Wear Iron

by Al Ewing

  That sounded about right. Rico smirked and followed along.

  One of the very few victories the ACLU had won against the Justice Department was to secure a guarantee from Chief Judge Fargo that those deemed not guilty by reason of insanity would not be placed in the nascent Isolation Cube system. Instead, they were housed in private, non-judicial facilities such as Noel Edmonds.

  There was talk, at the Council level, of going back on this pledge—creating a separate stream of ‘psycho-cubes’ to house Mega-City’s growing criminally insane population. Dr Justine Hoenikker, a practical, level-headed woman in her middle fifties who hadn’t survived a nuclear war and risen to the top of her field by being anyone’s fool, knew that the days of the facility—and her own as its head—were numbered.

  Thus, she’d begun using her one significant resource to build up a small but healthy retirement fund. Rico was far from her only customer—she’d offered similar deals in the past to Mega-Mob assassination cartels, off-the-books pharmaceutical laboratories, pimps, organ-leggers and a group called the Mega-City Long Pig Appreciation Society.

  Dr Hoenikker’s one significant resource was a plentiful supply of human beings.

  “Down here,” she said, leading Rico past a corridor of plasti-steel doors with small, reinforced windows. He could hear the sound of shrieking coming from one of them—as they passed it, Hoenikker retrieved a small communicator from her pocket, flipped it on and dialled a three-digit number. “Jeremy?” Her voice was cold. “G/134 hasn’t taken his medication. I’m assuming he hid the pills under his tongue again. You’re supposed to check for that.” On the other end, Jeremy—whoever he was—made his excuses. “I don’t care, Jeremy. We’ll have to inject him now. Handle it, please.” She flicked off the comm-unit and put it away, shooting Rico a brief look of exasperation. “Twice this week. It’s because he knows more than he should—he thinks that means he can slack off.” She sighed. “As soon as a suitable replacement is lined up, I suppose I’ll have to have him killed.”

  Rico found himself impressed. If they did end up shutting down the Edmonds Institute, he’d have to look her up—she’d make a good consigliore.

  At the end of the corridor was an elevator. “Those were the workaday patients,” Hoenikker said, as she pressed the button marked S4 and the elevator smoothly whirred into life. “The ones we’re expected to do something about. In the lower sub-basements, I keep the ones that have fallen outside the system—mostly just forgotten, although a couple I made sure to deliberately lose when I noticed how useful they could be. Those are the serial killers, the torturers, the would-be geniuses. I tend to sell them to foreign interests, although there was one I let go to the Mega-Mafia...” She thought for a minute. “Jimmy Jigsaw, I think the papers called him.”

  Rico remembered. Jimmy was a psycho who’d ‘escaped’ from Noel Edmonds and started cutting people into one-foot cubes and sewing them back together funny. All the people he’d gone after post-escape had—coincidentally—made an enemy of Don Vito Corelli in some way. Not that anything could be proven. “I remember.”

  “Well, never again. Too many hard questions over that one.” Hoenikker gave Rico a stern look. “I’m relying on you to be a little more discreet.”

  Rico smiled. He wasn’t planning on being discreet, exactly, but he was pretty sure she wouldn’t be caught in the fallout. And if she was—well, there were ways to make sure she didn’t have to answer any of those hard questions.

  The elevator doors opened, and Hoenikker led Rico onto another corridor lined with cells—although these ones were fronted with transparent plasteen, with small, barely visible seams where the cells could be opened electronically. For a moment, Rico wondered why the design was different from the cells upstairs, with their steel doors and small windows—then he understood. This floor was designed strictly for window-shopping.

  He walked past the cells, taking a look at the inmates. Most of them were in straitjackets or some other means of restraint. Some were male, some were female, some old, some young—there wasn’t an order or system to it that he could detect, beyond the fact that all of them were for sale. None of them seemed to be on their meds—Rico stopped for a moment to watch one woman in her twenties screaming in fury at him through the soundless glass. He tried reading her lips, but all he could make out was the word ‘many-angled,’ over and over again—the rest might as well have been glossolalia for all he knew. He nodded at her. “Something like that. But dialled down a little.”

  “Don’t worry,” Hoenikker murmured, giving him a businesslike smile. “I have someone here who should be perfect for your needs.” She stopped, indicating a right-hand cell. “Tellerman, Rockford J—found wandering the ruins a year after the war. Nobody’s quite sure what happened to him—we thought we knew, but it turned out he was just saying what he thought we wanted to hear. He’s pathetically eager to please, under the right circumstances.”

  “How do you know his name?” Rico was taking a good, hard look at Rockford J Tellerman. He was a little on the scrawny side, but otherwise in decent shape, and his hair and beard would calm down with a little maintenance. Throw some product on there and he could be a newsreader. Physically, he was perfect—or he would have been, if not for the constant, terrified tremble that wracked him from head to toe. He was scared out of his mind by something—something invisible, that he seemed to be constantly checking for.

  The question was, could he be used?

  “Driver’s licence,” said Hoenikker, matter-of-factly, before taking a few steps towards a small intercom unit on the wall next to the glass window and flipping a switch. “We can hear him now, and vice versa. Rockford? This is Judge Dredd. He’s come to visit you.”

  Tellerman just stared for a moment, as if the information was some kind of trap, ready to spring closed around him. When he spoke, it was in a terrified whisper that Rico had to strain to hear.

  “Uh, has he been checked? Doc? Has he been checked for the death signals? We can’t take chances, Doc. He could be a carrier. We need to know he’s…” He tried to drop his voice even lower. “One of us.”

  Rico looked at Hoenikker, then at Tellerman, then Hoenikker again. “I don’t know if he’s worth six thousand creds...”

  Hoenikker gave him an icy look and flipped the switch, making sure Tellerman couldn’t hear. “His kidneys are worth that alone—although his lungs are damaged. Ex-smoker, I’m afraid—well, we think.”

  Rico didn’t bother hiding the irritation this time. “I’m not going to cut him up, Doctor Hoenikker—”

  Hoenikker cut him off with a raised hand. “No, you’re going to blow him up. You want someone suggestible enough to do exactly what you tell them to—to the letter, I assume—who won’t stand out in a crowd. The price is six thousand—take it or leave it.”

  Rico shrugged and nodded, and after a pause Hoenikker flipped the switch back. Rico could hear Tellerman’s quick, nervous breathing.

  “Rockford, Judge Dredd is one of us. He actually came here to talk to you about the death signals, as a matter of fact. There are some things he wants you to do to help fight them.” Her voice dripped with honeyed sincerity. Once again, he was impressed with the woman.

  “That’s right, Rockford,” said Rico, giving the man in the straitjacket one of his brightest, toothiest smiles. “Only you can save us all. You just need to do as you’re told for a while. Can you do that?”

  Tellerman swallowed hard, then nodded, eyes flicking left to right wildly as if something beyond the periphery of his vision was coming to eat him. “You’re one of us, Judge,” he whispered, gnawing at a fingernail. “Doc says. You tell me what to do and I’ll do it. We gotta fight them, Judge. Gotta f-fight the death signals. Any minute, one of them death signals could come outta the sky and—”

  Rico nodded to the switch, and Hoenikker flipped it. Tellerman continued to rant behind the glass, unheard. “So, does he come with sedatives?” Rico asked. “Because I take your point about sugge
stibility, but there’s a... jittery quality there that I’m not exactly in love with. He’s going to draw attention if he has to stand in a queue for hours—even assuming he doesn’t freak out, someone’s going to ask him what the matter is.”

  “Well...” Hoenikker considered it for a moment. “Right now he’s been without medication for some time. I can start him on a few things to remove the jitteriness, as you call it—obviously, we want to calm him down without curing the basic delusions.” Hoenikker gave Rico a quick, almost apologetic smile. “But then, if I could cure those—on our budget, I mean—well, I wouldn’t be selling him in the first place, would I? I’m not a complete monster.”

  “Of course not, Doc. None of us are.” Rico grinned, amused despite himself, then reached past her and flicked the switch again. “So, Rocky—can I call you that?” He grinned again, even wider than before. “How would you like to never have to be afraid of the death signals again?”

  Tellerman looked at Rico for a long moment, and then started to cry.

  Rico almost felt bad for the guy.

  Nine

  “SO WHAT THE hell’s this wacko gotta stay with me for?” Mooney’s voice was shrill and a little slurred. Tellerman, shaved clean now and dressed in a suit and shirt, watched him nervously from the armchair in the main room, his hands fidgeting in his lap. He didn’t say much unless he was prompted to—the pills Hoenikker had left with Rico seemed to have mitigated some of the terror that gripped him, so much so that he’d pass for normal unless you had a conversation with him. Rico figured he’d probably have to be coached a little, but they had time.

  “Rocky here had to be signed out in somebody’s name, Buddy-boy. I figured I’d use yours.” Rico shot Mooney an amused glance, then directed his attention back to the plans on the kitchen table. “Don’t worry. He got lost in the system years ago—I doubt anybody outside of you, me and Hoenikker even remembers he exists.”

  “But he’s gonna—” Mooney started, before casting a fearful glance at Tellerman. He walked quickly over to the kitchen door and slammed it shut, then turned back to Rico, whispering at a volume a little louder than his natural shouting voice. “He’s gonna blow himself up! They’re gonna know he exists then, ain’t they? They’re gonna know and they’re gonna trace him right back to me—”

  Rico rolled his eyes. He was starting to wish he hadn’t told Mooney about that part. He’d got it stuck in his head. “He’s not blowing himself up, Buddy.” He watched Buddy-boy exhale for a moment. “I’ll be the one sending the detonation signal. And if you’ve got a better way to start a riot indoors, I’d like to hear it.” He grinned, enjoying the way Mooney had tensed up again. “Here, take a look, I’ll show you how it’s going to work.”

  Carefully, he placed the liquid explosive—disguised as a bottle of soda gum—on the kitchen table, along with a detonator small enough to swallow. “Eat, drink. This is my body, this is my blood. Rocky ingests these before he starts queueing. Friedricks and her squad won’t have the tech to scan for it—the Judges on the gate will, but I’ll be the one who scans Rocky, so that won’t be a problem. Rocky blows on my signal, and that’s when the panic hits. Suddenly we, by which I mean the good men and women of Justice Department, are all looking after the crowds and not looking after the take sitting in the money room. Any questions?”

  “Why does it gotta be a human bomb? We could just plant one—”

  “They’ll scan for that before the contest. Use your noodle, Mooney.”

  “Oh, okay.” Mooney slumped in his chair, visibly sulking—the suicide-bomber aspect seemed to be rubbing him the wrong way, but he’d been up for three days straight and didn’t have an alternative. He unscrewed his hip-flask and took a swallow, grimacing a little at the cleaning-fluid taste of the booze. He couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the bottle on the table. “Where the hell did you get that stuff, anyway?”

  A couple of hours before he’d kept his appointment at the Edmonds Institute, Rico had stopped in with another of his ever-growing list of contacts. Vassily Grochenko, late of Moscow-St-Petersburg—or East-Meg, as they’d called it since the war ended—was an old man with a reedy voice and a permanently sour expression, who’d kept a connection open to the thriving arms trade in what was left of the Euro-cities. He was the man to see about explosives.

  “Is so difficult for me here, Rico,” the old man had sighed, nursing the same cup of cold tea that he always seemed to have in his hand whenever Rico dropped into the frozen hole he kept over in Dan Duryea. “I am missing home. The children, when they are buying the guns from me, they are so rude.” He’d shaken his head, taking a sip of the tea. “You want your money, yes? Is always money with you. You are Judge—what you spend the money on, eh?”

  “Oh, this and that. I always need money.” Rico had smiled. “But I don’t necessarily need yours. If you play ball, you won’t need to worry about paying me off ever again.” The old man’s eyes had lit up, and Rico’d known then that he’d be walking out of there with everything he needed.

  Vassily had come through, all right, and Rico had been true to his word. Vassily had no worries now. It was a shame to cut off such a neat source of revenue so messily, but Vassily could be a little too chatty for his own good sometimes—besides, old men fell and broke their necks all the time. It probably would have happened anyway. At least that was Rico’s way of thinking.

  “None of your beeswax,” he smiled at Mooney, leaning back on the kitchen chair. “Come on, Buddy-boy, I’m due on the streets in ten minutes—I really don’t want to go back out there with your blood on my knuckles. You know how we’re pulling off the riots, and you know when. Let me hear what you’ve got.”

  “Okay,” Mooney rubbed a knuckle in his eye socket, scowling. “I managed to scare up the plans for the Herc, no thanks to you. Had to pay a few people a few bribes—creds I don’t exactly have, y’know? If this job don’t work out the way we think it will, I’ll be out on the street.”

  Rico nodded sympathetically. There was no danger of Mooney being left on the street, though—the only place he was going was the Resyk belt. But he didn’t need to know that.

  “Now, creds are paid in the ticket booths here—they’ll all be automatic. Exact change only. So the cash is all gonna get funnelled through to this room over here”—he tapped another part of the map, a storage room close to the ticket machines—“and once it’s in there, it goes right into money sacks for collection. So there’ll be a couple of schmoes in there working. Plus guards—maybe four or five? Nothing special, mind—just your average rentacops. Not good enough for the Academy, y’know?”

  Rico nodded. “Oh, I know.”

  Mooney narrowed his eyes, giving him a hard stare. “Are there gonna be any Judges back there, you think? Could mess up the plan if one of the guys has to take on any real opposition.”

  Rico considered the question for a moment. “If there are—Muttox is pretty dumb, but I wouldn’t put it past him to think of it—they’ll be needed, either when the panic hits in the stands or when the bodies start piling up outside. They won’t be backstage long.” He sat back, rubbing his ample chin, and for a moment the frown on his face made him seem like a different person entirely. “Way I see it, we’ve got two problems. If I’m reading these plans right, the money room has some kind of in-built security on the door...”

  Mooney nodded. “Right. Not exactly a bank vault, but there’s a lot of alarms there. It’d take a good half hour’s work to get through without setting them off—and once we do, the folks inside will have had time to call the Jays.”

  “Problem two is moving the cash. That many creds—we’re looking at maybe six hundred pounds of weight.” Rico checked the time on the chronometer on his glove, then quietly drew the Lawgiver from his boot holster.

  “W-what’s that for?” Mooney blinked, the colour draining from his face.

  “Like I mentioned, Buddy-boy. I’m back on duty in eight minutes. If it gets to seven minutes and you’ve
not given me something I can use...” Rico shrugged. “You’re not going to like the last sixty seconds all that much.”

  “You don’t gotta threaten me, Rico,” Mooney muttered, reaching in his pocket for something. “I’ve got answers. Hold on a sec, I gotta find this—it’s mixed up with my prescriptions—”

  “That’s my Buddy-boy,” Rico smiled. He sat back, waiting patiently for Mooney to produce whatever he was going to from his pocket. Eventually, the fat man smoothed a clipping from a trashzine out onto the table—some kind of advert. Rico cocked his head, looking at the image of a blow-up rubber doll staring back at him. “Buddy, Buddy, Buddy... if this is a suicide method, it’s kind of roundabout.”

  “It ain’t a blow up doll!” Mooney snapped, then flinched, as if expecting the bullet. “Sorry. But I know what it looks like. Listen, what these are—they’re woman suits. Like, rubber woman suits for perverts to wear—over their clothes, even. Like a gimp suit, but flesh-coloured, and... y’know.” He reached up, miming a pair of breasts in the air with his sausage fingers. “Y’know, like that. They even got hair.”

  Rico raised an eyebrow behind his visor. “The world is a strange place, Bud. Thanks for reminding me. You’ve got five more minutes.” He tilted his gun, flicking idly at the dial that selected which bullet it fired. “Ricochet’s fun. You ever fired a ricochet in between someone’s ribs? If you angle it right it’ll bounce about like a pinball—major agony, but the perp won’t actually die for—”

  “All right, already!” Mooney was getting angry now. Lack of sleep, Rico figured. “Listen, the guys who make these super-perv suits—they do custom jobs. I ordered a guy—big fat guy. Like the contestants, y’know? Zips up in the front.” He stared at Rico, as if expecting him to get the gist immediately. “Jeez! It’s like a bag, okay? A big bag that looks like it’s a guy!”