Demolition Man Page 12

  "Where's Cocteau?" asked Spartan gruffly. Lenina Huxley had never been in the Holy of Holies before-the Mayor-Gov's suite of offices-and she shrunk back in embarrassment, mortified by John Spartan's lack of respect for the sacred place.

  Associate Bob was less flustered. Like a well-trained guard dog Associate Bob's first instinct was to deny all access to the master, and both cops could see that Cocteau's assistant was going to be tenacious about letting them in.

  "I am ever so sorry, John Spartan," said Associate Bob unctuously. "Dr. Raymond Cocteau is not available for your unannounced visit. I don't think I can access him at this time." He turned back to his computer screen. "Be well."

  John Spartan decided to cut right to the chase. He grabbed Associate Bob by the throat and slammed him against one of the eight vid screens that surrounded his desk.

  "Think again."

  Associate Bob had never been choked before, and he found the sensation most unpleasant. More frightening, though, was the look in Spartan's eyes. Cocteau's assistant realized that the choke hold would only get tighter the longer he resisted. So he cut to the chase. What was the point of experiencing a great deal of pain if he was going to end up giving in eventually.

  "I will give my utmost efforts to securing you an appointment with the Mayor-Gov immediately, sir."

  "I thought you'd see it my way," said Spartan, shoving the man back in his chair. Associate Bob dropped to bis computer keyboard and he typed frantically for a moment or two.

  "Oh, wonder of wonders," said Associate Bob breathlessly, "I have located the Mayor-Gov on Fiber-Op in the main conference room."

  "Isn't that a stroke of luck," said Spartan.

  "Detective Spartan," whispered Lenina Huxley. "Please! Remember where you are!"

  Spartan did not have time to reply. Cocteau's always tranquil face appeared on all eight screens at once.

  "Mellow apologies for my lack of physical disposition, Detective," he said condescendingly. But I do have an entire city-gov to run."

  Lenina stepped up to the screen. "Mellow greetings, Mayor-Gov. We apologize for interrupting your busy day, but John Spartan and I have-"

  Spartan had no time to waste on pleasantries. "Run this," he snarled. "You programmed Phoenix's rehab to turn him into a bigger, better terrorist. And I don't think his escape was an accident either."

  Lenina rolled her eyes. "This is very subtle, John Spartan. Very subtle."

  Cocteau's face was like a smooth mask, and he stared at the two cops with his weird hypnotic sincerity.

  "Well," he said very slowly. "Let's take a look at the file, shall we? Associate Bob, Simon Phoenix's rehabilitation encoding. Now."

  "Yes, Mayor-Gov." The information began scrolling onto the screen as the cool female voice read off the information.

  "Phoenix, Simon," she said. "Rehabilitation skills: decorative gardening, retail floral arrangements, in-home horticulture, ornamental and fancy gift wraps . . ."

  Cocteau continued to smile. "What are you speaking of, Detective? My only interest in Simon Phoenix was to assist in the creation of an expert florist."

  "Florist?" said Spartan. "Phoenix wouldn't know a prickly pear from a pair of pricks."

  "And I remind you, John Spartan, you did not know how to knit before cryo-rehab."

  Spartan was getting nowhere fast. He decided to accelerate the pace a little. He pulled the Beretta stolen from the museum out of his pocket and blasted out three of the eight screens. Associate Bob dove for cover. Lenina Huxley stared in disbelief. But Raymond Cocteau had not moved a muscle.

  "Let's try again, Cocteau. Another line of questioning if you don't mind."

  "I am at your service, Detective."

  "Outside the museum, why didn't Phoenix blow your brains out?" Spartan demanded.

  Cocteau shrugged. "I was no threat to him, perhaps? I honestly do not know. Does it matter?"

  "It matters," said Spartan. "You don't have to be a threat to Phoenix to end up dead, Doc. I saw the security discs-Phoenix had plenty of time to think about where to put the hole in your head."

  "John Spartan," retorted Cocteau, "this display of barbaric behavior was not acceptable even in your time."

  Spartan fired three more times and three more vid screens shattered. Associate Bob's nerves short-circuited, and he fainted dead away.

  "When a man like Phoenix has a gun to your head, ten seconds is nine and a half seconds longer than you live."

  "Not everyone is as eager as you to resort to violence to solve all the difficulties in life," said Cocteau dreamily. "Even now I am beginning to wonder if the chaos in the museum was the result of Mr. Phoenix's presence or your own. It seems reasonable to assume-"

  He stopped suddenly. The warm nose of the Baretta was now pressed against the back of his skull. Spartan had lost patience with talking to the Mayor-Gov by vid screen. He had walked down the corridor and straight into conference room.

  "It is unreasonable to assume, shithead" said Spartan, "that you can control this guy. Trust me .. . you can't."

  Cocteau was unfazed. "Is there something specific you plan to do with that archaic device?"

  Spartan lowered the gun. He would like to have taken the smug expression off Cocteau's placid face, but the Mayor-Gov was the key to the whole puzzle.

  Cocteau smiled. "I didn't think so. Detective, the only thing I haven't got under control is you. But that can be solved. You, my Cro-Magnon friend, are dead. Your family is dead. Your past is dead. Dead things can't affect the living."

  "Don't bet on it," said Spartan.

  The Mayor-Gov sighed, as if he was deathly bored with Spartan's performance. "I suggest you enjoy your moment of prehistoric bravado, because after you leave here, it's all over for you. Like everything else in your life."

  Cocteau turned and gestured to Huxley, like a diner summoning a waiter. "Officer, return this man to cryo-stasis immediately. Be well."

  Spartan looked at him a long moment. "Be fucked."

  Lenina Huxley recoiled in horror, while the conference room morality box burped angrily.

  "John Spartan-" was about as far as it got. Spartan raised the gun and blasted the box off the wall. But his eyes never left Cocteau.

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  it looked like Spartan would go quietly. Lenina Huxley escorted him back to the cruiser and was relieved to see that Alfredo Garcia had joined her as backup in the arrest of John Spartan.

  "I am commanded to place you under arrest, John Spartan," said Lenina Huxley, feeling a trifle self-conscious.

  "Aren't you gonna read me- my rights?" said Spartan.

  "Your what?" asked Alfredo Garcia.

  "Forget it," said Spartan, getting into the cruiser. "Let's go."

  They drove in silence for a while, and Lenina Huxley had the feeling that right at that moment John Spartan probably did not care if he lived or died. Dr. Cocteau's words had been cruel, and Lenina was sure that Spartan was dwelling on one thought exclusively.

  "Your family is dead," Cocteau had said. "Your past is dead."

  To Spartan that meant that he really only had one thing to live for, revenge.

  If he allowed himself to be taken into custody, Simon Phoenix would be free to carry out his criminal plan. John Spartan couldn't allow that.

  "Stop the car!" he said suddenly.

  Garcia was driving and he looked alarmed. "What?"

  "I said stop the car!" The car screeched to a halt at the intersection of Wilshire and Santa Monica. All signs of Simon Phoenix's murderous mayhem of the day before had been carefully cleared away.

  John Spartan climbed out of the police cruiser and marched over to a ventilation duct set flush in the roadway. He ripped up one of the steel planks, a rush of hot air blasting out of the ground.

  "What are you doing?" demanded Lenina.

  "Escaping," said Spartan. He pulled another steel slat from the sticky asphalt.

  Lenina shook her head. "No, no, you can't do that. We have to escort you to the cryo-pri
son. Those are my orders. You wouldn't want me to disobey a direct order, would you."

  Spartan paused and stared deep into her eyes. "Look, you do what you gotta do, but I know what I gotta do," he said angrily. "My only chance is to nail this asshole and put him back on ice-or that's where I'm gonna be." The muscles in his neck appeared to clench and unclench like steel cables.

  "Enhance your calm, John Spartan," said Garcia trying to pacify his prisoner. "Don't mega-stress."

  Spartan ripped another bar from the grate and threw it away. "I like mega-stress. I've had it with enhancing my calm! I am going to locate this psycho Phoenix and enhance his calm. Got it?"

  "Perhaps we should call for backup," Garcia suggested.

  Lenina shook her head. "Enhance your calm, Alfredo Garcia," she said.

  "It's very difficult."

  Spartan had opened a wide hole in the ground and was working to make it extensive enough for him to squeeze through. "And I'll tell you something else; when I'm done with Phoenix, I'm going to turn my attention to that fruitloop Cocteau." The gap was big enough now, and he was preparing to drop down into the sewer, but he paused.

  "Look," he said, "you don't have to come with me. I can do this alone."

  Garcia nodded quickly. "He's right, Lenina Huxley, we have very good careers."

  Huxley could not believe that things had become so serious. "John Spartan, do you realize what you're doing? That you're going on the sheep?"

  Spartan looked at her, his eyes narrowing. "On the sheep? It's the lam. I'm going on the lam."

  "Oh," said Huxley, coloring slightly.

  Garcia was genuinely scared-but he didn't know which frightened him more: the wrath of the Mayor-Gov or the scorn of John Spartan.

  "Even if Simon Phoenix was programmed to escape," he asked nervously, "even if he has the power to extinguish life and steal contraband weapons, pray tell why you are proceeding down there? To the depths of the Wasteland."

  "That's simple." Spartan put his foot on the first rung of the ladder set in the cement wall of the tunnel. "The reason the city-wide manhunt didn't work was because Phoenix was down in the one place where you can't monitor. Where you're afraid to go. A place you just don't give a shit about."

  Alfredo Garcia shot a sidelong glance into the dark hole and swallowed nervously. Every single thing Spartan had said about the Wasteland was absolutely true.

  "Look," said John Spartan. "I'm going down there, I'm gonna find Phoenix, and I'm gonna put him in the hurt locker. You wanna come with me or you want to arrest me?"

  Lenina Huxley considered her alternatives for a almost a second. "Okay," she said with a smile. "I'm with you. Let's go blow this guy."

  Spartan winced. "That's 'blow this guy away,'" he said.

  Lenina Huxley shrugged. "Whatever."

  It turned out that not all pieces of San Angeles Police Department equipment were as useless as the stun batons. Officers were equipped with nifty flashlights called lightwands, and three of them carried by Spartan, Huxley, and Garcia lit up the wide sewer pipe.

  The bright light didn't make Alfredo Garcia feel any less nervous, and he shivered in the wind that moaned eerily through the tunnel. "My dog's better than your dog," he sang nervously. "My dog's better than yours .. . dog's better 'cause he. . ."

  Spartan stopped and stared at him. "Are you singing?"

  Garcia flinched. "I'm sorry, when I'm nervous I find it helpful to sing an oldie. I. . . sorry."

  They continued to creep forward until they reached a rusty hatch, a sealing wheel in the center of the corroded metal.

  "This looks like the way in," said Spartan. He seized hold of the wheel and turned it, fighting with the stiff metal until the lock broke and the hatch swung on its ancient hinges.

  The three police officers stepped from the dank sewer pipe and straight into a different world.

  The Wasteland was a parallel cosmos, an environment deep beneath the city of San Angeles, but it could not have been more different.

  First of all, the Wasteland was not a wasteland. It was bustling community-the narrow thoroughfare in which the cops found themselves was crowded and busy. There were dwellings everywhere, people living in every nook and cranny of the subterranean city.

  Everywhere they looked they saw evidence of human habitation. Tents and shacks, lean-tos, shanties, and huts were crammed into every conceivable space. The living area looked like an old Third World refugee camp.

  The marketplace was like a souk, a collection of stalls crammed with the junk and discards of the city above. The Wasteland was the underbelly of San Angeles, the underground universe lit by strand after strand of dim light bulbs encased in construction cages, old neon advertising signs, and street-lights salvaged or stolen from the metropolis overhead.

  The light shone on an intersection of a tangle of old conduits that had once carried water and telephone cables, mixed with a disused subway tunnel and what appeared to be a natural cavern. On closer inspection, Spartan realized that the cavern was, in fact, a man-made excavation.

  The Scraps had burrowed into a fifty-year-old sanitary landfill dump, harvesting the useful trash of a distant time. As the miners worked their way into the rubbish, they cleared more room for the ever-expanding Scrap population.

  The air was lively with the sounds of people talking-English, Spanish, a babble of a dozen Asian languages-as well as the smells of cooking fires and sweat. It was different from the antiseptic, sterile air of San Angeles. This place was poor and dirty, but it was alive and vital.

  The people were dressed in rags and castoffs and looked thin and malnourished. But they didn't have the phony plastic smiles of the San Angelenos, and they looked at the three police officers without fear. A few young men recognized Spartan from the battle in front of the Taco Bell the night before, but now they did not shrink back. They were in their own habitat and would fight to defend it.

  Already the buzz was starting that there were strangers in the Wasteland, but Spartan and his two colleagues did not notice. They were still gazing at this strange underground world.

  Children played in the streets, and mothers nursed babies at their breasts. Old men and women looked as if they had lived their whole lives in this strange environment.

  Spartan liked it down in the Wasteland. "So," he asked Lenina and Alfredo, "these are the terrifying savages that threaten your happy city?"

  Huxley's eyes were wide with wonder. "I had no idea ..." she gasped. "We've always been told the only people down here were thugs and hooligans ... I can't believe that there are women and children here..."

  But Spartan was not paying attention. He was sniffing the air and smiling. Alfredo Garcia had gotten a whiff of the same smell and was looking distinctly nauseated.

  "What is that emanation?" Garcia tried to talk and hold his breath at the same time.

  Spartan grinned. "Oh, yeah . . . yeah. I know that smell." A thirty-six-year memory came flooding back. He slapped Garcia on the back. "That emanation, old buddy, is the smell of cooking meat!"

  Alfredo swallowed hard to keep his kelp-and-yeast breakfast from coming up.

  The three police officers drifted toward a large, square hole cut in a sewer wall in front of which an old woman tended to some meat and buns cooking on a makeshift grill. Behind her a number of Scraps were in the room beyond the fires. They were sitting in ratty old armchairs, and to Lenina Huxley's horror they were smoking cigarettes.

  Spartan looked as if he had died and gone to heaven. "Thank God! Real burgers . . ."He turned to the Scraps. "Got any smokes? Marlboros?"

  Now it was Lenina Huxley's turn to look nauseated. "I think I'm going to be sick."

  John Spartan was salivating, and he was desperate for some cholesterol and nicotine. He snatched Lenina'swatch off her wrist and offered it to the old woman. She examined it and smiled.

  "Buenos dias, senor," she said. She flipped a meat patty onto some bread, doused it with a reddish brown sauce, and passed it to Spartan, al
ong with a grease-stained cigarette.

  He cadged a light from the grill and sucked the smoke into his lungs, exhaling with a satisfied groan. Then he chomped down on the burger, almost devouring the food in a couple of great big bites.

  The old woman offered a burger to Garcia. Alfredo turned away. "No ... no, thank you." He patted his stomach. "Full. Couldn't eat a mouthful." He also could hardly stand to watch John Spartan, who was alternating chewing and smoking like a unhealthy machine.

  "I love that special sauce," he said deliriously. "This tastes great."

  Huxley fought her squeamishness. "Just don't ask where the meat comes from."

  "Come from? What do you mean? Where else do burgers come from? From cows, right?"

  Huxley laughed. "Did you see any cows on our way down here, Detective?"

  Spartan had only one bite of his hamburger left, and he stared at it, trying to determine the origin of the tasty meat. He turned to the old woman.

  "De que este carne?" he asked in his best-but not very good-Spanish.

  The old woman laughed, throwing a veined old hand in front of her mouth to hide her broken teeth. "Es de rata, senor. Muy, muy sabroso!"

  Spartan paused a moment, a very thoughtful look on his face. He gazed at the burger. "Rat burgers," he said quietly, thinking it over. "I'm eating a rat burger."

  "Ugh," said Lenina Huxley.

  Alfredo Garcia was on the verge of losing his breakfast; he nervously hopped from one foot to another and tried to take shallow breaths to avoid smelling the roasting meats.

  Spartan shrugged and then popped the last piece of the burger into his mouth.

  "Not bad," he said, winking at the old woman, "best damn burger I ever had. Muy bien, senora."

  The rat burger vendor nodded. "Gracias, senor." She turned to Huxley, offering her a rat burger. "Senorita?"

  Leninawas horror-struck. "No ... No thanks."

  Spartan shook his head. "Hey, take it. It's on the house."

  "Never!"

  John Spartan couldn't understand it. "You should never look a gift rat in the mouth."

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