Swine Fever

by Andrew Cartmel

"Already?" Zandonella couldn't believe her ears.

  "Certainly. Licensed meat dealers have sprung up overnight. And retail outlets of Wiggly Little Piggly..."

  "Wiggly Little Piggly?" Zandonella felt as if she was caught in a nightmare.

  "A new fast food franchise specialising in pork products. Their first branches opened this morning to an enthusiastic and almost rapturous reception from our citizens," O'Mannion grimaced, "who are, after all, hardly gourmets. They've been mobbing every branch as it comes on stream. There's even been rioting at a few locations when supplies of their special spicy spare ribs ran out."

  Again Zandonella felt a chill, but this time it had less to do with Porkditz and more to do with policing. By the sound of it, the populace's sudden hunger for pork was going to create some problems for the Judges.

  As if he'd read her mind, Dredd said, "It looks like it's turning into a full-blown Mega-City craze."

  O'Mannion suddenly became impatient. She rose from the sofa in a single supple movement and tossed back her mane of silver hair. "Anyway, the long and short of it is, the trade in this meat is now legal and the pigs must be returned."

  "To face captivity in factory farms?"

  "That's right," said O'Mannion coolly. "Including your little friend." She glanced towards the doorway of the kitchen where Porkditz was standing silently, snout lifted attentively from his muesli bowl as if he was listening. O'Mannion turned abruptly and walked out without saying another word.

  Dredd and Zandonella were alone in the con-apt. He looked at her. "Tough break, Judge, but the Law is the Law. The pig can stay with you until the end of the week. If you don't bring him in after that, I'll be forced to bring him in for you."

  Zandonella fought back the tears welling up in her eyes. Her voice only contained the tiniest tremor as she said, "You mentioned a detail you wanted me on."

  "Correct," said Dredd. "We're helping to police the arrival of the Cetacean Ambassador."

  Normally, Zandonella would have been proud to be requested by Dredd for an assignment. But on this Saturday morning as she rolled through the Mega-City on her Lawmaster, motorcycle she was so depressed she felt as if she was moving through a pall of gloom. Dredd was immediately ahead of her and Carver rode at her side. Darrid had apparently not been selected by Dredd for this detail. It was somewhat surprising that Carver had, after the fiasco at the factory farm. More surprising still was the presence behind them of not only Tykrist, but also her wounded sister Esma, each on their own bikes. Esma seemed perfectly in control of her powerful Lawmaster. She must have spotted Zandonella looking at her because she smiled and waved with a streak of glinting metal.

  The Med-Judges had amputated the shattered remains of Esma's hand and had replaced it with a stainless steel prosthetic while they tried to grow her a new one in the tanks, a lengthy and unreliable business. The steel hand shined at Zandonella in a sardonic little flutter. Was Esma giving her the finger? Zandonella studied the girl's face in the rear view mirror and saw Esma was smiling at her. She certainly seemed in good spirits. Maybe it was the medication, still swirling around her system. Zandonella hoped it wouldn't dull her reactions. She had a feeling that all the Judges would need to be operating at full efficiency today.

  On this ride alone Zandonella had already seen two Wiggly Little Piggly fast food outlets in flames, the result of a shortage of spare ribs combined with a volatile populace in the grip of the latest craze. Dredd and his patrol hadn't stopped to help because other Judges were already roaring to the scene. Carver had stared fretfully at the bright pink plastic of the burning buildings. The fast food joints' facades consisted of the cute pink curves of a pig's rear end with a huge spiral of pink neon representing the animal's tail. The positioning of a large serving window directly beneath the tail indicated to Zandonella what quality of food emanated from the establishments. But the Big Meg's citizens had been bitten by the bug. They were jostling in lines that extended back for entire city blocks, waiting interminably for their turn at the pig's backside serving windows - except for those unfortunate branches where food shortages had sparked rioting.

  As they drove past these places Carver wore a fretful expression entirely due to worry that all supplies of Wiggly Little Piggly products would be sold out by the time he got off duty. "I've been looking forward to some ribs ever since they were legalised this morning," he'd told Zandonella when she met him at the motor pool.

  "At midnight, to be more precise," said Tykrist.

  "At midnight plus one, to be even more precise," said her sister, flexing her new metal hand as she tested the throttle on her Lawmaster.

  "I thought you wanted salami," said Zandonella, as she checked out her own motorcycle.

  Carver shook his head. "I had my fill of that during the toxicity versus nutrition tests." She remembered that the young Judge had volunteered to be a guinea pig. Carver smiled. "Now what I want to try is the ribs."

  Now he was casting worried looks around as they drove down an access ramp past Sofia Coppola Heights. Zandonella realised the reason for his concern. They were passing the flagship branch of the Wiggly Little Piggly fast food chain, a giant pink pig's rump which had been hastily constructed on a cantilevered plateau, a slab of steel jutting horizontally from the surrounding structures. Sometimes the only way for expansion in the Mega-City was by using such retrofitted developments. This platform was strung from the side of the Carmine and Francis Ford Coppola Block and abutted onto Nicolas Cage Block. The three buildings formed a tripod of supports for the restaurant and the rectangular slab on which it sat. The fourth side of the slab faced out onto a three hundred-metre drop, the drop that Zandonella and the other Judges were now negotiating by way of the long, sloping access ramp on their Lawmasters. Above them, crowds of eager citizens were converging on the restaurant from all three of the buildings joined to the platform. It seemed Carver was nervously estimating their numbers. Zandonella eased back on her bike so she was riding beside him.

  "Trying to guess whether they'll be sold out by this evening?" she said.

  Carver flicked his worried eyes at her. "That's the biggest Wiggly in the whole of Mega-City. If they sell out there, there won't be any hope."

  "There'll always be tomorrow," said Zandonella.

  "But I want it today," moaned Carver, unsuspectingly giving voice to the mantra of the Mega-City millions who were stampeding along in the mania of this latest craze.

  "Well, I hope you manage to get hold of some."

  Carver blinked at her. "Really?"

  "Sure," said Zandonella. She didn't add that she was thinking that maybe some good would even come of it, if it led to less catastrophic flatulence from her comrade in arms. She sighed and touched the accelerator on her Lawmaster, speeding away from Carver again and dropping back into formation immediately behind Judge Dredd.

  While she'd been talking to Carver she'd tried to keep from making the connection between the greasy takeaway treat Carver was longing to try, and the living flesh on the animal she'd left snoring soundly on the carpet in her living room. But it was impossible. She couldn't get Porkditz and his fate out of her mind. That's why she'd been hoping to go back on the job today. She couldn't sit in the con-apt with the poor innocent pig, watching him sleeping peacefully, unaware of his fate. Or maybe he would have become aware of his fate, somehow picking up some subtle subliminal clues from her, at a level deeper and more ancient than spoken language. He certainly seemed to sense that they'd been talking about him this morning...

  "Too bad," said Dredd. Zandonella looked up, startled, to see that he'd dropped back from his point position to ride beside her.

  "What's too bad, sir?"

  "That your new friend is going to end up as additional protein for the Mega Citizens." Zandonella stared into his face, searching in vain for some flicker of emotion to go with those words.

  "But how can we hurt them?" she said. "All those pigs. How can we eat them? They're intelligent, like us."

&nbs
p; A sudden sound of a small explosion interrupted their conversation. Dredd's Lawgiver leapt into his hand from the holster fitted to the side of his bike. Zandonella found that she was gripping her own gun, drawn and levelled without conscious thought. They glanced back towards the source of the explosion, just in time to hear another one and to see that the cause was an empty plastic bottle, one of several that some thoughtless litterbug had tossed from overhead. Carver had driven right over it, causing the sealed bottle to burst with a gunshot sound. Carver looked at them sheepishly as he fought with his bike, trying to avoid the other bottles. Behind him, the Karst sisters manoeuvred around the bottles effortlessly. Carver hit a third bottle and his face began to glow a bright red.

  "Intelligent like some of us," said Dredd, and sped off ahead of her again.

  As they merged with the traffic on the Diana Krall Skedway, Zandonella caught sight of the entourage following the Cetacean Ambassador, a trio of stretch limousines. The lead limousine was painted a glaring shade of pale blue, and the two trailing behind it were basic black. The black cars contained assorted Mega-City dignitaries and their wives on their way to the ambassador's reception. The blue limo contained the ambassador himself, or rather served as a platform for his tank.

  The Cetacean Ambassador was a dolphin. His tank was a transparent plastic, bulletproof cylinder three metres high and four metres in diameter, full of sloshing water and sealed at the top. Zandonella assumed it was bulletproof. At least, she hoped it was. The stretch limo had been adapted to accommodate the tank by cutting the back of the vehicle open, removing the roof and turning it into the kind of flatbed you got on one of those old-fashioned pickup trucks. The Cetacean Ambassador seemed oddly dignified, motoring along the skedway in his tank of slopping water. Occasionally he would adjust his position, turning smoothly in the tank to peer out at the passing Mega-City landscape.

  There were already five Judges escorting the ambassador's limousine, one at each corner and one in front, all on Lawmasters. As Dredd roared up, the five Judges dropped back to make way for him and his detail. Dredd took point and Zandonella settled into position on the left of the limo's front bumper. She was amused to see that the driver's compartment was concealed behind smoked glass, so that the chauffeur could remain anonymous while his famous passenger was on display in a transparent tank for the whole city to see. Carver buzzed up on his bike to take position to the right front of the limo. The Karst sisters settled in at the two rear corners. The other Judges placed themselves on either side of the black limos behind with the fifth man taking up the rear.

  Everyone was in place. Easy and smooth, thought Zandonella. This is going to be a piece of cake. Just then a bottle bounced off the roof of the ambassador's limousine and landed on the road in front of her. Zandonella steered her bike around it with ease, but four more bottles hit the road on either side of her and then half a dozen brightly coloured fast food takeaway cartons glanced off the limo. Zandonella recognised the colours on the cartons as being those of the Wiggly Little Piggly franchise. Greasy remnants of barbecued pork spilled out of the containers and spattered on her visor. Zandonella wiped it clear in time to see a further shower of bottles and food containers spilling from the sky.

  Where the sneck were they coming from? She looked up to see a steady stream of debris spilling down from the cantilevered platform high above with the Wiggly Little Piggly restaurant perched on it. Zandonella's first thought was that some kind of anti-dolphin faction was deliberately dumping debris on the ambassador's motorcade. Stranger things had happened in the Mega-City. Then she heard a thin distant scream and saw that it wasn't just rubbish that was being dropped. A plump young man with long, flowing red hair was also tumbling through the sky.

  Zandonella looked back to see the man hit the road behind her with a messy splat. The Judges driving beside the black limos had to take swift evasive action to dodge the body. One of the limo drivers panicked, swerved, and almost took out the Judge beside him. There was more screaming, a lot more screaming, from high above. Zandonella looked up to see people falling from the rim of the platform. There were maybe five or six of them, it was hard to tell with their bodies writhing through the air on the long fall down. Zandonella heard motorcycle brakes squeal and then the powerful revving of an engine as Dredd dropped back from point position to fall in beside her. She looked over at him, desperate for an order or an explanation. There were bodies falling all around them. One hit the roof of the black limo in the rear and bounced messily off, leaving a huge dent. The limo's brakes screamed abruptly as rubber burned.

  "What's happening?" she said to Dredd. He was gazing up at the platform above them, people and debris now spilling off the edge of it in a continuous stream.

  "The platform," said Judge Dredd. "Too many people on it. The supports are giving way."

  "The supports?" Zandonella remembered the steeply angled concrete pillars that ran from the surrounding skyscrapers to the platform. If they were to collapse...

  "Follow me," said Dredd. "We have to do something or they're all dead."

  SEVEN

  Zandonella followed Dredd, who was powering back up the access ramp, engine gunning as he raced towards Sofia Coppola Heights and the concrete shelf on which the restaurant sat. She had initially obeyed his command without question, but as they screamed back up the ramp, she found herself doubting Dredd's assessment of the situation. The concrete platform was a massive structure. How could it just begin to give way?

  But as they climbed higher, Zandonella started to get a better view of the structure and she saw that Dredd was absolutely right. The shelf was a giant circular slab of stone supported on three tubular sloping concrete supports, like a table with three legs. Each leg was attached to a different building and the triangular arrangement should have provided a strong and stable structure. But one of the legs, the one attached to Nicolas Cage Block, had begun to buckle. Jagged black splinter lines were running through the grey concrete and they were growing and spreading as Zandonella watched.

  The concrete platform began to tip sickeningly. On it were crowded several thousand citizens who a moment earlier had had only one thought in their minds: to get to the Wiggly Little Piggly restaurant that occupied the centre of the platform. Now those citizens had a new single thought. Survival. As the support trembled, the giant concrete slab tipped forward and several dozen junk food fans went slipping down the slope, spilled over the guardrail at the rim and tumbled helplessly over the side towards the streets far below. Zandonella was suddenly reminded of the sight of pigs spilling off the dump ships...

  Brakes screeched and Dredd pulled to a stop at the side of the access ramp. Zandonella slowed down and rolled to a halt beside him. They were opposite Nic Cage Block, directly over the damaged support. It slanted up past them, a concrete tube as big in diameter as a sewer pipe and at least two hundred metres long. The damaged section of the support was about fifty metres below them and now Zandonella could see that the cracks in it were opening up into dark hollows like pockmarks in the grey surface. Dust and concrete fragments spilled out with a crunching sound like big bones breaking. The support trembled and the platform above lurched as though shaken by an earthquake. Dozens more people fell off, screaming and writhing. Zandonella realised that it wasn't just the crowd around the restaurant that was in danger. If the supports collapsed, the whole platform would drop like a giant bomb into the streets below, destroying everything in its path.

  She turned to Dredd. "We have to do something." The words sounded ridiculous even as she spoke. What could they do?

  Dredd looked at her. "Do you have a grappling hook round in your Lawgiver?"

  "Of course. But-"

  "Fire it at that," Dredd pointed at the crumbling concrete support below them. "As close to the breaking section as you can get it."

  "But what good will that do?" The flimsy line paid out by the grappling hook would barely support a Judge's weight, let alone the millions of kilos of trembling c
oncrete above.

  "Just do it," snarled Dredd.

  Without further thought, Zandonella raised her Lawgiver, took aim, and fired. The expanding grappling hook glinted briefly in the sunlight as it sped down at a steep angle towards the fragmenting section of the support. Behind it the filament line paid out in a thin gossamer loop. The grappling hook hit the concrete and bit into it in a fine spray of dust just above the crumbling hole, which was now big enough to hide a man in. The bigger the hole got, the more unstable the support became, ready to hinge in on itself and snap. What they needed to do was spray some kind of quick setting cement into the hole to plug the gap and stabilise it. Only no cement could set that quickly, and they didn't have any, anyway.

  "Good shot," said Dredd. "Now secure the line to your bike."

  Zandonella obediently tied off the line to her Lawmaster. "What are you going to-"

  "Stand back," said Dredd. He backed up his bike, revved the engine, switched to turbo boost and shot forward, the bike growling like a savage creature. Dredd drove past Zandonella, right off the edge of the access ramp, and straight into the void.

  Zandonella wouldn't have believed it if she hadn't seen it with her own eyes. Dredd used the turbo boost facility to jump his bike off the ramp and send it out into thin air like a bird taking wing. But as soon as the bike left the ramp, it began to fall like the thousand kilos of inert metal it actually was. Yet it was a controlled fall, Dredd steering - or more accurately, wrestling - the bike into position as it dropped through the air. As he did so Zandonella began to realise what he was up to.

  The fragmenting concrete had taken a bite out of the thick cylindrical support and the open edges of the bite looked like they were going to snap down onto each other, causing the entire support to bend beyond a critical limit and snap in two. But Dredd was aiming for that bite in the concrete. As the bike descended towards the support, Dredd kicked free and launched himself into freefall. Zandonella understood, belatedly, the vital importance of the grappling line she had fired. Dredd grabbed for the line as he fell past it. For one heart-stopping moment she thought he'd missed it, but then the line tightened, jerking her bike towards the edge of the ramp. Zandonella automatically threw the parking brakes on and the skidding stopped. Dredd was holding onto the grappling line with both hands, hanging there, his weight supported by her bike like a big fish on a line.