Down and Out

  JUDGE DREDD: YEAR TWO

  DOWN

  AND

  OUT

  MATTHEW SMITH

  An Abaddon Books™ Publication

  www.abaddonbooks.com

  abaddonsolaris@rebellion.co.uk

  First published in 2016 by Abaddon Books™, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.

  Editor-in-Chief: Jonathan Oliver

  Commissioning Editor: David Moore

  Cover: Jake Lynch

  Design: Sam Gretton & Oz Osborne

  Marketing and PR: Rob Power

  Head of Books and Comics Publishing: Ben Smith

  Creative Director and CEO: Jason Kingsley

  Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley

  Copyright © 2016 Rebellion. All rights reserved.

  Judge Dredd created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra.

  ISBN: 978-1-78618-011-7

  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: Year One

  City Fathers, Matthew Smith

  The Cold Light of Day, Michael Carroll

  Wear Iron, Al Ewing

  Judge Dredd: Year Two

  The Righteous Man, Michael Carroll

  Down and Out, Matthew Smith

  Rico Dredd: The Titan Years

  The Third Law, Michael Carroll

  Judge Anderson, Rookie

  Heartbreaker, Alec Worley

  The Abyss, Alec Worley

  Judge Dredd

  Bad Moon Rising, David Bishop

  Black Atlantic, Simon Jowett & Peter J Evans

  Cursed Earth Asylum, David Bishop

  Deathmasques, Dave Stone

  Dread Dominion, Dave Stone

  Dredd vs. Death, Gordon Rennie

  Dreddlocked, Stephen Marley

  Eclipse, James Swallow

  The Final Cut, Matthew Smith

  The Hundredfold Problem, John Grant

  Kingdom of the Blind, David Bishop

  The Medusa Seed, Dave Stone

  Psykogeddon, Dave Stone

  The Savage Amusement, David Bishop

  Silencer, David Bishop

  Swine Fever, Andrew Cartmel

  Wetworks, Dave Stone

  Whiteout, James Swallow

  Judge Anderson

  Fear the Darkness, Mitchel Scanlon

  Red Shadows, Mitchel Scanlon

  Sins of the Father, Mitchel Scanlon

  Mega-City One

  2081 AD

  Tuesday, 16 June

  11.01 am

  JOE.

  There was a dark kernel at the core of his being into which he could retreat. No; retreat was the wrong word. That suggested weakness—that he was running away from the pain. He wasn’t yet prepared to admit that he’d been beaten, or that he was even engaged in a struggle. He was consolidating.

  He’d always known the calm centre was there. It was what made him so efficient; this ability to compartmentalise. He could shut off external stimuli, zero in on the essence that mattered: The Law. Duty. The badge. That’s what drove him, made him what he was. It was his engine, his beating heart, and that which he turned to when he needed... purity, he supposed. A clear line of thought, unsullied or complicated by human concerns.

  Joe.

  They’d taught him this in the Academy, of course; one of the many training exercises the tutors employed to shape these young children they’d taken charge of and turn them into emotionless guardians. Totems, bound by duty to the people they stood apart from and passed judgement on. They were equally servants and captors, there to protect as well as rule through fear. The dichotomy was why it was so important cadets were taught how to shelve their feelings. Put them in a box deep inside, close the lid, and leave them there. Don’t question the system. Justice was required to be delivered by a firm, unwavering, objective hand; it could not run the risk of being impaired by doubt or empathy.

  Joe.

  The same went for injury. The Academy’s extensive Applied Violence module was very thorough in teaching its charges as much how to receive pain as how to dish it out. No cadet graduated without a broken bone somewhere on their body, courtesy of a tutor’s daystick; some would be barely into their teens and have already experienced the sensation of a live Lawgiver round passing through muscle. Suffering was the fire that forged you; or rather, how you dealt with that suffering determined the kind of Judge you’d be. Push it down, ride it out, don’t let it consume you. Strength of will was everything. The uniform was everything. The Law was everything. It was greater than he was. He had to deal with it, prove that he was in control. He was trying...

  Joe.

  ...he was really trying. He couldn’t let it win (no; there was no struggle, remember?). It was just him and his resolve. Any minute now, he was going to force himself up. He was going to put one hand beneath him and lever himself from the ground. Any minute now.

  Any—

  Joe.

  Dredd opened his eyes. Through the fractured visor a silhouette loomed close. His mind scrabbled for his gun even if he knew his hand wouldn’t be able to hold it; any messages from his brain were ignored by the rest of his body. He couldn’t move. His breath rasped and something rattled in his chest, bringing a fresh wave of pain. He coughed, a coppery taste on his tongue. He must’ve visibly winced; the figure said, Stay calm, little brother.

  “Rico?” The name emerged as a croak.

  It’s okay, I’m here, the figure said, and Dredd felt a hand hold his. I’ll stay with you.

  “Stay...?”

  We’ll stick together. Like clones. Right to the end.

  “What do you mean?” He gripped the hand tighter till the joints creaked.

  You’re dying, Joe.

  One

  9.16 am

  “HOW DO YOU feel?”

  The question shouldn’t have caught him by surprise; after all, the session had been leading up to it. There was a grim inevitability to the counsellor’s words. But expectation didn’t soften the unease any. While it would’ve belittled the uniform to have squirmed, the soft plasti-leather couch in which he’d been instructed to recline suddenly felt unaccountably warm and uncomfortable. He was unused to luxury of this nature; it didn’t sit well with him. It smacked of indolence, indulgence. No-one made the tough calls—the hard, necessary decisions—from such a chair.

  Like sentencing your brother to twenty years. That required backbone, didn’t it?

  All the same, Perrineau picked up something in Dredd’s expression as soon as she’d said it—a muscle twitch, a slight grimace. The young Judge could picture the wheels turning behind the auxiliary’s blandly composed face. One hand jotted notes, though her eyes barely left Dredd, as if she was studying an animal behind glass, waiting for it to flinch, to strike, to betray any sign of its mood. She may as well have been poking him with a stick, though he knew her intention wasn’t to goad; she just didn’t understand him. She’d been chipping away at him—stoney-faced, some said, though he struggled to see the humour others evidently found in the epithet—for over forty-five minutes, and this was the first time she’d seen a crack appear.

  Dredd knew she wasn’t going to let this go when the pen stopped moving and was set down. Fingers steepled under her chin, head cocked to one side, Perrineau was inviting an answer, one he was struggling to formulate the words for. What did she mean, anyway? How did he feel? Or how did he fe
el? The response to the latter was that he couldn’t, not really. He didn’t know how. He didn’t have the apparatus. As a consequence, trying to vocalise what he was experiencing amounted to counter-programming.

  He’d queried the decision to send him here, of course. It seemed a supreme waste of resources and a massive impingement on his street time. He’d had a year now under his belt as a full-eagle Judge, and that was enough to whet the appetite, to keep calling him back, to make him aware of how crotchety and impatient he became when he wasn’t on the sked. It was where he belonged, and distractions such as this grated, to put it mildly. But he was in no position to disobey a senior command; he was still a rookie in the eyes of many, regardless of his lineage, and was expected to toe the line. When Goodman had told him to go make an appointment with Perrineau, he’d tried to respectfully decline, aware that the Chief Judge had his best interests at heart. The old man was adamant, though, and would brook no argument; he said it was a policy that would reap rewards. Judges should be psychologically fit as well as physically.

  He hadn’t been slow to pick up the inference about Rico. Dredd’s clone-brother’s descent into corruption and criminality—leading to his arrest and indictment to Titan—was cause for concern at every level of the Grand Hall. That the Fargo bloodline should contain such a potential flaw, and for one of the Department’s leading lights to have fallen so far, had massive repercussions for their genetics programme; certainly, it shed serious doubt on whether there was any future in further offspring from the Father of Justice’s DNA. It had hit them hard, at the very heart of their system, suggested their foundations were built on a faultline. The powers-that-be had done their best to cover up the full extent of Rico’s exploits—though they’d been unable to prevent it leaking into the media; the lowlifes his brother employed or did business with were only too happy to sell their stories about the Judge on the take—but they couldn’t afford it to happen again. Suddenly, Dredd—even though he’d been the one to pull his sibling in, and sentence him—was under a lot more scrutiny. His passion and devotion to the Law couldn’t be questioned, but then again neither could Rico’s when they’d both graduated; all it took was a nudge down a road from which there was evidently no return, and all that training was channelled into theft and murder.

  Hence the brain-shrinking session Dredd had been press-ganged into this morning. It wasn’t enough that they wanted to ensure Rico was the only bad apple; they also wanted to determine how the arrest had affected him, whether Dredd’s judgement had been compromised, whether there’d be any personal fallout. Dredd found it facile and beneath him, but he’d listened and responded as instructed. Truth was, Rico had broken the Law and brought the uniform into disrepute: there could’ve been no other possible outcome. He would’ve been doing a disservice to both himself and all that the badge stood for if he hadn’t imposed the maximum sentence. That Rico was his brother—more than his brother—had stung, there was no question of that; all the pair had been through together since Booth, since the nukes had dropped, had cemented a bond between them that had seen them through the Academy. He’d thought it unshakeable, and thus was cognizant of the tragedy of the situation; that he’d ended the career—and, to all intents and purposes, the life—of the person that had been closest to him. But what he’d done had been right, and that was the moral anchor that he clung to. It had been necessary. Why Rico had chosen to turn his back on all he’d been created to be, they would probably never know; but the important thing was that he was stopped, and he’d been punished for his misdemeanours.

  “Well?” Perrineau persisted.

  “Justice was done,” Dredd replied.

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all that matters.”

  10.05 am

  IT WAS GOOD to be back on the sked, clear away the cobwebs. He’d spent too long in that stultifying room. He didn’t think Perrineau got the answers that she’d hoped for—in truth, he got the impression she’d found him vexing—and was no doubt already filing a report to Goodman that Joe Dredd’s psychological profile was impossible to catalogue. Whether that would make the old man happy or not, he couldn’t say; but if she’d wanted a case study worthy of doctoral thesis she’d been better off interviewing Rico. He loved the sound of his own voice. Indeed, incredible as it seemed, his clone had attained a level of notoriety akin to a folk hero amongst the easily swayed—which was, to be honest, half the city. He did exude a certain charisma that the criminal meatheads fell for, Dredd had to admit, which probably explained how he’d managed to operate for so long unopposed. Already, journalists were submitting applications to travel to Titan and get a face-to-face with the new inmate; they were more than a little amused by the embarrassment that his arrest had brought on Grand Hall, and keen for juicy copy. Dredd found the whole circus nauseating, though he supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised. Every psycho and miscreant he’d put away in the cubes had a fan club waiting somewhere in the wings.

  He just wanted to be out enforcing the Law, not stymied by bureaucracy or enduring performance reviews; he was already gathering something of a reputation of not doing his fair share of the paperwork. He didn’t attempt to deflect the guilt of that charge: he knew full well it wasn’t his forte. But practical judgement dispensed on the streets was what he believed should be the priority—leave the pen-pushing to those with an aptitude for it. Anyone on the receiving end of this proclamation would roll their eyes when his back was turned, and then contemplate the steadily-mounting stack of arrest sheets. Many felt he received preferential treatment because of his lineage, though they never said so within earshot, and few could argue with his exceptional record. It was his second year as a full-eagle Judge, and he was putting some veterans to shame.

  He accelerated as he hit the Siegel exit-ramp, leaning in to Atwood Throughway as he merged with the traffic, feeling at home surrounded by the Lawmaster’s comforting roar. It enveloped him. He flexed his biceps, straightened his back, welcoming the wind whipping past his visor, bringing with it the scent trails of exhaust fumes and factory run-off, burnt rubber and seared hotties, and eased his bike between a pair of hover-trucks. It was moments like this that he felt the most free, furthest from the politics of the Grand Hall. At every opportunity he liked to escape the central sectors and head into the outlying districts; any excuse to experience the metropolis opening up before him. It was what made his job the greatest calling any person could aspire to, this feeling of control.

  He cast a glance at the other vehicles racing alongside him, aware that the drivers were conscious of him too, the Judge’s mere presence enough to maintain decent behaviour. He could probably find something on any of them if he pulled them over, but for now he was content to ride and exude the authority that kept them in line. In any case, he had his eye on a dark saloon roadster four cars ahead; nothing especially untoward about its appearance, but it was keeping a steady pace that suggested it was trying not to draw attention to itself. He’d already run the registration through the system and come back with switched plates, the name on the purchase docket almost certainly a fake. His instincts were twitching, but he didn’t want to intervene just yet; instead, he kept his gaze fixed on its smoked windows and followed at a discreet distance, matching its speed.

  It peeled off at the next intersection, heading downtown through a dilapidated area of Sector 9—known locally as the Strickland estate—and Dredd had to hold off some to avoid appearing conspicuously in the driver’s rear-view mirror. It was moving particularly carefully, and he got the sense that whoever was inside was looking for an address. It kept pausing at each tenement block, before eventually pulling up on a corner before one of the old pre-war apartment complexes, its façade pockmarked with age and weapons fire, many of the windows shuttered or boarded-up. Dredd couldn’t get any closer on his Lawmaster, so instead brought it to a halt a block away and dismounted, watching as the driver and his passenger emerged.

  They were a pair of squirrelly l
ooking creeps, visibly stoned on something, which would account for their over-cautiousness. Stepping round to the rear of their car, they wrenched open the back doors and each pulled a container from within, clearly struggling with the weight. They staggered into the building’s main entrance, glancing around to check they had no witnesses; the duo might as well have had ‘guilty’ written in Day-Glo colours on their backs.

  The lawman set off at a trot, drawing his sidearm. “Control—Dredd. Investigating suspicious delivery, Trenmar lux-apts on Strickland. Am engaging.”

  “That’s a rog,” his comm answered in his ear.

  He paused at the vehicle and cast an eye inside—there were a couple more boxes nestled in the space behind the seats. He looked briefly towards the block, discerned no movement, then yanked a container forward onto the tailgate, feeling the cold even through the insulation of his gloves. He tugged on the lid with his left hand and it cracked open a touch, expelling a blast of dry ice, instantly fogging his visor; he swiped it clear and sighted his Lawgiver on whatever lay within.

  The head gazed back at him with a lifeless stare, frost limning its eyebrows and lashes, pupils and lips grey, skin sallow. The freezing process had captured the victim’s expression at the point of death—or at the point his neck was severed clean off his shoulders, whichever had come first—and there was a degree of understandable surprise and consternation in the way the mouth had dropped open and the forehead had furrowed. Ice crystals gleamed in his hair. Dredd reached in and pushed it to one side to see what else was in there: a pair of hands neatly stacked like crockery, a wedding ring encrusted around one finger. He let the lid drop and turned back to the block.