"Hey!"
Wess registered nothing but the bright expanse of the dance stage, the worn brass pole and his girlfriend's affected performance of kicks, bends and touches. The rest of the club bled away into the sweaty darkness, a black sea of leering and catcalls around a plasteen island. Someone in the front row gave voice to the mood of the audience and threw a five-credit note at Jayni. "Get off, skinny! You suck!"
The girl's mask dropped for a split-second and she snatched up the money, flashing the boorish shouter with her breasts. She fell out of the robotic dance routine with a physical jerk and stalked off stage. Wess's lip curled in a snarl.
"Hey!"
Latreena came bounding out as the music changed, her ample chest raising a chorus of lusty yells, and Wess started for the back of the club, fury rising in him like a tide.
"Snecker, I'm talkin' to you!" From out of the dark an ebony fist took a ball of Smyth's radorak and pulled him to a stumbling halt. Dwayne, the only human bouncer at Bendy's, took it as a point of honour that he wouldn't shirk from working the door. "Cover charge is ten creds, roob!" He gave Wess a hard shake for good measure. "Else you beat feet, little man!"
The isolated spot of commotion was lost on the customers of Bendy's - Latreena's boobs sported hypnotic, swirling electro-tattoos that drew the attention of almost everyone in the room - but over at the club's stable of shuggy tables the joint's hustler-in-residence caught the action. Alvin was a cyborg with little else to do but fleece the unwary for cash, and play stick-and-ball with the other chancers of the skid district. Having recently learned of the untimely death of Bob Toes and his pal Hoog, Alvin was anticipating a return to his status as top dog on the tables, so to that end he was eyes-open for any opportunity that would put him in the good graces of Ruben Cortez. Alvin knew Wess Smyth by sight; he'd taken enough money from him in his time to know the little spug's face. He also knew that Cortez's man Flex was looking for the weedy loser in connection with what had gone down behind the Q-Save. Alvin thumbed the speed-dial on his wristo for the switchboard at the Carnivale and watched things develop.
Dwayne gave Wess another tug, and this time some of the radorak's material ripped. "Are you deaf?" he snapped, and just in case he was, the bouncer jerked a thumb at the sign over the door indicating the cover fee.
"I'm here for my girlfriend," Smyth pulled against the thug, stepping over the line of the entrance alcove and into the club proper.
This was Dwayne's point of no return. "You ain't," he grated, flicking his free hand. The electro-prod uncoiled from his wrist holster with a snapping fizz of sparks, a black snakehead of metal and plastic. He inserted it in Wess's kidneys and squeezed the trigger.
Alvin was watching intently, and he saw it all. One second the waster was going to get a thousand-volt shock tickle from Dwayne, the next Smyth's hand was in front of the bouncer's face and Dwayne was pale with shock. In the jiggling reflected glow of the spotlights from Latreena's chrome-painted breasts, Alvin thought he saw a grey-black block of metal emerging from Wess's fist. There was a blink of white light, like a flashbulb going off; then Dwayne was falling away, a cloud of pink vapour where his head was supposed to be. The flat crump of a weapon discharge hit Alvin's ears just as Flex answered the phone.
"Smyth! He's here at Bendy's! Holy sneck!"
Dwayne's murder got Latreena's attention. She had been having a thing with him for a while now, a kind of fumbling and inexpert sexual relationship that had grown out of her need for a zzip fix and Dwayne's fascination with oily boobs. She was just getting into her strobe-light number when she looked up to give him a little eye-contact thrill. She saw the gun go off and Dwayne's skull evaporate. The stripper lost all pretence of sexiness and screamed like a banshee. Some of the clients were confused but still aroused by this impromptu change to the routine; the others, the smarter ones, smelled the scent of fresh blood in the air and knew it for the danger signal it was.
The music was still thumping as a wave of panic swept across Bendy's. With Dwayne terminated, the club's two bouncer-meks weighed in, emerging from their watch alcoves with punch-mitts raised and stunners charged. Wess was ready for them.
There were targets everywhere. The gun spoke to him, not with words this time, but in a direct flood of sense and texture that came right into his sensorium. It was picking out people from the crowd, guiding his shooting arm to them and suggesting where and how to dispatch them. Most of the Bendy clientele were skid creeps and lowlifes, and despite the lacklustre attempts to keep weapons out of the strip club, there were still a fair few of them packing shivs or polyblades. None of them got close enough to attack Smyth - in truth, they were all running from him - but he killed them nonetheless in a strangely cold passion, enjoying the heady rush of power that came from having other people in fear of him.
The droids were a different matter. A nerve twitch in his legs told him to move, an instant before a fat fist of plasteen whooshed through the air where his chest had been. Wess turned the pistol flat and discharged a triplet of shots, so close together that the sound they made was one long ripping howl. The plasma darts punched through the armourplas chest carapace and ricocheted around inside, turning the first of the meks into scrap metal. The second machine tried to taser him from a distance, throwing sparkling bolts across the dance floor. Wess punched a running man with the gun hand and the victim fell back, soaking up the hits meant for him. In Smyth's world, everything was moving with a muddy, viscous slowness. He stepped through thickening air and unleashed the weapon on the other robot. It felt apart in clanking, burning segments.
Wess vaulted over the brass bar and on to the dance floor. He hadn't been up here since that time he'd got drunk and tried to steal Jayni's underwear. Bendy had barred him for that idiotic escapade.
Through the chaos, something drew his eye. The gun pointed it out to him; one of the fat slob's bootboys behind the bar, fumbling under the cred-till for something.
"Target has a firearm," it said. "Interrogative: Terminate, yes/no?"
The thug came up with a stump gun in his grip and threw a poorly aimed charge of pellets wide of Wess, the dance pole rattling as it was hit.
"Yes." Smyth let the pistol do the work, stitching hot blasts of fire into the gunman. The plasma bolts cut through him and burst open bottles of liquor, farting sheets of blue alcohol flames across the counter. Plasteen cracked and spat; predictably, Bendy's fire suppression system didn't work. The kickback paid to the district fire inspector was earning its keep tonight.
Wess felt the world speed up to meet him, as he shouldered his way through the bead curtain that separated the dance dais from the backstage area. Inside, he was assaulted by screams and crying. Smoke followed him in like a ghostly cloak.
His eyes prickled as he spotted Jayni, half-in and half-out of her street clothes. She was shoving the near-naked forms of the other two strippers out of the emergency exit that lead to the pod park. "Babe," he called, "it's me."
Jayni's expression was in disarray when she saw him; fear and anger, love and need all warred for territory there. "Wess, what's the drokk is happening? You look-"
She wasn't allowed to finish her sentence. Bendy emerged behind her and grabbed her rumpled blonde hair with a savage yank. He was furious and unkempt, flushed with colour and panting. His shirt was hanging loose over unbuckled trousers. "What that sneck is going on here?" Like his boss, Bendy had learned the trait of directing his anger at the first employee unlucky enough to be within arm's reach. "What's your spugwit boyfriend doing in my club? Where's Dwayne?"
"Dwayne's dead," Wess said, his voice wobbling with adrenaline shock. "Head pop. Boom. Dead." The words tumbled from his lips.
"You what?" Bendy didn't enjoy this answer, and tugged Jayni's hair again, as if making her squeal would somehow create a reply he liked better.
Smyth's teeth bared and he spat when he spoke. "Let her go, you fat shit." The gun went hot, flooding his bloodstream with endorphin triggers. He raised it
. "I'll kill you."
The fire in the club was now well and truly bedded in, and with a desultory whine, the smoke alarms finally spoke up, adding a keening cadence to the continuous music from the jukebot. If there was anybody still in the place, they would be choking on the heavy black soot. Bendy blinked at the halo of smoke invading the backstage area, washing around Wess's twitching form. "You bastard, what have you done to my place?" It was a lucky guess on Bendy's part. He dragged something from his belt and pressed it to Jayni's neck. A beam-knife. "Snecker! I'll gut her like a fish!"
Jayni began to cry silently. Wess studied her, the mock porcelain perfection of her face where she'd sprayed make-up across her cheekbones. He couldn't let her be hurt. The gun understood the priorities here, and with a wet snick of components, it dialled down the barrel diameter and shifted the gauge of its own emitter matrix.
Bendy's mouth opened in an "O" of bewilderment. "Whu-"
Flash. The fat man's hand was suddenly on the floor with the laser blade still gripped in its fingers. Bendy was thrown back against the wall by the shock of the pain, eyes bugging out at the cauterised stump at the end of his wrist.
Wess pushed Jayni out the door, and she gave no resistance.
By the time the chaos in the Resyk station had died down, the two surviving assailants were gone, disappearing as quickly as they had arrived. Judges on the scene quizzed security drones, working on the assumption that the killers might have got into the building disguised as ordinary citizens paying their respects. It was as good a theory as any, Dredd thought, but if gambling had been legal, the senior Judge would have bet his credits on a stealth entry through the sewers or even the main chem-slurry line to Resyk Central.
"That's enough," he told the Robo-Doc as the machine worked on taping his ribcage. "Speedheal patch will do just fine."
"You require mandatory downtime, Judge Dredd," insisted the machine.
"Yeah, whatever," he replied, zipping the upper half of his uniform bodysuit closed. He sniffed. The chemical stink of body preservatives was all over him from the crush of the dead.
He caught sight of a familiar badge as he stepped away from the ambulance. "Lambert."
"Dredd," she replied. "You okay? Keeble said they pulled you out from under a pile of corpses in there..." Her lip curled with disgust. "Nasty."
The senior Judge nodded. "Not the first time I've been knee-deep in the dead. Won't be the last."
"Right," Lambert was wary. "What were you doing here, anyway? I thought you were back on the Double-Eight busts."
Dredd flicked a look at the skin-sensor Tyler had given him. The device was smashed beyond all recognition, the data on the dead bodies lost along with the corpses blown apart or crushed in the confusion. "Chasing a lead. For what it's worth."
"Must've been close to have someone shoot up a Resyk facility just to get you." She glanced at the coffin-shaped building. "But I guess that's what you're used to, right?"
"Yeah," said another voice. "Some of us just do traffic stops and arrest go-ganger punks..." Keeble approached the two of them, a sneer playing on his lips, "Others get to fight alien superfiends from alternate dimensions and zombie necromancers."
Dredd eyed him. "Play the hand you're dealt, Keeble. You want glory, you should have quit before you left the Academy."
"Thanks for the advice." The other Judge addressed Lambert. "Come on, we got three dozen wailing cits back there crying about the last remains of their loved ones and it looks like it could get ugly."
"Okay." She glanced at Dredd again. "See you on the streets, sir."
"Count on it." Dredd gave the other officer a level stare. "Did you have something else to add, Judge Keeble?"
"Not a thing," said Keeble. "Not a thing."
Dredd approached his bike; the Lawmaster's pre-programmed self-preservation protocols had allowed it to escape the destruction in the service bay, and it came out of standby mode as he climbed into the saddle. The Judge noticed a message icon flashing on the bike's computer screen. He thumbed the "play" control and watched as a video window unfolded to show Tyler's haggard expression.
The Tek-Judge was running on adrenaline and it showed. "Dredd, didn't want to send this over an open channel, what with the way things are going. That skull-head Woburn is on the prowl and if the spooks are sniffing around too, I don't want them getting the drop on us. Bad news; Loengard's corpse had a little mishap after you left. He's nothing but ice and slush now." He paused, looking over his shoulder as if he expected Vedder to be standing right behind him. The Luna-City Judge leaned closer to the camera and lowered his voice. "Good news; that encrypted file from our friendly neighbourhood snitch? It's more data on Project Skorpion. You were right, they didn't kill the development back in '25, they just shifted it outta sight. Loengard was in on it, he was part of the original design team." A ragged smirk split Tyler's face. "And there's more. I found something interesting, but I gotta show it to you in person. Get back here as soon as you can."
Dredd deleted Tyler's message and gunned the Lawmaster's engine. The missing truck. Loengard's death. The shooters at Resyk. Someone was racing to clean up a mess before Dredd figured it out, but every instance was bringing him closer to breaking this case wide open. West 17, Vedder, the Covert Operations Establishment. It all kept coming back to the same factors. He turned the motorcycle on to the highway and opened the throttle to full.
Jayni drove back to her apartment, afraid to do anything more than glance at Wess in the passenger's seat. He was like a ghost of his usual self; she'd seen him angry, crying, top-of-the-world happy and low as the skids themselves, but never like this. He was almost vibrating with coiled tension, all twitchy and grey like a poorly tuned-in vid picture. She half-expected him to fade away into a cloud of static and pixels. This wasn't a Wess Smyth she'd ever encountered before.
As if he heard her thoughts, he turned his head slightly to look at her. "You have elevated skin temperature and heartbeat." The words weren't his, they seemed forced and parrot-fashion. "Don't be scared."
"How can you say that?" she piped. "I don't know how you did that. I don't want to know. But we have to get out of here! We've got to leave the city, Wess..." Jayni felt a strange sense of elation pass through her, a peculiar kind of freedom. She had nothing to hold her here now. They could just pack up the car and find some other hovel to call home.
"No," Wess said carefully. "I have things to do first."
She gripped the steering wheel and looked straight ahead. "You maimed one of Cortez's guys, maybe even killed another?"
"More," he whispered, but she didn't hear him.
"He'll hang you out to dry for that, Wess. Cortez only kept you around to kick, you know that!"
"Drokk him!" Smyth spat, suddenly animated, "Drokk The Eye and his drokking creeps! I'll kill them all!"
"Wess," she said, trying to keep the fear from her voice, "we can go live with my sister in Texas City. You can't fight Cortez... We have to run!"
He bent forward, cradling his right hand in his left. Jayni could only see it from the corner of her eye, but it seemed bulbous and swollen, wrapped around an ingot of black iron. He was touching it like a burn victim probing newly scabbed flesh. "Not yet. I still have targets."
OFF PROFILE
They left the city just before daybreak, lifting off from one of the flight pads on the South Wall. By the time the watery orange dawn was spilling into the sky, the flyer was already well into the expanse of the Cursed Earth, following the canyon lines of the Kentucky Burn toward the vast mega-swamps of the Ozarks. For a Tek-Judge born in a low-gravity environment, Tyler was a decent pilot, handling the modified H-Wagon with admittedly more confidence than Dredd felt was necessary.
The aircraft was typical of Mega-City One's iCON-Wagons, the flat shield-shaped fuselage painted with the distinctive black-and-white stripes that had made it a famous sight in post-Apocalypse War tri-d flicks like Sky Crew Nine and Nuke Patrol. Usually the long-range flyers carried
a four-man crew, but for this excursion it was just the two of them. Dredd's lip curled as Tyler made a flamboyant low-level turn to avoid a pack of grazing brachiosaurs.
"Stop showboating. We're trying not to draw any attention."
Tyler shrugged, never looking away from the viewscreen. "There's nobody but the dinos out here, Dredd. Who's gonna notice?"
The other Judge leaned forward. "Me. I don't want this bird wrapped around a tree just because you wanted to play hot stick. This is an investigation, not a vacation."
The razor edge in Dredd's tone cut right through Tyler's cocksure manner, and he swallowed hard, returning the aircraft to a more sedate course. "Sure. I mean, sorry, Judge Dredd. You're right."
"What's our ETA?"
Tyler glanced at the digi-map. "At this speed, seventy minutes. I'm gonna swing us north of the Tulsa Melts, then straight in toward Old Colorado."
Dredd accepted this with a nod and studied the map himself, scrolling the display to highlight the broken landscape of the Denver Death Zone. The data feed showed thermal readings, radiation concentrations and weather patterns, relayed by MC-1's armada of orbital satellites high above the North American continent. The Judge's experienced eye saw the signs of wasteland settlements in the outlying areas towards Neo-Cheyenne and the border with Wyoming, but barely anything that could be considered life in the mesh of impact fissures that radiated out from the former site of the old NORAD base near Colorado Springs. Nearly seven decades after the atomic conflict that had burned half the planet, this pocket of America was still hot with rad-pits and poisonous crater lakes. Dredd glared at the map, as if it would give him some clue as to what he would find there.
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