Both men assumed the meeting would be their last. But one story led to another, that led to another, that led to Judge Poet pulling Judge Jones from the firelit warehouse, burning more brilliantly than could ever be expected by daylight.
It also may be why all the new weapons to account for, the death of Pellegrino, and the ash and debris finding its way into Judge Poet’s ass-crack led him to suggest a coffee after his partner awoke.
“DESTINY HEAD. WE were… utter fucking garbage. I didn’t know how to play my bass, but I did know how to look really into it. If I look back at it, though? I just had a bit too much college at that point, and was sure that anything I vomited would be important to the world,” Poet said, twenty-five minutes and a bad coffee later.
“The hell does that even mean? Destiny Head?” Ezekiel laughed.
“Hell if I know. If you were to ask me then, I’d of probably freestyled something about us being at the head of a change that was necessary for the world to survive, that we were ultimately the one thing that can be the start of a new destiny, a reprise that would finally bring balance. All bullshit, of course; honestly, I joined three weeks after they’d started jamming together and was too excited that someone would let me play to even ask.”
Judge Jones laughed again, watching across the diner table as Poet sprinkled his fifth pack of sugar into his cup.
“Well, maybe you can go back to it after we send in this report,” Ezekiel said, sighing into his coffee. “Here’s to ‘Destiny Head,’” he added, raising his coffee ironically. “And to Marisa Pellegrino, who gave her life for—holy jelly bombers.”
When Marisa, still sporting singed garments from the night before, slid her butt into the stall next to Poet, their glasses stayed raised high. She took a long sigh that ran down the back of her throat, not stopping until it hit the seat beneath her.
She grabbed a cup of water from the table while the Judges’ eyes were too occupied to remember their coffee, searing their palms as they gaped.
Her hood was hanging by a thread; Ezekiel stared at it, trying to work out how in every multiple-choice hell she wasn’t burned from head to toe.
“Well, that was a fucking show, now, wasn’t it, gentlemen?” she said, slamming the water back down to the table.
“Ma’am…?” Judge Jones prompted, peeling his skin away from the ceramic and returning the cup to the table. She eyed him, and would have more than likely responded, if not for Poet’s sudden cheer.
“Rein it in,” she said with a huff, sliding her hand across the table to grab at Ezekiel’s coffee, taking it down with the same endless swig as she’d done the water.
“Yes, ma’am,” Poet said, sliding his helmet on and clipping it tight.
“I’m glad to see you made it out, ma’am,” Ezekiel said. “We—I thought something may have happened.” He turned his eyes down to the flat of the table. It’d been a long few hours without his visor, without the protection it gave from the rest of the world, but knowing Marisa, Ezekiel figured his relief wouldn’t have gone unseen either way.
“Yeah, I’m okay. I mean, you know, waking up to the sound of thirty sirens while a partially burned skull stares lifelessly into your eyes wasn’t, existentially speaking, a great start. Oh! At least I had the pleasure of speaking for two hours with Officer Dennison, who married a woman named Denise! It was such a fascinating story to hear fully seven times while they fixed the Wi-Fi to confirm my credentials.”
“Well, at least we have the weapons. I’m sure there’s a lot to sift through, but hopefully they lead back to—”
“We got shit, Poet. Thurgood is clever. The weapons that were seized melted in a soppy mess of hot steel by the time we reached the station. I’m not sure how he—well, how he anything, but it seemed in the handling, either the fingerprint locks, or something else, activated a failsafe.” Marisa leaned her head back and closed her eyes.
Judge Jones remembered the heat of the flamethrower, the seared flesh, imagining the sight of that same heat turned inward.
“Well, at least we have our lives, right?” said Poet. “At least we have—apologies, ma’am, but Judge Jones and I were having a rather productive lunch before you returned from the dead to remind us we’ve got nowhere.”
Marisa brought her head back from the ceiling.
“Well, it’s good that I have actually brought something more to the table than shitty jokes and an allergy to wearing my goddamned helmet like a Judge is supposed to,” she said with another sigh.
“What do we have, ma’am?” Judge Jones asked, dropping his voice. Marisa leaned in, a flash of a smirk passing by at the sound of Poet’s helmet clicking.
“Not here,” she said. “Clubhouse, gentlemen.”
The Judges nodded, standing up and following their superior out of the room.
During Fargo’s first hundred days of appointment, the Judges had had to move fast and steadily, sometimes ignoring the proper processes of government. Conversations caught on body cameras had been leaked, leading the new Chief Judge to make a public vow to never again bypass consultation with the Senate.
Sometimes however, time was not on his, or their, side. To avoid the possibility of Washington ears connected to Washington mouths from picking up on anything too sensitive for comfort, all discussions deemed classified were to be handled within codename ‘Clubhouse.’
It was archaic, but held unfortunately true for Washington, or for anywhere in the country where men held power and diners were sort of shitty, that statistically a women’s restroom was the safest place from eavesdropping.
They entered the restroom, Judge Poet leaning against the door after they scanned it for lingerers.
“The truth is, gentlemen, that our numbers aren’t strong enough. Not by half. A tip was received that you’d been set up, but no Judge in proximity to aid. Unlucky for me, I was still in Illinois, out in Elgin on business. I’d infiltrated the meeting by force, and that brings us up to speed.”
“Why couldn’t you communicate all of that to us with, you know, a phone? Or do anything else that would have helped us before we arrived?” Judge Poet asked, and Marisa shot him a glare from beneath slightly singed eyebrows.
“I had every means of communicating this information to you, I also had the means to withdraw you from the mission, but—”
“The mission mattered,” said Jones mechanically. “The mission is the only thing that matters. If we were aware, we could have compromised the acquisition of Carl Patterson, and the largest black-market distribution of arms in Chicago’s history.”
Marisa smirked proudly. “Precisely.”
“Well, lot of good that did, ma’am,” parried Poet. “We have none of Thurgood’s connections, the Brotherhood members who didn’t die escaped, and quite possibly the largest militia in history is gathering while we sit in this shitter.”
“We have what we’vealways had, gentlemen. We have the Law.”
Judge Poet sucked his teeth. “But do we have anything else, ma’am?”
Marisa rolled her eyes before making her way to one of the stalls, opening it and standing on the toilet seat. She pushed up the flimsy ceiling tile, allowing the thick briefcase she’d previously stored there to fall into her hands.
She heaved it to the sink countertop.
“Whew. Well, Judge Entitled, I do have a new helmet for Judge Jones, and a bit of fun for you boys,” she said, unlatching the combination lock with a pair of 20s.
She first tossed the helmet to Ezekiel, who wasted no time in stuffing it over his head. What was left in the black briefcase were two weapons, not so different from their own weapons, slightly larger, augmented somehow from within.
“We’re no Thurgood, but our boys in R&D do what they can. A disclaimer? Don’t break these, please. They are prototypes. They come equipped with a doubled capacity on your standard issue weapons, as well as”—she paused, taking one out and flipping it upside down for a moment to read a serial code etched on the bottom of the han
dle—“two additional munition options. Two buttons. One initiates a strobe light—”
“A strobe light?” Judge Poet interrupted, picking up the other weapon.
“Yes. A fucking strobe light. The other, which is activated with the second button, is a grenade launcher.” She lazily handed the weapon over to Ezekiel, who checked the scope and measured the weight in his hands.
“What grenade, ma’am?” he asked, setting the weapon down, pulling out his old one and emptying what was left in his clip.
“That’s a question for the nerds, but I’m told it makes the Milkor look like a little bitch.” She chuckled.
“Well, this is all good and admittedly cool, but what are you aiming us at, ma’am?” Judge Poet asked.
“We storm Thurgood and his annoying-as-shit street monks,” Pellegrino replied. “We take them out, we do the hero thing.”
She noticed the rally hadn’t fired them up as expected, so she changed tack. “He has them strapped to the tits. You know what order isn’t? This shit. This is that other thing.” She clacked the suitcase closed. “Someone got caught slippin’ up. The call was made from a cell phone. GPS puts it in a local house in the name of one Mrs. Patterson. Who was the grandmother of—”
“Catastrophe,” Jones finished.
“Precisely. The call was short, Aaliyah Monroe has been abducted; at least, that’s what was said. The call included the address, not that we needed it, but she couldn’t have known that.”
“Well, now what? Why are we sitting here, ma’am?” asked Poet. “Shouldn’t we be mobilising all Judges active in the Illinois area and ending this crap once and for all?”
Ezekiel nodded in agreement.
“Well, that would be protocol, but I don’t know what the hell we’re walking into there,” Marisa said with shoulders slumped and nearly burned body ready to shut down.
“What do you mean, ma’am?”
“The information wasn’t given freely. Protocol is for local law enforcement to surrender any pertinent information about ongoing cases to us. The location of one person of interest in the largest technological revolt is pretty fucking pertinent, don’t you think? The old guard kept it from us. They are still sitting on it. I thought that, at first, they wanted to be heroes, swoop in and make us eat crow.”
“But?” Poet asked.
“But we’re still sitting in a bathroom trying to figure out what to do about this,” Jones said.
Pellegrino smiled wide, with one finger on her nose and the other pointed at him. “Two for two.”
“Why the hell would they do that?” Poet asked, and she shrugged.
“All I know is that they’re not moving, at all. My theory? They want Thurgood to win, whatever he’s doing; they’re compromised. Maybe not all of them, though,” she amended, as she saw Jones flinch.
The thought of Ocasio being part of something like that hurt him more than he’d expected.
“So, what’s the move, ma’am?” Judge Jones asked, composing himself.
“We fight. We take this right to them, and we do it alone,” Marisa said, and this time it was Judge Poet who flinched.
“Well, that worked out so well for us last time.”
“You think you came here to live, Judge? Get your shit together, we have a job to do.”
THE JUDGES ARRIVED on Nuohlac Street to find it silent and peaceful. The door was cracked, sweltering a heat out into the world beneath the light.
Judge Jones was first. A thug in grey robe started reaching for something that looked enough like a gun, enough like a reason, and Judge Jones answered in kind. Ezekiel stepped over his body from the door to the corner of the den. Poet followed.
The next room was filled by one couch, a zebra-print throw rug, a TV affixed to a hastily-fastened wall mount, and not a single Brotherhood member.
“They know—” Judge Jones started to whisper, but he stopped at a footstep from above. He pointed to Judge Poet, and then at the steps at the end of the room leading to the basement. Judge Poet nodded, making his way to clear it out.
Judge Jones made his way to the flight of stairs leading up, before tapping the commlink at the base of his helmet.
“Justice blind, ma’am,” he whispered, and after a moment heard a quick “Affirmative” from Marisa crackle through the comm.
Three seconds later, the lights throughout the house—and the entire street—were shut down. Jones tapped the side of his helmet to initiate the dual night vision and body heat sensors through his visor.
When he reached the top of the flight of stairs he paused, unclipped a rattler from his belt, and slung it down the hallway.
There were the expected shots of gunfire in response. The flashes of fire, the boom of bullets, told Judge Jones of five firearms waiting through the hall for him.
“Come on, you pussy!” he heard one scream, and being a civil servant, Judge Jones obliged.
Tumbling forward, he sprang upwards, wrapping an open hand over the closest cultist’s face and twisting his head round with a snap. As the body began to fall, Jones tapped the button at the side of his new weapon, directing the strobe light at the rest of the cloaked trash.
As they blinked in the staccato light, Jones fired true. Nothing in the world seemed as fair or consistent as a centre-mass shot, and it didn’t disappoint as Ezekiel fired round after round, stopping only at the faint click.
“You murdering sonofa—” A man lunged at him from the darkness. Jones snatched a weapon from a corpse and hurled it as best he could at the voice.
When it connected, and the body toppled back with a wince, the rest of them opened fire again: a line of flame, the thack of bullets against the walls, and the familiar tic-tic-tic of a taser.
Ezekiel fell flat to the ground, smacking visor-first against it and losing the augmented sight.
The light from the fire was more than enough to see, so he popped back to his feet, snatched the wall-hanging mirror next to him from the wall and hurled it at the ceiling down the hall.
It impacted, and the glass shattered in jagged pieces over the remaining cultists, and they looked up.
Their screams blossomed in Jones’s ears, but there was still work to be done. He reloaded, weighed their crimes and granted them their due, one bullet at a time.
“Judge Poet, rooms scanned upstairs, seven down, report,”he said through the communicator.
POET, WHO’D BEEN indisposed by the Brotherhood members filling the basement, decided to apologise for not answering late, if he made it out alive. The Brotherhood members down here were less panic-prone than those his partner dealt with; one of them had thought enough to use her weapon’s flame mode to give her fellow cultists a fighting chance.
Poet deactivated the night vision mechanism in his visor, regaining clear sight as a robed gangster darted towards him, and quickly dropped a smoke bomb.
The Judge crouched low as an arm swung to lop off his head, then popped upwards, letting his helmet crunch the thug’s nose into his face. The lowlife sprawled out flat, and Poet shoved the heel of his boot through his throat.
He took off his helmet and hurled it at another thug’s head. The cultist ducked low, evading the helmet, but not the butt of Poet’s pistol, cracking into the waste’s jaw.
He flipped the gun back around before the remaining thug could respond. His aim was never anything special, but thankfully, the crescent-shaped birthmark on her face was target enough, and he laid out the probable drug addict and dropout with a merciful bullet to her face.
JUDGE JONES, STILL waiting for his partner to respond, continued dispatching the Brotherhood in the rooms along the hallway. They were easy enough game, and he’d judged them each within two seconds flat; just as the old guard would a pellet gun in a Cleveland park.
Clearing them out, one by one, bullet by bullet by bullet, was taxing. He wasn’t sure, as he reached the final room, that even the upgrades Marisa had provided could keep up; by his count, he had at best five rounds left, at w
orst three. It was immediately academic, though, as he was tossed across the room by a robed thug that tested their tailor’s one-size-fits-all strategy to the limit.
Jones had dealt with bigger, badder, and less breakable, but he was tired. The demon lumbered at him, and he tossed his weapon aside and rushed the thug, tackling him to the ground. It had little impact, as he plucked Jones off him with a grunt and slammed him against the ceiling.
“Fuck what you think,” Judge Jones wheezed, as he scrambled to his feet, closed in and swung a knee under the beast’s chin. It wailed and fell to its knees, gripping at its mangled, mandingo chin.
As Judge Jones leaned in, trying to grasp at the thick wrist, he felt like a five-year-old taking on Hulk Hogan.
“What the hell are you…?” he asked as the thing snatched its arm back, dripping thick, foamy spit, like a streetwalking waste who couldn’t be bothered with a sidewalk.
It drove its foot into Jones’s jugular, sending him sprawling.
The beast heaved itself to its feet again, and Judge Jones reached for his pistol, only then realising it had fallen to the floor when he’d come in. He resigned himself to a hopefully swift death.
“Martin?” A woman’s voice, an incantation that made the creature turn. Before it could reply, something smashed into the behemoth’s face with a heavy thwack, rendering it unconscious even as it fell to the ground.
“Marisa, showtime,”Jones said into his communicator, and as planned, the power came back on throughout the house.
Judge Jones turned off the night vision of his visor to see the person of ever-growing interest, Aaliyah Monroe.
He looked to the weapon across the room, and then to the woman once more. She dropped the pistol in her own hand and reached down to him.
“Could have shot him with that, you know,” Jones said as he climbed to his feet.
Aaliyah looked at the prone hulk for a moment, nudging him with a foot to confirm he was out. “No, I couldn’t. These weapons, only specific people could use them. Also, not much of a murderer, Judge.”
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