The Fall of Deadworld Omnibus

by Matthew Smith

  I’d worked myself into a seated position and peered round the edge of the truck. The remaining three greys had ceased firing and were stepping back as one, still facing the vehicle. I didn’t like where this was going. “Stender!” I roared over the incessant downpour. “Get out of there. Lox, move away from the flatbed, quickly.” I shuffled back as rapidly as I could, grunting with pain as my injured leg scraped along the road.

  Stender rolled out just as one of the Judges hit the fuel tank with a high-explosive bullet and the truck went up in a fireball that immediately ballooned into a huge cloud of steam as it met the chill rain. I caught sight of Lox and Stender being thrown to one side, and I shielded my face from the super-heated blast. My eyes felt cooked inside my skull, my skin boiling. I lay still for a moment and let the rainwater cool me, the breath seared out of my lungs. It was getting quiet inside my head, the drumming of the raindrops diminishing, the aches flattening out.

  “McGill!” I heard Loxley’s voice and consciousness filtered back. So did the pain as a patchwork of complaints all registered their presence the instant I opened my eyes. I blearily registered Lox crawling towards me like a drowned corpse pulling itself out of the seabed. Everything seemed in black and white and moving in a jerky zoetrope flicker, such was the effect of the storm. I heard her say my name again, and the background sounds rushed in. I lifted my head and saw the undead cops standing over me, Lawgivers raised. I knew I had the automatic in my hand, but it might as well have weighed a ton for all the strength I had to lift it; I was glued to the ground, immobile.

  You’re done, Jackson, I thought. Your fight’s finally, thankfully over. Wait for the ref to count you out. Let the canvas be your friend: take comfort in its embrace. You’re not getting up from this one…

  I heard a rumble I took to be a peal of thunder, but it seemed to be growing in volume. It distracted the greys from pulling the trigger and they looked around for the source. Suddenly, a shape tore over mine and Lox’s heads and clattered into the Judges, knocking them apart like bowling pins. It screeched on the slick asphalt, a blur of white and chrome, its thick tyres grinding a jay’s head to a pulp. Then it skidded round, and let rip a chattering burst of cannon fire—the other two deadfucks disintegrated.

  “What…?” I croaked.

  “Lawrider,” Loxley said. “It’s a Judge. A live one.”

  “Oh shit,” I muttered, watching as the bike circled the remains of the truck, then came back towards us, the engine purring to a halt and the helmeted rider booting the kickstand into place. “That’s all we need.”

  “HOW LONG’S IT been raining now?” I asked, watching the black sheets lance down relentlessly from where I lay in the doorway, head resting on the frame. The sky was a boiling cauldron of clouds through which the sun was no longer visible, imbuing the light with an end-of-days unreality. Everything felt weird and dreamlike, but that partly might have been the effects of the rapi-heal pack that the Judge had wrapped my gunshot wound in, plus some painkilling salve that had been applied to my burnt face. I didn’t know how much morphine was in this stuff, but it wasn’t long before I was pretty much numb all over. I kept teetering between a blissed-out reverie that I wanted to sink into and a guilt that I was getting high as the world burned, which stopped me from nodding out entirely.

  “Good six hours,” the Judge, Hawkins, said without turning round. She was on the far side of the barn, running a diagnostic on her bike. Lox was slumped against a huge abandoned tractor tyre, lost in her own thoughts, clothes soaked and steaming. Stender paced the straw floor, growing increasingly antsy. The interior was otherwise empty save for some unrecognisable engine parts heaped in a corner.

  I whistled. The deluge was biblical in its ferocity—the streets were being turned into surging rivers, ground washed away up in the hills. In our battle through the storm to this secluded safe haven—me riding pillion behind the Judge because of my leg, the others being led by Hawkins as she drove at a walking pace, high-power beams piercing the murk—we’d seen cropfields submerged and buildings destroyed by falling trees. Lightning would crackle occasionally on the horizon, illuminating a shattered landscape. The jay said, not unreasonably, that it would be impossible to continue in the current conditions, and directed us to the barn that sat just off the interstate, up on a raised concrete foundation, where we could wait out the weather. The way things were looking, we could be here for another forty days, if the creeps behind this were going the whole hog. Locusts, floods—it was the apocalypse playbook.

  “We’re losing time, being stranded here,” Stender whined, pausing by the open door to look out at the tumult before resuming his anxious circuit. “Every minute we waste, they could be developing their genocidal plans further.”

  “Let me check if I packed my hovercraft,” I said, making a meal of patting my jacket pockets.

  He was unamused. “This is what they want—to starve us out, drive us into these rat traps. This is only the beginning.”

  “You’re right,” Hawkins said, standing up and wiping her hands on a rag, turning back to us. “This is only the start. They’re doing all the broad strokes stuff first. All this”—she motioned outside—“is trying to wipe out as many of us as possible. Once the majority’s dealt with, they can start to refine it—get in and personal, whittle us down by hand. They’re still finding their feet.”

  “Finding their feet?” Loxley exclaimed, incredulous. “Jesus fucking Christ, they’re monsters—”

  “But they weren’t always,” the Judge replied in a measured tone. “They were once men—evil, sick men, but men nevertheless—who have been handed certain… powers. I wasn’t at the Grand Hall when it fell, I probably wouldn’t still be here if I was, but I heard the reports—of this kid Sidney De’Ath, this psychopathic cadet, who led the coup. There are forces at work guiding him, and the others, but it’s tasked them with destroying an entire world—you think that’s something you can just launch straight into without a little trial and error?”

  Lox snorted and turned her head away. I could tell she was struggling to control her disdain ever since the Judge had turned up. “These forces… what are they?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Some creepy-assed black-magic shit. De’Ath’s done some kind of deal with the devil. Or a devil, at least.”

  “The Sisters,” Stender interjected. “That’s what I was told Mortis had referred to once—that he was doing the Sisters’ bidding.”

  “Whatever mumbo-jumbo it sounds like, it’s real and it’s happening. They’ve now got half the Justice Department ranks on their side.”

  “Those grey zombie bastards,” I said, then added: “No offence intended if they were pals of yours.”

  “They’re not Judges any more,” Hawkins answered resolutely. “Hell, they’re not human any more. I won’t hesitate to waste them when it comes to it. They’re just tools De’Ath’s using to increase the body count.”

  “Ones I encountered last night talked about fluids…”

  “Yeah, the Dead Fluids. Christ knows what’s in that, but the uniforms were being ordered to drink it, changing them into these freaks. Word is it’s getting out into the civilian population now, sector houses shipping it out through the drug gangs. Ding-dongs are smoking it like it’s the crack of doom.”

  “Why would anyone…?”

  “If it gets them high, they don’t give a fuck what they turn into.”

  “So what are you jaybirds doing about it?” Loxley demanded. “I mean, the half that aren’t walking pusbags. What are doing to protect us? Are there, like, designated safezones that cits are being shepherded towards?”

  Hawkins laughed and threw the rag on the floor. “You’re kidding me, right? Infrastructure fell apart the moment that creepy fucking kid tore Chief Drabbon’s heart out. We fought back as best we could, but they were slaughtering us. People were goin’ mad, runnin’ rampant… it became clear there was no control any more. It was every man and woman for themselves.”
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  “So you ran,” Lox said.

  “Guess I did, sister. There was nothin’ left to police. The smart move was getting the hell out of Dodge.”

  “Don’t you have a moral code or something?”

  Hawkins jerked a thumb at Lox and looked at me. “What’s her beef?”

  “She’s not a big fan of Justice Department, but I guess she was hoping there was someone in authority actively tackling the situation,” I said.

  “Good luck with that. De’Ath and his creatures are the authority now. How long you stay alive now depends on how far you’re willing to flee.”

  “So where are you going?” I asked.

  “The coast. Figure my best bet is to find a boat that’ll drop me off at the furthest desert island possible.”

  “Look, man, we’ve got a real chance of stopping this thing,” I said. “In that guy”—I nodded at Stender—“we got a trump card. He knows what’s being developed out at Rennick.”

  “The disease centre, huh?”

  “You said yourself that they’re trying to find ways to kill as many of us as possible. If they get Red Mosquito out into the food chain, it’ll be—”

  “Long-term mass extinction,” Stender finished, reaching into his coat and pulling one of the vials free. He tossed it to Hawkins, who shuck off her helmet for the first time—revealing herself to be a thirty-year-old black woman with close-cropped hair and a prominent scar running under her left ear and down her neck—so she could take a closer look. “It’ll corrupt and eliminate every food source on the planet. No one will survive.”

  “Red Mosquito?”

  “That’s what they’re calling it.”

  Hawkins shook the vial, tipped it upside down, fascinated by the contents. “You’re crazy.”

  “Look, we get it,” I said, “you just want to escape, live out what’s left of your days on a beach somewhere. We don’t need you to come in with us. But if you can help us get there, help us avoid the patrols… well, maybe that’ll go a bit easier on your conscience when you’re lying there with sand between your toes idly wondering whatever happened to the rest of us.”

  “What makes you think I got one?” she said, passing the vial back to Stender. “A conscience, I mean.”

  “True. But I see you haven’t taken off your badge, so that’s still gotta mean something, right? ’Cause right now you’re still a Judge. And when you first zipped up that uniform all those years ago, you must’ve believed in something.”

  Hawkins locked stares with me, then slipped the helmet back on, adjusted her gloves, and replied: “You can’t motivate for shit, you know that?”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  HAWKINS WAS KIND of a dick—then again, I’d never met a badge that wasn’t—but her access to the Judgecloud proved invaluable. Sidney and his goon squad were still using the same system that Hawkins’ Lawrider bike was connected to, and she was able to map where H-Wagon units were being directed. All had been grounded when the storm broke, but now the rain was easing off some twelve hours later, she flagged several taking to the skies.

  “They’ll be looking for survivors,” she murmured, watching the radar pings and plotting a route that would take us outside the H-Wagons’ search vectors. “Surveying the wreckage.”

  “If you can track them, won’t they be able to do the same to you?” Loxley asked, peering over the jay’s shoulder.

  “Nope. First thing I did when I got the chance was disable the bike’s transponder.”

  “The greys told us that psychics were trying to get a bead on Stender,” I said. “Apparently, all that dying on a massive scale had so far crowded him out.”

  “Yeah, Psi-Div’s a bitch if you’re trying to keep something on the downlow. They got ranks of sensitives scanning the ether, combing through people’s thoughts. I’m not surprised there was a psychic whiteout the moment all that initial craziness kicked off. But we should get moving—they’ll find it easier to locate him now there’s a few less minds to worry about.”

  “We’ll need transport,” I said. “How far’s Rennick from here?”

  “About another forty miles,” Stender replied.

  “I got an idea about that,” Hawkins said. “Leave it with me.”

  She was as good as her word. Using a Justice Department secure channel, she radioed in a request for backup, claiming that she was taking fire from the resistance. She kept details deliberately vague, playing on atmospheric conditions for interrupting her broadcast and blaming a damaged Lawrider for an unresponsive transponder signal, but made sure Control picked up her coordinates. She then pushed her bike out onto the interstate, now a couple of feet under standing water, calling over her shoulder to us to stay out of sight.

  The three of us leaned against the barn wall and peered out at this grave new world that was being formed around us. It was just after dawn on the third day, and the sky was the colour of bruises—green fading to violet—and genuinely looked like it had been damaged. The clouds had dispersed a little, but there was no blue beyond them, just glimpses of a starry black emptiness as if something irreplaceable had been torn up there. It felt alien now; other. That our world was not just being flattened and scoured of life, but also remoulded in tribute to whatever powers Sidney was in league with. Hour by hour it was no longer ours but was being irreversibly corrupted and dismantled, shaped into a planet-sized tombstone. The persistent rainfall gave the air the smell of decay, of everything organic being reduced to putrefying matter.

  Within minutes a Justice Department cruiser came speeding along the highway, blue lights flashing silently, dividing the floodwater before it. It pulled up alongside Hawkins, who shielded herself from their gaze by remaining propped on the far side of the bike, head down, appearing injured and unresponsive, cloaked in a waterproof duster. The two greys inside clambered out and circled round in front of the Lawrider, just as Hawkins mouthed an order to the onboard computer, and the cannons opened up automatically—the Judges were instantly bisected, body parts scattered in the now pink and churning water. She got to her feet and beckoned us out.

  “Your carriage awaits,” she said, motioning to the cruiser. “I’ll be able to stay in contact by radio on a narrow-cast frequency, which the Grand Hall won’t be able to pick up. You should be able to travel under their radar in that, as long as you keep your heads down and don’t attract attention to yourselves.”

  “In that case, I’m driving,” Loxley said, already opening the car door, hand on the wheel before I’d had a chance to disagree.

  WITH HAWKINS LEADING the way on her Lawrider, we followed, me up front next to Lox, Stender on the back seat behind a wire mesh intended to protect the cops from their prisoner. He complained about the smell initially, shifting about and squeaking that there were troubling stains on the upholstery that he didn’t want to sit on, but a look from Loxley shot at him via the rear-view mirror quickly shut him up. She muttered that she had to concentrate, her eyes glued to what little she could see of the road ahead through the spray the tyres were kicking up, and we made steady if slow progress. I sympathised to a degree with Stender—there were gross smears that I could see on the dashboard and doorframe as if whatever these things touched they left a residue, a part of themselves, behind, and the stink was truly noxious as if a trapped animal had slowly rotted in the trunk—but it was getting to the point that squeamishness was redundant now. We were all being tainted by the grotesqueries of this butchered planet, all made to crawl through the shit and filth, and civilities maybe belonged to the old order. We would have to get used to death’s sickly sweet stench, for that would now be the norm, and become accustomed to the crunch of bones beneath our feet. We would be like insects scuttling across a vast carcass that was their world entire, for it was all they had ever known. I wondered if memories would eventually fade and no one would remember what their home used to be like before life and civilisation were washed away. All accomplishments, every evolutionary leap and breakthrough, would be lost to a hi
story that no one would ever read, and all that would remain would be a blasted, lifeless rock hanging in space solely defined by its very lack of existence. A dead world.

  I stayed defiantly uncheered by the view from my window. On either side of the road, sluiced up against half-submerged vehicles and buildings, was a logjam of bodies, some floating face down, others collecting like flotsam against a storm drain, piled on top each other as they bobbed with the movement of the current. There were hundreds of them, bleached limbs askew, clothes torn from their skin, to the point where they looked like amorphous entities attaching themselves limpet-like to whatever upright object had survived the tempest. It was impossible to discern where one corpse ended and another began; hair and fingers trailed like fronds on the water’s surface, but to what person they were attached was not easy to say. Presumably, the elements would conspire to meld them even closer together over time—who was going to be clearing them away, after all? From now on the dead would lie where they dropped—until they became a skeletonised mass, a community fused in calcium and marrow. Carrion-eating birds hopped from body to body, piecemeal offerings in their beaks, though they resembled no species of vulture that I’d ever seen before. They were ugly, sparsely feathered, deformed things that watched us pass with an unnerving intelligence behind their beady black eyes.