Down and Out Page 2

  He edged through the doors, gun at the ready. ‘Lux-apts’ was a joke—it had been many years since this had been desirable housing. It stank of rot and neglect, the entire subsector fallen to ruin, where the past hadn’t been entirely cemented over. After the nukes had dropped, and once Booth had been run out of town and Justice Department had taken over, the metropolis had grown and developed, pushing north and south to accommodate the swelling population: eight hundred million, at the last count. The gleaming starscrapers that grasped at the heavens and the tangle of meg-ways and zoom-lines that encircled them were just as much a distraction from the forgotten tenements as they were a solution; Old New York may lie beneath their feet, but the Mega-City was still a patchwork of ancient and modern, of destitute, ravaged areas dwarfed by aggressive expansion.

  People had to live somewhere, however, especially with much of the country decimated, though the new blocks—Mia Farrow, Ricardo Montalban—were well out of many cits’ price range. It grated with Dredd’s sense of justice that a lot of the blocks currently being constructed were not intended for the majority of the populace that needed them; the Judges had taken office on the understanding that they would protect its citizens, and if they couldn’t house them they were doing them a disservice. But that was the way of things, it seemed: what was right often collided with what was viable, and those caught in the fallout suffered the most, reduced to seeking shelter in borderline-condemned properties such as these. From the sky MC-1 gleamed, but there were those who were forced to exist in its shadows.

  Dredd stepped into the entrance foyer, the floor cracked and littered with refuse, the walls rent in places and exposing wiring innards. The lighting looked like it had long stopped working, leaving the interior in gloom, though the infra-red function in his helmet enabled him to penetrate the murk. Moving quietly, he followed two sets of glowing red footprints down a corridor, casting glances to either side at the firmly closed apartment doors, aware that anything could be lurking behind them. One opened a sliver and a curious eye regarded him as he passed, and was quickly shut again when he swung his gun in its direction.

  The footprints stopped a few yards later at a doorway which had been hastily fitted with brand-new locks and bolts. He backed against the wall, out of the periphery of the spyhole, and briefly tested the solidity of the wood—he wouldn’t be able kick it in without some assistance. He fished in his belt pouch and retrieved a pair of small, circular limpet mines, which he attached near the hinges, thumbing a ten-second fuse on the digital display. Double-checking the ammo selector on his gun, he stood back and waited for the big boom.

  The charges shredded the door as they detonated, and Dredd slammed his boot into what remained, knocking the warped wood to the ground. The two creeps he’d seen making the delivery were caught with their dicks in their hands—or rather someone else’s dick, in one case; the small organ glittered like a popsicle. Their eyes widened when they found themselves staring down a Lawgiver barrel.

  “Hands in the air! Now!” Dredd commanded.

  The perps complied instantly, arms shooting above their heads, silvery talisman still gripped in one of their fists.

  “Drop that,” the Judge muttered, and the guy raised his eyes at it sheepishly before tossing it back into the box, where it landed with a clink.

  Dredd moved forward into the apartment, gun trained on the pair. It was barely furnished, little more than a shell, and clearly not used for habitation. What space there was had been given over to stacks of the same containers and a couple of industrial, tomb-like freezer units plugged into the wall, which rumbled quietly in the background. There had to be at least a dozen missing persons cases waiting to be cleared here. It was quite the backstreet operation: too organised and well stocked, Dredd considered, to be the handiwork of a couple of bozos like this. They had to be just the delivery men, which suggested they took their orders from the brains—or at least the less chemically-befuddled leader—of the outfit.

  “You,” the lawman said to the scraggily-bearded meathead on the right, motioning with his weapon. “Anyone else on the premises?”

  The creep rolled his eyes to one side, towards an adjoining room behind a closed door. The forefinger of one upraised hand pointed discreetly in the same direction. Whoever was in there couldn’t have failed to be alerted to the Judge’s entrance.

  “Hey, man, come on,” his partner whispered. “I know it looks bad, but we ain’t got a choice in this; w-we just do what we’re told. We just pick this stomm up—we ain’t killers or nothin’.”

  “Shut up and move over there,” Dredd growled, beckoning for them to sidle away from the next room. He quickly patted them down, finding nothing in their overjaks. He fished for his cuffs on his belt, and chucked them towards the duo, the whiny guy catching them. “Put them on, one wrist each. Then sit down with your backs against each other.”

  “Look—” the perp started, doing as instructed regardless.

  “I thought I told you to shut up. Not a sound, understand?”

  It was at that point that the third occupant of the apartment came out blasting. The first shot tore through the door and punched a hole in the wall above his prisoners. Plaster, masonry and dust rained down on them; yelling and panicking, they tried to scoot out of the way, pulling uselessly in opposite directions. Dredd booted them onto their sides, where they lay sobbing, then ducked low and circled around the doorway. Another shot blew apart the latch, and the door swung open on one hinge. It listed for a moment, then a figure came barrelling through and tore it down completely. Dredd followed the figure’s trajectory and pumped three Standard Execution rounds after it, but it disappeared behind a freezer unit.

  “This is the Law,” he said, gun trained on where he surmised the perp was hiding. “Drop the weapon and come out with your hands raised. You will get no further warning.”

  No response. He moved closer, aware that the appliances ruled out a hotshot; there’d be the risk the bullet would boomerang back and strike him as the nearest heat source. He glanced to his left and saw an open container. He reached in carefully and retrieved what appeared to be an expertly removed lung, encased in a vacuum-pak. It shifted beneath his fingers, already starting to defrost. He hefted it once then slung it over the freezer and took a single shot, piercing the pak and spraying brown blood and dark matter in a wide arc. He heard a cry of disgust, and his perp clambered to their feet to avoid the shower, revulsion temporarily overriding safety.

  Dredd had a bead on her as soon as she appeared—a wild-haired woman in her fifties, surprisingly light on her feet considering she was more than several pounds into the obese category. She was wearing a kind of smock, covered in what he judged to be human stains, and she was wiping gore streaks off her face, still holding the shotgun.

  “Drop it,” he barked, knowing even as he said it that she wouldn’t cooperate. Half blind, she swung round at the sound of his voice, finger on the trigger, and he fired without hesitation, drilling an SE slug through her skull. She hit the floor with a thump.

  He crossed through the shattered door and found a makeshift laboratory-stroke-operating theatre: the shelves were lined with jars and medical equipment, a heart monitor and several oxygen cylinders stood by the wall, and in the centre were two gurneys that had seen better days. Upon one, hooked up to a saline drip, lay an unconscious male eldster, covered up to his neck by a green sheet. As Dredd got closer, he saw that one of the cit’s eyes was missing: just a riven, bloodied black hole. On a tray nearby stood a solution-filled beaker in which floated an eyeball, optic nerve trailing after it. Given the freshness of the organ, he guessed it hadn’t belonged to the patient. Dredd checked the old guy’s pulse and found a weak sign, then headed back into the main apartment, where the two delivery creeps were still whimpering under a film of filth.

  “Control, need catch-, meat- and med-wagons to Trenmar,” he muttered into his comm. “Uncovered a considerable organ-legging operation. Could do with a forensics t
eam here too—multiple body parts from numerous victims, will require some piecing together.”

  “Sh-she was just trynna help, man,” the whinger said. “People round here, they can’t afford the insurance, can’t go to the hospitals. They needed a cheap op, th-they came to her. She was savin’ lives best way she knew how, that’s all...”

  Dredd didn’t reply, merely surveyed the damage in the room, Perrineau’s words from earlier that morning coming back to him. How did he feel?

  He looked at the blood splatter. The simple answer was that he couldn’t afford to.

  Two

  10.33 am

  HE STUCK AROUND at the scene for the catch-wagon to cart away the two perps and for forensics to do their work. Curiosity made him linger. It didn’t take much encouragement for the creeps to talk while they waited, though what they knew was frustratingly sparse: couriers, basically, instructed to pick up body parts from specific collection points. A first-year cadet could tell that these two were not capable of murder, much less dismemberment, and they freely admitted the only way that they could handle the deliveries was to be wrecked on Banana City Brown (both were holding, and Dredd added a few years for possession on top of the organ-legging charges, though neither seemed to care by this point). They’d done more than two dozen of these runs in the past year, and they’d never met the killer, or had any clue to their identity, stating with some vehemence that the dead woman—Mama ‘Doc’ Carrington—wasn’t guilty either. The Judge suspected this was true, though the kills were almost certainly carried out at her behest; she was more than likely contracting a reliable out-of-sector hitman to keep her supplied.

  The doltish pair seemed to have no shortage of respect for Carrington, believing that she was only doing what was necessary to come to the aid of those that would otherwise be neglected. Dredd ran the woman’s details through his bike computer: she’d been trained as a med-assistant over at St Bart’s in Sector 12 but had been made redundant a couple of decades ago. Since then, she’d barely appeared on the system, falling through the cracks like so many in this twilight world. Employment records would be sketchy to the point of non-existent that close to the war, and would probably lead nowhere, but he had a fancy that her hired associate was also connected to the hospital—the victims were too cleanly disassembled for the perp not to know his way around the human anatomy. Dredd made a mental note to chase down KAs and cross-reference them with the targets, once they’d been fully ID’d. Could be that they’d been specifically chosen—rare blood group, low rad-count, healthy genes; info that someone with access to med-records could determine—rather than random snatches off the street.

  He watched as the delivery goons were shipped off to incarceration, where they’d be interrogated for locations and details. Surveillance footage would be studied, witnesses canvassed. The old boy, head heavily bandaged, was being similarly hurriedly loaded into the back of a wagon, the attending med-Judge diagnosing him as going into toxic shock, infection running rampant. Given the state of the apartment, Dredd wasn’t surprised. He wondered exactly how much good the cherished ‘Doc’ was actually doing in this stommhole of an operating theatre; for all her laudable intentions, she was surely responsible for many a botched job, killing as much as curing. How many had she seen over the years, the injured and infirm who couldn’t afford the health insurance or didn’t want to draw the attention of the Judges?

  He looked around the rockcrete canyons, at the equally destitute blocks opposite, and pictured Carrington’s patients dying alone and in pain, stitches unknitting, limbs blackening, so far from the reaches of the med-services. Ghosts haunting their own apartments, undisturbed in their tombs until the city finally decided to bulldoze the whole sub-sector. These forgotten citizens were no more than shadows on the wall, the war’s living dead that may as well have been atomised by one of Booth’s missiles for all the mark they made on the metropolis. It was a marginalised existence beyond the reach or control of Justice Department. Dredd felt a restless urge to put it right, but it seemed outside the capabilities of just one Judge.

  He shook his head, turning back inside. Forensics were still piecing together the remains that has been gathered from the doc’s lab. McCready saw him enter, put down a jar of something old and shrivelled, and wandered over.

  “Quite the haul,” he said.

  “What’s the count so far?”

  “At least ten different bodies, in variable states of decomposition. Despite the freezers and pickling solutions, she wasn’t much good at keeping the parts preserved. Some of them date back a couple of years—no wonder the eldster had septicaemia, she was trying to graft some seriously rank tissue.”

  “Working with what she had,” Dredd mused, watching heads, legs and a string of ears being bagged.

  “Yeah, well, Shapiro’s Hottie Emporium this ain’t. Hell, a beefalo slaughterhouse is more hygienic. I’m amazed anyone walked out of here after she’d finished with them.”

  “You managed to run any DNA traces yet?”

  “Still on it. Something of a jigsaw puzzle. I’m fairly sure none of them are local; looks like they were imported from the outlying sectors. We’d be talking about abductions and missing persons logged across city in the last twenty-four months. No easy task.”

  Dredd grunted in agreement. “How long till you come up with some names?”

  “Few hours at least.”

  “Okay, keep me informed.” He cast one last eye around the room, then headed into the welcome fresh air.

  Standard operating procedure would be to conduct some door-to-doors, he thought as he swung his bike around, see who else had benefited (or not, as the case may be) from the ministrations of the good doctor, or at least find out how many were aware of what she was up to. The chumps he’d arrested made it sound like she was a local hero—the backstreet shaman where surgery came with complimentary blood poisoning. Chances are the cits from around here wouldn’t be too pleased to learn that he’d gunned her down, no matter what she’d infected them with, or how many poor saps had to die to keep her in the organ business. Down here there was a protect-your-own mentality; a not unexpected resentment towards the glittering Mega-City crowding the sky overhead that manifested in a closing of ranks. He’d been taught crowd psychology at the Academy, mastered the ability to read a civilian’s body language, but all the same, the cits were alien to him at times: selfish, tribal, gullible. He still found it difficult to gauge their thought processes, understand them. He’d been schooled in the art of pre-empting what their intentions were, but couldn’t say why they did what they did. That was a part of human nature that escaped him.

  Morphy had told him once that flatfooting it amongst the populace was part of being a good Judge—not every case could be solved with a bullet. Sometimes it meant tedious, menial police work that involved engaging with the public, as frustrating and aggravating as that could be. It was meant to build up your people skills, enable you to approach the dangerous on their own terms, defuse potential scenarios with minimum risk. It was typically sage wisdom from an old hand like Morph; perhaps it came from an earlier age, or Dredd was simply too impatient. Whichever, it was an area he struggled with, and looking around him at Strickland’s grey tenements he knew it’d be a lost cause attempting to glean anything from here. It was too closed off, too entrenched. Another piece of advice Dredd found useful was not to waste time.

  He gunned the engine and peeled away, heading for the ramp that would lead him back to the meg-way. Climbing towards the main thoroughfare, it felt like he was rising out of the past, breaking free of the suffocating, clinging taint of the city’s history. He had to admit there was a small, unprofessional sense of relief to be leaving it behind: it made him uncomfortable to see the wreckage the gleaming metropolis had been founded on, and those that had to live amongst it. Of course, he’d been there when the bombs had dropped, him and his brother; he’d seen the destruction that had been wrought, and what needed to be done to save what rema
ined of mankind. He knew Fargo had made the hard decisions—evidently it was to become something of a family trait—but so much had to be sacrificed, and those choices were to inform the future of the city years into the future. To witness the legacy first-hand, down here in Strickland, was to confront the appalling cost they had paid as a species, perhaps even more than the vast wastes of the Cursed Earth—it was what they were prepared to accept on their own doorstep that was the true gut-punch. What they could live with if it was removed far enough from sight.

  Dredd threaded back into the traffic and immediately spotted a limo indicating for the junction back down towards the ghetto. He experienced a moment of dismay: the sub-sector hadn’t finished with him. There was no question his suspicion was aroused; it was far too expensive a model to be innocently cruising through such a district. Either it was lost, or the driver had business down here, and the latter was unlikely to be legitimate. He sighed; if he’d believed in fate it would feel like it was making a point. Since he didn’t, he figured today was simply going to be a challenge.

  He accelerated, veering across several lanes, and hit the downslope. The limo had almost disappeared among the warren of blocks already. He called in its registration and it came back as unlisted; that answered that question, at least. It was definitely up to something, though the owner couldn’t have chosen a more conspicuous mode of transport if they’d tried. Chances were that it was deliberately sending a message, that some level of intimidation was going on here. Dredd’s curiosity was piqued—and, he had to admit, he was pleased at the opportunity. Given the battering his reputation had received recently, a high-profile collar would go some way to returning honour to the name.