Dredd - The Final Cut

JUDGE DREDD:

THE FINAL CUT

"Dredd!" Trager's shout came a fraction too late.

A perp had jumped onto one of the boxes and pointed a sawn-off shotgun in the lawman's direction, letting off a deafening blast. Dredd threw himself sideways, feeling the high-calibre ammo shred the back of his uniform and pepper his skin with buckshot. He rolled, twisted and fired in one movement, pumping the trigger of his Lawgiver, but the pain igniting his back threw his aim off as he drilled a series of holes in the wall before catching the creep in the leg, shattering his kneecap. He squealed and dropped to the ground behind a stack of boxes, but Dredd sensed he wasn't out of the game just yet.

Trager scuttled alongside him, ducking low, and laid a hand on the senior Judge's shoulder. "Bad?" he asked.

"Had worse," Dredd answered, looking back and seeing a fine spray of his blood on the wall. "More pressing, spugwit ain't finished with us. I think I just winged him."

"OK, stay here. I'll deal with him."

"You're worse off than I am."

"Yeah, but I'm younger than you, old man. I carry it better."

"Shame your instincts weren't sharper. You might've spotted the punk earlier before he nearly plugged me."

JUDGE DREDD

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#8: WHITEOUT

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#9: PSYKOGEDDON

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For Lucy.

A 2000 AD PUBLICATION

www.abaddonbooks.com

www.2000adonline.com

1098 7 65 4321

Cover illustration by Dylan Teague.

Copyright 2005 Rebellion A/S. All rights reserved.

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

ISBN(.epub): 978-1-84997-057-0

ISBN(.mobi): 978-1-84997-098-3

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

THE FINAL CUT

MATTHEW SMITH

Judge Dredd created by John Wagner & Carlos Ezquerra.

Chief Judge Hershey created by John Wagner & Brian Bolland.

MEGA-CITY ONE, 2126

PROLOGUE:

LIFE, AND AFTER

Of all the wounds on Emmylou Engels's body, it was the three-inch slash across her throat that had ended her life. As the blood fountained from her severed jugular, it had taken her last breath with it, her lungs emptying into open air with a soft rasping hiss like a punctured tyre. Her mouth had been bound with tape, so she died with barely a sound. Her nostrils flared, her eyes bulged, then rolled up into their sockets, but any cries died at source. Her feet kicked a brief rhythm on the cold plascrete floor, but she was firmly held and seconds later ceased all movement. Emmylou was two weeks shy of her twenty-fourth birthday when her arteries spewed their red spray in a five-foot parabola, a distance that everyone who'd seen it later agreed was impressive.

And yet that cut was the kindest she'd received in the five hours between groggily opening her eyes and the light dimming from them forever. It had been administered by a strong hand that wielded the knife with authority and skill. In truth, she'd prayed for a death blow long before she was granted one. Her torso and arms were a patchwork of abrasions caused by a plethora of instruments, from a pair of pliers to several lit cigarettes. They had used some kind of small chainsaw to cut off her left leg just above the knee - one of the goons held the limb aloft like a trophy, only to drop it because his hands were slippery with blood - and she had blacked out for several blissful minutes. Slapped back into consciousness, she wondered if she would go insane. The prospect of being able to crawl away into a dark hole in her brain and shut out the atrocities being wrought upon her person was welcoming. Her mind, however, remained typically, screamingly rational. Emmylou's mother had always said her daughter had no imagination.

So torture piled upon torture, in all its cruel ingenuity. Sometimes her captors improvised and sometimes they followed strict orders, but they never addressed her personally, never yelled abuse in her face, or indeed seemed to be aware that she was a living human being at all. Their faces bore the expressions of professionally bored people who had done this sort of thing many times before, and would continue to do so long after she was just a faded crimson stain on the seat of the chair they had strapped her to. She was just a body, upon which pain was to be conveniently writ in big, bold and deep red marks.

And once that sharp steel had parted the flesh from her throat, that's all she'd become: a body. Her lifeless form was of no use to them anymore, and so her bloodied husk was untied and dragged away to join the five others in the back of the small, black speedster van parked outside. Emmylou was the last to be loaded, and the evening's work needed disposing of.

It was like a mobile abattoir in there: limbs entwined, vermilion streaks painting the walls, the corpses tumbling together with the motion of the vehicle as it drove through the city, headlamps from passing cars occasionally shining against the darkened windows and highlighting a glazed eye impassively staring up from the tangle of corpses. The two-man team charged with dump duty knew the route and the course of action intimately, and they worked quietly and efficiently.

They arrived at their destination, the cloud-heavy night sky adequately concealing their task from passers-by. They backed the van up to the chem-pit, opened the doors and began to empty the contents. Although the furnace of the pit would have been enough to destroy the cadavers' clothes, the men knew enough about Justice Department procedures not to take the chance, and began to remove any personal effects that would identify them too easily. If they had had the time, they would have removed all the teeth and fingertips - those that still remained - but complete dismemberment was a luxury they couldn't afford. Anyone with any experience of disarticulation knew just how long and tiring it was to take apart a human body, so they would just have to rely on the dissolving qualities of the chemicals in the pit. Similar sites had proved useful for such purposes and there was no real reason for the Judges to come sniffing around here, provided they were careful.

Except...

Perhaps it was the heat. The night was sultry and the seething surface of the chem-pit ratcheted up the temperature by a good twenty degrees. Perhaps it was because one of the men was unknowingly incubating a viral infection. Perhaps he was worrying about his kid's eye operation in a couple of days' time. A lapse of concentration can usually be traced to a specific point of origin, from which the consequences ripple outwards and all tales take flight.