13.13 pm
“JOVIS, DAX, YOU seen this?” Bonedog pointed from the bench in Scott Potasnik plaza. They all turned and stood as one.
“Holy drokk,” Sheema breathed.
The pat-wagon rumbled into the thoroughfare between Meyer and McCluskey and came to a halt, the Judges dismounting and spreading out. Even from this distance, the scatterblasters the badges were wielding looked huge, intimidating. The jays meant business.
Bonedog glanced down at the snubnose he’d been twirling on his finger, then hurriedly stuffed it in his pants. They’d been taking potshots at batgliders for the last couple of hours, held up some dinks on the pedway and scored a few creds, which Dax had used to purchase half a dozen grams of sugar off the Candyman. The gun falling into their laps had felt like a stroke of luck, a means to have a little fun. Now it was impossibly heavy, a millstone that he wanted to discard as soon as he could. Dax saw him sweat and fidget nervously.
“Relax,” she said, turning her attention back to the helmets. They seemed to be going door to door, rousting the bums from the entrances. “They ain’t gonna turn out in force like this for a stolen piece of hardware. Probably don’t even know we got it. They must’ve come for the bluejay.”
“But he saw us,” Sheema said. “Remember? He saw you take it, Dax. What if he fingers us, reports us for not calling it in?”
“Will you calm down? He’d just had the stuffing kicked out of him, he ain’t gonna remember shit.” All the same, Dax was worried. She should’ve known pilfering the weapon would be bad news, but she couldn’t help herself. To be honest, she hadn’t expected the Judge to have made it; she would’ve anticipated the Furies or the MC to have taken care of a wounded badge without much trouble. She assumed he was still alive, that that was what this was all about: officer down, back-up required. Kid must have some sand to have survived this far.
“Reckon we should dump it,” Juice remarked. “Lose it before the jays track it to us.”
“Just don’t blow your cool, okay?” Dax was insistent, as much for her own benefit.
“Easy for you to say,” Bonedog scoffed.
“I’ll take it, you’re so scared.” Bonedog surreptitiously passed it to her, and she jammed it in her belt, pulling her vest-top over it. “Jays ain’t lookin’ for us. Long as we stay under the radar, nobody does nothin’ stupid, we’ll be all right—”
It was at that moment that the first firebomb came arcing out of Meyer and exploded in front of the pat-wagon.
13.15 pm
THEY CLIMBED IN silence and darkness for several long minutes before they reached a service door that Dredd had to shoulder repeatedly until it buckled enough for them to squeeze through. They came out on a middle level, quietly relieved to be back on firm ground. Under the grimy ceiling-mounted fluorescents, Saunders could finally see the damage that Dredd had inflicted upon himself in the jump from the el roof: a deep gouge between the shoulder blades, the uniform soaked in blood. His right arm was also hanging oddly, limp and unmoving against his side.
“Christ, Dredd, what’s happened to your arm?”
He glanced at it, brought his left hand round and tested the unresponsive limb. “Took the full weight of both of us on this side. Pulled it from its socket, I think.”
“You climbed the ladder with it like that?” she asked incredulously.
“Wasn’t easy, admittedly.”
“Here, let me,” she said, stepping forward and firmly placing one palm on his bicep, the other on his shoulder. “On three.” She got as far as ‘one’ before she slammed his arm back into place. Dredd yelled like she’d never heard him respond before, a primal cry of pain that he must have been desperate to let out. The kid had been through so much, borne so much, that this latest physical trauma needed some release. The sharp, guttural roar was over in a second, and he looked angry with himself for having given voice to his agony, like it was a display of weakness. She got the impression that any emotion should be buried deep down inside, that it was a betrayal of his own personal code to allow it to escape. It couldn’t be healthy, she thought—if he kept this up, in a few years he’d be a roiling mess of stifled fear and anger that would see him either retreat within himself completely, or quit.
He pulled away, but nodded nevertheless in gratitude. “Appreciate it.”
“You’ve got a hell of a wound on your back, too.”
“I’m aware. It’ll have to wait.”
“It might not, if you’re losing blood.”
“Just one more deadline we gotta beat, then.” He motioned towards the el doors. “Lift’s out of action. Are the stairs going to be viable from this point?”
“Yeah, Winstanley didn’t bother controlling access this far south.”
“Guess we’re walking.”
In fact they ran, as much as they were able, half-tumbling down the emergency stairs, Dredd losing his footing occasionally but waving off support and indicating that Saunders should concentrate on her own descent. They’d gone down nine flights when gunfire striated the wall, ricocheting off the metal bannisters, forcing them to retreat and hunker down—a six-man group of Murder Corps members came streaming up in the other direction, stutter-rifles blazing. They had them pinned down. Dredd managed to take out one with a well-aimed shot down the stairwell, but they had the numbers; a sustained barrage kept the Judges from manoeuvring into a better position to return fire. Dredd tried his belt pouches, but came up empty of stumm grenades, or indeed anything else: Winstanley’s men had been thorough.
“Any ideas?” Saunders asked.
“They’re being paid to get the flashdrive back,” Dredd answered. “We could give it to them.”
“That’s not going to stop them killing us.”
“No, but it might make them pause.” He ejected the clip from his automatic, and held out his hand for Saunders’ blaster, which she passed over reluctantly, eyebrow raised. “Tip from my final-year firearms instructor,” he said. Then he shuffled over to the edge of the step they were perched on, waited until there was a lull and called down, “You want the memory stick? It’s yours.”
There was no response, so Dredd tossed the clip, which clattered down onto the next landing, then drew a bead on it with the blaster. They heard murmuring, and shadows moving up from the level beneath. The lawman waited until he saw the first MC meathead edge within a couple of feet of the landing, then fired, the slug striking the clip dead-centre; the bullets detonated, becoming a bright fireball. Screams and curses echoed up the stairwell, and Dredd took advantage of the chaos, standing to shoot down the stairs. He put one perp down, still beating flames from his clothes, and another two followed, too stunned by the explosion to seek shelter. Saunders used the covering fire to retrieve one of the dead men’s stutter-rifles and found a corner to take out the remainder. Once the last body hit the deck, the two Judges regrouped and collected as much ammo as they could carry.
“Remind me to thank your tutor,” she said, pocketing a handful of clips.
“Died two months ago,” Dredd replied, chambering a round. “Random drive-by.” He looked around at the distant thud of explosions outside the block. “Let’s keep moving.”
Eight
13.21 pm
THE SPECIAL TACTICS unit was coming under fire from both sides, and had fallen back to regroup at the pat-wagon. Pools of liquid flame were scattered around them, courtesy of the improvised weapons thrown from above. It seemed the Russ Meyer Furies and the Len McCluskey Murder Corps had buried the hatchet and joined forces to repel the Judges—the jays hadn’t been down on Strickland like this for years, hadn’t shown any interest in the cits that scraped a living amongst the half-ruined towers of the old city. If they thought they could move into the estate in force, start throwing their weight around, they had another think coming.
Jeb Rawlings watched from his vantage point as the helmets sought cover behind the wagon, their progress impeded by the automatic gunfire tearing up the rockcrete between the tw
o blocks. He knew why they were here: they’d been sent in to extract the badge that had turned up this morning. Quite why he deserved the overkill treatment, Rawlings didn’t know, but the jays sure were keen to pull him out. Rawlings should’ve had his head by now—he’d promised Gilpig as much—but now things were getting messy, which wasn’t going to please the councillor one bit. More witnesses, more loose ends: it was spiralling out of control. Maybe they should’ve hung back and let the ST-Div conduct their search, not drawn any more heat onto themselves, but it’s hard to deny a Fury when his blood is up—and those uniforms weren’t popular among his crew. Just the sight of a single bluejay was enough to get them riled; a fully-armoured squad rolling onto Strickland was an automatic target. It wasn’t smart, but feelings were running high.
No, Gilpig wasn’t going to be happy. He’d bet the farm on this scheme of his, and now it was unravelling, thanks to a random—seemingly indestructible, it had to be said—helmet being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was mad of the councillor to have come onto Strickland in person to deliver the codes—Rawlings had warned him about keeping a low profile—but it was typical of his paranoid arrogance that he didn’t trust anyone else to hand them over. Even then, he’d held back half the files until he was sure the Furies weren’t going to stiff him, which, ironically, had been his undoing—if the jay hadn’t found the zipdrive in Gilpig’s car, then they wouldn’t have been put in this position.
To be fair, his mistrust wasn’t entirely misplaced; Rawlings had been contemplating selling on the codes to the highest bidder (someone who could’ve made better use of black-market treemeat cargo), much preferring the immediate creds to the long-term plan Gilpig had in mind. It had sounded impressive, and could’ve meant serious paydirt in the future, but the gang leader wasn’t that patient; it would’ve been years before they saw a return on the risk they were taking. All very well for the councillor to shut himself away in Learner, far from the scene of the crime, while the Furies did the dirty work. He was the kind of uptown drokkwad who saw the people of Sector 9 as nothing more than variables in a potentially lucrative project. Why should their feelings come into the matter when there was an area that needed gentrifying?
Rawlings had done a five-stretch in the same iso-block as a knucklehead who later became one of the politician’s minders; Bertram wasn’t picky about where he hired his muscle. Rawlings was serving time for robbery, the goon a manslaughter rap. When Gilpig wanted a contact in Strickland, the chief Fury got the call—and when he’d heard what the councillor had to say, he told him to go to hell. But in the end, greed won out.
Still, all moot now. The jays were going to call for reinforcements if they got beaten here, and more waves of Judges would be on their way: the gangs would be pummelled into submission by the sheer weight of Grand Hall forces, and the trail of evidence would lead back to Gilpig, who would be looking at thirty years. There’d be questions asked about who he had leaked the transporter codes to, and a major internal review—heads would roll, security access would be scrutinised. Ripples cascading outwards, people across the board exposed in a chain of events that originated with that one badge zeroing in on the councillor’s car. It didn’t really matter now whether they killed the jay or not; there were too many eyes on Strickland now for anyone to get away.
Part of Rawlings felt a little relieved that Gilpig’s plan wasn’t going to come to fruition. He’d been born in Meyer, and like most of the locals, hadn’t come close to escaping it. Glum acceptance led to a perverse sort of pride, an obstinate belief in keeping Strickland the way it was for the people unlucky enough to be stuck here. If he was honest, he didn’t want it bulldozed and replaced with something else, he didn’t want redevelopment, even though it would’ve set him and his brothers up for life, if Gilpig had come through on his promises. He shouldn’t feel anything for this dump, but... you grew attached.
A sharp boom as the cannon mounted on the pat-wagon took out a corner of the block, and the whole building rumbled. The helmets were forcing their way into Meyer, getting under the arc of burning bottles and rubble; the Judges knew their tactics. Within minutes they’d be coming for him—there would be nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. He doubted any quarter would be given.
As much as he wanted to preserve Strickland, he didn’t want it to forget him, either. If the jays were going to trample all over the estate, then he wasn’t going to make it easy for them. Rawlings turned from the window and woke up the laptop sitting on the table, fishing a zipdrive from his overjak pocket and plugging it in. A wash of data flooded the screen, and he flicked through it quickly, finding the time and code he’d been seeking. He started the hack program running, aware that without the other half of the codes it wasn’t going to give him much control—as a final note of payback, it was going to be untargeted and somewhat random. But needs must, he supposed.
As the numbers scrolled by and he got a lock on his particular cargo vessel, Rawlings considered the deal with the Devil that had brought him to this point, and wondered which of them was the innocent party seduced into corruption. He laughed, despite himself. They were all going to hell, he thought. Every damn one of them.
13.26 pm
MCCLUSKEY WAS DESCENDING into chaos. The regular cits that still called it home were trying desperately not to be caught in the crossfire between the Judges and the Murder Corps, who were lobbing firebombs and using any window available to open fire on the officers on the ground. If Dredd had hoped that he and Saunders could pass through the panicking throng unmolested, he was disappointed—if anything, the MC were more hopped up on destruction than before. Maybe they recognised that they never had any realistic chance of withstanding a Justice Department onslaught, and were determined to go out in a blaze of glory. Perhaps they wanted to set a fire to Strickland and burn it down themselves before the jays could get close. Whichever, the madness was palpable, thick in the air as much as the stink of gasoline and oily smoke. But they evidently hadn’t forgotten they were meant to be finding Dredd, and whenever the pair was spotted they had to take cover from guns and blasters, punching chunks out of the plaster walls haphazardly. The uniform was making him a target.
Every delay dealing with these attacks was critical. As far as Saunders could see, her companion was growing paler by the minute, the blood loss becoming more acute. His breath was shallow, and his attempts to cover up his pain were less and less convincing. The MC were becoming increasingly wanton in their violence, and the Wally Squad Judge found that taking them out was not especially difficult; Dredd’s aim, however, was deteriorating, his left hand wobbling. She blew holes in the latest two creeps and before they’d hit the dirt pulled Dredd into the corridor to continue their descent. But the young Judge resisted this time, his attention elsewhere, and instead walked through the open door into a vacated apartment. She barked his name a couple of times, and when she received no acknowledgement, she followed him, sighing. A figure was silhouetted against the window on the far wall, watching the insanity outside.
“Maze,” Dredd murmured.
The figure didn’t turn, but the lawman could see her reflection lit by the orange glow of burning petroleum. It was impassive, mask-like. “This was my home,” she said softly. “It was everything I knew.”
“We’ll get you out of here,” Dredd replied. “Come on.”
She cast an eye over her shoulder as if only just becoming aware that there were others in the apartment with her, and shook her head. “I don’t want to leave. I belong here.”
“I promised I’d get you out. I can’t guarantee your safety if you stay. The whole building could come down.”
“You don’t have to guarantee me anything. You’re not beholden to me, Dredd. I’m just another Strickland bum; I should be doing time for vagrancy. I’m a perp, like all the others.”
“You’re a citizen. I’m sworn to protect you, regardless of your station.”
“Really? How’s that going?” She turned to face him, je
rking her head back at the window as a fresh explosion blew out a balcony across the way in Meyer. “Have you seen yourself lately? You look like you’ve been dragged through a garbage grinder ass-backwards.”
“So everyone keeps telling me. But that’s secondary to my duty, as long as this is still intact.” He tapped his badge, an echo of a gesture that Maze had made—hours? It seemed like a lifetime—earlier. “Everything else is just flesh and blood.”
“Can we have this conversation another time?” Saunders interjected. “Dredd, we need to go before you pass out, or one of us is shot, or McCluskey topples over, whichever comes first. Leave her if she wants to stay.”
“Do you want me to arrest you?” Dredd asked Maze, ignoring Saunders. “I haven’t forgotten that unlicensed firearm you’ve got about your person.”
Maze laughed, raising her arms. “One prisoner, amongst all this. Feels kind of pointless, don’t it?” As if to underline her comment, an MC gunman came crashing into the apartment, drunk on disorder. He had a moment to recognise Dredd before Saunders grabbed him by the throat, slammed him into the door frame, and swung the door repeatedly into his head until he collapsed. She rolled him into the corridor and kicked the door shut behind her.
“Okay,” the undercover officer breathed. “Now we’re getting the drokk out of here.”
“This doesn’t have to be your life,” Dredd said. He remembered hearing Jeperson’s passing remark back in Winstanley’s quarters. “Your parents abandoned you here, didn’t they?”
“No, they just never came back. Drug deal over in Earhart—must’ve gone sour. Funnily enough, the local jays didn’t assign it top priority, and Welfare didn’t quite stretch all the way down to Strickland. So I fended for myself, and McCluskey became my family. Became everything. I couldn’t leave it.”
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