Judge Dredd

Dredd vs. Death

"Very well then,' Chief Judge Hershey concluded. 'If there's no other business to be discussed..."

"Just one item," interrupted a new voice from the other end of the room. All heads turned to see Judge Dredd standing in the council chamber doorway. The Council of Five meetings were supposed to take place in closed session, with no one permitted to enter without the Chief Judge's permission. Dredd, however, was always a special case.

When Dredd spoke, Hershey knew from long experience, it paid for Chief Judges to pay attention to what he had to say. She sat back in her chair, signalling for her old street patrol partner to continue.

"What's the official Department policy on vampires?" he asked.

JUDGE DREDD

#1: DREDD VS DEATH

Gordon Rennie

#2: BAD MOON RISING

David Bishop

#3: BLACK ATLANTIC

Simon Jowett & Peter J Evans

#4: ECLIPSE

James Swallow

#5: KINGDOM OF THE BLIND

David Bishop

#6: THE FINAL CUT

Matthew Smith

#7: SWINE FEVER

Andrew Cartmel

#8: WHITEOUT

James Swallow

#9: PSYKOGEDDON

Dave Stone

MORE 2000 AD ACTION

JUDGE ANDERSON

#1: FEAR THE DARKNESS - Mitchel Scanlon

#2: RED SHADOWS - Mitchel Scanlon

#3: SINS OF THE FATHER - Mitchel Scanlon

THE ABC WARRIORS

#1: THE MEDUSA WAR - Pat Mills & Alan Mitchell

DURHAM RED

#1: THE UNQUIET GRAVE - Peter J Evans

ROGUE TROOPER

#1: CRUCIBLE - Gordon Rennie

STRONTIUM DOG

#1: BAD TIMING - Rebecca Levene

FIENDS OF THE EASTERN FRONT - David Bishop

#1: OPERATION VAMPYR

#2: THE BLOOD RED ARMY

#3: TWILIGHT OF THE DEAD

A 2000 AD PUBLICATION

www.abaddonbooks.com

www.2000adonline.com

1098 7 65 4321

Copyright © 2003 Rebellion A/S. All rights reserved.

All 2000 AD characters and logos © and TM Rebellion A/S."Judge Dredd" is a registered trade mark in the United States and other jurisdictions."2000 AD" is a registered trade mark in certain jurisdictions. All rights reserved. Used under licence.

ISBN(.epub): 978-1-84997-052-5

ISBN(.mobi): 978-1-84997-093-8

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

JUDGE DREDD

DREDD vs. DEATH

Gordon Rennie

Judge Dredd, Judge Giant and Galen De Marco created by John Wagner & Carlos Ezquerra.

Psi-Judge Anderson, Chief Judge Hershey and the Four Dark Judges created by John Wagner & Brian Bolland.

Novelization based on the PC/PS2/Xbox game "Judge Dredd: Dredd Vs Death". Script by Tim Jones, Kevin Floyer-Lea & Paul Mackman.

MEGA-CITY ONE, 2112

It was the smell from the rotting corpses of his wife and daughter which finally forced Vernon out of the apartment he had shared with them for the last five years.

He wasn't sure how long he had been in there with them. Time seemed to have altered its flow in the days since the whole of Mega-City One had fallen into this place which must surely be something close to Hell. The perpetual gloom that cloaked the city and enveloped the tops of the highest city blocks made it difficult to tell day from night, but by his reckoning it could only have been a few days since reality, as the citizens of Mega-City One had known it, had simply ceased to exist.

Just a few days. Not long enough to account for the rapidity with which the city had fallen apart. Not long enough to account for the overwhelming stench of weeks-long decay emanating from behind the closed door leading to the small apartment's bedrooms. But more than long enough to account for the growing sensation of gnawing hunger in his stomach.

The city's power supply was intermittent now, but even that couldn't account for the speed at which the food in the icebox had rotted away. There was something in the air which seemed to seep into absolutely everything, bringing festering decay in its wake. Even the contents of the packets of synthi-stuff in the kitchen cupboards had become mouldy and rotten, and Vernon hadn't been able to keep down more than a few mouthfuls of the raw synthi-noodle flakes he had tried to eat.

All he could do was sit there in the semi-darkness of the apartment, shivering against the unnatural cold that seemed to creep right into his very bones, listening to the terrible sounds that echoed through the deserted street-canyons outside - and wonder when it would be his turn to meet the awful, shapeless source of those sounds.

The stench got worse every day. It touched something deep inside Vernon, something dark and growing. Finally, he found the courage to flee the apartment and venture into the terrible, frightening world outside before his sanity finally gave way, before the terrible, groaning hunger within him caused him to look at that closed door and think of the bodies festering away behind it with something other than revulsion and a distant, mournful despair.

He stepped out into the corridor, closing the apartment door silently behind him, leaving behind forever the life he had lived there. The flickering corridor lights illuminated a scene of derelict decay. Slime dripped down cracked walls onto mildewed floors. Strange patterns of mould and moss crawled across walls and ceilings, finding nourishment from ultra-synthetic surfaces which should have provided none.

Just a few days, Vernon reminded himself. All this has happened in just a few days.

Most of the apartment doors which lined the corridor were closed. From behind some, he heard a few faint sounds of life: sobbing or weeping, or disjointed, mumbling words which may have been snatches of some half-remembered prayer. From behind one - 78/34, the Kirschmayers, he remembered, and Mr Kirschmayer was a deputy lieutenant in the block's Cit-Def unit - he heard a broken, maniacal cackle. From another, a few doors along - 78/42, Mr and Mrs Voogel, who had been friendly with him and his wife - he heard eager, hungry, scratching sounds.

One door at the end of the corridor stood open, with the welcome, reassuring sound of a voice on a tri-d coming from within. Vernon found himself running eagerly towards it. Tri-d at least meant some kind of normality, a reminder of what had until recently been a huge part of everyday life in Mega-City One, when the city's thousands of media outlets poured out a brain-numbing torrent of game shows, vidverts, chat shows, info-blips, newscasts and shock jock tirades into the over-saturated minds of the citizens. Someone talking on a tri-d meant that maybe someone was explaining to them the cause of the madness that had engulfed the city - and that maybe, just maybe, someone somewhere was doing something about bringing an end to it all.

'Good morning, citizens,' hissed the eerie, sibilant voice on the tri-d. 'Once again, a sinister black pall has settled over the entire city, blocking out all light and hope, while the temperature will be somewhere round about zero, meaning that you can leave the corpses of your friends and loved ones to fester for a while longer yet. If you are foolish or brave enough to venture outside, remember that the curfew is still in force and that you will be shot on sight... which would be a real pity, since we have provided so many other more interesting and painful ways for you to die.'

Vernon was at the door now, staring in at the figure suspended from the ceiling, hanging from the synthi-leather belt wrapped round its neck, the other end attached to the lighting fixture in the ceiling, and at the figures - a woman and two children - all dead from single gunshots, lying sprawled on the floor beneath its dangling feet. But it was the ghoulish, cackling apparition on the apartment's tri-d screen that monopolised his attention.

'Although, really, we should be grateful to you all,' it continued to hiss in its monstrous voice. 'Many of you have already given up hope and lost the will to live. Some have already begun to starve, and disease is spreading rapidly throughout all parts of the city. Faced with this, many of you have already chosen to take your own lives rather than await your fate at the hands of my brothers and their servants.'

The creature broke off, laughing shrilly to reveal an animal-like mouth crammed with sharp-fanged incisors. With a start, Vernon realised that the thing on the tri-d screen was actually female.

'All this pleases us very much,' the monstrosity continued. 'Your help in achieving our great work is very much appreciated. Even now, our brothers work tirelessly to bring justice to you all, but they are few, and you are so many. Be patient, remain in your homes and they will get to you in time.'

The creature's voice was rising, moving swiftly towards a shrieking crescendo: 'It is a momentous task we have set ourselves. To purge this city, to cleanse all of you, its teeming millions. To grant you eternal absolution from the greatest crime of all... life itself!'

Vernon started to run, fleeing from that voice and from the terrible, awful things it was telling him. Even as he fled down a stairwell choked with corpses, climbing over the bodies of neighbours and strangers, he could still hear the final words of the inhuman, mocking creature on the tri-d pursuing after him.

'With your help, we will turn this city into a monument to justice, a home fit only for the innocent. Where the only sound will be the blessed silence of the grave, and where the only sign of life will be the flies crawling amongst the vast mounds of your rot-bloated corpses. With your help, all this will soon come to pass... TOGETHER, SINNERS, WE WILL BUILD OUR GLORIOUS NECROPOLIS!'

He never could remember how long he had wandered the city for, or how he had managed to survive. He imagined he must have found food from somewhere, scavenged from the many derelict city blocks or shopping precincts, for the hunger pangs were not such a problem anymore. Deep down, he knew he had probably gone mad. But what did it matter, he reasoned to himself, when the whole city had also gone mad?

He glimpsed other wanderers like himself, other survivors and scavengers, but warily stayed clear of them. Several times, he saw larger groups of survivors, on one occasion several hundred strong, but always he hid until they had passed by. One of these groups spotted him and called out to him, urging him to come back and join them, but he kept on running. They were doomed, he knew. They had the invisible mark of death upon them - he had seen it clearly in the faces of the nearest of them - and he had no wish to join their fate.

On another occasion, a Judge patrol spotted him. Vernon didn't know why, but he knew that the Judges were part of what was going on in the city. He had taken off running as soon as he saw them. The Judges had chased after him, firing at him with their Lawgivers, but Vernon had managed to lose them somewhere in the darkness of the Hel Shapiro Underway. Bored with the chase, the Judges had given up and gone into the nearest building, looking for easier targets. Even from several kilometres away, Vernon had heard the gunfire from their weapons as they roamed at whim from apartment to apartment and level to level within the massive city block.

On that occasion, he had been fleeing from gunfire, but it would be the same kind of sound which ultimately led him to the moment of glorious rebirth, when he was to discover where his own new destiny lay.

He heard them from afar: rippling bursts of gunfire, tight and coordinated. There were always plenty of gunfire sounds in the city, but something about these seemed different in a way he could not explain. Carefully, going against every new instinct he had developed surviving on his own on the city's devastated streets, he crept towards the sound, drawn in by something invisible yet undeniable.

He found his destiny in Whitman Plaza. The surface of the square had been violently ripped up, transformed into a series of giant craters which were now being used as mass graves. There were Judges everywhere, herding in groups of citizens in their hundreds, barking harsh orders at them, lining them up in neat rows at the lips of the craters and then sending their lifeless corpses tumbling down into the burial pits amidst crashing volleys of Lawgiver fire. Some of the people in the mass graves were still alive, and an occasional laughing Judge would fire into the pits with rippling bursts, making the corpses piled down there dance and jerk as the high-velocity Lawgiver bullets tore through them. Those they missed were left to die, suffocating beneath the weight of the new layers of corpses that soon fell down to join them.

Vernon picked a path across these burial pits, drawn inexorably towards something in the centre of the square. Judges were all around him, but none saw him. Death was everywhere around him too - in the dismal, tainted air he breathed, in the lifeless, bloodied mass of flesh he crept across - but something or someone had decided that he was to be spared from it all. Taking up a position at the edge of one of the craters, crouching down to stifle the dying moans of one of the bodies he was standing on, he looked upon the figures that had drawn him on to this place.

They were standing in the centre of the square, surrounded by their Judge servants. Hover vehicles known as h-wagons, restless and lethal, circled overhead, standing guard over the new masters of Mega-City One.

There were four of them, and Vernon knew instantly who - what - they were, as soon as he saw them.

Death. Fear. Fire. Mortis.

The four Dark Judges. Creatures from another dimension, the news-vid reporters had said, with a thrill of fear in their voices. Twisted, evil entities who had decided that all crime was committed by the living, and that, hence, the greatest crime of all was life itself. They had wiped out all life on their own world and had then discovered a means to cross the dimensions to find Mega-City One. Twice before, the city had come under attack from them, with thousands of citizens losing their lives, but each time the human Judges of the Justice Department had fought back and defeated them, seemingly destroying them for ever.

But, like some creature from an old horror-vid, the Dark Judges refused to die and would return again, each time seemingly more deadly than ever. Now they were back once more, and this time killing not thousands but millions. The entire city was theirs, and they would not rest until they had killed every living thing in it.

Judges, seemingly under some kind of twisted mind control, were moving amongst the columns of captured citizens, randomly pulling people aside and herding them forward to be personally judged by the four creatures. Terrified citizens were herded in groups of a hundred or more into a smouldering crater, where Judge Fire immolated them en masse with blasts of lethal, supernatural fire from his burning trident.

His three brothers stood waiting as their Judge servants brought their unwilling subjects forward to them. The creatures had been busy, Vernon could see. Pairs of Judges carried off the lifeless remains of those who had been selected to be personally judged by the Dark Judges, and the pits set aside for each of the Dark Judge's victims were all nearly full.

Pleading and sobbing, each citizen was brought forward in turn to meet their fate at the hands of one of the Dark Judges. The Judges attending Mortis wore their helmet respirators down, Vernon noticed, to fend off the decayed stench from the rot-corrupted flesh of his victims, while even from this distance he could clearly see the frozen looks of sheer terror on the unnaturally twisted features of the victims of Judge Fear.

But it was Judge Death above all who captured Vernon's attention.

He stood like some regal overlord, his Judge servants making his victims kneel on their knees before him as they were brought forward to be judged.

'Rejoice, sinners! Soon you will be free from the crime of life, and the burden of your terrible guilt will be gone!' he hissed as each was made to kneel before him, before reaching down almost as if to bestow a blessing upon them. His claw-like hands melted seamlessly through flesh and bone, passing mysteriously through organs and innards until they unerringly found the heart, before those same long, inhuman fingers closed around the vital organ and squeezed all life from it.

The victims fell dead at his feet, the same look of horror and fear stamped into all their faces. Instantly, each corpse was picked up and tossed into the nearby pit, before the next victim was dragged forward to meet the same fate.

Vernon was awestruck by what he saw. Here was something far more than a supernatural bogeyman, the extra-dimensional fiend of the old news-vid reports. Here was a creature beyond life and death, an unholy, blasphemous god; terrible in his glory, undying, immortal, a taker of lives and guardian of the secrets of what lay beyond death. Had Vernon been one of those the Judges were bringing before Death, he would have fallen to his knees willingly and without being forced, in voluntary submission to this most glorious and terrible of creatures.

Death paused in his work, looking up as though suddenly sensing something amiss. From behind the iron grille of his helmet, undead eyes gazed out in search of what it may be. He gave a low hiss of irritable displeasure as his gaze picked over the thousands of corpses in the craters surrounding him. He did not like to be disturbed in his work, not when there were still so many sinners waiting to be judged.

Vernon cringed in terror, pressing himself into the tangle of cold, lifeless flesh beneath him as he felt Death's eyes searching him out, inexorably finding the spark of treacherous life amidst the otherwise pleasing landscape of death. The icy grip of fear took hold of Vernon's body as Death's gaze fell upon him and, horribly, he felt the creature's long, cold fingers picking through his mind, almost as if he were physically kneeling before him to receive the Dark Judge's lethal blessing.

His body convulsed and the beating of his heart slowed... and stopped. For a moment, he knew what it was to stand on the very edge of the abyss of death, and then the fingers withdrew, and the gaze of Death was lifted from him. Whatever Death had found in the mind of one helpless and terrified human had pleased him.

Death withdrew his deadly tendrils from Vernon's soul with a long, low hiss of satisfaction and turned his attention back to the business at hand. 'The crime is life... the sentence is death,' he ritually intoned and, seconds later, another corpse joined the thousands of others in the burial pits.

Vernon crept away, still only dimly aware of the significance of what had just happened. Death had found him, had judged him - and had found him worthy of something other than extinction.

There was something more though, something the Dark Judge had left within him. If he closed his eyes and concentrated, Vernon imagined he could just see it, a slick, hard, black pearl planted amongst the living tissue of his brain.

He had been marked by the Dark Judge. Marked not for death, but for life. For a purpose that was yet unknown to him, but which he already knew he would faithfully and devoutly carry out when the time came, for he knew that if he did Death's bidding, then he would be suitably rewarded.

'I don't want to die,' he intoned to himself as he crept away again. I don't want to die. Not now, not ever. I don't want to die.'

MEGA-CITY ONE, 2122

ONE

"Anything happen while I've been away?" Burchill asked, helping himself to a few generous gulps from Meyer's cup of now lukewarm synthi-caf.

Meyer sighed in unhappy resignation. Being a Judge-Warden wasn't exactly the most exciting duty in the Justice Department, and keeping watch over the things they kept down here in the Tomb wasn't exactly the choicest duty posting in the Division, but it was having to work with jerks like Burchill that was the worst thing about this job. Worse even than the mind-numbing boredom and the extra creep-out factor of the nature of the... things encased within the crystalline cube-prisons only a few steps from where Meyer sat at the duty-console.

"Nothing much," she told the smug Psi-Judge. "You're welcome to watch the vid-logs, if you want. We've got the whole of the last eighteen months since you were last here still on file. Not much to see, I'll grant you, but I think maybe Sparky might have done something like blink or change the flicker pattern of his flames a month or two ago."

Burchill snorted into the cup of synthi-caf. "Sparky! It was me that christened him that, you know that? Sparky, Spooky, Creepy and Bony, that's what I called 'em one night, a year or two ago. Glad to see it's caught on while I've been away."

Meyer bristled in irritation again. Psi-Judges were notoriously highly strung, and other Judges were expected to cut them a little extra slack, but Burchill was just an annoying creep. Duty regs said that there must always be a Psi-Judge on duty in the Tomb, to protect against any dangerous psychic activity from the things imprisoned down here, but the Psi-Judges selected for the job were rotated every three months since there were concerns about the effects on a Psi's mind of long-term exposure to the creepy vibes generated by the four detainees held in the Tomb. It had been a year and a half since Burchill had been on Tomb duty - or "spook-sitting", as he called it - and Mayer didn't think that was nearly long enough.

"Yeah, ain't you just the Department comedian?" she commented, the sarcasm bare in her voice. "And, hey, by the way, feel free to finish the rest of my synthi-caf, why don't you?"

"Thanks. Don't mind if I do," laughed Burchill, draining the last of the contents of the plasti-cup.

"No! Don't you d-" began Meyer, way too late, as the Psi-Judge casually flipped the empty cup over his shoulder, throwing it towards the thick red warning line painted on the floor behind him, which divided the underground room into two distinct halves.

On one side of the line were the duty-consoles for the two Judges - one experienced Judge-Warden and one Psi-Judge - which Tomb regs required to be at all times on duty here, as well as the elevator entrance back up to the surface. On the other side of the no-go line were the four entities imprisoned within the Tomb.

Even before the plasti-cup had crossed the line, hidden sensor devices buried within the walls of the chamber had detected the movement and were tracking the object's progress. As soon as it entered the no-go area marked by the line, multiple sentry guns placed at various points around the chamber opened fire, using precise telemetry data fed to them by the room's remote sensors.

The cup was instantly vaporised, struck by several laser beams simultaneously. All that remained of it was a fine residue of ash, which drifted slowly down to settle on the ground on the forbidden side of the red line.

Meyer cursed, and punched a button to open up her duty log. "Thanks a lot. Now I'm going to have to make a report on that."

Burchill laughed, and settled down into his seat in his duty-post across from her. "Hey, look at it this way: at least I've given you something to do now, which makes a change down here."

From behind the substance of the crystalline barrier, from behind the walls which had imprisoned him and his brethren for too long, Death watched his captors. The failure of their great work, the collapse of their grand vision of the Necropolis, had been a galling experience. And defeat at the hands of their old enemies, Dredd and Anderson, had been even more so. The destruction of their physical bodies, the entrapment of their ethereal spirits within these crystal prisons, where they were almost completely cut off from each other and unable to plan the continuation of their holy work, all this was bad enough, but worst of all was seeing sinners so close by - sinners guilty of the worst crime of all, the crime of life - and being unable to bring due punishment upon them.

Although Death could not actively commune with his brothers, he knew that they felt as he did. Within his prison, Fire blazed with angry, vengeful rage. Next to him, Fear writhed in agitation, his spirit twisting in on itself. On his other side, Mortis's restless spirit-shape formed and reformed itself, prowling round the borders of its prison, endlessly testing the strength of the walls and psychic wards which had been put in place to contain him.

Of them all, only Death was at relative peace. While the others raged and turned their anger on themselves and the seemingly unbreakable walls of their prisons, he watched. And waited.

And now, perhaps, his patience was being rewarded.

Death recognised their new gaoler, the Psi-Judge. He had been here before, and Death, probing subtly and tentatively at the edges of the man's mind, had sensed the interesting possibilities within. There was weakness within this one, Death understood, weakness that could be exploited to his advantage. The man had gone away again, as they always did, but Death had waited patiently for his return, silently laying his plans.

In the city beyond were the special ones, the ones who knew the Dark Judges for what they truly were - liberators, come to free all from the sinful burden of life - and who were eager to help Death and his brethren in their glorious task. Death had encountered several such special ones, and had put his mark upon them, knowing that one day he might have need of them. That day was soon, he knew now, and his call had already gone out to them.

Secret acolytes in the city beyond this place, and now a weakness here amongst their guardians. Yes, now he had everything he needed.

Patience, brothers, he whispered silently to the occupants of the other three cells. Soon we will be able to begin our great work anew. Soon, Necropolis will be ours once more.

Eyes, red and hungry, blazed at her from out of the darkness. She tried to move, to draw her Lawgiver, but the darkness around her was a living, sentient thing. It wrapped itself around her, snagging her limbs, dragging her down.

She felt herself falling, down into the dark. From above her came the angry, cheated snarl of whatever had been pursuing her.

She hit the ground with a clattering impact. She felt dust on her face, smelt withered, ancient decay and felt something dry and brittle beneath her fingers. Opening her eyes, she saw she was lying on a carpet of bones. Raising her head, she saw the litter of bones - human remains, she noticed, seeing identifiable skulls and bone shapes amongst the graveyard detritus - stretching out as far as she could see. The vague tombstone shape of vast buildings, cracked and ruined, loomed up out of the surrounding gloom. There was something horribly familiar about the whole scene.

Deadworld, she wondered to herself, remembering her past experiences in the nightmare world which had given birth to the Dark Judges?

Or Necropolis maybe, she asked herself, noticing with growing disquiet how much the surrounding buildings resembled the familiar outlines of Mega-City One?

No, none of these things, something whispered inside her. Not something from the past. Something from the future, something dreadful that had yet to happen...

Pulling herself to her feet, she heard a chorus of menacing growls from the nearest of the buildings. Backing off, she heard more of the same sounds from the buildings behind her. And from those to her left, and then her right.

Surrounded on all sides, she checked the ammo counter on her Lawgiver and waited for whatever was out there to come to her.

She didn't have to wait long. From out of the buildings they came, a black wave of shadow figures, snarling and hissing at her in hungry anticipation. She opened fire with her Lawgiver, firing off quick controlled bursts as per Academy of Law standard training. The bullets tore into the ranks of the shadow things, giving rise to an outraged chorus of howls of pain and anger. A dozen or more of the things tumbled to the bone-littered ground, to be fallen upon mercilessly and ripped apart by the others swarming close behind.

Despite the carnage, the others came right on at her, swift and relentless. As they closed in on the Judge, heedless of the Lawgiver bullets tearing through unnatural flesh, they merged into one great shadow-shape, a black and red collage of maddened, hunger-filled eyes and crimson-dripping fangs.

They bore down on her, dragging her to the ground, and the last conscious thing she remembered before the red veil descended was the sensation of talon-like fingers raking into her and sharp, needle-like teeth worrying at her flesh.

After that, there was only the darkness, and the overpowering smell of freshly spilled blood.

My blood, she thought, awakening with a shuddering start. The thin synthi-satin sheets of the bed were soaked with perspiration; the short vest she wore - definitely not Department-approved, which was probably why she wore it - clung to her sweat-soaked skin.

Coming out of the nightmare, it took her a moment to remember where she was: the small and predictably Spartan temporary quarters assigned to her within the dorm-wing of Psi-Division Headquarters. Closing her eyes, she received a few brief but gruesome mental after-images of the nightmare she had just experienced.

"Grud on a greenie, that was a doozie," she murmured to herself as she leaned forward to flick-activate the intercom control on the panel set into the wall beside the bed. Instead, she hit the wrong switch, and made the room's small tri-d screen activate into sudden and noisy life.

"...it's Fluffy, darling... he's dead!" bellowed the voice on the tri-d, making Anderson look up with an involuntary start. She saw a husband-and-wife pair of citizens, both of them straight out of the usual dumb vidvert Central Casting, by the looks of things, crying and cradling the white-furred corpse of something she assumed was supposed to be a dead rabbit. At that moment, the vid-generated background of an ordinary city block apartment wiped away, and a tall, rather intense-looking man in a spotless white lab coat stepped into shot, smiling in a supposedly disarming but actually rather scary manner at the camera.

"Dr Dick Icarus, chief scientist from EverPet! What are you doing here?" exclaimed the wife character in a way that probably made the vidvert director wish he'd gone for digitally generated actors after all.

"I'm here... for Fluffy!" declared the freaky mad scientist type, brandishing a syringe filled with an alarming-looking, glowing green liquid, and quickly injecting the noxious stuff into the dead pet. Almost instantaneously - because vidvert airtime didn't come cheap, naturally - the animal sprung back to life and went hopping off out of shot.

"He's alive! But HOW???" shrieked the wife-actor in amazement, no doubt seeing a dazzling career ahead of her in walk-on roles in middle-of-the-night graveyard slot soap-vids.

"It's all thanks to this," boasted the wacko in the lab coat, holding the syringe and its contents up to camera. "EverPet's revolutionary new Pet Regen Formula. That's right! Now there's no need for death to part you from your most beloved animal companions. For only a small monthly fee, and regular injections of Pet Regen, EverPet can bring your furry little family members back to life. So dial 555-REGEN and resurrect your pet tod-"

"Bringing dead pets back to life... only in the Big Meg," Anderson muttered, hurriedly switching off the tri-d before what was shaping up to be a predictably dumb and irritatingly catchy musical jingle started playing. Second time lucky, she activated the intercom.

"Psi-Control - Anderson. Just picked up something. Could be a pre-cog flash, maybe a big one."

The answering voice on the radio-link was politely sceptical. "You sure about that, Anderson? We've got more than thirty other Psi-Judges asleep in the dorms, not to mention the full-time pre-cogs down in the Temple, and none of them are interrupting my duty shift to report on picking up anything. You sure it wasn't just some REM sleep phantom bogey stuff?"

Anderson fought to keep her temper under control. "You know my rep, Control. You're not talking to some rookie Psi straight out of the Academy. I know the difference between a nightmare and a genuine pre-cog flash."

"Okay," sighed the voice of Control. "You want me to log this as a possible pick-up. We both know the routine. Tell me what you thought you picked up, starting with surface impressions first."

Anderson closed her eyes, bringing her psi-powers to focus on the images still burning in her brain. A moment's concentration, a careful sectioning off of the various areas of her mind to prevent random and subconscious psi-spill from polluting the memory of the images she had picked up, and then she was ready to replay the nightmare she had just experienced.

"I see blood, Control. Lots of blood."

"I mean, just what the drokk is it with these so-called 'Church of Death' freakoids, anyway? The Big Meg is what I like to call a broad church, with room for all kindsa wackos, freaks, gomers, spazheads and nutjobs, sure, but there's still gotta be some limits, ain't there? Now, all you regular listeners out there know that good ol' Drivetime Sam ain't no bigot - except when it comes to muties, Alientown freaks, Juggernaut fans, stuck-up Brit-citters, assorted Euro-cit trash, those big-mouthed domeheads from Texas City, Luna-cit weirdos and especially those dirty Sov-Blokers - but usually I say 'live and let live'. Except in the case of these Death cult creeps.

"You know the freaks I'm talking about, right? Loons that paint their faces like skulls, dress up like it's Halloween and worship - yeah, you heard me right, I said WORSHIP - Judge Death and his three fellow extra-dimensional freakshow buddies? That sound SANE? That sound LEGAL? That sound like the kind of thing we should encourage our innocent young people to get into, when they could be out there getting into juve gang rumbles, taking illegal narco-tabs, setting fire to winos or doing any of the other traditional things the juves of today get up to?

"'Of course not, Sam,' I hear you say, 'that's why the Judges are rounding these freaks up as soon as they appear.' Which is fine by ol' Drivetime Sam, but I say we should all be doing our part too. You know any of these wackos, you think some of your neighbours might be perverted sickos who have a shrine to the Dark Judges hidden in their apartment, then there's only one thing to do. Let the Judges know about it. Dial 1-800-KOOKCUBE, and tell 'em Drivetime Sam told ya to do it.

"Okay, so that's the Rant of the Hour slot and our statutory public information obligations taken care of for the time being, so now it's back to our usual mix of travel-time news, made-up stuff about the private lives of vid-celebs and phone-in chat with you, the dumb, feeble-minded and pathetically attention-seeking ordinary cits of Mega-City One. First on the line is Chuck Cheedlewidge, who we understand is some dweeb who wants to tell us that the weird growth on his neck has started channelling the spirit of the late Chief Judge Goodman. Ooowww boy, now where did I put that kook cube num-"

Galen DeMarco switched off the radio with a curse that would surely have earned her a verbal reprimand from any of her old Sector House shift commanders. Like millions of other citizens, she couldn't stand arrogant, opinionated shock jock creeps like Drivetime Sam. Then again, like millions of other citizens, she also couldn't help tuning in to hear what he was going to say next.

"So much for all those dull citizenship classes they made me take," she said to herself. "If I really wanted to blend in with the rest of the population, all I had to do was listen to the meatheads on talk radio."

She looked out the series of wide bay windows that lined one entire wall of her apartment, relishing the spectacular view it gave her across the central core sectors of MegEast. In the distance, behind the towering bulks of Sax Rohmer Block and the DaneTech Building, one could just catch a glimpse of the Statue of Judgement standing guard near Black Atlantic Customs and Immigration, while off to the east the afternoon sun reflected brightly off the gilt-metalled giant eagle facade of the Grand Hall of Justice. Clustered for tens of kilometres around it were a host of other Justice Department ancillary facilities, including the Academy of Law, Psi-Division HQ and the Tech 21 labs, as well as City Hall, the glittering stratoscraper headquarters of nearly every giant mega-corp company worthy of the name, and several of the most elite and exclusive luxy-blocks and conapt buildings in the entire city. When foreigners thought of Mega-City One, this was the sector they thought of: the soaring, gigantic-beyond-belief buildings, the colourful, teeming millions of citizens and the seemingly never-ending number of fads and crazes which these citizens invented to occupy their time, and the dominating and ever vigilant presence of the Justice Department. Right outside her window was a snapshot of all the allure, glamour and splendour of the biggest, craziest and most powerful Mega-City on the face of twenty-second century Earth.

The reality, DeMarco knew, was nowhere near so exciting and exotic. Over on the West Wall, on the city's border with the Cursed Earth, the Department fought what was practically a non-stop war against the hordes of muties who tried every night to get into the city. There were areas of the city, most notably parts of City Bottom or some slum sectors such as the notorious Pit, where the Judges had all but ceded control to perp gangs that were more like small standing armies than criminal groups - not that anyone in the Department would ever officially acknowledge this. Eighty-seven per cent of the population was unemployed, and too many of them chose some form of lawbreaking as an alternative pastime. The cits invented new crimes faster than the Judges could pass laws to deal with them. The city's iso-cubes were full to bursting, the kook cubes even more so.

Statistics said that sixty per cent of citizens were likely to suffer some form of serious mental breakdown some time in their lives, mostly due to the pressure of twenty-second century life as it was lived in Mega-City One. They even had a term for it - Future Shock Syndrome - and the kook cubes were full of the plentiful evidence of its virulence and widespread adoption.

Statistics said that fifty-three per cent of citizens were afraid of being murdered by their neighbours. Maybe with good reason, though, since another survey also suggested that seventy-seven per cent of citizens - including, simple arithmetic suggested, many of the respondents from the other survey - actually had given serious thought at least once to the idea of murdering whoever was living next door to them.

It was the Big Meg, the craziest and most violent city on Earth, home to four hundred million citizens, every one of them a potentially violent criminal, and Grud help her, she loved every over-populated, crime-ridden, polluted and blood-stained square metre of it.

Looking down from the penthouse level of the two hundred storey apartment block, she could see the stacked snarl of megways, skeds, overzooms, underzooms, pedways and shoppo-plazas that passed for the Mega-City One street system. It was times like this that she missed those streets the most, missed being a Street Judge and being out there on patrol, dealing with all the madness and mayhem the city had to throw at you.

Boredom was the biggest problem for her now. More than twenty years with the Department, and every minute of that time she had always been busy doing something. She had money, of course - the fortune she inherited from her father more than ensured that, unlike the rest of the ordinary cits, she'd never have to worry about where her next cred was coming from - but like a lot of other cits she had had to deal with the boredom.

Setting herself up as a Private Investigator after she had left the Justice Department hadn't been her idea, but she had to admit that it was a gruddamned good one. Her connections within the Department gave her more leeway than that afforded to others in her profession, and, while it would never beat the buzz of having to quell a full-scale block war after pulling an energy sapping, sixteen-hour double shift of street patrol, it was better than sitting in your luxury apartment all day painting your nails and watching the tri-d, which is what she figured most of her neighbours seemed to do.

Since she didn't have to work for the money, she tried to pick and choose her cases, sifting through the run-of-the-mill surveillance, insurance fraud and employee-vetting jobs that came walking in through her office door. She passed a lot of these kind of jobs on to some of her competitors, only keeping on the cases that interested her. The ones that involved the stuff that slipped through the cracks of the Justice Department's attention, the ones that made her feel she was still doing some good for someone. She had an office downtown, close to City Hall, but a lot of the time she preferred to work out of her apartment.

Which was what she was supposed to be doing now, she reminded herself guiltily as she called up a number on her phone. It rang, and was immediately answered by an auto-message program. DeMarco gave a silent prayer of thanks. As a Judge, the security of the badge and uniform had always allowed her to erect a professional barrier between her and the cits she dealt with. As a cit herself, she was still learning about how to deal with people in emotional distress.

"Hello? Mrs Caskey? It's Galen DeMarco. As I promised a few days ago, I'm calling to give your progress report on what I've found so far. I've talked to some of Joanna's friends at her college, and, according to them, she had got involved in some college fringe society that calls itself the 'Friends of Thanos'. I did a little digging on these creeps, and found that..."

She checked herself here, trying to work out an easy, sympathetic way to tell a mother that her daughter had probably run off to join a cult of death-worshipping loons.

Damn it, she thought to herself. Why did the Academy learning program have more than fifty compulsory courses on combat techniques and only one brief one on Cit Relations?

"Well, uhhh... I have reason to believe that they're maybe connected in some way to a group you might have heard about on the vid-news recently, a group called the Church of Death. I'm not sure, but it's possible she might be with them... It's possible some boy she met might have persuaded her to join. I'm looking into it now, and I've already got a few leads I want to follow up about this cult, maybe even be able to track them down. Don't worry, Mrs Caskey, whatever you've heard on the tri-d about these people, it's probably just the usual exaggerated vid-news stuff. I'll contact you in a few days, by which time I'm fairly sure I'll have some good news about your daughter."

She hung up, thinking that maybe the Academy of Law training wasn't so bad after all, since at least it taught you how to lie with conviction to the cits. She had some leads on this Death cult alright, but her gut feeling was that these Church of Death creeps were a cut above your usual Mega-City One lunatic fringe/apocalypse cult bunch of wackos.

She had a lot to do now, she knew, but she couldn't help looking out the window at the city again and wonder, for what was maybe just the twentieth time that day, where Dredd was, and what he was doing right now.

TWO

Judge Dredd's fist smashed into the perp's face, spreading most of his nose across his face and making a trip to the iso-block med-unit for some dental reconstruction surgery a likely event in this creep's immediate future.

One of the perp's buddies used the moment for his advantage, slipping around Dredd and trying to blindside him. The Judge turned and pivoted as the perp came at him with a pig-sticker blade. Dredd swung his daystick twice, swiftly. One sharp crack of reinforced plasteel on bone broke the wrist of the creep's weapon-hand and sent the knife skittering across the rough rockcrete surface of the alleyway. The second caught him neatly on the top of the skull and booked him a place in an iso-block med-unit alongside Creep Number One.

Creeps Number Three, Four, Five and Six looked slightly disconcerted about this. They hung back for a moment, weighing up the odds. Creep Number Four, with slightly fewer disfiguring facial tattoos than the rest of the gang, was maybe the brains of this particular outfit, and the others seemed happy for him to do all their collective, half-witted thinking for them.

"Don't matter what the name on that badge says!" he shouted, weighing up the odds, doing all the necessary mental arithmetic and still coming up with very definitely the wrong answer. "There's one of him and four of us, and he can't take us all. Get him!"

They rushed at him together. Dredd's Lawgiver was in its boot holster, within easy reach, but he made no move to draw it. None of these punks were packing guns, and so far there didn't seem to be any just cause for the use of deadly force against them.

Besides, he thought to himself, it had been a slow day so far, and he could probably do with a workout.

Creep Number Five hit the ground first, taking a plasteel-reinforced Judge's boot to the groin and a daystick blow to the temple. Creep Number Three followed swiftly, courtesy of a knock-out punch to the jaw. Creep Number Four drew back, looking like he was having second thoughts about the whole thing. Dredd gave him something else to think about instead: a daystick jab to the solar plexus which sent him reeling to the ground, winded, the follow-up kick from a boot swiftly reintroducing the perp to the violently regurgitated remains of his synthi-fries and Grot Pot lunch of only a few hours ago.

If Creep Number Four was the brains of the outfit, then Creep Number Six must have fancied himself as the brawn, throwing himself at Dredd with a savage roar. Dredd bent slightly, caught him in the ribs with the hard edge of his eagle-shaped shoulder pad and used the creep's own momentum against him, judo-throwing him over his shoulder and sending the perp face-first into the surface of the wall behind him. The pattern of the rough brickwork, now stamped deep into the skin of the unconscious thug's face, made an interesting new addition to the mosaic of ugly tattoo markings already there.

With the six perps lying unconscious or groaning on the ground around him, Dredd finally relented and lifted his foot from the back of the original perp - Creep Number Zero, he supposed he should call him - who had been lying there helpless, hands cuffed behind his back and pinned to the ground by Dredd's foot, during the entire fight.

"Control - Dredd. Seven for catch wagon pick-up, Mohammed Alley, just off Spinks and Foreman."

"Wilco, Dredd," came the crackling reply over his helmet radio. "What are the charges?"

Dredd looked at the seven subdued figures around him. "Six of them on Attempted Judge Assault - five years." Dredd paused, looking at the six groaning, bleeding perps lying around him. "Tell the catch wagon crew there'll be no problem figuring out which ones they are. The other one..."

Dredd looked round at the colour-splashed and still-wet graffiti wall decor behind him.

"Scrawling - one year's cubetime."

Scrawling was a common enough Mega-City crime, Dredd knew, and Sector House Chiefs were required to order regular crackdowns on it in some of the worst-hit areas. Dredd had made thousands of arrests for scrawling in his years on the streets, and this one had at first seemed no different from the rest when he had come across an illegal scrawler - Creep Zero - still at work on his latest graffiti masterpiece at the mouth of the alley.

What had been unusual, though, was when Creeps One to Six turned up to dispute Dredd's arrest of their buddy. Scrawl wars were common amongst the city's street gangs, with gangs leaving provocative scrawl-tags on their rival's turf and then protecting their own gang territory - often with lethal force - from reprisal scrawl attacks in return. Gang members protecting their gang's scrawl artists wasn't that uncommon, but what was very much out of the ordinary was a gang willing to do the same thing if it meant attacking a Judge.

Especially if that Judge happened to be Judge Joe Dredd.

Dredd looked again at the scrawl design the scrawler had still been working on when he arrested him. He saw a cartoon depiction of a familiar-looking ghastly figure, a figure which Dredd knew all too well, but which the scrawler would only have seen in brief and heavily Justice Department-censored news-vid images. The figure, a grinning ghoul wearing a crudely imagined parody of a Judge's uniform, was surrounded by a chemically treated fluorescent paint halo of glowing black energy. Written beside it, in large and still unfinished letters, was a single stark message: "DEATH LIVES!"

Despite the cartoon crudeness of the thing, despite the mundane setting of a typically grubby and garbage-strewn Mega-City alleyway, there was something strangely unsettling about the image, almost as if the scrawler had subconsciously tapped into some greater hidden reservoir of fear and dread.

Sensing he was onto something, Dredd bent over the nearest prone body, ignoring the injured perp's groans of pain as he quickly searched him. Like all the other gang members, the perp's clothes were uniformly black, but, beneath the fresh dye marks, Dredd could still see the evidence of the ganger's original and quite different gang colours. Likewise, while his arms bore traditional juve gang tattoos - Dredd recognised them as belonging to the Sid Sheldon Block Big Spenders Crew - the ones on his face were most recent, and different from the gang tattoos. Flaming skulls, vampire bats, clawed hands coming out of graves and similar cartoon-gothic imagery seemed to be the predominant style here.

Standing back up, he reactivated his helmet radio link.

"Control - Dredd. Extra to that last call: possible evidence tying my perps into these Church of Death creeps."

"That's a check. We've been seeing more and more of this amongst the sector juve gangs. Could just be the latest passing street gang fad."

"Or it could be something else, Control," growled Dredd. "Fads don't make gangers attack Judges the way these punks tried to attack me. Slap a mandatory extra five years onto all their sentences for membership of an illegal organisation, and have them all run through the interrogation cubes to find out what they know. It's time we came down hard on these Death cult freaks."

"Wilco, Dredd..." responded the voice of Control, before suddenly assuming a more urgent tone. "Just got something coming in. Armed assault at the Bathory Street med-supply warehouse. Judge Giant on the scene and requesting assist from any nearby units!"

Dredd looked at the seven subdued perps around him. Bathory Street was only five blocks from here, just off Ingrid Pitt Plaza, and it would take him less than a minute to secure his perps for catch-wagon pick-up. Cuffed together, and with most of them already beaten unconscious, he didn't figure it likely they would be going anywhere before the catch wagon crew arrived.

"Wilco, Control. On my way."

Judge Giant didn't believe in vampires.

Which was not to say he'd not witnessed some freaky stuff in his time as a Judge, of course. Even as a cadet, during the darkest days of Necropolis he'd faced off against no less a creep than Judge Mortis. And then there had been the whole Judgement Day thing, with the dead - yeah, the freakin' dead - rising from the grave and forming into one big zombie army to try and destroy everything and everyone. Since then, he had seen or heard about all kinds of weird stuff - tribes of werewolves in the Undercity, alien monsters with acid for blood attacking the Grand Hall of Justice - but he still didn't believe in vampires.

Which was perhaps a pity, since "vampires" seemed to be exactly what he was faced with right now.

He'd already pumped six Lawgiver rounds into one of the freakers, but now here it was again, popping up from behind the cover of those crates of med-supplies to take another shot at him. It didn't look much like what Giant thought of when he thought about vampires - no fancy burial suit, no black cape lined with red synthi-satin, and so far it hadn't turned into a bat or a plague of rats, or anything really freaky like that - but the fangs, the pale, dead-white skin pallor, the superhuman strength and the blood-crazed hunger all seemed to be present and correct.

And guns? Vampires weren't supposed to fire guns at you, thought Giant, ducking back round the corner as the hail of bullets from the thing's spit pistol popped holes into the surface of the doorway beside him.

A security guard's corpse, throat brutally ripped out, lay in the corridor behind him. The perps' means of entry into the building had been anything but subtle. The building was closed to the general public and its doors and windows were impressively secure, considering the amount of proscribed drugs kept in the place for use by the city med-units, they would have to be, but the perps - Giant knew there were an even half-dozen of them - had simply ripped through the front door to get in.

Yeah, with their bare hands, Giant reminded himself, remembering seeing what had looked unpleasantly like claw marks gouged into the metal of the door.

After that, they had gone on the rampage through the building, brutally killing everyone they found in the place before breaking into the large central room they were in now, where the repository's main med-supplies were kept.

Arriving minutes after the break-in had been reported, and moving through the building in the perps' murderous wake, Giant had automatically assumed that they must be stimmed-up hypeheads, breaking into the place in a desperate need to feed their narco-addiction. Professional perps would have been long gone so many minutes after the alarms were first tripped. These creeps might be vicious - Giant had counted seven corpses on his way in here - but they were also amateurs, and now he had them trapped in the main storeroom.

Like juves in a synthi-candy store, he had thought to himself. Probably too busy getting stimmed-up to even remember that the Judges were coming to throw their punk-ass butts into a Detox Cube if they didn't get out of here fast.

He'd pretty much abandoned the hypehead theory, though, when he came across two of the things feeding on the dead security guard. The creeps were hunched over the corpse, lapping eagerly at the blood pouring out of its ruined throat, too busy in their meal to register the Judge's approach at first.

They'd looked up at him in fury at having their meal interrupted as he aimed his Lawgiver at them and called out a warning. They'd hissed at him in raw anger, baring their teeth and showing him their fangs - and then reached for their own weapons.

He'd shot both of them, quickly and expertly, putting them down with a piece of clinical precision marksmanship worthy even of Dredd himself. Then they had got back up, ran into the cover of the main storage area and started firing back at him.

Giant took stock of the situation, trying to evaluate what he'd seen with what he still thought was impossible. A glance down at the dead security guard - throat savagely laid open, eyes wide in disbelief at the circumstances of his death, killed by vampires right here in the biggest city of the twenty-second century - told him that the impossible was what he was dealing with right now.

Well, if it looks like a vampire, acts like a vampire and tries to rip your throat out just like you'd expect a vampire to, then... thought Giant, deciding it was time he took the fight back to these things.

He darted out from the corner where he had been sheltering, heading for deeper cover inside the storage room. The move instantly provoked a hail of bullets from the two perps, but luckily any kind of marksmanship ability with automatic weapons didn't seem to be such a high agenda item with the undead.

The warehouse space was divided into a maze of wide aisles separated by pallets of med-stuff, and row upon row of storage shelving which stretched all the way up to the building's high ceiling. Giant ducked into the first aisle he came to, which seemed to be solely devoted to the storage of artificial cybernetic limbs. There were thousands of the things there, bionic arms and legs stacked floor to ceiling, everything from the cheap and basic models that any cit could get on the City Mega-Care program to the high-performance, top-of-the-range bionic-enhancement deluxe jobs favoured by the top professional athletes and sports celebs. Giant wondered for a second if someone knew something he didn't, and was stocking up in advance of some forthcoming rerun of the Apocalypse War, before returning his attention to the problem at hand.

He heard fast, eager footsteps behind him, and turned to see one of the perps following him in, charging down the aisle towards him. No sign of a weapon, but from the way it bared its fangs at him and flexed its talon-fingers in keen anticipation, he figured it had other ideas about how it was going to kill him. He fired instinctively, pumping three Lawgiver rounds into its chest. Three heart shots, each one a perfect ten score. The vampire staggered a little, and the change in pitch of its snarling seemed to suggest that this had hurt it some, but it was still on its feet and coming at him.

Department regs didn't allow Judges to carry religious ornamentation, so the idea of waving a crucifix at it was a complete non-starter, and only Psi-Division had access to the exotic stuff like silver-bladed boot knives and holy bullet Lawgiver rounds - so just how the hell was he supposed to kill the drokking thing?

Giant remembered Judgement Day, and Dredd's sanguine advice when they had been the first to encounter the zombie menace while on a Hotdog Run out in the Cursed Earth: "Pick your targets and shoot for their heads."

It had worked for zombies - and so had Hi-Ex and Incendiary too, though the latter only worked if you had the luxury of enough time to wait for the things to burn to death - so just how much difference was there between vampires and zombies?

Giant got his answer soon enough, firing off another burst of shots as the thing leapt at him. Its head exploded in a bloody pulp, and he hurriedly stepped aside to avoid its flailing corpse as it flew past him to land on the floor behind him, where it continued to twitch spasmodically.

Giant was just beginning to congratulate himself on his new-achieved status of vampire-slayer, when the next one stepped out at the opposite end of the aisle from the other one. And this sucker was a lot closer and a lot angrier-looking.

"Hold it right there, freak! You're under arrest!" Giant barked, aiming his Lawgiver right at it, wondering as he did so if the undead were entitled to the same Justice Department regulation warning as living perps.

It leapt at him, faster and more agile than the first creature. Giant, following years of drilled-in Academy of Law training, put three textbook shots into its chest before amending his aim in light of what he'd just learned, and snapped off another three at its head.

It twisted out of the way, tucking its head down protectively, although one of the shots drilled through its cheek and blew away its lower jaw. This only seemed to make it even madder, Giant noticed.

The monstrosity crashed into him, slashing at him with its claw-like nails, tearing rents in the bullet-resistant material of his uniform. Giant fell, taking the vampire with him. He dropped his gun, unable to bring it to bear on the squirming thing clinging tightly to him, and used both hands to try and tear the thing off him.

Its strength was incredible, even more so when Giant realised that his attacker was a young girl, probably no more than about twenty years old. Her shrieks of rage were shrill and hellish and she seemed possessed by a frenzied, almost superhuman strength and tenacity. Her head darted down towards his exposed throat, elongated fangs eager to bury themselves in the soft flesh there. Giant desperately blocked the attack with his arm, and she sank her teeth into the tough material of his Kevlar-lined Judge gauntlets, chewing into it to get at the meat beneath. If she could bite through the stuff his gloves were made of, Giant didn't even want to think of what kind of quick work she would make of his jugular vein, and his efforts to get away from the thing became all the more frantic.

His heart sank as he heard more footsteps running along the corridor behind him. If it was another one of these things, he knew he was doomed.

"Out of the way, Giant. Give me a clear shot."

The voice, authoritative and unmistakable. Suddenly, Giant was pretty sure he wasn't going to die anymore.

"Dredd!" he called out. "I know it sounds crazy, but they're vampires. You need to..."

There was a sound of a Lawgiver shot, and the thing on top of him was snatched away, the top of its head blown clean off.

"Shoot them in the head," finished Dredd with typical steely calmness as he stood over Giant, offering a hand to help him to his feet. "Figured that was the best way to go, soon as I saw it."

Dredd looked down at Giant, at his torn uniform, unsure whether the copious amounts of blood splattered across it belonged to Giant or to his attacker. "You injured?"

Giant climbed to his feet and recovered his Lawgiver, for the first time getting a good look at the thing which had almost just killed him. Scratch twenty. That thing had been no more than seventeen, tops.

"Only if you count my pride, I guess."

"How many more of the creeps are in here?"

It had been Dredd who had rescued Giant as a juve, keeping him on the straight and narrow and enrolling him in the Academy of Law, making sure that his life would have some real purpose. Dredd had been a permanent fixture in Giant's life for almost as long as the younger Judge could remember, and was the nearest thing to a father he would ever have, even if neither him or Old Stony Face would ever admit it.

Still, no matter how long he had known Dredd, Giant would never fail to be impressed by the way Dredd dealt in the same stoic and matter-of-fact way with absolutely every freaky and weird thing the city had to throw at him. Whether it was vampires, zombie armies, extra-dimensional superfiends or apparently indestructible Cursed Earth headbutting cyborg maniacs, it was all just another day on the streets for Joe Dredd.

"Security cams picked up six of them when they broke in, so I figure that means four of them left. Watch your back - some of them are armed with more than fangs and bad breath."

"So am I," said Dredd, bringing his Lawgiver up to bear. "Let's go find them."

It wasn't too hard. The creatures had left a trail of destruction through the interior of the warehouse, randomly smashing everything and anything along the way as their frustrated search continued for whatever it was they had come here to get. That search had apparently ended at one of the refrigerated storage rooms off the main warehouse space. The thick metal door had been ripped off its hinges. Hungry snarls and chill, refrigerated air drifted out of the room beyond. Dredd silently motioned with the barrel of his Lawgiver towards the sign beside the entrance to the room: Synthi-Plasma Storage.

"Figures, when you think about it," said Giant. "What else would a bunch of vampire perps pull a heist job for?"

Both Judges tensed, automatically bringing their Lawgivers round to bear as another one of the vampire creatures shambled out of the freezer room, its face dripping with bright-red synthi-plasma, its arms laden down with packet after packet of the stuff. Gorged on the blood substitute, almost drunk on the taste of it, it stared in stupefied surprise at the two Judges. Finally, something within its brain clicked, and it made to unsling the stump gun it wore over one shoulder.

"Picnic's over, freak. Hi-Ex!" barked Dredd, giving the command to his Lawgiver's voice-activated shell selector, aiming his gun at the target's central body mass.

Both Judges ducked as the area in front of the entrance to the freezer room was suddenly painted bright crimson as the vampire and the twenty-eight one-litre plasti-packs of concentrated synthi-plasma blood it was carrying exploded under the impact of the Hi-Ex bullet.

Giant recoiled back, splattered with the stuff. Some of it had got into his mouth, and he spat it out in disgust, revolted by its taste. If he ever turned vamp, he figured he'd probably end up starving to death, if that was the only kind of chow he was expected to go for. His vision was a red smear, and he was still wiping clear his helmet's face visor when he heard Dredd's Lawgiver firing again.

The remaining three vamps were holed up in the freezer room, probably armed and ready to blow away anyone who tried to storm in there after them. Which Dredd wasn't about to do - not when his Lawgiver had everything he needed to encourage them to come out to where he was instead.

"Ricochet," he ordered, firing off a brace of shots through the freezer doorway. He hadn't bothered taking aim, and couldn't even see the targets he was firing at. With Ricochet rounds, though, he didn't need to.

The rubber-tipped titanium bullets weaved a deadly pattern in the close confines of the freezer room as they bounced off metal walls, bursting the racked packets of synthi-blood by the dozen and biting into vampire flesh. In seconds, the floor of the room was centimetres deep in blood spilling out from the bullet-exploded storage packs.

Possibly more enraged by the destruction of their food supply than any damage caused to them by the bullets, the vampires charged out wildly to face their attackers. Lawgivers at the ready, Dredd and Giant were more than prepared for them.

Dredd shot the first one with an Incendiary shell. Howling in agony as its body exploded into flame, the creature threw itself back into the freezer room, rolling and splashing about on the blood-covered floor in a vain attempt to put out the volatile and hungry phosphor fire which ate relentlessly into its undead flesh.

Taking a cue from Dredd, Giant picked off the next one with a Hi-Ex shot, splattering its shredded remains against the nearest wall. This was going to be a messy one for the clean-up crews, Giant guessed, and he hoped the Tek-Judge forensics squad that was soon going to be crawling all over this place were packing spatulas and scraping tools with their tech-kit, to gather up all the evidence now sliding down the walls.

Dredd coolly took care of the third creep as it leapt at him with apparent lightning speed, claws and fangs ready to tear him open. It was fast, but not fast enough. For a moment, it seemed to almost defy the laws of physics, hanging suspended in mid-air as Dredd's rapid-fire spray of bullets struck against it. Then it was moving again, hurled backwards by the relentless force of the shells still being fired into it. A final burst decapitated it as it struck the far wall. Head and body fell to the ground several metres apart.

Yes sir, a very messy one for the poor slobs in the clean-up crews, thought Giant.

Dredd took in the aftermath of the brief but spectacularly gruesome fight, casually prodding the remains of the nearest vamp with the toe of his Judge boot.

"Creeps don't seem in too much of a hurry to turn into dust when they're dead either, or whatever it is they're supposed to do in the horror stories."

Giant bent down to study the scraps of the one he had tagged with the Hi-Ex shot. It had been wearing what looked like ordinary citizens' clothes. No fancy evening suits. No red synthi-satin lined opera cloaks. "You think we're looking at something normal here, not necessarily supernatural?"

"Bloodsucking freaks that shrug off standard Execution rounds aren't exactly what you'd call normal, even for this city, but I'd rather look for some rational answers before we call in the Psi-Div spook chasers," Dredd said.

He shifted impatiently, re-holstering his Lawgiver. Giant sighed inwardly. He knew what was coming next.

"Meat wagons and clean-up units are on their way," said Dredd, already moving to leave. "Stay here and supervise, Giant. I want full forensics back-up on this one. Let me know what they find. Anyone wants me, I'll be finishing the rest of my patrol shift."

Giant watched him go. No, Old Stony Face never changed. Vamps, freaks, muties and weirdoes Dredd took in his stride, but every chance he got, he always pulled rank and left someone else to deal with the paperwork.

THREE

It was the paperwork Hershey hated the most.

Well, she also hated the meetings, the drafting of minutes, "resolutions" and "mission statements", the inane photo-op PR events, the occasional obligatory chat show appearance to show the citizens the allegedly friendly face of the Justice Department, the mind-numbing meet-and-greets with foreign dignitaries and ambassadors, the endless briefings from her policy advisors on a thousand different and tediously uninteresting but vitally important subjects.

But, most of all, she decided, she hated the paperwork. It was only now, two years after being elected Chief Judge of the most powerful city in the world, that she fully appreciated why Joe Dredd had turned down the post on several occasions in the past, when it would otherwise easily have been his for the asking.

"My place is on the streets," Dredd had always said.

"Yes, Joe," those within the Justice Department who, like Hershey, knew him best, could always have silently added, "because that's where you're the furthest away from the drokking paperwork."

Not that she blamed him, really. Sitting here in the Council of Five chamber within the Grand Hall of Justice, listening to Judge Cranston of Accounts Division making his quarterly budgetary report to the Council, she wished with all her heart she was out there with him, putting down a block war or two, or even re-fighting the Apocalypse War all over again.

Grud, even the time she had been kidnapped, completely paralysed and almost tortured to death by Fink Angel had almost been preferable to this.

"Furthermore, looking at our overseas balance of trade figures for this current fiscal quarter, and taking into account our projections for the next fiscal quarter, as well as the standing moratorium on non-essential trade with the former Sov Blok cities and the ongoing renegotiation with Sino-City as regards their Most Favoured Nation trade tariff status, we can predict with some modest confidence that, as far as the budget deficit for both this quarter and the next two is concerned-"

"Thank you, Judge Cranston," Hershey interrupted with what she hoped was the correct amount of tact. "Unfortunately, I have several other pressing appointments following this meeting, so thank you, but we'll read and review your budgetary report and recommendations later, and let you know our decision before the end of the week."

She kept on going before the flustered-looking elderly Accounts Division Senior Judge could protest. "Moving on to the next item on the agenda: the rise in incidents involving members of the so-called 'Church of Death'. Hollister?"

Judge Hollister, the Council's only member who wasn't already a Justice Department Divisional head, had been assigned to brief the rest of the Council members on the problem. Hershey was amused to see that, for once, Hollister had actually turned up for a Council meeting in proper Judge uniform. As a senior member of the Wally Squad, she had occasionally attended meetings in various kinds of civilian attire, some of them downright scandalous. Hershey wondered what Silver, one of her predecessors as Chief Judge and a notoriously prudish stickler for the rules, would have had to say if one of his most senior Judges had turned up for a Council of Five meeting wearing the fishnet tights and low-cut halter top outfit of a common slabwalker, as Hollister had once so memorably done.

"Most Sector Chiefs are reporting a rise in crimes associated with the cult. Up until now, it's been relatively small-time stuff; pro-Death scrawl-graffiti, juve gangs swapping their gang tags for cult symbols, the occasional case of pet animal sacrifice."

"And now?" said Hershey.

"Now we're seeing a sudden spike in these crimes, not just in number, but also in terms of their seriousness," replied Hollister. "Juve gangs claiming an association with the cult are banding together to start violent rumbles with the other gangs. Street preachers claiming to be pronouncing the 'Gospel of Death' have started appearing - we're picking them up as soon as they appear, of course - and some of them have even taken to the airwaves on illegal pirate radio stations to spread the word even further.

"My anti-pirate monitoring units have already tracked down a number of these illegal broadcast stations, and identified and arrested those responsible," interjected Tek Chief McTighe testily, keen to counter any suggestion that his Tek-Judges weren't already on top of the situation."

"Granted," agreed Hollister, "but what we're dealing here is something more than a few pirate broadcasters. We're looking at Death cult-related crimes all across the board. More worryingly, we're seeing a noticeable rise in missing persons cases. We believe the cult may be tied into a lot of these."

"You think they've maybe graduated from pet sacrifice to something more serious?" asked Judge Niles, head of the Public Surveillance Unit and, in Hershey's opinion, probably the most astute mind in the room.

"Human sacrifice? The cult grabbing victims off the streets?" answered Hollister. "It's possible, but we think it's more likely that a lot of these are simple runaways. Juves or dropouts running off to join the cult."

"So they're actively recruiting now?" noted Buell, the gruff and no-nonsense head of the Special Judicial Squad, the division of the Justice Department charged with rooting out corruption within the force itself. "If they're recruiting, they must be organised. Do we have any idea of the kind of numbers they might have, or how they're organising or funding themselves?"

Hershey nodded in silent agreement. Typical Arthur Buell, his question cutting right to the heart of the issue.

"Nothing so far," admitted Hollister. "Grud knows we've rounded up enough of these loons, but the ones we're seeing so far are strictly small fry, lone kooks picking up on the Death cult vibes on the streets at the moment, or loosely associated local groups like street gangs or the odd kook collective. If there's a central leadership or organisation to the thing, we've yet to see any real hard evidence of it."

Ramos, the head of Street Division, shifted impatiently in his seat. "We've seen this kind of crap before, surely?" he said, with typical Street Judge bluntness. "Last month it was half the juves in the city painting red stars on their foreheads, calling themselves stuff like the 'Sons of Orlok', pledging their undying allegiance to East Meg One and swearing to avenge its destruction. This month it's worshipping the Dark Judges, and next month it'll be something else. Sick as it is, it's probably just another fad. Maintain control of it, round up a few of its most visible proponents and make examples of them, and it'll soon blow over, just like that whole 'Kool Kommunista' thing did."

Several heads round the table nodded in quiet agreement. Hershey looked towards the man sitting on the far side of the room, seated beside Cranston and amongst the other non-Council member divisional heads. Even though the accountant and these others had no right to a vote when it came to making Council of Five decisions, Hershey still welcomed the opinions of her divisional chiefs, especially when it came to matters relating specifically to their own division's field of expertise.

Like now, for example. When it came to anything to do with the Dark Judges, Hershey didn't believe in leaving any possibility unconsidered.

"Psi-Chief Shenker, Death and the rest of his super-creep buddies are supposed to be your bailiwick. What does Psi-Division have to add to everything we've heard so far?"

"Nothing much, Chief Judge," came the Psi-Chief's answer. "Whatever this supposed cult's activities involve, it doesn't seem to have generated any significant psi-presence to be picked up over the psychic white noise thrown out by a city of over four hundred million human minds."

"Nothing at all, then?" asked Hershey, aware of the thinly veiled sharpness in her voice. Psi-Division's success in predicting city-threatening disasters had been less than stellar, most notably in the case of the so-called "Doomsday Scenario" event of the previous year, when organised crime group the Frendz almost seized control of the entire city. Like many others within the Justice Department, Hershey's faith in Psi-Division's effectiveness had been severely tested by such events, which went a long way to explaining why Shenker had swiftly lost Psi-Division's long-held seat on the Council after Hershey's election to the position of Chief Judge.

The Psi-Chief, a quiet, slightly fussy man, paused, looking vaguely uncomfortable, before venturing an answer. "We have had one unsubstantiated pre-cog warning in the last few days, relating to a possible supernatural threat against the city, Chief Judge, although as far as we can tell, there's nothing in it yet to suggest any connection to the Dark Judges or this Death cult phenomenon."

"Just one?" queried Hershey, puzzled and slightly irritated. Whenever possible, Psi-Division policy was to cross-check possible pre-cog warnings from any of its operatives with any secondary visions picked up from other Psi-Judges, especially those amongst the Division's supposed powerful and specially trained pre-cogs. Usually, it took verification from several other Psi-Judges before the alarm bells would start ringing loud enough to be heard here within the Grand Hall of Justice.

"Who did the pre-cog warning come from?" asked Hershey, suspecting she already knew the answer.

"Well... Anderson," said Shenker reluctantly.

There was a series of muted sighs from several Judges in the room. Although no one questioned Anderson's psi-abilities - she was without doubt Psi-Division's top operative - her reputation could only be described as... troublesome, at best. She could be irreverent, highly strung, insubordinate, even downright mutinous at times, and was becoming increasingly questioning of Justice Department methods and policy. That was Anderson all over, and Hershey knew that she wouldn't be the first Chief Judge to have problems with Psi-Judge Cassandra Anderson.

Nevertheless...

It had been Anderson who had dealt with Judge Death the first time he had ever appeared in Mega-City One, trapping his spirit within her own mind at a cost to herself which few here within the Council of Five chamber could ever possibly imagine.

When the other three Dark Judges had struck, freeing Death and slaughtering the inhabitants of an entire city block, it had also been Anderson who, along with Dredd, had stopped them. The pair had followed them back to the ghastly netherworld where the fiends had originally come from, and apparently destroyed them for good.

They had returned again once more, though, tricking Anderson into unwittingly bringing them back to life, but she had redeemed herself for that terrible mistake, devising a way of trapping them forever in extra-dimensional limbo. Or so it had seemed at the time.

And then, in the nightmare that had been Necropolis, it had been Anderson who had enabled Dredd to deliver the killing blow, destroying the power of the twisted beings known as the Sisters of Death and allowing the Judges to take control of the Mega-City back from Death and his foul kin.

Every time the Dark Judges had struck, Anderson had been instrumental in stopping them. There was no denying that Anderson had a special link with Death, almost certainly down to having the creep taking up joint residence in her brain for over a year, so Hershey wasn't about to ignore any chance, no matter how slight, that there was any threat to the city involving Death and the other Dark Judges.

"There's a cult dedicated to the worship of Death on the rise in the city, and Psi-Division's top telepath has a vision about a possible supernatural threat. Coincidence?" asked Buell, making Hershey wonder if her SJS Chief didn't have a few mind-reading powers of his own.

"Let's assume not, at least for the time being," replied Hershey, looking to Shenker. "Have Anderson brought in. I want a full face-to-face briefing from her on what it was she thought she picked up."

"And the Church of Death?"

"As you suggested," she told Ramos. "We come down hard on them, right across the board. Brief all the Sector Chiefs to round up any and all Death cult agitators in their sectors. Any of them who look like they might know anything get a full tour of the interrogation cubes. Until we know anything better, we assume there might be more to these munceheads than just another passing fad. Agreed?"

There was a brief show of hands round the table. Unanimous agreement.

"Very well," Hershey began. "Next item on the agenda, the increase in illegal alien smuggling at the spaceports. Judge Blunkett of Immigration Division will give us his report..."

Cowed and fearful, cringing and repentant, the vampires bowed in submission before the angry figure on the altar's vid-screen.

"With so much at stake, at this late hour, and you fools couldn't contain your blood thirst for a day or two longer?"

Hissing in fear and contrition, the vampires grovelled even closer to the stone floor, afraid to even glance up at the figure on the vid-screen before them.

"Your children grow hungry and impatient," said the priest, shuffling forward in his dark green and amber cult robes to address the hidden speaker on the vid-screen. "Impatient at having to remain in hiding for so long, impatient for the glorious moment when the Dark Brethren are at last released from their imprisonment and we, their children and faithful servants can come out from the shadows and finally claim this city as our own."

There was a keening of agreement and anticipation from amongst the congregation of vampires, some baring their fangs in murderous and barely restrained blood hunger at the thought of the slaughter to come.

Many kilometres away, secure in his own hidden sanctum, the figure in the vid-screen sighed in thinly veiled irritation. They had their uses, these things, but ultimately they were at best a mistake on his part, yet another failed experiment on the route to his ultimate goal. Like these Death cultist fanatics whom he had found and with whom he shared at least some beliefs, he would use them to his own ends. And then, when they were of no use to him any further...

He broke off from that distracting, if not entirely unpleasant, train of thought, reminding himself that there were still important matters to be attended to first, and that these creatures he had created and these ignorant fools he had gathered to him were still the only tools he had at hand to carry out those matters.

"Believe me," he told the coven, the more conciliatory and understanding tone in his voice evident even over the static interference of the heavily code-scrambled vid-link. "I understand your impatience, and there is no one more eager to see our Dark Lord and his Holy Brethren returned to us, but there is still work to be done first, and we cannot afford any more mistakes now. If the Judges discover our plans, everything we've worked for up until this moment will have been pointless. You understand me? The Dark Ones will remain held prisoner by the unbelievers, and you will have failed them in the holy duty they have asked of us."

"I... I understand," the Death cult priest said, bowing his head in fearful contrition.

Fear and religious awe, the figure on the vid-screen marvelled to himself. That's how to make these fools do as you want. Keep them properly subdued, remind them who it is that they believe speaks through you and dress up everything you say in the right amount of portentous-sounding quasi-religious gobbledygook, and you can get them to do just about anything.

Even die for you, he thought with a smile. As would be amply demonstrated soon enough.

"Excellent," he said aloud. "Contain your hunger and impatience just a little longer, my children. I know the serum I provide you with is not enough to satisfy you, but I promise blood enough to feed the hunger of all of you, just as soon as the psi-witch is no longer a danger to us."

"Anderssssson..." Her name was a collective hiss of pure hatred from the members of the coven.

"Yes, Anderson," affirmed the figure on the vid-screen, further stoking the fires of the vampire coven's hatred. "The witch who has defied our masters time and time again, the one who has always been there to lead the Judges against them. The one who has even foolishly believed that she had actually succeeded in destroying that which cannot be killed!"

The coven snarled and hissed in rage at these reminders of past transgressions against their holy masters. The figure on the vid-screen waited a few moments for the sounds of their anger to abate.

"You still have her under surveillance?" he asked the priest, who nodded eagerly. "Then do our masters' bidding - and kill her!" commanded the figure on the vid-screen. "This time, when the Dark Judges are set loose to continue their holy work, Judge Anderson will not be there to stop them!"

Sitting there secure in his hidden sanctum, he leaned forward, hitting the switch to kill the vid-link, cutting off in mid-snarl the coven's predictable sounds of enthusiastic and bloodthirsty approval.

He tapped his fingers lightly on the console keyboard, calling up the floor plans which it had cost him much effort and money to secure from the supposedly impregnable Justice Department computer files.

He looked over the precious schematics for perhaps the thousandth time, mentally tracing out the pre-planned entry points, his eyes automatically seeking out those vital places which a hundred or more detailed computer simulation assaults had shown to be the most tactically vital or weakly defended. There would be casualties during the attack, of course, but that wasn't really going to be too much of a problem, was it? Not when he had a small army of death-obsessed fanatics and bullet-resistant vampire servants at his disposal?

Allowing himself a small smile of satisfaction, he closed his eyes and thought of the glorious transformation that would soon be his.

He was so close now, so close, and, the blundering incident at the med-supply repository aside, everything was going perfectly to plan.

"So much for that plan," muttered DeMarco to herself, drawing herself further into the shadows of the doorway from where she had been keeping hidden watch for most of the last few hours.

Another vehicle drew up, depositing a further group of figures outside the seemingly derelict dockside warehouse which she now knew to be the headquarters of the Church of Death.

In truth, the place wasn't much to look at, just another run-down old pre-Atomic Wars building in a street full of similar abandoned heaps in a neighbourhood almost now completely derelict due to the pollution overspill from the lethally toxic waters of the nearby Black Atlantic shore. But then again, DeMarco reminded herself, if she was setting up a secret and highly illegal cult dedicated to the worship of a mass-murdering, extra-dimensional super-freak, wouldn't this be exactly the kind of generally forgotten place she'd choose to hide out in too?

Her original plan had been to sneak into the place and reconnoitre it, to discover if it really was the cult's headquarters and see if she could find any clue about the whereabouts of the Caskey girl.

The constant flow of people in and out of the building - she had counted over fifty people arriving or departing in the last hour alone - had swiftly put paid to that idea.

"Grud, this place is almost as busy as Remembrance Square on Apocalypse Day," she muttered to herself again, as the warehouse's loading doors screeched up noisily and a medium-sized hov-truck slid forward into the street outside. Its rear panel doors were still open, and DeMarco saw a small platoon of figures in the now-familiar garb of the Death cult scrambling aboard. One of them suddenly looked round, straight toward where she was hiding, and DeMarco hurriedly pressed herself deeper into the shadows of the doorway.

Still, the brief moment she had seen the cultist's face was enough time for her street Judge-trained instincts to get a glimpse of the creep, and she registered a shockingly pale and gaunt face with fierce, red-rimmed eyes and...

"Fangs?" she breathed to herself, wondering just what she had gotten herself into here. She was also pretty sure that almost all of then had been armed with a mixture of firearms: stump guns and automatic spit guns, the weapons of choice amongst most of Mega-City One's criminal fraternity.

She supposed that this was the point when she should do what any good cit was required to do, and call in a crime report to the Justice Department. Leave it to the Judges, that's what ordinary citizens were supposed to do. There was just one problem with that theory: Galen DeMarco didn't consider herself to be just another ordinary cit. She was an ex-Judge - she had been a Sector Chief before she left the Department, for Grud's sake, in command of a force of hundreds of Street Judges and responsible for the safety of the millions of inhabitants of an entire city sector - and she still had an experienced Judge's training and instinct, so no way was she just going to turn and walk away, leave it for someone else to deal with like a good little cit was supposed to.

Besides, she reminded herself, she was a Private Investigator, and she had a job to do and a responsibility to her client. And to her client's daughter, the still-missing Joanna Caskey.

DeMarco had gone to town on one of these "Friends of Thanos" creeps at Joanna's college, and, after searching his apartment (illegal entry: minimum five-year sentence, the Judge part of her mind dutifully reminded her) and finding a large stash of highly illegal narc-stims there (failure to report a crime: automatic minimum five-year sentence) she was fairly sure that the girl was here, and probably being held against her will. Apparently, her unwilling informant had told her, there was something special about the Caskey girl's aura, and she had been chosen for some unspecified "special purpose".

None of which DeMarco much liked the sound of at all. She told herself that even if she called it in now, the Judges might still not arrive in time to stop whatever was going on in there.

No, she decided, she had to get in there herself, find the girl and discover what exactly these creeps were up to. Then, she promised herself, she'd put in a call to the Judges, once she had done her duty to her client and got the Caskey girl safely out of there.

There was a guard left at the still-open loading doors. He was wearing robes with identifiable Church of Death markings (membership of an illegal organisation: five years), was openly carrying a well-worn pump-action stump gun (possession of an illegal weapon: two years) and, even as DeMarco watched, paused to light up a cigarette (illegal smoking in a public place: one to three years mandatory).

"Creep sure is racking up the crime count," DeMarco murmured to herself. "At this rate, he'll probably be catching up with me soon."

The guard was standing with his back to her now, looking along the street while taking a long draw on his cigarette, although DeMarco wondered why he even bothered smoking the thing down here. If he wanted to dramatically cut his lifespan and pollute his body with lethally toxic substances, then a few good big lungfuls of the stuff that passed for air down here would do the job just as easy.

Reaching into her pocket to make sure that her pistol with its add-on stun beamer (unregistered modification of a licensed firearm: six months to a year, that little Judge voice reminded her) was still there, she slipped quietly from her hiding place and began sneaking across the street towards the guard's unprotected back.

The first plan had been a bust, she told herself, so let's see how this one worked out.

FOUR

Anderson was revving up her Lawmaster, before pulling out onto Tinto Brass Memorial Expressway for a long, looping, random patrol circuit of the inner sectors of MegEast, when her bike radio crackled into life.

"Anderson - Control. Chief Judge Hershey wants to see you. Report your position; we're sending an h-wagon to pick you up and take you to the Grand Hall of Justice."

"Not necessary, Control. I'm a big girl now, I can get there on my own."

She broke off communications before she received Control's no doubt exasperated repeat of the instructions they had already just given her. Even though she was a telepath, she didn't have to be a mind-reader to know what was probably going through the mind of an anonymous Comms Judge back at the local Sector House Control.

That Anderson. Always making trouble, always thinking that normal regs don't apply to her. Grud knows why she's still even a Judge.

To be honest, Anderson asked herself the same thing a dozen or so times a day at least. She thought she'd left the Justice Department and even Mega-City for good before - "Cassandra's little hiatus away from us" was how Psi-Chief Shenker referred to that period, with a wry smile - but, despite herself, she had eventually returned, called back by something inside her.

She loved Mega-City One, but she hated it too. She had hated being a Judge too, had hated and fought against the monolithic authoritarian weight of the Justice Department and much of what it stood for as well, but still she had come back, realising that this was all she knew and was where she was needed most.

Like now, for instance. The last time she had come back it was because, even from halfway across the galaxy, she had sensed a premonition that the Dark Judges were going to strike once more, and she had arrived back on Earth just in time to stop Death and his three super-creep amigos from escaping again.

And this time? What was the source of that vision she had, and that growing, creepy feeling at the back of her mind? Was it linked to the Dark Judges in some way?

Anderson didn't know, but she intended to find out and, while the immediate prospect of an audience with the Chief Judge didn't exactly thrill her, she hoped that it would go some way to putting her mind at rest. Death and the other Dark Judges might be contained under the highest security in the Tomb level beneath Nixon Penitentiary, but, as the Justice Department had discovered to its cost too many times before, imprisonment or even their apparent destruction hadn't been enough in the past to reduce the deadly threat they represented to every living soul in Mega-City One.

Checking the non-stop flow of Traffic Division info-updates scrolling across the screen of her bike computer, Anderson saw that Tinto Brass was severely congested at a point a few kilometres ahead, with serious delays at the Brucie Campbell Interchange caused by fans travelling to the smashball game at the nearby Juggernauts stadium and the aftermath of yesterday's brief block war spat between the Kylie and Dannii Minogue twin conapts.

"Grand Hall of Justice - best alternative route from present location," she barked to her bike computer in the approved Justice Department tone of voice.

"Wilco. Please stand by," responded the onboard computer in a voice Anderson had long come to call Justice Department Techno-Soulless. She'd heard that some of the younger Judges coming out of the Academy these days liked to have bike computers with a selection of changeable audio circuits. Apparently some bright spark at Tek Division had even made it possible to have your bike speaking to you in a synthesised version of Dredd's own unmistakably terse and no-nonsense tones. Anderson grinned at the thought - Grud only knows what Dredd thought of that. Then she smiled to herself again at the realisation that, to many of the younger Judges hitting the streets these days, she must seem almost as much a piece of Justice Department legend - "relic" would be the more unkind term they used amongst themselves in the sector house locker rooms - as Old Stony Face himself.

A moment later, the screen on the compact instrumentation panel in front of her displayed the requested map route, with secondary and even tertiary alternatives suggested as optional extras. Anderson selected the main route and guided her Lawmaster away from the expressway and onto an off-sked ramp, keeping one eye on the scrolling flow of traffic data as she did so. Like any good Judge, she knew the city's main roadway map by heart, but the day-to-day traffic situation was so chaotic, affected by everything from freak Weather Control mishaps to major block wars, and not forgetting the seemingly random basis on which the planners down at City Hall decided to carry out roadwork repairs and construction projects, that any seemingly simple trip from A to B could end up taking in unplanned detours to C, D, E and F along the way.

She hit the off-sked ramp at an easy 150 kph, turning onto it in a casual manoeuvre that would not have met with approval from any Bike Skills tutor at the Academy of Law - and which would have quickly drawn angry beeps and honks of protest from the vehicles behind her, had she been anyone other than a Judge.

Three lanes back, unnoticed by Anderson, the hov-truck which had been following her jumped lanes to match her manoeuvre, drawing a chorus of complaint from the motorists around it. Anderson, speeding off and accelerating up to 200 kph now, didn't notice as the vehicle slid onto the sked ramp behind her, bringing its own speed up to catch her.

She was on Joey Ramone Undersked, travelling east towards Sector 44. From there, she would cut off at Linneker Junction, catching the Tushingham Expressway for half a sector until she hit Slab 12 with its For Justice Department Use Only express lanes, which would allow her to open up the throttle and cruise all the way to the Grand Hall at a cool 350 kph. In less than fifteen minutes, she figured, she'd be pulling into the Grand Hall's motor pool levels.

When it came to beating the big city traffic, Anderson mused to herself, there were times when being an agent of a rigidly authoritarian law enforcement regime definitely had its advantages.

A juve skysurfer swooped in low above her, buzzing the speeding traffic below him and briefly mooning a party of outraged-looking elderly Brit-cit tourists sitting on the top deck of a strato-bus. He laughed at their reaction and briefly posed theatrically for the cameras of the delighted party of Hondo-cit tourists sitting behind the more uptight Brit-citters, and then hit the uplift throttle on his board, zooming back upwards and making the complex task of juggling high-speed aerodynamics with balancing the requirements of the skyboard's notoriously delicate and unreliable anti-grav field look as easy as riding an escalator.

Anderson supposed she should call the incident in to Control and have an aerial unit pick him up. Grud knows a stickler like Dredd would already have done it as soon as he spotted him, probably with good justification. Pulling illegal low-level flying stunts like that, the juve was a danger to himself and others, and maybe a few months in the Juve Cubes would cool his heels a little and do him some good.

On the other hand, she thought, watching the skysurfer accelerate away, dodging with masterful skill through two lanes of aerial traffic and then gliding gracefully up across the strong thermal updrafts from the stacked rooftops of the giant city blocks below, Anderson couldn't help but marvel at the momentary illusion of complete freedom the juve seemed to represent.

"Enjoy it while it lasts, kid," she murmured to herself. "Trust me, the rest of life in this city is all downhill from where you are now."

Distracted by her thoughts and the skysurfer's antics, she didn't even notice the hov-van pull almost level with her in the lane opposite. It was the psi-flash, screaming through her brain with nerve-shredding intensity, that warned her scant moments before the panel door at the side of the van nearest her slid open and a hail of automatic weapons fire was blasted out at her at near point-blank range.

Anderson swerved.

And braked. Hard.

She ducked too, leaning forward fast and hugging the chassis of her Lawmaster as a hot stream of bullets passed through the space where her head had been a brief moment ago.

The gunfire raked down the side of the bike. Anderson's violent swerve manoeuvre took her away from most of it, but she still heard shots ricocheting off the bike's armoured bodywork or shattering its sidelights. Something punched into the calf of her leg, while another red-hot shell tore painfully into the tough, bullet-resistant material of her Judge boot.

No biggie, she thought to herself. I'm a Judge. I've been shot plenty of times before.

She veered away from the van, into the next lane and the path of traffic flowing in the other direction, forcing her to violently swerve again to avoid smashing into oncoming vehicles. A bright red Foord Strato screamed by, passing close enough for Anderson's Lawmaster to leave scrape lines along the length of its gleaming paintwork. Anderson caught a lighting-speed glimpse of the horrified expressions of the car's occupants - mother, father and their population regs-permitted two juves - and then they were gone before they could realise just how close they came to having Psi Division's top telepath smeared all over the front of their family car.

She was behind the van now, wondering how long it would be before back up might arrive, wondering if she could stay alive long enough for it to matter. By now, some of the cits in the passing cars might be making emergency calls to the Justice Department. Roving spy-in-the-sky anti-crime surveillance cams might already have picked the incident up, beaming the images of it back to the local Sector House Control, while the Traffic Division cameras would surely have picked up something of it, although, unless a human supervisor was present, it might take the autobot programs that each monitored the images from thousands of such cameras some time to realise what was happening.

A personal heads-up call from her probably wouldn't do any harm at this point either, she thought.

"Control - Anderson. Am under attack, Joey Ramone U-sked, between Fred Fellini and Pete Bogdanovich Interchanges. Perps are driving a black, late-model Kryton-Skesky hov-truck. Am in pursuit and still under fire."

Right on cue, she was reaching for her Lawgiver even as the rear doors of the van burst open. She saw her attackers clearly this time. Four of them, wearing familiar-looking green and amber robes, and aiming their weapons at her.

Death cultists, she realised with a chill. In her book, at least, the Church of Death had just become something much more than another passing craze amidst Mega-City One's usual quota of harmless loons and jaded thrill-seekers.

She swerved again as they opened fire. What they lacked in accuracy, they more than made up for in sheer ferocity of firepower. Spit shells smacked into the rockcrete surface of the sked, gouging huge chunks out of it, or smashed into the front of her Lawmaster, shattering against its array of powerful headlights or ricocheting off its densely armoured eagle badge facade. One lucky shot drilled through the armoured casing of her bike computer and the thing died with a noisy electronic squawk, cutting off any reply that she might have been expecting to hear back from Control.

Stray shots flew everywhere, causing mayhem amongst the traffic behind her. She veered off again to a position directly behind the hov-truck, drawing her attackers' fire directly back upon herself and away from the other vehicles on the road. She wasn't in a hurry to get killed today, but she didn't want innocent cits to get hit by any bullets meant for her.

In doing so, she caught an unexpected break. Her attackers had completely emptied their magazines and were now struggling as fast as they could to reload their guns.

I'm being attacked by a hit-squad of amateurs, she thought to herself. If these creeps kill me now, I'll probably never live it down.

She could see them clearly. The hood of one of them slipped back, and she saw a shockingly pale face, a pair of red eyes staring at her in hatred, a mouth snarling open to reveal...

Fangs, she wondered to herself, remembering the things from her psi-flash nightmare?

The cultist raised his reloaded spit gun to fire at her again.

"Not going to happen, freak," Anderson said, beating him to the punch, as she raised and fired her Lawgiver at him.

As was normal with Psi-Judges, she wasn't the greatest shot the Justice Department had ever seen. The extra-intensive psi-training at the Academy of Law came at the expense of some of the other regular skills taught to all Judge cadets, and she was never going to be able to beat someone like Dredd on a sector house firing range - but, nine times out of ten, her Lawgiver shots went exactly where she wanted them to. This time was no exception.

The two shots punched into the white-faced freak's chest, knocking him backwards. A second later, though, he was back on his feet, reaching for his dropped weapon and snarling in even greater hatred.

Body armour, thought Anderson. That's what he must be wearing under those robes. There's a couple of light and flexible armour types - stuff like the new shokk-hard jackets favoured by Mega-Mob blitzers - that can stop anything up to a Lawgiver AP round.

Then Anderson saw the freak's face again, felt for a moment the burning hatred in those unnatural red eyes and sensed the awful hunger behind that hatred, and suddenly knew that, no, there was no armour hidden underneath those robes. She had just put two shots straight into this freak's chest cavity, and it hadn't even phased him.

The other three were getting ready to fire again too. One of them was fumbling with an object in his hand, and Anderson got another psi-flash as, in her mind's eye, she saw the object leave the cultist's hand; saw it explode against the front of her bike; saw both her and the Lawmaster burning furiously, wreathed in unquenchable flames. Saw herself falling screaming from the saddle as she burned alive in agony, her body smashing into the surface of the road and then lying there lifeless and yet still burning. By the time the nearest back-up unit arrived a few minutes later, there would be hardly anything left of her to scrape up and deliver to Resyk.

Phosphor bomb! her mind screamed to her in warning at the weapon in the cultist's hand.

Her own hand stabbed the handlebar-mounted fire control switch for her Lawmaster's main armament, sending out a long, roaring stream of shells from the twin-linked cannons on the bike's front. Large-calibre shells raked the rear and interior of the hov-van, ripping through metal bodywork and human flesh with equal ease. The phosphor grenade, blown out of its owner's hand, exploded inside the van with devastating effect, and Anderson had to manoeuvre hard to avoid the ferocious fireball which suddenly burst out of the vehicle's open rear doors.

Its whole interior ablaze, including its driving compartment, the vehicle swerved violently across the lanes of the sked. A flailing figure covered head to toe in flame fell out of the still-open side door and hit the surface of the road with a sickening crunch. Anderson followed the vehicle on its careering course, hitting her bike sirens to alert all oncoming traffic of the danger, although the sight of the fiercely burning and out-of-control vehicle was surely enough to make the driver of any oncoming vehicle sit up and take notice.

Suddenly, without warning, something detached itself from the flame-filled furnace that was now the van's rear compartment. It was a human figure, covered in fire. It leapt - flew, almost - from the rear of the van, covering the nearly ten-metre gap between the burning van and Anderson's position in an astounding feat of strength, landing on the bullet-scarred front of the Lawmaster with a bone-jarring impact.

Anderson recoiled back in her saddle in disbelief, finding herself staring into the inhuman eyes of the thing as it launched itself upon her. Most of its clothes were burnt away by the fire which crawled over almost all of its body, and Anderson could clearly see the gaping holes on its torso from the wounds inflicted by the bike cannon shells and her two Lawgiver shots. It was the same freak she had already shot twice in the chest.

It leapt across the front of the bike at her, forcing her to relinquish control of the bike's handlebars as she brought an arm up to block a lunging bite from that fang-filled mouth. With her onboard computer knocked out by a lucky bullet hit, the Lawmaster was now effectively out of control.

The monstrosity locked its hands round her throat, pressing forward eagerly toward her. Her nostrils were filled with the stench of burning meat, and she could feel the heat from the flames starting to blister those portions of her skin that weren't protected by the fire-resistant material of her uniform.

The thing's face - Anderson no longer thought of her attacker as now being anything remotely human - loomed up in front of her, only centimetres away from her own. Its red eyes bored into her with a terrible intensity. For a moment, Anderson involuntarily brushed minds with the thing, tasting the hunger and hatred which consumed it. There was something else there, something hidden at the back of its mind...

She focussed her psi-talent, pushing violently through the repellent barrier of the creature's hunger-thoughts and into the remnants of the ravaged mind beyond. In that briefest of moments, she plundered what she could from the creature's own memories. She saw the gleaming antiseptic surfaces of a high-tech laboratory... a dingy warehouse front, possibly somewhere down at the Black Atlantic docks, judging by the pollution haze hanging in the air...

She pushed in still further.

Some kind of religious ceremony, heads bowed in fear and awe before some kind of altar... A figure speaking on a vid-screen, its face hidden from view, its voice sending a thrill of fearful obedience through the mind of the thing...

Further. Still further. Not memories now, images of events still to happen.

Doors opened to reveal huge caches of weapons, eager hands reaching in to snatch up what they can... Dozens of creatures identical to the thing Anderson was now fighting crammed into the compartments of hov-transporters, a sense of almost unbearable hunger and eagerness running through them as they neared their destination... A set of schematics marked with a 'Justice Department: Highly Classified' security notification... Guard tower points, security bypass procedures, level after identical level of corridors lined with small cube-like room... Cells... An iso-block?

With a sickening realisation, Anderson knew in an instant what these freaks were up to. She broke off the psi-contact, snapping back to the reality of what was still happening to her right this moment. The sucker's hands were still around her throat, burning into the material of her uniform, strangling her. She felt herself start to black out. From somewhere far away, but somehow coming swiftly closer, she heard an urgent roaring sound...

She threw herself backwards off the saddle, taking her attacker with her, hurling themselves both off the Lawmaster a split second before it crashed into the front of the huge jugger-transporter, the sound of the impact as the Lawmaster was smashed apart momentarily drowning out the blaring roar of the giant vehicle's batteries of warning horns.

Falling backwards at a 100 kph or more, it was times like this Anderson wished she had paid more attention to the Department regs about the compulsory wearing of helmets. She desperately twisted in mid-air, putting her attacker's body between her and the road surface now rushing up towards them, figuring she might as well let him hit it first.

It worked, mostly.

They hit the ground and rolled for fifty metres or so, the rough surface of the sked making them pay for every bone-breaking, skin-shredding metre. The creature took the worst of it, as Anderson had hoped, but at least it didn't have to worry about being on fire anymore. Not when most of its burning skin had been scraped off along the way.

Anderson fared better, her uniform and protective pads saving her from the very worst of the variety of injuries on offer.

She came to rest on the edge of the sked's hard shoulder, still conscious, and started counting the damage. A couple of ribs were gone, and she suspected one of them might have punctured a lung, judging from the white-hot spears of agony she felt every time she took a breath. Her left leg was bent back at a decidedly unpleasant angle, and she didn't need to try to pick up any pre-cog visions to see some serious time spent hooked up to a speedheal machine in her immediate future.

The pain was bad, real bad. She knew some psi-tricks to block a lot of it out, but they would have to wait. The most important thing now was to let everyone else know what it was she had seen inside the mind of that creature.

She was just reaching down for the communicator stored in her utility belt when the hand, charred and almost fleshless, reached out to grab her.

The creature, incredibly, was still alive. Its body was smashed, its skin was burnt away from it in huge, terrible patches, yet it still wouldn't accept the inevitable and just roll over and die. It was crawling up the length of her body, making a horrible, hissing, gurgling sound from its ruined throat.

Pinned to the ground, weak from pain, Anderson was helpless to stop it. Her Lawgiver was long gone, knocked from her hand as they fell from the back of the bike, and probably now crushed beneath the wheels of the jugger-transporter. Which only left her with...

Ignoring the screaming pain from her broken leg, she reached down for the boot knife secreted there. Her hand found it just as the creature pressed itself down at her throat. Its mouth hung slackly open, revealing the jutting fangs there. Anderson's hand flashed up, stabbing the knife's blade right between the thing's open fangs.

Psi-Judges were equipped with silver-bladed boot knives as standard these days. Anderson didn't know what this fiend was or where it came from, but she was pretty hopeful that this might finally be enough to kill it. Silver blade or no silver blade, ramming the point of a boot knife right through the roof of its mouth and straight up into its brain was sure to have some kind of effect.

It did. The creature gave a choking cry and fell forwards across her, its fangs closing around the hilt of the knife still gruesomely jutting out from between its clenched jaws.

Using almost the last of her rapidly failing strength, Anderson painfully pushed the thing off her and reached in desperation towards the communicator lying on the ground nearby.

A black, nauseous wave of unconsciousness rushed up towards her. She struggled to hold it off for a few more precious moments. She had to radio in what she knew... Had to let the rest of Justice Department know what was about to happen...

Had... to...

She heard sirens in the distance, coming closer. Her fingers brushed against the hard casing of the communicator. Her vision swam. And dimmed.

The back-up squad found her less than two minutes later. She was unconscious, lying in a spreading pool of her own blood. The first Judge on the scene gingerly knelt over her, feeling for a pulse and relieved to find one, weak though it was.

"Control - Varrick. Med unit urgently required down here on Joey Ramone. Alert anyone who needs to know - Psi-Judge Anderson's down and in a bad way."

"Wilco, Varrick. Med assist on its way."

"Hold on, Anderson. Help's coming," Varrick said gently to the near-comatose Psi-Judge. Two years ago that had been him, lying bleeding into the ground of a block plaza after being caught in the crossfire of a juve gang rumble, and he knew from experience how much it meant to hear a friendly voice or just to know somehow that someone's there with you, watching out for you, while you're lying there helpless and injured.

He reached down to take her hand, noticing as he did so that she had her back-up communicator held in it. Her finger was on the call switch, although she'd passed out before she could activate it.

FIVE

"Hey, what was that?"

Burchill looked up in irritation from the book he was reading, his concentration broken by the sudden sound of Meyer's voice. Dull as it was, Dredd's Comportment was supposed to be required reading for any Street Judge.

Despite the mood of breezy nonchalance Burchill affected whenever he was on duty down here, he hated this posting, and seriously resented having to come back to the Tomb for another three months of sitting here doing nothing.

Which was why he had put in a request for permanent reassignment to something a little more interesting than guard duty in the Tomb, once this latest three-month stint was up. Something like open patrol assignment, say, maintaining a visible Psi-Division presence on the city streets and giving psi-specialist back-up to the ordinary Judge on patrol.

Which meant he'd have to undergo a series of revaluation tests at Psi-Div HQ, to see if he was suitable for more responsible duties.

Which meant having to brush up on his knowledge of Street Division and the way the Street Judges operated.

Which he couldn't do, if Meyer kept on drokking interrupting him.

"What?" he said testily.

Meyer indicated the instrument panel in front of her. "The needle on Containment One. Did you just see it move?"

Sighing in undisguised irritation, Burchill laid down the book and looked at the matching instrumentation on his own duty station. There were huge and expensive batteries of delicately calibrated electronic sensor devices trained on the four containment capsules on the other side of the no-go line. Much of it was designed to measure or detect any kind of psi-activity on the part of the four beings imprisoned in those capsules. If Spooky, Creepy, Sparky and Bony were up to anything, it was supposed to register on these instrumentation panels.

Which it never did, because nothing - absolutely nothing at all - of any interest ever happened down here in the Tomb.

"Nothing here," he answered. "You sure you didn't just imagine it?"

Meyer didn't look amused. "Check the log record," she ordered. "You know how the regs work."

Burchill punched up the sensor readings for the last few minutes, giving an unimpressed grunt in response to what he saw. "Okay, so there was a tiny micro-spike on One, forty-three seconds ago, but nothing to get your panties wound up about. Less than point-three of a psi-joule. Despite what the Tek-heads say, you know how random some of this junk is. One of the perps in the cells a hundred levels above has himself a real hot erotic dream one night, and sometimes the instruments down here pick it up. Satisfied?"

"Not yet. You still know what regs say. I need you to do a psi-check."

Now Burchill was getting really irritated. Despite the flippant names he gave them, the four things in those containment cells seriously creeped him out sometimes, and he really hated having to do what he was now required to do.

He sat back in his chair, closed his eyes, doing his best to empty his mind of the usual mental clutter as he brought his psi-abilities into focus. He reached out, overcoming the instinctive mental recoil from the sheer evil power of the things on the other side of the no-go line and, for the briefest possible moment, scanned the psi-activity within the chamber, looking for anything out of the ordinary. He hated doing this. What made it even more unnerving was knowing that Meyer, sitting across from him, had her hand on the grip of her Lawgiver, ready to draw it and put a Standard Execution round through his brainpan at the first sign that he had become possessed or psychically controlled by any of the occupants of the containment units.

After a few moments, he opened his eyes again, seeing Meyer looking at him intently.

"Anything?" she asked, the tension clear in her voice.

"Not a thing," he replied. She stared at him hard for a few moments more - like maybe she's expecting me to start spouting tentacles or levitate into the air with my head spinning round in circles on my shoulders, he asked himself, incredulously? - and then visibly relaxed, bringing her hand up from under the desk where her Lawgiver was secured.

"With these creeps, it's always best to be sure," she said, perhaps in way of partial apology.

"Whatever," grumbled Burchill, going back to his book again.

"A Judge's first weapon is not his Lawgiver or his boot knife or his daystick," he read. "It is his Judge badge, and the natural authority it gives him..."

Oh brother, Burchill thought to himself. Old Stony Face might still be Mega-City One's greatest lawman bar none, but when it came to writing, he'd all the slick prose style of the late, great Mayor Dave the orang-utan.

Within his prison, the spirit of Judge Death hissed to itself in silent pleasure. Yes, this one was pleasingly weak, not even aware of Death's growing control over his deep-buried subconscious. He saw only what Death wanted him to see and nothing more.

Death was pleased. Equally pleasurable had been the event he'd just detected from afar. Since the time he had first come to judge the sinners of this place, his fate and that of the psi-witch Anderson had always been intertwined. He still rankled at the memory of his imprisonment within her, trapped by the frightening power of her mind, unable to escape her comatose body, the two of them put on display together in a museum, of all places.

The memory of that first defeat, that first humiliation, still fuelled his hatred against this city and the sinful life that teemed within it. It was this connection between them that had allowed Anderson to defeat him and his brothers several times since, but that connection worked both ways. Just as Anderson could sense him, so too was he sometimes psychically aware of her, even while he was imprisoned down here, weakened and disembodied.

Her aura was like a distant glimmer of light in the darkness of his thoughts, torturing him with the knowledge that she still existed, despite all his attempts over the years to extinguish that light forever.

Now, though, the light was faint. Barely perceptible and unusually dim. She was not dead, he sensed, or at least not yet, but her life force had been seriously diminished. Perhaps for good, he hoped.

His servants in the city beyond this place had done well. Anderson was no longer a threat to he and his brethren, which meant that those same servants were now ready to take the final step.

The spirits of his foul companions writhed in psychic restlessness, demanding to know when they would be free.

Soon, brothers, he whispered to them in a voice that only those who had passed beyond life and death could ever know. Very soon now. I promise.

Hershey resisted the urge to yawn. They had almost reached the end of the Council session, which was traditionally Kook Time, when the Council discussed what Hershey secretly called AOOC.

Any Other Outstanding Crap.

Last on the Kook Time agenda was a concern about some new bio-product that had come onto the marketplace a few months ago. Med-Division had given it a clean bill of health and approved the patent, but there had been a number of complaints about it from the citizens. For reasons that Hershey still wasn't quite sure about, no one at Justice Central had been able, or perhaps cared enough, to make a decision about what to do, and so the case had gradually risen up through the hierarchy of the Department until the Council of Five, which regularly debated issues vital to the security and existence of a city of over four hundred million people, found itself now arguing about a novelty medical treatment for raising pet animals from the dead.

Only in the Big Meg, thought Hershey, using a Street Judge's customary dismissive opinion on all the weirdness and craziness that passed for daily life in Mega-City One.

"After the events of Judgement Day, we're aware of many citizens' objections to the idea of a product which brings dead flesh back to life," Hershey said, gesturing towards the computer file compilation of the several tens of thousands of complaints they'd received from the citizens about the EverPet adverts that had been running for weeks on the tri-d networks, "but we have Med-Division's most stringent assurances that the treatment only works on the simpler nervous systems of animals like common household pets, and definitely not on human beings."

"Quite so," nodded the representative from Med-Division. "We went down to Resyk and pulled dozens of corpses off the conveyor belts there and dosed them with increasingly huge quantities of the Pet Regen formula. We got nothing so much as a twitch from any of them. And besides," he added a hint of a smile, "a chemically reanimated cat, budgerigars or goldfish isn't quite in the same league as an army of millions of flesh-eating zombies knocking on the gates of the West Wall."

"My thoughts too," agreed Hershey, glad that the issue looked like it was going to be quickly resolved. "Any other comments?"

"Well, there are the fiscal benefits to consider too," volunteered Accounts Judge Cranston, pouring over the tables of carefully prepared statistics he'd brought with him. "Besides the standard twenty-five per cent sales tax charged on the product, there's also the extra income we'll derive from the necessary re-issuing of new pet licences."

"Meaning what, exactly?" Ramos asked, showing the same kind of impatience as Hershey.

Cranston shuffled through his beloved piles of paperwork. "Well, the cost of a general pet licence is one hundred credits, with some of the more dangerous or alien pet types also requiring an annual additional inspection fee on top of that. In all cases, however, a pet licence becomes legally null and void when the animal dies. If a pet owner then wants to use this product to bring their beloved creature back to life..."

"Then they'll have to buy a new licence," Niles smiled, instantly seeing where Cranston was going. "And the Department in effect will receive double the licence money for the same animal."

"Indeed!" beamed Cranston, making quick-fire calculations on his desktop analyser. "So, with fifteen million, three hundred thousand and twenty-seven pet licences currently issued, and assuming that at least ten to fifteen per cent of pet owners might take advantage of this product, we can probably expect to accrue additional revenues somewhere in the region of..."

Hershey, however, had already heard all she needed or wanted to. "Enough to settle the issue, I imagine. Unless anyone has any other points, we'll assume the Pet Regen product is allowed to remain on sale - for the time being?" She looked around the room, seeing only nods of agreement and gratefully brought the Council meeting to an end for another week."

"Very well, then. If there's no other business to be discussed..."

"Just one item," interrupted a new voice from the other end of the room. All heads turned to see Dredd standing in the council chamber doorway. The Council of Five meetings were supposed to take place in closed session, with no one permitted to enter without the Chief Judge's permission. A guard of armed Judges was posted in the corridor outside, to make sure of this. Dredd, however, was always a special case. There seemed to be an unofficial and unspoken understanding, established many administrations ago, that Dredd had automatic and unrestricted access to the Chief Judge whenever he required it.

When Dredd spoke, Hershey knew from long experience, it paid for Chief Judges to pay attention to what he had to say. She sat back in her chair, signalling for her old street patrol partner to continue.

"What's the official Department policy on vampires?" he asked.

SIX

Anderson struggled and fought against the darkness that surrounded her. She was back in the nightmare world she had seen in her earlier precog vision - only this time it was much, much worse.

She was running through the empty streets of the city again, her feet crunching gruesomely on the carpet of bones which littered the ground. From all around her, she heard the growling and snarling of the vampire creatures. At first she thought they were hunting her, but then she realised they had no interest in her.

There were thousands of them, maybe even tens of thousands. The vampires were flooding through the city streets like a living tide of darkness, converging on one central point. In the distance, Anderson could see their destination: a vast prison tower, forbidding and impenetrable. The teeming creatures threw themselves at its walls, tearing at the seamless stonework with their claw-like hands, gnawing madly at it with their bare fangs. Teeth shattered against dense, unyielding stone. Taloned fingers were shredded down to the bone, but still the creatures persisted in their crazed task.

Their toil and mindless sacrifice finally paid off. A crack appeared in the blood-smeared surface of the wall, then a second. The creatures redoubled their efforts, tearing eagerly at the weakened stonework with a renewed fervour. The cracks widened, vast blocks of masonry tumbled out of place...

There was a scream of hellish triumph from within the breached prison tower, echoed a moment later from the snarling throats of the thousands of creatures gathered around its base. A wave of darkness poured out through the breach, accompanied by the overpowering stench of pent-up decay and corruption.

There were presences within that darkness, the fetid feel of their psychic auras so sickeningly familiar to Anderson. Four voices, so terribly familiar also, hissed in unison: "At lassssst. Now the great work continuessss. Thisss time, there will be no esssscape for thosssse guilty of the ultimate crime - the crime of life!"

The brief but urgent series of beeps from the devices monitoring Anderson's vital signs was enough to bring the med-bay orderly over in a hurry to where the unconscious patient lay on the bed of the speedheal machine. Anderson was out of danger now, but her body still needed time and rest to allow the speedheal procedure to go to work on her injuries, and so she was still under sedation.

The orderly leant in close to study the readings on the monitor beside the bed. She frowned, seeing a sudden momentary spike in the patient's brain activity. That shouldn't be happening, not with the sedatives that had been administered, and under the technology the speedheal machine used to accelerate the body's healing own healing processes. Still, she thought to herself, Anderson was a Psi-Judge, wasn't she, and who knew what went on in the minds of those frea-

She jumped back suddenly, dropping the tray of instruments she had been carrying, as Anderson's hand snatched out and grabbed her by the wrist.

Anderson's eyes fluttered open, which should have been nearly impossible, considering how much sedation she was under. She locked eyes with the Med-Div auxiliary, her grip tightening on the frightened woman's wrist. Using strength she shouldn't by any rights have at the moment, she pulled the orderly closer, her lips forming half-mumbled, slurred words, every one of them taking a supreme effort of will to get out as she struggled against the black walls of near-unconsciousness which still pressed in on her from every side.

"Nixon Penitentiary... D-Dark Judges... Tell Dredd, warn the Chief Judge... before it's too late..."

"Vampires?" asked Hershey doubtfully, looking at the naked corpse of the thing lying on the autopsy slab in front of her.

They were in a forensics lab deep within the Grand Hall of Justice. This was where Dredd had had the remains of the perps from the Bathory Street med-repository attack brought for examination, and whatever the Forensics Teks had found had been enough for him to bring the Chief Judge down here in person.

The corpses of the perps killed by Dredd and Giant were spread out on various autopsy slabs around the large room, with various combined teams of Tek- and Med-Judges working over them. Hershey had received Dredd's verbal report of what happened down there on Bathory, and had heard all about how hard it had been to truly kill any of the perps. Hi-Ex, Incendiary and rapid-fire had been the order of the day, it seemed. The corpse on the slab in front of her, the top half of its skull clinically removed by a Standard Execution round from Dredd's Lawgiver, was definitely one of the more presentable pieces of evidence that Dredd had given the lab technicians to work with.

"Yes, most assuredly. Not that they seem to be the kind of things that sleep in coffins and have any kind of unlikely aversion to sunlight, garlic or random religious symbols - but they're definitely vampiric in nature," Tek-Judge Helsing beamed, using a forensics tool to proudly show off the most interesting details of the specimen on the slab in front of them. Helsing was a typical forensics Tek, probably more at ease poking through the innards of some horribly mutilated corpse than in talking to real, live people. His complexion was only a ghost of a shade darker than that of the bloodless thing on the autopsy slab, and he looked like he probably spent his every waking moment under the thin, antiseptic light of the windowless forensics labs.

"Look here," he indicated, drawing back the corpse's lips to reveal its unnaturally long and sharp fang teeth. "And here too," he added, lifting up one of the corpse's hands and displaying the long, cruel talons that passed for the fingers there.

"Plenty of Bite Fighters get fancy dental work jobs like that, to give them an advantage in the ring," noted Hershey, "and we've seen the combatants in underground bash'n'slash fights coming back from the Hong Tong chop shops with surgically altered hand weaponry just like that."

"These aren't surgical alterations," said Helsing. "They're the result of some kind of massively accelerated bio-evolutionary change."

"Mutants, then?"

"Of a sort, but these things didn't evolve naturally. They were deliberately created. Probably as recently as a few short months ago, they were still ordinary human beings."

"And now?"

"Bio-engineered vampiric creatures, their body chemistry altered to an extreme degree by massive infusions of a gene-reprogramming retrovirus. Their systems are saturated with the stuff, although unfortunately we haven't been quite able to identify it yet."

"What are its effects?" Hershey asked, staring in mild disgust at the thing on the slab. In twenty years on the streets, she had seen countless thousands of dead bodies, had attended Grud-knows-how-many forensics examinations like this, but there was something uniquely disquieting about the corpse in front of her.

"Unnaturally high levels of strength, almost superhuman resistance to physical injury-"

"Giant and I can vouch for that," grunted Dredd.

"So that the only way to put them down for sure is to inflict massive physical trauma to their central nervous system," Helsing concluded.

"Blow them up, set them on fire or just shoot 'em through the brain," commented Dredd. "It worked during Judgement Day and it works with these creeps too."

"So far I'm only wondering why we aren't pumping our personnel full of the same stuff," quipped Hershey. "I assume there's some drawback to it."

"Alterations in brain chemistry probably cause violent psychosis and, in the long term, true death or complete derangement, but the main immediate and adverse side-effect is this-"

Helsing deftly slit open the arteries of the creature's wrist, and pressed down with his fingers. Hershey wrinkled her nose in distaste as a milky and pale pink liquid wept out of the wound.

"The retrovirus consumes the haemoglobin in the body's blood supply at a quite astonishing rate. Combined with the psychotic effects, anyone infected with the retrovirus will be consumed by an overpowering need to find fresh supplies of haemoglobin to keep the virus's long-term side-effects in check."

"Blood thirst," noted Dredd dryly. "Now we know why these creeps were raiding a blood bank."

"You said a retrovirus," said Hershey, picking up on the unpleasant implications of what she was hearing. "These creatures can kill by biting their victims, and traditionally the victims of vampires are supposed to rise from the dead and become vampires themselves. What are the chances the victims of these things might become infected by the virus too, and turn into yet more vampires?"

"We've already thought of that," Helsing smiled cadaverously. "The bodies of the victims from the Bathory Street massacre are being transferred over from Resyk. We'll give them full tests for any signs that they might be infected with the retrovirus."

Hershey nodded in approval. After Judgement Day, another outbreak of the dead coming to life and attacking the living was the last thing the city needed.

Or almost the last thing, she thought to herself, remembering the news that had come in about Anderson shortly after the Council of Five meeting had broken up. The implications of that weren't too thrilling either, not with her best Psi-Judge unconscious in a med-bay when trouble relating to the Dark Judges was maybe on the agenda again.

"And we're sure that these were the same things that attacked Anderson?" she asked Helsing.

"The report from the clean-up crew at the attack scene indicates they might be," answered the forensics specialist, "but the ones in the truck are too badly burned to do anything with. There's one specimen on its way here. I'll get to work on it as soon as it arrives."

"The clean-up crew say the thing they scraped up had fangs and had taken enough damage to kill a maybe a dozen Kleggs," pointed out Dredd, with his customary impatience. He gestured to the half-dozen charred and exploded corpses in the room around them. "Sound familiar? We know now why the creeps Giant and I met were robbing a blood blank. Big question now is: why were they so keen to see Anderson dead?"

The question was a troubling one, the possible answers to it even more so, thought Hershey. "Something she knew? You think this is all connected to that precog vision she had?"

"Too much of a coincidence to be anything else," said Dredd with trademark certainty. "Anderson gets a psi-flash of a possible supernatural threat to the city. Next thing we know, she's been jumped by a bunch of wannabe freaks from an old cheapo-horror vid-slug."

He gestured at the thing on the slab. "These things didn't fly over the West Wall on bat wings. Someone created them. So: who, and why?" He looked at Helsing. "We got an ID on any of them?"

"Not yet," conceded the Tek-Judge unhappily. "The massive genetic changes caused by the retrovirus has so far made identification by DNA match impossible, and the physical changes to their facial features and hands is making slow work of any attempt to identify them by normal fingerprinting or photofit ID methods. If they're on the citizens register, we'll find out who they are eventually, but it'll take time."

Hershey considered what they had so far, and wasn't pleased with the answer she came up with. "What we really need is more information, and fast. As soon as Anderson's conscious, I want-"

As if on cue, Dredd's helmet radio crackled into life.

"Dredd - Med-Judge Caley, head of Med-Div operations, Sector House 42. Got a message for you from Psi-Judge Anderson. She says you've got to get down to Nixon Penitentiary fast. She says the Church of Death and some bunch of vampire creeps are about to try and bust out the Dark Judges!"

Dredd and Hershey looked at each other in alarm. It was Hershey who replied to the voice on the radio: "Anderson's conscious? How does she know this? Why isn't she reporting this to us herself?"

Over in the Sector House 42 med-unit, Caley blanched as he recognised the voice now interrogating him over the radio link. Talking to Dredd made him nervous enough, but now he had the Chief Judge on his back too.

Unhappily, he glanced over at the now-empty bed of the speedheal machine.

"That's just it, Chief Judge. Anderson's gone. None of us could stop her. She just got up and took out of here running, just a few minutes ago!"

Anderson exited the turbo-lift, still jogging. Her barely healed leg, the one that had been badly broken only a few hours ago, hurt like hell. So did her ribs. But only every time she took a breath, she reminded herself with a smile.

In fact, most of her still hurt like hell. She stuck a few more stim-tabs into her mouth from the bottle she'd grabbed on her way out the med-bay. They took the edge off the pain, and allowed her to overcome the effects of the sedatives that had been pumped into her, but mostly she was running on pure psi-fuelled adrenaline. A properly trained Psi-Judge could turn their psi-ability in on themselves, using it to push their body often well beyond normal human endurance limits. It wasn't recommended, though. The comedown, when their reserves of psi-power finally ran dry, could be brutal, sometimes even lethal.

Anderson figured that was a problem she was just going to have to deal with when it came. Of course, considering what it was she was just about to do, and who she was just about to go up against, she might be dead long before then.

That's it, Cass, she reminded herself. Just keep looking on the bright side of everything.

She arrived at the Sector House's motor pool level, sprinting across a maintenance bay towards a line of parked Lawmasters. The instrumentation panels of several of them showed a green light on their status panels. All systems running, and engine refuelled and ready to go. Better still, they all had scatter guns locked into place too, which was a relief, since she had lost her Lawgiver back there on Joey Ramone and hadn't had any time after her escape from the med-level to stop by the sector house armoury and pick up - you mean "steal", Cass, she reminded herself ruefully - a replacement for it.

She jumped onto the nearest of the bikes, slipping her Department-issue ID card into the slot and punching in her personal recognition code. The bike computer screen blinked into life in acknowledgement.

"Hey! You can't just take one of those," shouted a Tek-Judge, running towards her from the motor pool admin office. "I need to see something from the Watch Commander before I can let you ride that outta here!"

"Anderson, Psi-Division!" she told him, waving her badge at him. "Sorry, friend, but the paperwork's going to have to wait for another time."

What the hell, she thought to herself. I've only broken about half a dozen Department regs in the last few minutes. Stealing a Lawmaster is just adding one more to the list.

The Tek-Judge's protests were drowned out in the powerful roar of the Lawmaster engine as Anderson gunned the thing into life and headed at speed out of the motor pool.

A few seconds later, she was out of the Sector House and lost amongst the seemingly never-ending flow of the city's traffic. She looked around her, getting her bearings. She was on Megway 126, heading east towards the core sectors of MegEast. If she stayed on this route, it would eventually take her to Sector 57, where Nixon Penitentiary was located.

On the other hand, the turn-off for the McFly Spiral was just coming up, which would take her to the Black Atlantic dockside sectors.

Much closer, she thought to herself. 57 was way too far away, and she'd never get there in time. Dredd would have to deal with whatever was about to happen at Nixon Pen without her. In the meantime, she had urgent business down at the docks.

She hit the accelerator controls, abruptly changing lanes and taking the turn-off for McFly. She realised then that she still had her uniform tunic and utility belt gripped in her hand. She would just have to finish getting dressed on her way to the docks, and at least it would give the citizens some unexpected entertainment.

After all, it probably wasn't every day they saw a half-undressed Psi-Judge struggling to put on the rest of her uniform while riding a Lawmaster at high speed along the megway.

SEVEN

Being an iso-cube guard sure could be boring, Judge-Warden Kiernan grumbled to himself. Nixon Penitentiary was a maximum-security facility, maybe the most impregnable iso-block in the entire city. Some of the most dangerous perps on the Justice Department's files were kept under lock and key here, and that wasn't even counting the four... things they had locked away down in the basement, he reminded himself. But it still didn't make guard duty here nearly as interesting or exciting as it maybe sounded.

Mostly, his duties involved patrolling the prison building's eighty levels of iso-cubes, or closely monitoring the prisoners' activities during the few hours a day they were actually allowed out of their iso-cube cells. Over fifteen thousand perps were held here, with several hundred arriving or being released every day, and Kiernan reckoned he'd seen just about every kind of perp there was, everything from the ordinary cit doing a six-month stretch for Jaywalking, Littering or Slow Driving, to the hardened lifers who were never going to see the outside world again: the Mega-Mob blitzers, responsible for dozens of gangland hits and carrying sentences totalling hundreds of years; the Judge killers, whose crime carried an automatic life sentence in a justice system where life imprisonment meant exactly what it sounded like; the juve gang thrillkillers, who would spend most of the rest of their young lives in here in payment for those few hours of murder-spree fun.

You name it, thought Kiernan, if there's a law against it, then there was someone in Nixon Pen who had been locked up for doing it.

And then there were the four monsters in the basement, but no one really liked to talk or even think about them. As dull as iso-block guard duty sometimes was, Kiernan would much rather be dealing with all the freaks, psychos and stone-cold killers in the main population levels than the creepshow inhabitants of the Tomb.

Kiernan shivered involuntarily. Sometimes he swore he could sense the vibes from that place, feel it creeping up from deep underground below the prison, subtly affecting the minds of everyone inside it. Psi-Div said that was impossible, that the prisoners in the Tomb were under full containment and that there was no possible chance of any psi-radiation leakage, but Kiernan and the rest of the Judge-Wardens in the Pen weren't so convinced. Vividly macabre nightmares were a frequent complaint amongst both guards and inmates and even for a max-security facility holding so many dangerous perps the Pen had much more than its fair share of fights and violent disturbances amongst the prisoners.

Everyone's on edge round here, thought Kiernan. It's this place, and it's not just the creeps in the cubes who want to get out of here.

His radio buzzed. "Thinking about that transfer to a West Wall guard duty assignment again?" laughed the voice of Sprange, his partner on this duty shift. "Mutie raids, rad-storms blowing in from the Cursed Earth, dodging the falling crap from low-flying dog-vultures? You don't seriously think any of that is better than this?"

Kiernan laughed in return, and looked over to where his opposite number was stationed. The two of them were on the prison's h-wagon rooftop landing pad, manning the two gun turrets positioned there to defend the facility from aerial attack. The airspace around Nixon Pen was restricted, strictly forbidden to civilian traffic, and the only flyers which came near the place were Justice Department h-wagon transports, delivering high-risk category prisoners who were too dangerous to be conveyed by ordinary catch-wagon road vehicles.

As guard duties went, this was one of the dullest, but at least it got you outside.

"Hey, at least on the West Wall, your job's to stop creeps breaking in. All we do here is-" began Kiernan, only to be cut off by Sprange's alert-sounding tone.

"Hold it, Solly. You picking this up?"

Kiernan glanced at the scanner screen in his turret console, and looked up into the darkening evening sky for confirmation of what the scanner showed him.

"Check. A hov-transporter, a big one judging by the scanner readings, inbound our way. We expecting any more perp deliveries tonight?"

"Not according to what I know. Hold on, I'll check with Control. Those munceheads in Perp Transfer are always doing this to us. You ask me, they're the ones who should be finding out what it's like to go on West Wall duty, not chumps like you..."

Kiernan waited, watching the hov-transporter coming towards them. It was in restricted air-space now, and this was just about the point when it should be hitting its retro-jets to slow down to land while signalling in to them with the correct recog-code.

It was doing none of these things. Instead, if anything, it seemed to be increasing its speed. And so were the two identical craft coming in right behind it, on the same approach course.

"They're not Justice Department flyers, and they're not responding to hails!" warned Sprange, bringing his turret round to bear.

Kiernan fumbled to do likewise, losing precious seconds as he got the unlock code wrong on his weapon's auto-targeter. By the time he had got his weapon activated it was too late. He looked up in horror as the first hov-transporter came straight at him. Whoever was in the cockpit must be some kind of madman, Kiernan realised, because the pilot wasn't even trying to bring it in on retro-jets; instead, he was simply going to crash-land the transporter on the roof. Kiernan's last act was to press the firing controls on his turret weapon, sending a long line of explosive shells into the nose of the lumbering hov-transporter, raking the cockpit and blowing apart anyone seated there.

It didn't matter, just as Kiernan had already sickly realised. Gravity and the vehicle's own momentum would finish what the pilot had started.

The transporter hit the roof of the prison in a shower of sparks and screeching metal, belly-flopping right across the wide area of the landing pad and smashing into Kiernan's turret, ripping it right off its mountings and hurling it over the far edge of the roof.

Sprange, in the other turret, fared better, at least for a while. He concentrated his fire on the second flyer coming in, riddling its cargo compartment with armour-piercing shells and destroying a power-feed to the underbelly grav-lifters. Stricken, the transporter dropped out of the sky on a downwards trajectory that ended with it pile-driving itself into the body of the iso-block some thirty levels below. Amazingly, many of those creatures inside the transporter would survive the impact. Unfortunately, the more human occupants of the hundreds of iso-cubes on those levels would not, and many were crushed or burned to death as the transporter's engines drove it deep into the structure of the building.

Alarms were going off all over the building. Up on the roof level, the third transporter was coming in to make the same kind of makeshift landing as the first. Sprange concentrated his fire on it, aiming for the engines and trying to cripple or destroy it before it could land. He was still firing when he noticed the dark figures streaming out of the wreck of the first craft down. He didn't know who these freaks were or why they were attacking a heavily defended maximum-security iso-block, but he was just about to show them what a dumb proposition that was.

He spun the gun turret round towards them, bringing his targeting scope to bear and switching the fire selector on both guns to rapid-fire wide dispersal. These babies could cut up armoured steel like it was synthi-cheese, and Sprange couldn't wait to show these chumps what they could do to a packed mass of human bodies.

Before he could fire, however, the door behind him was wrenched off its hinges and dozens of clawed hands reached in to violently pull him out of the gun turret. He was borne aloft into the midst of the baying pack of creatures there, screaming as he realised what was about to happen to him.

The monstrosities descended on him eagerly, claws and teeth hungrily tearing into his flesh. They had been waiting a long time for this. The serum the master provided staved off the worst of the blood thirst that consumed them, but it was nothing in comparison to a taste of the real thing.

"Rocking Jovus, what was that?!"

Mayer and Burchill had felt the impact of the transporter crashing into the iso-block, although this deep underground it had registered as little more than a faint rumbling tremor. Even that, however, had been more than enough to break the eerie, perpetual calm of the Tomb.

Seconds later, alarm lights started flashing on their consoles. Mayer flicked switches on her comms board, trying to raise someone in the prison levels above to find out what was going on, but no one seemed in too much of a hurry to answer. She flicked through channels, getting back only static in answer to her calls. Finally, she found an open frequency - someone's helmet radio was broadcasting, even if they themselves weren't talking - and she could pick out identifiable sounds. What she heard didn't exactly thrill her.

It was gunfire, and the frantic sounds of human panic.

She drew her Lawgiver. "Stay alert," she told Burchill, "I think there's some sort of prison riot going on above."

She locked her gaze on the thickly armoured slab of the sealed elevator door, the only means in or out of the Tomb. You needed about ten different security codes to even begin to think about getting into that thing up there on the surface, never mind starting it up and using it to come down here. As added security back-up, every metre of the elevator shaft was monitored, and anyone trying to climb down it surreptitiously would trip a dozen or more alarms and run into a seriously nasty surprise at a point about halfway down, where the hidden robot sentry guns were located.

"Stay alert," she repeated again to Burchill. "Until we know what's happening up there, we assume anything coming out that elevator is going to be bad news."

Burchill barely heard her. The Psi-Judge's attention was fixed on the four containment cubes on the other side of the line, and he stared at them in unnatural concentration... as he listened to the voices whispering inside his head.

The recently deceased Judge-Warden Kiernan would have been very unhappy if he could see the events unfolding throughout Nixon Penitentiary at the moment. However else you might want to describe it - chaotic, gruesome, a murderous bloodbath - you certainly couldn't describe it as being boring.

Senior Judge-Warden Scholker and his riot squad, en route to the rooftop h-wagon landing pad, would be the first to agree with that. As far as Scholker was concerned, all hell seemed to be breaking loose inside his beloved Nixon Penitentiary. Some kind of large flying vehicle had crashed into the iso-block, causing several fires and major casualties on levels 54 to 57. The impact and subsequent fires had also damaged the security systems in the prison, and Scholker was getting confusing reports about armed perps being loose on some of those floors, although where these perps came from, no one could yet figure out, since they didn't seem to be inmates. He had been on his way to the section affected by the crash, with the firm intention of busting heads and restoring order, when he got the call to head to the roof level instead. The turret crews there had reported engaging incoming aerial targets, but nothing had been heard from the Judge-Wardens on duty up there since.

Scholker fumed in impatience and tightened his grip on the stock of his scatter gun as he watched the level numbers tick past on the elevator control panel display. No creep was going to get away with mounting a mass break-out attempt - if that was really what they were dealing with here - on Nixon Pen. Especially not on his shift.

"Get ready," he growled to his squad. "Whoever's up there, we'll give 'em-"

That was all he said, before the doors rumbled open and the tide of vampire creatures which had been waiting for the elevator's arrival swept in at them with a howl of ecstatic glee. Scholker's finger couldn't even close on the trigger of the scatter gun before a vampire ripped his throat out with one sweep of its claws.

With Scholker and his squad obligingly bringing the large transport elevator up to where they were lying in wait, the vampires now had a means of entry down into the rest of the iso-block. They swept into the place, more than two hundred of them, shrugging off Lawgiver bullets and scatter gun shots, killing everything in their path. Some, overcome by blood-thirst and the temptation of having so much prey trapped helplessly all around them, broke into cube after cube, feeding on the defenceless and terrified inmates they found inside. Most of them, though, retained sufficient self-control and presence of mind to follow out their master's instructions.

Guard points were overwhelmed, control rooms seized, security systems destroyed or sabotaged. As they were slaughtering their way down through the levels of the prison, those vampires which had been aboard the second hov-transporter and had survived its crashing impact into the building were doing likewise.

In a way, Sprange had done the Church of Death a big favour. Starting from the levels where the transporter had hit the building, they were able to reach the iso-block's main control centre on level 45 far quicker than had been anticipated. After breaking into the place and killing the command staff there, they were able to bypass the security codes and open every iso-cube door in the prison at a point far earlier than had been expected, way back when this crippling attack had first been planned.

Sherman "Sharkey" McCann didn't like being locked up. In truth, he didn't like most things, but most of all he didn't like Judges, which was why he had kept killing them. He'd killed six of them - although a couple of them had been those wannabe Judges who drove the catch wagons and did all the cleaning up after the real Judges had finished doing their law stuff, so Sharkey wasn't too sure if they really counted - before the drokkers caught up with him.

Sharkey hadn't liked getting caught, and had liked being shot even less. He'd taken three Lawgiver shots, one in the arm and two through the chest, and the Med-Judges had fitted him out with a crappy paper lung after one of those shots in his chest had royally messed up one of the perfectly good human lungs he'd had all his life. Still, Sharkey took quiet pleasure in the fact that the Judges hadn't been able to kill him, not even with three Lawgiver slugs. Better still, it had been Dredd himself that had pulled the trigger on those shots. Sharkey knew that the rest of the Judges were secretly afraid of him, 'cause otherwise why would they have had to call in their top lawdog to bring him in?

Yeah, he took three shots from Dredd, and he still wouldn't lie down and die for them.

Not that Sharkey liked Dredd much either. Dredd had shot him. It was because of Dredd that he was in here, with this crappy paper lung that didn't work properly, that gave Sharkey a pain in his chest every time he took a breath, never mind what the Med-Judges said about the pain all being in his head. Sharkey knew the pain was real, and every time he took a breath and felt it cutting into him, it made him think of Dredd.

Oh man, but there was one lawdog Sharkey would like to add to his score. He fragged Dredd, and he knew he wouldn't ever hear any more sniggering behind his back from the other cons about how he wasn't really such a big, bad Judge-killer 'cause some of the badges he scragged weren't real Judges.

This was what Sharkey was thinking, and wasn't really that much different from what Sharkey was normally thinking, when the hov-transporter had hit the iso-block about ten levels above where his cell was. Sharkey's cube didn't have a window - like everyone knew, only narks or rich creeps who could bribe the Judge-Wardens got cubes with windows - so he didn't see the rain of burning wreckage from the crash tumbling down the outside of the building. But he sure felt the impact and he sure heard every gruddamned alarm in the place going off right afterwards.

After that there had been a lot of screaming and shouting, and then a heap of gunshots, and then just a whole lot more screaming. Looking out the tiny aperture in his cube door, Sharkey hadn't been able to see or figure out much of what was supposed to be going on, even if he did fleetingly see some freak in a Halloween monster mask run down the corridor outside. Which just didn't make much sense at all to Sharkey.

It was a little while after then that there was a familiar-sounding clunking noise, and Sharkey's cube door swung open. Sharkey stepped forward and peered cautiously out into the corridor. It turned out that Sharkey's wasn't the only cube door to have been opened, 'cause there was everyone else in the corridor standing there and peering out just like Sharkey was.

Best of all, the only guard in sight was the dead one slumped against the wall at the end of the corridor. Sharkey moved fast, getting to the Judge stiff before anyone else and helping himself to whatever he had.

Sharkey knew enough to leave the stiff's Lawgiver in its holster - try pulling the trigger on that sweet little package and you can kiss your flipper goodbye - but he was happy to help himself to the scatter gun.

Satisfying himself that the weapon was in working order - Grud, but it felt good to have a gun in his hand again after all these years - Sharkey looked up, seeing the faces of his crew looking expectantly at him. Some of the other cons, the ordinary Joe cits doing the kind of joke cube-time that you counted in months instead of years or even decades, stayed in their cubes, too afraid of what was happening, but Sharkey's crew knew what the score was.

"Find some more weapons," he told them. "We're gonna bust our way outta here and maybe have some fun while we're doing it."

"There's serious trouble at Nixon Pen. Let's roll!"

The message crackled through the helmet radios of more than eighty Judges, all of them mounted on Lawmasters and heading at speed out of Sector House 57. The call had come in only a few minutes ago. Nixon Penitentiary was under attack, and every Street Judge in the sector house had been scrambled in response. Off-duty Judges were rudely roused out of dorms or sleep machines, Judges who had just come in from an eight-hour duty shift immediately got ready to hit the streets again. Emergency response units were being pulled in from other sectors, and more units from their own sector house - pat wagon crews, riot squad teams, even sector house admin and auxiliary staff to plug the holes in the ranks of the Street Judges - would follow them up soon enough, but these would be the first Judges to arrive at the scene and bring the situation at Nixon Pen back under control.

They were travelling along Minnie Driver Megway towards the prison, bike sirens blaring en masse, when the ambush happened.

A juggernaut-transporter jackknifed itself on the road ahead of them, overturning and completely blocking the road, crushing half a dozen other vehicles and their occupants in the process. At the same time, ten or more roadsters travelling along behind the Judge convoy suddenly skidded to a halt, blocking off the road behind the Judges and cutting off their escape. Hidden snipers on the block plazas and pedways on either side of the road opened fire at the Judges below. Seconds later, their comrades at the roadblocks in front of and behind the Judges joined in too.

Corralled in, the Judges took cover behind their Lawmasters, returning fire at targets whenever they presented themselves. It didn't take them long to identify their attackers; their coloured robes and the way in which they fought with almost suicidal abandon soon gave the game away.

"Death cultists!" shouted a senior Judge, picking off a black-cloaked, skull-tattooed sniper perched on top of a Sump Industries advertising billboard overlooking the roadway. "And if it's death these freaks are looking for, then today's their lucky day!"

"It's happening everywhere, Dredd. We're getting reports of attacks and violent disturbances involving Church of Death cultists all across the board!"

Dredd studied the tactical display on the h-wagon's control console. A pattern quickly appeared to him.

"They're centred around Sector 57, and Nixon Pen. Every incident is either designed to cut off one of the main routes to Nixon or tie up units that would otherwise be sent to deal with the trouble there."

"That's a roj," said the voice of Hershey over the radio link. "These Death cult kooks are coming out of the woodwork everywhere. They're doing everything they can to keep us away from Nixon Pen. There's thousands of them, but at the rate we're mopping them up, they'll all be either in the cubes or on their way to Resyk by the end of the night."

"If we don't get more units into Nixon fast, the whole city might be following those creeps along the Resyk conveyor belts," Dredd said grimly.

He'd commandeered the fastest h-wagon available at the Grand Hall of Justice as soon as Anderson's warning had reached him, but it had barely even taken off before the news of the attack on the prison had come through. Anderson's warning had been passed on too late, and the Death cultists had already made their move. It was minutes after that, as the h-wagon sped across the sky, that the first reports started coming in about the other Death cult attacks.

Like Hershey said, the Church was coming out of the woodwork, throwing everything they had into slowing the Judges down. Small groups of heavily armed Death cultist commandoes were on the loose in several sectors adjacent to 57. A human wave of unarmed, chanting cult members had blocked off Bachman-Turner Oversked, cutting off yet another approach to Nixon Pen. Lone cultists were going on killing sprees in crowded plazas and ped-precincts, and a report had just come in that a Death cult suicide bomber had detonated herself in the lobby of Sector House 58. Several block wars had suddenly flared up - the ever-feuding Minogue twin conapts had been the first, eagerly renewing simmering hostilities once more - and it seemed too much of a coincidence for the Death cult's involvement not to be suspected.

Dredd had intended to rendezvous at Nixon Pen with the local Judge units already at the scene there and then take command of the operation to restore order in the prison. At the moment, with roads blocked off and most of the available reinforcements tied up in dealing with the Death cult attacks, he was going to be the first unit to reach the place. He needed more Judges, and he needed them now. He activated his helmet radio.

"Giant - Dredd. Where are you?"

"About twenty minutes behind you," came the reply, "with four h-wagons' worth of riot squad units and a couple of heavy weapons teams. There's another ten wagons of the same taking off now, about another ten minutes behind me. We'll rendezvous with you at Nixon Pen, and-"

"No time," growled Dredd. "These Death cult creeps are trying to bust out the Dark Judges. The whole city's at risk now."

Dredd could see Nixon Pen through the h-wagon's cockpit window; a dark, forbidding-looking tower standing starkly against the illuminated backdrop of the city's spectacular skyline. Part of the building was burning, and even from this distance Dredd felt a sense of the chaos that had suddenly enveloped the place. Grud only knows how bad it was inside.

He signalled for the h-wagon pilot to begin his approach. "I'm going in on my own right now," he told Giant. "I'll meet you inside."

Two minutes later, the h-wagon touched down briefly on an emergency landing platform on the side of the prison building, then at Dredd's signal took off almost immediately afterwards. There were probably hundreds, if not thousands, of escaped and dangerous perps on the loose inside the prison, and Dredd had no intention of leaving an h-wagon sitting there on the landing pad for any of them to try to seize and make their aerial escape in.

Dredd was left standing alone on the landing pad, with the door into the main prison levels in front of him. He deactivated its coded locking mechanism with his override card, drew his Lawgiver and stepped into hell.

EIGHT

The Hi-Ex shot caught the vampire in the midsection, blowing it and the one next to it apart in the same single, bloody blast. The third creature leapt over their smoking remains, fangs bared in anger.

"Hungry, creep?" Dredd asked it. "So chew on this!"

He fed his Kevlar-reinforced fist into the creature's mouth, feeling its fangs break against the armoured material of his Judge glove. Two Lawgiver shots into its chest gave it something more to howl about. Dredd knew the shots wouldn't kill it, but they would keep it distracted for a few more seconds - and a few more seconds was all he needed.

Grabbing it by the shoulders, he hurled it backwards, smashing its head into the cell door opposite and then, before the creature could recover, he propelled it in the other direction across the narrow corridor, throwing it through the broken doors there and into the elevator shaft that dropped through fifty levels of this section of the iso-block building.

The vampire fell, uselessly flailing its limbs and howling in equally useless fury. Dredd didn't know if the fall would kill it - as he had been finding out ever since the battle at the Bathory med-repository, these creeps took a lot of killing - but he was fairly sure he wouldn't be seeing that particular example again in a hurry.

He continued on, following the route down to the next level. Power to the elevators and grav-tubes was gone, possibly as a built-in security measure when the alarms had first gone off, possibly as a result of damage done to the building's power supply either by the impact of the crash or sabotage by the rioting prisoners. Either way, the only way down through the building was on foot.

Dredd was heading for level 10, where the elevator entrance to the Tomb level was located. So far, he'd managed to fight his way down through twenty-six, with another twelve still to go. His combat responses had fallen into a pattern on the way down through those twenty-six levels.

Vampires got Standard Execution rounds to the head, or Hi-Ex or Incendiary shot special deliveries. Any armed perps he came across - and there were thousands of them at loose within the prison - and who were dumb enough to get in his way got the Standard Execution treatment, no more questions asked. Everyone else got a single warning and, if that didn't work, they got a brief but efficient first-hand demonstration of Dredd's unarmed combat ability and renowned daystick head-busting skills.

It was a crude but effective system, designed to get him to where he wanted to go with the minimum of delay and using the minimum of ammunition. Even so, in the twenty-six levels he'd covered so far, he'd still managed to go through four whole Lawgiver magazines, and his supply of Hi-Ex and Incendiary shells was now at a premium.

At the moment, nothing else mattered other than getting to that express elevator to the Tomb, and Dredd was forced to press on, going against his every instinct by ignoring all the other law-breaking going on in the prison around him. If the Dark Judges escaped, the chaos happening now in Nixon Pen would be as naught compared to what could result across the entirety of Mega-City One.

Giant would be touching down with his riot squad reinforcements soon enough. Dredd had been in constant radio communication with him, giving him updates on his progress so far. Thanks to Dredd, when Giant and his squads stormed into the place, they would already know where the worst trouble spots were, and where to apply the most force to swiftly bring order back to the prison.

He found the stairs from the level below and was down them in seconds, applying his daystick to the two shiv-armed escaped perps who stepped out of the shadows halfway down, demanding that he first pay the "entrance toll" to the next level. Dredd left them where they fell, unconscious and bleeding.

"Giant - Dredd. Two more for you, level 22, bottom of Stair B. Attempted Assault on a Judge: five years apiece onto their sentences, on top of the general counts for Rioting and Attempted Iso-Cube Escape."

Level 22. Twelve more levels to go.

Level 19.

Turning a corner, he ran into a mob of fifty or more escaped perps, all of them armed with a variety of makeshift weapons, all of them doing their best to slaughter each other. Freed from their cubes, and with no sign of any living Judge-Wardens, the prisoners had so far been at liberty to pursue their own violent agendas. Many of them, like the fifty creeps here, were using the opportunity to reignite some ancient gang feuds.

Dredd didn't have time to deal with a distraction like this. A precious Hi-Ex shot into the ceiling stopped the fighting and grabbed their attention. Two more Standard Execution rounds into the heart of a perp - probably one of the gang leaders - who tried to fire a stolen scatter gun at him grabbed their attention even further.

Fifty pairs of hostile eyes regarded him with sullen hatred, fifty hands grasped the handles of makeshift clubs or shivs, fifty minds imagined how good it would feel to bring those clubs down hard on that helmet or bury those shivs hilt-deep into that chest. Dredd coolly stared down every one of them, daring any of them to make their move. Not one did.

"Lay down your weapons and return to your cubes," Dredd commanded, bringing his full, natural authority to bear in what could almost have been a textbook moment straight out of his own Comportment. "Wait there - and don't even think about leaving them again. Judges will be here soon enough to deal with all of you."

"Drokk that!" shouted some big creep who had stripped off to the waist, his filed teeth and scar-crossed skin marking him out as a former bite-fighter. It was time for the classic equation. "There's one of him, and-"

He never got to finish it. Dredd's Lawgiver sounded once and the perp hit the floor, a Standard Execution round drilled through the centre of his forehead.

The other creeps took the hint. By the time Dredd reached the end of the corridor, there wasn't one of them left in sight.

Level 16.

"Giant - Dredd. Make sure someone picks up the four creeps in the Level 16 med-bay. Life sentences all round - murder of a Med-Judge. Any problems finding them, just look for the four perps with my Lawgiver slugs in each of their kneecaps."

Level 15. He was getting close now, and running into more vampires along the way. Some of them were sluggish and bloated from feeding on the plentiful supply of unwilling blood donors they had found in the iso-cubes around them. Some of them weren't, but sluggish or still hungry, they all went the same way.

By the time he found the way down to the next level, he had taken care of another eight vampires, at the cost of most of another Lawgiver mag and an extra minute's delay. It was time Dredd knew he didn't have to spare.

"Gruddamnit, what's keeping them up there?" cursed Mayer, frustrated at her attempts to raise anyone on her console radio. "Why isn't there anyone there to tell us what's happening?"

"Yessss. Do it now."

The sound came from behind her. It was Burchill's voice, but at the same time it wasn't. Mayer spun round, seeing Burchill standing right in front of the no-go line and staring in what she could only describe as mesmerised adoration at the things imprisoned on the other side of it.

Being chosen for Tomb duty meant that she was no shrinking violet, and was more than capable of taking the kind of swift and cold-blooded decisions necessary for keeping the four most dangerous beings in Mega-City One safely under lock and key. She didn't hesitate, snatching for the Lawgiver stored in the specially built holster under her console desk. She had seen Burchill's combat scores, and knew that she was both quicker on the draw and a better shot.

She shot him four times, just as he drew his own Lawgiver, hitting him three times in the stomach and once in the chest. Each time she hit him, his body jerked weirdly, as if it was suspended on strings.

Also like a puppet on strings, it refused to fall down, no matter how hard it was struck.

Burchill continued moving as the bullets pummelled into him, drawing his own Lawgiver with a horrible, awkward slowness, a gruesome rictus grin fixed on his face which only seemed to grow wider as each bullet tore through him.

Finally he raised it to face her and returned fire, even as Mayer's fifth shot hit him in the throat in what should have been an instantly lethal wound. His own shot took her through a lung. She dropped to the floor, coughing blood.

She heard his weird, shuffling footsteps coming towards her across the room, heard the blood from the four or five fatal wounds she had inflicted on him pumping out of him and splashing onto the ground. She stretched out to reach for her Lawgiver, almost managing it before his boot came down hard on her fingers, breaking them all.

She sobbed in pain as he reached down to grab her under the arms, dragging her roughly across the room. She tried to struggle, but could not. She tried to call out, maybe hoping desperately to be able to reason with whatever remnant of Burchill remained in the thing which had hold of her now, but all that emerged was a choked and bloody cough.

She groaned again as he took even firmer hold of her, lifting her bodily up with a strength which he simply shouldn't have had. She saw where they were now, right at the edge of the no-go line, saw the four things in the crystalline containment cubes looking at her as their possessed servant displayed her to them, almost as some kind of offering. She felt herself being lifted up higher, suspended high above Burchill's head - and suddenly she knew what was about to happen to her.

He threw her. She suddenly found her voice again and screamed, although the sound was abruptly cut off a moment later amidst the hissing chatter of the sentry lasers as her hurled body sailed across the no-go line and was instantly cut apart in the bright tangle of laser fire.

The alarms had started going off as soon as the hidden sensors in the room had registered the sound of Lawgiver shots. A whole chorus of further, more strident ones went off now, as Burchill's body jerked round to open fire at the two control consoles, riddling them with rapid-fire Standard Execution rounds. Hi-Ex rounds unerringly found both the sentry gun sensors and then the hidden guns themselves.

Now that it was safe to do so, Burchill stepped forward to stand before his masters and do the final things necessary to release them. The alarms kept ringing, both in the Tomb and in the prison above, but Burchill knew that there was no one left up there to hear them.

Level 12. Almost there now.

The bloodsuckers had been through this level like an impossibly virulent plague, and many of the corridors were choked with the corpses of their victims. Dredd heard screams from an open iso-cube door ahead. Approaching it at a run, he glimpsed in and saw a prisoner being attacked by one of the vampire creatures, the vampire pinning down its victim and biting bloody chunks out of his neck and shoulders.

Dredd raised his Lawgiver and shot the creature through the back of the skull as he ran past, never even breaking stride. The victim was still, weakened by shock and blood loss, and looked in a bad way. Dredd didn't know who he was or what his crimes were, but even as an iso-block inmate he was due the same cold, dispassionate mercy accorded to every citizen of Mega-City One.

"Giant - Dredd. Vamp victim in urgent need of med-treatment, Cube 47, Level 12. If he's still alive when you get to him, put him into med-unit quarantine until we find out what effects there might be from a bite from these things. Same goes with any other vamp victims you find."

Sharkey couldn't drokkin' believe it! Him and his crew were down on Level 10 somewhere, heading downwards all the time. They'd lost a couple of guys along the way - Long Louie had got shivved in the riot they'd had to blast their way through up in Level 33 and good ol' Marv had been jumped by one of those bloodsucker freaks somewhere in the 20s, and, boy, was Sharkey not in a hurry to run into any more of those freaks - but they were still in pretty good shape and on course to reach one of the lower level exits outta the Pen.

They had just shot their way through a security point down here - two Judge-Wardens had tried to stop them, but Sharkey and a few scatter gun blasts had nixed that idea - when Sharkey caught sight of him on one of the vid-monitor screens.

Dredd! Right here in the Pen, running along a corridor somewhere.

Sharkey glanced at the monitor reading. Level 11, Sub-section 4A, it said. Sharkey grinned. That was only one level above them, and, better still and judging by the direction he was heading towards the level exit drop-tube, Dredd was heading straight this way.

Sharkey wasn't big on all that Holy Church of Grud prayer-mumbling stuff, but he decided there and then that someone up there must like him. First of all they get him sprung from his cube, and now they obligingly drop Dredd right into his lap, and if that wasn't just too sweet, then Sharkey didn't know what was.

Of course, he'd added to his Judge-fragger score a couple more times today, but all the ones he'd killed had been Judge-Wardens, and Sharkey didn't really think they rated that much higher than those other kinds of phoney Judges who drove the med-wagons and handed out the parking tickets.

But Dredd... Well, he was the biggest, baddest Judge of them all, wasn't he? So fragging him would make Sharkey the biggest, baddest Judge-killer of them all, wouldn't it, and then there wouldn't be anyone laughing behind his back at him no more, would there?

Besides, Sharkey reminded himself sourly, thinking of that paper lung in his chest and the pain it caused him every time he breathed, him and Dredd had some history together, and he still owed the lawman some payback, didn't he?

He picked up his scatter gun and checked its load. Plenty of shells left, more than enough to take care of business, even with a tricky drokker like Dredd.

"Gonna be a change of plan, boys," he told his crew. "Got some unfinished business to settle up before I get us out of here."

Burchill's hands moved over the small control console, their movements stiff and awkward. The four shadowy beings in the crystalline containment cubes focussed their powers more heavily upon him, redoubling their efforts to remain in control of his mind and body. The material their prisons were composed of blocked virtually all their powers, and the vassal's body had sustained too much damage to allow them to keep it alive for very much longer. Time was running short, but they were too close now to even think of the possibility of failure.

"Release us!" hissed the voices in Burchill's head, forcing his body to carry out the Dark Judges' bidding.

He hit the final command key and a robot arm unfolded from its cradle in the chamber roof, smoothly snaking down towards the four crystals held in their heavy mechanical restraints. The restraining grips holding the crystal cubes in place were built into the deepest foundations of the iso-block building, and were designed to survive even a major earthquake. Nothing had been left to chance that might allow the creatures held here to be accidentally released, but it had always been hoped that sometime in the future a means might be found to destroy the Dark Judges' disembodied spirits once and for all. With that in mind, there had to be a way of opening up the virtually indestructible crystals to get to the things contained inside them, since the crystals protected the Dark Judges from harm just as much as they protected the city from their escape. The holding chamber's designers had no doubt imagined the deliberately engineered release of the creatures taking place under carefully controlled conditions, with a large number of Psi-Judges on hand to keep them under psychic control. What was happening now was probably beyond their worst nightmares.

A lance of stellar-hot laser energy shot out from the las-drill attachment on the end of the robot arm, cutting into the ultra-dense material of the nearest crystal's surface with a piercing sonic shriek. In just over a minute, its work was done and it was already moving on to the next crystal in line as a thin stream of what looked like greasy smoke poured out of the tiny, centimetre-wide hole that had been las-drilled through the wall of the crystal.

As the other three Dark Judge spirits writhed in impatience, the smoke from the first crystal coalesced in mid-air, slowly reforming itself into the familiar visage of the greatest enemy Mega-City One had ever faced.

"Freeeeeeedommmmm!" Judge Death hissed in triumph, over the shriek of the las-drill and the continuing chorus of warning alarms.

KOOM!

Dredd rolled for cover as the scatter gun spoke loudly again. The desk he had been sheltering behind just a moment ago exploded, throwing shredded paperwork and a spray of cold synthi-caf into the air around him.

"Remember me now, Dredd? Thought you'd seen the last of Sharkey McCann, didn't you?" called the voice from up the corridor. "You made a big mistake last time we met, lawman. Shoulda made a better job of your aim last time you pulled a trigger on me. You only get one chance with a guy like Sharkey!"

Sharkey McCann? Who the drokk was Sharkey McCann, Dredd wondered? He'd put tens - Grud, maybe even hundreds - of thousands of perps into the cubes in his time. His ability to recognise perps from memory alone was legendary within the Justice Department, but even he couldn't be expected to remember every two-cred punk and small-time jerk who had crossed his path during his forty years on the streets.

Still, at least all this dumb creep's jawing had allowed Dredd to get a good fix on his position.

"Ricochet!" he commanded, firing a single shot up the corridor. It hit the far wall of the foyer area at the end and rebounded back at an angle. He heard a choked-off scream of pain and surprise, followed by the sound of something hitting the floor.

"Sharkey!" The call came from one of the other armed perps, who came popping up from behind the overturned desk he had been sheltering behind. Dredd wasn't about to pass up the gift of a free target, and sent him sprawling back behind the desk again with a single shot.

Another creep broke cover from behind a doorway off the foyer, firing two shots with his scatter gun. The weapon was set on wide spray. Dredd ducked as he felt the sizzling flurry of hot lead rip through the air around him. He tracked the target, manually adjusting his shell selector setting as the creep ducked behind the open, heavily armoured door of a high-security interrogation cube. The creep might have thought he was safe from harm there, but the Armour Piercing shell that Dredd put through the thick metal slab of the door said otherwise. A second later, there was the sound of another body hitting the floor.

Dredd strode forward out of the abandoned Judge-Warden duty station area where the perps had thought they'd had him bottled up in. He hadn't killed them all, but experience told him he'd more than made his point. The three remaining, terrified-looking perps standing there waiting for him with their hands in the air and their guns dropped at their feet obviously agreed.

Dredd glanced down at the corpse of what he assumed was Sharkey McCann on the ground at his feet, noting the surprised look on the creep's face and the bullet hole dead centre in his back which had gone through to find the creep's heart.

"How's my aim this time, creep?" he asked the corpse as he tossed three set of handcuffs to the three surrendered perps.

"Cuff yourselves to the wall over there," he commanded, gesturing towards the holding bars on the side of the room. "Judges are on their way. If you're not here when they arrive, I guarantee I'll come looking for you."

Dredd ran on down the corridor. He was halfway down it when his memory put the name and face together. Sherman "Sharkey" McCann: sentenced to life back in 2016, for the murder of a Judge.

A Judge-killer, then. So no big loss there.

Still, the incident had been yet another troubling distraction along the way. A delay which might yet cost the city dear.

The scream of the las-drill died away as soon as its job was done, and the robot arm glided smoothly on to the last of the crystal containment cubes. The same stream of foul smoke poured out of the hole to coalesce into shape beside the other disembodied Dark Judges.

The spirit form of Judge Fear took his place alongside Death and Fire, as the drill went to work on the final crystal containing the spirit of Judge Mortis.

Now that it was now longer needed, the lifeless body of Psi-Judge Burchill lay discarded on the ground nearby, like a puppet with its strings most definitely cut.

The late Judge-Warden Mayer had been right in thinking that anyone wanting to access the Tomb level from the main prison building would have needed ten different security clearances even to make it to the elevator entrance. Sometimes, though, there were exceptions.

"Dredd, alpha red priority!"

The double set of thickly armoured blast doors obediently rumbled open before him and he ran through them without breaking stride. The sentry guns lining the corridor beyond submissively swivelled away as he approached and then swivelled back after he had passed, guarding his back. The Tomb and its entrance level within Nixon Pen had their own independent power source, and so were unaffected by the damage inflicted on the iso-block's security and power systems. The computer controlling them was now responding to the order, the combination of Dredd's name and voice recognition pattern, together with the command code he had given it, these all combining to override all other considerations.

"Activate elevator!" he barked while still a good ten paces away, making it through the heavy blast doors just before they rumbled shut, saving himself a few more precious seconds.

The ride down was a speedy one, considering how far below ground the Tomb level had been buried. For Dredd, with the safety of every citizen in Mega-City One at stake, it still seemed to take forever.

He squeezed himself through the doors as soon as they began to open again, his Lawgiver held at the ready. He took the situation in at a glance, seeing the two dead Judges, the bullet-riddled control consoles and the disabled security systems. The las-drill he destroyed with a single Hi-Ex shot, but it was too late, because its work was already done, and the stream of spirit matter was already flowing out through the fissure that had been cut into material of the crystal.

The spirit of Judge Mortis coalesced alongside those of its brethren, the four Dark Judges hissing together in shared triumph.

"Free at last," they exalted. "Free to continue our great work."

The atmosphere inside the Tomb was charged with dark psychic power. Even Dredd, who was double-zero rated for psi-sensitivity and thus mostly immune to any kind of psi-attack from the Dark Judges' spirit forms, could feel it, like a pressure between his temples. There was a foulness there too, a creeping sickness, the sense of something tainted hanging invisible in the air of the place. The Dark Judges were toxic, completely poisonous to everything around them. Even in spirit form, their deadly, corrupting power could still be felt.

They began to flow through the air of the chamber, heading towards the metal grille openings of the chamber's air-conditioning system. Dredd instinctively opened fire at them, spraying a dozen or more Lawgiver rounds into them, knowing just how futile the gesture was even as the bullets passed harmlessly through the creatures' insubstantial forms to strike the walls of the chamber.

They flowed with ease through the grilles and into the narrow conduits beyond. Dredd knew that the air-conditioning was supposed to be secure, with dozens of fail-safes built into it to prevent anything - even something gaseous - making it in or out of the Tomb, just as he had no doubt at all that the Dark Judges would find a way to elude all such safeguards. They were too cunning, too dangerous, to allow anything as mundane as air filters or vacuum-sealed plasteel slam-barriers to stop them now.

The others were gone, but the Death spirit lingered for a moment, floating tauntingly in the air before him. Dredd stared dispassionately at the leering visage of what was probably his oldest and greatest enemy.

"Patience, sinner," it grinned at him. "Your time to be judged will come soon enough."

Dredd raised his Lawgiver to give Death his reply, but the spirit-thing was already gone, flowing into the grille after the others, leaving behind only the mocking echo of its chilling laughter. Dredd activated his helmet radio to deliver the bad news to the rest of the Justice Department.

"Alert the Chief Judge. Tell her we were too late. The Dark Judges have escaped and are loose in the city."

NINE

Just as night fell, disembodied, invisible, the spirit-forms of the four Dark Judges passed across the face of the vast, teeming future city which had once come so tantalisingly close to being theirs forever. The city bustled with life as day turned to evening. The bars, clubs, restaurants, hottie houses, shuggy halls, vid palaces, juve joints, poseur parlours and all-nite shopperamas were starting to fill up with the night's customers, and the zoom trains were running at double frequency in the busiest central sectors, bringing in millions more citizens to the bright lights of the city's main attractions. It was Sunday night. Which meant that the familiar phenomenon known to the Justice Department as Sunday Night Fever was just beginning to bite, as countless millions of citizens went out to drown their sorrows or vent their anger and frustration against the fact that the following morning would bring nothing but the prospect of another long week of unemployment, boredom and poverty.

This was also the time when the tour party flyers took to the city skies in droves, each one packed full of foreign tourists who gawped down in stupefied amazement at the ocean of light that was the Big Meg by night. For these visitors, no matter how large they had previously thought their own mega-cities to be, there was no sight like it. Light and life stretched out everywhere below them; giant city blocks clustered together to form bright, glittering constellations, vehicle-filled megways threading between them and looking from this height like living rivers of light; the spaceports and strat-bat ports were blazing galaxies of light, throwing out the comet-like engine trails of craft blasting off for somewhere new every few minutes. Few ordinary flyer vehicles were capable of ascending to the height necessary to see the city in its entirety, where it stretched from the shores of the Black Atlantic in the east to the sullen, ominous darkness of the Cursed Earth rad-wastes to the West, so for those looking down on it from the tour flyers, it seemed as if Mega-City One was all there was to the whole world.

For these sightseers, the sight was simply amazing. For the spirits of the Dark Judges, moving invisibly amongst the drifting flyers, it was simply hateful and frustrating. So much despised life teeming beneath them, so many sinners waiting to be judged.

They were travelling at great speed, riding the invisible currents of psychic power that flowed across the face of the city, drawn inexorably towards a point somewhere just over the horizon. They were being called, they knew, and allowed the call to carry them to their ultimate destination.

A summoning spell, they realised. Their followers were calling the Dark Judges to them, to a place that had already been prepared, where Death and his brethren would be garbed in flesh again so that they could continue their great work of eradicating the crime of life from this world.

Passing unseen amongst the tourist flyers, Death amused himself for a moment by plucking thoughts from the minds of those sinners within the craft. He had always known that there were other cities in this world, other clusters of pestilent life waiting to be judged, but the number and variety of them which he found within the minds of those sinners surprised even the Dark Judge.

Brit-Cit... Simba City... Banana City... Hong Tong... Hondo City... Oz... Cuidad Espana... Cal-Hab... Puerto Nova... East-Meg Two... Sino-City Two. So many different places. So much disgusting life. So many guilty souls awaiting judgement.

"Patience, sinners. Your time will all come," gloated Death to himself, deliberately echoing what he had told Dredd earlier, thinking now of all the glories that still awaited even after Mega-City itself had fallen to him and his brothers.

There was still much to be done here first, of course. Their old enemy Dredd had arrived just too late to stop their escape, and he and the rest of his troublesome kind were still a danger to Death and his brethren at this early stage of their escape. Clearly something must be done to distract Dredd and those like him, while the Dark Judges and their servants prepared for the next stage of the great work.

Death could sense the one who had set all this in motion. He was one of those few sinners whom Death had allowed to live long ago, choosing him for some greater task and setting his invisible mark upon him. That mark was there still, like a hard black stone planted within the mortal's mind, and the chosen one had passed it on to the things he had created, the Hungry Ones. And they, in turn...

Death hissed in pleasure to himself, seeing a sudden opportunity to keep Dredd and the others from interfering in their plans for a little longer.

"Concentrate, brothers," he told the others. "Focus your energies. Let us put one more obstacle in the path of those who would try to stop us completing our work."

"For Grud's sake, will someone go and see what that banging sound is?"

Unlike their colleagues in Street Division or on general Sector House assignment, the specialist staff of the central tek-labs didn't work in shifts, and many of them were off-duty now, leaving the labs mostly empty for the night. Which suited Helsing just fine. He didn't like noise and he didn't like company, at least while he was working, and the few other Judges and auxiliary staff still on duty in the labs knew to keep their distance and give the Forensics Chief some space.

Helsing picked up the las-scalpel again and bent down over the corpse to take another tissue sample from its inner organs. The results of the last few sample tests had been inconclusive, but he felt sure that he was getting close to what he was looking for. Despite its startling gene-altering properties, there was something tantalisingly familiar about the chemical composition of the as-yet-unidentified retrovirus. The Justice Department computers still hadn't found a match for it yet anywhere in their mind-bogglingly huge file repositories, but Helsing trusted his own instincts more than any computer, and felt sure he had seen a protein chain profile much like it before - and recently too. If only he could get a better idea of the way it reacted and replicated, then perhaps-

The sound occurred again, breaking his concentration. A dull booming noise coming from somewhere to the back of the labs, near the refrigerated mortuary rooms where specimens and evidence still awaiting analysis were stored. The corpses of the victims from the Bathory Street massacre had arrived just after Hershey and Dredd had left the lab, and-

The sound came once more, louder and more insistent. A hammering, drumming sound, like fists pounding on metal.

Laying down his las-scalpel with an exaggerated sigh, Helsing went to investigate. The lab was deserted and he seemed to be the only one here. Acting on a vaguely disquieting afterthought, Helsing went to his desk and retrieved his Lawgiver from one of the drawers. As a Tek-Division lab specialist, he had never fired the weapon in anger - the closest he ever usually got to actual perps was when they turned up as evidence on his autopsy slab - but Justice Department regs required him to attend marksmanship courses at least once a year at the Grand Hall of Justice's firing range.

He walked towards the source of the sound, which was definitely coming from one of the locked mortuary rooms. Even as he watched, he could see the metal door shaking on its hinges, as something or someone relentlessly hammered on it from the other side. By the looks of things, the lock on it would only last a few moments more, and then there was the matter of the angry, animal-sounding, growling and moaning noises coming from whatever was on the other side of the door.

Calmly and methodically, Helsing reached down for his belt radio handset. "Control - Helsing. Unidentified intruders in the Forensics lab. I need some back-up down here as soon as possible."

He had barely finished speaking before the door lock gave way with a scream of snapping metal. The occupants of the mortuary chamber beyond tumbled out, snarling and hungry as they quickly spotted Helsing and started shambling eagerly towards him.

Helsing had lived through Judgement Day and knew what zombies looked like. How these zombies had come into being, whether the corpses of the vampires' victims had been reanimated by scientific or psychic means, these were questions the forensic scientist in him would have to wonder about later, assuming he was going to live through this. Right now, the only part of him that mattered was the Judge part, and his reactions were textbook perfect.

He brought his Lawgiver up to bear, drawing a bead on his first target and fired. The zombie's head exploded and it tumbled soundlessly to the ground, where the others trampled over it in their mindless, stumbling rush to get to Helsing.

Helsing took aim at the next nearest one, wondering if his first shot was a fluke, since to be frank his marksmanship scores on those annual firing range courses were barely above the Department required minimum.

One way or another, he figured he was soon going to find out. The zombies were almost upon him, and there was still no sign of that back-up.

"Say that again, Giant?"

"It's happening all over the prison, Dredd. Corpses are coming back to life again. Anyone who was killed by the vampires' bite is getting back up again as a zombie."

Grud almighty, that's all we need, Dredd cursed to himself. Vampires, Death-worshipping freaks, the Dark Judges and now the walking dead. This case was turning into a real late-night vidshow horrorfest.

"You able to handle things at your end?"

There was a pause on the radio link. Dredd could hear screams and Lawgiver fire in the background. Giant's riot squads had touched down a few minutes ago, and were methodically working their way down through the iso-block from its uppermost levels, rounding up escaped perps and gunning down any of the vampire things still on the loose. More h-wagons full of reinforcements were on their way, and it was confidently expected that Nixon Penitentiary would be back under full Justice Department control before dawn the next day.

Of course, that was before they had found out about the zombies, Dredd grimly reminded himself, listening to the dead air over the radio link with Giant.

"Giant?"

He heard a chorus of snarling sounds over the radio link, coming from somewhere close to Giant, followed by a series of rapid-fire Lawgiver shots. A moment later, the Judge came back on the radio.

"Sorry, Dredd. For a moment, a couple of the things got closer than they were supposed to. Yeah, no problems here. Zombies I can handle. I was there with you for Judgement Day, remember? It's Death and those other three creeps I'm worried about."

"Same here," answered Dredd. "Everything else they're throwing at us is just a distraction to keep us busy while they make their next move."

He was in the elevator now, travelling up from the Tomb to rejoin the effort to take back the prison. Might as well make himself useful, he thought, until they got a fix on the Dark Judges' position. To do that, of course, they really needed...

"What about Anderson?" he asked, knowing that Giant would easily pick up on the note of anger in his voice.

"Your guess as good as mine, Dredd. No one's been able to track her down since she broke out of med-bay and boosted that Lawmaster."

"Wilco, Giant. I'm coming out the elevator now. I'll do what I can down here, until your squads can make it down to meet up with me. You hear anything about Anderson, let me know. Dredd out."

He exited the elevator and marched along the corridor, the security doors obediently rumbling open in front of him. Sharkey McCann's three accomplice perps were exactly where he had left them and had cuffed themselves to the wall as ordered. They quaked visibly when they saw Dredd coming back towards them again.

"That's the idea, creeps," he warned them as he strode past. "Just make sure you keep it like that."

Out in the stairwell, he could hear the snarling and moaning sounds echoing from the levels above. He recognised it from Judgement Day. Zombies, lots of them. And on the move, coming down the building towards where he was. He could hold this stairwell by himself, he knew, as long as his Lawgiver ammo lasted, but how many of the things were there, and how many other ways down that were now standing unguarded?

Dealing with these creatures would take time, time he didn't have. Not with the Dark Judges on the loose somewhere out there in his city.

So where the drokk was Anderson?

Judge Anderson was almost in a trance as she piloted the Lawmaster at speed through the dark and mostly deserted streets of the city's dockside areas. She had switched her radio off some time ago, finding the angry calls from Control demanding that she report her position immediately too much of a distraction while she concentrated her psychic abilities on finding the Church of Death's headquarters.

She was getting close now, she knew, homing in on the place she had seen in the mind of the vampire thing. She could sense how close she was - just as she could sense that something had gone terribly wrong at Nixon Pen, and that the Dark Judges were free once more.

She could feel them too, floating somewhere in the psychic ether over the city, sense their hunger and eagerness to begin their sick work again as they looked down at all the life spread out below them. Something was calling them, she could sense that too, a summoning spell of some kind, and she was now using her psi-powers to focus in on it, following it back to its source, just as the Dark Judges themselves were now doing.

She sped on, entering the maze of warehouse-lined streets clustered around the old dockside district. Dredd hadn't been able to prevent the Dark Judges escaping from their prison. Now it was up to her to stop them taking on physical form again.

Inside Nixon Pen, the walking dead were on the move. Something was calling them too. Obeying some invisible summons, they left the places where they had died at the fangs of the vampires and flocked out into the corridors and cell-wing landings, crowding the stairwells, some even tumbling down the powerless grav-tubes, in search of a means out into the city beyond. Some were trapped and picked off by Giant and his men as they pushed down through the prison building, retaking it level by level. Others ran into the immovable obstacle of Dredd who had taken up station in one of the lower level stairwells, and was mowing them down by the dozen just as fast as he could reload his Lawgiver. But even he was just one man with just so many bullets, and, just as Dredd had already grimly surmised, there were other stairwells and other exits.

The zombies flooded out of the prison building in their hundreds, breaking through locked doors and barriers by sheer weight of numbers, passing unhindered through guard posts and security checkpoints left unmanned as more and more Judge-Wardens had been called away from their posts to deal with the rapidly spreading disaster that had enveloped the prison.

Most of them were still not even cold yet, raised from the dead before the heat could leave their bodies. Most wore the bright yellow uniforms of the iso-cube inmates, marked with prominent target symbols on their front and back, but there were the uniforms of Judge-Wardens amongst them too. Perp or guard, the vampires hadn't discriminated when it came to satisfying their blood-thirst.

All of them were splattered with gore and bore the marks of the circumstances of their own deaths: clawed-open throats, teeth-ripped jugulars, some even eviscerated or with their rib cages brutally pulled open and chest plates smashed through to expose the empty hole where blood-gorged hearts had hungrily been ripped out. The retrovirus was in their polluted bloodstreams, infecting their nervous systems and replicating within it, bringing them back to life again as these shambling, ravenously hungry creatures, connecting them to the vampire-things which had killed them and infected them with their bite, connecting them further to the figure who had created the vampires, and connecting them finally to the Dark Judge whom the vampire creator ultimately served.

The zombies poured out of the prison, heading towards the lights of the city beyond, eager to feast on human flesh and spread that infection even further.

Judge Ashman had graduated from the Academy to make full Street Judge status in 2018. She had still been a cadet when the zombie war known as Judgement Day had happened, and had missed the whole thing. Her class had been amongst those put on alert to join the battle on the West Wall perimeter, bringing desperately needed reinforcements to plug the gaps in the Justice Department defences as they struggled to fight off the massive zombie army encroaching in on the city from the Cursed Earth. In the event, the zombie war had been over before they could go into action, won not on the bloody battle lines along the West Wall borders or in the similar, desperate battles taking place at every other Mega-City on the planet, but in the tunnels beneath the mystic Radlands of Ji, where Dredd and a small, elite band of Judges from all across the world had destroyed the power of Sabbat the Necromancer and broken his psychic control over his deathless hordes.

Ashman had always wondered what it would have been like to be there on the West Wall in the darkest hours of Judgement Day, fighting off an enemy coming at you in countless numbers; an enemy that shrugged off wounds that would have killed any living human; an enemy which came on mindlessly and relentlessly, never tiring or despairing, its only motivation being the most basic animal impulse to kill and eat its prey.

Now she was about to find out. She and her partner Farrer were the first Judges to make it through the Death cultists' ambushes and roadblocks, and they were just pulling up on their Lawmasters in front of Nixon Pen when the horde of zombies started flooding through the iso-block's broken gates. Their Sector House Control was in radio communication with Giant and his squads within the prison, and so the two Judges had been warned what to expect when they arrived.

On the other hand, being confronted by a shambling, howling, flesh-hungry mob of the walking dead was a career first for both young Judges, and it took them some vital moments to adjust to the situation.

"Holy Jovus!" shouted Farrer, only a few months as a Street Judge after being promoted and transferred over from more sedate duties in the Justice Department's Traffic Division. "There must be hundreds of them! What do we do?"

"This," answered Ashman, dropping to one knee, taking aim with her Lawgiver and opening fire with calm, accurate precision at the first ranks of the approaching zombie horde. Farrer hesitated a moment, then followed suit.

Zombie after zombie fell to the ground, bullet holes drilled through their skulls. As each one fell, though, others instantly came forward to take its place, all of them pushing eagerly forward toward the two Judges.

"Code 99 Red!" Ashman shouted into her helmet mike, giving the Justice Department emergency code that signalled a Judge in trouble, designed to bring the nearest back-up units scrambling to their assistance. "They're out in the open here at Nixon Pen. We need help down here now!"

She looked over at Farrer, relieved to see that he didn't seem to be showing any more signs of panic. "How you doing?" she shouted over to him, raising her voice to be heard over the sound of Lawgiver fire and the hungry moans of the zombies.

"Sure beats being back at Traffic and giving out parking tickets and speeding fines!" he shouted back, blowing the top of the head off a zombie dressed in the shredded remains of a Judge-Warden uniform.

"Reloading!" he called over to her again, as his Lawgiver gave a warning beep to signal that its magazine was now empty.

"Covering you," confirmed Ashman, picking off a zombie from her side of the firing line and then rapidly switching her aim over to those on Farrer's front, shredding three of them with a single Hi-Ex shot. A few moments and six more destroyed zombies later, her own Lawgiver gave the same warning alert.

"Reloading!" she shouted, reaching down to her belt pouch for a fresh magazine. "Covered!" confirmed Farrer, bringing his aim round to return the favour. This time, however, the arrangement didn't quite go according to plan.

A zombie stumbled forward towards Ashman, taking advantage of the lull in fire from her position. Farrer saw it and nailed it with one shot, but his aim was slightly awry and he only blew off the lower half of its face. His second, hastily fired shot only winged it in the shoulder, while his next two shots, fired in growing panic, both missed it completely.

The dead thing came on at Ashman, growling hungrily, a mess of blood and juices dripping from the ruined remains of its face. She dropped her Lawgiver with a curse, snatched her daystick from the loop where it hung from her belt and swung it with every bit of strength she could muster. There was a sickening crunch as the blow struck the zombie and it fell lifeless to the ground, its brains dribbling out of its smashed-in skull. Ashman ducked down, trying to scoop her Lawgiver up from the ground, but the flailing hands of several more zombies reached out, trying to grab hers, and she snatched them back quickly, shocked by how close these others had got now. She retreated back, abandoning the precious weapon to the advancing things.

Things were bad, but a glance over at Farrer's position told her they were about to get a lot worse.

In trying to cover her, Farrer had been forced to take his fire off the zombies advancing on him, and now they were upon him. He must have switched to Incendiaries as they closed in on him, because several of them were ablaze, something that didn't seem to trouble the mindless things too much as they clustered in on him, hungrily falling upon him.

"Farrer!" she shouted in anguish, hearing his screams as the zombies started to tear into him with their teeth. The flames covering the bodies of those struck by Farrer's Incendiary shots quickly spread to the others packed in close around them, and soon the whole pile of them would be ablaze. Not that this would be enough to deter them from eating Farrer alive as they all burned away to nothing together.

Farrer's Lawgiver lay teasingly nearby, knocked aside by a hungry zombie but, like any other Lawgiver, it was coded solely to its owner's palm-print, and Ashman knew it would be as dangerous to her as it would be to any other perp who foolishly tried to pick it up and fire it.

The zombies were closing in on her too. She turned and ran back towards her Lawmaster, popping a stumm gas grenade as she did so and throwing it behind her back into the midst of the pursuing zombies. Designed to incapacitate and render unconscious rioting citizens, the non-lethal gas would do nothing to walking, reanimated corpses which no longer even had the need to breathe, but Ashman hoped that the thick cloud of white gas that spewed out of the grenade would at least succeed in blinding or confusing them for a few vital moments.

Her bike! She had to get to her bike. Its twin-linked cannons would make short work of these things, and there was the scatter gun in the bike's saddle holster for more close-up action too.

She made it onto the bike, was starting up its engine with one hand and pulling the scatter gun from its holster with the other, when the lead zombie grabbed her. She smashed an armoured elbow pad into its decaying face, knocking it away, but plenty more were already closing in. They grabbed for her, their fingers clawing at her body and the pieces of her uniform, the creatures mindlessly unable to distinguish one from the other as they tried to pull her apart. She was dragged off the bike, giving an involuntary wail of despair as she felt herself being pulled down, felt the first teeth bites starting to worry at her flesh. The scatter gun was still in her hand but it was useless, the arm holding it pinned to the ground by the weight of a zombie body.

She looked and saw the barrel of the gun pointing towards the underside of her bike's fuel tank. A Lawmaster's fuel tank was heavily armoured, but at this extreme close range, and firing into one of its more vulnerable and lesser armoured sections...

She felt something nuzzling roughly at her throat, and then felt the sharp pain of something biting excitedly into the flesh of her neck. After that, what came next was easy. A defiant curse on her lips, she pulled the trigger of her scatter gun.

The explosion immolated everything in a five-metre radius around the bike, killing Ashman and more than twenty zombies. The other remaining creatures took little interest in the charred and scattered remains of what only moments ago had been living prey.

Confused by the explosion and the sudden, disappointing lack of living flesh to consume, the zombie mob began to break up, individuals or groups of the creatures shambling off to begin their own search for more tasty prey. They would spread out into the sector around the prison with alarming speed, and the retrovirus-infected and partially consumed corpses of their victims would rise a few hours after death to join them. For days afterwards, the citizens of Sector 57 would hide behind their doors as the Judges and eager citizen squads of volunteer zombie-killers hunted the creatures down and destroyed them. After that, disappointed by the lack of further targets, some of the more over-enthusiastic volunteer groups of zombie-hunters would ignore the Justice Department's order to disband, preferring to instead turn their guns on any unfortunate citizen who in their opinion looked too suspiciously zombie-like. The last of these renegade zombie-hunter groups would be rounded up by the Judges after the notorious Oliver Street Soup Kitchen Massacre, when the vigilantes would learn that the line "Well, they kinda looked like zombies to us" was not a legitimate excuse for the murders of thirty-seven homeless street bums.

All this, however, was still to come. Right now, the only thing that mattered was the zombies and their growing hunger.

In life, Mikey "Swifthands" Liebling had been an expert pickpocket and thief. Known as a "dunk" in Mega-City criminal underworld slang, his favourite hunting grounds had been the city's many large and busy shopperamas and mega-malls. Cube-time was an occupational hazard of his chosen profession, and he had been about halfway through a five-year sentence when the attack on Nixon Penitentiary had happened and to his eternal surprise a vampire had torn through the door of his iso-cube and ripped his throat out. Now, in death, only the vaguest and most fragmentary memories of the circumstances of his life remained in the mind of the zombie-thing which he had now become.

The thing that had been Mikey Liebling dimly remembered a place near the prison, a place where it had gone before, a place where it had found in plentiful abundance the things he had gone there looking for. As Mikey "Swifthands" Liebling, what it had been looking for back then were crowds of people and plenty of inattentive shoppers who wouldn't even notice that their wallets or cred-cards were gone until minutes after Mikey had struck. The needs of the thing that used to be Mikey Liebling were far different, but something told it that it would still find what it was looking for now in that selfsame place.

Slowly, acting on the most dimly held trail of memory, he stumbled off on his own, not even noticing as first one and then another zombie mindlessly followed him. Many others wandered off in other directions, following their own random and unknowable impulses, but, by chance or instinct, the greater part of the horde shambled off after Mikey as he mindlessly led them to their night's feast.

Dredd exited the prison a few minutes later, taking in the situation at a glance. The pattern and number of zombie corpses and the remains of the two dead Judges told him the story of almost everything that had happened out here. Grimly, he bent down over the remains of one of the Judges, picking up the heat-fused badge lying there. The name on it was still barely legible: Ashman.

He had never known Judge Ashman, but she and her partner had both died bravely, fighting by themselves against overwhelming odds. Too many Judges had died already today as a result of the events at Nixon Pen. As a senior Judge, Dredd would see to it that these two, at least, would receive posthumous commendations for their courageous actions here.

Going over to the Lawmaster that still remained intact, Dredd used his autokey to open its stowage pod, rummaging through it in search of the spare Lawgiver magazines that every Judge carried with their bike supplies. The battle in the iso-block had left him seriously short of ammunition, and he needed every spare mag he could find. It had been a busy night, and Dredd didn't have to be a Psi-Judge to realise there was probably a lot more to happen yet.

He clambered onto the Lawmaster, activating his helmet radio as he did so.

"Giant - Dredd. What's the situation?"

"Not good, but getting better, Dredd. We've retaken the top thirty levels, and we've probably already seen the worst of the opposition we're going to encounter. Besides, given a choice between us and those vampire creeps, most of the perps in here would prefer us any day. They know we're the only thing that's going to protect them from the vamps and they're surrendering to us whole levels at a time."

"Back-up?"

"On its way, thank Grud. They'll be here any minute to secure the lower levels and prevent any more of these creeps getting out."

"You'll have to manage with a couple of units less when they get here," Dredd told Giant. "I need them to deal with these zombie things."

"Understood, Dredd. Any idea where they went?"

"Working on it now. Dredd out."

Dredd rode off at a slow pace along the prison's approach road. He flicked on the bike's front-mounted powerful UV beamer, flooding the area in front of the bike with ultraviolet light. Since they were dead, the zombies would generate nothing in the way of body heat as their bodies eventually cooled to room temperature , but it had been less than an hour since most of them had died, and there were hundreds of them grouped together en masse, so Dredd figured they had to have left some kind of heat trace behind him.

He was right. The UV beam revealed the faint but discernable marks of hundreds of pairs of feet on the ground in front of him. They were heading in a disorganised pattern away from the prison and towards the more populated areas of the city, but at a point a hundred or so metres on, there was an abrupt break in the pattern. Some continued on towards the pinnacles of the city blocks in the distance, but the greater part of the zombie tracks broke away from the main skedway, taking a side-road instead. Dredd followed those ones, accelerating off in pursuit. Even before he saw the bright, gaudily coloured sign pointing the way ahead to the large and equally gaudily coloured building in the near distance, he already knew where the zombies were heading.

"Control - Dredd. Be advised: large group of zombies, estimated several hundred strong, on their way to the Winnie Ryder Mega-Mall. Am in pursuit."

TEN

Judge Anderson turned her stolen bike onto the dark, warehouse-lined street, recognising it immediately as being the same as the one she had seen in the mind of the vampire. The psychic summoning call which she had been following up to this point was overpoweringly strong this close to its source, and it was with a real mental effort that she finally managed to wrench her mind separate from it. She didn't need any psi-powers now, just plain old Judge's instincts, and her first act was to switch on her bike radio to report in.

As soon as she did, the urgent-sounding voice of Control came flooding through to her. "...repeat, Control to Anderson, call in your location and situation immediately. This is a direct order from the Chief Judge. You must respond immediately, Anderson!"

Oh Grud, she thought to herself. Well, I knew I was going to get into trouble when I started out on this thing.

"Control - Anderson," she started, cutting off Control's immediate angry response. "Have located the Church of Death HQ. They're on Jack Kevorkian Street, down in the old Black Atlantic dockside district. Get everything you've got rolling and on its way here fast. My hunch is the Dark Judges are going to be putting in a surprise guest appearance down here any minute now."

"Understood, Anderson. Maintain position and wait until back-up units are-"

"Jovus, didn't you here me, Control? I'm talking about the Dark Judges! They're going to be here any moment. This is the place where they'll get new bodies again, and if that happens then Grud help us all. No time to wait for back-up - I'm going in now!"

She broke off radio contact again, cutting off Control's expected objections in mid-sentence.

Roaring along the street, she saw two figures on the road ahead of her. They were both wearing robes marking themselves as members of the Church of Death, and both were armed. Guards, posted to keep a lookout on the street outside.

"Well, so much for trying to sneak in the quiet way, Cass," she told herself as she saw them pointing in alarm towards her and unslinging their spit guns.

She didn't have her Lawgiver, and the scatter gun was too unreliable firing at this range from a moving Lawmaster.

"Bike cannons it is then," she decided, hitting the weapons' firing switch.

Thirty millimetre armour-piercing cannon shells chewed up the road surface, cutting a line directly towards one of the guards. The line reached him and suddenly he wasn't there any more, disappearing in a spray of blood and bullet-shredded clothing.

The other guard was running for her, opening fire with his gun. Anderson crouched low on her bike, as bullets whistled over her head. She'd been shot already today, and had no intention of having it happen to her again. Still, there was another problem to deal with. The street ended in a dead-end, which Anderson was now rapidly approaching on a speeding Lawmaster.

Time to kill two birds with one stone, she thought, wrenching the handlebars, hitting the brakes and throwing the big bike into a controlled braking skid. The Lawmaster hurtled sideways in a wide skid manoeuvre, slamming at speed into the gunman. He flew through the air, slamming into the wall at the end of the street some twenty metres away. By the time what was left of him had messily slid down the surface of the wall to land on the ground, Anderson had already dismounted from the now stationary bike and was sprinting towards the warehouse building that housed the cult's headquarters.

Another cultist emerged from the doorway, raising his gun to fire at her. Anderson didn't even bother with the scatter gun in her hands, and let fly at the creep with a powerful psi-blast right into the centre of his cerebral cortex. The gunman hit the ground as if he'd been pole-axed, lying there drooling, with a glazed and stunned expression on his face. In direct breach of Psi-Div regulations, Anderson hadn't even tried to regulate the strength of the blast she'd hit him with, and the after-effects of the attack would be unpredictable. The creep could wake up in a couple of hours with a raging migraine, he could wake up in a couple of days with the mental age of a small child or he could lapse into a persistent vegetative state and never wake up again at all. With so much at stake, with the Dark Judges on the loose again, Anderson frankly didn't care which way it went for the Death-worshipping freak.

Scatter gun at the ready, Anderson charged into the lair of the Church of Death. And her psi-senses screamed at her in warning, telling her the Dark Judges had already arrived ahead of her.

DeMarco was still waiting for the right moment to make her move. A sick feeling of growing dread inside her kept on telling her that she'd probably already missed her chance.

Maybe she should have done the good cit thing after all, and just called the Judges much earlier on, before she'd slugged that guard and dragged his unconscious body into a nearby alleyway, stripping and cuffing him before putting on his Death cultist robes and just walking into the place wearing them, mingling unnoticed among the other Death worshipper freaks.

Or maybe she should have done something when the ceremony started and they'd brought out Joanna Caskey.

The ceremony was taking place in the central warehouse area. The windows of the large room had all been blacked out and the walls covered with black and red drapes, embellished in gold and silver with what DeMarco assumed were supposed to be arcane, magical symbols. The only real source of illumination in the place came from the numerous tall, black candles around the room, and most of these were clustered in what was obviously supposed to be an altar area on the elevated stage at the front of the room. So far, so run-of-the-mill hokey occult mumbo-jumbo, DeMarco decided; half the sectors in the city probably had hidden set-ups like this, bored cits looking for some kinky, illicit thrills by dressing up in these mad monk outfits and mumbling some cod-Latin gibberish before stripping off and getting down to the real point of the exercise.

However, it was when they dragged the girl out that things started to turn deadly serious.

They had drugged her with something, that much was plain to see, and she had lain down all too placidly on something that was clearly and gruesomely supposed to be a sacrificial altar. There were four other similar slabs there too, two of them on each side for the sacrificial altar, and with a stone column with more occult markings upon it standing at the head of the altar. There were four other shroud-covered figures lying upon the slabs beside the altar. From where she was standing amongst the Death worshippers at the rear of the congregation, DeMarco couldn't make out anything of the bodies under those shrouds, although she couldn't help but notice the reverence with which any cult members up there on the altar platform treated the four figures lying there whenever they came near them.

If DeMarco was having any thoughts about slipping quietly away and alerting the Justice Department to what was going on now, these were swiftly ended when the doors to the place were sealed and two long lines of cloaked and hooded figures were marshalled into place on either side of the main congregation. DeMarco didn't much care for the sound of snarling and growling coming from beneath those hoods, and she liked it even less when the hoods came off and she saw the shockingly feral faces of the fanged, white-skinned things beneath them.

The vampires - DeMarco couldn't really think of any other term to describe them - hemmed the congregation in, leading them in the droning chant begun by the priest figure on the altar platform. The priest stood over the altar, a gleaming black, horned skull in one hand - the remains of some kind of Cursed Earth mutie specimen, DeMarco imagined - and a curved-bladed dagger in the other. DeMarco didn't like the look of that at all, and realised that she was going to have to do something about this.

She had been edging slowly forward for a while now, taking advantage of the darkness and the semi-trance state into which many of the congregation members seemed to have entered to slip forward surreptitiously, row by row, creeping towards the front. There were over a hundred of them and only one of her, and all she had was her pistol held inside her robes and her training as a Judge, but she had a job to do, and she wasn't going to stand by and watch these sick freaks kill an innocent girl.

Up until now, DeMarco still wasn't completely worried. If worse comes to worst, she told herself, she was going to use her first shot to save the girl from whatever they had planned for her, and then use the rest of the clip to kill as many of these creeps as she could. It was only when the four spirit-shapes started materialising in a greasy cloud of dripping, dark-coloured vapour in the air above the altar platform that she finally realised just how far out of her depth she was here.

"Yes!" the four voices hissed in unison. "Complete the ceremony. Give us flesh once more!"

The air was charged with psychic power. The congregation's chanting was nearing its frenzied climax. The vampire things prowling round the sides of the room were filled with a terrifying anticipation and excitement. Unable to control itself any longer, one of them leapt upon a member of the congregation, hungrily tearing out his throat. Several more of the creatures rushed to join the feast, and their eager snarling and the scent of freshly spilled blood only added to the highly charged atmosphere inside the place.

The priest stepped forward, raising his dagger. DeMarco slipped her pistol out from her robes, mentally drawing a bead on him as she raised the weapon to fire. Two in the chest, one in the head, she decided, and then everything else for the creeps around her. The dagger in the priest's hand began to descend. DeMarco's finger began to tighten on the trigger.

There was a loud gunshot explosion from behind her - a scatter gun shot, DeMarco's Judge training instantly told her - and the doors there crashed open. Two more scatter gun blasts sent the cultist guards there flying through the air.

"Justice Department! Party's over, freaks!" shouted a commanding female voice.

"Andersssson!" the four things hovering in the air above the altar hissed as one, their voices full of hatred. And something else too, DeMarco detected. There was fear there too.

"Kill her!" they ordered their followers. "Finish the ceremony. Give us flesh!"

The priest raised the dagger once more, getting ready to strike. DeMarco beat him to it, putting two slugs into his chest, as promised. The one intended for his head instead found its way into the big creep in front of her, who had turned and tried to grab her as she began firing.

There were more scatter gun blasts from behind her, together with the screams and howls of dying cultists and vampires. Whatever Anderson was doing back there, she was going about it the right way. DeMarco pushed forward through the throng of panicked cultists, trying to get to the figures on the altar platform. She pistol-whipped one cultist who tried to block her way and delivered a swift kick into the crotch of the next creep who came running at her with the same idea. The rest of the time she simply cleared a path through with her pistol, firing blindly into the bodies of any robed figures that stood before her.

Somewhere in the distance, above the sounds of the melee, she thought she could hear the sounds of Judge sirens. Lots of Judge sirens, in fact. Help was on its way and closing fast. DeMarco just hoped she could stay alive long enough for it to matter.

Incredibly, the priest creep was on his feet again, still holding the knife and staggering determinedly towards the girl on the altar. Ignoring for a few vital seconds everything else going on around her, DeMarco took careful aim again and put two more slugs into his back. Her gun clicked on empty the third time she pulled the trigger.

The creep was still staggering forward, but he had lost the knife now.

"Yes, serve us," the spirit-shapes commanded him. "Be our sacrifice. With your own life's blood, make us flesh again."

The priest pitched forward with the last of his strength, throwing himself forward against the stone column. As he touched it, smearing the blood from the bullet wounds in his chest across its surface, the spirits of the four Dark Judges gave a hellish shriek of triumph. The stone suddenly seemed to suck the life out of the figure clinging to it. Sorcerous energy crackled forth from it, touching first the disembodied spirits of the Dark Judges and then down into the four forms beneath the shroud covers. The spirits of Death and the others flowed with the energy stream, allowing them to take possession of the corpses their devoted followers had so carefully prepared in advance for them.

It all happened with surprising speed. One moment, Death and his super-creep pals were floating about in the air in spirit-form, and the next the four corpses on the slabs were rising up with preternatural speed and an awful, unnatural stillness. The shrouds of Death and Fear fell to the ground at their feet. The one covering Fire fell away in burning fragments. That covering Mortis simply rotted away into stinking, mildewed pieces in seconds.

There they stood, reborn again: Death, Fear, Fire and Mortis. The four Dark Judges, who had expunged all life on their own world and had come to this one to do the same here.

One of the Death cultists clambered eagerly up onto the platform, throwing himself down to kneel, hands clasped in supplication, at the feet of Death. "Master!" he begged. "Grant me eternal existence. Let me join you there in the glorious realm beyond life and death!"

"With pleasure, sinner," cackled Death, sinking his hands seamlessly through the shell of the man's skull and squeezing its contents with his clawed fingers. The cultist fell dead at the monster's feet, the frozen expression of pain and horror on his face suggesting that the experience had been somewhat different from what he had hoped.

"Don't be shy, sinners. Who's next?" Death asked with an inviting leer, looking round, his cold, inhuman gaze finally settling on DeMarco. She wanted to reach for the spare ammo clip she had on her, load it into her pistol and empty it into the thing in front of her, but found she couldn't.

She couldn't do anything, in fact: move, scream, call for help or turn her gaze away. All she could do was stare back into that ghoulish caricature of the face of a Judge, as Death loomed up towards her.

"NO!"

It was Anderson's voice, and there was real power in it, enough to break whatever psychic spell Death could cast over his would-be victims. With a shock, DeMarco realised that it hadn't been Death that had been moving, it had been herself, shuffling unwillingly and unconsciously towards him to receive his twisted sentence of judgement.

Death looked up, all interest in DeMarco forgotten as he saw his old nemesis come running towards him. There were other Judges arriving on the scene too, crowding in through the door behind her, and DeMarco could hear the distinct heavy engine thrumming of at least one large h-wagon circling above the building. But the Dark Judges had sightless eyes for only one person here.

"Anderssson," hissed Death. At his gestured command, one of the vampires hurled itself at her. She blew its head off in mid-air with a scatter gun blast and kept on moving.

"Anderssson," gloated Fear, throwing one of his vicious mantrap weapons into her path. Another scatter gun blast sent it flying out of harm's way, and still she kept on moving.

"Anderssson," blazed Fire in hatred and raised his burning trident weapon, sending out a blast of supernatural flame. Anderson twisted out of the way and the blast struck behind her, consuming several panicked Death cultists and reducing them to charred scarecrows in seconds.

Anderson strode forward, firing the scatter gun, and the weapon's high velocity shot load tore into the Dark Judges' bodies. Their Church of Death servants had done their work well, and each of the creatures was dressed in an exact replica of their familiar uniform, which themselves were grotesque, twisted parodies of the uniforms worn by Mega-City One Judges. DeMarco watched as Death slid one long, bony hand down to his version of a Judge's utility belt, reaching for the object attached there, reaching for what looked like a-

"Teleporter!" shouted Anderson in angry warning to the other Judges following in behind her. "For Grud's sake, shoot them. Stop them before they can teleport away!"

She opened fire again with the scatter gun, the roaring sound of the weapon joined seconds later by the crash of massed Lawgiver fire. A hail of Lawgiver fire, including Hi-Ex and Incendiary shells, struck out at the Dark Judges, but it was already too late. A dancing nimbus of energy surrounded the four figures on the altar platform, and the volley of gunfire passed harmlessly through their dematerialising forms as the activated devices teleported them away out of the Judges' reach.

"There is much work to be done, but we will meet again soon, Anderson," hissed Death as he shimmered into nothingness, his gloating gaze fixed on Anderson. A moment later, he was gone, his final words left echoing psychically in the minds of those left behind. "This time, we will not be stopped so easily..."

Not wasting any more time, DeMarco scrambled forward up onto the altar platform, standing on the spot where the Dark Judges had been only moments ago. She heard the ominous clatter of a scatter gun being cocked directly behind her.

"Don't shoot! Family man!" she shouted, realising that in these robes she looked like any other Death cultist, and giving the traditional code phrase used by undercover Judges to identify themselves to other members of the Justice Department.

"Turn round. Slowly."

DeMarco did as ordered, seeing Anderson there, a hostile, suspicious look in her eyes, the scatter gun levelled straight at DeMarco's body. The look in the Psi-Judge's eyes intensified for a moment, and DeMarco felt cold psychic fingers picking through her mind, searching for the truth about her identity.

The fingers withdrew, the odd look left Anderson's eyes and the gun barrel was lowered.

"You're DeMarco?" asked Anderson, surprise evident in her voice. "The one that used to be Sector Chief in 303? The one that..."

Anderson's voice drifted off, but DeMarco knew what she had been about to say.

The one that's supposed to have tried to get Dredd into the sack with her? Yeah, that's me, ma'am. Guilty as charged.

"I guess that means I can lower my hands now without worrying that you're going to shoot me?" DeMarco said, continuing what she had been doing and going over to the prone figure of the girl on the altar slab.

"What are you doing here?" asked Anderson.

DeMarco laid a finger on the girl's neck, feeling for a pulse - and finding one. It was weak, but it was still there, thank Grud.

"Closing a case and saving a girl's life," she replied. "I guess you've got some important calls to make. Make sure one of them is for this girl. Grud knows what kind of drugs these freaks pumped into her. We need to get her into a med-unit fast."

Anderson nodded in understanding, and reached for her belt pouch radio.

"Control - Anderson. Things didn't go so well down here at Jack Kevorkian. Thanks to these cult creeps, the Dark Judges now have bodies and teleporters. They've escaped and are still on the loose. Wherever Dredd is, and whatever he's doing, tell him to drop it now. I need him to help track them down again before they start trying to wipe out the entire city."

ELEVEN

Fergus Munclie liked being a living mannequin. Sure, it wasn't the greatest job in the world, but it was still a job - and that was a damn site more than most people in this city could ever say. He was the only guy on Level 271 of Jack Yeovil Block who even had a job, and the only other person in his extended family who had one was that dumb jerk of a brother-in-law of his, who had somehow managed to land a gig down at Resyk as a Part-Time Assistant Trainee Blockage Cleaner. Fergus had been down there once to see him, and hadn't been too impressed by what he saw. His brother-in-law worked in the sub-basement maintenance area directly below the main fat-rendering vats. The acidic fumes down there were pretty nasty, especially when the Resyk conveyor belts were running at full capacity, which was pretty much most of the time, and as far as Fergus could figure out, his brother-in-law's job mostly involved crawling about inside pipes and run-off troughs with the partially dissolved remains of recycled human organic matter dripping down on top of him.

No, Fergus was much happier where he was. Sure, he had to cross two sectors to get there, taking three zoom train interchanges and a hover-bus journey to do it, but any job was better than no job, he figured.

He had been employed as a living mannequin at the Ryder Mega-Mall for the past three years. Some people couldn't handle the job, having to stand still for eight hours a day, minus lunch-breaks, but Fergus adored it. It got him out and about amongst people, and he enjoyed being the centre of attention, as passing shoppers stopped to check out what he was wearing, and gangs of juves pulled faces and made gestures at him through the glass, trying to make him move or react. He was good at it too, able to come up with some truly novel and dynamic poses and hold them for hours at a time, able to look good in whatever they required him to model each day, and skilled at really selling the product, tailoring the intensity and excitement of his pose to whatever it was he was supposed to be modelling.

The mall management moved him around a lot, but most of the time he spent his work days in the window displays of shops like Kneepad-U-Like, Mosgrove & Thung and Ugly Kid Joe's; solid, respectable, middle-of-the-marketplace chains found in every mall and shopperama all over the city.

Of course, what he really dreamed of was a move up to the top tier: the prestige gigs working in the window displays of high-class retail outfits like Sump Couture, Khaki-a-Go-Go and Military Junta. All the mall's mannequins took home the same pay cheque amount at the end of the week, but the mannequins in those particular stores were still rated a cut above the rest. They got to put on the most daring, imaginative and outrageous poses - poses that the traditionalist management of family orientated stores like Mosgrove & Thung would never approve of - and in the staff canteen they always sat at a table of their own, never mixing with the other mannequins. All the other mannequins hated them, of course; all the others wanted to be where they were.

Fergus was pretty sure he was getting close to that dream now. His posing work a few weeks ago in the "Give Me Victory, or Give Me Death" window display of Harv's Sports Gear & Armoury had been the talk of every mannequin in the place. Better still, while he had been standing there in the display, dressed in a Juggernaut strip and holding a copy of the Inter-Meg Smashball trophy aloft in one hand and the blood-dripping, severed head of one of his shop dummy opponents in the other, he had seen none other than the assistant display arranger from Sump Couture sidle past the outside of the shop, clearly sent to check out his work on the sly.

Yeah, Fergus was pretty sure that he was on his way up, and that soon enough it would be him there in the window display of those places, modelling all the latest in high-Meg fashions.

Assuming, that was, that he didn't get eaten by rampaging hordes of zombies in the meantime.

They were everywhere in the mall. Where they came from, Fergus had no idea. What they wanted, though, was clear enough. Trapped there in the Cursed Earth safari-wear display outside Ronnie Radback's, he had watched as at least half a dozen people were eaten alive right there in front of him. He was wearing the latest in anti-rad fashion and had a machete in one hand, swinging it in frozen motion at the head of the giant fibreglass ant coming out of the ground in front of him, but the weapon was useless, as fake as the cardboard rad-counter in his other hand, so all he had to depend on to keep himself alive were his wits and his Grud-given abilities as a living mannequin.

On the plus side, he knew he could remain in this pose for hours yet. The zombies were everywhere, milling all around him, one or two of them even brushing against him, but as far as he could tell, they were simply too dumb to realise that he was flesh and blood, and not the inanimate object he appeared to be.

On the minus side, his display partner today was the new kid, the girl who had just started last week. Fergus hadn't been happy with being paired with her. Her stance ability was all wrong, she had no idea about dynamic posing, her muscle control was sadly lacking - and now, to top it all, she was probably going to get him killed and eaten.

She was playing his wife in this display, cringing in fear before the giant ant model while showing a very customer-pleasing amount of leg and cleavage, as Fergus, the intrepid Cursed Earth explorer, strode forward to defend her. She didn't have to fake that frozen look of terror on her face anymore, but she was visibly trembling in barely contained panic, and her skin glistened with a clammy fear-sweat. She couldn't take much more of this, and when she screamed, tried to run or even just moved, the zombies were going to realise she and him were there amongst them.

They could hear screams from all around, echoing through the cavernous space of the multi-level mall, along with all the snarls and moans of the zombies as they fell upon the terrified shoppers within the place or fought amongst each other for some of the choicest scraps of meat. There were security droids hovering around the place, spraying the zombies with knock-out gas or zapping them with stunner shots, although as far as Fergus could see these attacks were as much use against the things as the stern cease-and-desist warnings issued by the droid units. The droids were designed to take legal, non-lethal action against shoplifters, pickpockets, juve troublemakers, loiterers, buskers and mimes, but apparently their programming didn't cover eventualities like zombies invading the place to eat the shoppers.

Incongruously, in amongst all the carnage, the mall's auto-ads kept on running, broadcasting out their hard-sell messages to terrified shoppers and the roaming packs of zombies that were hunting those same shoppers.

"Important new Mega-Mall research by top scientists has proved that buying things may actually boost your immune system, clear your complexion, improve your eyesight and sex drive, and even significantly reduce cholesterol, so get those creds out, shoppers, and spend, spend, spend! Your continued health and well-being may depend on it!" boomed a tannoy announcement, as a gang of juves in the ground level vid-arcade pulled out their illegal las-blades, preparing to go down fighting against the zombies now crowding into the place.

"Grot Pot! When a snack's this cheap, delicious and easy to prepare, who gives a drokk about nutritional value?" suggested the Grot Pot dispenser machine at the entrance to the level one drop-tubes, unaware that most of its customers were being attacked and eaten by ravenous zombies.

"Take two bottles into the shower?" squealed a holo-ad projection of a near-naked female model in the main foyer, looking down blindly on a pack of zombies tearing apart a screaming family of Fatties. "Not me! With Otto Sump's new Sham-Poo, I just stink and go!"

"Tired? Stressed? Bored of a lifetime of endless unemployment and poor-quality leisure time?" asked a wandering hov-unit, trying to sell its ads to the corpses strewn along the main concourse. "Why not take a vacation in our new Cursed Earth holiday work-camps? We promise back-breaking hard labour, brutal overseers and the best protection from the surrounding hostile mutie tribes that money can buy!"

"Brit-Cit! Where outdated tradition, and useless pomp and ceremony still reign triumphant! And all of it just a quick trip away through the Black Atlantic tunnel!" boasted another hov-unit in a typically snooty Brit-cit accent, as it followed its rival in the holiday ad business along the same concourse.

The hov-units weren't going to be doing much business amongst the shoppers tonight, but they seemed to have attracted the attention of the zombies, and a group of the things were shambling along the concourse behind them, drawn in by the sound and movement generated by the devices. Which meant, Fergus knew from long days watching them go round and round, that they were coming straight towards him and the girl.

The girl gave a whimper of fear and shifted slightly.

"Don't move! Just let them pass us by!" Fergus hissed urgently through gritted teeth, knowing it was probably not going to do any good. She was too far gone, and probably going to start panicking any second.

The hov-units were past them now, still blaring out their ad messages. The zombies were only a few metres behind them. The girl moved again, and gave a stifled scream. The slight sound or movement was enough to catch the attention of at least one of the creatures. It looked round towards the display, studying the two immobile figures there with its dead, blank gaze. It took a step towards them, and then another one-

There was a loud, shocking report of a gunshot. The zombie fell one way, most of the contents of its skull went the other way, propelled out in a gory spray by the bullet that had just passed clean through its head.

More gunshots rang out, felling more of the creatures. Some of the shots lacked the fatal headshot accuracy of the first and instead hit the zombies' bodies, making the creatures dance and stagger under the impact of multiple hits. Fergus heard the pounding of heavy booted feet coming towards them along the concourse. Like any other citizen of Mega-City One, he recognised the sound immediately. Unlike many of those citizens, though, he thought it was the happiest sound he'd heard in his life.

Thank Grud, the Judges had got here at last.

Six of them came pounding along the concourse, gunning down zombies as they went. The bullet-riddled shape of one of the creatures picked itself back up off the ground and threw itself snarling at the lead Judge. Without breaking stride, and while gunning down another undead freak at the same time, the big Judge simply grabbed the zombie as it attacked him and hurled it over the side of the concourse, sending it crashing down onto the roof of the luxury Foord Falcon grav-speedster on the Mega-Mall prize giveaway promotional stand on the ground-floor concourse, three floors below.

The big Judge turned round, and Fergus recognised him from his voice even before he saw the name on the badge on the Judge's chest.

"Spread out," Dredd commanded the other Judges. "Two-man teams. Secure the exits on this level and check for any cits that might be hiding around the place. Remember, if it's moving but it hasn't got a pulse, shoot it in the head."

Dredd paused, glancing round at the two immobile mannequin figures. "And you two can quit playing possum. Danger's over now. Clear the area, citizens. That's an order."

With the mall's entrance and exits secured, and with the bulk of the surviving staff and shoppers who had been in the place when the zombie attacked now safely evacuated, the clean-up op could begin. No zombies could get out of the mall, and the only thing that was going to be coming in through its doors were more and more Judges, so Dredd didn't think there was much more of a problem here, and gladly relinquished command of the situation to a Tac Watch Commander from Sector House 57.

That the situation at the Ryder Mega-Mall was no more or less under control didn't exactly please Dredd. It had been nothing more than an annoying distraction from his main duty, and it wasn't even over yet. Reports were coming in of more zombie attacks in the area around the iso-block as the creatures spread further out into the sector, although it seemed as if the main concentration of the things had been trapped here at the Ryder Mall. Now all that was left to do was a tedious but necessary mopping-up operation throughout the rest of the sector to prevent the zombie contagion spreading any further.

Judges were flooding in from all the adjoining sectors now, adding to the available manpower. By all accounts, there were almost as many Judges as surviving perps inside Nixon Penitentiary now, and Giant reported that the situation there was well under control. The remainder of the vampires and any zombies that had remained in the building were now confined to just three levels in the prison's lower sections, and Justice Department heavy weapons teams armed with flamer units were already on their way to remove their polluting presence for good from the prison.

Two problems down, but what was by far the biggest issue was still unresolved. The Dark Judges were still out there somewhere and every minute they remained free, the danger to every living person in Mega-City One increased accordingly.

"Control - Dredd. Any update on the Dark Judges?"

"Negative, Dredd. We've got Anderson and half of Psi-Div scanning for them, and so far they've come up with zip. No reports of any sightings coming in either, and every slab jock in the Department is out there looking for them. If Death and his pals are out there, they're managing to keep a real low profile."

"Give 'em time, Control. Maybe they're planning something, but they'll turn up sooner or later. When that happens, all we can do is start following the trail of dead cits."

"Wilco, Dredd. Chief Judge says she wants you and Anderson together on this one. We're sending an h-wagon to pick you up."

Dredd considered the situation for a moment. He was no longer needed here, and he and Anderson together had proven themselves in the past to be the best weapon Mega-City had against the Dark Judges, but too many unanswered questions still remained.

Someone had created the retrovirus that had given birth to the vampire and zombie creatures.

Someone, possibly that same someone, had carefully planned the attack on Nixon Pen that had allowed the Dark Judges to escape.

The members of the Church of Death were no different from the fanatical kooks who filled the ranks of at least a dozen other similar illegal crank-cults, but someone had organised and funded those creeps, turned them into a weapon to be used against the Justice Department at the crucial moment of the Dark Judges' escape.

Someone was behind everything that had happened so far, and Dredd and the rest of the Justice Department didn't have a clue yet who that someone could be.

First things first, decided Dredd angrily. First we deal with Death and the others, then we find out who was responsible for this whole mess.

"Understood, Control. Awaiting h-wagon pick-up. Dredd out."

He was at the outside of the mall, supervising as meat wagons and med-wagons arrived to take away the dead and injured, and pat-wagons delivered more Judges to deal with the situation inside the mall. As he watched, a group of injured cits were brought out of the place. Six of them were stretcher cases, and the walking wounded were splattered with gore and nursed blood-soaked bandages showing where they had been clawed or bitten in zombie attacks. A Med-Judge accompanied them, saw Dredd and came running over to him.

"The wounded are starting to stack up now, Dredd. We've got over two hundred injured cits, all the victims of zombie bites. What little we've got to go on with these things all suggests that they were reanimated by a retrovirus passed on to them by bites from the things that attacked Nixon Pen. What do we do if the retrovirus affects living victims the same way?"

"Quarantine?" asked Dredd.

"That's what I'm thinking," nodded the Med-Judge, grimly. "If I've got a couple of hundred injured cits here who are maybe going to turn into vamps or flesh-hungry zombies in an hour or two, then we need to do something to either cure them or contain them."

"Good point," agreed Dredd, activating his helmet radio again.

"It's an interesting question, Dredd," said Helsing, bending over the zombie specimen on the autopsy slab in front of him. Even with most of its cranium missing, destroyed by one of Helsing's own Lawgiver shots, they weren't taking any chances with the thing. It was secured to the table by metal restraints, and there were armed Judges standing by in the room to make sure that the zombie and the rest of its equally dead friends weren't going to pull any more surprise resurrection stunts. Helsing was glad of the guards' presence, and was fairly sure that if they had arrived a few moments later when he had first raised the alarm then he would probably be lying stretched out on one of his own autopsy slabs along with the rest of the dead meat on display here.

"As far as I can tell," he continued, talking via radio link to Dredd while he neatly sliced into the zombie's body with his trusty las-scalpel, "the virus changes structure when it jumps from the vampires and into the bloodstreams and nervous systems of their victims. It degenerates, becoming less effective, so that when the dead tissue is reanimated, virtually all the higher brain functions are lost, and all that remains are the most basic and animalistic urges such as hunger and aggression."

"But is it contagious?" asked Dredd, a clear note of impatience in his tone.

"To anyone non-fatally bitten by these things? I'm not sure, I'm afraid. I'll have to do tests on blood samples for the bite victims, but it's my hope that the more degenerative form of the virus only affects dead tissue. In fact, it was only when I saw it in its degenerated form that I realised where I had seen it before-"

"You've seen this virus before? Where?" The note of impatience in Dredd's voice had suddenly been replaced by one of alert interest.

"In molecular form, it's strikingly similar to the chemical formula recently patented by the EverPet Corporation."

"Pet Regen? The stuff that brings cits' dead pets back to life?" The disbelief in Dredd's voice was clear.

"Basically, yes," answered Helsing calmly. "It's very possibly an early test-form of the final product."

There was a pause on the radio link before Dredd answered: "Good work, Helsing. Keep me informed if you find anything else. Dredd out."

Helsing bent down over the corpse again, wincing from the pain in his arm. He'd had the wound dressed and had allowed a Med-Judge to administer him some minor pain-killer tabs, but nothing that would interfere with his thought processes or cloud his judgement, and he had absolutely refused the Med-Judges' suggestions that he go into med-may for observation.

One of the zombies had got a little too close for comfort, and had taken a bite out of Helsing's left arm before the Judge had managed to jam his las-scalpel deep into its brainpan. Despite the worrying certainty that he, too, now had the retrovirus coursing through his bloodstream, Helsing tried to look on the bright side, telling himself that having a personal stake in this case would give his work an extra added impetus.

After all, now he was in the same boat as the other injured citizens who had been bitten so far, and if the retrovirus was contagious in this fashion then it really rather was in his interest, just as much as theirs, that he find a cure as soon as possible.

Humming quietly to himself, he applied the las-scalpel to another part of the zombie's exposed innards, calmly continuing on with his work.

Someone had deliberately engineered the virus that had created the vampire and zombie creatures. Someone had organised and funded the Church of Death and had mounted a successful operation to free the Dark Judges from their prison - but now Dredd had a good idea just who that someone might be.

"Control - Dredd. Been a change of plan. I still need that h-wagon, but the rendezvous with Anderson will have to wait. If she needs back-up, recommend Judge Giant for the job. Tell my pilot to pick me up and then plot a course at double-speed for the EverPet Corporation's HQ, and give me everything you've got from Central Records on the company."

After so long shut away in the darkness, disembodied and under constant guard, it was good to be free to kill once more. Their servants had done well - the teleporters were a good copy of the devices the Dark Judges had used on their own world - and now those devices had brought them to this fine place where there were so many sinners to be judged, and no interlopers with their guns to interrupt Death and his brethren in their sacred work.

Fire lashed out with his burning trident. More of the crude dwellings burst into flame. Screaming figures stumbled amidst the inferno, burning from head to foot. The others fled from where they had been cowering, flushed out from hiding by the flames, herded by further blasts from Fire's trident straight into the deadly embrace of the other three Dark Judges.

Death pushed a hand into the chest of one sinner, his fingers twisting amongst the arteries of his heart. With his other hand, he thrust into the back of another fleeing figure, withdrawing it again almost as quickly, leaving Death clutching his gory, dripping prize in triumph. The man kept on running for a few steps more, and then collapsed to the ground, an expression of utter and horrified disbelief fixed on his face. Death threw the still-beating heart into the spreading flames and then moved on to judge more of the sinners.

Mortis looked down at the begging, whimpering figure kneeling before him. There was decay in this one already, he could sense. Disease festered within him, his insides eaten away by the bottles of low-grade meths-brew he had been consuming for years. All it would take to bring it out to full bloom in the sinner's body was the merest touch from the Dark Judge.

Mortis's fingers stroked the man's face, leaving deep, pus-filled boils where they brushed the skin. Almost instantly, the man fell writhing to the ground, maggots boiling out of his rotting flesh as it slewed away wholesale from his bones. Mortis hissed in pleasure, and strode on to bestow his gifts to the next sinner in turn. Where he walked across the uneven, broken ground, where his feet made contact with the polluted soil there, maggots and other carrion insects sprang out of the earth in the wake of his passing.

Fear flowed out of the shadows of a heap of crumbling war ruins, seemingly appearing from nowhere to the rabble of sinners who had been fleeing the wall of flame behind them. The barred gate of his helmet visor gaped open, and the first few sinners in line caught a glimpse of what lay behind that visor, and fell lifeless to the ground, their hearts frozen solid like blocks of ice, fireworks exploding amongst the darkness of their dimming vision as their brains were wracked by a series of instantly fatal embolisms.

The others turned and fled, seeking escape amongst the ruins. Fear spread his cloak wide, revealing the living darkness that lay beneath the garment. Shadow-shapes, moving too swiftly to be properly seen, flew out of that darkness and flitted after the escaping sinners. As each shadow-shape found its target a sinner fell to the ground screaming and writhing, their minds filled with images of the things they had previously glimpsed only on the furthest fringes of their worst nightmares. Fear stalked forward to find his prey and finish them off, his mystic senses guided by the screams in the darkness and by the delicious taste of the victims' terror.

Death stood upon a small mound of the corpses of his victims and exalted in being free once more. The place they had found - the place destiny and their teleporters had brought them to - was one of those places where the lost and dispossessed drank to blot out the worst details of those existences. Of all the inhabitants of this city, these were amongst the most wretched and miserable, with little or nothing left to live for, but still they had tried to run when the Dark Judges had appeared amongst them. As all foolish mortals did, they had tried to survive rather than surrender to the inevitable.

What was it about these sinners, Death wondered, that they wanted to compound their crimes by hanging onto the sin of life for as long as they could? With more co-operation, with more understanding of what it was he and his brethren were trying to achieve, their great work would be done all the sooner, and then first this city and then the rest of this world would know peace at last.

The giant towers of the city loomed up around this area of waste ground where the lost ones had made their home on the ruins of one of the city's past wars. So many wars these sinners fought amongst themselves, and still they had not succeeded in wiping themselves out. So disappointing. That was why their great work was so necessary, Death knew. If the sinners did not have the courage to end their own existences, then it was the task of the Dark Judges to do it for them.

The sound of h-wagon engines interrupted Death's contemplation. He saw the running lights and search-beams of the aerial vehicles coming closer across the darkness of the ruins, and realised that time was short.

He called his brothers to him. Some of the sinners still lived, fleeing in terror into the darkness and towards the city lights beyond, but it did not matter. Their escape was only temporary and they, like the rest of this doomed city, would be judged soon enough.

"They have found us," said Fire. "We must leave this place and continue our work elsewhere."

"There are only four of us, and many of them. They will be determined to stop us, just as they have stopped us before," said the dead, cold voice of Mortis.

"We are still weak from our long captivity," noted Fear, his whispering voice like a cold shiver running down the spine. "Perhaps we should return to Deadworld to gather our strength. We have more power there than we have here."

"Or perhaps Deadworld should come to us."

It was Death who spoke. The other three Dark Judges looked at their leader. With all their minds psychically linked, it took only a moment for them to realise the intent of his words. His plan was instantly met with a low chorus of approving hisses.

"I will gather the sacrifices and go to the Under-Place to prepare the way," whispered Fear. This too met with an approving chorus of hisses.

It was Death that spoke next. "They seek four of us together. If we are apart, they will be confused. Their forces will be spread thinly as they attempt to find us. The carnage we other three bring will distract them. They will not realise what it is we plan to do until it is too late to stop us."

Death looked at the other three Dark Judges. "Judge well, brothers. When next we meet, in the Under-Place, this city will finally be ours."

The h-wagon reached the spot less than thirty seconds later. Powerful search-beams played over the place, and Tek-Judges aboard the vehicle scrutinised monitor screens that displayed the entire area on spectrums far beyond the power of the naked eye, but there was nothing to find.

The Dark Judges were gone.

Icarus sat in the darkness of his laboratory, quietly satisfied with the way events were proceeding. The Dark Judges had been freed, and so soon his own elevation to a higher state beyond life or death would begin. Of course, the Church of Death which he had secretly set up and then funded had been virtually wiped out by the night's events, but that didn't really matter, not in the grand scheme of things. Those fanatics had died happy in the knowledge that they had helped set free their precious masters and, more importantly, their role in Icarus's plans was over now anyway. After that, he really didn't care what happened to them. The only thing that mattered was what was going to happen to him tonight.

Rebirth.

Transcendence to a new and greater level of existence. That was why he had freed the Dark Judges, so that they could elevate him to the same status of everlasting life that they had achieved. The Dark Judges existed at a state beyond life and death, and so soon would Icarus.

"You cannot kill that which does not live," he murmured to himself, picking up the large syringe of fluid that lay on the desk before him. It contained the Regen retrovirus in its final, perfected state, and was far removed from the debased stuff which he had tested on the Death cult members to create his vampire creatures, or the even further adulterated muck which he had marketed as the EverPet product in order to fund his work.

No, the contents of that syringe represented his life's work. Everything he had strived for since the scales had been lifted from his eyes during the time of Necropolis was held within the dark, swirling liquid inside the syringe.

He picked it up, pushed the needle into his skin and pressed the injection switch. The liquid flooded into him, mixing with his bloodstream, the retrovirus molecules instantly attaching themselves to his blood cells, beginning the rapid process of reprogramming his DNA in preparation for what was to come.

The final stage would be death itself, the virus spreading to infect every cell in his body, going to work on his necrotized flesh. Icarus had a range of chemical substances that would bring on his own death quickly and painlessly. Many of them were the same Justice Department-approved compounds used in the city's chains of euthanasia clinics. Still, none of them seemed quite appropriate, Icarus felt. For his death, for rebirth and transcendence to the state of eternal undeath, something more dramatic than mixes of toxic chemicals was called for, surely?

As if on cue, the radio intercom on his desk buzzed.

"A Justice Department h-wagon landing outside. There's a Judge getting out of it."

"Just one?" asked Icarus, puzzled.

"Just one, answered the Death cultist in charge of security at the facility. "It looks like it might be Dredd."

Dredd! Icarus's mind thrilled at the news. How appropriate, he thought. Fate was obviously at work here. Dredd was death incarnate. The biggest mass murderer on the planet, the man who had pressed the button on East Meg One and consigned hundreds of millions of people to nuclear oblivion, the man who had given the brutally necessary order that would condemn billions more people to death during Judgement Day.

Yes, how appropriate, Icarus decided. This was destiny, this was fate. This was clearly how things were meant to happen.

"Stop him," Icarus ordered over the radio, knowing that there was no way the defenders he had left would ever be able to stop Dredd, even if he was on his own. "Make sure he doesn't get to the lab."

Yes, Dredd would come here, and Icarus would allow Dredd to kill him and elevate him to his destiny.

And then, after that?

Icarus was distracted for a moment by another barrage of angry fists pounding on the thick vault doors behind him. He smiled, thinking of the creatures contained behind those doors. Vampires, newly created and still filled with the worst after-affects of the virus flowing now through their veins.

So let Dredd come, Icarus smiled. After he had fulfilled his purpose and sent Icarus on the path to his destiny, he would find his supposed victory to be very short-lived indeed.

TWELVE

Dredd exited the h-wagon at a sprint. He'd been on duty now for over twenty hours, which wasn't completely unusual for him, but in that time he'd fought a couple of dozen vampires, battled his way through the middle of a prison riot, missed preventing the escape of the Dark Judges by the skin of his teeth, single-handedly taken on a couple of hundred zombies and commanded the clean-up op at the Ryder Mall which had saved the lives of hundreds of cits.

Even by his standards, it had been an eventful day - and it wasn't over yet.

Now, though, he could feel the exhaustion starting to build up in his body. He'd been a Judge for over forty years, and had pushed himself to the very limits of human endurance just about every day of every one of those years. His body was a machine, crafted from fifteen years of the toughest training on Earth at the Academy of Law, honed to near-perfection from four decades patrolling the streets of the biggest, most dangerous and crime-ridden city on the planet.

But even the best machines start to wear out after a while, Dredd knew. The Justice Department knew it too, and they'd already lined up his replacements, clones from the same precious bloodline as himself. The first of them was already on the streets. How long did Dredd have left, people secretly wondered within the Department? How long could he keep on pushing himself at the same rate that he had sustained for so many years?

For as long as necessary, Dredd told himself. For as long as his city still needed him.

He'd downed some standard-issue pep tabs in the h-wagon to fight off the worst of it, and from long experience he knew they'd keep him alert and on his feet for another six hours or so.

Long enough to stop the Dark Judges and save his city? Grud only knew, but Dredd hoped it would be enough.

Through the speakers in his helmet, Control fed information through to him straight from the files held in the giant MAC computer system at the Grand Hall of Justice.

"Icarus, Dick. Real name: Martins, Vernon. Born 2078, Betty Boothroyd Maternity Med. Graduated Meg U, class of 2101, first class honours in Biochemistry. Employed as biochemist at DaneTech Industries, 2102-2115. Specialist field of research: Longevity and age retardation."

Dredd was at the doors to the lab facility, using his override card to open the doors as the calm voice of the Justice Department's anti-crime super-computer continued to feed him information.

"Left to establish own company, 2015. EverPet Corporation. No criminal record. Admitted for psycho-cube observation, 2112-13, following death of wife and daughter in citywide Necropolis disaster of 2112."

A spell in the kook cubes. That caught Dredd's attention. Not that Martins, or Icarus, or whatever he wanted to call himself, was unique in that respect. Necropolis was like an open wound in the city's psyche; sixty million citizens had died, and tens of millions more had suffered severe mental trauma, filling the city's psycho-blocks to maximum capacity for years afterwards. Some had recovered sooner than others. Clearly, the psycho-cube docs had thought Martins/Icarus was one of them, but now Dredd knew different.

Using MAC's resources, he'd uncovered a lot on the h-wagon ride out here. All the information had been there all along, for anyone who wanted to go digging for it. Dredd knew that, with over four hundred million citizens to watch over, the Justice Department couldn't keep a close eye on all of them, but there were enough anomalies in the records to have maybe raised at least a few questions in someone's mind.

EverPet's financial records were a revelation. The Pet Regen product was a commercial success, but the company was still trading at an enormous loss. Their public accounts records showed huge large amounts of money being ploughed into unspecified "research projects". Using MAC's high-powered analytical abilities, Dredd had quickly found out what that really meant.

Money had been transferred to overseas accounts and then shifted back into the city in the guise of charitable donations to various minor religious organisations, all of which, Dredd suspected, would quickly be revealed as mere fronts for the Church of Death. Other funds had been siphoned off to set up the facility Dredd was about to enter now, even though there was no official record of the place in the list of the company's property holdings.

A secret lab, hidden away from the prying eyes of the Justice Department. A biochemist with a history of mental disorder, connections to the Church of Death and whose research speciality was the reanimation of dead tissue.

Didn't need forty years on the streets to put this one together, Dredd figured.

Icarus, for whatever reasons of his own, had funded the Church of Death, created its vampire shock-troopers, freed the Dark Judges and caused the deaths of a lot of cits and Justice Department personnel. The mood he was in now, Dredd would be happy now to just put a few Standard Execution rounds into the murdering creep at the first provocation, and let some of the big brains down at Justice Central figure out all the hows and whys of whatever it was Icarus was hoping to achieve from all this mayhem.

"Help you, sir? I'm afraid this facility is closed to the general public, but if you want a tour of the main EverPet labs, then our Citizens Relations office will be happy to arrange it. Their office hours are 0900 to 1700, and you can contact them on-"

Dredd silenced the security droid in the foyer with a single Armour Piercing shot, instantly transforming it into just so much expensive junk. Another shot silenced the alarm that had started shrieking as soon as his first gunshot rang out. His override card took care of the second and more serious set of security doors, and then he was through and into the lab complex proper.

The h-wagon Dredd had rode in on was a command model, with a fully equipped mobile armoury of Justice Department standard-issue weaponry. Dredd hadn't been shy about helping himself to whatever he thought he was going to need. When he exited the h-wagon, he had been carrying enough weaponry to fight a small block war all on his own.

Beyond the doors, a group of Death cultists were waiting for him. High on hate and eager for death, they charged down the corridor towards him, firing off indiscriminate volleys of bullets at him. Dredd raised his Lawgiver and introduced them to the gun's rapid fire setting, giving them an object lesson in what tight, accurate bursts of fire were all about.

Four of them hit the ground in as many seconds, Resyk-bound. Dredd popped a stumm grenade and let the rest of the survivors share its contents out amongst themselves. Respirator down, Dredd strode on through the midst of them. Choking and retching, completely incapacitated by the effects of the gas, Dredd knew none of these creeps were going anywhere in a hurry. One of them still managed to rise staggering to his feet. Dredd slammed him hard in the face with the butt of his Lawgiver. The creep ate floor, fast and sudden. Next stop for him would be a med-unit to fix his broken nose, busted teeth and severe concussion, before the Judge-Wardens threw his deranged butt into an iso-cube for the next twenty years or so.

Dredd strode on. A chorus of snarls and growls warned him what was waiting for him round the next corner. Dredd figured that Icarus's retrovirus didn't do much for IQ and common sense when it came lying patiently in ambush. He also figured that, since they had been voluntarily infected with the virus, Icarus's vampire-things were, to all intents and purposes, legally dead. That being the case, they weren't entitled to the same legal rights as any ordinary, decent citizen that still had a pulse, and hence Dredd's next actions weren't governed by the regulations that normally applied in matters relating to the correct use of the proper and legal amount of force to be applied in carrying out his judicial duties.

And besides, he reminded himself... both the retrovirus and the Dark Judges were clear and present dangers to the lives of everyone in Mega-City One, meaning that any extra-judicial force he chose to employ was officially permitted under the terms of the Security of the City Act. Short version: no arrest, no warning shot, no shooting to wound. These creeps were going straight to Resyk.

Dredd reached for the first of the surprises he'd taken from the h-wagon armoury, popping the safety caps and timer fuses on them and throwing them almost casually round the corner. The explosions came just a second later, but Dredd had already moved into the cover of the near wall to avoid the dual waves of flame and shrapnel that came roaring round the corner.

A vampire, completely bathed head to foot in fire, came staggering round the corner. The phosphor chemicals from one of Dredd's grenades had already burned away its eyes and face, but somehow it could still sense his presence. It turned and came charging towards him, screaming in rage and pain. A moment later, anything that was left of it was decorating the walls, floor and roof of the corridor, liberally distributed there by the Hi-Ex shot Dredd had calmly snapped off.

Round the corner waited more evidence of the aftermath of the phosphor and fragmentation grenades that Dredd had just used. The shredded and burning remains of several more - Dredd estimated at least four - vampires littered the place. One of them, its lower body torn away by shrapnel, its remaining upper half charred and burning, still managed to summon up the strength to start crawling towards him, making a hideous mewling sound as it scrabbled at his Judge boots with its burning claws. Dredd put two Standard Execution rounds through the top of its head and carried on.

It was at the next corridor junction that he started to run into trouble. He was just finishing mopping up the combined group of vampires and cultists who had foolishly imagined they could lure him into some kind of crossfire ambush there. He'd picked off the first few of them with shots from his Lawgiver, demolishing one of the barricades they'd been sheltering behind with a double-blast of Hi-Ex. Heatseeker hotshots had flushed the remaining cultists out of hiding. The vamps, whose inhumanly low body temperature barely registered with the Heatseeker warheads' targeting systems, Dredd took care of with one of the other weapons he was carrying, hosing them down with a spread of rapid-fire explosive shell fire from the Colt M2000 Widowmaker.

The M2000, a replacement for the old Lawrod weapon in providing Judges with some additional heavier firepower for on-the-street use, had first come into widespread service during Judgement Day. It had proved highly effective then against zombies, so Dredd didn't see why vampire targets would prove any more resistant to its devastating effects.

He wasn't wrong. The vampires disintegrated bodily under the impact of the volleys of high-calibre shotgun shells. One of them, which had come at Dredd with an industrial las-burner, was blown clear across the corridor by the impact of the shells into its body, hitting the far wall with a sick, wet splat.

It was only after the roar of the weapon's fearsomely loud gunfire reports started to die away that Dredd heard the other sound coming from the corridor behind him: the loud, pounding tread of metallic feet, too heavy to be anything human, too regular and steady to be anything other than a droid. And not just any kind of droid.

War droids were supposed to be illegal in Mega-City One. Even before the Second Robot War, when crimelord Nero Narcos had used an army of war droids to try and overthrow the entire Judge system and install himself as the city's new ruler, the manufacture and ownership of any kind of combat-orientated robot unit was highly illegal. The Justice Department had its own war droid reserve resources, of course, although a scheme under the late Chief Judge McGruder's administration to make up the growing shortfall of patrol Judges by putting robot Judges onto the city streets had not met with success, Nevertheless, the private ownership of such droids was forbidden.

Such devices were still available elsewhere, of course. Asiatic mega cities such as Hondo Cit, Sino Cit and Nu-Taiwan did a roaring trade in war droid manufacture, and even in Mega-City there was always a thriving underground black market in war droid units still left over from previous conflicts, stretching all the way back to events as long ago as the early twenty-first century Volgan Wars. In fact, the ABC Warrior unit, dating from the mid-period Volgan Wars, was still highly prized for its combat abilities, even now more than a hundred years after its original construction, and there were those collectors and aficionados of such things who considered the ABC unit so durable and easily adaptable that they claimed they could still be in active service even thousands of years from now.

Dredd dived, rolling for cover, as the metal brute stomped up the corridor towards him, opening fire with its own inbuilt weaponry. Bullets ricocheted off walls and careened off the stone floor as the droid's weapons systems tracked Dredd, his speed and reflexes managing to keep him just that vital hairsbreadth ahead of its targeting sensors.

He dropped the M2000, knowing its high-calibre shotgun capabilities, although devastating against unarmoured human opponents, would be useless against a heavily armoured droid. The droid kept on coming, its thunderous footsteps cracking the stone of the floor. It was too big and heavy to be one of the sleek new Hondo-cit jobs had been coming onto the market in the last few years, and superior targeting programs on the Nu-Taiwan models would most likely have found him and vaporised him by now, so Dredd's best guess was that it was probably an old Sov Blok unit, probably even pre-Apocalypse War. The details didn't worry him; if they wanted to, the Tek-Judges could try and identify it from whatever scrap metal was left when he had finished taking care of it.

He came out of the roll, Lawgiver in hand, firing as he went. Armour Piercing shells ricocheted off the droid's armoured carapace, barely even denting the thick armour there to protect its CPU core. A Hi-Ex shell took care of the heavy spit-blaster mounted on one of its shoulders. Dredd was just about to fire a second shot to destroy the mini missile launcher on the droid's other shoulder, when it hit him with the auxiliary electro-gens built into its chest unit. Crackling lightning bolts of electricity filled the corridor in front of it, leaping from metal wall to metal wall, striking Dredd multiple times. The heavily insulated material of his uniform's bodysuit saved him from the worst of it, but the blasts still threw him several metres back, slamming him painfully against the corridor wall. His Lawgiver flew from his nerveless grasp, landing far away from where he fell.

He slumped to the ground, hearing the stone-cracking impacts of the droid's footsteps as it stamped forward to finish him off, its servo-motors growling in what sounded almost like eager anticipation.

Muscles cramped with pain from the effects of the electricity blast refused to respond. Dredd's vision swam, the heavy, deadening weight of imminent oblivion pressing in on the edges of his consciousness.

Get up, old man, he told himself. You're not out for the count yet, not while your city's still in danger.

The reminder was like a shock to the system. He was moving even as the droid's giant metal fist jack-hammered down towards him, pile-driving into the area of the floor where only moments ago Dredd's head had been resting. He scrambled away from it, reaching out for the nearest weapon which instinct and more than forty years of combat experience told him should still be lying right where its previous owner had dropped it.

The las-burner wasn't designed for combat use, and wasn't a particularly easy thing to operate, usually requiring a physically strong operator or even work-droid to wield properly. Its main purpose was to cut up dense materials like metal or reinforced plasteel. Perps had quickly found its uses when it came to slicing through inconvenient obstacles like vault doors and walls. It probably didn't say anything about it in the manufacturer's manual, but disabling maniac war-droids seemed to be another one of the multi-faceted tool's many useful applications.

In an impressive feat of strength, Dredd swung the heavy device one-handed, activating its power supply with a flick of his finger. The tool's las-beam instantly hissed into life, projecting several feet from its end, burning with a cold, clear light that made Dredd's eyes hurt, even through the polarised visor guard of his helmet.

The las-burner sheared through the armoured metal of the droid's right arm as if it was nothing more substantial than raw munce. The metal monster's hand fell to the ground with a loud clunk, twitching in distressed reflex, sparks and oily black hydraulic fluid spraying out from its severed end. The droid made a dull roaring sound that was either a mechanical expression of pain and anger or merely a change in the pitch of its servo-motor system as it shut down the flow of power and fluid to the damaged limb.

Dredd was moving again, rolling between the thick metal tree trunks of its legs as it swivelled round in search of him, trying to bring its remaining weaponry to bear on this one unexpectedly troublesome human target. Designed mainly for frontal assault, the droid was more vulnerable to attack in its more weakly armoured rear sections. Hefting the las-burner, Dredd quickly got to work on the backs of its legs, slashing into the joint-pistons and power cables there.

Hamstrung, with both legs disabled, and bellowing in impotent mechanical distress, the three and a half metre tall droid pitched forward onto its face, with a crash that reminded Dredd of the sound of a conapt building or small-sized city block being demolished.

It lay there, emitting strange mechanical growls as its servo-motors whined in protest, flailing its one still-functioning limb about the place in futile protest. A few more brief seconds' work with the las-burner put paid to even this much activity from it. Dredd walked away, leaving the now-deactivated weapon buried deep into the fused slag that had been the droid's CPU unit.

Icarus had been surprised how easy it had been to track Dredd's progress through the complex by the sound of the gunshots alone.

First had come the loud and intense sounds of several different guns firing at once, as Dredd encountered and dealt with the main groups of Icarus's security detail at the main entrance points to the lab. After that, the gunfire had become more sporadic as it crept closer to where Icarus was and Dredd penetrated further into the complex, encountering the occasional wandering vampire or small pocket of Death cultist resistance. Amidst these had come the odd explosion, the sounds of those also coming progressively closer as Dredd methodically destroyed lab after lab, wiping out years of Icarus's research into longevity and various possibilities for sustaining life after death. It didn't matter, Icarus knew. He already had everything he wanted from his research, and it was coursing through his veins now, changing his mind and body in ways that puny, mortal intellects like Dredd's could never imagine.

The last explosion had come about half a minute ago, no doubt caused by Dredd laying waste to the lab just down the corridor, where the vampires' blood serum food supply was produced. If that was the case, then by Icarus's calculations he should be entering the...

Right on cue, the lab doors obediently opened in response to the Justice Department override device's command. Dredd walked in, his Lawgiver aimed at Icarus. Apart from the two of them, there wasn't another living soul in the lab.

"Dick Icarus? Fun-time's over, creep. You're under arrest."

"Really? On what charges?" Icarus's tone was casual and breezy, his voice deliberately raised to distract Dredd's attention away from the faint pounding sounds on the incubator vault door on the wall to the side of them.

"Don't get cute, punk. So far tonight, you've been responsible for the deaths of thousands. Grud knows how many more are going to die before we take care of the things you've unleashed on this city."

"Aren't you even going to ask me why?" asked Icarus, glancing down at the weapon he'd left on the desk top beside him. It was only an arm's reach away. All he had to do was-

"No need. You'll tell us everything we need to know soon enough, as soon as we get you into an interrogation cube," promised Dredd. "Why you did it, what you know of the Dark Judges' plans, any more little surprises you had planned for us. You won't hold anything back for too long. We've got interrogation techniques that'll make you tell us things you didn't even know you knew, and that's even before we bring in the Psi-Judges to go creeping around inside your mind."

"I did it because I want to live forever, and because the Dark Judges have the power to grant me that wish." Icarus was almost shouting, as much to drown out the sounds from behind the vault door as from the sense of rising excitement he felt within him. The moment was so close now, so close...

Dredd wasn't impressed. "So thousands have to die to feed your sick fantasy that the Dark Judges will give you eternal life? Grud alone knows how you managed to convince anyone to let you out the kook cubes, Icarus. The only wish the Dark Judges are ever going to grant is a death wish. You'd have to be completely insane to ever think you could make a bargain with those things."

Dredd was walking across the room towards him now, reaching into a belt pouch for the handcuffs to secure his prisoner. The noise from the vault door finally drew his attention. He paused, glancing suspiciously over at the door.

"What you got in there? More bloodsuckers?"

Icarus knew it was now or never. "Why don't you see for yourself," he screeched, making a grab for the weapon on the counter.

It was a good choice of weapon, he thought. A Flesh Disintegrator, instantly recognisable to someone like Dredd, and instantly lethal to anyone on the receiving end of its organic matter-destroying field. Icarus had had cause to use it several times before, in dealing with difficult-to-control lab specimens infected with some of the early versions of the retrovirus, and he could happily attest to its deadly capabilities.

He knew he wouldn't be able to grab the weapon, pick it up and fire it before Dredd could fire his own weapon. But then, as Icarus reminded himself, that was something he didn't have to worry about.

His hand was barely on the weapon's grip before the first Lawgiver shot punched into him, followed by two more in the space of a heartbeat, all three closely hitting in a tight cluster over his ribs. Icarus felt his heart explode, torn apart by the bullets' paths through his body. He had wondered many times what this moment would be like. His knowledge as a medical research scientist and his experiences from studying death in all its many forms over the last eight years suggested to him that it would all be quick and refreshingly pain-free. His knowledge and practical experiences had lied to him, he now knew; being shot dead hurt, and seemed to take much longer than you would reasonably expect.

A tremor passed through him. The formula coursing through his bloodstream seemed somehow to realise the fact of his imminent death, and was reacting accordingly. Icarus felt it release some its strength into him, and he began to rise again to his feet, still clutching the disintegrator weapon, still bringing it up to bear at its target.

Dredd, caught by surprise by the fact of the nondescript-looking scientist's unexpected reliance, almost hesitated for a moment.

Almost.

Three more shots ripped into Icarus, hurling him backwards, knocking the gun from his hand. The scientist sank to his knees, blood pouring out of him. In spite of the pain from his torn-apart innards, he still managed to look up at Dredd and smile.

"Me, I know I'm coming back. For you, though, this is the end of the line."

He fell dead to the ground, Dredd at the same time spotting the small remote device held in Icarus's other hand. Icarus's hand had squeezed around it at the moment of death, activating it, and now the vault door on the far wall was sliding open. An alarm blared in warning, and over it Dredd could clearly hear the excited snarls and ravenous growls of the things behind that door.

They poured out of the vault: vampires, maybe a hundred or more of them, naked and newborn, hungry for blood, keen to start killing and spread their retrovirus further.

When they had joined the Church of Death and volunteered to undergo Icarus's retrovirus transformation process - a "rebirth into a glorious state beyond life and death", he had promised them - they had imagined that they would become natural-born predators, with nothing to fear and none strong or brave enough to stand against them. They were wrong.

Dredd's Lawgiver and M2000 roared together, their combined firepower blasting into the first few rows of vampires, picking them up and hurling their bullet-shredded bodies back into the ranks of those following on closely behind.

Dredd's marksmanship was almost as good with his left hand as it was with his right, and he kept up the punishing hail of fire with both weapons. The M2000 was difficult to control one-handed, but at this range, and with the weapon's devastating area of effect, all he really had to do was keep it trained on the general area of the open vault door, forcing anything that tried to come through that doorway to pass through the barrier of gunfire. His Lawgiver was in his left hand, picking off any vampires that managed to make it relatively unscathed through the curtain of Widowmaker fire. Vampire after vampire was knocked back, screaming and hissing, by the combined fire of both weapons, but there were still many more vampires in the vault than Dredd's guns had bullets for, and he was fast using up the magazines in both of them.

The M2000 was the first to run dry. With its final shot, it hit an enraged vampire that it had already hit at least once before, flaying its flesh even further and hurling it once more back into the vault with the others. Dredd dropped the weapon, knowing he didn't have the time to reload it. He emptied his Lawgiver of its remaining Incendiary shells, firing them into the mass of bodies in the vault's doorway, buying himself a few more seconds as the vampires retreated back, hissing and snarling, from the wall of flame that was now between him and them.

He reached for the weapons pack holding the last of the ordnance he had brought with him from the H-wagon. He activated it with a flick of a switch and threw it into the vault, throwing himself at the heavy vault door as he did so, slamming into it hard and using every bit of his strength and body weight to push it shut. Slowly, painfully, it swung shut. For one terrible moment, a mere hand's breadth before it sealed shut again, Dredd felt the weight of the vampires hurl against the other side of the door, threatening to push it back wide open again in seconds, but a moment later the device he'd thrown into the vault went off, and all that remained after that was the terrible roaring sound from beyond the doors.

A second after that, Dredd pushed the door fully shut, the door's seals engaged and the vampires were trapped amidst the inferno now raging inside.

Dredd had grabbed the thermal bomb as soon as he had seen it in the h-wagon armoury, intending to use it as a weapon of last resort in case Death and the other three super-creeps showed up at Icarus's labs. They hadn't dropped by to pay their respects to their liberator, but, as it turned out, the thermal bomb had still come in handy after all.

Detonating inside the thick-walled vault, it had immediately raised the temperature inside the place to well over three thousand degrees. The air beyond the reinforced doors would have ignited instantly, and everything combustible in there would be reduced to ash long before the oxygen supply had been burned up. Dredd could feel the heat radiating through the thick metal of the door, and knew that the clean-up crews would probably need to use las-burners to cut through into the vault afterwards, since the heat inside it now would almost certainly have melted and fused the door workings.

He didn't care. The Teks and Meds could come and take what evidence they needed from the wreckage of the labs, but, as far as Dredd was concerned, Icarus and his vampires were now one less problem to deal with tonight.

Satisfied the vampires were destroyed, he stepped away from the door, speaking into his helmet radio.

"Control - Dredd. Clean-up crews required at the Icarus labs. Tell Chief Judge Hershey the vampire outbreak has been cut off at source now."

"Roger, Dredd. And Icarus?"

Dredd glanced at the corpse lying on the floor nearby. Was it his imagination, or had the corpse somehow changed in the last few minutes? It looked different somehow, larger and strangely swollen. Despite that, he was still clearly dead. Something else for the Teks and Meds to look into, Dredd supposed.

"As dead as Judge Cal," Dredd replied. "Make sure the clean-up crew get him properly bagged and tagged. I want him delivered to Helsing at Justice Central Forensics for a full autopsy. Any word on Death and the other three creeps yet?"

"Plenty. They've hit random points across the city four times now, but every time we got there they teleported away. They seem to have split up after the first attack and are operating solo, which is a new strategy, but the death count is already reaching block war level. We've got a confirmed sighting of Mortis at Clooney Memorial - Giant's on his way there now - and Anderson's picked up a psi-flash hunch that something might be about to happen at the Churchill Smokatorium. She's heading there herself."

"And the other two? Death and Fear?"

"Nothing yet, Dredd. We've got every spare badge we've got out on the streets, and a citywide alert's been given. If they turn up anywhere, you'll know about it as soon as we do."

It was the overpowering psychic stink of pure evil that alerted every Psi-Judge in the Academy of Law to Fear's presence in the building as soon as he teleported in. And it was the sound of the cadets' frantic screaming, mere seconds later, that alerted everyone else.

Tutor Judges came running in response as word spread throughout the building that something terrible was happening in one of the dorms reserved for Psi-Judge cadets. They hammered uselessly on the door of the dorm, unable to break it down. Fear had sealed it using one of his mantrap weapons, and it would need more than brute strength to overcome the device's mysterious psychic properties.

Meanwhile, for several long and terrible minutes, the Dark Judge was able to run amok in the dorm, with thirty young and helpless Psi-Judge cadets trapped in there with him.

The sealed door finally succumbed to a fusillade of Lawgiver fire and the combined psychic efforts of three Psi-Judge Tutors. What they found when they charged in, Lawgivers at the ready, was something from their worst nightmares. Fear was gone, teleporting away again, but leaving behind him the slaughtered remnants of an entire class of Psi-cadets.

However, it would be several minutes later, after Judge Tutors had finished the grim task of compiling a roll call of the dead, that the most terrible thing of all would be discovered. Four of the cadets were missing. A search of the entire Academy was ordered, but it was already clear to all what had happened to them.

Fear, for whatever twisted reasons of his own, had taken them. The four cadets were in the clutches of the Dark Judges.

THIRTEEN

Anderson had almost to be restrained from jumping out the hatch of the h-wagon while it was still in mid-air above the Smokatorium. Anxious and impatient, she forced herself to wait as it came into land, her feet hitting the ground only seconds after the tarmac there had been heat-scorched by the after-blast from the h-wagon's underside thrusters.

There were Judges everywhere, cordoning off the Smokatorium building from the rest of the city.

"Rosen?" she asked the nearest officer. He pointed to a harassed-looking female Judge nearby, who was issuing orders on the radio from the back of a Pat-Wagon. Anderson strode over to her.

"I'm Anderson," she told her. "What's the situation?"

Rosen looked at her for a moment. Anderson didn't need to use her telepath abilities to know what she was thinking. Anderson's reputation - as a troublemaker, as a maverick, as the best Psi-Judge the Justice Department had, as the woman who had saved the city from the Dark Judges several times before - preceded her everywhere she went within the Department.

"He's inside," Rosen said. "Somewhere in the main Smokatorium hall levels. He ported in while we were still evacuating the place."

"Casualties?" Anderson asked.

Rosen grimly nodded her head. "Too Gruddamn many, cits and Judges. It would have been a lot worse, though, if your warning hadn't reached us. There's still some cits trapped in there, we think, but we got everyone else out." She paused, looking at Anderson. "We were ordered to wait for your arrival. You're here, so what do we do now?"

She's scared, thought Anderson. She probably hasn't been on the streets more than five years. She must be good to have made it to Tac Watch Commander this early in her career, but she's too young to have been with the Department during Necropolis. She's never met the Dark Judges before, all she knows about them are the bogey man stories she's probably heard about them at the Academy - and now she's scared about facing the reality behind those stories.

"Just secure the area while I go in and get him," Anderson told her.

"On your own?" Rosen asked, doubtfully.

Anderson knew exactly what Rosen was thinking. There were now several dozen Judges on the scene. Leaving aside those needed for crowd control duty, that still left more than enough to provide Anderson with all the back-up she would ever need.

"If you give him the space to use that flame weapon of his, Fire's the most lethal of all the Dark Judges," Anderson told her. "He can kill fifty of us just as easily as one with that thing. No point losing any more people than we have to. Besides, I've handled all four of these creeps before. One of them on his own shouldn't be too much trouble."

The last comment was said with half a smile. Anderson looked around. "Now all I need to do is find a gun to use."

At Rosen's signal, a Tek-Judge handed her a Lawgiver. "Straight from Tek-Div central armoury, already programmed to your palm-print. It arrived just before you did."

Anderson smiled and took the weapon, testing its feel and weight. It gave a series of coded bleeps, its built-in micro-computer acknowledging her palm-print signature and signalling that it was now in the hands of its rightful owner. She checked the ammo counter, seeing that it was already fully loaded. She had a feeling she was going to need every one of those shots, and all the other ones in the spare magazines she was now cramming into her belt pouches.

"You heard about what happened at the Academy of Law?" asked Rosen.

Anderson nodded. The news had reached her while she was still en route aboard the h-wagon. Four Dark Judges individually on the loose, and now four Psi-cadets taken, not to mention the massacre of the rest of their class. The problems just kept multiplying.

The snatching of the four cadets was a new and worrying tactic. The Dark Judges didn't take prisoners or hostages, not before now; the only thing they were interested in was spreading death to every living thing that came into contact with them. So what did they need the cadets for, and why specifically Psi-cadets?

With a heavy feeling of foreboding, Anderson guessed she would probably find out the answer soon enough. Assuming she survived the coming encounter with Fire.

She hefted her Lawgiver and looked at Rosen. "Okay, I'm ready."

People were always jealous that he had a real, honest-to-grud, genuine job, Ernesto Kopinski knew. He wasn't so sure, though. Of course, it was a real job, not some airy-fairy pretend kind of job like that dumb jerk of a brother-in-law of his had.

Standing around all day pretending to be a shop dummy, what kind of a job was that for a grown man? Ernesto's job was different. It required skill, application, dedication, not to mention several tedious days of introductory training. It served a useful purpose, to the city and his fellow citizens, and, most importantly of all, it couldn't be done just as well by an inanimate object, unlike the so-called job that dumb jerk of a brother-in-law of his had.

Which still didn't mean that it didn't suck.

He crawled forward through the low-roofed tubeway, his thick armoured boots splashing through the bubbling acidic gruel that swirled around his ankles. More of the same kind of gruesome organic gunge dripped from the leaking pipes overhead, splattering on the acid-proof material of his protective hood and overalls. The pressure tanks on his back hissed and gurgled, and he adjusted the pressure gauge on the barrel of his sprayer gun accordingly. His task was to crawl around down here all day, clearing blockages in the run-off pipes and sluiceways leading out from the main fat-rendering tanks overhead. Strictly speaking, it was really a job best performed by maintenance droids, but the dripping acids and metal-corroding fumes made that an expensive proposition and so, bearing in mind Mega-City unemployment was still running at over 87%, it was far cheaper and easier to use human workers.

The business of Resyk was death. Or, more specifically, the breaking down and recycling of human organic material as the corpses of dead cits were delivered to Resyk from all over the city. Once here, they were reduced to their most useful base constituents for later use in a bewilderingly large array of commercial products and substances. Resyk ran day and night, and only the very richest citizens who could afford interment in a private cemetery - or, for the truly rich and dying, a place in cryo-facilities such as Forever Towers - could avoid that final trip along the Resyk corpse disassembly conveyor belts. "We use everything except the soul!" was the proud boast of Resyk management, and there was a steady belief amongst Mega-citizens that the scientists in Resyk R&D were working on ways to remedy even that little oversight.

None of this, however, was at the forefront of Ernesto Kopinski's thoughts right at this moment. All he wanted to do was clear this new blockage, finish his shift and get the drokk out of here with the minimum of acid burns or inhaling of too many of the toxic fumes.

"Ray? Billy?" he called out, thinking he could see two forms in the drainage chamber ahead of him. Ray and Billy were supposed to be working this area on this shift, and the blockage they had been sent to clear was still there, causing an overflow that was now threatening to back up all the way to the bile pumps.

Gruddamnit, if he found out that they had been slacking off again, sneaking off down to the illegal card games run by one of the conveyor belt's assistant foremen in the maintenance sub-bay next to the bone-grinders, then there was gonna be trouble...

He stepped into the drainage chamber, seeing the two figures lying there in the swirling, acidic chem-fluids. Working at Resyk, you got used to the sight of corpses real fast, and Ernesto had no hesitation in deciding that both Ray and Billy were as dead as you could get. They could only have been dead for a short while, though, otherwise they would already have started dissolving into the bubbling tox-brew they were lying in. Ernesto had seen a lot of corpses, but he had never seen two likes these, especially with what he could only describe as frozen looks of horror on their faces.

He was just reaching for his radio headset to report on what he had just found, when he heard splashing sounds from the sluice-duct to his right and looked round to see the silhouette figure of a Judge coming towards him. Sure, it was a real thin-looking kind of Judge, wearing some kind of extra funky looking uniform, but Ernesto knew there were all kinds of Judges with all kinds of different uniforms, and so he didn't see anything to get worried about - not until the thing he had thought was a Judge stepped out into the dim light of the chamber and reached out towards him with something that was more like a ghoul-claw than a human hand.

"Greetingsss, sssinner," it hissed. "Rejoiccce. Judgement is here."

Dredd was still in the air, aboard his h-wagon, when the news broke.

"Dredd - Control. Got a query for you from the clean-up crew at the Icarus lab location. You sure about call on the Icarus stiff? The meat wagon crews say there's no sign of the body."

"That's impossible, Control," Dredd snarled into the radio mike. "I put six Lawgiver slugs into him, every one a kill shot. The only place that creep was going was Resyk. Tell them to check again and-"

"Hold it, Dredd," the voice of Control abruptly cut in. "Something coming in over the radio net now. Reports coming in about a possible Death sighting... Wait, that's confirmed! We've got a positive lock on Death's position."

"Where?" Dredd's voice, instantly commanding.

"Only half a sector away from your current position, Dredd. He's at Resyk, and he's killing every living thing in the place."

The h-wagon pilot must have been monitoring the conversation, because the vehicle was already swerving round in an abrupt change of course, accelerating off towards Resyk.

"Wilco, Control. I'm on my way. Dredd out."

Being dead wasn't nearly as dramatic as one might have imagined, Icarus had decided. For a start, he still had consciousness, although he wasn't sure how much that was to do with the retrovirus which was now steadily transforming his recently dead body. The seat of his consciousness was still tied to that body, and he was aware of his surroundings and what was happening around him, but the sights and sounds were oddly dimmed, almost as if he were experiencing them all in a strangely detached, fugue-like state. He knew he was still within his body, but he had no sense of physical existence, and any kind of sensation of pain or bodily awareness was completely absent. Which was probably just as well, he decided, considering the six Lawgiver bullets which had torn his insides apart.

As far as he could tell, he was somewhere in the Undercity, carried there by the last few vampires which had remained in hiding in his lab during the confrontation with Dredd. He had no idea where they were taking him, or why. To be honest, he wished he could communicate with them in some way. On the other hand, even if he had been able to, he wasn't sure they would take any notice of his commands any longer. The way they were moving, the way they seemed to work together in perfect accord without speaking, he got the distinct impression they were acting under the direction of some outside force.

His creations were no longer his to command. For the first time since he had taken his first steps on the long road to this point, Icarus began to feel a vague uneasiness about his presumed pact with the things he had set free from Nixon Pen.

Meanwhile, while he dwelled on what Dredd had told him about the wisdom of making deals with the Dark Judges, his former servants continued on their mysterious journey, carrying him deeper and deeper down into the darkness of the Undercity beneath Mega-City One.

Giant still woke up sometimes at night in his dorm cubicle at the Grand Hall of Justice, sweaty and panicked from nightmares about his first encounter with Judge Mortis. The experience had been a defining one for him. And almost a fatal one too, he grimly remembered. Mortis had kept right on coming at them, as he and the others had pumped round after round of Lawgiver fire into the Dark Judge's rotted, ossified body. Even after a decapitating Hi-Ex round, the Dark Judge had simply picked itself up again and reattached its head to its body before continuing the pursuit.

Mortis's touch was literally death, and Giant could still remember the putrefying stench that had filled the air as he watched the flesh rot away in mere seconds from the body of one of Mortis's victims. The memory, together with the fear of those hands ever bestowing the same deadly touch on his own flesh, had stayed with Giant a long time. He had been a cadet back then, of course, not one of the rising stars of the Justice Department and Dredd's chosen right-hand man, but some things you don't forget. Especially in your nightmares.

And now here he was, ten years later and about to confront the source of those nightmares again.

He was leading a squad of Judges down the corridors of Clooney Memorial Hospital. So far, it hadn't been difficult to work out which direction Mortis had taken. Like Dredd said, all you had to do with the Dark Judges was follow the trail of corpses.

Mortis hadn't been here long - it was less than twenty minutes since the alert had gone out and Giant had jumped aboard an h-wagon and maybe broken the Department's aerial speed record to get here - but, by Grud, Mortis had been busy in that short time. He had been going from one ward to another, slaughtering every living soul he found, and the rooms and corridors of the place were choked with corpses and filled with that same awful and familiar reek of decay. Not even the droids had been spared, because Mortis's touch affected more than just flesh. Giant had already passed the rusted and corrosion-pitted remains of several robo-docs.

They were in the isolation ward now, and there were screams coming from further up the corridor. Mortis had been busy here too, going from room to room dispensing his version of justice, the occasional locked or sealed door proving no barrier to his material-corrupting touch.

Grubb's Disease. Rad-sickness. Creeping Buboes. 2T(FRU)T. The oddities of twenty-second century life threw up a bewildering variety of new and dangerous diseases, and this was where the sufferers of such contagious ailments were treated. Of all the deadly contagions that had been loose in here, though, Mortis was by far the most lethal.

The corpse of a fattie wearing a hospital smock was blocking the corridor. This one was fresh, the flesh on it still in the process of accelerated rotting, its body looking like a deflating tent as the decaying bulk of its mountainous belly melted away, leaving bare the bones of its massively expanded rib-cage. Giant vaulted over it, homing in on the continued sounds of screams from just up ahead. They were close now.

"No, please! I-I'm sick!" came a voice from up ahead. "I got Super-Duper Creeping Buboes, or something real bad like that. You... you don't wanna touch me or you'll catch it too, I guarantee!"

"Life itself is a sickness, sinner," snickered the unearthly voice of the Dark Judge. "Death is the only sure cure."

Giant rounded the corner, seeing a terrified cit in a patient's smock in Mortis's grip. The cit was screaming, Mortis's horrific decay touch already going to work on him. Too late to save this poor creep, thought Giant, bringing his Lawgiver up to bear.

"Rapid fire," he ordered his squad. "Blow that bony freak to pieces."

Mortis looked towards them, hissing in irritation, the screaming cit still caught in his lethal grasp. In one movement he turned and hurled the cit at them, using him as a human shield, throwing him into the full fury of the Judges' weapons fire.

If the cit wasn't dead already from the effects of Mortis's touch, then he surely was now, as the hail of Lawgiver bullets struck him, tearing apart his decay softened, putrefying body and spraying Giant and his squad with the leftovers.

If Giant had somehow ever forgotten how deceptively fast the Dark Judges could move when they wanted to, he got a sudden reminder now. Mortis was in amongst them in the blink of an eye, cackling in malignant glee as he went about the business of bringing judgement to the Judges.

Furio, a ten-year veteran who had been Giant's second-in-command, was the first to die, collapsing in a rotted heap as one of Mortis's claws punched right through him. Willot, whom Giant had first met when he had been briefly posted to Sector House 301 to help Dredd in his mission to clean up the city's most crime-ridden sector, was next to go. Screaming in agony as tumours and lesions spread in seconds through his body, Willot tumbled backwards, thrashing and writhing, knocking Giant to the floor.

In the time it took Giant to kick Willot's disease-bloated corpse away from him and realise that he had lost his Lawgiver in the fall, Mortis had already killed Judges Powers, Hiassen and Goldman. That left only Giant to be judged.

Mortis loomed over him, reaching down towards him. Giant stared into the empty sockets of Mortis's skull head, feeling the tug of the powerful psychic spell the Dark Judges were capable of casting over their victims.

"Come, sinner, why try to resist? Fighting me is useless. You cannot escape your fate."

Mortis's hand descended towards Giant's face. The Judge's own hand snatched down, finding and drawing his boot knife in one smooth motion.

"Heard it before, freak. It might have had more effect ten years ago, when I was still a frightened kid - but not now."

Giant's hand came up to meet Mortis's, the knife he was holding stabbing hilt-deep through the centre of Mortis's outstretched palm, stopping the Dark Judge's taloned fingers just centimetres away from Giant's face.

Mortis hissed in anger. His powers of decay were already going to work on the blade piercing his unnatural flesh, and the metal of the knife blade was quickly starting to crack and erode away in rusted flakes. Giant had only delayed Mortis for a few seconds, but those few seconds were all the defiant Judge needed.

Giant brought his feet back and lashed out with both legs, catching Mortis square in the chest with two Judge boots, propelling him backwards. Mortis crashed into the wall opposite with a dry, bony rattling sound, but recovered almost immediately and pulled himself up again. Giant rolled, grabbing his fallen Lawgiver and aiming it at the Dark Judge as Mortis advanced upon him again.

"We've met before, freak," he reminded him. "Remember this?"

The Hi-Ex shell tore Mortis's head off. Whatever he was made of, however light and frail his leathery, mummified skin and wasted, brittle bones appeared to be, the Dark Judge was a lot tougher than he looked. Anything else would have been blown to shreds by the same shot.

As it was, it was still enough to stop him in his tracks as he bent to pick up the skull and reattach it to the snapped-off, bony stump of his neck. Giant had seen this trick before. What was new, though, was that he found out Mortis could still speak even with his head separated from his body.

"Foolish mortal," rasped the voice from the bodiless skull. "When will you learn? You cannot kill that which does not live..."

"Tell it to someone who gives a drokk," replied Giant, firing a brace of Incendiaries into the body of Mortis.

Even as the hungry flames took hold of him, Mortis still took the time to wait for his head to reattach itself. Meanwhile, up until now, Giant had been acting on instinct, just trying to survive the encounter moment to moment. Now, seeing the open doorway to the place directly behind where Mortis was standing, he suddenly saw a way to bring this whole thing to an end.

He charged forward towards Mortis, even as the Dark Judge staggered forward towards him. The fiend was wreathed in flames, a fact which would soon force him to abandon his current body, but not before he took one last sinner with him, it seemed. Even after his body had been destroyed by the flames, Mortis's spirit would still survive, roaming the city until it found another host form to occupy and possess. If that happened, Mortis would rise again, free to continue the same kind of carnage that had occurred here and elsewhere.

Giant wasn't about to let that come to pass.

He shoulder-charged straight into Mortis, turning his face aside and holding his breath to avoid scorching his lungs with super-heated air from the flames that were now all over Mortis. It was like charging into a pillar of solid granite. A pillar of solid granite that had been set blazing alight. A lancing shot of agony told Giant he had probably just dislocated his shoulder and maybe cracked his collar bone into the bargain. Numerous points of growing pain told him he was on fire down most of that same side. Giant could already hear the sirens of the med-wagon that would probably soon be rushing him to the nearest sector house med-bay.

Even so, what he had intended to do still worked. Mortis reeled backwards and through the open doorway behind him. Giant slammed a fist into the door-seal switch, not stopping to beat out the flames that were eating into the material of his armour and bodysuit until he was sure the door had slid securely shut.

He stared through the transparent material of the door, watching Mortis burn. Most of the Dark Judge's clothing and unnatural flesh had burned away now, leaving little more than a skeleton covered in flame. Still, he wasn't ready to die yet and staggered forward, pressing one burning, skeletal hand against the transparent wall of the room he was in. His rattling hiss of fury increased sharply in volume as the material of the wall stubbornly refused to yield to his decaying touch.

"Reinforced glasteel, freak. Supposed to be able to last for centuries, maybe even longer. Maybe if you tried long enough you could rot through it, but I don't think you've got the time to do that, have you?"

Mortis's body was already starting to collapse, too much of it eaten away by the flames to allow him to sustain it any longer. He abandoned it with a final, whistling shriek, his spirit flowing out of it as it crumpled to the ground to form a small pyre of burning bones.

Mortis's spirit-form prowled round the borders of the room, restlessly seeking a way out, hurling itself against various portions of the floor, ceiling and thick glasteel walls. Giant laughed at its growing fury.

"Oh yeah, and it's airtight too, didn't I tell you that? You're in a quarantine cube. They use them to keep suspected contagious disease cases in isolation until they know what they're dealing with. That's what you are, freak: a disease. And now I've got you where you belong, in quarantine."

Watching the furious contortions the thing behind the glasteel walls was now going through as it relentlessly and futilely sought an escape from its new prison, Giant reached for his radio.

"Control - Giant. I need a Psi-Judge squad to Clooney Memorial. I've got Mortis trapped here in spook form. Tell them there's no rush, I don't think he's going anywhere else in a hurry right now."

One down, three to go, thought Giant. He wondered how Dredd and Anderson were doing with their own super-creep Dark Judge freaks.

As another blast of supernatural fire blazed out towards her, Anderson dived for cover. She hoped Dredd and Giant were doing better than her.

She rolled past the shrunken and flame-blacked corpses of another row of smokers and popped up out of cover to snap off another few Lawgiver shots at Fire. Not that it would do any good, she reminded herself.

Every time she encountered the Dark Judges, they always brought something new to deal with, some new, never-revealed-before ability or power they could use to counter the Judges' best efforts to track them down and destroy them. In the past, it had been teleporters, psychic possession, mind control, the ability to body-hop when their own bodies were destroyed and then to rise up again in the flesh of the next nearest corpse. This time, though, Fire had found a brand new trick of his own and, by Grud, was it a doozie.

He could use the unnatural heat of the supernatural flames which permanently surrounded him to vaporise bullets before they could strike him. Incendiaries were useless against this particular Dark Judge, of course. Falling back on what had worked against him before, Anderson had fired off several rounds of Hi-Ex shells as soon as she caught sight of him within the main Smokatorium hall - only to see them vaporised as they struck the shimmering heat barrier around him. Every Standard Execution round she had fired since had gone the same way, either vaporised instantly or ineffectually striking Fire in the form of little more than a thin spray of molten droplets. Now, as the Dark Judge hunted her through the smog-filled, corpse-strewn interior of the Smokatorium, Anderson began to suspect she was in serious trouble.

She had borrowed a helmet from one of the Judges outside. Its respirator and visor provided some protection from the poisonous, choking fumes of nicotine and tar that surrounded her, but her eyes still stung from the effects of the thick cigarette smoke that hung heavy in the air of the place. Anderson always knew she would probably die in the line of duty one day, most likely at the hands of a major-league perp like one of the Dark Judges. Except she had figured it would probably be Death that would do the honours, not Fire. And she had always imagined her death as taking place somewhere a lot more glamorous than a city Smokatorium.

There were several Smokatoriums in the city, being the only places in Mega-City One where citizens were legally allowed to smoke. Anderson could never see the attraction in the filthy habit; there were enough unpleasant and hazardous things that could happen to you in this city without deliberately poisoning your body with the after-effects of inhaling burning tobacco. The circumstances in a Smokatorium, where smokers sat in rows wearing protective suits and smoking tobacco products through filter mouthpieces fitted into the air-sealed helmets they wore, made the whole thing look even less attractive than it already was, but the Smokatoriums were still very popular. Dedicated and die-hard smokers still flocked to them to smoke everything from the finest, hand-rolled cigars from the Cuban Wastes to the cheapest brands of Brit-Cit cigarettes. Only in a Smokatorium was smoking legal, and the money generated in the hefty smoking taxes imposed on everyone using them was always a welcome addition to the city's financial coffers.

Now the lifeless smokers sat in rows where they had died. With visibility poor due to the thick, choking cigarette smoke that filled the place, and with all sound muffled by the head-enclosing helmets worn by all smokers, many of them had probably never even known what had hit them as Fire stalked from room to room, incinerating everyone he found in all of them with fiery blasts from his trident weapon.

Justice Department med-programs and health education vidverts always stressed that smoking killed. Now the proof of that was here in abundance in the Churchill.

"Good to see you again, Anderson," cackled Fire. "Looking for a light?"

Anderson dodged again, narrowly avoiding another fire blast that struck the wall behind her, setting it instantly ablaze.

There were now numerous blazes burning throughout the building, some of them spreading rapidly, all of them started by the Dark Judge's deadly trail of destruction through the place. Idly, Anderson wondered if that meant she was still going to burn to death even if she managed to defeat Fire, and then decided that she would probably still be long dead by the time there was any danger of the building burning to the ground.

Even more idly, she wondered why the building's fire control systems hadn't kicked in by now. After all, Smokatoriums were just one big fire hazard, so surely there must be...

Fwooosh!

She barely moved in time, as the hungry tongues of supernatural fire licked out towards her. She rolled away from them, feeling the flames caressing her back and legs, imagining her skin start to blister even under the heat-retardant material of her uniform.

She sprang back up and ran, snapping off several Heatseekers at the Dark Judge, knowing that they would have no difficulty in locking on to him, just as she knew that they would probably be almost completely useless against him.

Fire laughed as the tiny, buzzing heat-seeking bullet missiles vaporised harmlessly in the heat-shimmering air in front of his flaming skull face. His laughter was dry and crackling, like the sound of hungry licks of flames.

"Anderson, always so fast and so fortunate. But how long can you stay that way? You have to remain fortunate all the time. I only have to get fortunate once."

He stalked forwards across the wide space towards her, swishing his trident impatiently in front of him, tracing patterns of fire in the air.

He's been toying with me, Anderson realised, but now the game was coming to an end and Fire was clearly intent on closing in for the kill. Anderson instinctively backed off away from him, realising with a sick feeling that she was being herded into a corner with no other means of escape.

Desperately, she looked around her, looking for a way up. All the exits were behind Fire, as was a window looking into a small control room. No way out that way, since the only way out of the control room was a locked door leading back into the Smokatorium hall.

And yet... there was something about that small room that drew Anderson's attention back to it again.

A control room, but a control room for what?

Something - a hunch or intuition - told her to glimpse upwards towards the roof of the high-ceilinged chamber. As soon as she did, she knew she had found a way to defeat Fire, and she was moving even before she had consciously started to formulate the plan that was about to save her life and put paid to at least one of the Dark Judges.

Fire brandished his trident and a column of flame leapt from it, chasing after Anderson as she ran. Heat splashed against the wall behind her, melting the surface of the wall's material, leaving a burning map of the direction of Anderson's sprint as it chased after her along the wall, always lagging a few precious moments behind her.

Anderson fired off a series of shots. Fire laughed in malign satisfaction at what he thought was a sign of growing panic in the mind of the Psi-Judge, since none of the shots came anywhere near him. In fact, Anderson had hit absolutely everything she had been aiming at.

The first few shots shattered the viewing window of the control room, making things a lot easier for Anderson for the moment when she would hurl herself through it a few seconds later. The last shot - a Rubber Ricochet - hit the tiny panel set into the wall on the far side of the chamber, shattering the glass panel over it and hitting the large red emergency switch beneath the glass.

Not bad shooting, Cass, Anderson congratulated herself as she leapt through the smashed control room window and tumbled across the console inside, hearing the Smokatorium's sprinkler mechanism finally kick in response to her activation of the building's fire control systems.

Water gushed down, smothering the fires here and elsewhere throughout the building. Judge Fire walked through the downpour, giving off a cloud of hissing steam as the falling droplets of water noisily vaporised as soon as they came into contact with the flames of his body. The flames he produced did seem noticeably diminished by the effects of the sprinkler downpour, but they were supernatural in origin, and Anderson doubted that anything could completely douse them as long as Fire's spirit remained in possession of its host body.

Fire laughed as he stalked closer. "Foolish Anderson, did you really think this would have any effect at all?"

Anderson waited before replying, carefully measuring Fire's progress towards her. She was trapped inside the control room, with nowhere inside it to take cover. One blast from Fire's trident weapon would obliterate everything inside the small room. If Anderson had misjudged anything at all, she knew she probably only had a few seconds to live.

"No, creep," she answered, grabbing hold of the big lever handle on the control console in front of her. "I did it so you wouldn't guess that I was really planning to do this."

She hauled on the lever, her action instantly rewarded by the ominous sound from the chamber roof of something large and heavy powering up. Fire hesitated and then looked up. Anderson didn't know if Dark Judges could actually visibly express panic and alarm, but she supposed that this must be what she was seeing now, as Fire saw what was happening up there in the chamber roof.

Each day after it closed, the Smokatorium underwent a rigorous cleaning process, a giant rotary fan in the ceiling of the main chamber sucking the nicotine-choked air out of the entire building and into a series of rooftop filters where it was cleansed and purified of all traces of tobacco taint before being safely expelled out into the general atmosphere of the city. That was what the huge fan-blades now spinning with increasing speed up there in the chamber roof were usually used for. Now Anderson had them in mind for a completely different purpose entirely.

As far as she could see, as the air began to swirl round the chamber in a rapidly growing vortex, Fire was going to immediately do either one of two things. One of them still meant almost immediate certain death for Anderson.

Instead, he did the other, reaching down to the teleporter device on his belt instead of aiming his trident and blasting Anderson to oblivion. His burning fingers reached out to activate the device, but Anderson was already firing her Lawgiver. She had flicked the shell selector to Armour Piercing, hoping that the solid, diamond-hard titanium bullet would have more chance of making it through the slightly diminished hazard of Fire's heat aura. It was a gamble, but a calculated one.

The bullet hit and shattered the teleporter device before the Dark Judge could activate it. His screaming hiss of anger was lost amidst the growing hurricane roar of the effects of the giant fan mechanism overhead. Fire vengefully raised his trident to send a scouring, fiery blast into the control room, but it was already too late. The weapon was pulled from his hand by the force of the wind vortex that now filled the chamber and went flying upwards towards the spinning blades. A second or two later, Fire followed it, sucked up into the fan's hungry mouth along with all the other loose material in the chamber. Corpses, charred fragments of corpses, the litter of ash and hundreds of cigarette ends: all of it went tumbling upwards into the blades. The last Anderson heard of Judge Fire was his unholy shriek of rage as his body passed through the fan rotors and was dashed to pieces by the spinning blades.

Wedging herself beneath the console to prevent herself suffering a similar fate, she shouted into her helmet radio, praying that the Justice Department units waiting outside could hear her voice over the roar of the vortex blasting around the chamber.

"It's Anderson. I've destroyed Fire's body, but his spirit is still going to escape. It's going to be coming out the air vents on the Smokatorium roof any second. If there's any h-wagons in the vicinity, get them there pronto. Tell the pilots to use their underside airlocks. Evacuate the air from the airlock then hover over the vents and pop the airlock hatch as soon as Fire comes out. The sudden vacuum should suck him right in. It worked before, during Necropolis. Let's see if it works again."

She crawled out from under the console, anchoring herself securely to it as she disengaged the fan rotor control. The tornado force wind died away almost instantly. A few seconds later, Anderson gratefully received the message she had been waiting for over her helmet radio.

"That's a roj, Anderson. Manta Tank Four reports it's got Fire in the bag. Word's just come through that Giant has got Mortis under containment too, over at Clooney Memorial.

Two down, two to go. Anderson found herself almost giving a silent prayer of thanks. Cruel and capricious, contrary and whimsical though they may be, the gods of Mega-City One were being relatively charitable today. As bad as the carnage had been so far, it could still have been a lot worse if all four Dark Judges remained on the loose.

"Any word yet on the other two?"

"Death's turned up at Resyk. Dredd's there now."

Resyk was five sectors away. Anderson knew that, even if she left now on a fast-travelling h-wagon, she would still get there too late to be of any help there. Dredd would have to handle Death without her, but if anyone could deal with the most dangerous and unpredictable of the Dark Judges, it would be Joe Dredd.

"Copy. Any sign of Creep Number Four?"

"Judge Fear? Nothing so far, not since he hit the Academy of Law. Looks like he's gone completely to ground."

Indeed he had, quite literally.

Fear was down there in the darkness beneath the city, preparing the way for what was to come next. Through the psychic links that connected all four Dark Judges, he already knew of the defeat of at least two of his brethren, but it was only a temporary setback, at worst. Soon his work here would be complete. Then the power of the Dark Judges would be multiplied many times over, and they would at last be able to bring justice to this city and then the sinful, life-filled world beyond.

He had gathered others down here in the darkness to aid him. Some were their would-be servants from the city above, the humans and the transformed Hungry Ones, who all foolishly believed that they would be joining Fear and his brethren in the dark new world they would soon be creating. Others were the simple, debased things that lived down here in the Under-Place already. Fear had found their primitive minds surprisingly and pleasingly easy to control. Seized by terror, possessed by a mind-numbing dread of the Dark Judge, they made useful enough slaves for the moment, but, like all of the Dark Judges' other erstwhile servants, they would be judged along with all the others when the time came.

Fear watched as his servants and slaves hauled the final plinth into position, bringing it into carefully judged alignment with the others. Nearby, the Hungry Ones held the moaning, terrified figures of the four kidnapped Psi-cadets. The vampires growled softly to themselves in irritation, their blood thirst held in check only by the all-powerful command of the Dark Judge.

There was the other prize too, although Fear barely recognised it as being the same human who had served them so faithfully in engineering their escape from their prison. Fear almost cackled aloud to himself at the idea that this wretched thing had thought itself worthy of being elevated to the same status as he and his brethren. The foolish mortal's desire for life-beyond-death was motivated purely by a terror of dying. Yet how could dying be something to be avoided, when death was the natural state to which all living things should be despatched to as quickly as possible?

Still, thought Fear, there were interesting possibilities in this new form their servant had created for himself. These human forms he and his brethren inhabited, even when strengthened by the power of the Dark Judges' psychic possession, had too often proven to be too fallible for the great work at hand.

Perhaps, he mused, they would find a use for the corpse when the portal was opened and the business of judging this world began in true earnest.

FOURTEEN

If the business of Resyk was death, as the facility's slogan proudly proclaimed, then it was certainly a claim that Judge Death had taken seriously. By Dredd's estimation, by the time he and the other Judges arrived there, the undead creep had already slaughtered his way through most of the staff of the entire day shift, as well as the crews of several meat-wagons making deliveries to the place, and also four separate and well-attended funeral parties there to see their loved ones off on their final journey along the Resyk conveyor belt.

Dredd and the others had burst in on the fourth of these funeral parties, a mass event for sixteen victims of the recent Minogue Sisters conflict, just as Death was consoling one grieving window in his own unique way.

"No need to thank me, sinner," he hissed, laughing as he thrust one skeletal hand into her chest and squeezed her heart dry. "You'll be with him again soon enough."

Dredd caught his old foe's attention with three Lawgiver rounds through the head and chest. His fourth shot shattered the teleporter device hanging from Death's belt, destroying it with just the same intent as Anderson's earlier ploy.

"Now you're going nowhere, creep, except back to the place you escaped from," Dredd told him.

Death hissed angrily, discarding the lifeless corpse still held firm in his grip. Anderson had already found out that the Dark Judges were again exhibiting some unnerving new abilities this time around. Now Death was about to prove that Anderson's experience with Fire was no fluke. At a single gesture from Death, the lids flew off the row of coffins against the far wall where the corpses would be loaded down onto the conveyor belt below, and the bullet-riddled bodies of the sixteen block war combatants climbed out to attack the nearest living things around them.

"Just a taste of what is in store soon enough for you all, sinners!" Death hissed as the reanimated corpses hungrily charged at the terrified mourners.

Dredd didn't know how far Death's newfound zombie-making abilities extended, but the tactic had already achieved its immediate purpose. While the attention of Dredd and the other Judges was on the zombies, Death had already made his escape from the room.

"Teague and Goddard - with me!" Dredd shouted to the two Judges nearest him. "The rest of you - take care of the situation here!"

Dredd was already running through the door, pursuing Death along the catwalk that ran along the length of the huge processing hall, following the conveyor belt below and the corpses stacked up on it on their progress towards the Resyk grinders. Teague and Goddard came running along behind Dredd, both of them good back-up men whom Dredd knew he could depend on against a perp as dangerous as Death. All three Judges snapped off shots at Death. Lawgiver rounds punched into the Dark Judge's lifeless body, doing little to no real damage but keeping the pressure up on the fleeing figure.

Suddenly and without any warning, Death turned and went on the offensive. He reached out and, with one skeletal hand, snapped off a two-metre length of steel tubing from the guard rail of the walkway. The amount of force needed to do this was impressive, showing the supernatural strength hidden within the Dark Judge's deceptively emaciated and cadaverous frame. What Death did next was even more impressive.

He hurled the steel pole like a javelin, sending it hurtling towards his pursuers. Dredd ducked, barely avoiding the missile as it flew past him at near bullet-like speed. Judge Teague, following in close behind, wasn't so fortunate or agile. The pole struck him full in the chest, impaling itself through him, and he collapsed to the ground with almost a metre of blood-slicked metal jutting out of his back.

His partner Goddard grabbed at him before his body could slip under the guard rail and fall onto the conveyor belt below.

"Call for med-assistance and stay here with him until it arrives," Dredd ordered grimly, knowing that Death had just further successfully whittled down the odds against him, promising himself that Teague was going to be the very last of Death's victims today.

Time to bring this chase to an end, decided Dredd, firing off a brace of Hi-Ex shells at the fleeing figure in front of him. Death eluded all of them, as Dredd suspected he would, but the Dark Judge hadn't been his primary intended target.

The shells exploded into the grillwork of the walkway in front of Death, blowing it apart. Suddenly there was nothing supporting that end of this section of the walkway, and so, with loud groan of rending metal, it collapsed from beneath Death's feet.

The Dark Judge plummeted, spilling onto the Resyk conveyor belt. A second or two later, Dredd landed on the same belt, about twenty metres behind him, having jumped from the walkway to continue the chase.

Death rose to his feet, snarling: "Fool! You still think you can defeat me?"

"Willing to give it my best shot, creep," countered Dredd, raising his Lawgiver.

Before he could fire, through, he felt something scrabbling against the material of his Judge boot. Looking down, he saw one of the corpses there hungrily trying to gnaw its way through the toe of his boot. A Standard Execution round through the crown of the corpse's skull put paid to that idea, but now more reanimated cadavers were rising up all around Dredd on the conveyor belt.

More proof of Death's newfound zombie-making ability. They came at Dredd, snarling and clawing, all of them hissing at him in an eerily familiar voice.

"Fool! You cannot stop me now!" gloated one of them, just before Dredd blew its head off with a burst of Lawgiver fire.

"Give up, you have already lost!" mocked another, as a kick from Dredd sent it flying off the conveyor belt and into the giant metal rollers that kept the whole mechanism churning along.

"Why struggle when the end is inevitable?" suggested another, shrugging off the blows that Dredd pounded into its dead face. "Soon Mega-City One will be judged. Equal justice for all, that is what we will bring."

The corpse collapsed, lifeless, back to the ground as Dredd delivered a blow powerful enough to drive its nose bone back into the decayed mush of its brain. For every zombie that fell, though, at least another one rose up to take its place. They threw themselves at Dredd remorselessly, clawing and biting at him, tearing away shreds of both his uniform and the skin underneath as they tried to drag the Judge down by sheer weight of numbers.

Dredd shot, punched and bludgeoned his way through all of them, showing the same indomitable, die-hard determination that had kept both him and his city alive so many times before.

Suddenly, there were no more zombies in front of him. Only Death himself awaited, and Dredd barely had time to react as the leader of the Dark Judges lunged at him. Dredd knocked aside the clawed hand that might otherwise have squeezed the life out of his heart. The important thing, he knew, was to keep Death's hands away from him, and for this he brought his daystick into play, weaving it in the air between him and his old foe, using its weighted tip to parry away any of Death's sudden, darting attacks.

Equally important, Dredd knew, was to keep Death distracted, so that he didn't realise what was happening behind him, and just how close they were getting to the end of the conveyor belt.

Dredd had rarely been this close to his ancient enemy, and the stench from Death's lifeless, decaying flesh was almost overpowering. The most dangerous of all the Dark Judges literally reeked of evil and death, souring the air around him, tainting everything that came into contact with him.

Death lunged forward again. Dredd hit him a daystick blow to the side of neck that would have killed anything living, but this time Death's attack was in deadly earnest, and he didn't retreat back again. His long, thin fingers darted out, sinking through the armour of Dredd's shoulder pad to penetrate through into the flesh beneath. To Dredd, it felt like being stabbed by five burning icicles of frozen venom. His whole right arm blazed with pain and then went completely numb. His Lawgiver dropped from fingers suddenly rendered senseless and he fell to the ground, the numbness creeping slowly into the rest of his body.

Death bore down on him, his other hand poised to push into Dredd's chest to find and close on his heart.

"Hurts, doesn't it?" cackled the Dark Judge, flexing his fingers inside the meat of Dredd's shoulder, exploring the contours of the bones and muscles in there. If he was expecting any cries of pain from Dredd, he was to be disappointed. "Don't worry, though. Your pain and sin will soon be at an end."

Death's other hand hovered over Dredd's heart. He leered down at his old enemy, their faces only centimetres apart. "Any famous last words?"

"Yeah, creep - eat helmet!"

Dredd's head shot up, the armoured crown of his Judge's helmet smashing into Death's grinning visage. Bone shattered, teeth went flying. As viciously brutal head-butts went, it was a move worthy of Mean Machine Angel himself.

Death reeled back, spitting teeth and curses. If his claws hurt as they went into Dredd's flesh, it was little compared to how much they hurt as they were ripped back out again. The entire shoulder and arm and a good part of Dredd's chest were shot through with white-hot needles of pain. The lawman hauled himself to his feet, fighting off the wave of nausea that welled up inside him. He couldn't allow himself to succumb to it, not when Death was still a threat. His gun-hand was useless, so he scooped up his Lawgiver with his left hand instead.

Death came lurching straight back at him. Dredd's Hi-Ex shot caught him square in the chest, blowing him backwards and knocking him to the floor of the conveyor belt.

They were only a few metres from the end of the belt now. After that, there was nothing but the drop into the corpse-grinding machinery. Death was starting to draw himself up again, his chest blown open but the rest of his body otherwise intact. Dredd ran at him, not giving him a chance to decide how to react.

Dredd leapt upwards, grabbing the bottom rung of the overhanging maintenance ladder with his one good arm, swinging both legs out as he did so to catch Death full in the face with the soles of both Judge boots.

"How about it? Any famous last words for me?" asked Dredd, as Death flew backwards over the end of the conveyor belt. Any answer he might have had come back with was lost in the whirring thunder of the machinery below, machinery which was designed to render the human form - even one possessed by the spirit of a Dark Judge - down into its most basic constituent elements.

Dredd hauled himself painfully up the ladder, not sure he was going to have the strength to make it to the top. From long experience, he knew he was going to be spending a lot of recuperation time in a speedheal machine after this.

"Dredd!"

Goddard's voice. Dredd gratefully grabbed the hand wearing a Judge glove reaching down towards him. A few seconds later, he was being pulled back up to the safety of the overhead catwalk.

"Teague?" he asked.

"The Meds have got him. They say he should pull through. Where's Death?"

Dredd glanced down into the churning machinery below. "He got recycled."

He activated his helmet radio. "Anderson - Dredd. Scratch Death off the list, at least for the moment."

"Copy that, Dredd. I got a sudden psi-flash when he hit the grinders. Trust me, you really don't want to know what his last words actually were, but you can be sure they were about you."

Two Med-Judges came running up, concern written all over their faces. Dredd waved them away in annoyance. In forty years on the streets, he'd been shot, stabbed, beaten, blown up and burned to within a centimetre of his life almost more times than he could remember. Whatever his injuries were this time, they could wait.

"He's out there in spirit form again. Any idea where he's heading now?" Dredd asked Anderson.

"The Undercity," came the reply. "That's all I could pick up from him before I lost contact again. I think Fear's down there too, with the missing Psi-cadets. I'm picking up a trace of their psi-presence. I'm on my way now to the Gate 38 Undercity entrance. How soon can you meet me there?"

Dredd thought of his injuries. Sensation was gradually returning to the shoulder where Death's fingers had penetrated his flesh. As sensations went, the lancing bolts of pain he was now experiencing there wasn't exactly what you would call comforting. Clearly, the smart thing to do would be to get his injuries fully checked out in a Sector House med-bay before he did anything else.

"Meet you there in twenty," he told Anderson.

FIFTEEN

The Undercity. The ruins of Old New York, abandoned and forgotten. A festering blight which Mega-City One's original architects had dealt with by simply building over the top of it, burying the decaying streets in a vast rockcrete shell which served as part of the foundations of the shining future city they erected above it.

The Undercity may have been abandoned, but that did not mean it was uninhabited. Criminals often sought refuge in its sheltering darkness from the prying eyes of the Justice Department. As refuges go, though, the Undercity was one fraught with dangers all of its own, for its derelict buildings and eternally dark alleys were home to mutants, outlawed cults, tribes of troglodyte cannibals and sinister outcasts from the city above.

When Judges could no longer serve on the streets, many chose to take the Long Walk, bringing law to the lawless regions that bordered Mega-City One. It was often a matter of locker-room debate amongst Street Judges about whether the wild, mutie-inhabited rad-deserts of the Cursed Earth were any more dangerous and challenging as a Long Walk choice of destination than that dismal, sunless place directly beneath the streets they patrolled every day.

Dredd and Anderson had both been in the Undercity before, and its eerie ghost town streets and crumbling, derelict twentieth century buildings and remains of skyscrapers held little that they hadn't encountered before.

"More troggies in front of us," commented Anderson casually, registering the dim shapes moving in the gloom ahead of them, just beyond the furthest fringes of their flashlight beams.

"I see 'em," answered Dredd. "Nothing to get worried about. Light's usually enough to scare them off. If that doesn't work, the sight of a Lawgiver or a Judge badge will do the trick. They know better to mess with us."

Anderson ducked sharply, barely avoiding the axe weapon that was hurled at her from out of the shadows in front of them.

"You were saying?" she asked, bringing her Lawgiver up to bear as the troggies rushed at the two Judges.

They were in the area known as Central Park, having followed what had once been Park Avenue north from where they had entered the Undercity at Gate 38. Anderson didn't know what Central Park had been like back in the days of Old New York, but now it was an overgrown, tangled maze of petrified, leafless trees and weird thorny vegetation that still somehow managed to thrive down here in the absence of natural light. It wasn't the kind of place you chose to enter unless it was strictly necessary. Anderson was tracking Death's trail, following his psychic spoor. The Dark Judge's disembodied spirit had passed this way, and recently too. Which meant Dredd and Anderson had to follow him in there too.

Dredd levelled his M2000 Widowmaker. He was just about to fire - at this range, the gun would wreak carnage amongst the charging troggies - when Anderson suddenly knocked his gun barrel aside.

"Wait, there's another way!" she shouted, changing the shell selector switch on her Lawgiver and firing the gun up into the air.

The flare shell exploded in the darkness overhead, bathing the whole scene in eerie, brilliant luminescence. The troggies, the spectrum of their vision atrophied through generations of life in the lightless depths of the Undercity, screamed as one and turned and fled, their hands shielding their sensitive, light-damaged eyes.

Dredd lowered his gun and looked at Anderson. "Didn't know you had a soft spot for troggies, Anderson. My way would still have been better. At least then they wouldn't have had a chance to regroup and come back for another shot."

"It wasn't their fault, Dredd," explained Anderson. "They're just simple, scared creatures. You were right when you said that normally they would be too afraid of us to attack, but something made them. I sensed it just as they attacked, and it was almost as if they were possessed by their own terror. Their minds were filled with nothing but-"

"Fear?" said Dredd. "With a capital F?"

Anderson nodded gravely. "Looks like Death and Fire weren't the only ones to pick up a few new tricks this time around."

The troggies tactic hadn't worked, so next time the Dark Judges used their other remaining servants. A few minutes further on, as Dredd and Anderson cleared a thicket of petrified trees, they were attacked by what must surely have been the last of the vampires and Church of Death fanatics.

This time around, Anderson wasn't so concerned about preventing a bloodbath.

Volleys of Heatseekers from her and Dredd unerringly sought out and found the warmer human bodies of the cultists amongst the lines of vampires. After that, with the cultists taken care of, the two Judges could both go to town on the remaining undead.

Anderson switched Lawgiver mags, loading one filled with nothing but Hi-Ex and Incendiary shells. Lawgiver special rounds might be expensive, but Anderson didn't think that Accounts Division would be querying the cost of any excessive use of them in this particular firefight.

In the space of a few seconds, three vampires exploded apart under the impact of multiple Hi-Ex rounds, while the same number were transformed into stumbling, screaming mannequins of flame by Incendiary hits. Over on his side of the battle, Dredd was doing plenty to keep up his share of the kill tally. The M2000 kept up a steady rate of fire, obliterating anything that came within five metres of Dredd's position.

Despite the carnage that was being inflicted upon them, however, the bloodsucking freaks just kept throwing themselves forward. They were probably psychically controlled too, Anderson realised, but why were Fear and Death throwing their remaining followers at her and Dredd in such a reckless, suicidal fashion?

A glance at the torch-lit area beyond the scene of the battle quickly told her the answer. She didn't immediately recognise the standing stone structure erected there, but she recognised its purpose, and she could clearly sense the strong psychic vibrations emanating from the shimmering patch of darkness between the pillars of the central stone arch. Even as she watched, she saw a group of figures hurrying towards it. The disembodied spirit of Death was with them, her psi-senses told her, and so were four other distinctive psi-presences.

"Dredd!" she shouted in warning. "They've opened up a gateway to Deadworld! That's where they're taking the Psi-cadets!"

"Cover me!" Dredd shouted, running forward, blowing apart the first vampire trying to stop him. Anderson dropped to one knee, gripped her Lawgiver in two hands and began picking off targets, Hi-Ex blasting anything that looked likely to get close to her fellow Judge.

Dredd, still running, drew his Lawgiver. The M2000 was good enough for the kind of work it was designed for, but he was a Street Judge, and a Lawgiver was his stock in trade. Bullets spat out at him from amongst the standing stones; armed cultists left behind to guard the gateway. Dredd picked them off with ease; all the suicidal determination and crazed religious fanaticism in the world was no substitute for Academy of Law training, where a cadet's marksmanship training began at age five.

The last cultist fell to the ground, and Dredd was in amongst the stones now. He was approaching the gateway when a shape amongst the surrounding darkness detached itself from the shadows and flowed towards him.

Alerted by her senses a scant split-second earlier, Anderson managed to shout out a warning. The shape hissed in anger and hurled something at her. Anderson cried out in pain, and fell to the ground as she felt the mantrap device's jagged metal teeth bite into her leg, penetrating right through to the bone. Dredd spun round, instinctively firing several shots into the shadow shape's central body mass, and then the most mysterious of the Dark Judges was upon him. And, for the second time in his life, Dredd found himself gazing into the face of Fear.

The first time had been almost twenty years ago. He had been a younger man then, of course, completely sure of himself and his abilities, afraid of nothing, free of any of the doubts and fears that came with age.

And now? What was he afraid of now, when he had once taken the Long Walk into the Cursed Earth after losing faith in the justice system he'd served all his life? When he knew that he was no longer irreplaceable, when he knew that the Justice Department had a whole new series of clones sharing the same bloodline as him coming through the Academy?

Death? No. Everyone died, and death had been an ever-constant factor through his life, for as long as he could remember. He did not fear death, he knew.

Failure. That was what Dredd was secretly afraid of now, and that was what he saw there in the terrible black void within Fear's open helm.

He saw his city defeated and destroyed in a thousand different ways. He saw its walls crumble, and the teeming millions of howling, vengeful muties pour through into the city beyond. He saw a city ruled by a hundred different versions of lawlessness, but in all these visions the end result was the same: its citizens, free to do what they wanted, falling upon each other in a murderous display of the very worst aspects of unfettered human nature. He saw times when the place where Mega-City One stood was nothing more than a vast smoking crater or a dead landscape of nuked-out ruins. He saw the city empty and abandoned, its giant towers slowly crumbling to dust, with no clue as to what happened to its vanished inhabitants. He saw his city under occupation by its enemies, its citizens brutalised and enslaved.

He saw all this, and in every vision he knew what he saw had happened because he hadn't been there to stop it. One day, death, old age or bad luck would catch up with him, and then Mega-City would fall.

Fear hissed in satisfied pleasure as he sensed Dredd's worst nightmares bubbling to the surface. At last, he had found something that this most stubborn of sinners was afraid of. It was all Fear needed to push the door open further into Dredd's mind and flood it with sensations of pure, unadulterated terror. In moments, the sinner would be lying dead at Fear's feet, his eyes stretched wide in final horror at the things the Dark Judge had unleashed into his mind, and then Fear's triumph would be complete.

"Yes," the cold, ghostly voice of Fear whispered. "Look deeper. Gaze into the face of Fear and know what true nightmare looks like."

Dredd looked, and for a moment stood on the edge of the precipice. Then he remembered three things, and the shadowy terrors waiting for him down there in that abyss retreated back into the shadows, snarling in cheated anger.

He was Joe Dredd, a Judge of Mega-City One, and he wasn't going to lie down and die as long as his city still needed him.

"Told you once before," growled Dredd, reaching down to his belt pouch. "Maybe you don't remember, so here's a quick reminder...

"Gaze into the fist of Dredd!"

Dredd's fist smashed into the empty helm that was Fear's head. The Dark Judge reeled back, hissing in outrage. A moment later, though, Fear was rising up again, damaged but still intact.

"The years have made you weak, sinner. Now you no longer have the strength to defeat me!"

"Don't bet on it, creep," Dredd told him. "Check your headspace. I left something for you in there."

Dredd hurled himself aside as the frag grenade he had left inside Fear's open helm exploded. The blasted remains of Fear crumbled to the ground, trails of black vapour already starting to seep out of it as Fear's spirit abandoned its destroyed host body.

Dredd didn't waste any time. The suction trap device was in his hand even before the Dark Judge's spirit had finished seeping out of its former body. He threw it, its small anti-grav generator and gyro-stabilisers activating immediately. It hovered above Fear's abandoned body, powerful motors kicking in to draw in everything in the air around it, including the gaseous stuff of Fear's escaping spirit. Fear gave one last hissing scream as his spirit-form was drawn inexorably into the device, and then the trap sealed itself shut again. It fell to the ground, its power used up, giving little hint of the malign monstrosity now safely held inside it.

Dredd picked it up, and looked over to where Anderson was limping towards him. The mantrap, its jaws prised open, lay behind her, as did the corpses of the last few vampires who had foolishly thought she was trapped there helpless.

He tossed the suction trap over to her. "Souvenir of your trip to the Undercity, courtesy of the Psi-Div Teks."

She caught it, wincing it pain from her injury. Fear's mantrap had done a real number on her leg, Dredd saw.

"Three down-"

"And one to go," Anderson said, looking at the swirling darkness of the dimensional gateway. "Death's escaped back to Deadworld, and he's taken the Psi-cadets with him. Grud knows what he's planning to do with them."

"Nothing good," decided Dredd, reloading his Lawgiver before moving off towards the gateway entrance.

"Wait, Dredd! You can't go through that thing on your own! You need me there too!" Anderson started limping forward after the other Judge, but her injured leg suddenly gave way beneath her. Giving an involuntary cry of pain, she fell forward. Dredd caught her and lowered her gently to the ground.

"You'll be more of a liability than a help in Deadworld, with that leg," he told her. "Wait here for back-up. Anything except me tries to come back through that gateway, use Hi-Ex to demolish the whole thing. Check your chronometer - I'll be back within an hour."

"And what if you're not?"

Dredd was already walking away towards the mouth of the portal.

"Then Hi-Ex it anyway. If I don't make it, then at least we haven't left the door open for Death to come back. Whatever he's planning, I'm going to make sure it ends on Deadworld."

And then he was gone, swallowed up by the swirling darkness of the gateway.

Dredd's boots crunched noisily on the carpet of bones at his feet. The bleached litter of human remains stretched out in all directions, for as far as the eye could see in the perpetual twilight gloom of Deadworld. How many were there, Dredd wondered. Hundreds of millions? Billions? However many, it could never be enough for the Dark Judges. They had exterminated all life on their own world, and now they wanted to export this same nightmare to Dredd's world.

Dredd had been on Deadworld before. The carpet of bones, the twisted buildings with giant, screaming faces emerging out of them, the eerie, eternal silence that hung in the air, the sinister gloom that cast a lifeless pall over everything - all of it was familiar to him, like the memory of a particularly bad dream.

This is what my city will look like one day, he reminded himself, if we ever fail to stop Death and the others.

They were just ahead of him, he could see, mounting the bone-scattered steps of what had probably been this world's version of the Grand Hall of Justice. There weren't many of them left now, Dredd saw. Four vampires or cultists, each one carrying one of the Psi-cadets, and another group carrying something large and shroud-covered on a makeshift stretcher. Dredd couldn't see the disembodied spirit of Death, but he knew it would be here somewhere, hissing commands and sinister exhortations to its servants.

The bloodsucking freaks disappeared inside the vast, fortress-like building. Dredd picked up his pace, hoping to catch them before they could begin whatever it was they were planning. He got halfway to the entrance of the building before, with a dry rattle like someone expiring on a slab, the inhabitants of Deadworld began to come to life again.

Skeletal fingers reached up to claw against the soles of his Judge boots, trying to pull him down into the writhing bone carpet at his feet. Empty skulls shouted out hate-filled insults or defiant threats, all of them speaking in Death's own hissing, mocking tones. Dredd kept on going, in places actually wading through the layers of human remains as they rose up around him.

They came up in massed groups, the tangled mess of bones creating strange skeletal hybrids as the fragments of different bodies were freely used to form brand new composite forms. Roaring blasts from Dredd's M2000 blew them back into the bone-dust from where they came. He kept on firing, destroying group after group just as fast as they rose up to face him. Those few that survived the furious barrage succumbed easily enough to punches or blows from his weapon butt, collapsing back into the ground whenever they were struck with enough force. It was grim, tiring work, but Dredd was in little real danger from the waves of skeletal figures that threw themselves at him. The real point, he knew, was to keep him busy and delay him from reaching Death's lair.

He broke through at last, reaching the entrance to the fortress in a few paces and discarding the now empty Widowmaker as he sprinted up the steps towards the open doorway ahead. The skeletal things pursuing him collapsed as one, the bones of the closest ones tumbling rattling down the steps behind him.

After that, Dredd was through the doorway, which took the form of a giant screaming mouth, and into the lair of the Dark Judges.

It wasn't difficult to work out which way to go. The rising sound of the chanting echoed through the dead, empty corridors and chambers of the place. All Dredd had to do was follow the sound back to its source.

The Judge found Death and the others in a vast, high-ceilinged chamber deep inside the fortress complex.

The four psi-cadets were tied down on the top of crystal slabs, grouped around a structure that was like a more elaborate version of the gateway portal in the Undercity. Crackling bolts of psi-energy leapt from the cadets to the dark, stone-like material of the new portal that dominated one wall of the place. As each bolt struck, flickering power runes became visible, carved into the surfaces around the edge of the portal, and the glowing, swirling haze at the centre of the gateway seemed to grow slightly larger and more ominous every time.

Dredd strode forward, sheer instinct warning him of the waiting ambush vital moments before it came. The vampire that leapt at him got a Standard Execution round through its head for its troubles. At the same time, however, a cultist hurled a dagger at him from his other side. Unable to dodge the weapon in time, Dredd simply chose the most expedient course and used his free hand to block the blade which would otherwise have found his heart. A brief grunt of pain was his only reaction as the spinning knife sank through the material of his Judge gauntlet, impaling him through his left hand.

Dredd had better things to do than react to the injury. The knife-throwing creep got two shots through the heart back in return, and so did his pal while he was still fumbling to aim his spit pistol. Half of what he had left in his Lawgiver's magazine took care of the rest of the Dark Judges' remaining servants. A few seconds later, the last of the gunshots faded away, the last of the cultists slid to the floor, and Dredd declared the Church of Death officially out of business.

He ran forward towards the nearest of the Psi-cadets, intending to free them. As far as he could see, he and the four cadets were the only things left alive in the chamber...

And as soon as he'd formed the thought, the... the thing appeared out of the shadows on the far side of the chamber.

"Hello, Joe," it cackled in a voice that was both horribly familiar, but still somehow different. "Surprised to see me back so soon?"

"Icarus!"

Dredd knew this wasn't really the deceased Dr Dick Icarus, aka Vernon Martins, that he faced now, even as the surprised exclamation of the name escaped from his lips. For one thing, Icarus was dead. For another, the last time Dredd had seen him, he hadn't been three metres tall and covered in thick bony plates of armour that rose out of his mutated, virus-warped flesh.

"Not quite," growl-hissed the thing in a voice that was half Death's, and half something even stronger and yet more monstrous. "Our servant's spirit has left this flesh, but his sinful attempts to attain eternal life would seem to have had their uses. His serum flows in this body's veins, transforming its dead flesh. Now it is truly indestructible, a fitting new form to contain my spirit and a vessel with which to continue our great work."

As the thing spoke, Dredd could see Death's own ghastly visage emerging at moments from the pulsing mass of flesh that was its face. It was still changing, still transforming before Dredd's eyes.

"Indestructible?" sneered Dredd. "Fine in theory. Let's see how it works in practice."

His Hi-Ex shots caught the Death-thing square in the chest, blowing it backwards off its feet. It landed heavily and twitched for a moment, lying in a spreading pool of its own fluids and exploded flesh. It lay there for a moment, but then began to climb to its feet again.

Dredd watched, seeing its flesh knitting back together, layers of hard bone-shell pushing up through the surface of the skin to provide additional natural armour. In what seemed like seconds, the thing's body had regenerated itself. If anything, in fact, it actually looked slightly larger, more powerful and menacing than it had before he had shot it.

The Death-thing growled in pleasure, pleased at this test of its new body's abilities. Dredd didn't give up. Standard Execution rounds struck against its bony armour, to little effect. A Hi-Ex round to the face wiped the gloating smile from its face, but only for a moment. After that, the smile just grew back again, along with the rest of its face. Several Incendiary rounds burst against it, setting it ablaze. The phosphor-fed flames caught for a moment but died away again, unable to affect the stuff of the thing's unnatural body. What little flesh that had been burned flaked away in blackened scales, to be instantly replaced by newly regenerated tissue.

Death was shambling towards him all this time, forcing Dredd to circle away from him, keeping the altars with the Psi-cadets on them between the Dark Judge and his prey. A moan escaped from the lips of the cadet nearest Dredd, as another current of rippling psi-energy leapt out from her towards the portal. Death gloated at the sound, as if it was the sweetest music.

"Yes, with the energy from these little ones, I can open the dimensional gateways to their full extent. The Sisters of Death will be found and returned to us. Deadworld and your own corrupt dimension will merge together as one. I will cross over again to free my brothers. In this body, with our two worlds merged into one, I will be invincible, and all will finally be judged!"

"Right. And what makes you think we're going to stand here and let that happen?"

It was Anderson's voice. Dredd turned to see the Psi-Judge standing at the entrance to the chamber. She looked seriously haggard, worn out by everything she'd been through in the last twenty-four hours. Then Dredd remembered his own experiences in the same period, and realised he probably looked just as bad.

"Anderson! Thought I told you to-"

"Stay and guard the gateway in the Undercity? Yeah, well, you know me, Dredd. I never was much good at following orders. So how do you want to handle this?"

"Free the cadets. I'll keep gruesome here busy while you do it," Dredd ordered, snapping off another series of shots at the foul thing containing Death.

The brute charged forward, knowing that it was now under serious threat. Dredd hit it with everything he had, and then some more, just for good measure. The Death-thing staggered under the crippling impact of multiple Hi-Ex shells. Rapid-fire bursts tore into it. Incendiaries set it ablaze. Armour-piercing shells drilled through the bony plates of its chest, futilely seeking out vital organs to puncture and burst.

The Death-thing absorbed it all, and just kept on coming. Dredd stood his ground, knowing that every bullet impact still delayed it for one crucial moment more, giving Anderson more time to free the cadets. He risked a glance back, seeing that she had now freed the first of them. He had only looked away for the barest of moments - but when he looked back the Death-thing was right on top of him.

It lashed out at him with its claws. Dredd felt razor-sharp talons shred apart the armour of his eagle shoulder pad and then he was flying through the air. The bone-jarring collision with the wall only added to the damage Dredd had just suffered, but even as he fell to the floor, he was reloading his Lawgiver and taking aim at Death's monstrous new form as it bore down on him once more.

Three Hi-Ex rounds staggered it in its tracks. A raking blast of Standard Execution rounds blew out both of its eyes.

Two cadets freed now. Weak and confused though they were, they still ran to help Anderson free their remaining companions.

An Armour Piercing shot erupted though the back of the beast's head, unleashing a torrent of black, slimy matter from inside the Death-thing's skull. Double blasts of rapid-fire took away its knees. It stumbled for a few seconds as its body regenerated the damage, and then kept on coming.

Three cadets free now. They huddled together in fear as Anderson hurried to free the last of them.

Dredd protected them, standing there pumping round after round into the Death-thing's body as it remorselessly came on at him. With a hellish shriek, it lashed out with one hand, knocking the weapon from Dredd's grip, grasping him by his now empty gun-hand as it hauled him up off his feet, dangling him in the air in front of its grinning face.

Death squeezed, enjoying the spreading grimace of pain on the face of his old enemy as every bone in Dredd's hand was crushed, the broken bones grinding together under the relentless pressure of Death's grip.

Dredd blacked out for a few moments. The Death-thing dropped him with a disappointed shrug, and then prodded at the groaning figure lying at its feet. "Wake up, sinner," it hissed. "Judgement time is here at last!"

"Got that right at least, freak," Anderson challenged, standing with the four psi-cadets clustered around her. "You wanted to use these kids' abilities for your own sick reasons. Let's see how you like getting some of it back at you in return."

She and the cadets linked hands, linking minds at the same moment.

Psi-blasting was only taught to Psi-cadets in their last two years at the Academy of Law, and the cadets had just begun their training in it. Anderson had, however, had more than a few years' practice. She focussed their power through her own mind, amplifying and focussing it, adding her own considerable psychic strength to theirs.

What hit Death was the psychic equivalent of a close-range blast from a sawn-off scatter gun. His bestial form reeled back, screeching in psychic and physical pain. Injuries he had thought safely regenerated spontaneously opened up again. Wounds blossomed across his body, overwhelming this new form's ability to deal with them. Death screeched hideously again, feeling his control slipping over his host body, feeling its strange, unnatural flesh begin to rebel against him.

"Now, Dredd!" shrieked Anderson, bringing her own Lawgiver up to bear. Dredd rolled and grabbed his own fallen gun. His gun-hand was useless, and his other hand was still injured, but as long as he could hold a gun, Dredd was still to be considered completely lethal.

The two of them opened fire simultaneously, and Death's new body was destroyed utterly in a few furious seconds of combined Lawgiver fire. Death's spirit was already abandoning the thing, even before the burning, shattered fragments of it hit the ground.

"Uh-uh," warned Anderson, focusing her psi-powers again. "Your non-corporeal butt's going nowhere, except back with us."

With her mind still linked to those of the psi-cadets, she reeled Death's screaming, struggling spirit-form in with relative ease. At the last moment, she broke off all psychic contact with the others - cadets that young and inexperienced weren't up to having a super-creep like Judge Death crawling around inside their minds, Anderson wisely decided.

Death's spirit flowed unwillingly into her, held fast in the iron grip of her psi-power. It was inside her now, and she felt the old, sickeningly familiar lurch of repugnance as everything he was reached out to taint her mind and soul. With a final, wrenching mental effort, she seized hold of him and pushed him down into the dark, buried place in her mind which she had prepared for him. His screams of psychic rage filled her mind as he was forced in there and she slammed shut the mental barriers that would hold him there until she was ready to undergo the long and stressful process, assisted by a carefully chosen group of other experienced Psi-Judges, that would be necessary to extract the Dark Judge's spirit again and force it into another, more permanent prison.

Her strength gave way as soon as she knew she had Death under control. She stumbled and fell forwards, only to be caught by Dredd, who by any rights should barely have been able to stand himself.

"I'm... I'm alright," she assured him, weakly. She could still feel Death inside her mind, squirming frantically against the barriers of his psychic prison. "But I can't hold him forever..."

She gestured towards the now-deactivated portal, which showed only blank stone where minutes ago there had been the swirling darkness of the extra-dimensional void. "Whatever you've got left, use it to destroy that. Even if they ever get out again, this is one option that's not going to be available to them again. And then, after that..."

She looked at the four, still-traumatised cadets. One of them was quietly sobbing to herself. Under normal conditions, had this been a Hotdog Run or any other kind of live training mission, that would have earned a cadet a reprimand, or perhaps even have been grounds for failure and instant dismissal from the Academy. Under the circumstances, though, even Dredd wasn't going to comment.

"After that, we go home," Anderson promised.

SIXTEEN

"And the gateway in the Undercity?" asked Chief Judge Hershey.

"Destroyed also," Psi-Chief Shenker assured her.

Hershey sat back in her chair, digesting everything she had heard in the last few hours as the Council of Five had convened in special session to discuss the aftermath of the recent carnage caused by the Dark Judges' escape.

It could have been a lot worse, she reminded herself, looking at the death toll figures that scrolled across the screen of the small desk monitor in front of her. It still made for grim reading but yes, she told herself, it could have been a lot worse.

The Church of Death was officially no more, its members either dead or locked up for life in the cubes. EverPet had been shut down, and Icarus's secret research work seized by the Justice Department before anyone else could try to replicate it. Even before Justice Department med-scientists had started going through it in detail, Judge Helsing had been able to successfully replicate a cure for the effects of Icarus's retrovirus. There would be no more outbreaks of any plagues of undead in Mega-City One for the foreseeable future.

Harsh lessons had also been learned. A new prison to hold the Dark Judges had already been built. Death and his three brethren would be its only inmates, and the facility's location was a closely guarded secret, even within the ranks of the Justice Department. Security procedures at the facility would be ultra-rigorous, with several systems of fail-safes in place. There could hopefully never be a repeat of the events that happened at Nixon Pen.

"We've heard all the reports now," Hershey announced to her assembled Division heads. "Does anyone else have anything to add?"

Ramos cleared his throat noisily and shifted in his seat. Hershey looked expectantly towards her head of Street Division. She could already half-guess what he was going to say.

Ramos pointed to the thick stack of files on the table in front of him. "With respect, Chief Judge, we've had full reports on all the facets of this incident, from all the senior Judges involved. Giant. Helsing. Grud, even Anderson managed to file something..."

Hershey interrupted him. "If you're wondering about Dredd, I remind you that his preliminary report is there in front of you, along with all the others."

"Yes, his preliminary report," emphasised Ramos, who was infamous in the Justice Department for his strict belief in the importance of proper paperwork. "But when can we expect to see his complete report?"

Despite the gravity of the events they had been discussing here at the Council meeting today, Hershey still had to fight to suppress a slight smile as she answered Ramos's query.

"The Meds tell me Dredd is still undergoing speedheal treatment. I'm sure, however, he'll be looking forward to catching up on his paperwork and submitting a full written report to the Council when he returns to active duty in a few days' time."

"But, Dredd, you can't leave the med-bay yet! You've got to give the speedheal time to take full effect, and the Chief Judge's office said that they were to be informed before-"

Dredd's only response was a trademark menacing glower as he hit the activate switch and the elevator doors slid shut in the face of the panicking young Med-Judge.

Riding the elevator down to the Sector House motor pool level, Dredd activated his helmet radio. He was immediately immersed in the non-stop flow of comms data that was the strangely comforting background buzz to the daily life of every Street Judge in the city.

"Item: suspected mob blitz reported, Tony Soprano Skedway..."

"Item: riot by Human League anti-droid agitators in progress, Robot of the Year Show. Riot squad in attendance, Judge Giant commanding..."

"Item: multiple vehicle pile-up, Mo Mowlam Megway. Extra meat and med wagons required urgently. Sounds like a real mess down there on Mowlam..."

"Item: Justice Central reminds all units that there's a full moon tonight. Expect an increase in futsie crimes and general psycho activity. Additional kook cube space has been allocated for tonight's quota of loon-related arrests..."

Dredd flexed the muscles of his gun-hand as he listened to the litany of item reports. The speedheal treatment had been a perfect success, reknitting the broken bones in the hand in almost record time, and the Meds had assured him there was no nerve damage, but the hand still felt slightly stiff and unresponsive to Dredd's own hyper-critical sense of self-judgement. What might seem more than good enough to anyone else was more often than not completely insufficient for the exacting standards Dredd set for himself.

What he needed, he decided, was something to give him a chance to test his combat responses and Lawgiver-handling skills under real combat conditions.

"Item: block war flaring up at the Minogue Conapts. Looks like Kylie and Dannii are renewing hostilities again. Units already at the scene requesting Senior Judge assistance."

The elevator doors opened, and Dredd walked out to where the vehicle pool Tek-chief had a fully fuelled and ammo-loaded Lawmaster already waiting for him.

"Control - Dredd. I'll take command at the Minogues. I'm on my way."

His brethren at times fought and raged against the even more restrictive confines of their new place of imprisonment, but Death remained still and silent, content for the time being to merely observe the conditions of the barriers and wards that held them in check, and study the minds of their human jailors.

Slowly, imperceptibly, the thinnest, most invisible tendrils of his psychic aura crept out to explore the limits of this new place and of the living minds that inhabited it. He was patient, never rash or greedy, and his slowly expanding knowledge of all that was happening around him passed beneath the psychic perceptions of the batteries of Psi-Judges who were there day and night to keep watch over him and his brothers.

There were possibilities even here, Death sensed. Dim and remote they may be right now, but Death was patient in a way in which his still-living jailers were not, and after all he had all eternity to wait and plan, if need be.

"Patience, brothers," he consoled the others, whispering to them in a voice so quiet that it existed at a level never even suspected by the living. "One day we will be free again, I promise, and then our great work will begin again."

On the other side of the dimensional void, in the empty silence of Deadworld, something stirred amongst the jumbled litter of ancient bones that was all that remained of the original victims of the Dark Judges.

Death had been wrong when he had thought he had seized control of an empty vessel when his spirit had flowed in to take possession of Icarus's retrovirus-mutated corpse. Some vestige of the body's original owner had lingered, remaining trapped and helpless within the prison of its own dead flesh, powerless to intervene as the Dark Judge had claimed that same flesh for himself.

That same remote vestige had survived the destruction of its body, but in being freed from that dead flesh, it found it had merely exchanged one prison for another, larger one. It wandered the far reaches of its new prison, receiving no response to its increasingly frantic entreaties for help.

Dr Dick Icarus, aka Vernon Martins, had achieved his wish at last. Here in the empty, still spaces of Deadworld, he would live forever, lingering bodiless and alone for all eternity, with nothing but the dead bones to hear his whispered, begging pleas to be granted the oblivion he now so desperately craved.

THE END

Introduction

Other titles

Indicia

Title Page

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen