by Gaiman, Neil
Sweet Justice
Selected Short Stories from the 2000 AD
and Judge Dredd Annuals
Stories by Neil Gaiman, Peter Milligan, Dan Abnett, Alan Grant, Mark Millar and others.
This electronic edition first published in 2011 by Rebellion Publishing Ltd, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.
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.
Copyright © 1983, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1992, 2011 Rebellion A/S. All rights reserved. Judge Dredd, Judge Anderson, Judge Hershey and all related characters, their distinctive likenesses and related elements featured in this publication are trademarks of Rebellion A/S. No portion of this book may be reproduced without the express permission of the publisher. Names, characters, places and incidents featured in the publication are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes) is entirely coincidental.
Cover art by Barry Kitson
ISBN (epub) 978-1-84997-321-2
ISBN (mobi) 978-1-84997-322-9
Judge Dredd created by John Wagner & Carlos Ezquerra
Judge Anderson & Judge Hershey created by John Wagner & Brian Bolland
CONTENTS
Judge Anderson: The Scream by Peter Milligan
Diary of a Mad Citizen by Alan Grant
Judge Anderson: Exorcise Duty by Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning
I Was a Teenage Perp! by Alan Grant
Judge Hershey: Sweet Justice by Neil Gaiman
Judge Anderson: Dear Diary by Peter Milligan
Radical Cheek by Peter Milligan
Judge Anderson: The Most Dangerous Game by Mark Millar
Roll On Justice by Ian Rimmer
JUDGE ANDERSON: THE SCREAM
By Peter Milligan, Judge Dredd Annual 1987
Out of the darkness it came, like a living thing: a scream of wild terror.
And with the Scream came pictures and feelings that flickered like shadows, dissolving, gelling, screaming...
...There is a woman, holding three children. Their mouths are twisted, their eyes white discs of fear. They back away. The woman tries to gather the children into herself, as though she might envelop them completely. They back away until a wall stops their retreat...
They can scream but they cannot run. Closer. We move closer... We feel the blood, the pistons pumping hot blood inside our head... We must kill them... Kill them...
A scream of wild terror.
Judge Anderson opened her eyes and found a dark pillow pushing down onto her face. She had stopped breathing. The Scream echoed off unseen walls. She pushed herself up, panting now, gulping in air like a woman surfacing from water...
Sweat ran down her face as the overhead striplight automatically illuminated her sleeping quarters. Anderson was scared, shivering like a child plucked from a nightmare, but she didn’t want to lose it. She had to go back. She had to go back and face that scream again.
AN EMPTY ROOM
As a Judge in Psi Division, Anderson was on call 24 hours a day. Any time, day or night, she might get a ‘flash’, a psychic ‘message’ that might aid the Judges in their war against Mega-City crime.
Psis were especially receptive to these messages during sleeptime, that period when the barriers of the conscious mind are lowered and the dormant paranormal regions of the brain can reach out and speak to us.
Anderson travelled back, through her dreams. Normally it was routine to check out your dreams but now she was looking for something specific. She was looking for a woman and three children. She wanted to know what could have wrung from them a scream so terrible...
She walked through an empty room. Her mind was blank. The scream vision had gone, was hiding somewhere, but its psychic power had been so great it had scorched from Anderson’s mind the night’s other dream images.
The Scream was now just a memory. Yet still it made her shiver.
OMAR
The face of Omar, head of Psi Division, appeared on the vid-screen. ‘What is it, Anderson? You’re not on for another hour. Got something special?’
‘Think so, Omar. Haven’t been hit so hard since the Dark Judges were up to their tricks.’
Anderson paused, knowing that Omar would be holding his breath.
‘I think I’ve got a lead on the Alphabet Killer.’
REIGN OF TERROR
On her way to the Hall of Justice, Anderson listened to the early morning news broadcast. It was familiar stuff...
‘...This is Ned McTafferty standing outside the Hall of Justice, where an angry crowd has gathered to express its dissatisfaction with the city’s so-called finest.
‘On the 38th day of the Alphabet Killer’s reign of terror, the Judges are still no closer to making an arrest – and the body count grows. This morning, 26 new corpses were found. Eye witnesses claim that Judges on the scene appeared to be visibly shaken by their discoveries. Our lawforce, once thought to be invincible, has shown its weak and yellow underbelly. Justice Dept. has slapped a ban on any description of method of murder or of the condition in which the victims have been found, fearing that...’
Anderson blocked the rest from her mind. She knew it only too well. 26 bodies for the last 38 nights. Each murder spree starting with a victim whose Christian name began with A, working its way through the alphabet and finishing with Z.
Most of the city’s Zebedees, Zachariahs and Xaviers had fled. The Judges would get the creep eventually, but it was a big, teeming city. Anyone desperate, crazy, and resolute enough could, while his luck held, get away with murder.
And, as the man said, the body count continued to grow.
‘As far as our records show, the Alphabet Killer hasn’t killed a woman and three children as you describe. The killer seems to be strictly a one-hit-at-a-time operator,’ said the Chief Judge, in her office.
‘Maybe it’s a pre-cog flash,’ Anderson suggested. ‘It was so strong I thought it might already have happened... But maybe the killer’s going to get the woman and the three juves...’
‘Can you give us a locale? A time? A description of the killer?’
‘N-No... Not yet. But I was inside the killer’s head. I was thinking his thoughts, looking at his victims...’
‘Did this person actually say it was the Alphabet Killer?’
‘Not exactly,’ said Anderson, aware that she was making a mess of it. ‘But I knew. As soon as I heard the woman’s scream I knew it had something to do with the Alphabet Killer... And then I was inside his mind...’
‘His mind? You can positively identify the killer as male?’
‘Yes. No. I mean, his, er, its thoughts felt male... But...’
‘But really,’ drawled the Chief Judge, ‘you should have a little more to go on before you come in here acting as though you’ve solved all our problems. Log your flash with the Alphabet Operations Squad and resume your normal duties.
Drokk! thought Anderson.
PANIC RULES
Anderson gave her flash to the Alphabet Ops. They looked all washed up. The killings were affecting everyone. On top of everything else, cases of assault on and gross disrespect for Judges had risen fifty-fold since the killings started. There were marches every day complaining about Justice Dept.’s handling of the case. And, to top it all, a bloody new block war had erupted between Grover Block and Mills Mansions, and the Muggers’ Rights League were holding their annual meeting in Ian Paisley Piazza...
Already, three Judges had thrown in their badges and gone into hiding. Five were in Psycho-Cubes following mental
breakdowns. Sixteen were in sickbay following assaults, and three were in the mortuary following more serious attacks.
‘It’s funny,’ said Judge Monk.
‘What’s funny?’ asked Anderson. ‘Your face or your arrest record?’
‘Ha ha. What’s funny is how this city can take a block war that kills thousands and a daily homicide and mugging rate of drokk knows what without batting an eyelid. But you get someone who’s knocking them off one by one in a logical, cold-blooded pattern and bang! Panic rules.’
‘You seem full of sparkle. How long’ve you been on duty, Monk?’ Anderson asked.
Monk was a big man with thin lips. The lips curled into a little smile. ‘Oh, 30 hours, give or take a few. Who wants to sleep when there’s a riot going on? C’mon, Patel,’ he said to the Judge standing right beside him, ‘we’ve been seconded to Riot Squad. The Muggers’ Rights meeting is turning ugly.’
‘I’ve only been going three hours and I feel beat already,’ said Anderson as the two men stomped out of the room. ‘Some of these he-man Judges really get up my nose.’
‘Know what you mean,’ said Judge Carter, yawning. ‘Take Monk. Some of the boys have got a saying about Monk.’
‘What’s that?’
‘They say he’s as tough as Old Dredd.’
PSYCHIC TERROR
The Scream struck Anderson with monstrous mad fury as she was returning to Psi Division after a fruitless patrol of the city.
As her mind swooned she saw the woman, her face contorted, her arms cradling the children. Anderson understood now that the woman was the children’s mother. Most of her fear was for them.
Anderson was not yet totally inside the killer’s mind, although she was seeing the woman through the killer’s eyes. She had to concentrate, find a clue. Where was this happening? Who was the killer?
While all her senses begged her to pass out, Anderson summoned her last vestige of mental fortitude and cast her mind’s eye away from the woman. The Scream grew louder, more demented and, for an instant, Anderson saw a wall. A tower block. Some words, blurred. She strained at them and managed to decipher some of the middle letters: ---ESS, a gap, and then BL---.
And then the Scream, the awful, spiralling scream of psychic terror, dragged her back to the woman’s face, her mouth, twisted in the act of screaming...
Anderson tried to enter that face. She tried to become that face, to see through those eyes and know what those eyes were seeing.
Her mind was being torn from her body. Her own screams mingled now with the other Scream, and for a moment she saw something else, she saw through the woman’s eyes.
Anderson’s mind was a jumble of images, of ghosts dancing in ether. She looked hard into this ether and made out a shape. Something dark. Something big and dark was moving, unsteadily, towards her. Something glinted on the face of the dark thing. Something caught the light and glinted. For a heartbeat the reflected light illuminated something yellow... The thing was closer now. It was black or blue. The face caught the light again. No. It wasn’t a face. It was something in front of the face. Something the face was wearing. A visor, on a helmet. And above the visor a badge. A yellow badge on a helmet.
A Judge’s helmet.
A STATE OF WAR
Omar’s expression was crumpled and peculiar, as though every tiny muscle in his face was trying to pull in opposite directions. The Chief Judge’s left eyelid flickered once. Just once.
‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that, Omar.’
‘That’s what Anderson said. The Alphabet Killer’s a Judge. I know it’s crazy but Anderson isn’t usually that far off the mark.’
‘Listen, we’re all under a lot of strain. Only today I saw a gang of juves pelting a med squad with acid bombs. If we suggest that the Alphabet Killer is one of us we’ll have a state of war.’
‘Yes, Chief Judge... I understand...’
The Chief Judge leaned forward, her voice softening.
‘Oh, but off the record, Omar... let Anderson follow the lead.’
AGNESS BLAGG
The Scream was like a tune playing a few rooms away. It was always there, though sometimes she forgot about it. She tried to home in on it, tried to glean more information from it, but she came to understand that she would have to wait. The Scream came to her. She did not go the the Scream.
While she waited she went through the computer files to see how many Mega-City blocks ended in –ESS. In all there were 739. She started sifting through them, hoping that if she came across the right one she would recognise it.
She’d been working on this half an hour when the first Alphabet Killing of the evening was reported.
Anderson visited the body in the mortuary, hoping to pick something up. The victim’s name was Agness Blagg and she had been found near Dudley Moore Bungalows. Anderson had seen plenty of gore in her time, but this horrified her. And Judge Monk, standing nearby, saw it.
‘Don’t let it get to you, Anderson,’ he said. ‘It’s just another stiff. Dead is dead, however you got there.’
Anderson turned as Monk was leaving with another Judge. He cracked some lousy joke but Anderson didn’t hear it. All she heard was a scream, like a living thing, wild and monstrous, terrible and terrified.
As Judge Monk walked away, the Scream faded.
‘Who found the body?’ she asked the attendant.
‘Why, those two. Judges Monk and Lord. Lord looked a little shook-up but Monk, boy, he sure can take it on the chin. D’you know what the boys say ’bout Monk? They say he’s as tough as...’
‘...Old Dredd. Yeah, so I heard.’
Anderson was already running out of the slab room.
THE BIRTHDAY BUTCHER
It was all there on the files. You just had to be looking for it. Judge Monk had reported the first Alphabet Killing and the mortuary attendant had been sufficiently horrified by the corpse to have made a note of it... and of Monk’s lack of emotion.
And there was more on his personal record.
A very terrible thing had happened to Monk. He’d been called to his original home one day to find his father murdered. His father had been the sixth victim of the notorious Birthday Butcher, a killer who claimed 28 lives before he was finally caught.
The Birthday Butcher was in fact a sub-hume called Nathan Bones who, as a child, never received birthday presents from his sub-hume parents. One day, Nathan’s anger and resentment boiled over and he went on his killing spree. For 28 nights he killed a selected person; a person whose birthday it was. A few film companies made movies out of Nathan’s killing spree.
The description of the Birthday Murders read like a horror story but one thing caught Anderson’s attention. Monk’s father had been impaled on metal-spiked birthday candles, which were subsequently set alight.
Agness Blagg had suffered a similar fate.
JUDGE DREDD
Omar wasn’t alone. The Chief Judge and Judge Dredd were with him in his office. Anderson burst in.
‘Omar! C.J.! I’ve cracked it! I know who did it!’
Dredd, Omar and the Chief Judge looked straight back at Anderson without saying a word. Anderson gulped in air and said, ‘It’s Judge Monk. Judge Monk is the Alphabet Killer!’
‘That’s very interesting, Anderson,’ said the Chief Judge. ‘Because Dredd has just apprehended the Alphabet Killer... and he most certainly is not Judge Monk.’
‘You’ve... arrested...’
‘The Alphabet Killer. That’s right, Anderson. Caught the creep as he was going for his third stiff of the night.’
Anderson stood in dazed stupefaction as Dredd told her about the Alphabet Killer, who was nothing but a low-lifer called Angelo Christie who had wanted to get rid of his brother.
Christie had hit upon the idea of killing 25 people as well as his brother, so the Judges would look for a psychotic methodical killer instead of someone who plugged his brother because he couldn’t stand his guts.
Christie had got hooked on murd
er, though, and just couldn’t stop. A dormant sadistic streak was awakened and the killings just went on and on, long after the original purpose of them, to deflect suspicion from his slaying of his brother, had been forgotten.
Apart from his job on the zoom-tube allowing him quick access to every part of the city, there was no special reason why Christie had evaded the law for so long. He was just a non-entity who got lucky. Which was unlucky for his 990 victims.
‘Now,’ said the Chief Judge, when Dredd had finished. ‘Would you like to repeat what you said about Judge Monk?’
The Scream hit Anderson with so much force she staggered. She saw the woman and her three children. And she saw the woman’s mouth. And she heard the Scream. For the first time, she really heard the Scream.
‘Where’s Monk? WHERE IS HE?’
JUVE ABUSE
Anderson’s bike sped through the night-time streets of Mega-City One and the flashing neon lights were glowing like phantom faces: the woman, the three juves...