Swine Fever

by Andrew Cartmel

  That night Zandonella had vivid, endless, sweaty nightmares. In them Porkditz was eternally squealing and spurting blood as he was dismembered and eviscerated in vivid, full-colour detail to provide the Meg's madcap citizenry with its Crunchy Bacon Wunchies, Chinese-Style Ribs and Offal Lot of Fun Buckets of Offal.

  On the sixth day Judge Dredd arrived. He stood, filling the doorway and looking down at Zandonella without expression. He might have been there to give her an official reprimand and take away her badge and gun. Equally he might have been about to issue a commendation and pin a medal on her.

  Instead, he said, "You've got a visitor. You don't have to see him, but he asked to meet you again."

  "Again?" Zandonella was about to ask who the sneck this visitor was when Dredd stepped away from the door to allow O'Mannion to approach with the Cetacean Ambassador's tank.

  The tank - this time a slim-size version for special visits - was floating on a hover platform that O'Mannion steered using a control line. She looked like the girl at the circus leading an elephant. "The ambassador asked to see the Judge who saved his life," said O'Mannion with a note in her voice of what might almost have been pride.

  "I offer greetings and thanks and the gratitude of my entire pod," said the dolphin diplomat, smiling in his cylindrical tank. His synthesised voice boomed from the base of the tank. "If you are ever swimming in the Magellan Vortex of the South Indian Current please do drop in on us. We shall splash in your honour."

  "Uh, thank you," said Zandonella. "You are welcome. But I was only doing my duty." Just then Porkditz poked his head in to see what was going on. He took one look at Dredd and O'Mannion and the Cetacean Ambassador, floating there in his tank on its hover platform, and he scooted off back down the hall to the bedroom, his trotters rattling on the floor.

  "I seem to have startled your friend."

  "He's probably nervous because he senses he's scheduled for execution. Or slaughter, as people prefer to call it. He was given a week before being turned into food." Zandonella turned to O'Mannion and Dredd. "Is it time? Did you come here to take him away?"

  "We came here because the ambassador wanted to see you," said Dredd. "Why don't you stop talking and listen to him?"

  "There is new hope for your friend," said the ambassador, smiling in his tank.

  Zandonella hardly dared to believe what she'd heard. "What do you mean?"

  "In a sense, he is the reason I left my mother the ocean and came into the Mega-City. He and others like him. A new breed of mutant pigs with extremely high intelligence."

  "I said he was intelligent," said Zandonella. "I tried to tell people." She shot an accusing look at O'Mannion.

  O'Mannion smiled at her and said, "This sudden rise in pig IQ, combined with a steady drop in IQ among the Mega-City couch-potato human citizens, means that pigs are now adjudged to have an intellect close enough to humans to merit citizens' rights."

  "Citizens' rights?" said Zandonella.

  "Like myself and other cetaceans," added the dolphin.

  "That was the reason for the kidnapping and assassination attempts," said Dredd. "The meat lobby desperately wanted to sabotage the ambassador's mission."

  "But what you're saying is that Porkditz can live."

  The ambassador flipped himself over playfully in his tank. "Porkditz can live. Just as I, thanks to you, still live. I present my gratitude, and now, sadly, my farewell. I must return to my mother, the sea."

  "Goodbye," said Zandonella. "And thank you. For saving my friend's, er, bacon."

  "No need to thank me," said the dolphin's voice box as O'Mannion guided his tank out through the door. It was a tight squeeze. Once she'd steered the tank through it, O'Mannion glanced back.

  "You got out of Theo Barkin's body just in time," O'Mannion said. "A few seconds later he was brain-dead; in a comatose state. If your consciousness had still been inside him, we have no idea what would have happened to you."

  With this cheery thought, she left. Dredd remained standing in the living room, looking down at Zandonella. "You realise what this means, don't you?"

  "A change in the Law," said Zandonella. "And Porkditz gets to live." Dredd stared at her in grim silence. His face was lit for a moment by the sweeping coloured searchlight of an advertising dirigible outside the window, peering in, looking for someone to beam its message at. The Wiggly Little Piggly tune blared.

  "Think," said Dredd.

  Zandonella looked at him. The advertising jingle made it hard to think. Then she realised what he meant. "Oh my grud."

  "That's right," said Dredd. "The Mega-City is now hooked on pork. When this new Law makes their favourite fast food illegal, millions of citizens are going to be very snecked off." He went to the window and stared out at the darkening streets.

  Zandonella's happiness ebbed away and she felt a rising chill. "Get ready," said Dredd. "It's going to be a war zone out there."

  NINE

  A flaming bottle sailed through the dark night sky. It arced brightly, rising in a graceful curve before it began its swift descent, flame flickering through the air, glowing ever brighter as it grew ever larger, falling from the sky to finally shatter with a brilliant crash and a blazing spatter. The flame exploded on Zandonella's riot shield.

  The riot shield was a curved rectangle of shatterproof plastic approximately a metre and a half tall. It was held by means of a strap that the Judges clasped in their left hands, or their right, whichever hand didn't grasp their daysticks - large lightweight clubs that could smash any miscreant to the ground in a compliant, uncomplaining heap. "Every citizen is a model citizen once he's been tapped," was the saying amongst the Judges.

  Zandonella held her shield in her left hand, tilting it up toward the sky at a gentle angle. The mess of broken glass and burning grease slid harmlessly onto the ground. On either side of her, the Karst sisters held up their own riot shields, Esma using her bright new steel hand to hold onto hers. Behind Zandonella, Carver fumbled with his shield, struggling to get the strap over his hand. "It keeps slipping off!" he whined.

  Meanwhile, more bottle bombs sailed through the night sky. Zandonella and the Karst sisters closed ranks, Carver huddling behind them. Glass smashed on the concrete around them and several puddles of fire blazed up.

  Esma looked over at Zandonella. "What's in those things? Gasoline?"

  "Pork fat," said Carver.

  "Pork fat?"

  "Maybe mixed with a little gasoline," conceded Carver. "They get the pork fat from the restaurants."

  "No drokkin' kidding," said Esma.

  The Judges were crouched in the middle of a large grey concrete parking lot painted with radiating yellow lines. It was situated outside the Sylvia Plath Shoplex and Fun Centre. There was normally space enough in the parking lot for six thousand vehicles, but tonight the concrete expanse was covered with crowds of rioting citizens. The rioters were typical Mega-City dwellers of all ages, from infants to senior citizens, and they formed a turbulent howling mass that swept back and forth in front of the shoplex, swarming over shopping trolleys, concrete planters full of shrubs, and any vehicles unlucky enough to still be parked in the lot.

  The neon lights from the block made the eyes of the rioters glow, wide and ferocious, as the cits were swept up in the mob emotion of the moment. The flames of banned cigarette lighters gleamed as the rags of bottle bombs were ignited, and then the flaming missiles themselves rose up into the air.

  The rioters had by now been contained into half of the parking lot and were gradually being forced into an even smaller area. The shoplex was an imposing pentagonal building that once had been used as government offices. Zandonella remembered vaguely that it had something to do with national security. Now it had been taken over and resanctified to the religion of shopping. Retail outlets sprouted on each of its long high walls and the pentagonal space at its centre had been turned into a giant illuminated fountain with a glowing hologram that blossomed at regular intervals to read, "Shop at Sylvi
a's - Formerly the Pentagon" in rotating letters of fire as high as a house.

  The shops all around the perimeter, with one exception, had been locked up to prevent any of the rioters getting inside. However, this was a relatively futile measure since the one exception was the huge, lurid Wiggly Little Piggly's that was the cause of the trouble. The fast food outlet jutted from the wall facing Zandonella. Like other WLPs, its frontage consisted of a massive pink pig's ass with a neon curly tail. The riot had begun here and the restaurant remained the epicentre of the storm.

  The crowd, despite its variety in terms of age, sex and physical types, did have certain unifying traits. Approximately half of the rioters were wearing pink T-shirts or pink baseball caps while the other half were wearing blue T-shirts or blue top hats. The pink and blue factions were savagely tearing into each other, with grim results. Bleeding and groaning casualties were lying all over the parking lot, those on the fringes of the violence being removed by Med-Judges to med-wagons, after being judged and sentenced for affray, disorderly conduct, creating a public disturbance, bleeding on civic property and littering. Many of those carried off didn't look like they'd live long enough to pay their debt to society. Other than the bottle bombs, the rioters weren't wielding any weapons more sophisticated than a lead pipe or the occasional knife. Most of them were using their bare hands, but that was quite enough.

  "I don't understand what they're rioting about," said Zandonella.

  "Do you ever?" said Esma. "I don't."

  "I mean, they're ripping each other apart. They hate each other. But why? They basically agree. They're on the same side."

  "The same side?" said Carver, still fumbling with the wrist strap on his riot shield.

  "Yes. They all eat pork."

  "But the ones in pink eat at Wiggly Little Piggly." There was a certain note of approval in Carver's voice, which turned into disdain as he added, "and the ones in blue eat at Pork Lane." Carver shook his head. "That's a big difference."

  "A big enough difference to kill each other?"

  "They're like mega-ball hooligans," offered Tykrist, raising her shield to fend off a flaming bottle bomb. "Or religious fanatics."

  "I thought I told you to drive the rioters back towards the shoplex," grated a voice behind them. They turned to see Judge Dredd standing there with Judge Darrid at his side. Neither of the men carried riot shields. Instead, Dredd held what looked like a bazooka with glandular problems - evidently a missile launcher of some kind - and Darrid had a sophisticated-looking megaphone.

  "I'm sorry, sir," said Zandonella. "But we can't move forward and engage the crowd until Carver has his riot shield fitted."

  "So why isn't it fitted?" demanded Dredd.

  "It's this damned wrist strap, sir," said Carver. "It won't stay on my wrist."

  "Here. Give it here," said Dredd impatiently. He grabbed the shield and strapped it onto Carver. To Zandonella it seemed absurdly like a parent buttoning a child up in foul weather gear before sending him out into the rain. "Now get down to business."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Try to contain them in the area immediately in front of Wiggly Little Piggly's," said Dredd. "Darrid and I are going to get onto the roof of the restaurant and see if we can use sedative gas on them." Dredd held up the rocket launcher. "Have you all got your nose filters in?"

  "Yes," chimed Zandonella and the others.

  "Good. Just make sure you don't breathe through your mouths. Especially you, Carver." Zandonella saw his point. Carver was a natural mouth breather. Dredd turned to go, but Darrid insisted on staying a moment longer.

  He lifted up his megaphone. "And if the gas doesn't work I'll use the public address system," he said happily.

  "Come on, Darrid." Dredd dragged the smaller man away and they vanished into the night.

  By the time the pair appeared on the roof of Wiggly Little Piggly's, Zandonella and the others had fought their way to within fifty metres of the fast food outlet. The crowd of rioters had been squeezed into a dense mass by the inexorable advance of the Judges on all sides, holding their shields high and wielding their clubs with enthusiasm.

  Yet the rioters still seemed largely unaware of the presence of the Judges. They were obsessed instead with attacking each other, the Wiggly Little Piggly adherents trying to brutally murder the Pork Laners, and vice versa.

  "Here we go," said Esma, pointing up at the sign over the Wiggly Little Piggly. There under the pink neon corkscrew of tail, Dredd and Darrid stood. Dredd took aim with his rocket launcher.

  "Everyone got their nose plugs in?" said Zandonella. "Carver, close your mouth." She was glad that Dredd was in position. Her left arm was tired from holding the shield and her right one was tired from clubbing rioters into submission. Dredd fired; a pale lilac flame flared at the nozzle of the launcher and a gas projectile sailed out over the crowd, spraying gas in all directions in a glowing milky cloud. The sinister cloud settled rapidly towards the milling heads of the rioters below.

  "This is more like it," said Esma. "In thirty seconds all we'll have to do is start stacking the sleeping beauties and shipping them off to cells."

  "Make sure you stack them in the recovery position," said Zandonella.

  "Why?" said Carver.

  "Because if you don't they'll suffocate, you bozo," said Esma.

  But at that moment, as though at the whim of a sardonic fate, the mild breeze strengthened into a brisk wind that danced around, shifting quarters and vigorously blowing the gas away to disperse harmlessly into the night.

  "That's that," said Zandonella.

  "Damn," said Esma regretfully. "It would have been an easy way of putting a stop to this rumble."

  "Can't he just fire another one?" said Carver, looking up at Dredd standing tall under the neon pig's tail.

  "What's the point?" said Zandonella. "The wind isn't dropping." Indeed, the wind seemed to be picking up strength and speed, blowing away with it all hope of deploying riot control gas.

  "What are we going to do now?" moaned Carver.

  "Just keep on swinging," said Esma jauntily, bringing her club down on the head of a portly and pugnacious Pork Lane supporter wearing nothing but a blue top hat and blue jock strap with the initials PL on it. There was the sizzle of electricity and the rioter fell to his knees, then toppled slowly forward, unconscious from the blow, his fat, hairy white buttocks jutting up in the air in obscene entreaty.

  "Wait a minute," said Carver. "Judge Darrid's stepping forward. He's going to do something." Zandonella looked up to see that Darrid had moved into the position vacated a moment earlier by Dredd under the Wiggly Little Piggly sign. He was raising his omniphone to his lips.

  "Switch on your noise-cancelling earphones," said Zandonella quickly. She reached up and made the adjustments on her own helmet. The dense, ghostly sizzle of white noise filled her ears. The headphones were designed to block out external sounds using active audio control by profiling the unwanted signal and echoing it out of phase so as to cancel it.

  Even so, Zandonella could still hear a tinny insect echo of Darrid's voice as it boomed from the public address system on the roof above. Like the sleep gas, it was an approved means of crowd control. Zandonella could hear the faint echo of Darrid saying, in his most unctuous voice, "Citizens, there's no point in you fighting."

  The crowd in front of the Wiggly Little Piggly paused for a moment in its battle and looked up at the tiny figure of Darrid standing underneath the neon corkscrew of the tail. Zandonella was startled that they had stopped fighting; all of them, at once.

  "They've stopped fighting each other," said Carver.

  Maybe Darrid was going to pull this one off after all.

  "You're fighting tonight to show your love and support for your favourite fast food pork provider," continued Darrid, "but there's no point in that. Not anymore."

  "Oh no," said Zandonella. "He isn't-"

  "Isn't what?" said Carver.

  "That's right. No point. Because both res
taurant chains are being closed down," said Darrid brightly. The crowd below him had fallen dangerously silent and now it gave a collective gasp. "That's right," chirped Darrid, "in a few short hours pork in all its forms will be completely and utterly illegal."

  Zandonella winced. The old fool knew nothing about crowd psychology. The collective gasp from the crowd was like the sighing of dying wind that signalled the onset of a tropical storm. A hurricane, in fact. There was an agonising moment as the message penetrated sluggishly into the collective mind of the rioters with its full implications, and then as comprehension dawned, a tumultuous roar of insane rage rose from the crowd. The two factions forgot all about combat with each other and instead turned as one to face the Judges, murder in their eyes.

  Zandonella, Carver and the Karst sisters fell back as the bottle bombs and other missiles smashed against their shields, arriving a few seconds ahead of the howling mob itself, hurling itself forward in a bloodthirsty fury, adroitly united by Darrid's little speech.

  Judge Carver sat in the canteen. There were tears in his eyes. Real tears. Sitting opposite him, Zandonella stared in disbelief. It was nearly midnight, but both of them were still in their riot gear which stank from the smoke of the riot at the Sylvia Plath Shoplex. The smell of burning pork fat was sunk deep in their uniforms. It had taken a further three hours to quell the crowd after Darrid's little speech had invigorated the mob and sent them on a unified rampage. Now both blue and pink clad partisans were all languishing in cells or in secure med-units, recovering from their wounds. The rest were in the morgue.

  On the plate in front of Carver was a jumbo-sized Wiggly Little Piggly pink plastic bucket of spicy spare ribs. WLP didn't have an outlet inside Justice Central, but Carver had purchased a large selection of food from the outlet in the Plath Shoplex after the riot. The restaurant had remained open throughout the violence and had actually taken in a lot of business that night. Carver religiously brought in such takeaway meals from outside to eat in the canteen, but since the new Law had been announced, he knew his pork eating days were soon to end.