When the Light Lay Still Read online

  An Abaddon Books™ Publication

  www.abaddonbooks.com

  [email protected]

  First published in 2019 by Abaddon Books™, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.

  Creative Director and CEO: Jason Kingsley

  Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley

  Head of Books and Comics Publishing: Ben Smith

  Fiction Commissioning Editor: David Moore

  Marketing and PR: Remy Njambi

  Design: Sam Gretton, Oz Osborne & Maz Smith

  Cover: Neil Roberts

  Copyright © 2019 Rebellion 2000 AD Ltd. All rights reserved.

  Judge Dredd®; Judge Dredd is a registered trade mark; ® and © Rebellion 2000 AD Ltd; All rights reserved.

  Based on characters created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra.

  ISBN: 978-1-78618-120-6

  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: Year One

  City Fathers, Matthew Smith

  The Cold Light of Day, Michael Carroll

  Wear Iron, Al Ewing

  Judge Dredd: Year Two

  The Righteous Man, Michael Carroll

  Down and Out, Matthew Smith

  Alternative Facts, Cavan Scott

  Rico Dredd: The Titan Years

  The Third Law, Michael Carroll

  The Process of Elimination, Michael Carroll

  For I Have Sinned, Michael Carroll

  Judge Anderson, Rookie

  Heartbreaker, Alec Worley

  The Abyss, Alec Worley

  A Dream of the Never Time, Alec Worley

  Bigger Than Biggs, Danie Ware

  Devourer, Laurel Sills

  Judge Dredd

  Bad Moon Rising, David Bishop

  Black Atlantic, Simon Jowett & Peter J Evans

  Cursed Earth Asylum, David Bishop

  Deathmasques, Dave Stone

  Dread Dominion, Dave Stone

  Dredd vs. Death, Gordon Rennie

  Dreddlocked, Stephen Marley

  Eclipse, James Swallow

  The Final Cut, Matthew Smith

  The Hundredfold Problem, John Grant

  Kingdom of the Blind, David Bishop

  The Medusa Seed, Dave Stone

  Psykogeddon, Dave Stone

  The Savage Amusement, David Bishop

  Silencer, David Bishop

  Swine Fever, Andrew Cartmel

  Wetworks, Dave Stone

  Whiteout, James Swallow

  Judge Anderson

  Fear the Darkness, Mitchel Scanlon

  Red Shadows, Mitchel Scanlon

  Sins of the Father, Mitchel Scanlon

  Dedicated to the continued search for justice.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Tuesday, October 25th 2033

  20:34

  OFFICER EZEKIEL JONES watched as a puff of white smoke crackled from his partner’s Glock in the near winter night. One body down, one weapon forward, and Ezekiel unsure if after that night—its cold promise, its absence of light—he’d ever really know up from down again.

  “You saw—holy fuck, Ezekiel, I swear, it looked like a gun,” Officer Williams cried out to her partner.

  Later, Ezekiel would have a response.

  He’d say that the moonlight hadn’t glinted across the plastic in the same way it would steel. He’d say that it was uncommon for a gun to come so small, or in a pastel blue.

  In that moment, though, there was only the body beneath them and the eyes that kept Ezekiel fixed. Ezekiel hadn’t even budged when his partner jogged to the cruiser and began rummaging around in the trunk; for nothing Ezekiel could think would matter.

  “Tank, did you hear me? Does. He. Have. An. ID?” Williams shouted over the clang of the trunk slamming under her hands. Ezekiel heard. But he shut his eyes, hoping they’d find a way to fall into themselves and never stop.

  “Tank?” Williams shouted again, snapping Ezekiel’s eyes open to the dark beneath him. This time he looked over to his partner, his Taco Tuesday compatriot.

  “I… yeah, I got it, Williams,” he said, and for a moment he took in the sight of Williams’ sweat-soaked hair, thin blonde strands stuck slack to her trembling forehead, and forgot the body in front of them. It didn’t last, though, when looking back at the memory of how he needed to serve in that moment.

  He hummed loudly, to quash the tide rising in him, and knelt to the body.

  The body.

  The fucking body.

  A body not unlike his own, carrying the same harsh history as most who were brown and beaten. While Ezekiel thumbed through the boy’s pocket for a wallet, Williams flicked her flashlight on and began shakily scanning the empty parking lot as she walked back towards them. She stopped, mostly, when she reached Ezekiel and the thirteen-year-old corpse; Ezekiel holding up a puffed pleather wallet with a cartoon character on it.

  When Williams finished searching through it, she tossed it to the ground. The flap as it struck the blacktop made Ezekiel flinch.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, not sure if it was for Williams or himself.

  “The… shit, Ezekiel. He’s thirteen. He—if he wouldn’t have run. If he’d just listened. Why didn’t he just listen?”

  The Grant High School drama club member—the receiver of countless embraces from a soon to be hollowed-out mother and father—Jeanie Jeffery’s first kiss under paint-chipped bleachers—another bullet-riddled body—Dushane—was still bleeding as Williams knelt beside him. Ezekiel could finally make out what it was his partner had grabbed from her trunk when she set down her flashlight; and he knew, as he watched her place a clunky BB gun into the boy’s hands, that this night would be the end of more than just one life.

  “No… No, Williams, just… Don’t do this. Please, you can’t do this.” Ezekiel’s hand went to his pocket—for his walkie, not his firearm. His plea had come out as more a whimper than anything else, but Williams stopped. If that moment could have gone on, sliced out to infinity, maybe there would have been something to find. Maybe, Ezekiel hoped, something could catch her from falling.

  She’d made a mistake; a horrible, indescribable mistake. Ezekiel didn’t imagine, even if she had let his words dig rather than prod, that they’d be shooting the shit at Dewey’s behind a couple piss-warm beers that weekend. If she’d just stop, take account of her actions even though it cost her career as a cop, then Ezekiel could plausibly hang on to hope: the most dangerous four-letter word in his lexicon.

  “I made a mistake. I made one mistake,and what, I’m supposed to just let everyone forget about everything I’ve done up until now? No. Fuck that. This is happening, Tank,” Williams said, as she propped the once-person into a pose that told a story not nearly as strange as the one they knew to be true.

  When he joined the force, Ezekiel hadn’t exactly been the pride of the Jones household. There’d been an understanding—or so his mother had thought—that her boy wouldn’t be taken in by the stories of his father’s glory days: glory days that everyone but the man himself had the opportunity to enjoy.

  He’d grown up with a thousand uncles in the same line of work—his father used to say they had blue blood. Whenever they’d take him for the day, or stop by for dinner with what remained of their brother’s legacy, he’d fall face first into the tall tales. He could tell a few on his o
wn, now, as if he’d been there himself: the one about the standoff on the city bus, or the one about riding on the hood of a getaway car going fifty miles an hour (even if it’d been thirty in the first telling of it). There were also the wounds, the people he couldn’t save, the mantra that put him back into the uniform every morning.

  Even in the grip of that fantasy, Ezekiel entertained his mother’s blueprint. Maybe he’d even fooled himself into thinking—from one stage to another, from high school diploma to masters—that he’d make it to the type of law that took place behind tables, as far from bullets and bravado as could be.

  Reya, his mother, insisted it was just bubble guts and butterflies that kept him from pushing on past the LSATs, that the badge he’d come home with instead was just some twenty-something symptom he’d get past once he was done chasing ghosts. He tried to explain that even he hadn’t known what it was that made him wake from a fever dream with a blue uniform and a job in his father’s precinct. It wasn’t fear, though: it was fulfilment. It was knowing his place was on the street, as close to their people who’d needed protection as he could get.

  All at once, here in this crappy parking lot, Williams had stripped him of that, like the thief she’d thought she’d found in Dushane.

  Ezekiel’s gun had never felt so alien to his fingers than that moment, placing a hand over the Glock on his hip.

  “The fuck are you doing, Tank?” Williams said. Ezekiel had grown up under the blue, under a revolving door of uncles that taught him respect for the badge, for the oath and the weapon. He knew enough to chide himself for giving Williams a chance, for being so obvious, for not pulling the piece in the six different ways he could have without her seeing.

  “This isn’t happening, Williams,” he said. “I won’t let it happen. I’m taking you in, and we’re going to figure this out the right way, okay? Don’t make this any worse than it already is.” His breath misted, drifting over the body between them.

  Williams was a quicker learner than he’d given her credit for. All those nights at the range, before drinks or dinner or softball (the EMTs were nigh-unbeatable), he’d shared some of the secrets he’d learned over the years. Her own draw almost escaped his eye.

  Almost.

  His fingers perfectly matched hers, unhooking and drawing his own pistol. It flew into his hands as if magnetised. Earlier that day, sitting with Williams at Stu’s Diner, a plate of pancakes and rubbery, overcooked turkey sausage links in front of him, the last thing he could have imagined was a standoff with the one person he’d thought got it.

  “This is ridiculous, man. You know, you know how close I am, Tank. I have a—a—a fucking week before I start the Judge program. Soon enough, we’re going to be out here, all of us, Tank, making the choices. We’ll say what’s right, not the lawyers, not the politicians, not a—a—dickhole on Twitter or YouTube.” She was pleading, but her grip on her pistol was steady as rock.

  HE’D NEVER SAY it to anyone but the bottom of a glass, but he wondered, later—more times than Dushane deserved—what if he’d just gone along with it? What if he hadn’t gone for the walkie?

  Williams was closer than most Ezekiel had known to being accepted into the Judges program, not that she’d told anyone outside of Ezekiel and her family. It was only a week earlier they’d celebrated it, and if she’d seemed to be going through the motions since then, Ezekiel forgave it as a late case of senioritis. She was proof, he’d thought, that Fargo and Gurney may have been right about things after all.

  After the call, though, as Ezekiel sat across the table from Chief Cori, there wasn’t anything right about it as far as he saw. After the call, as the chief scanned every social media platform he could find with Dushane’s face, to get a hold of the situation, and make sure the people know the truth about this kid before crucifying one of their own, Ezekiel couldn’t stop the thought bubbling up that the blue was covering something a bit more yellow-bellied. After the call, visiting Williams in her holding cell, crowded with the brothers he’d bled with, who wouldn’t leave a policewoman alone with a traitor like him, his father’s stunts seemed less righteous by the moment.

  It would be nasty. Everyone knew that; no matter how much they spun things, no matter how they stalled before the media got hold of it. Williams was given a leave of absence with pay while they got to the bottom of the shallow puddle Dushane spent his last seconds choking in.

  Ezekiel’s own suspension, which felt less a matter of law and more of morale, was paid as well. He’d always been a frugal sort, though; his mother, a bank branch manager for most of his youth, had made it nearly impossible to do any summer fun spending without a guilt trip. As annoyed as he would be to ever tell his mother she’d been right, it proved more important than ever when those post-suspension payments, a bit cold and stiff and bloodied and dark, landed in his account. It meant it wasn’t so hard a choice to send his weekly compensation for sitting on his ass anonymously to a GoFundMe campaign setup for Dushane’s family.

  At least, it wasn’t at first. Because nothing on the net stays private, and when his contributions were revealed, the accusations followed; the insinuation that this was ultimately about the one thing it couldn’t be, if anyone would take him, his truth, for anything more than that of a divisive, black, race-baiting traitor.

  Jones had spent the better part of his short career being asked by a myriad of sides just who he was loyal to. He’d laughed it off, that ridiculous obsession with defining him, as if they were picking sides for a pickup game at the park. If he wasn’t a Clarence Thomas or Uncle Tom, he was a radical in repose.

  He’d have probably made a mistake sooner or later, erupted in front of one of the cameras that buzzed like gnats around his apartment after the incident. Thankfully, he’d always had two things to help him keep hold of the waning fucks he had left to give.

  For one, he carried with him every voice, every face that he’d come across on his beat that offered love in one way or another. He remembered every peanut-butter-and-chocolate cookie Mrs. Sanderson sent him since he’d saved a high schooler from an after-school pummeling. He remembered the gratitude on Mr. Darzada’s face when he popped into his 11th grade English class to explain and make amends after a video went viral of another officer choking Lanita Moore for mocking him.

  For the other, he’d heard the voice of his father—like Ghost Dad, but less Cosby—over anything he did, and everything he tried to be.

  His mother had explained to him that there was only one truth to know as a minor by way of melanin: to move from one day to the next.

  There’s another after this, and one more after that. It sounded like nonsense the first time he’d heard it, hell, it sounded even more insane when he started saying it to himself. It wasn’t enough to simply exist, through a country that systematically deconstructed and parceled out black bodies; there had to be survival, and knowing that survival is just another turn of the wheel. Apathetic? Maybe, but Ezekiel leaned into it as a call to arms for the battle ahead.

  There’s another after this, and one more after that, he whispered on the day he’d taken the stand. The suit and tie, his only suit and tie, felt stiff and tight over a body that had swollen in strength in the years since he’d bought it. When he made his way to the stand, there were the expected murmurs of the misanthropes.

  They may as well had been vapour, though. The only people Ezekiel thought mattered that day were Dushane’s mother and father. The two of them glared tightly at him, into him. He almost missed his cue to swear to the higher power that’d let all this happen, as he was as fixed on them as they were on him.

  It was far from the first time he’d stood in front of a grand jury. He didn’t remember that old suit of his sticking sweat-drenched to his body like that, though. This is the easy part, he reminded himself, this was just going to get the ball rolling, to carry them all to court for the struggle that mattered. While the prosecutor shuffled through his briefcase, Ezekiel scanned over the Grand Jury. Most of
them were white; not so much a conspiracy as the luck of the draw, but it couldn’t do Dushane any favours.

  Three of them are under 30, that could help… shit, well, at least it’s only the onered hat… is he trying to get bumped? Ezekiel thought as he bounced from one face to another. He looked beyond the faces, seeing how they itched, how number 7 rolled his eyes when Dushane’s family asked to be present, at the rising hate in the older tongues, ready to erupt at the broken boy on the road.

  Eventually, Ezekiel was brought to the front and sworn in, the clerk’s eyes never looking higher than his nose as she mouthed the familiar words.

  Until that point, he’d not-so-accidentally found himself sat far, far behind Dushane’s parents.

  “You were present at the scene, Officer Jones, is that correct?” the prosecutor asked, his eyes unpeeled from the rain-worn legal pad on his table.

  “Yes, sir,” Ezekiel returned.

  “Would you please elaborate on the events leading up to the incident?”

  It took Ezekiel a moment to take his gaze away from the vibrating eyes of The Incident’s parents before he responded. There was someone else with them, he realised, as Mrs. Reed doubled over at the mention of her son. It only took another glance to recognise Aaliyah Monroe; he’d seen her enough times over the last few months on TV. She’d usually be easily spotted in her ridiculous blue scarf, on the front line of a protest or behind the parents of pre-pubescent, plundered life. Ezekiel may have thought it noble, if she wouldn’t always use the platform to push her own fairy-tale ideas of restorative justice.