"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.