Judge Dredd

FIVE

“Move along, damn you, I ain’t got all day!”

Fergie took a short step. The line shuffled forward. Glancing over his shoulder, he could see the broad curve of the shuttle’s hull. Like the cons it had carried, the shuttle had gotten its cleansing spray as well. Fingers of dirt dripped down its eroded sides. Nearly-faded letters on the side read:

MEGA-CITY JUDGE SYSTEM: ASPEN PRISON SHUTTLE # THREE

I hope to hell I never see your ugly self again, Fergie thought to himself.

“Next,” the guard said.

He stuck his right hand into the blinking red slot. The robot sensor whirred, then winked at him in green.

“Ferguson, Herman, ASP-niner-zero-zero-seven-six-four… Sentence served: Six months, three days. Welcome back, Cit-i-zen…”

“Thanks,” Fergie said.

The robot didn’t answer back. It made a bleeting sound, and flipped him a blue plastic card. The card showed Fergie’s face the day he’d entered prison. That was not a good day. He decided he looked better now.

He walked through a gate. He looked down at the ground. He waited for someone to tell him what to do. It struck him, then, and the thought nearly brought him to his knees. There was no one watching, no one telling him where to go, no one telling him what to do. He was free. He didn’t feel free, but he’d be damned if he let that hold him back.

The back of his card read:

“Sounds great,” Fergie said aloud. “Better than where I’ve been.”

A passerby saw him talking to himself. He glanced at Fergie’s prison-issue clothes, gave him a sour look, and hurried on. The man’s face was painted half cobalt-blue, half Chinese-red. His hair was coiled in a pile atop his head and tied with razor wire. It was impossible to guess the current fashion trend. Everyone he passed looked totally different from the person who’d passed before.

Poking his card in an infoslot led him to the Skycab station that would take him to the Red Quad sector, some sixty miles away. He hadn’t seen a woman on the street—or if he had, he didn’t recognize them as such. The Skycab ride made up for that. The great towers of Mega-City swept by below, but Fergie hardly noticed the sight. As the Skycab veered sharply to the left, he glanced down and saw a dazzling blue rooftop pool. Under a brightly-striped umbrella were three young women, standing and laughing by themselves. All of them were lean and impossibly tall. All of them had bright scarlet mouths and silver eyes. They wore their thick raven hair down to their thighs, and little else.

Fergie felt a knot in his stomach. He wanted to cry. He wanted to follow the women wherever they planned to go. One of the cons in the electronics shop had patched together a VIRG program, a Virtual Reality Girl. It tended to overload. Several prisoners burned out their skulls before the guards found the thing and hauled it away.

The Skycab set him down on a pleasant street. Fergie stood and stared at the breathtaking sight before his eyes. There was a shady green path winding through a forest of thick-boled trees. Sunlight filtered through the branches to sparkle in a gentle waterfall. Couples strolled hand in hand. Children chased each other across the lush lawn.

The scene brought a smile to Fergie’s face. Man, can these frigs possibly be as dumb as they look?

New variations on old schemes danced through his head. The platinum-brick routine, the antique-Coke bottle scam. These groons mooning in the park would buy a sackful of spiders if they thought they could get them half-price.

“Wonderful,” Fergie said aloud. “Herman Ferguson loves Heavenly Haven. Herman Ferguson is going to fit right in!”

“…coming soon, Citizens, the Heavenly Haven Pocket Park. Bringing fresh air and recreation to your lives. Another design for better living from the Mega-City Council…”

Fergie blinked, startled by the kindly, sonorous voice that seemed to come from everywhere. It was a warm, commanding voice, a voice you knew you could trust.

“—ing soon, Citizens, the Heavenly Haven Pocket Park. Bringing fresh air and…”

Heavenly Haven Pocket Park suddenly disappeared. Fergie stared at a dirty, graffiti-covered wall and felt the color rise to his face. Six months in Aspen and he’d let himself be conned by a damn holo poster!

“I gotta get with it,” he said, shaking his head. “I got to get straight before some scammer starts sellin’ me spiders…”

With the holo poster gone, Heavenly Haven didn’t look all that terrific anymore. Dark, skeletal tenements formed brooding canyon walls on every side. Citizens scurried through the murky streets. This part of the city was obviously incredibly old. Reminders of the Way Back When were squeezed between the tenement walls. Fergie saw a row of marble columns that held up nothing at all. Something that might have been a twentieth-century church was imbedded in a bleak slab of stone. Swallowed by the years, its brick entry surfaced now and then like the bones of some long-dead creature buried in a geologic fault.

Just to his right, half-covered by a tenement that rose out of sight, Fergie made out the remains of a statue from the very distant past. The metal was eroded and green. Half the face of a woman was left, and one raised arm. Whatever it was, time and pollution had taken its toll, and it was nearly rotted out and gone.

Fergie checked his directions again. There were no street signs. Nothing that said Red Quad or anything else. He spotted a fly-specked window, half a block away. A faded sign read: NICKO’S. He decided it was better than nothing, crossed the street, and stepped inside. There was a bar and a dirty wooden floor. A flickering bulb hung from a frayed electrical cord. There was no one in the place except the man behind the bar.

“Ah, you got a beer?” Fergie said. “Okay if I come in?”

“You got a card?”

“Of course I got a card. Everybody’s got a card.”

Fergie slapped his card on the bar. The bartender had half a steel face and two ruby-cut eyes. A cheek tattoo said he was a veteran of some obscure war.

Fergie quickly downed his first beer in six months. He closed his eyes and let his taste buds come back to life.

“How long you been out?”

Fergie didn’t bother to lie. “An hour and a half. Aspen Shuttle Three.”

“You want another one of those?”

“What do you think?”

The bartender slid another beer Fergie’s way and pushed his card into a slot. Fergie wondered how much they’d put in his account. You got some pitiful amount when they let you out of the joint. It couldn’t be much. He figured he’d have to get a scam going pretty fast.

“Since you know where I come from, maybe you can tell me where I am,” Fergie said. “I’ve got a room in Heavenly Haven. Where they’re going to do the park—”

“You’re in it, pal.” The bartender jerked a dirty thumb straight up. “Heavenly Haven. Looks a lot like Celestial Heights and Paradise Woods, only it ain’t.” The bartender grinned, showing moldy teeth. “Nice, huh? Welcome to the neighborhood.”

Fergie shrugged. “Beats hell out of Aspen Prison.”

“Yeah? That’s ’cause you just got here, friend.”

The day was nearly gone. Old-fashioned lampposts shed amber pools of light on the pot-holed streets. Far above the dark walls, the heights of Mega-City shimmered bright as day.

As he stepped out of Nicko’s, Fergie heard the sound. It was a deep, angry drone, and it echoed off the tenement walls. Fergie walked back the way he’d come. Turning the corner, he walked right into the crowd. They were boiling out of every building, shouting and waving their fists. He backed against a wall and let them by. He had seen one riot in Aspen Prison and he didn’t want to see one again.

Everyone was running south. Fergie followed a comfortable distance behind the crowd. They were throwing rocks and bottles at the wall where the holo of Heavenly Haven Pocket Park had been. The holo was different now. It showed a great shining building, stretching to the skies. The golden shield and eagle of the Judges was superimposed on the image, glowing in a painted blue sky. He could hear the booming voice, even over the anger of the crowd:

“…Coming soon, the Heavenly Haven Law Enforcement Barracks, bringing surveillance and security to your lives. Another design for better living from the Mega-City Council… Coming soon, the Heavenly Have—”

A stone shattered a window past the holo. A woman beat at the image with the leg of a chair.

“They stole our park!”

“Damn them all!”

“Lying bastards!”

“Stinkin’ lying Judges!”

The crowd swept forward in a wave, a dark and ugly beast with half a thousand heads. They tossed bricks and stones, and tore at the empty air with their hands. A lamppost snapped, and a bright electric arc crackled along the street. A Citizen jerked in a crazy dance and fell.

And that was the moment the weapons opened up on the crowded streets below. Men and women screamed. Lead ripped flesh and bone. Heads exploded and limbs tore away. A river of blood spattered the dark and grimy walls, and Herman Ferguson, ASP-niner-zero-zero-seven-six-four, peed in his prison-issue trousers and ran like hell…