Dredd VS Death Read Online Free PDF

eagle-shaped shoulder pad and used the creep's own momentum against him, judo-throwing him over his shoulder and sending the perp face-first into the surface of the wall behind him. The pattern of the rough brickwork, now stamped deep into the skin of the unconscious thug's face, made an interesting new addition to the mosaic of ugly tattoo markings already there.
    With the six perps lying unconscious or groaning on the ground around him, Dredd finally relented and lifted his foot from the back of the original perp - Creep Number Zero, he supposed he should call him - who had been lying there helpless, hands cuffed behind his back and pinned to the ground by Dredd's foot, during the entire fight.
    "Control - Dredd. Seven for catch wagon pick-up, Mohammed Alley, just off Spinks and Foreman."
    "Wilco, Dredd," came the crackling reply over his helmet radio. "What are the charges?"
    Dredd looked at the seven subdued figures around him. "Six of them on Attempted Judge Assault - five years." Dredd paused, looking at the six groaning, bleeding perps lying around him. "Tell the catch wagon crew there'll be no problem figuring out which ones they are. The other one..."
    Dredd looked round at the colour-splashed and still-wet graffiti wall decor behind him.
    "Scrawling - one year's cubetime."
    Scrawling was a common enough Mega-City crime, Dredd knew, and Sector House Chiefs were required to order regular crackdowns on it in some of the worst-hit areas. Dredd had made thousands of arrests for scrawling in his years on the streets, and this one had at first seemed no different from the rest when he had come across an illegal scrawler - Creep Zero - still at work on his latest graffiti masterpiece at the mouth of the alley.
    What had been unusual, though, was when Creeps One to Six turned up to dispute Dredd's arrest of their buddy. Scrawl wars were common amongst the city's street gangs, with gangs leaving provocative scrawl-tags on their rival's turf and then protecting their own gang territory - often with lethal force - from reprisal scrawl attacks in return. Gang members protecting their gang's scrawl artists wasn't that uncommon, but what was very much out of the ordinary was a gang willing to do the same thing if it meant attacking a Judge.
    Especially if that Judge happened to be Judge Joe Dredd.
    Dredd looked again at the scrawl design the scrawler had still been working on when he arrested him. He saw a cartoon depiction of a familiar-looking ghastly figure, a figure which Dredd knew all too well, but which the scrawler would only have seen in brief and heavily Justice Department-censored news-vid images. The figure, a grinning ghoul wearing a crudely imagined parody of a Judge's uniform, was surrounded by a chemically treated fluorescent paint halo of glowing black energy. Written beside it, in large and still unfinished letters, was a single stark message: "DEATH LIVES!"
    Despite the cartoon crudeness of the thing, despite the mundane setting of a typically grubby and garbage-strewn Mega-City alleyway, there was something strangely unsettling about the image, almost as if the scrawler had subconsciously tapped into some greater hidden reservoir of fear and dread.
    Sensing he was onto something, Dredd bent over the nearest prone body, ignoring the injured perp's groans of pain as he quickly searched him. Like all the other gang members, the perp's clothes were uniformly black, but, beneath the fresh dye marks, Dredd could still see the evidence of the ganger's original and quite different gang colours. Likewise, while his arms bore traditional juve gang tattoos - Dredd recognised them as belonging to the Sid Sheldon Block Big Spenders Crew - the ones on his face were most recent, and different from the gang tattoos. Flaming skulls, vampire bats, clawed hands coming out of graves and similar cartoon-gothic imagery seemed to be the predominant style here.
    Standing back up, he reactivated his helmet radio link.
    "Control - Dredd.