The Final Cut

by Matthew Smith

  JUDGE DREDD:

  THE FINAL CUT

  "Dredd!" Trager's shout came a fraction too late.

  A perp had jumped onto one of the boxes and pointed a sawn-off shotgun in the lawman's direction, letting off a deafening blast. Dredd threw himself sideways, feeling the high-calibre ammo shred the back of his uniform and pepper his skin with buckshot. He rolled, twisted and fired in one movement, pumping the trigger of his Lawgiver, but the pain igniting his back threw his aim off as he drilled a series of holes in the wall before catching the creep in the leg, shattering his kneecap. He squealed and dropped to the ground behind a stack of boxes, but Dredd sensed he wasn't out of the game just yet.

  Trager scuttled alongside him, ducking low, and laid a hand on the senior Judge's shoulder. "Bad?" he asked.

  "Had worse," Dredd answered, looking back and seeing a fine spray of his blood on the wall. "More pressing, spugwit ain't finished with us. I think I just winged him."

  "OK, stay here. I'll deal with him."

  "You're worse off than I am."

  "Yeah, but I'm younger than you, old man. I carry it better."

  "Shame your instincts weren't sharper. You might've spotted the punk earlier before he nearly plugged me."

  JUDGE DREDD

  #1: DREDD VS DEATH

  Gordon Rennie

  #2: BAD MOON RISING

  David Bishop

  #3: BLACK ATLANTIC

  Simon Jowett & Peter J Evans

  #4: ECLIPSE

  James Swallow

  #5: KINGDOM OF THE BLIND

  David Bishop

  #6: THE FINAL CUT

  Matthew Smith

  #7: SWINE FEVER

  Andrew Cartmel

  #8: WHITEOUT

  James Swallow

  #9: PSYKOGEDDON

  Dave Stone

  MORE 2000 AD ACTION

  JUDGE ANDERSON

  #1: FEAR THE DARKNESS - Mitchel Scanlon

  #2: RED SHADOWS - Mitchel Scanlon

  #3: SINS OF THE FATHER - Mitchel Scanlon

  THE ABC WARRIORS

  #1: THE MEDUSA WAR - Pat Mills & Alan Mitchell

  DURHAM RED

  #1: THE UNQUIET GRAVE - Peter J Evans

  ROGUE TROOPER

  #1: CRUCIBLE - Gordon Rennie

  STRONTIUM DOG

  #1: BAD TIMING - Rebecca Levene

  FIENDS OF THE EASTERN FRONT - David Bishop

  #1: OPERATION VAMPYR

  #2: THE BLOOD RED ARMY

  #3: TWILIGHT OF THE DEAD

  For Lucy.

  A 2000 AD PUBLICATION

  www.abaddonbooks.com

  www.2000adonline.com

  1098 7 65 4321

  Cover illustration by Dylan Teague.

  Copyright © 2005 Rebellion A/S. All rights reserved.

  All 2000 AD characters and logos © and TM Rebellion A/S."Judge Dredd" is a registered trademark in the United States and other jurisdictions."2000 AD" is a registered trademark in certain jurisdictions. All rights reserved. Used under licence.

  ISBN(.epub): 978-1-84997-057-0

  ISBN(.mobi): 978-1-84997-098-3

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  JUDGE DREDD

  THE FINAL CUT

  MATTHEW SMITH

  Judge Dredd created by John Wagner & Carlos Ezquerra.

  Chief Judge Hershey created by John Wagner & Brian Bolland.

  MEGA-CITY ONE, 2126

  PROLOGUE:

  LIFE, AND AFTER

  Of all the wounds on Emmylou Engels's body, it was the three-inch slash across her throat that had ended her life. As the blood fountained from her severed jugular, it had taken her last breath with it, her lungs emptying into open air with a soft rasping hiss like a punctured tyre. Her mouth had been bound with tape, so she died with barely a sound. Her nostrils flared, her eyes bulged, then rolled up into their sockets, but any cries died at source. Her feet kicked a brief rhythm on the cold plascrete floor, but she was firmly held and seconds later ceased all movement. Emmylou was two weeks shy of her twenty-fourth birthday when her arteries spewed their red spray in a five-foot parabola, a distance that everyone who'd seen it later agreed was impressive.

  And yet that cut was the kindest she'd received in the five hours between groggily opening her eyes and the light dimming from them forever. It had been administered by a strong hand that wielded the knife with authority and skill. In truth, she'd prayed for a death blow long before she was granted one. Her torso and arms were a patchwork of abrasions caused by a plethora of instruments, from a pair of pliers to several lit cigarettes. They had used some kind of small chainsaw to cut off her left leg just above the knee - one of the goons held the limb aloft like a trophy, only to drop it because his hands were slippery with blood - and she had blacked out for several blissful minutes. Slapped back into consciousness, she wondered if she would go insane. The prospect of being able to crawl away into a dark hole in her brain and shut out the atrocities being wrought upon her person was welcoming. Her mind, however, remained typically, screamingly rational. Emmylou's mother had always said her daughter had no imagination.

  So torture piled upon torture, in all its cruel ingenuity. Sometimes her captors improvised and sometimes they followed strict orders, but they never addressed her personally, never yelled abuse in her face, or indeed seemed to be aware that she was a living human being at all. Their faces bore the expressions of professionally bored people who had done this sort of thing many times before, and would continue to do so long after she was just a faded crimson stain on the seat of the chair they had strapped her to. She was just a body, upon which pain was to be conveniently writ in big, bold and deep red marks.

  And once that sharp steel had parted the flesh from her throat, that's all she'd become: a body. Her lifeless form was of no use to them anymore, and so her bloodied husk was untied and dragged away to join the five others in the back of the small, black speedster van parked outside. Emmylou was the last to be loaded, and the evening's work needed disposing of.

  It was like a mobile abattoir in there: limbs entwined, vermilion streaks painting the walls, the corpses tumbling together with the motion of the vehicle as it drove through the city, headlamps from passing cars occasionally shining against the darkened windows and highlighting a glazed eye impassively staring up from the tangle of corpses. The two-man team charged with dump duty knew the route and the course of action intimately, and they worked quietly and efficiently.

  They arrived at their destination, the cloud-heavy night sky adequately concealing their task from passers-by. They backed the van up to the chem-pit, opened the doors and began to empty the contents. Although the furnace of the pit would have been enough to destroy the cadavers' clothes, the men knew enough about Justice Department procedures not to take the chance, and began to remove any personal effects that would identify them too easily. If they had had the time, they would have removed all the teeth and fingertips - those that still remained - but complete dismemberment was a luxury they couldn't afford. Anyone with any experience of disarticulation knew just how long and tiring it was to take apart a human body, so they would just have to rely on the dissolving qualities of the chemicals in the pit. Similar sites had proved useful for such purposes and there was no real reason for the Judges to come sniffing around here, provided they were careful.
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  Except...

  Perhaps it was the heat. The night was sultry and the seething surface of the chem-pit ratcheted up the temperature by a good twenty degrees. Perhaps it was because one of the men was unknowingly incubating a viral infection. Perhaps he was worrying about his kid's eye operation in a couple of days' time. A lapse of concentration can usually be traced to a specific point of origin, from which the consequences ripple outwards and all tales take flight.

  Whatever the cause, the man in question paused for a moment in his work to wipe his brow, and dirt, blood and sweat smeared across his forehead. The fumes stung his eyes and made his saliva taste bitter on his tongue. His partner looked up from rolling a corpse down the bank and into the chemical soup and admonished him for his slowness. He whispered at him to pick up the pace, reminding him what the boss would do to them if they fouled up. The first man didn't need telling twice, but still the heat made him dizzy and he stumbled as he finally pulled Emmylou's body from the van in his haste to be finished. He stripped her quickly, removing two rings from her fingers, and squinted through streaming eyes to check for any other belongings. His colleague slammed the van's back doors and hissed at him again to hurry.

  Head pounding and a sickness rising in his chest, the man angrily released Emmylou without a second thought and she rolled down the bank, following where the others had gone into the greenish-yellow cocktail of substances. The bubbling surface closed over her form, accepting her into its fiery embrace, and by the time the van had disappeared into the darkness, all trace of her had vanished from sight.

  Already the mix of chemicals was at work on the bodies, disassembling atoms. Marrow cooked and meat sloughed off bone. It would take several weeks for the cadavers to be reduced to little more than a liquid film on the boiling surface, but the soft parts were quick to be eaten away: the skin, lips, eyes, cartilage. Emmylou's right ear was gradually separating itself from the side of her skull, now not much more than a discoloured globule. But within it, where it had been hidden by the top of the lobe, was a titanium stud. The man who'd stripped and dumped her had missed it with his cursory glance, his mind on other things. And there it remained, a hard, black rock amidst her transient flesh. While the woman she had been collapsed around it, her earring resisted any corrupting touch.

  The earring had been given to her by her boyfriend, Callum, shortly before she left the Pan-African States for the Big Meg. He'd said he wanted her to have something that she would carry around forever - necklaces could be broken, rings mislaid. But the stud would always be there, a permanent reminder. At the time, she'd found the sentiment touching, if a little overbearing. She'd never been one for overt displays of romantic sentiment and discouraged Callum from acting too much like a simp over her, but secretly she loved the attention. He could well have been the one she would end up throwing her lot in with, she'd decided, and never intended her move to Mega-City One to last more than a couple of years. The plan was that she'd make some creds, get her face known around the studios, prove herself as an actress, then decamp back to her home country with the weight of experience behind her and watch the offers come flooding in. As a rule, the money was in MC-1, but their pictures were loud and dumb. Emmylou fancied herself maturing into a dignified elder thespian of the holographic image - a Guinevere Cathcart, for instance, or a Dame Marjorie Pickering. Sedate, respectable films, where she didn't have to scream at some big rubber monster for days on end, or shed her clothes at opportune moments.

  Emmylou's parents had supported her career choice from the beginning, though in truth they felt she was a rotten actress (a view held by the majority who'd seen her performances in the handful of movies she'd actually had speaking parts in). Dudley and Janice Engels knew enough about their daughter's ambition not to even try to stand in her way, despite their reservations about the limitations of her talent and the unreliability of show business. Fourteen years ago, in Brit-Cit, Emmylou's fifteen year-old sister Roxanne had, for reasons unknown - though the Judges attributed it to Lemming Syndrome - leapt from the bedroom window of apartment 2234/B Nicholas Blake Block where the Engelses had lived all their lives. She fell to her death on the pedway thirty stories below. Ten year-old Emmylou was watching cartoons at the time. Dudley and Janice - driven by grief and a strange, shapeless guilt - had initiated a move from the country of their births to make a new life as far away as possible in Pan-Africa, and ploughed all their energies into always making sure their surviving daughter's wishes were granted.

  Emmylou never wanted anything else but to appear on the Tri-D: she wanted to attend the premieres, wanted the glamour, the illicit affairs with her dashing leading men, the column inches written about her. She wanted all this to stoke the fires of her own vanity, sure, but she also wanted to give the trappings back to her parents, in a kind of reciprocal show of love. Once she had the wealth, she would get them out of their shabby, cramped apartment and fix them up somewhere as befitting the mother and father of a superstar.

  Needless to say, none of it turned out like it does in the movies. After a long period of inactivity, firing off her expensive publicity pics to every studio in New Nairobi, all she got was a succession of bit-parts in dubious, low-rent quickies that wouldn't be appearing on her CV anytime soon. She eventually had to sack two successive agents for repeatedly putting her name down for unsuitable material.

  She wanted to be taken seriously as an artist, but for some reason she couldn't break out of the Z-grade ghetto. It wasn't as if she was the archetypal blonde, with an arresting cleavage and a breathy voice, the sort that seemed to drift towards trash as if driven by a hardwired homing device. But apparently she had a homeliness about her - or so she was told by embarrassingly transparent directors - that would endear her to a large proportion of their audience. She was "the girl next door" or "the childhood sweetheart", and by the way how did she feel about taking her top off for the beach party scene?

  This wasn't how she had envisioned an actor's life. It was just cheap and tawdry. The films she reluctantly took roles in - Hard Justice VIII: Caught Handling Swollen Goods, The Day They Took My Son Away, Frat Party Massacre II, Confessions of a Resyk Assistant, Blood Worms of the Meteor - were funded by shady Euro-Cit producers and made in the full knowledge that they were rubbish by the very people putting them together. They believed that filling the shelves with crap product was better than no product at all.

  It was dispiriting, but she found her fellow thespians shared the same laissez faire attitude, reasoning that they were lucky to have jobs at all. It was one step up from vidverts, and if the producers had any more money they would be using digitally generated models, and so could do away with the inconvenient human livestock altogether. When her third agent rang her to say that he'd got her a part in Death Block: The Block That Eats, she realised something had to be done.

  To the desperate, Mega-City One can seem like a place of golden opportunity. As it was becoming apparent Emmylou wasn't going to break into the upper stream of quality Tri-D movies on her own terms, she considered maybe a change of scene was required. Film lore often spoke of unknowns being plucked from obscurity to become the toast of the Big Meg; all it took was one breakout part and some clever PR, making sure she was seen with all the right people.

  She'd discussed the possibility with her new beau Callum, whom she'd met on the set of a washing powder vidvert - she was the ecstatically pleased young housewife, he the smarmy salesman - which, despite the romantic outcome, she thought represented her lowest ebb and demonstrated just how far she had fallen from her original lofty ambitions. Ironically, her parents were quietly proudest of this piece of work, beaming at the Tri-D screen every time she appeared in an ad break.

  Callum had been ploughing a similar furrow to hers for the past couple of years, trading on his good looks, boyish charm and, most importantly, his willingness to take virtually any role that was offered to him.

  Her boyfriend thought the idea of moving to MC-1 made sense, if that wa
s what she really wanted. He couldn't go with her because he had a sick father to care for, but he could see that fame was something she yearned for. Where it left their relationship was left unspoken - she imagined herself returning to him full of star-struck tales, and he sensed that as soon as her first invite arrived for a glitzy premiere, he would be the next, new citizen of Dumpsville.

  Three months later, Emmylou said farewell to her parents and Callum at the spaceport. She would get a flight to Brit-Cit, then change onto the zoom train that would take her through the Atlantic Tunnel and on to the North American metropolis. She'd found herself a room lodging with a landlady in one of the southern sectors, and early in-roads into finding work over there had yielded promising results. Callum gave her the earring, and she felt her eyes filling up. They told each other that they would speak every day, though neither of them truly believed it at the time. In fact, it all felt weirdly like something was coming to a close, but they couldn't have possibly guessed where Emmylou's final destination lay. Callum kissed her on the lips for the last time ever and she passed through the departure gate. She turned and waved once, and was gone.

  Throughout the journey, she fretted that she had made the right decision; Mega-City One was as famous for its levels of crime and violence as it was for its size and population. Horror stories filtered across through the Pan-African media: tales of supernatural ghouls murdering citizens in their thousands, of wars and disasters, of attempted coups and the harsh brutality of living under the Mega-City Judicial system. Halfway beneath the ocean bed, she began to feel homesick and wondered if she had sacrificed everything meaningful in her life for a shot at something so transitory and insubstantial.