Judge Dredd: Year Two

by Michael Carroll

  It had to be Finch. Drokk it!

  Peck turned, putting on his best smile. But there was no guard’s uniform, no cybernetic leg; just a tall man in a long coat, a scarf wound around his face and a trilby hat low on his brow. Something was tucked into the hat’s band. A ticket? No. It was a press card, like in old movies. But there was nothing old-school about the gun the guy was pointing in their direction.

  “Okay, pal,” the reporter said, trying to ignore the tremor in his own voice. “I’m sure we can sort this out. There’s no need for any—”

  The gun twitched to the side and fired twice, the shots muffled by the integrated silencer.

  Pfft. pfft.

  Peck whirled around to see the mutants slide down the wall, leaving two red smears as their bodies settled on the floor.

  By the time Peck turned, the gun was trained on him.

  “Now, wai—”

  This time, Peck didn’t hear the shot at all.

  Two

  Who Was That Masked Man?

  JUDGE JOSEPH DREDD shielded his eyes against the glare of the morning sun. A sky-surfer was flitting back and forth above the Dependicorp depot, a familiar logo emblazoned across the bottom of his hoverboard.

  Dredd’s lips curled as he turned to the Lawmaster parked beside the shipping containers.

  “Activate screen. Vid-channel.”

  “Which station do you require?” the bike’s telecommunication unit enquired in a prissy voice that didn’t quite match the vehicle’s sleek powerful lines.

  “Hound News,” Dredd snapped, glaring at the news report that immediately filled the screen between the bike’s curved handlebars. The network’s logo was tucked discreetly in the corner of the picture, the same stylised letter H painted on the board high above his head.

  Dredd was looking at footage of himself shot from the air, captioned with the headline: Haulage Homicide Horror.

  “This is Seymour McKenzie,” announced the reporter currently flying above Dredd’s head. “Your eye in the sky, reporting live from the West Wall. As you can see, a Judge has arrived to investigate the body found in a container unit early this morning; a body that has yet to be identified.”

  Dredd activated his bike’s loudspeakers, linking them directly to his helmet mic.

  His voice boomed. “They’ll be identifying your body if you don’t move along,” he said, looking up at the sky surfer. “Do I make myself clear?”

  The picture on the screen picked out Dredd’s hand moving to the Lawgiver gun holstered on his belt.

  “And now back to the studio,” Seymour McKenzie stammered as the image switched unexpectedly to Hound News’ resident anchor Bret Barnet, who looked up, shocked, from flirting shamelessly with a make-up girl.

  Satisfied, Joe killed the screen as the hoverboard sped away.

  Dredd stalked back into the container where the haulage firm’s security guard was waiting for him, a bulky man with a thick beard, an even thicker neck and a clunky artificial leg.

  A corpse was lying on the floor of the crate, its head circled by a halo of dried blood.

  “And you didn’t touch the body?”

  The security guard raised a pair of shaggy eyebrows. “Why in Grud’s name would I do that?”

  “You’d be surprised.” Dredd stepped over the stiff to examine the blood stains he’d spotted in the far corner. He crouched down beside the red spatter on the plasteen wall, noting the fragments of bone and brain matter lodged in the gore. Whoever had been shot had been sitting on the floor; the gun was angled down. Both bullets had ripped straight through the plasteen. Two bullets, two bodies, both removed before the security guard had discovered the corpse—or so the cyborg claimed.

  Dredd reached into a pouch on his belt, drawing out his snuffler, a hand-held DNA scanner usually reserved for Tek-Judges. Dredd had requisitioned one from Justice Department stores in his first month on the skeds. Why wait for forensic examiners to arrive at a crime scene when he could do it himself?

  He swept the snuffler over the blood, the unit automatically sending a sample back to the sector house.

  “Control,” he said into his helmet mic. “Have sent unidentified blood samples for testing. Require full DNA sweep.”

  “That’s a rog,” a voice came back immediately. “Have forwarded to Tek-Division. Stand by.”

  Slipping the snuffler back into its pouch, Dredd returned to the corpse, looking down at the rubber mask covering the stiff’s face. The exaggerated features of an old-school clown, complete with ruddy cheeks and red nose, stared back.

  “Any idea who it is?” he asked the watchman.

  The guard shrugged. “I was gonna check, but thought I should wait for you boys.”

  “The right choice,” Dredd told him, reaching down to prise the mask from the dead man’s face. “Otherwise you’d be looking at eight months in the cube for tampering with evidence.”

  The rubber was stuck fast to the blood caking the sap’s face. Dredd peeled it back to reveal a nondescript male in his mid-to-late thirties, nondescript except for the gaping bullet hole in his forehead.

  “Greg,” the guard gasped as he saw the face. “That’s Greg Weld. Works the exo-lifters.”

  “Knew him well?” Dredd asked.

  “No, he was pretty new. Only been here three or four weeks.”

  “Long enough to make an enemy?”

  Dredd looked at the clown mask in his hand. There was no hole in the rubber, meaning that it had been placed on Weld’s face after he was shot. Some kind of message?

  He turned over the mask and something fluttered to the floor, a folded piece of paper, no bigger than a postage stamp. It must have been sandwiched between the rubber and Weld’s skin, stuck to the blood on the inside of the mask.

  Dredd retrieved it, opening it carefully so as not to rip the gore-soaked paper.

  “What does it say?” the guard asked, trying to peer over Dredd’s shoulder pad. Joe fixed the watchman with a glare and the creep backed off.

  “S-sorry,” the bearded man said, retreating out of the container with a clank of his mechanical leg. “I’ll leave you to it. I-I’ll be back in the office if you need anything else.”

  Dredd returned his attention to the paper as his comm sounded.

  “Control to Dredd.”

  “Dredd here. You got the results?”

  “Mutants.”

  “Say again?”

  “You got yourself some dead muties, Dredd. No doubt about it. Can’t you tell from the bodies? They’re kind of easy to spot.”

  “No bodies, just bloodstains. Unless you count Weld.”

  “The stiff in the container?”

  “Greg Weld. Mid-30s, exo-lift driver at Dependicorp Haulage company. Got anything on Mac?”

  There was a pause while Control checked the Justice Department’s central database, the Macro Analysis Computer system.

  “That’s a negative.”

  “No criminal record?”

  “No anything. Greg Weld doesn’t exist.”

  Then who was the body at his feet? Dredd glanced at the writing on the paper, reading the text again, four words printed in stark black ink on the now scarlet paper:

  Three

  Crowd Control

  “HEY, MEATHEAD—EITHER you get behind the cordon, or you feel my boot. Understand?”

  Isiah Morphy was no fan of crowd control. A Judge with over thirty years’ service under his belt, Morph had seen City Mayors come and go; helped break up hundreds of protests, both peaceful and otherwise; and been given security detail at music concerts, employment lines and binge-eating conventions. He knew that getting thousands of cits together in one place was just asking for trouble, especially at political rallies like the one he was covering today. Worse, he couldn’t give his full attention to the hundreds of punks crammed into Boris Johnson Plaza, not while he was assessing his latest rookie, Zidane Lint.

  The kid was standing a little way along the cordon, scanning the throng
of mayoral supporters for any signs of trouble. He’d done well so far. Since they’d arrived, Lint had busted six dunkers, broken up three fights and spotted a juve using the rally to shift illegal comic books. The criminal scum of Mega-City One never missed an opportunity for lawbreaking, that was for sure.

  Still, Morphy had a good feeling about Lint. The rookie had aced his tests, and handled himself with distinction in a recent armed robbery at Racy’s department store. It wouldn’t be long until he was awarded his full eagle. Still looked about twelve, though. Morphy couldn’t remember ever being that young.

  The Senior Judge ran gloved fingers through his moustache as he watched Lint give a punk six months for back-chat. Grinning, he turned towards the floating stage that hovered at the far end of the plaza, the platform where mayoral candidate Jocelyn Piper would soon address her followers.

  Giant banners displaying Piper’s face wafted in the breeze on either side of the podium. She was a good-looking woman, that was for sure, in her early fifties with a fine head of golden hair and piercing green eyes, but her stomm-eating smile was getting old, real quick. Morphy had never seen anyone with that many teeth. He dreaded to think how much the woman had shelled out on dental treatments. Enough to feed three blocks in MegSouth, no doubt. But money wasn’t a problem for the likes of Jocelyn Piper. An overexcited supporter had insisted on telling the Senior Judge Piper’s life story when he and Lint had first arrived, giving him chapter and verse about how the trillionaire had built her tech-empire from scratch, selling second-hand back-scratchers from a stall in Alan Sugar Block. The star-struck teen had related how many businesses Piper had to her name, how many penthouses she owned, how many shoes, dresses, private hover-yachts, dogs, cats, robots and diamonds were in the woman’s various collections. The list went on and on, the drokker only shutting up when Morphy threatened her with a year for wasting Judge time.

  Morphy didn’t care how many millions Piper held in her bank account, how many times she’d been married, or any of the other trivia spewing from the Meg’s news outlets. All he cared about was making sure that the afternoon went without public disaster, gang warfare, zombie outbreak, or any of the other scenarios a Mega-City Judge had to be prepared for at any given moment.

  “Judge Morphy.”

  Morphy turned to see a familiar face walking towards him.

  “Dredd!” Morphy said as his former rookie approached him, stopping only to knock an e-cigarette out of a cit’s mouth and give the vaper a month in the cubes. “It’s good to see you.”

  “You too, sir,” Dredd said with a polite nod.

  Morphy raised a hand. “That’s enough of that, Joey Boy. I’ve told you before; it’s Morph to my pals.”

  Dredd’s jaw clenched beneath his helmet and Morphy had to stop himself from laughing. Two years since Morphy had passed Dredd for full service, and Joe was still as uptight as ever. When the lad had been assigned to him for final assessment, Morph had been told that his tutors at the Academy still had their doubts, and not just because of the controversy surrounding the cloning programme. Dredd was considered too inflexible, too tied to the letter of the law, to cope with life on the street. Morphy had liked the kid from the minute they’d swung their Lawmasters onto the sked outside the Grand Hall of Justice. Dredd had guts, that much was clear. He’d made his first arrest within two minutes of leaving the Hall. The first of many, it turned out. Since getting his shield, Dredd had had it tough, what with Rico and everything, but who said being a Judge was an easy ride? As far as Morphy could tell, Joe was doing fine. He was pleased to see him. His presence would make the afternoon go quicker, and having a Judge of Dredd’s calibre on hand would be no bad thing either.

  Dread greeted Lint with his usual professional detachment, and the three lawmen swept the crowd for more signs of trouble, discussing recent cases as they did.

  Soon, the conversation turned to a homicide Dredd had responded to two days earlier, a stiff found in a haulage depot.

  “And there’s no evidence of who popped him?” Lint asked.

  “Nothing firm,” Dredd confirmed. “No DNA, no vid-footage. Turns out he had plenty of enemies, though.”

  “How so?” asked Morphy.

  “Control was right. Greg Weld didn’t exist.”

  “A spook?”

  “A reporter, working undercover. Lived a dozen lives under different identities in the last year alone. Real name Ben Peck, currently working for MC-1 Today. According to their records, Peck used a face-changer to alter his appearance before securing the job at Dependicorp, even going so far as having a gangland tattoo inked on his chest.”

  “Permanent?”

  “No. Looked real enough, but wasn’t sub-dermal. Would wipe clean away with a laser scrubber.”

  “Which gang?”

  “Valverde.”

  Morphy whistled. “Tough bunch. Think they found out he was faking?”

  “And took him down?” Dredd plucked a can of soda from the hand of a nearby cit to check its sugar content. “It’s possible, although no one’s claimed the hit.” Satisfied the drink was within regulations, Dredd returned the can and sent the supporter on her way. “I made enquiries in known Valverde hangouts.”

  “Cracked some heads?”

  “No one had even heard of Peck, by either name.”

  “Going by the note, someone must have known he was a newsman,” Lint said. “That crack about the deadline.”

  Dredd nodded. “The note’s interesting. The letters were typed, not printed.”

  “As in a typewriter?”

  “Affirmative.”

  Morphy crossed his arms in front of his chest. “I haven’t seen a typewriter in... well, I don’t know how many years. Not outside a museum anyway.”

  Lint clicked his fingers. “There’s a typewriter museum in Jessica Fletcher Block.”

  “Already checked it out,” Dredd told him. “All the exhibits are present and correct, and none of the keys match the letters on the note.”

  “Any idea what Peck was investigating?” Morphy asked.

  “Not conclusively, although the mutie blood suggests wall-hoppers.”

  Every day mutants from the radlands tried to gain entrance to Mega-City One. Judges were permanently posted on sentry duty, but refugees still flooded through, some peaceful, some with extreme violence. However they came in, their fate was sealed. Mutation was illegal within city limits. Muties were either deported back to the Cursed Earth or executed on sight.

  Morphy nodded. “Could Peck have discovered them?”

  “Maybe, but who shot the muties? We found three bullet holes in the container.”

  “Same gun?”

  “Tek-Division’s not found the bullets, so we can’t be certain, but—”

  Dredd’s sentence was lost as music blared from the floating platform’s loudspeakers. Dredd pulled a sensor from his belt to check the decibels, grunting when they appeared just below the legal limit. The needle on his device bucked as a roar went up from the crowd, but Morphy was sure even Dredd would think twice about arresting every supporter in the plaza.

  Probably.

  Morph looked up, watching through his visor as Jocelyn Piper strode confidently across the platform, waving at the crowd, her self-assured image splashed across holo-screens on either side of the stage.

  He looked around the assembled throng and shook his head. The woman standing behind the podium was as rich as they were poor, and yet they worshipped her as if she was Jovus reborn. To the right of Lint, a cit in threadbare clothes babbled excitedly to her partner: “Ain’t she wonderful, Clive? She cares about us, you can see it in her face. She cares about the people, Clive. The people!”

  Yeah, Morphy thought. As long as you keep buying her crud, she’ll care about you come what may.

  Four

  Making Mega-City Work

  BEHIND THE PODIUM, Jocelyn Piper raised her hands to quieten the crowd.

  “Thank you, my friends,” Piper drawled, her
smile broadening. “Thank you for such a warm welcome today.”

  “That accent...” Dredd said.

  “She was born in Texas City,” Lint told him. “Moved to the Meg when she was a teen.” The rookie glanced at Morphy. “A good Judge does his homework before any public event, sir.”

  “You telling me how to do my job, rookie?” Dredd growled.

  Lint look flustered. “No. I was just pointing out—”

  Morphy shut both of them down. “You were trying to impress, I get it. But I’m trying to listen.”

  “Sorry, sir,” Lint said, although Dredd still glared at the cadet.

  Wasn’t long since you were quoting the law book at me, Joe, Morph thought to himself. You’re not all that different, you and Lint.

  On the stage, Piper continued her speech.

  “For too long, the poor and needy of this great city have been left behind. Is it any wonder we have crime? Is it any wonder our young people are disillusioned? Is it any wonder that we live in terror? Why, only yesterday, Sector 39 suffered that terrible tragedy in the Redwater shopping mall. One hundred and forty-nine dead after a sales-bot decided to rupture its power core.”

  Morphy’s eye twitched at the comment. He hadn’t attended the explosion at Redwater himself, but from what he’d heard, there was no evidence that the detonation had been deliberate. There had been numerous incidents linked to robots in recent weeks, and the press had been quick to suggest it was some kind of mechanical protest, android activists fighting for robo-rights. Morphy wasn’t so sure, and the last thing the city needed was mechanoid lynchings. The Big Meg was a tinderbox: half the population were just waiting for the right cause.

  Even here, he could hear the murmurings. The atmosphere in the plaza was charged, like the air before a storm. Piper had to be careful. She was whipping her people into a frenzy, every sentence punctuated by rapturous cheering.

  “What does the City give you?” she bellowed, pointing a finger at the crowd. “Nothing! What does it take? Everything! Mayor Amalfi talks about you as if you were cattle. No, worse than that: as if you were sheep.”