Judge Dredd

THREE

The bench was hard as stone and the sound of the shuttle droned in Fergie’s head. The sound nearly put him to sleep, but Fergie knew better than that. A couple of cons had dozed off, then woke up yelling as the hot metal scorched their backs raw. The hull had been shielded when the craft was brand new, but it was far from new now.

Iron sweat dripped from the rusting pipes overhead. The air-recycler had blown on liftoff and the stench was unbearable in the hold. There were thirty-seven cons, cramped together on either side of the narrow aisle. No one was shackled. You could get up, move around, do whatever you wanted to.

“If you groons are crazy enough to kill each other on the way back home, then have at it, boys,” the guard said.

The con on Fergie’s left had a deep and deadly cough. The man on his right had a silver-plated leg. Fergie had heard of the guy but had never actually seen him before. His name was Jimmy Eyes, and he’d spent twenty years in Aspen Prison etching the leg with acid he’d stolen from the metalwork shop. He had done the whole thing with a magnifying glass. Unless you had a glass, all you could see on the leg were squiggly little lines. Strongly magnified, you could see the screaming faces of the people Jimmy Eyes had killed. He had driven his airbus into a power pole at three hundred-plus. No one but Jimmy got out. Everyone else was squashed flat or burned alive. A drug test showed Jimmy Eyes was bombed out on Triple Zetamine at the time.

After Jimmy finished his art—which everyone said was real fine for a man with no training at all—Jimmy took his etching acid and poured it into his eyes.

Fergie felt like a real nobody with cons like Jimmy Eyes and some of the other hardguys around. He recognized the Butcher from the paper hat he never removed from his head. The Lizard himself was supposed to be aboard. Everyone said he was a small, ordinary man, the kind you’d never notice in a crowd. Fergie shuddered at the thought. There was nothing ordinary about the Lizard, or what the Lizard had done.

Fergie knew he was small time, and that was fine with him. He had always made a real good living with a scam, and they’d only caught him once. Six lousy, miserable months, but he’d made it to the end in one piece, and he sure as hell wouldn’t let the Judges catch him cold like that again.

Fergie was certain he felt a change in the shuttle’s engines again. Maybe they were finally coming down. Or maybe the ancient crate had simply given out and they were plummeting to the ground.

There was no way to tell, no way to look out. And even if you could, there was nothing there to see. Nothing but the Big CE, the Cursed Earth itself. Death and desolation where nothing ever grew, where no one but a scrawny Dusteater could live, if you called that being alive. There was nothing else down there but the dry, hot winds that swept across the continent for three-thousand terrible miles. The winds, and one thing worse than that: Giant tornadoes that stalked the arid plains and sucked the earth dry—black, roaring funnels older than any man alive. Some people said that they weren’t simply weather anymore, like they were in the Way Back When. Now, they said, they were really alive, creatures as cunning as man himself.

That was just Dusteater talk, Fergie knew. Except he had seen one once from far away, on an Aspen Prison work detail. Now, he could no longer swear that the poor souls cast out upon the Cursed Earth weren’t right.

The shuttle tilted on its side, squeezing the seatbelt hard against his belly as the big engine started whining down. Where? Fergie wondered. Mega-City, most likely. They hardly sent anyone down to Tex-City anymore, and they never sent you back to the place where you’d committed your crime.

Fergie had tried to put that thought out of his mind for six months. He would never see LA again. Maggie, Bix and Gant—as far as he was concerned, they might as well be on Mars.

Okay, that’s that, put it out of your head. There are guys you can work with everywhere, and there’s plenty of Maggies out there.

Bix and Gant, right. But another Maggie, she wouldn’t be that easy to find…

No one was talking now. He knew what the other cons were thinking. That’s what he was thinking, too. Maybe they’d change their minds. Maybe they’d send him back. Judges could do that. Every man who’d ever been caught knew the Judges could do whatever they wanted.

He could hear the massive lock-gate grind, then thunder shut again as the shuttle passed through. Metal squealed, and the giant craft settled to the ground. The portal hummed, then opened like a massive steel eye. Fresh air filled the hold. The afternoon light was harsh after hours in the gloomy bowels of the ship. The cons opened their mouths up wide and shut their eyes.

“The Aspen Prison Shuttle has docked. Commence anti-contamination procedures at once… Parolees will disembark from Portal One-Niner now… You will maintain a single line. You will proceed in an orderly fashion to the assembly point outside…”

The voice grated from the antique speaker overhead. It sounded like gravel in a can. The cons stood and did as they were told. Fergie choked as he walked through the disinfectant spray. Whatever it was, he was certain it would kill anything inside a man or out.

When he blinked the sting away, he could see he’d guessed right. It was Mega-City, there was no mistaking that. The massive wall they’d just passed through was easily half a mile high. Ahead, he saw the awesome city itself, the silver-gray structures rising up abruptly, shutting out the sun, the great spires lost in the clouds twenty thousand feet above. Crowded skyways curled like graceful ribbons among the heights.

And, nearly out of sight, he could see the flying barges and shuttles speeding people and goods to those rich enough to live in the sparkling city towers. Fergie knew the rules. It was the same in LA. The mighty live high, and the droogs live low.

Videos didn’t do the city justice. It was bigger, grander, more terrifying than Fergie had ever imagined. LA was big—but not big like this. He had a momentary vision of a million iron swords, blades rising up north and south as far as the eye could see. And to make the image complete, the sun dipped beneath the city wall, turning the sharp planes of the city blood red…