Fear the Darkness

by Mitchel Scanlon

  "Control to Anderson," her bike radio blared amid the roar of the engine and the whoosh of air. "First backup Judges on the scene at Whitman have made contact with the futsie. Do you want to be patched in to their comms traffic? Over."

  "Affirmative, Control. I want to know what we're dealing with."

  "Acknowledged, Anderson. Switching channels now."

  For a moment the radio crackled with static as the channels were switched. She heard a man whispering. His voice all but drowned out by the brutal tat-a-tat-tat of a weapon firing on full automatic somewhere in the background.

  "...need more backup!" the voice was hoarse with barely suppressed panic. "McCartney and Hoskins are down. The futsie's a walking arsenal. I'm trying to get behind him but it's like the drokker's got eyes in the back of his-"

  There was a scream and the sound of more gunfire. For an instant the radio shrieked out an ear-splitting wail of feedback, then hissed before falling silent.

  Dead air.

  "Connection's broken." The channel switched back to Sector Control. "We've lost them."

  Anderson refused to dwell on whether he meant the connection or the Judges.

  "Understood, Control," she said. In the distance she could see "Charles Whitman" written in large letters down the side of one of the blocks ahead of her. "ETA to Whitman now one minute. Do you have a floor number for that last transmission?"

  "A call-in from a block resident reporting gunfire puts it at the thirty-eighth. Ross and Ebden were ambushed on thirty-nine so it sounds like the creep's working his way down. More backup is on its way. ETA: three minutes. You may want to wait for them to catch up."

  "Negative, Control. I'm going in the second I get there. Anderson out."

  "Received and understood. Will advise you as soon as other units arrive. Control out. Oh, and Anderson? Grudspeed."

  Vin Meacham. Jeannie Chow. Jerry Kramer. Edie Morales. By the time Jeffrey's murder spree had reached the thirty-eighth floor, he no longer knew the names of the people he was killing. Instead, he had to check the lists of apartment residents posted alongside the elevator station at the floor entrance. The Markhams in Fourteen-A. The Husseins in Eighteen-C. George and Myrtle Kahn in Apartment Twenty-B. Door by door, room by room, bullet by bullet, corpse by corpse: before he was halfway along the thirty-eighth, names had given way to numbers. Soon, the numbers became boring in turn and they too gave way. Ninety-seven. Ninety-eight. Ninety-nine. Upon reaching his hundredth victim he stopped counting, killing without thought of who the person was or how many others he had killed. Once a body was dead, who cared what its name or number was?

  He stank of cordite. His arms and shoulders ached. He was covered in blood. He still felt the same dizzying sense of freedom he had experienced when he first started shooting, but with a body count now in triple figures, Jeffrey found he was getting tired. Every time he went inside an apartment and saw the beds in the bedrooms he just wanted to stretch out on one of them and get some sleep, but the voice was insistent. It would not let him rest. Jeffrey's enthusiasm for their joint crusade might be waning, but Uriel's appetite for carnage never seemed to be sated.

  The woman in Forty-A, the voice said in his head. She is about to make a break for it, Jeffrey. Kill her. Now.

  Turning to see a door burst open as a middle-aged woman suddenly ran from her apartment and sprinted toward the elevators, Jeffrey lifted the stump gun by his side and fired. The pellets caught her in the small of her back, sending her tumbling to the floor with a scream.

  "Please!" she said, as Jeffrey walked over to her and mechanically pointed the stump gun to fire the other barrel. "No, please! Please don't-"

  The stump gun fired. More cordite. More blood splattering up at him as the woman's face disappeared in the blast. Jeffrey didn't like the stump gun. It was noisy. It only carried two rounds - one in each barrel. The recoil was nearly as bad as the Magnum and it made his arms hurt more, but after working his way from door to door along one-and-a-half floors, he was getting short of bullets. He had stuffed all the guns and ammunition from Stan Kowalski's collection he could fit into his overcoat, but there was a limit to how much a man could carry. Jeffrey had to conserve his stocks and use each gun for the task to which it was best suited. The stump gun was for stopping runners. The Magnum for shooting through walls and doors. The other pistols - the Browning and the Colt - he used for the more common or garden shootings when he went into an apartment to kill all the residents. Most of all, he needed to save the AK-47 for the work it did best. Killing Judges.

  The Judges. As far as Jeffrey could see they were responsible for most of his problems. It was not that killing them had turned out to be so hard after all; with the voice to help him he could get the drop on them every time. No, it was a question of what the presence of the Judges had done to the citizens of this city. Accustomed to the Judges ruling every aspect of their lives, the majority of the residents of Charles Whitman stayed in their apartments like frightened sheep. Some ran, of course, but they were the exception that proved the rule. As far as Jeffrey could figure it, he had been killing for an hour now - plenty of time for the other people in the block to make a run for it before he could even get to them.

  Instead, they waited in their apartments, listening as the sounds of gunfire came inexorably closer, never once considering the fact if they ran for it en masse Jeffrey would have been hard-pressed to kill more than half of them before the others escaped. But they didn't run. They just huddled, frightened, behind doors that could not stop him, waiting for their precious Judges to come and save them. It proved something Jeffrey had always suspected: notwithstanding the fact some of them could cure cancer or build rockets to go up into space or do all kinds of other cool stuff, most people were pretty damned dumb when you came right down to it.

  It's a shame more of them don't run, Jeffrey thought. Least that way I wouldn't have so many of them left to kill before I can call it a day. He became embarrassed as he realised no secrets could be kept from the voice. Uriel could hear his thoughts and might well view Jeffrey's flagging interest as an act of betrayal. It made Jeffrey feel guilty. The voice had been so good to him: showing him where the guns were, warning him, helping him against the Judges. Jeffrey might be really tired, but the last thing he wanted to do was inadvertently hurt his guardian angel's feelings.

  There are two men in Apartment Thirty-Five-B. If the voice had heard Jeffrey's thoughts it gave no sign of it. They practise unnatural and sinful acts on each other every night. Kill them, Jeffrey. Kill them both.

  "Sure thing," Jeffrey said breezily, hoping to gloss over his earlier lapse. "I'm getting kind of short of bullets though. Maybe I should go grab the guns from some of those dead Judges and start using them as well?"

  No, the voice said. Lawgivers have a self-destruct mechanism designed to activate if anyone but its Judge owner tries to fire it. It would blow your hand off, Jeffrey. You have enough bullets. Now, the men in Apartment Thirty-Five-B.

  The voice paused. It was longer than the last time when the voice had paused. Longer and different. Courtesy of their connection, at some level Jeffrey detected a strange and sudden nervousness on Uriel's part. It was almost as though the voice had become as frightened as the family in Twenty-C, or the woman from Forty-A, or anybody else who had died there today. As though the voice had sensed something coming towards them that caused it unease. Some enemy it had particular reason to fear.

  "Voice?" Jeffrey was concerned. "You've gone awful quiet. Is something wrong?"

  She is here, Jeffrey, the voice said. I hoped she would come to us. It is better to kill her here and now. Away from the lair. The voice paused again as though conflicting emotions were warring within it. Then, the conflict was ended as fear and uncertainty coalesced into a command spilling over with boiling venom and hatred.

  The psi-bitch is here, Jeffrey, the voice said. Kill her. Kill her, now!

  ELEVEN

  THE SHADOW OF ANGELS

  It wa
s even worse than she had expected. Standing crouched in a firing stance inside the elevator, her Lawgiver cocked and ready, Anderson looked out as the elevator doors opened on the thirty-eighth floor and saw a scene from a nightmare. There were dead bodies everywhere: the corpses of men, women, even children, lay strewn across the hallway alone or in small untidy heaps and piles like rubbish sacks awaiting collection. Charles Whitman Block had been turned into a slaughterhouse.

  She saw dead faces staring up at her with unseeing eyes while their blood covered the floor and walls with drag marks and spatter. She smelt the stench of fresh blood and cordite, and something worse. As she moved from the elevator into the hallway, she felt a rush of emotions hit her as she was exposed to the psychic residue left by the carnage. Every step of the way the last memories and experiences of the bodies before her hung in the air like screaming ghosts: impressions of pain, fear and horror left indelibly imprinted on the victims' surroundings by the violence of their deaths. Above all else, she could feel a question hanging in the air. The same question each of the victims had screamed out in desperation in their minds before their deaths. A question, heavy with despair and incomprehension, which each of them had taken unanswered with them to their graves.

  The question: why?

  Not for the first time in her life, Anderson found it was a question she could not answer.

  She moved further down the hallway, her eyes scanning her surroundings cautiously for signs of danger as she fought hard to prevent herself from being distracted by the waves of raw emotion boiling restlessly in the air about her. The victims' pain was everywhere. It threatened to overwhelm her. With every step she was assailed on every side by the silent testimony of the dead. Flashbacks. She felt stray images and fragments of memories - none of them her own - force their way into her mind. She saw images of terror, grief and loss. Children screaming. Loved ones dying. Pleas for mercy cut off by brutal gunfire. Most of all, she saw a recurring image play through her mind repeatedly. The image of a man wearing an overcoat and carrying a spit gun, his face hidden beneath a mask of congealing blood, seen from a dozen different angles through the eyes of a dozen different victims. The killer. She saw him kicking his way through doors. Firing his spit gun. Writing on walls. Smiling.

  Smiling. Her own anger rose inside her at the thought. The creep smiled every time he pulled the trigger. Anderson felt her eyes burn as her vision became clouded. Putting her hand to her face, she saw tears and realised she was crying. So much pain, so much horror, so much sorrow. Sometimes, it was almost too much for her to bear.

  Get a grip, Cass, she told herself. You need to stay focussed and catch this creep before he kills again. She breathed deeply as she attempted to regain her equilibrium. Another thought occurred to her. Wait a minute, writing on walls?

  There were words written in jagged letters on the walls all around her. At first she had been too caught up in the pain and sorrow of the dead to even notice, but now she could see them: words on the walls, written in the victims' blood, messages from the killer to his hunters.

  I am the fire and the flame, one of the messages read. I do not fear the darkness. She saw another. I am the sword that guards the gate. I sit in judgement. And another. I am the Angel who watches. I have weighed this city and found it wanting. More than any other message though, amid the blood and the stillness and the silence she saw a single word repeated endlessly as though it spoke of some kind of reason for all the slaughter she could see before her.

  Judged. She saw that word written over and over and over again in blood.

  "Control to Anderson." After so long a period of silence, the sound of a voice over the radio unit on her belt almost made her jump. "Backup has arrived at the scene. They are en route to rendezvous with you on the thirty-eighth floor in approx-"

  "Negative to that, Control." Keeping her Lawgiver warily pointed down the hallway ahead, Anderson took the radio from her belt and held it close to her mouth. "Tell them to cover the elevators and stairwells and work their way up floor-by-floor. I'll work my way down and see if I can drive the killer towards them."

  "That's not procedure, Anderson," Control said. "You're alone in there. You need backup. Stop trying to be a hero."

  "Believe me, Control, that's the furthest thing from my mind," she replied. "I've found evidence at the scene indicating the killings at Whitman may be linked to the murders in the Sector House holding cubes. I don't know quite what we're dealing with here, but my instincts tell me it's a whole lot more than a simple futsie."

  "No offence, Anderson." Control's voice was testy. "But I can't go violating procedure just on your instincts-"

  "You want authorisation?" she cut him off. "Call Sector Chief Franklin - I'm sure he'll give it to you in spades. Anderson out." She broke the connection.

  She knew she was taking a gamble by bringing Franklin in on this. After what she had seen during the meeting with Grimes, she had no way of knowing whether the Sector Chief would back her play or countermand her instructions and the order the cavalry sent in at once. If nothing else, though, there would be a delay while Control contacted Franklin and waited for his decision. A delay that would buy her the one thing she needed most right now: time.

  Judged. The same word from the Sector House was written on the walls of Charles Whitman. Assuming on that basis that the killings here and at the Sector House were linked, Anderson needed to capture the futsie alive so she could question him. This was a priority any other Judges on the scene would be unlikely to share, especially given that the futsie had killed at least five of their fellow Judges already. Anderson did not necessarily think the local Judges would set out to intentionally kill her perp, but there was a hard way and an easy way to any capture, and with five Judges dead nobody was likely to offer the futsie the easy way. To top it off, there was the unsettling fact that a single perp had proved capable of killing five Judges in the first place. Even in Mega-City One, things like that rarely happened. Judges were too well trained and well equipped to be slaughtered so indiscriminately by some madman, no matter how many guns he had. "It's like the drokker's got eyes in the back of his head," she had heard a Judge say over the comm line. An exaggeration in the heat of a fire fight, maybe? Then again, there was ample evidence at the scene to suggest there was a lot more going on here than just a futsie on the rampage. The whole thing was too strange for that.

  Strange. It had "Psi Division case" written all over it.

  All right then, Anderson thought to herself. So it looks like I'm on my own against a Judge-killing psycho. I don't know where he is, what he really looks like, or even if he's watching me right here and now. Oh, and he's armed with a spit gun and he's a mass murderer who's killed a minimum of several dozen people already. I've got to hand it to you, Cass, you sure know how to get yourself in the middle of these tricky situations.

  Seeing the bodies of two Judges lying down the hallway, Anderson moved cautiously towards them, past a pile of corpses, her eyes sweeping from side to side and alert for any sign of movement from the doors alongside her. Kneeling beside the closest Judge, as she put her fingers to his neck to check his pulse she glanced at the name on his badge. Hoskins. He was dead. She noticed an entry wound in his back where a bullet had evidently slipped in-between the plasteen armoured plates inside his uniform. Then, she noticed the other Judge had been shot in the back as well.

  Futsie must have got behind them somehow, she thought. For a moment she was tempted to read the Judge's lingering memories in search of answers, but she couldn't risk losing track of the physical world around her, no matter how briefly. The futsie could be anywhere; she had stay sharp and focussed. She glanced at the bloody drag marks criss-crossing the floor. Looks like he killed most of his victims in their apartments and then dragged them out into the hallway. But why? And Hoskins here looks to have been in his forties at least. An experienced Judge. No way he just walks blindly into an ambush and lets a perp get the drop on him. Unless...

&n
bsp; Her mind raced and took flight, thoughts rushing in breathless staccato rhythms towards a conclusion. Two Judges shot in the back. Bodies lying everywhere. Bodies dragged from their apartments. Bodies alone or stacked haphazardly in piles. Extra work for the perp. No reason for it. Two Judges. Shot in the back. Bodies moved. Why?

  The perp was using them for cover!

  The psi-bitch, Jeffrey, she suddenly heard a strange voice whispering in malevolent urgency. Not audible. In her mind. She knows. Kill her, Jeffrey. Kill her now!

  She heard the sound of bodies falling. From the corner of her eye she saw a bloodstained man rise smiling from the tangle of limbs of the corpse-pile behind her, but Anderson was already moving - diving toward the ground as bullets cut through the air above her. She rolled, firing her Lawgiver. She saw the man jerk as a bullet took him in the belly. She felt a sudden pain as something struck her in the shoulder. She fired again, wild this time, and saw the man drop his spit gun as a bullet hit his arm while two more chewed up the ceiling above him. She saw his hand go to his pocket, emerging with a fist-sized metal ball. He threw it in her direction, the ball bouncing and skidding across the floor towards her.

  A grenade! It seem to move towards her in slow motion. The creep's crazy, he'll kill us both.

  It detonated, not with a bang but a whimper. Amazed, Anderson heard a soft fizzing noise and saw a black puff of smoke rise from the top of the grenade as it landed beside her and rolled to a halt.

  A dud, she thought, still hardly believing it. Lucky, Cass. Lucky.

  The tails of his overcoat flapping behind him, abandoning his fallen spit gun, the man turned to run away. Bringing her gun to bear, she thought she saw something, a shadow around him. Ignoring it, sighting in with her Lawgiver, Anderson fired low. She needed him alive. The bullet struck the futsie's thigh, causing him to stumble, but he regained his balance, turned a corner and disappeared out of sight.