Swine Fever

by Andrew Cartmel

  "When we got back from investigating the explosion Porkditz had disappeared," said Darrid, refusing to look anyone in the eye.

  "We found out how they lured him away," said Dredd. He held up a small bottle in a plastic evidence bag.

  "What's that?"

  "Truffle oil."

  O'Mannion shot Zandonella a puzzled look. "Pigs can't resist truffles," explained Zandonella.

  Dredd slapped something down on the table. It was a sealed package; a squat cylinder wrapped in the characteristic blue plastic of the Justice Central evidence lock-up.

  "Dredd," said Darrid. "There was no way we could have prevent-"

  "Button it, Darrid," said Dredd. He began to unwrap the package. "The Council of Five is extremely unhappy at losing Special Deputy Porkditz. We've been deprived of our best means of finding the illegal pork farms at a time when we're under increasing political pressure to settle this situation once and for all."

  "It's the Cetacean Ambassador, isn't it?" said Darrid. "Those damned dolph-"

  "Darrid, shut your trap," said Dredd. "The Council is determined to go on bringing down those farms. We mustn't slow down our arrest campaign. Immediate results are required." He pulled the last of the blue wrapping off the cylindrical package to reveal a Wiggly Little Piggly bargain bucket.

  Everyone at the table stared at it. From the carton came the greasy aroma of cooked pork.

  "What's that doing here?" said Zandonella. She felt a queasy squirming in her stomach.

  "We've lost your friend, the pig," said Dredd. "But we still have to track down the factory farms."

  "Yes, I got that. But-"

  "So we've decided to use your special ability, Psi-Judge Zandonella."

  "My ability?" said Zandonella. "But I'm a PNE. I jump into the body of someone who was nearby at the time of a killing."

  Dredd watched her, grim and unmoved. "I know that, Judge."

  "I deal with murder victims," said Zandonella.

  Dredd tipped the bucket over and Piggly Little Wiggly barbecue ribs spilled out on the table, bright red and glistening.

  "Here's your murder victim," said Dredd.

  ELEVEN

  Zandonella focused on her subject, the greasy bucket of Wiggly Little Piggly spicy ribs. Her PNE powers had never failed her before, but for a moment it seemed like nothing was going to happen.

  There was no sound in the briefing room except the distant background hum of the air conditioning. The five Judges sat around the circular black table. Its surface was as shiny and smooth as the lid of a grand piano. Zandonella stared into the gleaming ebony depths, trying not to look directly at the grisly bucket of junk food in front of her. She didn't need to look at it. The stink of it slithered into her nose, an oily slaughterhouse fetor.

  Judge Dredd was sitting to her right. Next to him sat Psi-Judge O'Mannion. On the other side of the table were Carver and Darrid, who were watching her with twin stares of bafflement. Zandonella looked into the bucket of ribs. The bright red mess had once been a living creature. She felt her stomach heave briefly. She looked up at O'Mannion.

  "Well?" said Dredd.

  "Nothing," said Zandonella.

  "Nothing?" echoed O'Mannion. Zandonella shook her head. She looked down at the bucket again. It was a vile shade of green with the violently pink Wiggly Little Piggly logo embossed on it. She peered over its rim into the pile of ribs. Dredd had poured them on the table but she'd scooped the remains, as she thought of them, back into the bucket. Zandonella regarded it as a kind of fast food funeral urn. The cremated remains of the dear deceased. She could feel the grease from the ribs still sticky on her fingers.

  "Keep trying," said Dredd.

  Zandonella nodded. She could feel the sticky grease on her fingers...

  There was a sensation of falling.

  Like walking down a staircase and putting out your foot for the bottom step, but the bottom step isn't there...

  Zandonella's eyes closed and her head lolled forward towards the table, falling asleep in slow motion. O'Mannion moved forward quickly, dodging around Dredd as she moved to Zandonella's side. She caught Zandonella's head and cradled it so it settled gently onto the table.

  Carver and Darrid jumped to their feet in surprise. Dredd remained seated, calm and implacable.

  "What the hell did she do?" said Darrid.

  "She's some kind of necro-something," said Carver.

  "A possessive necro-empath," said O'Mannion, brushing Zandonella's long black hair back so it revealed her oddly peaceful sleeping face. "Like Zandonella said, she has the power to hop into the body of the person who was closest to the deceased at the time of death."

  "That's one spooky, sick trick," said Darrid. O'Mannion stared at him with level contempt then looked away, shaking her head.

  "Our aim," said Dredd, "is for her to land in the body of the slaughterhouse foreman or someone else in a senior position at the factory farm."

  "I see," said Darrid. "Then she just calls us with her location and we go and get her, and shut down the factory farm and arrest all the perps."

  "Something like that," said Dredd.

  Darrid chuckled and whistled. "Neat." He began stroking his long grey moustache with excitement.

  "Will she be all right?" asked Carver.

  O'Mannion shrugged. "We have no idea." She looked at the bucket of ribs on the table. "All the victims we've tried it on previously have been human." She shot a bitter glance at Dredd. "We've never tried this trick across the species barrier before."

  The lights were red - a sweltering, uniform, ruby glare. That was the first thing Zandonella noticed. Then the red light hurt her eyes, so she closed them. And that was when she sensed the heat. Heat and steam and the smell of swill. Swill? How did she even know what the stuff was? It was an unfamiliar, disgusting odour. Zandonella had never smelled it before. Or had she? There was something terribly, eerily familiar about it, like an impression experienced as dÈjà vu.

  Of course. She had never smelled swill before in her own body. But she wasn't in her own body. She was now in one of the personnel at the factory farm. Whatever human being had been nearest to the victim at the time of death. The victim being the poor pig who had ended up in that bucket of barbecued ribs.

  Her mind was beginning to catch up with her new situation, finding itself in a new body like a bird that had knocked another bird off its perch. Her awareness gradually settled into its new surroundings. She was beginning to make sense of the situation. It was always like this after a jump. As the disorientation faded, Zandonella finally noticed another odour, stronger and more pervasive than the swill. It was also a more familiar odour, so familiar that she had ceased to register it a lifetime ago.

  Pig stomm. Everywhere, all around her, filling her nostrils, the all-pervading stink of pig excrement. Now that she concentrated on it, it filled her sensitive nose, causing it to twitch with disgust as she detected every nuance of the bacteria-laden filth, the tang of residual stomach acid, the smell of cells sloughed off the gut lining of the pigs who had left the droppings. The stink of the swine excrement was the stink of information. An over-ripe, rotting stench of overwhelming detail which she sifted and analysed with her immensely sensitive nose.

  There was a renewed waft of stench as a fresh pile of excrement spattered to the floor. Zandonella could distinctly hear it land, soft and moist on the unyielding metal bars. Her sensitive ears detected and analysed the sound. And her stomach rumbled with satisfaction as the flow of waste spilled out of her, dropping from her hindquarters, just beneath her curly tail, to land with a final splash on the metal bars of the floor beneath her trotters.

  Her trotters...

  Trotters. Curly tail. Large, pointed, hypersensitive ears. Refusing to believe what her mind was telling her, Zandonella stepped daintily away from the pile of excrement, giving it a final sniff with her long, sensitive, flexible snout.

  Zandonella opened her eyes again and looked around at the big room full of
red light. She was seeing the room from about a metre above floor level. That was the height of her head, as she stood here on her four trotters, her little tail testing the air behind her.

  Gradually, like sipping a viciously bitter medicine, Zandonella let the truth trickle into her mind: the appalling, unavoidable, awful truth.

  She had jumped into a new body all right. A body that should by now have been covered in the oily sweat of fear.

  But pigs don't sweat.

  Five hours had elapsed since Zandonella had gone into her PNE trance. After the first hour, O'Mannion had arranged for her sleeping body to be transferred to the med-unit in Justice Central.

  The med-unit was a large white room with a domed ceiling illuminated by floating mobile spheres of brilliant white or intense glowing purple that hung in the air or moved freely around to those areas that were in need of increased light. The purple spheres were designed to kill insects and bacteria with their intense ultraviolet glow. The white ones were for providing illumination. They would swarm in close whenever a medical procedure required it, crowding together like a school of airborne jellyfish, hanging over the doctors and their patients, providing a steady, pure white light. The spheres were dimmed at night so the patients could sleep undisturbed, but only on the Judges' level.

  This circular gallery where the Judges were treated overlooked another level below - a secondary hospital facility complete with a large number of holding posts - where violent criminals, who had been injured or wounded during arrest and were awaiting recovery, could undergo the full rigours of their sentences. From the circular balcony above, these miserable, condemned malefactors strapped to their holding posts could be looked down upon with satisfaction by convalescing Judges in the perpetual twenty-four hour light of the spheres.

  But Zandonella wasn't convalescing. She wasn't even conscious. O'Mannion turned away from the balcony railing to look at Belinda Zandonella lying motionless in her spotless, white med-bed. She moved forward to check the computer readout on Zandonella's vital signs. Nothing had changed, of course.

  "She's been out for five hours."

  O'Mannion turned to see Judge Dredd standing there. "I know," she said.

  "Zandonella's a resourceful officer. She should have found a way of communicating with us by now."

  O'Mannion nodded. It was a bitter conclusion, but it was the truth. "Unless..."

  "Unless she's in some kind of trouble."

  "I agree." O'Mannion nodded. She turned to look at Zandonella lying in the med-bed. "Her trance is unnaturally deep and prolonged." O'Mannion looked at Dredd. His face betrayed no emotion. "There's no telling what happened to her."

  Dredd watched her steadily with his cold gaze. "No telling what happened? I disagree. It's obvious what happened."

  "Really? Enlighten me."

  "Zandonella is trapped in the body of a pig. One of the pigs in the factory farm."

  "Oh come on, Dredd. A PNE is presented with a corpse and jumps into the body of the person nearest at the time of death. The person. No one has ever jumped into the body of an animal."

  "But no one has ever used the corpse of an animal as a subject before, have they?"

  O'Mannion thought about the brightly coloured bucket of barbecue ribs and repressed a shudder. "No," she said. "And whose fault is that?"

  Dredd stared at her. "We're going to find Zandonella. Whatever trouble she may be in, we're going to find her."

  "I hope so," said O'Mannion. "Because if she is in the body of a pig, then that pig is in a factory farm waiting to be slaughtered."

  Dredd looked away from her and said nothing. He moved away from Zandonella's bed, crossing to the rail of the circular balcony. O'Mannion moved to join him. He said nothing, staring down at the perps tied to the holding posts. She searched his face in vain for some telltale trace of emotion.

  Far from looking upset, he was as cold and unmoved as ever. But there was something else. He was staring down at the perpsi with great concentration, as if he was looking for something in particular.

  Something, or someone.

  Dredd turned and looked at her. His face showed a brief ghost of a twitch that might have hinted at a smile of satisfaction had it been on the face of another man. "That was a Wiggly Little Piggly bucket of bootleg ribs, correct?"

  "Correct," said O'Mannion, trying to work out where this might be going.

  "And the main black market supplier for Wiggly Little Piggly is...?"

  "Mac the Meat Man and the Barkin brothers," O'Mannion said automatically. "What's that got to do with...?" She fell silent, following Dredd's gaze down to the holding posts below. Dredd was looking with particular interest to the unmoving body of Theo Barkin.

  O'Mannion turned to Dredd and smiled.

  "Now, that is a good idea," she said.

  Dredd nodded, his face expressionless. "I'll give orders for the news to be passed to our criminal informants," he said. "We'll get them spreading the word on the street right away."

  Mac the Meat Man shot a nervous glance at Blue Belle. "But our friend here can't just drop everything, can he?"

  Blue Belle shrugged. "A man's got to do what a man's got to do," Belle said in what she intended to be a sardonic drawl.

  Mac turned to Blue Streak. "But he has responsibilities to us. To his business partners."

  Blue Streak shrugged. "I don't care what he does."

  Mac turned away from the couple to look at Leo Barkin. The four of them were standing in the control room, with Leo's spindly robot standing by the door, like a parked appliance. Leo himself was busy in the weapons locker.

  Rifling through the weapons locker, thought Streak, pleased with the pun. "But you have duties here at the farm," Mac was saying to Leo's back as he pulled guns and ammunition out of the locker and piled them on the floor.

  "I'm not going to be gone long," Leo declared portentously, strapping a cartridge belt around his waist. "I'll look after my duties when I get back."

  "Not gone long?" said Streak. "You're going to bust into Justice Central and try to kidnap your brain-dead brother while taking on every Judge in the Mega-City. You might find that will take a little while."

  "I agree," said Mac urgently. "Think about this before you do anything rash, son."

  "I have thought about it." Leo began to attach hand grenades on his ammo belt, arranging them carefully, as though he was adorning a Christmas tree with decorations. When he was finished, he looked at Streak, his eyes hot and moist and angry. He held up a finger. "Number one," he said, "I am not going to bust into Justice Central and take on every Judge. If you'd been listening you would have heard me say that Theo..." His voice trembled at the mere mention of his brother's name. "Theo is being transferred to a new secure facility by hover bus. I won't even have to set foot in Justice Central. We'll hijack the bus as it leaves the building." He glanced over at Boyard-27 standing by the door and then looked at Streak again. He held up two fingers. "Number two. I am not kidnapping my brother. Kidnapping is what those bastard Judges did to him. I'll be setting him free. I'll be springing him. I'll be liberating him."

  Saliva sprayed copiously from Leo's mouth. His voice was shaking with emotion. Streak wiped the moisture from his face as Leo held up three fingers. "And, finally, number three. My brother is not brain-dead!" His voice rose to a raw scream that silenced everyone in the room for a long moment.

  When eventually someone dared speak again, it was Blue Belle, in a mild voice. "All we're saying is that you ought to be careful. I mean, you only just got this information about your brother being transferred."

  "That's another thing," quavered Mac. "How do you know this information is accurate?"

  "I just know it," said Leo. He struck himself on the chest, where there were now a number of ammo pouches bulging with refill magazines for his Rasterblaster RB-32. The mags clanged musically in their pouches. "I feel it in my heart," said Leo with a note of finality. The discussion was obviously over. He turned and marched to the do
or of the control room, heading for the launch chamber and the shuttlecraft. "Take those," he said, nodding towards the pile of weapons he'd left on the floor.

  The robot obediently scooped up the guns and, clutching them to his metal breast, clanked out after Leo, the door automatically whispering shut behind them.

  "Oh great," said Belle as soon as they were gone. "Now we have to look after the farm without him."

  "Don't worry," said Mac. "He'll be back soon."

  "Will he?" said Streak bleakly.

  Mac cleared his throat, obviously uncomfortable with the subject of mortality. "I suggest we all get back to work," he said in a brisk business-like voice. "We have a farm to run."

  "Without the Barkin brothers, it looks like," said Streak.

  Mac either didn't hear him, or pretended not to. He slapped his hands together in a down-to-business gesture and said brightly, "Well, we'd better get cracking. Or should I say, get crackling?" He chuckled for a moment or two into the uncomprehending gazes of Blue Belle and Blue Streak before falling silent and saying apologetically, "Just a little bit of pork dealer humour."

  "Someone is going to have to take the latest shipment of tins of Sputam to Aquatomic for irradiation," said Streak. "I guess that will have to be me."

  "Would you, son?" said Mac with fulsome gratitude. "That would be really fine. One other thing, could you take a couple of cases of gin along with you? For the boys at the irradiation plant?"

  "I guess so."

  "That would be just great. Those boys sure do enjoy a tipple. And it's a lot cheaper than paying them a bonus." He slapped Streak on the back as he walked towards the exit. When he was gone, Mac looked shyly at Belle. "Oh, and there's also something wrong with the Judas pig in chute S."

  "The one I vaccinated?"

  "That's right, Satan's Sow."

  "What do you mean, something wrong?"

  "She just isn't luring the livestock to slaughter like she should. Instead they have to be flushed out of the holding sheds with electric shocks run along the floors. And do you know how expensive that is? Not to mention putting voltage spikes on the grid which the Judges might be able to detect and identify as illegal pork production. No, no, much better to have another animal lead them unsuspecting into the killing chutes. Which is exactly what Satan's Sow used to do. In fact, she used to be our number one Judas pig. Something must have happened to her."