"We got stuff," said the voice of Control. "We're just holding you back a little for when the thing starts."

"Thing?" said Dredd. "What thing?"

"Hey, you okay, Dredd?" the voice of Control asked. "Have you forgotten what day it is? It's Swami Whompa Day."

"Drokk!" What with one thing and another over the previous days, this had gone completely out of his head. Maybe it really was time to book in for another rejuve.

The Thirty-seventh Day Whompatarian Adventists were one of those religious sects based on a creed that had originated on Earth, been taken up by aliens and then imported back to Earth again. They were one of the few religious sects whose observances were banned under Mega-City Law - something that ordinarily only happened with activities like ritual human sacrifice.

The Thirty-seventh Day Whompatarian Adventists weren't quite that bad, but their celebrations on the day of their leader Swami Whompa's birth had been banned in response to the city-wide chaos it tended to cause.

The details would be too long and tortuous to go into in an account such as this, but the simple upshot was that, due to the Chinese-whispering nature of their creed, Thirty-seventh Day Whompatarian Adventists celebrated their holy day by sacrificing livestock, which had been genetically engineered and bred for that especial purpose.

Large livestock. By catapult.

From the tops of hab-blocks.

At the precise moment that Dredd was recalling all this, the time-readout in his helmet incremented noon, and from above came the approaching and terrified lowing of cattle.

The first Jersey cow hit a hov-cab, flattening its canopy and sending it skewing into the side of a tanker truck. From then on, things only got worse.

As the world went to hell around him, though, and he gunned the Lawmaster forward on overdrive, Dredd found that he had to control what might have been a relieved sigh. There had been a few days of complications, of having to deal with subterfuge and vested interests of all kinds; of having to cope with any number of different factions, each and every one of them with their own agenda.

It was good, in a sense, to have a clean and simple job in front of you.

A return to sane reality.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dave Stone studied Fine Art and Visual Communication. After a spell in advertising, he found that most of his energies were being transferred to the written word. Scripting for computer games and comics led to writing full-length novels for such well-known titles as
Judge Dredd
and
Doctor Who
- work which he continues to this day. His experiment in self-publishing an original novel, The Mary-Sue Extrusion, can be obtained from:
www.cafeshops.com/extrusion.