Judge Dredd

by Neal Barrett

  “Tastes good.” He leaned back, took off his hat and wiped his brow. He looked about the room and smiled.

  “A little irony, I guess. You and me and the others winding up here.”

  “Sir?” Dredd raised a brow.

  “Don’t know where you are, do you? Those columns, that piece of carving up there… This is a courtroom, Joseph. Or used to be. That, part of a face, what’s left of it. Up there?”

  “Yes, sir.” Dredd agreed, though he wasn’t certain what he could or couldn’t see.

  “That’s the blind lady. Justice. Before your time. Mostly before mine, too. She treated everyone the same. No favors, no secrets. A jury of ordinary people. Hard to believe that one, but it’s true. They decided. Not us. We should never have taken the law out of their hands.”

  Dredd shook his head. “You had to. You brought order out of chaos.”

  “That we did. Solved a hell of a lot of problems. And created more than we knew how to handle.”

  He saw Dredd’s confusion, and laid a hand on his arm. He seemed to hesitate, lost for a moment in thought.

  “I never thought we’d be sitting here together. Or that I might have the chance to tell you what I could never tell you before. To be a Judge, to decide the fate of thousands of lives during your career, I think that’s… too much power in one man’s hands. Too much, Joseph. For me, you, any man.”

  He looked right at Dredd. Dredd read the doubt in the old man’s eyes, the sorrow and regret, the pain of recalling a past that was written in the stone of lost years.

  “I once tried to compensate for that,” he said. “To strike some kind of balance, to eliminate the mistakes we might make, to put Justice beyond the possibility of error. We tried to… to create the perfect Judge. We called it Janus.”

  Dredd frowned. “I don’t understand, sir. I’ve never heard that name before.”

  Fargo shook his head. “No, no you haven’t. It was forty years ago, Joseph. To create the perfect Judge, DNA samples were taken from all members of the Council. The samples were analyzed and studied. One was chosen for the Janus project. Mine. It was then refined again and again. Altered to enhance the best qualities and screen out the worst. Weaknesses. Frailties. Any physical or mental characteristics that might obstruct the purpose of the project. We… we created you, Joseph.”

  Dredd’s breath caught in his throat. “Me? Sir, that couldn’t be. I—”

  “Listen to me.” Fargo shook his head. “Let me finish this.”

  “I had real parents. I wasn’t made by any… project!”

  “Yes, you were, Joseph.”

  “No!”

  “Joseph…”

  Dredd gripped Fargo’s arm. “My parents were killed. When I was just a kid. They told me at the Academy. You told me!”

  “It was a lie.”

  “I have a picture of my parents!”

  “You have a fake, a lie.” Fargo shook him off. “We lied to both of you!”

  “Both of—both of who?”

  Fargo wouldn’t look at him. “There was another person created in that experiment. But something went wrong. Terribly wrong.”

  Dredd blinked in sudden understanding. “I have a brother?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what went wrong with him? Is he dead, did he die?”

  “He didn’t die. You were best friends at the Academy. Inseparable. Both of you star pupils. Then he… turned. Went bad. We didn’t know until then. We created one perfect Judge, and another who genetically mutated into the perfect criminal.” Fargo stopped. “And for his crimes… you judged him.”

  Dredd came to his feet, fists clenched at his sides. “Rico? You let me judge my own brother and never told me!”

  “I couldn’t, Joseph. You were like a son to me.”

  “A son!” Dredd’s hand swept out and grabbed the water jar from Fargo, shattered it against the wall. The parched earth drank the precious fluid at once.

  “Rico had to be killed,” Fargo said. “To protect you. To protect the city.”

  “To protect yourself, you mean.”

  “Yes. That’s true. God help me, I cannot deny that. I did it for myself, for all of us, for—”

  “Wait, wait…”

  It struck him, then, like a physical blow, real and so suddenly clear it nearly brought him to his knees.

  “Rico. He’s not dead.” He stared at Fargo. “Rico’s still alive.”

  Fargo looked at his hands. “No, he’s not dead, Joseph. He’s alive. I signed the order myself. He’s in Aspen Prison. Special quarters there. I couldn’t—I couldn’t destroy him, whatever he was. He’s part of me. Part of you.”

  Dredd struck his fist against the wall. “Damn it, don’t you see it?” He gripped Fargo’s shoulders. “I didn’t kill Hammond. He did. It was his DNA that convicted me. Our DNA. It was Rico. I don’t know where the hell he is right now, but he’s not in Aspen Prison!”

  “Oh, Joseph, Joseph…”

  All the color drained from Fargo’s face. He looked at his hands, as if he might make the whole thing go away.

  “How, though? How could he…” He looked up at Dredd. “Griffin. It has to be. There’s no one else. He’s deceived us both. Sent us both to hell and brought Rico back.”

  “The Janus project.”

  “Yes. Of course.” Fargo’s eyes went cold. “He’s going to do it. He’s going to activate the project, open up that box of horrors again.”

  Dredd shook his head. “No. He won’t. Griffin can’t do anything without Rico. We get to Rico and we stop Griffin cold.”

  “Joseph—”

  “Sir. I will stop him. There are ways to get into Mega-City, we both know that.”

  “It’s not that easy. You don’t know, Joseph.”

  “I know I can sit on my butt in this pesthole and die!” Dredd’s voice clattered off the walls. “I know I will not do that, sir. He took my badge away from me. That’s all I ever had, and I will get it back!”

  Fargo slowly pulled himself to his feet. Dredd thought he looked every one of his years. Dust filled the lines of his face, a map of his long days of service, of giving himself to a cause he was no longer sure had been a just cause at all.

  What of all those years now? Dredd wondered. What had it come to, his faith in the system, in himself?

  Dredd had never imagined he could look at this man with any feelings except those of respect, devotion. Fargo had been like a father to him, the only father he’d ever known. Now, with the twisted irony of truth, he knew that Fargo was his father, in blood as well as name. And with that realization came the shadow of doubt, the confusion of love and hate—rage, sadness, despair.

  Dredd felt the heat rise to his face, the heat of sudden shame. Emotion of any kind had always troubled him deeply, and now those emotions battled with one another, clashed like dark and angry stormclouds in his head. That terrible conflict paralyzed him with doubt. He wanted to turn away, be anywhere but here. He wanted to reject his father for what he’d done… to go to him, tell him he understood, that he, himself, felt the torment of the decision this man had been forced to make. Right or wrong, he had followed his heart, served in the best way he could…

  And as he watched the old man in the long duster coat, watched him as he looked out at the cold night stars as if he sensed Dredd’s thoughts, as if he knew that he, too, was being judged, judged by the son he had created, loved, and finally betrayed, as Dredd watched his father’s tall silhouette, another shadow rose, stirred, brought itself up on its haunches, came out of the dark with the quickness, with the awesome blurring speed of a snake, striking before Dredd could move, before the message of danger could flash from his senses to his brain.

  Mean Machine screamed, a high-pitched senseless babble of sound, a hymn of joy and death. Fargo sucked in a single breath. His arms and legs went rigid, his head snapped back, his hat slid across his face. Mean Machine’s blade arm ripped through Fargo’s back, lifting him off the ground.

&nb
sp; Fergie sat far away from the ruins, alone out in the night. He didn’t like it out there. It scared the hell out of him to be alone in the dark. But it didn’t scare him half as much as staying back there. Not after what had happened, not after what he’d seen. Sitting out here with the scorpions and centipedes and the god-awful spiders bigger than his head was better than being back there. Better than being in that building with Dredd.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “This is Duncan Harrow with the news…

  “I’m sure most of you were watching less than twenty minutes ago when we interrupted our programming to bring you a bulletin on the explosion at Blue Quad Heights’ Mega-City Bank. Reports have been confused and scattered, with conflicting stories of a daring daytime robbery, a utilities explosion and the crash of an inter-city shuttle. Judge squads and Mediks are on the scene. An area between Nine-hundred-fifty-seventh Street and Nixon Avenue has been sealed off tight. And while authorities are not answering questions, this reporter has obtained an interview with a source close to the disaster scene.

  “Here, in an exclusive story, are the facts as we know them behind the explosion in the heart of Mega-City’s exclusive Blue Quad Sector. At nine-thirty-five this morning, just thirty-eight minutes ago, an All-Judges call reported Citizen Unrest in Blue Twelve. According to our sources, a squad of seven Lawmaster-mounted Judges arrived on the scene at the Mega-City Bank. Minutes later, four more Street Judges reported in at the site. The Judges entered the bank in what is reported as a standard intervention wedge. Only seconds later, an explosion ripped through the building, sending flaming debris into the street. While we don’t wish to anticipate official word on this incident, early reports indicate that all eleven of the Judges are casualties, as well as an undetermined number of bank employees and Citizens. At least four stories of the bank were destroyed, as well as a number of public and commercial vehicles in the streets nearby.

  “Death tolls already mount into the hundreds, and many severely- and critically-wounded persons have been admitted to area hospitals…

  “Ah, yes—here it is, our first video coverage of the disaster from our News-Drone unit over the scene. There are the… remains of the entrance to the bank. You can see isolated fires still burning in the building. There is a… a Judge Emergency Van, I believe, and I believe there are at least a dozen vehicles, including a ground shuttle, destroyed there in the street. That’s all the video we have at the moment, but there’ll be more as additional news units arrive.

  “Let me say that since officials have not issued a statement, we have no indications at this time of the cause of this explosion. We’ll be going into the Hall of Justice now, where Willi Cupp is standing by. Willi… ?”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “Duncan Harrow here with a special bulletin…

  “Only moments ago, tragedy struck again in Mega-City. This time, unknown perpetrators struck at the heart of the social order. At two minutes after one this afternoon, an explosive device of undetermined strength detonated in the Street Judge locker room, deep inside the Hall of Justice itself. There are no casualty reports as yet, but an anonymous spokesman at the scene has reported that the death toll will almost certainly be high. The device exploded moments after the mid-day shift change, a time when the locker room is normally filled with personnel coming on duty, as well as those just finishing their tours.

  “Though no official will comment at this time, there is little doubt that this tragedy and the earlier massacre of Judges and civilians at the Mega-City Bank are most certainly connected. Our news-drones are on the scene, and we’ll bring you an update on this story as soon as possible.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  The six Lawmasters stopped in the street, just at the entrance of the darkened alley. The deep throb of muffled engines was the only sound except for the steady drip of water overhead. Senior Sergeant Landdale knew the city as well as any man could, and he didn’t like this place at all. Downtown, as deep as you could go. If the underbelly of Mega-City was a cesspool, the stink started here.

  “Dispatcher said a Six-Oh-Three, Sergeant. If there’s an Armed Robbery in Progress here, they’re being nice and quiet about it.”

  “Keep your eyes open and your mouth shut, Colter. You haven’t seen the dog, don’t go telling me what color it is.”

  “Yes, Sergeant.” Colter felt the color rise to his cheeks. He didn’t have to look at the other Judges. He knew they were grinning behind their visors. Senior Sergeant Judge Landdale was always putting him down with shit Colter didn’t understand. “Don’t start singing till they pass out the music” was last week’s helpful hint. This week it was the damn dog.

  “All right,” Landdale said finally, “Bolo, take the point. Pierce, you back him up real close.”

  Landdale spoke softly into his visor-comm, telling the dispatcher there was no sign of a Six-Oh-Three or anything else except a lot of bad smells, and they would henceforth investigate the said area in question, stand by.

  The harsh headlights of the six Lawmasters had enough power to light up the cellars of hell, but they scarcely ate through twenty feet of the murky atmosphere of the alley. Landdale didn’t care for that at all. He had stayed alive as a Street Judge for fifteen years by religiously following Landdale’s Law: “If it’s light, yell ‘Halt!’ then shoot and bring up the body bags. If it’s dark, just shoot and check it out the next day.” The only thing wrong with this practice was it never got light in this part of town. Never did and never would.

  Bolo and Pierce were entering the alley, hugging opposite walls, Lawgivers off-safety, suit-lights on blind. The other members of the squad waited, holding their breaths. Suddenly, a high, whirring sound cut through the silence of the dark. Landdale and his men turned on their heels as one, fingers on the squeeze. The landcar wheezed to a stop, scant milliseconds before the Judges would’ve opened fire and turned it into a blossom of superheated gas.

  Landdale put his rage on hold, stalked over to the squat vehicle, and yanked open the door.

  “All right, groon-breath,” he said, “haul it out of there. I want to see ten empty digits dancing in the air.”

  The man stepped out. He was a small man with a face as round as a pie.

  “No need for alarm, Judge. I’m not armed. My name’s—”

  “I know who you are.” Landdale lowered his weapon in disgust. “You’re that sum-bitch on the video. What are you doing here, Harold? This is a potential crime scene.”

  “Harrow. Duncan Harrow with the news,” Harrow corrected. “I ran the scales, follow the little blips, the little lights. I look and listen in. That’s how I get the news. I was down in Yellow Quad, got the Six-Oh-Three, possible Armed—”

  “I know what it is, mister.” Landdale glanced down the alley, then back to Harrow. “I got an interdiction in progress here. You get your ass back in that vehicle now. Turn it around and go quiet-like back the way you came in.”

  “Huh-uh. I don’t have to do that. I’m a certified journalist. I have every right to be here.”

  Landdale raised his visor. His eyes were hard as flint. “I’ll tell you what you got. You got every right I tell you you got. So far that isn’t even one.” He poked the muzzle of his Lawgiver between Harrow’s eyes. “Now you turn this piece of crap around and git.”

  Harrow took a deep breath, ready to tell this uppity Street Judge who he knew in what high places, and decided that really wouldn’t help. This was a man who’d been around a while, and likely had a broad understanding of resisting arrest.

  “Yes, sir,” Harrow said. “You got it, sir.”

  He wound up the window, turned the car in a quick circle, and disappeared down the block.

  Landdale watched him go, muttering under his breath. He didn’t like the video or anyone on it. They said whatever they wanted to, even something bad about a Judge. Landdale was sure it was video people behind that awful business with Fargo and Dredd. Things like that shouldn’t happen. The Judges ought to take care of thei
r own. And if something did happen, groons like that Harold guy shouldn’t be allowed to stand in front of a camera and crow.

  He thought about the groon. He thought about his hair. If he remembered, the guy didn’t have any hair. He had hair on the video, he didn’t have any hair now. Maybe that was a rule. You had to have some hair on top, you were on the video. You were off, you could do whatever you wanted to. So why not wear it all the time? Landdale wondered. Guys like that, who’s to say what they might do?

  “Nothing, nada,” Polo said into his visor-comm. “Zero plus two up here.”

  “That’s a double,” Pierce said. “I got junk and bad smells and that’s all.”

  “Okay, squad, standard line-and-stagger, let’s move it in,” Landdale said.

  The Judges began their sweep. They were pros, and they kept the chatter down to a word here and there to let Landdale know what was going on with every man. Nothing happened. The water dripped steadily from the city up above. The alley was thick with murky poison air.

  “Up here, team,” Bolo said suddenly. “I’ve got potential lifeforms, Sarge.”

  “Shit,” Pierce put in, “how can you tell? It’s bums, Sergeant. Scummos and vags. We’ve landed in Maggot City, guys.”

  Landdale walked up toward where Bolo and Pierce were shining their lights. Colter was up there, too, Rodger and Workman on Landdale’s right.

  Landdale shook his head at the pitiful sight. Judge Pierce was right. These miserable creatures were human, but only because you couldn’t classify them as anything else, not without offending some other group like earthworms or slugs. They shuffled away, squealing in fright, turning their sallow faces from the light, ducking beneath their ragged hoods.

  Landdale made a mental note to tell Dispatch what he thought of their Armed Robbery in Progress report. There was something in progress here, all right. Like lice. “All right, get ’em out of here, move ’em out.”

  “Where, Sarge?”