by Al Ewing
...wait. There he was.
Rico had been right—with his hair cut and a decent suit, Tellerman could pass for an unassuming newsreader. Looking at him now, after a triple dose of his meds, you wouldn’t know about his problems at all—he was smiling, happy, just another productive member of society, or as close as Mega-City could manage. You could put him to work in a bank, Rico thought—sure, he’d natter about death signals over the water cooler, but by this city’s standards that was almost normal. Watching Tellerman follow his orders—the way he obediently separated himself into the correct queue when it subdivided, the way he let a young couple with a kid go first so Judge Trelawney would scan them instead of him, the way he approached Rico as quietly and gently as a lamb—Rico had to wonder how Hoenikker dealt with her conscience. Maybe Tellerman couldn’t be cured, but it was obvious he could be managed.
Then again, she probably didn’t have a conscience. Rico certainly didn’t.
His scanner-wand flashed red when it passed quckly over Tellerman’s belly—Rico kept his thumb over the light, making sure nobody else saw, then clapped Rocky on the shoulder, ushering him through, making no sign they’d ever met. “Good to go,” he muttered.
Tellerman smiled, and leaned close for a moment. “Thank you so much for everything. I haven’t felt this good in years. It’s going to be so great not to have to worry about the death signals—”
Rico clapped him on the shoulder again, a little harder, checking to see if anyone had heard. “Good to go. Sir.”
Tellerman walked into the Stadium, smiling beatifically. A saint among men.
Meanwhile, the remote for the detonators sat in Rico’s belt pouch, small and malevolent.
Waiting.
Fifteen
IN THE MONEY room, Strader was starting to feel the adrenaline—like an old friend. Events were moving faster now, but still running to plan. He’d bound Cleveland and Hartsdale with the zip-ties, wrists and ankles, then gagged them with the tape. Cleveland had thrashed around plenty at first, but when Strader had shown him the gun for the second time—making it clear, in his low voice, that he wouldn’t hesitate to keep Cleveland quiet the hard way—the kid had settled down. Meanwhile, Hartsdale was being as good as gold.
On the monitors, Strader could see ten men—there must be a separate women’s event—being led out onto the pitch. He tried not to look for too long—the sight of that blubber, undulating its way forward, the sweat on those pink and brown rolls of flab glistening horrifically in the sunlight, it all made him want to be sick. But the arrival of the competitors onto the field of play meant that all the spectators—the lucky 100,000—were now in the stands, which meant things were probably getting ugly outside. He could expect Prowse and Ramirez pretty soon.
Strader turned back to the sorting machine, watching it count up the last of the thousands and hundreds—a few fifties—as they came in, sorting them neatly into bricks of cold cash for the convenience of the bank they’d never arrive at. The skin-suit, which he’d laid out on the floor, was packed tightly with the various denominations, the fleshy latex or neoprene or whatever the hell it was straining a little at the joints and seams. True to Mooney’s word, it weighed about six hundred pounds—it’d take all three of them to lift it, once the other two got here.
All notes, of course. Strader had been a little worried about the amount of coinage that was coming through at first—the one, two and five cred tokens, cast in heavy plasteel, that were clattering down a side chute on the machine and into separate bins. Since they couldn’t take it with them, every coin that tumbled down into those bins might mean less profit once the score was divided up, and with Rico unlikely to want less than his already mammoth share, that meant less to pay off the Cowboy at the end of all this. Then again, the queue snaked past several vending machines, all connected in the same way the ticket booths were, and there were the automatic bars and snack machines inside the Herc to think of as well—people mostly used coins for those, so maybe it worked out. They’d find out when they got back to Mooney’s hab, their temporary safe house—always assuming they made it out alive and with the cash in hand.
There was still everything to play for.
Strader froze, cocking his head, listening—and then pointed his gun back at Cleveland. The kid’s eyes went wide, and he almost cried out into the gag—until Strader put a finger to his lips. He’d heard the sound of footsteps in the corridor outside—not the squeak of the security guards’ plastic soles, but something much heavier. The tramp of a Judge boot.
His eyes flicked to the side, checking on Phil Hartsdale, making sure he was going to be good too—then narrowed. Phil—good old Phil, the smart one, who’d followed orders like a pro—wasn’t moving. And he hadn’t moved for a few minutes now. He took a step forward and leant down, putting two fingers against Phil’s thick neck, feeling for a pulse.
Nothing.
Phil was dead. Could be anything from a heart attack to a brain embolism, but he’d had it without making a sound. Even in death, he hadn’t made any trouble. Well, almost no trouble—Strader sniffed the air, detecting the faint but unmistakable odour of human feces.
And now Strader had a problem, because Corey Cleveland had been watching all this. And he’d worked it out.
Suddenly, he was thrashing again, banging his heels against the floor, the back of his head against the wall, making what sound he could through his nose—anything to try and get the attention of the heavy footsteps passing the door. Strader cursed under his breath and gave Cleverland a hard backhand—no dice. It just made him flail around more.
The footsteps were right outside now—and if the Judge on the other side of the door tried the handle, or noticed the dead keypad, it was all up. Cleveland’s eyes were bulging with the effort—he was doing his best the scream his lungs out into the gag. Now that Hartsdale was dead, there’d be no calming him.
Strader hesitated for a moment, weighing the risks—then put a single bullet through Cleveland’s left eye and into his brain. The silencer helped, but there was no such thing as a silent gun—if you were close enough to the sound, you’d know exactly what it was you’d heard.
The heavy footsteps stopped.
Strader held the gun on the door, trying not to look at Cleveland leaking onto the carpet.
The handle of the door began to move.
The moment stretched. Strader’s eyes flicked up at the monitor, a flash of movement—
—and he saw that the camera was panning over the crowds, that they were panicking, running, stampeding. Rising out of one of the stands was a plume of smoke.
There was a crackle of static outside the door—the shrill sound of an order barked—and the heavy footsteps took off down the corridor at a run.
Strader slumped against the wall and let go a long, ragged breath.
Sixteen
THROUGH THE DINER window, Mooney watched the news spread through the queues—there were no more tickets, the last lucky sucker had been let in, they’d spent hours standing in line like geeks for nothing at all—and he wondered if the riot would kick itself off without him.
Then he exploded.
The diner window blew out, sending spinning chunks of glass shrapnel out into the street, to slice through faces, bodies, throats and arteries. A vast swathe of people pushed forward, terrified and screaming—and the rest of the crowd pushed angrily back against them.
The riot was on.
Seventeen
IT TOOK A lot of effort for Rico not to laugh. The timing had been absolutely beautiful—he’d seen Tellerman, smiling his saintly smile up in the back seats, and Muttox pushing his way through the same row, daystick at the ready, yelling at a couple of young juves fighting over a mock-ice. And he’d realised there would never, ever be a better moment than this.
All it took was pressing a fingertip into the right pouch on his belt. Rocky had gone up in Muttox’s face, spraying him like a water balloon across the stands, along with a nice
clutch of bystanders. Now that whole section of the crowd was a big, beautiful, gory mess, and chaos reigned—it wasn’t like Muttox would have been particularly effective at controlling things, but with him splattered all over the ad hoardings, it really was headless chicken time.
With a mighty effort, Rico somehow kept his face straight as he watched two of the contestants barge their way off the stage and try to force themselves through the screaming crowd, trampling and smothering them with their bellies. What a way to go. And meanwhile, on stage, the largest of the contenders—Dale ‘The Whale’ Tucky, known in Texas City as the man with the biggest heart in competitive eating—had died of a massive coronary, brought on by the stress. So much for that theory, Rico thought. A couple more of the fatties had taken advantage of the confusion to start in on their first round of food—when the referee tried to stop them, the larger of the two punched him in the eye.
It really was Christmas.
Now it was all up to Strader and his people. If they didn’t screw this up, Rico would be fifty million creds richer by sundown—assuming he let them live to enjoy their share.
He wondered if now was a good time to check in on his investment.
Eighteen
STRADER OPENED THE money room door to the sound of the secret knock. Shave and a haircut, two creds—an oldie but a goodie.
“Prowse is back at the ambulance. We’re parked near the fire door—holy Jovus, what the hell happened here?” Ramirez stared at the bodies as he pushed the hover-stretcher into the room. Without taking his eyes off them, he handed Strader the paramedic’s uniform they’d stolen for him when they’d heisted the getaway vehicle. It didn’t quite fit, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. “Didn’t they know to keep quiet?”
Strader shrugged, pulling off his black shirt. “One of them died, the other didn’t like it. It doesn’t matter. Come on, grab the bag—”
“Wait.” Ramirez was looking down at the skin-bag, the dead fat man Strader had painstakingly built out of rubber and money. The belly was still unzipped, thick wads of green poking out through it. Idly, Ramirez popped a cube of sugar onto his tongue, crunching down on it. “There’s room for more.”
Strader shook his head curtly as he shrugged the bulky paramedic jacket on, irritated that the lean-faced man had even brought the subject up. Technically, he was right—there was space left for more money, if there’d been any more money—but that was neither here nor there. “Doesn’t matter. There is no more. I packed up every bit of paper that came through here—even the tens, for Grud’s sake. Now, can we get moving before—”
“What about that?” Ramirez cocked his head, pointing a thin finger at the coin bins. Without another word, he started grabbing handfuls of coins from the five-cred bin, shovelling them into the empty spaces in the skin-bag.
“What the hell are you—” Strader couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He grabbed hold of Ramirez’s shoulder, trying to pull him away, and Ramirez shrugged him off. The thin man had and aggrieved look on his dour little face.
“Watch where you’re puttin’ them hands, man. Don’t come here to be pawed by you.”
Strader just stared, dumbfounded. “Ramirez—those are five-cred coins—”
“So? There’s room.” He honestly didn’t seem to understand what Strader was talking about. Dear Grud, where had he come from? Was this his first ever job? “More the merrier, right?”
“Listen to me. The weight—”
“Hover-stretcher can take it. And we can take our time—the Jays are gonna be busy for a while, right? I mean, it’s crazy out there. Like, all-out war.” He shot Strader a look of total contempt and carried on ladling great handfuls of heavy, clattering metal into the bag. “Don’t help me or nothin’. Cheez.”
Slowly, the skin-bag grew fatter, the seams bulging until it seemed barely human even by the grotesque standards of the contestants. When Ramirez finally decided he’d packed enough in—somewhere in the region of five thousand creds, Strader figured; chickenfeed—they could barely get the thing onto the stretcher, which dipped dangerously at one corner. “There, see?” Ramirez said, looking angrily at Strader. “Now we got a bonus. No thanks to you.”
Strader considered punching him in the face. Or shooting him in the head. Or walking out the door and never coming back—if he stripped the paramedic outfit back off, he could slip into whatever madness was happening outside and be lost forever, or at least for a little while. But he knew these weren’t real options. He wasn’t a professional anymore—maybe he hadn’t been since Texas City, or even before that. He was just another gun-happy idiot who thought he was a thief.
The hell with it. At least he had the chance to be a rich idiot. “Come on, let’s get this back to the ambo.”
Nineteen
BUT THE AMBO wasn’t there.
It was flipped over on its side a little way up the street, on fire. Prowse was hanging out of the side window, badly burned, with her brains blown out.
Standing nearby, Lawgiver smoking—a lone figure amidst the chaos on the streets—was Rico Dredd. He turned to look Strader in the eye.
He wasn’t smiling.
“Cheez—” Ramirez gasped, letting go of the stretcher. Without both of them to keep it under control, the overloaded stretcher tipped over, spilling the rubber corpse out onto the street. Weakened by the mass of the coins, a seam in one armpit split, tearing a fissure up the side of the thing, spilling a great torrent of creds out into the gutter. “It’s a double-cross—“
Strader didn’t think so. That had always been on the cards, but not like this, not out in the open. But Ramirez was already reaching into the paramedic’s jacket for the squat, black snubnose he kept there—and then he was dead, toppling back onto the mountain of spilled notes, a red geyser bursting from the centre of his forehead.
“I know you from somewhere, creep,” Rico said, his face twisted into an unfamiliar scowl. He really didn’t seem to know who Strader was. Like they’d never met. Strader had never seen Rico’s face look quite like that before—set like stone into a grim, unyielding frown that didn’t seem to move. “Raise ’em.”
Strader didn’t move. He couldn’t. It was impossible, it couldn’t be, but—but he had seen that look before. At the jeweller’s. The jeweller’s where Rico said he didn’t think they’d met. That Strader must be thinking of someone else.
Oh, Grud, Strader thought.
Oh, Grud, there are two of them.
Part Four
Twenty
DREDD HAD KNOWN something was off from the start.
The ambulance had arrived almost the moment the riot began—about thirty seconds after the bomb went off in the diner. A private ambulance at that; while it was conceivable, even probable, that some eldster in the middle of the violence had hit an aid-call button, the response time was way too fast. Civilian ambulances didn’t have access to the special Department-Only lanes, so they could take up to half an hour longer than a judicial med-team.
So there was that. Then you had the one paramedic staying and keeping the engine running while the other went in through the fire doors. Not exactly standard procedure.
“Something wrong over there,” he’d mentioned to Friedricks.
“You think?” Friedricks was busy. The whole paved area in front of the Kool Herc Infernodrome was a mass of bodies—running, screaming, fighting, doing anything they felt they could get away with. Always the same story—scratch a cit and underneath you’d find a perp. Give them an inch and they’d take whatever wasn’t nailed down. Friedricks hauled a woman off her husband—she’d been trying to drown him in one of the decorative fountains—and cracked her upside the head with a daystick. “I swear to Grud, whoever owns the Herc is doing time for this. I don’t give a damn who rubber-stamped this nonsense—as far as I’m concerned, they should go down too.”
Dredd nodded. “Maybe.” He lashed out with his own daystick, snapping the wrist of a creep with a broken bottle. He had one eye on the a
mbulance, in the distance. It was still idling, and the driver—a tough-looking woman with a distinctive tattoo on her lower arm—was leaning out of her window, watching the fire doors intently.
Dredd snapped his helmet mic into place. “Control—I need records of paramedics and drivers working for Well-Wish Incorporated—the private medical firm. List any with dragon tattoos on the left arm. And run the plate—” He squinted, focussing, and read the number off, before driving his fist into the face of an old man who’d drawn a sword from his cane. “I’ll wait.”
Morley—a heavyset Judge in his thirties who fancied himself next in line for Koslowski’s job—rolled his eyes. He was trying to get the cuffs on a juve without breaking the kid’s arm, and it didn’t look like he was going to manage it. “You don’t got enough to do, junior? Crem, kid, settle down—”
“Crime doesn’t stop just because we’re busy, Morley.” Dredd brought the end of the daystick down hard on the juve’s right temple—he went out like a light.
Control was back in his ear. “No records of any dragon tats, Dredd. Plate number comes up as stolen—missing since two days ago.”
Dredd nodded to himself. Friedricks and Morley were trying to stop a young girl being slashed in the face by what looked like her twin sister—their hands were full. A quick glance confirmed the other Judges on the scene were engaged and unavailable for backup.
Which was fine by him.
“You in the stolen ambulance!” he bellowed. “Out and on the ground! Now!” The woman with the tattoo stared at him—white as a ghost—then gunned the engine into gear and tried to peel out, wheels spinning on the roadway, kicking up smoke.