01.Dredd VS Death

by Gordon Rennie

  "Wilco, Control. I'm on my way. Dredd out."

  Being dead wasn't nearly as dramatic as one might have imagined, Icarus had decided. For a start, he still had consciousness, although he wasn't sure how much that was to do with the retrovirus which was now steadily transforming his recently dead body. The seat of his consciousness was still tied to that body, and he was aware of his surroundings and what was happening around him, but the sights and sounds were oddly dimmed, almost as if he were experiencing them all in a strangely detached, fugue-like state. He knew he was still within his body, but he had no sense of physical existence, and any kind of sensation of pain or bodily awareness was completely absent. Which was probably just as well, he decided, considering the six Lawgiver bullets which had torn his insides apart.

  As far as he could tell, he was somewhere in the Undercity, carried there by the last few vampires which had remained in hiding in his lab during the confrontation with Dredd. He had no idea where they were taking him, or why. To be honest, he wished he could communicate with them in some way. On the other hand, even if he had been able to, he wasn't sure they would take any notice of his commands any longer. The way they were moving, the way they seemed to work together in perfect accord without speaking, he got the distinct impression they were acting under the direction of some outside force.

  His creations were no longer his to command. For the first time since he had taken his first steps on the long road to this point, Icarus began to feel a vague uneasiness about his presumed pact with the things he had set free from Nixon Pen.

  Meanwhile, while he dwelled on what Dredd had told him about the wisdom of making deals with the Dark Judges, his former servants continued on their mysterious journey, carrying him deeper and deeper down into the darkness of the Undercity beneath Mega-City One.

  Giant still woke up sometimes at night in his dorm cubicle at the Grand Hall of Justice, sweaty and panicked from nightmares about his first encounter with Judge Mortis. The experience had been a defining one for him. And almost a fatal one too, he grimly remembered. Mortis had kept right on coming at them, as he and the others had pumped round after round of Lawgiver fire into the Dark Judge's rotted, ossified body. Even after a decapitating Hi-Ex round, the Dark Judge had simply picked itself up again and reattached its head to its body before continuing the pursuit.

  Mortis's touch was literally death, and Giant could still remember the putrefying stench that had filled the air as he watched the flesh rot away in mere seconds from the body of one of Mortis's victims. The memory, together with the fear of those hands ever bestowing the same deadly touch on his own flesh, had stayed with Giant a long time. He had been a cadet back then, of course, not one of the rising stars of the Justice Department and Dredd's chosen right-hand man, but some things you don't forget. Especially in your nightmares.

  And now here he was, ten years later and about to confront the source of those nightmares again.

  He was leading a squad of Judges down the corridors of Clooney Memorial Hospital. So far, it hadn't been difficult to work out which direction Mortis had taken. Like Dredd said, all you had to do with the Dark Judges was follow the trail of corpses.

  Mortis hadn't been here long - it was less than twenty minutes since the alert had gone out and Giant had jumped aboard an h-wagon and maybe broken the Department's aerial speed record to get here - but, by Grud, Mortis had been busy in that short time. He had been going from one ward to another, slaughtering every living soul he found, and the rooms and corridors of the place were choked with corpses and filled with that same awful and familiar reek of decay. Not even the droids had been spared, because Mortis's touch affected more than just flesh. Giant had already passed the rusted and corrosion-pitted remains of several robo-docs.

  They were in the isolation ward now, and there were screams coming from further up the corridor. Mortis had been busy here too, going from room to room dispensing his version of justice, the occasional locked or sealed door proving no barrier to his material-corrupting touch.

  Grubb's Disease. Rad-sickness. Creeping Buboes. 2T(FRU)T. The oddities of twenty-second century life threw up a bewildering variety of new and dangerous diseases, and this was where the sufferers of such contagious ailments were treated. Of all the deadly contagions that had been loose in here, though, Mortis was by far the most lethal.

  The corpse of a fattie wearing a hospital smock was blocking the corridor. This one was fresh, the flesh on it still in the process of accelerated rotting, its body looking like a deflating tent as the decaying bulk of its mountainous belly melted away, leaving bare the bones of its massively expanded rib-cage. Giant vaulted over it, homing in on the continued sounds of screams from just up ahead. They were close now.

  "No, please! I-I'm sick!" came a voice from up ahead. "I got Super-Duper Creeping Buboes, or something real bad like that. You... you don't wanna touch me or you'll catch it too, I guarantee!"

  "Life itself is a sickness, sinner," snickered the unearthly voice of the Dark Judge. "Death is the only sure cure."

  Giant rounded the corner, seeing a terrified cit in a patient's smock in Mortis's grip. The cit was screaming, Mortis's horrific decay touch already going to work on him. Too late to save this poor creep, thought Giant, bringing his Lawgiver up to bear.

  "Rapid fire," he ordered his squad. "Blow that bony freak to pieces."

  Mortis looked towards them, hissing in irritation, the screaming cit still caught in his lethal grasp. In one movement he turned and hurled the cit at them, using him as a human shield, throwing him into the full fury of the Judges' weapons fire.

  If the cit wasn't dead already from the effects of Mortis's touch, then he surely was now, as the hail of Lawgiver bullets struck him, tearing apart his decay softened, putrefying body and spraying Giant and his squad with the leftovers.

  If Giant had somehow ever forgotten how deceptively fast the Dark Judges could move when they wanted to, he got a sudden reminder now. Mortis was in amongst them in the blink of an eye, cackling in malignant glee as he went about the business of bringing judgement to the Judges.

  Furio, a ten-year veteran who had been Giant's second-in-command, was the first to die, collapsing in a rotted heap as one of Mortis's claws punched right through him. Willot, whom Giant had first met when he had been briefly posted to Sector House 301 to help Dredd in his mission to clean up the city's most crime-ridden sector, was next to go. Screaming in agony as tumours and lesions spread in seconds through his body, Willot tumbled backwards, thrashing and writhing, knocking Giant to the floor.

  In the time it took Giant to kick Willot's disease-bloated corpse away from him and realise that he had lost his Lawgiver in the fall, Mortis had already killed Judges Powers, Hiassen and Goldman. That left only Giant to be judged.

  Mortis loomed over him, reaching down towards him. Giant stared into the empty sockets of Mortis's skull head, feeling the tug of the powerful psychic spell the Dark Judges were capable of casting over their victims.

  "Come, sinner, why try to resist? Fighting me is useless. You cannot escape your fate."

  Mortis's hand descended towards Giant's face. The Judge's own hand snatched down, finding and drawing his boot knife in one smooth motion.

  "Heard it before, freak. It might have had more effect ten years ago, when I was still a frightened kid - but not now."

  Giant's hand came up to meet Mortis's, the knife he was holding stabbing hilt-deep through the centre of Mortis's outstretched palm, stopping the Dark Judge's taloned fingers just centimetres away from Giant's face.

  Mortis hissed in anger. His powers of decay were already going to work on the blade piercing his unnatural flesh, and the metal of the knife blade was quickly starting to crack and erode away in rusted flakes. Giant had only delayed Mortis for a few seconds, but those few seconds were all the defiant Judge needed.

  Giant brought his feet back and lashed out with both legs, catching Mortis square in the chest with two Judge boots, propelling hi
m backwards. Mortis crashed into the wall opposite with a dry, bony rattling sound, but recovered almost immediately and pulled himself up again. Giant rolled, grabbing his fallen Lawgiver and aiming it at the Dark Judge as Mortis advanced upon him again.

  "We've met before, freak," he reminded him. "Remember this?"

  The Hi-Ex shell tore Mortis's head off. Whatever he was made of, however light and frail his leathery, mummified skin and wasted, brittle bones appeared to be, the Dark Judge was a lot tougher than he looked. Anything else would have been blown to shreds by the same shot.

  As it was, it was still enough to stop him in his tracks as he bent to pick up the skull and reattach it to the snapped-off, bony stump of his neck. Giant had seen this trick before. What was new, though, was that he found out Mortis could still speak even with his head separated from his body.

  "Foolish mortal," rasped the voice from the bodiless skull. "When will you learn? You cannot kill that which does not live..."

  "Tell it to someone who gives a drokk," replied Giant, firing a brace of Incendiaries into the body of Mortis.

  Even as the hungry flames took hold of him, Mortis still took the time to wait for his head to reattach itself. Meanwhile, up until now, Giant had been acting on instinct, just trying to survive the encounter moment to moment. Now, seeing the open doorway to the place directly behind where Mortis was standing, he suddenly saw a way to bring this whole thing to an end.

  He charged forward towards Mortis, even as the Dark Judge staggered forward towards him. The fiend was wreathed in flames, a fact which would soon force him to abandon his current body, but not before he took one last sinner with him, it seemed. Even after his body had been destroyed by the flames, Mortis's spirit would still survive, roaming the city until it found another host form to occupy and possess. If that happened, Mortis would rise again, free to continue the same kind of carnage that had occurred here and elsewhere.

  Giant wasn't about to let that come to pass.

  He shoulder-charged straight into Mortis, turning his face aside and holding his breath to avoid scorching his lungs with super-heated air from the flames that were now all over Mortis. It was like charging into a pillar of solid granite. A pillar of solid granite that had been set blazing alight. A lancing shot of agony told Giant he had probably just dislocated his shoulder and maybe cracked his collar bone into the bargain. Numerous points of growing pain told him he was on fire down most of that same side. Giant could already hear the sirens of the med-wagon that would probably soon be rushing him to the nearest sector house med-bay.

  Even so, what he had intended to do still worked. Mortis reeled backwards and through the open doorway behind him. Giant slammed a fist into the door-seal switch, not stopping to beat out the flames that were eating into the material of his armour and bodysuit until he was sure the door had slid securely shut.

  He stared through the transparent material of the door, watching Mortis burn. Most of the Dark Judge's clothing and unnatural flesh had burned away now, leaving little more than a skeleton covered in flame. Still, he wasn't ready to die yet and staggered forward, pressing one burning, skeletal hand against the transparent wall of the room he was in. His rattling hiss of fury increased sharply in volume as the material of the wall stubbornly refused to yield to his decaying touch.

  "Reinforced glasteel, freak. Supposed to be able to last for centuries, maybe even longer. Maybe if you tried long enough you could rot through it, but I don't think you've got the time to do that, have you?"

  Mortis's body was already starting to collapse, too much of it eaten away by the flames to allow him to sustain it any longer. He abandoned it with a final, whistling shriek, his spirit flowing out of it as it crumpled to the ground to form a small pyre of burning bones.

  Mortis's spirit-form prowled round the borders of the room, restlessly seeking a way out, hurling itself against various portions of the floor, ceiling and thick glasteel walls. Giant laughed at its growing fury.

  "Oh yeah, and it's airtight too, didn't I tell you that? You're in a quarantine cube. They use them to keep suspected contagious disease cases in isolation until they know what they're dealing with. That's what you are, freak: a disease. And now I've got you where you belong, in quarantine."

  Watching the furious contortions the thing behind the glasteel walls was now going through as it relentlessly and futilely sought an escape from its new prison, Giant reached for his radio.

  "Control - Giant. I need a Psi-Judge squad to Clooney Memorial. I've got Mortis trapped here in spook form. Tell them there's no rush, I don't think he's going anywhere else in a hurry right now."

  One down, three to go, thought Giant. He wondered how Dredd and Anderson were doing with their own super-creep Dark Judge freaks.

  As another blast of supernatural fire blazed out towards her, Anderson dived for cover. She hoped Dredd and Giant were doing better than her.

  She rolled past the shrunken and flame-blacked corpses of another row of smokers and popped up out of cover to snap off another few Lawgiver shots at Fire. Not that it would do any good, she reminded herself.

  Every time she encountered the Dark Judges, they always brought something new to deal with, some new, never-revealed-before ability or power they could use to counter the Judges' best efforts to track them down and destroy them. In the past, it had been teleporters, psychic possession, mind control, the ability to body-hop when their own bodies were destroyed and then to rise up again in the flesh of the next nearest corpse. This time, though, Fire had found a brand new trick of his own and, by Grud, was it a doozie.

  He could use the unnatural heat of the supernatural flames which permanently surrounded him to vaporise bullets before they could strike him. Incendiaries were useless against this particular Dark Judge, of course. Falling back on what had worked against him before, Anderson had fired off several rounds of Hi-Ex shells as soon as she caught sight of him within the main Smokatorium hall - only to see them vaporised as they struck the shimmering heat barrier around him. Every Standard Execution round she had fired since had gone the same way, either vaporised instantly or ineffectually striking Fire in the form of little more than a thin spray of molten droplets. Now, as the Dark Judge hunted her through the smog-filled, corpse-strewn interior of the Smokatorium, Anderson began to suspect she was in serious trouble.

  She had borrowed a helmet from one of the Judges outside. Its respirator and visor provided some protection from the poisonous, choking fumes of nicotine and tar that surrounded her, but her eyes still stung from the effects of the thick cigarette smoke that hung heavy in the air of the place. Anderson always knew she would probably die in the line of duty one day, most likely at the hands of a major-league perp like one of the Dark Judges. Except she had figured it would probably be Death that would do the honours, not Fire. And she had always imagined her death as taking place somewhere a lot more glamorous than a city Smokatorium.

  There were several Smokatoriums in the city, being the only places in Mega-City One where citizens were legally allowed to smoke. Anderson could never see the attraction in the filthy habit; there were enough unpleasant and hazardous things that could happen to you in this city without deliberately poisoning your body with the after-effects of inhaling burning tobacco. The circumstances in a Smokatorium, where smokers sat in rows wearing protective suits and smoking tobacco products through filter mouthpieces fitted into the air-sealed helmets they wore, made the whole thing look even less attractive than it already was, but the Smokatoriums were still very popular. Dedicated and die-hard smokers still flocked to them to smoke everything from the finest, hand-rolled cigars from the Cuban Wastes to the cheapest brands of Brit-Cit cigarettes. Only in a Smokatorium was smoking legal, and the money generated in the hefty smoking taxes imposed on everyone using them was always a welcome addition to the city's financial coffers.

  Now the lifeless smokers sat in rows where they had died. With visibility poor due to the thick, choking cigarette smoke tha
t filled the place, and with all sound muffled by the head-enclosing helmets worn by all smokers, many of them had probably never even known what had hit them as Fire stalked from room to room, incinerating everyone he found in all of them with fiery blasts from his trident weapon.

  Justice Department med-programs and health education vidverts always stressed that smoking killed. Now the proof of that was here in abundance in the Churchill.

  "Good to see you again, Anderson," cackled Fire. "Looking for a light?"

  Anderson dodged again, narrowly avoiding another fire blast that struck the wall behind her, setting it instantly ablaze.

  There were now numerous blazes burning throughout the building, some of them spreading rapidly, all of them started by the Dark Judge's deadly trail of destruction through the place. Idly, Anderson wondered if that meant she was still going to burn to death even if she managed to defeat Fire, and then decided that she would probably still be long dead by the time there was any danger of the building burning to the ground.

  Even more idly, she wondered why the building's fire control systems hadn't kicked in by now. After all, Smokatoriums were just one big fire hazard, so surely there must be...

  Fwooosh!

  She barely moved in time, as the hungry tongues of supernatural fire licked out towards her. She rolled away from them, feeling the flames caressing her back and legs, imagining her skin start to blister even under the heat-retardant material of her uniform.

  She sprang back up and ran, snapping off several Heatseekers at the Dark Judge, knowing that they would have no difficulty in locking on to him, just as she knew that they would probably be almost completely useless against him.

  Fire laughed as the tiny, buzzing heat-seeking bullet missiles vaporised harmlessly in the heat-shimmering air in front of his flaming skull face. His laughter was dry and crackling, like the sound of hungry licks of flames.