Prog 17 : Disarmed

Resistance was light on level eight. The dark intelligence that motivated Mercy had thrown most of its strength against Quartermain at the entrance, trying to drive her back to the stairwell and upwards to meet Brant and her destiny. The two Judges – she following in the wake of his Tutor-precise CQB – moved through the corridors junction-by-junction, methodically securing each intersection with calm discipline and a minimal number of expended rounds.

It was only strength of will and ingrained doctrine that prevented Quartermain from cutting loose with the blockrocker, raking the few zomborderies they saw with full-auto fire. She had two magazines left, and she knew – with dreadful certainty – she wouldn't need a single bullet more than she'd loaded. The desire to hurry through this, to get Mercy over and done with, was almost overwhelming.

It doesn't work like that, Jackie, she told herself. It doesn't work like that.

There was no clear trail to follow – Anderson's injury had probably scabbed over after she pulled the shard of glass from her foot on level five, and the floor of the former pediatric wing was so filthy with rotting blood, black in the chemlight and churned by innumerable shuffling feet, it was impossible to discern the psi's footprints. But it was certain Anderson had come this way – the effort put into keeping them off this level was proof enough of that.

Rindon had wanted each of them alone. That had been his plan all along; separate and manipulate, playing with their minds and preying on their fears and insecurities. It was all a trick, lies designed to make them see the world the way he saw it, to recruit them to his side. None of it was true. She just had to keep telling herself that.

Are you sso scertain, Little-Missss Thunder-Thighss?

Cornelius had taken point, moving quickly along the corridors back to the main stairwell. Each level in the wings had the same basic layout. There were minor changes – partition walls built, areas opened up to create larger spaces – but nothing too confusing for people born and raised in an urban jungle. He turned a corner, snapping his gun to his shoulder but not firing. For the first time since they had entered this level, his face shuddered out of stoicism.

He took a staggering step backwards as Quartermain dashed up, gun lifted. "Oh, Grud have mercy . . ." she gasped.

There was a woman – or, rather, what was left of two women – crawling along the floor towards them. A lumpen torso made up of a patchwork of quasi-healthy muscle and hunks of rotting meat dragged itself forward on four working limbs, trailing another four decayed stumps behind it. A grimacing skull with desiccated eyes lolled next to a grief-stricken face, the two heads joined by translucent tubes. "My sister's sick!" the thing wailed. It grabbed something from the floor – a stinking handful of excrement or offal buzzing with flies. "She won't eat!" it screamed, jamming the crawling, maggot-thick mass into the dead head's mouth. "Will you be our friend?"

The still-living head exploded as Cornelius and Quartermain simultaneously fired, blood and brain matter splattering their feet and calves. "If Cassandra came though here . . ." Quartermain began.

Cornelius shook his head; he knew the horrific possibility she was driving at. "Rindon wants her alive," he told himself as much as her. "You heard what he said; all that spug about purging her, making her strong. He wouldn't let . . ."

"These were the children, boss!" Quartermain almost screamed, her voice on the very edge of hysteria. "These aren't his zomborderies, they're not controlled by him. They were just kids and he . . . he . . ." She couldn't bring herself to look, merely gesture. "He did this to them. They'll hate him, hate the one he loves."

Cornelius stared at her as if she were mad. "'Loves'?"

She looked up at him with haunted eyes. "You're not a psi, boss – you don't . . . know him. You can't feel him, inside you, scrabbling at the walls of your mind. Dirty, sticky little fingers, clawing through . . ." She scrubbed her hands over her face, slid them over her plastic-sheathed scalp. She shuddered and sighed. "He's one sick puppy, boss," she said eventually.

"She's alive," he promised her. "She's alive and . . ."

"What if you're wrong?" she wailed. He stopped, stupefied. "What if he got fed up with her? Or she resisted him? Or he couldn't protect her in this madhouse? What if she just bled out? What then, boss? What then?"

He set his jaw. "Then we do what Judges do, Cadet," he ground out through gritted teeth. "We engage. We sentence. We execute."

Quartermain looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. "How can you . . . ?"

"I'm here for justice," he said – again, perhaps just as much for his benefit as hers. "Not love, not compassion, and certainly not revenge. I'm a Judge – I don't do those things. I do justice."

Quartermain looked at him for a long second, green eyes piercing him. "I thought you only lied to Cassie," she said quietly. For an instant, Cornelius stared blankly at her. Mirar en la cara del miedo, pequeño Juan.

And then Quartermain was in motion, running past him, a splintered second before the scream. Anderson's voice, unmistakably so, laced with fear and despair, echoed through the corridors. John! Jackie! His name, howled as a desperate entreaty into the void, galvanized him into a sprint. He raced after the Cadet, caught up with her in moments, barreled past her, accidentally clocking her in the back and sending her stumbling into the wall. "Cassie!"

She struggled upright and ran after him – too-fast to secure junctions, rounding corners too-quickly to check them, doctrine discarded in a flurry of emotion. Her awareness had narrowed to a narrow cone directly ahead, her speed-smeared peripheral vision useless. For such a big guy, Cornelius could run – she was flat-out sprinting just to keep up. She tried to tell herself it was her injuries and the constricting effect of the sprayskin that slowed her – but Cornelius was rated-and-plated in full kit and was outpacing her with ease.

He was ahead of her, charging forward, running into ambushes, discipline forgotten, gun long-empty and no time to reload. He was fighting hand-to-hand, daystick flashing. His strength and size – not to mention skill – meant the zomborderies hadn't really laid a fang or claw on him yet, but it was only a matter of time before he tired or slipped up and the horde dragged him down.

Because they were really coming out of the woodwork now. Just how many of these things were there? The place was thick with them, it seemed – clambering over each other, filling the corridors with a veritable wall of clawing hands and gaping, fang-filled mouths. Cornelius sprinted past a junction without even a glance – three or four of them skittered out of it behind him, loping along the floor, clinging to the walls and ceiling. They sprang towards him, claws leering. She raised her gun and desperately cut them down.

Not good. If he's not watching his own back, he's certainly not watching mine.

She turned just in time – more of them were charging towards her. She spun and fired. One dropped but another slammed into her, throwing her backwards. That saved her life as the rest clawed the air where she'd been an instant before. She landed badly, skidding on her tush and tumbling awkwardly over. Somehow, she ended up on one knee and with her gun pointing in the right direction. She fired.

The hi-ex detonation blew the lead zomborderly into a bloody rain of stinking hash. The expanding fireball caught them, tearing off limbs and tossing them about like toys. It slammed her in the chest and abdomen, lifting her off her knees, driving the air from her lungs and punching her in the gut with the hard fist of nausea. She staggered upright and stumbled into the harsh sunlight of the atrium. Her vision was gray, fogged at the edges with bright blotches of color. She leaned heavily on the railing, gulping down lungfuls of spore-thick air, staring blindly down into the decaying garden below.

Her name shouted once again jerked her out of her reverie. She snapped her head up. Four levels above, across the atrium, on the southern side, Anderson was cowering back from something only she could see. As she watched, the older woman screamed, clutching her head as she fell to her knees. From the levels above, a horde of zombordies skittered down the stairs, gnarled fingers latching onto her naked limbs and carrying her supine body upwards like a trophy.

Quartermain grit her teeth, pain and weakness forgotten, and pushed herself off the railing so she could follow Cornelius. He was already sprinting along the landing, swinging himself around the corner, bounding up the stairs three at a time. She took two strides before something dark and ravening caught her in the mind and sent her spinning to the ground. Her head slammed on the marbelite and her consciousness fled for a moment. That probably saved her sanity as her limp mind was tossed like a coracle in a storm by the psychic backwash.

She came to beached and gasping, eyes wide and every synapse aflame, agony spiking through her frontal lobes along with another's memories. She struggled to her feet, dashing across the landing and staggering up the stairs. Her injuries were catching up with her, wounds in her abdomen opening beneath the sprayskin, painkillers wearing off and a bone-deep nausea squirming its way through her body. She all-but-dragged herself onto level twelve, lifting a gun that seemed heavier than a barbell.

The zomborderies had borne Anderson upwards, carrying her to a meeting with a dreadful figure that loomed in Quartermain's subconscious – a skeleton of truth denuded of the flesh of lies. But only some of them. The others had remained here, a desperate attempt by Rindon to save his special girl from being kidnapped. They were fighting Cornelius, swamping him with their bodies, clawing at him and trying to drag him down. It was a last-ditch effort, Rindon's only remaining play to protect her from those who would hurt her . . .

You know I love her! Don't let them take her from me!

Quartermain pressed her fists against her temples. "Get out . . . of . . . my head!" she hissed through gritted teeth. Gobs of memory were clotting into her brain, fragments of experience and emotion not her own. Games and jokes, kindnesses and gifts, a warm embrace and a comforting drawl when the nightmares were too much. A softness covering the brazen hardness of the Judges. But darker things, too – a gnawing hunger without appetite, the uncomprehending agony of a child, a desperate, heart-felt entreaty . . . and her reaction to it. No, not mine. Yess, yess, my little butterfly – yours! Her reaction to it; disdain for his compassion, disgust at his weakness, dismissal of his desires.

A Judge – a man, a doctor, the title thick like a slur – sending his subordinates away, donning an isolation suit and entering the realm of contagion through an airlock. A pistol held, unfamiliar, in a trembling hand. The disease-ravaged face of a child weeping tears and pus and bloody serum. A forgetting of discipline and the kick of the gun in the hand and the tumbling brass caught in a fold of the sleeve and the hot casing melting through the plastic. The pain of a seared forearm and blisters bursting, exposing raw flesh to the tainted air. And now her own memories – no, no, not mine. Yess, yess, yourss! Watching the barrier being built with butcher-blue eyes cold as the gaps between stars. Turning away once the last weld was run and the last seam sealed, walking past the pens of bleating sheep waiting to be used as living petri dishes.

The sound of a gunshot, muffled as it echoed through plasteen and armorglass. Barely a hitch in her stride and nine-year-old lips curling into a cruel smile as she shrugged and looked up at her mentor. Her own mouth forming the words; "That ain't gonna be enough."

Quartermain roared in denial, kicking Rindon out of her head and lurching to her feet. Cornelius was still fighting, lashing out with daystick, fists and feet. She lifted her gun and stepped forward – the space was as she remembered it, only now thick with the accumulation of age and decay; the bones in the pen where the sheep had starved to death, the bulkhead of riveted and epoxy-sealed plasteen and armorglass, the welding torch discarded in the corner. She fired, three-round bursts systematically cutting down the zomborderies.

She erred on the side of caution with her aim, making sure she missed Cornelius and not minding if stray shots hit the bulkhead; even the bronze-jacketed 9mm rounds of a blockrocker wouldn't penetrate the inch or more of plasteen and armorglass sealing the microbiology & virology wing. Cornelius cracked the skull of one zombordery and kicked the last one away, right into her arc of fire. One final three-round burst and . . .

Her smile faded. She'd forgotten wasn't just firing 9mm FMJ rounds.

Forgotten? Tissk, tissk, my lively little firebrand! You loaded them yoursself! You know jusst what you're doing . . .

The first round hit the target square in the chest, the second higher and to the left as the barrel jerked upwards with recoil and the body tumbled. The third passed an inch above its shoulder, striking the door like so many bullets had before.

But it wasn't a bullet.

It was an AP round, a pseudo-bullet of lead powder sintered around a depletalloy flechette in an overpressure cartridge. The sabot disintegrated into a puff of dust on impact and the needle-sharp penetrator shattered the armorglass porthole with a tinkle of polycarbonate.

Thick, bloodstained silence fell. Quartermain lowered her gun with shaking hands. Cornelius shook brain-matter from his daystick with a practiced flick of his wrist and jogged past her, towards the stairs. "Let's go!" he urged. She didn't move. "Cadet!"

"We've got a problem, boss . . ." she muttered dully, staring blankly at the bulkhead. The porthole had delaminated, outer layers punctured, inner ones badly fractured, the whole thing severely compromised. She remembered Rhinne's report – a fire in the north wing, an outbreak of drug resistant pathogen in the south; two levels still quarantined. Rindon . . . and Cassssandra! . . . had sealed the ward, sacrificing the doctor inside to protect the city.

Oh, how naive you are, my little butterfly!

As she watched, something moved in the darkness beyond the bulkhead – the movement seen not by a difference of color but sheen; black-on-black, gloss-on-matte. A presence slid and slithered, moving slimily between her fragments of clotted memory. Fascinated, as if drawn by a volition not her own, she moved forward, peering through the porthole.

She screamed and leaped backwards when the sheep's skull loomed into view inches from her face, just beyond the cracked glass. Its jaw yawned open, a demoniac shriek hissing between chipped incisors, gobbets of contagion-black slime splattering the window. Spectral witchfires, yellow as pus, crackled with awful intelligence in empty eye sockets. Idiotically, she lifted her gun, only just stopping herself from firing.

A gnarled fist of moldering bones wrapped in a glutinous skein of glistening black threads slammed against the glass, crazing it further. The bones disarticulated, but quickly popped back together with a particularly disgusting squelch. A holocaust of frustrated anger swamped her – it wanted out. It pressed against the porthole, glass creaking, skull screaming.

"Seal it up," she muttered, slinging her gun and fumbling for a glue grenade. "Epoxy's airtight, sticks to anything. Seal it in there . . ." Her burned fingers and trembling hand hindered her and she took her eyes off the perp, looked down – not even a Rookie mistake; worse than that, a freshman Cadet mistake.

"Jackie!" Cornelius' massive hand slammed into her wounded shoulder, sending her sprawling out of the way as the porthole exploded in a shower of shattering glass, splattering slime and splintering bone. A geyser of filth spewed from the hole and hit the floor like diarrhea. The stinking puddle gathered itself, bones knitted together by black tendrils of infection into a desperate parody of a human form surmounted by a rotting sheep's skull. It shrieked, lunging for Quartermain with clawed hands that dripped with disease.

Cornelius grabbed its wrist, jerking the talon away from her. It tore off, decaying in his grasp into a handful of moldering bones greasy with pus, a horrific stench rising from them. He retched and gagged as the thing whipped around, screaming in his face. He drove an explosive left-hook into its head, crushing the orbit of its eye and tearing the sheep's skull from its shoulders.

Somehow, it didn't need to see. It lashed out, filthy claws scraping along the plates of his right vambrace, gouges in the blackened metal instantly rusting. He grunted in pain as its index finger slid off and punctured leather and armorweave, a hypodermic-sharp talon piercing his flesh. He jerked his arm back and grasped his wrist protectively, leaping into the air and kicking the thing in the chest double-footed. It flew backwards, splattering against the wall like vomit.

The thing coalesced, scattered bones borne on a stinking slurry, rising up again. Cornelius writhed on the floor, teeth gritted against the pain, unable to unlatch his fingers from around the burning agony in his wrist.

But Quartermain hadn't been idle. She'd scrambled for the welding torch, smashing the tip off on the floor and wrenching the valves open. Grud-only-knew where she'd found a spark – almost-delirious with pain, Cornelius could have sworn she passed the jet of fuel-air mixture over her palm, igniting it into a dirty-edged cone of smoky red-yellow flame.

Yess, yess! The power iss yourss, my lively little firebrand! Accsept your desstiny!

Quartermain bellowed, roaring in despair as she trained the flame on the specter of decay. The thing howled, keening in agony as the inferno incinerated the writhing bacterial colony. It slithered backwards, slime crisping to crackling, rotten bones roasting. It wailed pathetically, slopping and slinking as it shrank like rancid butter in a furnace, smoke and a nauseating stench filling the air. It fled towards the decontamination shower, discarding its bones one by one. Quartermain could hear its psionic wail of anguish as it surrendered the last vestiges of humanity, leaving nothing but virulent hatred for the living. The last few droplets slithered down the drain. She twisted the valves closed, the inferno's roar fading.

Cornelius lifted his trembling arm, tugging his glove off with his teeth and drawing his knife left-handed. His hand was pale and waxy, clammy and cold to the touch, sensation dimmed like he'd leaned awkwardly on it. The pain was fading, a creeping coldness seeping up his forearm. He sliced the leather, stripping the sleeve. Not good. "Jackie . . ." he said.

She turned and gasped. The wound on his wrist was a suppurating sore, a festering volcano of flesh, black-and-crimson at the edges, the crater bubbling putrid yellow-white pus. The color was leeched as far as his elbow, a rotting green tinge spreading from the wound, veins blue-black with contagion writhing vermiform under translucent skin. As Quartermain watched in horror, the rot spread; liquifying-char claiming more flesh and glutinous gobs of curdled infection dripping to the ground, hours of gangrene happening in seconds. Quartermain clapped her hand over her mouth, swallowing heavily as the stench of putrefaction reached her nostrils. "Oh . . . my . . . Grud . . ." she gasped. Gingerly, she reached out.

"Don't touch it!" snapped Cornelius. There was no pain – no sensation at all below the elbow – but the grotesque sight of his flesh rotting and sloughing off was horrifying, the nightmarish fears of fleshy decay the false-Novak had taunted him with coming literally true. His mind raced – what was this? Just what had been quarantined within the sealed ward? What had they let loose into the city? It had to be panic, but he almost fancied he could feel a presence gnawing away at his arm, at his flesh, at his very life. His hand abruptly fell limply forward as the joint failed, pinkish-white bones visible through gaping rents in his skin. The blood-black necrosis had spread to his knuckles and about a third of the way down his forearm, precious ropes of tendons, sinews and nerves snapping one by one.

Quartermain fumbled in her medikit. "Broad spectrum antibiotic," she muttered. "That'll . . ." She stopped as the putrefaction reached the knuckle of his pinky finger, the long white spar of the carpal bone rotting to greenish-gray coral. The digit swung loose, dangling by a thin cord. It snapped and the finger fell to the floor.

Awful knowledge of what had to be done hit Cornelius; the impossible infection was spreading too-rapidly for anything else. He spun the knife in his hand, offering it to Quartermain hilt-first. "Field amputation," he ordered grimly. He jammed a rubber doorstop into his armpit, pressing it in place with a plasticuff around his shoulder. He jerked it snug with his teeth, slipping his daystick inside the nylon loop to twist it tighter.

Quartermain blanched. "You can't expect me to . . ."

Cornelius fired a painkiller into his shoulder, setting his elbow on a discarded crate. The strain of movement tore already-weakened tendons and his hand disarticulated, bones clattering to the floor, splattering amid stinking pus. Radius and ulna jutted obscenely from the bubbling putrefaction of rotting flesh that was his forearm, the flesh pallid and clammy halfway up his bicep. "Do it!" he snapped, his voice on the edge of hysteria.

"Oh, Grud . . ." Emergency amputations were part of the field medicine curriculum at the Academy, but every Judge hoped against hope he'd never have to use it. Frantically, Quartermain tried to recollect hazily-remembered lessons; anatomy, best-practices and strange terms – fish-mouth flaps, guillotine amputations, ligation of structures, preferred stump geometry . . . It was hard enough to recite lessons when grilled by a stern-faced Tutor; it was all-but-impossible in a darkened chamber of horrors with your partner rotting to death before your eyes.

She grabbed his shoulder to steady herself, pressing the blade against the still-healthy skin just below the massive mantle of his deltoid. She winced as she pushed down and sliced – the razor-edge cut easily through the flesh and blood flowed, curtaining over his bicep and running down the blade. His face twisted and he hissed in pain. "I'm sorry!" she sobbed, her hand instinctively drawing back.

"Don't apologize!" grunted Cornelius through gritted teeth. He looked with terror at decayed ruin of his arm – the putrefaction had destroyed his elbow, was advancing up his bicep. If she delayed any longer . . . "Just drokking do it!"

Tears streaming down her face, Quartermain reversed her grip on the knife and hooked the blade under his arm, slicing to the bone and spinning swiftly around it. Cornelius' jaw clenched and his arm jerked, a scream trapped behind his teeth, but Quartermain was resolute. Face grimly set, she sliced through the last lingering shreds of meat – the stinking sheath of rotted muscle slid grotesquely down the bone in a slurry of pus.

She glanced at him – he was pale with pain, eyelids flickering, lingering on the edge of consciousness. "Stay with me, oppa," she begged. The humerus was pinkish-white just below where she'd sliced the muscle, but the elbow end was gray and dead. She flipped the knife to use the serrated edge. Cornelius flung back his head and howled a single, harsh obscenity as she sawed living bone. "Just a moment more," she lied.

There was no way she'd make it in time; she'd sawn less than a quarter of the way through and the gray contagion was working its way inexorably along the humerus, the end already black and worm-eaten like the bones of his forearm. The disease would creep through the marrow, into his shoulder and chest, eat his lungs, heart, neck, head and brain. She could taste the disease's malignant animus, the fixated, simple-minded psyche of the infection; infect, spread, grow. The notion of a conscious contagion was horrific enough, but the fact it hungered to not merely survive and prosper but actually kill was abjectly terrifying. It wanted Cornelius dead, longed to course through his bloodstream to his heart and brain and utterly destroy him, snuff out his life. It was frustrated by its quarantine, bitter jealousy and a desire for vengeance against all that lived festering and growing year after year.

Its disgusting determination galvanized her. She jerked the knife free and gripped it in her teeth, grabbing the roll of detcord from her belt. Normally used to set instant fuses so charges would detonate simultaneously, the thin tube of chemical explosive could also be used as a cutting charge. She wrapped two turns around the bone, tying it off and paying it out as she backed away. Snatching the knife so quickly she nicked the corner of her mouth, her and Cornelius' blood mingling on her tongue, she sliced a long fuse. She sheathed the blade and grabbed her gun, aiming at the tip of the cord.

"Fire in the hole!" she yelled, and fired.

The explosion painted a bright, actinic line on her retinas, detcord vanishing with the suddenness of a conjuring trick. Cornelius screamed as the detonation shattered his arm, splintering the humerus and driving fragments of bone-shrapnel into his cheek and chest. The force of the explosion knocked him to the floor, shaking the tourniquet loose. Quartermain dived for him as blood gushed from the jagged ruin of his shoulder in a bright arterial spray.

The floor was slick with it, her boots slipping as she frantically spritzed sprayskin onto the ragged wound. It hissed when it hit, bio-plastic bubbling and writhing as it chemically seared itself to raw meat. Even through the painkillers, Cornelius arched his back and screamed anew; there was nothing subtle about auto-cauterization. Grimly, Quartermain sprayed until the can was empty. She tossed it away, slumping down as the backwash of adrenaline flowed through her, trembling hands slipping on the bloody floor.

Cornelius lay still, mercifully unconscious, the bubblegum-pink scab of sprayskin pulsing with a thin, reedy heartbeat. Quartermain struggled to her knees and then shakily stood, looking at the remains of his arm.

There was little left – rotting, eroded bones surrounded by a spreading pool of swamp-black pus that oozed and bubbled, tendrils writhing in the air as if seeking something new to infect. The contagion's anger was palpable, frustrated rage hissing at the edge of her awareness. As she watched, it seemed to notice her and moved with dreadful purpose.

Never taking her eyes off the oozing puddle, she picked up the impromptu flamethrower. "Drokk you," she spat. The roaring cone splashed out, bathing the infection with fire. The liquid hissed and shrieked as it vaporized, a psionic howl of pain and frustration. Frantically, it tried to slink away, slopping back towards the drain, but Quartermain was merciless. She kept the flame on it, herding it from its escape, encircling it in a enclosing inferno, hunting down and burning away errant drops until the floor was a scorched ruin and the air thick with the scent of burned mold.

She tossed the torch down, her hands trembling uncontrollably, her legs going weak as the horror finally hit her. Cornelius stirred, his eyelids flickering, and came around with a weary groan. He rolled the wrong way, the stump of his shoulder grinding against the floor. Agony shook him fully awake as he yelped in pain, clutching at the remains of his arm. With a visible effort he mastered himself. "Gruddrokkit it all to spugging stomm," he grunted.

The sense of relief that flowed over Quartermain was so overwhelming she fell to her knees and was violently sick.

A/n : I will admit, I am not as happy with this chapter (indeed, this story) as I have been with others. But I think I might be overthinking it. Anyway; here it is, for better or for worse! I've found it difficult to write – not had as much time as I might like, when I do have time I don't have the motivation etc. I think I just need to plow on and get it done – I hope you guys enjoy it! (Let me know with a review, eh? :) )

Comic-book readers will recognize (or, hopefully, should recognize!) the character introduced here. I've departed a lot from his comic origins but, in many ways, Judge Mortis had the weakest identity of all the Dark Judges. His name simply means "death" and the idea he would kill people by decaying them was never truly explored. The notion of him as a living infection, a living bacterial colony, was an interesting one (some of this is discussed in the previous chapter, more will be revealed in the next). When I was working with Chinook (on DeviantArt) to come up with the pictures of my imaginings of the Dark Judges he latched onto a key personality element – that he is desperately clinging to his humanity. I tried to reflect that here.

Now that all four of Dark Judges have been introduced (Judge Death only through his avatars, I suppose) it is worthwhile pointing out I drew on imagery of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Death is, of course, Death. Mortis is Pestilence (and will probably be called Judge Pestilence because mortis just means "death"). Fire is War, and Fear is Conquest (his original name of Victor Timor, "conquer fear" in Latin, refers to this – as well as the underlying motivation of Judge Fear; to make those he terrorizes overcome their weaknesses).

The idea of Cornelius losing an arm comes from my original Judge Dredd badfic. There, in the final climactic fight between Cornelius and the clone of Judge Cal, he looses his arm and has it replaced. I wanted to reprise that scene, but with tie it into this story and the fears Cornelius was made to face by Judge Fear. Cornelius told the Fauxvak he was prepared to sacrifice himself, piece by piece if necessary, and he pretty much immediately has to confront that.

But, of course, there are other's fears here – it is strongly implied in this chapter and the previous one it was Anderson who made Yersin sloppy with his containment protocols, and it is Quartermain who fires the round that cracks the window and Cornelius fights the bacteria to protect her. While both women have suffered, perhaps their greatest suffering will come knowing they cost their beloved oppa an arm . . .

Anyway, that's all in the future! For now, I am publishing this. As I said, not as happy as I could be, but I want to get it up there. Let me know with a review what you think!