Judge Dredd

“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.

TWENTY

Dredd decided he was dead.

The big con had squeezed the life out of his lungs, pounded his head against the shuttle’s iron floor. Blood filled his eyes. He couldn’t feel his legs anymore. He beat at the man’s ugly face until his fists went raw and the bastard wouldn’t budge.

He had never thought about death. Death was just there. Death was what you did when you didn’t do life anymore.

Then, in an instant, the world ripped apart in a ball of blinding light. Dredd and the con weren’t fighting on the floor; they were spinning through the air, locked together like two angry cats. The walls of the shuttle went by in a blur. Dredd flailed out and missed, turned end over end and tried again. His fingers found steel; the con’s grip tore free. He stared at Dredd and opened his mouth in a scream. The sound was lost in the howl of escaping air. The con seemed to shrink and disappear.

Dredd saw a ragged slice of blue sky and realized half the shuttle was gone. Something hit him solidly in the back and bounced off into the light, something without a head or legs. Dredd gripped the wall and held on.

Explosion, he thought. Something hit us… not in the shuttle… something outside.

The earth and the sky flashed by in a blur of blue and brown. Not too fast, Dredd noticed, gradually slowing down, spinning, but still slowing down. The front of the shuttle, half of the craft or more, ripped itself apart. The broken shell that was still intact was trying to stabilize itself, bring itself down in one piece. Dredd couldn’t see them, but he knew micro-computers in the molecular structure of the hull were patiently firing thruster rockets to bring them out of the spin. The computers didn’t know that there wasn’t a ship anymore, just a twisted piece of scrap. It was a valiant attempt to put a scrambled egg back together and cram it in the shell.

“Dreeeeedd!”

Dredd heard his name shrieking in the wind. With an effort that strained the tendons in his neck, he turned and spotted Fergie a dozen feet away. He was still strapped down, his fingers clutched tightly around the bottom of the bench.

“Dredd, do something,” he shouted. “Get me out of here!”

“Hold on,” Dredd told him. “We’re going down.”

“No kidding? See, I didn’t know that, I thought everything was fine. Now you tell me we’re going down, you’ve got me all upset again.”

Someone screamed. Fergie decided a lot of people were dead somewhere. A few were still alive and wishing to hell their luck would run out.

“This is all your fault,” Fergie said. “You did this to me. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you!”

“You broke the Law, Ferguson. You do the crime, you serve the time.”

“What time?” Fergie stared. “I haven’t got any time!”

“Thirty seconds,” Dredd said. “Maybe forty-five.”

“Shiiiiiiiiit!” Fergie said.

The corridors were dark. Even when Griffin thumbed his flash up to high the beam seemed to fade out and die. The cold steel walls were always thirsty down here. They always drank the light. Griffin had supervised the construction of the tunnel that led to the project, but he was never comfortable in the place. The bowels of Mega- City burrowed deep into the earth, but the tunnel was farther down than that.

Too deep, too cold, Griffin thought. Even too cold for a secret like this.

He was aware of Rico beside him, Rico’s silver eyes and chilling smile. Griffin knew Rico was aware of the fact that he feared the ancient robot, that its presence over his shoulder brought the memories of terrible wars to mind, horrors that Griffin had tried to forget. It filled him with rage that Rico could do this to him, that he couldn’t control these emotions in himself. That Rico knew, that he could smell and taste a man’s fear.

The corridor ended abruptly with a blank steel wall. Judge Griffin placed his left palm against a surface as cold as glacial ice. There was no marking there, no indication that this particular point was any different from the rest.

A sound almost too low to hear throbbed within the metal wall. The warrior robot shifted its massive weight.