Dredd VS Death Read Free Page B

fingers. Opening her eyes, she saw she was lying on a carpet of bones. Raising her head, she saw the litter of bones - human remains, she noticed, seeing identifiable skulls and bone shapes amongst the graveyard detritus - stretching out as far as she could see. The vague tombstone shape of vast buildings, cracked and ruined, loomed up out of the surrounding gloom. There was something horribly familiar about the whole scene.
    Deadworld, she wondered to herself, remembering her past experiences in the nightmare world which had given birth to the Dark Judges?
    Or Necropolis maybe, she asked herself, noticing with growing disquiet how much the surrounding buildings resembled the familiar outlines of Mega-City One?
    No, none of these things, something whispered inside her. Not something from the past. Something from the future, something dreadful that had yet to happen...
    Pulling herself to her feet, she heard a chorus of menacing growls from the nearest of the buildings. Backing off, she heard more of the same sounds from the buildings behind her. And from those to her left, and then her right.
    Surrounded on all sides, she checked the ammo counter on her Lawgiver and waited for whatever was out there to come to her.
    She didn't have to wait long. From out of the buildings they came, a black wave of shadow figures, snarling and hissing at her in hungry anticipation. She opened fire with her Lawgiver, firing off quick controlled bursts as per Academy of Law standard training. The bullets tore into the ranks of the shadow things, giving rise to an outraged chorus of howls of pain and anger. A dozen or more of the things tumbled to the bone-littered ground, to be fallen upon mercilessly and ripped apart by the others swarming close behind.
    Despite the carnage, the others came right on at her, swift and relentless. As they closed in on the Judge, heedless of the Lawgiver bullets tearing through unnatural flesh, they merged into one great shadow-shape, a black and red collage of maddened, hunger-filled eyes and crimson-dripping fangs.
    They bore down on her, dragging her to the ground, and the last conscious thing she remembered before the red veil descended was the sensation of talon-like fingers raking into her and sharp, needle-like teeth worrying at her flesh.
    After that, there was only the darkness, and the overpowering smell of freshly spilled blood.
     
    My blood , she thought, awakening with a shuddering start. The thin synthi-satin sheets of the bed were soaked with perspiration; the short vest she wore - definitely not Department-approved, which was probably why she wore it - clung to her sweat-soaked skin.
    Coming out of the nightmare, it took her a moment to remember where she was: the small and predictably Spartan temporary quarters assigned to her within the dorm-wing of Psi-Division Headquarters. Closing her eyes, she received a few brief but gruesome mental after-images of the nightmare she had just experienced.
    "Grud on a greenie, that was a doozie," she murmured to herself as she leaned forward to flick-activate the intercom control on the panel set into the wall beside the bed. Instead, she hit the wrong switch, and made the room's small tri-d screen activate into sudden and noisy life.
    "...it's Fluffy, darling... he's dead!" bellowed the voice on the tri-d, making Anderson look up with an involuntary start. She saw a husband-and-wife pair of citizens, both of them straight out of the usual dumb vidvert Central Casting, by the looks of things, crying and cradling the white-furred corpse of something she assumed was supposed to be a dead rabbit. At that moment, the vid-generated background of an ordinary city block apartment wiped away, and a tall, rather intense-looking man in a spotless white lab coat stepped into shot, smiling in a supposedly disarming but actually rather scary manner at the camera.
    "Dr Dick Icarus, chief scientist from EverPet! What are you doing here?" exclaimed the wife character in a way