The Cold Light of Day Read online

  Judge Ruiz turned to the cadets. “Don’t stray too far. Keep your eyes open. Try to avoid engaging the locals.” She looked at Joe as she spoke, though he was the least likely to get into trouble.

  She followed the Mayor into the store. It was packed with racks of canned goods, most of the cans having long since lost their labels.

  “I’m the chief supplies officer as well as the Mayor,” Faulder said. “And the banker. And I run the mail service.” He stopped, and turned back to face her. “Hell, I’m the town doctor too, when I need to be. You can’t survive out here without picking up a few skills.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, toward the back of the store. “Office is back there. Come on through.”

  THE CADETS HAD been alone for less than five minutes when Gibson turned to Rico. “Want to check this place out? Joe’ll stay here and keep watch, right?”

  “We have orders,” Joe said.

  “Vague instructions, at best,” Rico replied. “C’mon, a bit of freak-spotting won’t hurt anyone.” To Gibson, he said, “You see that guy on the way in who didn’t have a head? Now, that’s a mutation.”

  As they walked away, Joe heard Gibson say, “I once heard about a mutie woman who had two breasts.”

  “Two? So what’s so odd about that?”

  “One hanging out of each side of her neck, that’s what.”

  Joe kept his expression neutral as he watched them leave. He wanted to argue with them that they should stay put, but it wouldn’t do for cadets to be seen squabbling, even out here. Besides, they weren’t technically breaking any rules.

  He heard the sound of something scuffing on the ground behind him, and turned to see a small mutant boy lying face-down on an old skateboard as he pulled himself out of the mayor’s store. The boy’s legs trailed out behind him, boneless lumps of scabbed, filthy flesh that were barely recognisable as limbs. The door slammed shut behind the boy as he asked, “You a Judge?”

  “Not yet,” Joe replied. “I’m training to be one.” He wasn’t entirely sure where to look.

  “I could be a Judge,” the boy said. “Doesn’t look hard, just tellin’ people what to do all day.”

  “And making sure that they do it,” Joe said. “Enforcing the law is considerably more work than just declaring it.”

  The boy nodded for a moment, then asked, “What?”

  Before Joe could answer, the boy propped himself up on one elbow and with his free hand reached out towards Joe’s boot. “How much for the boots? Them’re good boots. I’ll give you... six credits. I got the money back in the house. C’mon an’ I’ll—”

  “The boots aren’t for sale.”

  The boy looked up at Joe again. “Hey, wanna see sumpthin’? Sumpthin’ cool?”

  “No.”

  “All right, I’ll tell you. It’s a dead dog-vulture, down by the river.” The boy scooted backwards a little. “No one else knows about it an’ I was thinkin’ we could go poke it with a stick.”

  “Not interested.”

  The boy hesitated for a moment, then said, “You’ll like it. It’s on the way ta where that old Judge’s body is up on the cross. Yeah, some old fella came in a few months back an’ he was tryna arrest Stumpy Nigel fer sumpthin’, an’ Stumpy’s missus put a bullet in the Judge’s back. They stringed him up an’ left him ta die.”

  Joe stared down at him. “You telling the truth?”

  “Sure, yeah. That’s why I hadda ask if you was a Judge, on accounta you gotta different costume.”

  “It’s a uniform, not a costume.” Joe glanced at the door of the mayor’s store, then said, “All right. Show me.”

  The boy grinned and began to propel himself down the street on his skateboard. Joe fell into step next to him.

  “You’re from the Meg, right? What’s yer name?”

  “Joe Dredd.”

  “I’m Lamb.”

  “That’s... An unusual name.”

  “Yeah. When I was bornd the mayor ast my maw, ‘Whatcha wanna call ’im?’ and she said, ‘Name him after his father,’ an’ then she passed out an’ the mayor ast around who my paw was, an’ someone teld him my paw was on the lam.”

  Lamb talked constantly as they made their way through the small town, but the further they travelled from the mayor’s store, the quieter the boy became. They reached a crossroads, and Lamb inclined his head to the right. “We gotta go down this way to th’ river. I’ll hafta climb over the fence, so that’s gonna be tricky an’ you’ll hafta help me.”

  Lamb scooted around the corner. “Normally, see, when I get to the fence I tie a rope around the board an’ then I hafta drag it over when I get to the other side, unless I wanna crawl all the way to the gate, but that takes even longer. You can just throw it over for me. That’ll save time.” He grinned up at Joe. “An’ you won’t just keep the board or throw it away or anythin’ like that, right? We’re friends now, right?”

  “Don’t you have any other friends?” Joe asked.

  “Sure, yeah. There’s my maw, an’... an’ my gramma, an’ there’s my half-sister Emily, but she’s only three. Mosta the other kids in town don’t liketa play with me ’cos I can’t run.” He stopped, and pointed ahead. “All right, there’s the fence. We’re nearly there.”

  The crude wooden fence was less than a metre high.

  Joe crouched down next to the boy, grabbed him around the chest and lifted him over the fence, then scooped up the skateboard and climbed over.

  Lamb laughed as he slithered back onto the board. “That was great! No one’s ever lifted me before!” He began to propel himself down the gently-sloping riverbank. “Come on, I’ll show you where the dog-vulture is. There’s all, like, maggots an’ beetles all over it. Crawlin’ in its eyes and outta its mouth—it’s really cool.”

  “I’d rather see the body of the Judge.”

  “Yeah, okay... Only, it’s pretty far an’ I’m not sposta go there an’ I’m not even sposta know about it, I think, an’...”

  “You’re lying,” Joe said. “Is there a dead Judge or not?”

  Lamb looked down at the ground. “They tole me to get ridda you. They got guns.” He looked up at Joe. “They beat up the lady Judge an’ said they’d kill my maw if I didn’t distrack you but you can stop them, can’t you? You’re nearly a Judge.”

  Joe felt the skin crawl on the back of his neck. “They’re already here.”

  Mega-City One

  2080 AD

  Eight

  ZEDERICK MARYBETH D’ANNUNZIO winced as the med-Judge poked a long, thin probe into the wound on his thigh.

  “Through and through,” the med-Judge said to Dredd. “No fragments, missed the bone. Some minor vessel damage... Should heal nicely.”

  They were in D’Annunzio’s apartment, with the landlord stretched out on a long canvas-covered sofa. Dredd had insisted that D’Annunzio be removed from Chalk’s apartment—“he’s already contaminated the scene; let’s not make it worse”—and D’Annunzio had complained and moaned as he dragged himself up the stairs.

  Dredd was sure D’Annunzio was hamming it up, but right now wasn’t the time to cite the citizen for slowing the progress of an investigation.

  The med-Judge finished cleaning and sealing the wound. “That’ll do it. Keep off the leg for the next forty-eight hours, citizen.” He turned to Dredd. “Heard about Pendleton and Collins. They were good Judges. That’s on you.”

  Dredd ignored that. “Check on Ruiz. Any change in her condition, let me know immediately.”

  “I’m just saying that—”

  Dredd nodded toward the door. “You’re done here. Out.”

  The med-Judge hesitated for a second, then gathered his equipment and left the apartment.

  “D’Annunzio, you lucid?”

  “What? No! I never touch the stuff!”

  “I mean, are you clear-headed right now?”

  “Oh. Yeah.” The man looked down at his leg. The med-Judge had sliced through his brand-new FantyPance to get access
to the wound. “Feels a bit numb, but kinda nice, y’know? Whatever was in that hypo is doing the trick. So how much am I gonna get?”

  “Get?”

  “You know. Compo. I got shot ’cos of you, and now I’ve gotta repair a window and two doors, plus these pants ain’t cheap. So what’s the deal?”

  “The deal is that you tell me everything you know about Percival Chalk and I don’t haul you in on any of the dozen violations I can see right now without turning my head. Drag your heels and I’ll order a full investigation on this rat-hole. Everything you’ve ever done will be brought to light. You understand me?”

  “Look, I don’t know what you want! I already told you I didn’t know Chalk. Never even saw the guy!”

  “That door in the lobby. Security glass, bullet-proof. Expensive. Why’d you have that installed?”

  D’Annunzio shuffled himself into a sitting position. “We had some trouble a couple of years back. Guy came here after a ten-stretch... Roman Chantell, his name was. In for assault. Some creeps came lookin’ for him. They shot the place up. What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “That model door is fitted with an intercom and camera.”

  “Yeah, but they weren’t wired up. It would have cost me an extra five grand, and the sort of tenants we have here don’t get many visitors, so I didn’t bother.”

  Dredd pulled out his radio-mike. “Dredd to control... Send the tech-team out to retrieve the door—they’ll know which one—and extract the inbuilt camera. I want names and details of every face captured in the past two months.”

  “On the way, Dredd.”

  D’Annunzio asked, “What for? I told you the camera wasn’t wired up.”

  “We might get lucky,” Dredd replied. “Repair team will be here in a day or two, citizen. Until then, stay put.”

  “But I was gonna go watch the race!”

  “Not my problem.”

  Dredd left the man complaining and groping around on the sofa for the TV’s remote, then made his way back down to Chalk’s apartment.

  A Judge met him in the doorway. She was in her mid-twenties and barely came up to Dredd’s shoulder. “Brenna, forensics. We’ve scanned the place upside-down and inside-out. Chalk definitely spent some time here, but not much, judging by the amount of DNA evidence. We’ve got eight other traces. We’re running them now against the database, but nothing’s flagged on the perp list.”

  “The roof?”

  “Minute particles of metal lubricant at the spot you figure he shot from. It’s WD-400, common stuff. Very simple ingredients, so there’s no way to tie the sample into a specific batch. Not that that would help much. You can get the stuff at any hardware store in the city. We also got some boot prints in the dust, pretty fresh, too. Weather control ordered a downpour last week to wash the road surfaces for the race—guess they wanted to make the city look clean for the foreign viewers, too—so we know the prints aren’t more than five days old.”

  “But you can’t say whether the prints belong to the shooter.”

  “No way to be sure,” Judge Brenna said. “For all we know, the shooter came in on a skysurf board. That’d explain how he got away, too. I’ve taken the liberty of polling the spy-cams, but I don’t expect much—almost every cam has been on the race’s route since early this morning.” She took a small step back, and peered at Dredd for a moment. “You look like him. Not identical, but there’s definitely a resemblance. Fargo, I mean. I met him once.”

  “I ordered a check on the building’s security door.”

  She smiled at him. “Not one for chit-chat. Got it. Yeah, I heard about the door. But I don’t get the point. The camera wasn’t linked up.”

  “That model is fitted with a Pentakon PerfekteAugen. Reliable camera, decent resolution, minimal circuitry. Powered by solar energy absorbed by its own lens. Its memory can store about a year’s worth of footage.”

  “So...?”

  “So the PerfekteAugen is always on, Brenna. It’s got built-in motion and proximity detectors. It’s easier and cheaper for the door’s manufacturers to build the one model and just not connect the camera’s output if the buyer doesn’t want it. So the camera’s always recording, even if it’s not connected to anything. Get that footage analysed. We’re looking for anyone who might have come looking for Percival Chalk.”

  The young Judge nodded. “Okay... How do you know all that?”

  Dredd stepped past her into the apartment. “I read.”

  Inside, another Judge was examining the bullet-holes in the window, but otherwise the apartment was bare, its few contents having already been removed for closer inspection.

  Behind him, Brenna said, “I heard what everyone is saying about you, Dredd. For what it’s worth...”

  He turned to face her. “It’s not worth anything. My judgement was sound back then. I bear no responsibility for Chalk’s subsequent actions.”

  “Sometimes we make decisions—judgements—that feel right in the heat of the moment, but later, in the cold light of day...” She shrugged. “You’ve only been on the streets a year. You’ll learn.”

  The Cursed Earth

  2075 AD

  Nine

  JUDGE RUIZ LAY on the rough ground, breathing slowly and steadily as she tried to build a mental picture of her location. Her captors had stripped her of weapons, tied her wrists and ankles, and pulled a mouldy canvas sack over her head.

  Now, the voice of Mayor Genesis Faulder came from somewhere close behind her. “Tomorrow. You were told that Ynex would be here tomorrow! Why in the seventeen hells did you have to come here today?”

  Ruiz said nothing. She hadn’t spoken since her capture, and had no intentions of breaking that streak now. There were at least five of them, she knew, though two of them would never harm anyone again. One had had his throat torn out when they’d grabbed her, and the other was now missing his eyes.

  But another of her captors had proved to be considerably stronger than he looked: the mutant was short and thin, but his muscles were like steel cables. He had grabbed her from behind, one arm around her neck, crushing her throat, and a filthy, bony hand pressed hard against her mouth. She had been within seconds of passing out when something slammed hard into the backs of her knees. Ruiz had collapsed, the fall dislodging the man who’d been choking her but allowing several more to move in on her with heavy boots and hard-edged rifle butts.

  Several ribs had been fractured, and her face was a mess of cuts and bruises, but they hadn’t killed her yet. That, at least, was a positive sign. Though a sign of what, she wasn’t yet sure.

  Ruiz had already been scheduled for the hot-dog run when word reached Mega-City One that Ynex was using the town of Eminence as one of his trading points. The man—it was assumed Ynex was male, since most of the nomadic mutant tribes were led by men—scoured the Cursed Earth for caches of pre-war weapons, and somehow those weapons found their way into the hands of perps inside the city.

  An automated message pod had been despatched to Eminence, informing the mayor that help was on the way. Though the Judges officially only ruled within the city limits, it wasn’t uncommon for them to extend their reach into the Cursed Earth, especially when doing so would be to the city’s benefit.

  Now, Mayor Faulder crouched close to Ruiz and hissed, “You screwed up the plan! When we learned you were coming, we were going to turn a bunch of low-life nomad scum loose on you. You’d shoot them down and you’d go away happy thinking that you’d stopped Ynex. Grud-damnit!”

  A second man’s voice said, “Keep your stomm together, Faulder. Man, you are one major drokkin’ idiot! You should have done nothing—be a damn sight easier to deal with her and the cadets if you’d left it to us.”

  “So now what do we do?” a third man asked. “We kill them, the Jays’ll swarm on us like bees after an open sugar-truck. We don’t kill them, same thing’ll happen.”

  The second man replied, “And we’ve still got these here drokkin’ scavengers to deal w
ith.”

  So that’s how they’re getting hold of the weapons, Ruiz said to herself. They ambush the teams of scavengers. Makes sense—get someone else to do the digging and excavating for you.

  Then Faulder said, “They never arrived here. That’s how we play this. In a week, maybe two, more Judges’ll come looking for them. We make damn sure that everyone in the town knows the story. They never showed up. ’Fact, when their back-up does arrive, we make like it’s them we’re expecting. We’ll be all, ‘You Judges were supposed to be here ages ago, what kept you?’”

  The third man said, “Yeah. Yeah, that could work. But it won’t be just the four of them—there’ll be others, camped outside of town. Probably all cadets, but we can’t underestimate them. These kids are, what, fifteen or sixteen? That means they’ve got a decade of training behind them. They’re kids, but they’re not children, if you get me.”

  “Think you mean that the other way around,” the second man muttered. Then, louder, he added, “All right. The three in town, we get them back here. Deal with them before we go after the rest of their party. Faulder, that crippled kid you sent out to distract the cadet who was waiting outside... Send someone out to find him. Be easier if we lead them in one at a time.”

  JOE FOUND GIBSON and Rico poking around a store that sold unfathomable objects made out of baked clay.

  “What the hell is that?” Rico asked the store’s owner, a misshapen man with an abundance of extra fingers. He lifted up what looked like a beverage mug with an irregular row of holes in the base. “Hey, Joe, what do you make of this?”

  “Outside.”

  Gibson put down an object that could have been a water bottle, had it not been solid. “We’re just having a look around.”

  Joe threw a glance at the store’s owner, then grabbed Rico’s arm. “Let’s go.”