Judge Dredd

NINETEEN

The air in the hold was thick and foul. The odor was of flatulence and fear, fury and the sour smell of sweat. The prisoners were chained to the hard metal benches. The guards stalked up and down the narrow aisle between them, mean-eyed men with big necks and arms like slabs of iron. They held their riot guns close to their chests, like lovers who might run away. They prayed to dark gods that they’d get a chance to kill someone today. Maybe a con would go mental and howl like a dog. Maybe a man would try to strangle his buddy with his chains. Maybe one or two men would try to escape.

No more than two. They never prayed for more than that. A shuttle guard’s worst nightmare was a hold full of desperate men, all coming at them at once. The guards never told each other, but they knew what they would do. They wouldn’t take a chance. They’d turn their weapons on themselves, blow off their heads in one clean and decent shot.

Fergie knew who the guy was. He knew, but he knew he wasn’t right. He wasn’t right because it didn’t make sense. There wasn’t a chance in hell that the man who had put him in this stinkhole was sitting next to him on the bench. Okay, it looked like the guy. A lot of people looked like someone, but that didn’t mean they were them.

He held his hands up and brought them close together. He peeked through the gap until all he could see were the guy’s dark eyes, a little piece of nose. He closed the gap, opened it, closed it shut again.

“Dredd?” Fergie couldn’t believe it, but now he knew it was true. “Holy sh—Dredd, it’s you!”

“So what?” Dredd didn’t look up.

“Wha-what are you doing here? You can’t be here you’re a—I mean you’re not a—Hey, you’re undercover, right? On the job. Watchin’ someone. Keeping your eyes open. Following a clue. I’m deaf and dumb, okay? My lips are sealed, I will not say a thing.”

Dredd looked up. Fergie felt the man’s eyes drill halfway through his head. “I was convicted of a crime. Wrongly convicted. That’s what happened. That’s why I’m here. I don’t want to talk to you. Leave me alone.”

“You, too?” Fergie slapped his head. “Hey, no kidding? That makes two of us. How about that?”

“No. That makes one of us.” Dredd shook his head. “I remember you. Ferguson, Herman. Interference with public droids. Unlawful use of—”

“Five years? For saving my own miserable ass? You got an innocent man in here. It was big mistake, Dredd!”

“The Law doesn’t make mistakes.”

“Yeah? So what happened to you? How do you explain that?”

Dredd looked at his hands. “I can’t. I don’t know.”

“Oh, right.” Fergie made a face. “But the Law doesn’t make mistakes. So what do you call this? A computer glitch, what? What did they get you for, jaywalking, spitting in the stree—”

“Hey, groon…”

A heavy finger poked Fergie in the ribs. Fergie turned. The con on his right had barbed wire tattooed in horizontal stripes across his face. Now and then, the artist had added tattooed drops of blood.

“You illiterate, or what? You don’t keep up with current events, you goin’ to look stupid, man. You goin’ to be ill-informed.”

“I’ve been busy,” Fergie said. Wire-face had breath like a sewer. “I’m a big-time crime lord. I’ve got a lot of things to do.”

Wire-face grinned. “What he done, man, is he hit two Citizens: that guy on the video an’ his old lady, too.”

Fergie frowned at Dredd. “What’d the droog do, spell your name wrong, what?”

“Hey, you slobs, listen up!” Wire-face strained against his chain and jabbed a finger at Dredd. “Look who we got with us. We got a muckin’ celebrity on board. We got us Judge Dredd!”

The word went up and down the hold, spreading like an angry ripple from one con to the next.

“Dredd.”

“Dredd.”

“Dredd’s here…”

“Dredd!”

“Dredd!”

“DREDD!”

The drone of voices swelled into a roar. The guards sat up straight, looked at each other, flicked off safeties, and stroked the triggers of their weapons.

“All right, cool it off down there. I ain’t askin’ you again!”

“DREDD… DREDD… DREDD!”

Someone snapped a chain. Someone found a plastic blade strapped to his leg, a weapon the detectors didn’t find. Someone spit a shard of broken glass from his mouth and slipped it between the knuckles of a scarred left hand.

A man nearly seven feet tall came to his feet behind Dredd. He howled and rolled his eyes, spitting Dredd’s name, a broken chain whipping about his head. He came at Dredd fast. Dredd kicked him in the gut, slamming him back into a benchful of men. The men yelled and shook their fists, straining at their chains. A burly arm came out of nowhere, crooking around Dredd’s neck. Dredd drove his elbow straight back. The man grunted in pain, but he wouldn’t let go.

A riot gun exploded twice, breaking eardrums and lighting up the hold. A scream pierced the air.

Fergie saw the man scooting on his arms across the surface of the deck. Long arms, long legs, hairy as a spider. Dredd roared in Fergie’s ears, and pounded on the enormous arm around his neck. Fergie didn’t think Dredd looked good at all. His face looked red. Then it looked purple, then it looked blue.

If I get out of this alive, I won’t have to do any time, Fergie thought. Dredd’ll kill me and I won’t have to do five years—five minutes maybe, sure as hell not five years…

Reverend Billy Joe Angel fought the urge to reach beneath his robe and scratch his crotch. That was wrong, that was sin. God wouldn’t care for that. There was something crawling around down there—maybe a centipede, it felt kind of long. ’Course it might be a bunch of red ants. There were lots of red ants in the gully, and if you stayed on your knees long enough in holy prayer they’d find you out.

Whatever it was, it stung bad. It was stinging parts that hurt worse than anything at all. The Reverend rejoiced in God’s blessing, in the joy of the pain.

“Gwowy do Goht,” he cried out, “gwowy do hids nabe!”

He drew the hood tighter about his head, and raised his face to the skies. He was blind, but he could feel the terrible wrath of the sun. It burned through ragged cloth, blistered his flesh and seared him to the bone.

Thou art good, oh Lord, he prayed in his head. Thou hast sent me bountiful suffering and near-unbearable pain. I thank thee for this empty and worthless land, for the merciless ball of fire thou hast placed overhead, for the tiny creatures of the earth that do constantly sting and bite this worthless body, which is unclean and eternally damned. Bring forth festering sores upon me, and upon my wicked sons, the filthy spawn of my loins, the—

“Shuttle coming, Pa! Link-Link’s got us a ETA of three minutes flat!”

The Reverend felt a rush of glorious pain, a thrill of agony more intense than the nest of scorpions he’d sat in last spring.

“Praish the Lort who breegs us thish boundy!” Reverend Billy Joe Angel cried. “Praish hids nabe!”

He reached for his staff, found it, and pulled himself shakily to his feet. The ants were angry at his movements and swarmed up both his legs. He plodded up the gully, dizzy with a hundred stabs of venom in his veins. He avoided rocks and holes, for though he was blind, he knew this piece of hell as well as he knew the welts and bites that covered his scrawny form.

“Coe, coe my suds,” he shouted, shaking his shaft above his head. “Coe forth and gedder in the Harbest!”

Mean Machine jumped up and down with delight. He covered one eye and squinted through one side of the antique binoculars, the side that wasn’t filled up with dirt. He couldn’t see a thing, but he knew it was coming, knew it was there. He hadn’t seen a shuttle or heard a thing at all but he knew. The same way he knew a lot of things, since Pa had put the little tick-thing in the hole upside his head. Pa said the tick-thing was a blessed curse of God. Pa was annointified and sorely ordained, and Pa ought to know.

Junior Head-Dead scrambled up the pathway, making pig-noises with his mouth. He dragged the big Boomer along behind him, stumbling and falling and picking himself up again.

“You break that and Pa won’t hit you fer a week,” Mean Machine warned him. “And I ain’t kidding, neither!”

“Snuk-Snuk-snuk!” Junior Head-Dead dropped the handle of the boomer, scattering parts on the ground. Snapped the shaky tripod in place. Lifted the clumsy weapon and set it on the stand, bolted it into place. Junior Head-Dead had no idea what it was. He knew it worked good and that was all he cared. It was a long, dented tube, still flecked with olive-drab paint. In an ancient incarnation in the Way Back When, it might have blown the treads off of a tank. It was hard to tell what it was then. Now, a missile that looked like a gas pipe protruded out the front. The missile had flat round magnets soldered to its snout. They looked like a plague of metal warts.

“Go-go-go!” cried Junior Head-Dead. “Going to catch me some citified boys!”

“Shut up,” Mean Machine said. He looked at Link-Link. Link-Link squatted like a sausage as he always did. His rat-nose twitched at the sky. Mean Machine had the Numbers of the Beast in his head. He could see things before they happened, but Link-Link could see them when they did.

“Give me a range-oh,” Mean Machine said. “Give me an Eee-Tee-Ay, gimme a G, gimme a O…”

“Sixty-Mixty-Levendy-Three,” Link said. “A four and a two and a thing with two heads…”

“That’s an eight, shit-brain,” Mean Machine said. “You gettin’ this, Junior?”

“Snuka-Snuk!” Junior said. “Goin’ to whup ’em right out of the sky!”

“You jus’ hold it,” Mean Machine said. “There’s nothing to shoot at yet, groon.”

“Don’t you—snuk!—go callin’ me that!”

“Lo,” said the Reverend Billy Joe Angel, “Lo, I am an ins-drew-ment of the Lort. He shall blesh me with hids abomonashuns!”

Mean Machine saw it in his head, the way it would happen, the way it would be. The flash of light, thunder, and the roar.

“Fire One!” he yelled as loudly as he could, though he didn’t know why because there wasn’t any Two…

“F-F-Fire One!” Junior Head-Dead said. He pulled the trigger and closed his eyes. Fire blasted out of the rear end of the weapon. It seared all the hair off Junior’s head. Junior hit the ground and rolled twice. The missile whined and wobbled drunkenly into the air. Mean Machine marveled at the white tail of smoke fading into the colorless sky. Reverend Billy Joe Angel prayed for God to send vipers and maggots to his bed.

Then, an instant before he heard the great din of retribution, the joyous sound of death, he felt the heat of the explosion on his face, felt the mighty flame of God’s breath.

“Got the sinners, Pa!” Mean Machine shouted. “Got ’em real good!”

“Hagga-lulla!” the Reverend Angel said.