Demolition Man Read online

  "You know, I musta done something right in a previous life to be this lucky . . ."He thought for a moment. "Don't know what it coulda been, of course ..."

  Then he fired.

  Spartan had less than a second to throw himself on Katherine and drag her to ground, shielding her body with his own.

  "Get down!" he roared.

  Everything seemed to happen simultaneously. The AcMag settled on a rusting hulk of a Chevy, and it burst into flame. Garcia and Huxley and the Scraps fast enough dove for cover.

  A pair of rebels did not make it to safety. The two men erupted in twin balls of flame as the AcMag landed on them, their anguished death screams shredding the air around them.

  "Two for the price of one," shrieked Phoenix, still delighted with the AcMag's deadly, devastating performance.

  The cryo-cons fanned out around their maniac leader, blasting away with all manner of weapons. Scraps dropped in a volley of bullets, cutting down rebels and innocent bystanders alike as the wind of murderous lead sliced through bone and flesh. The air was alive with the screams and groans of the dying.

  Simon Phoenix's sudden, deadly arrival had caught Spartan completely unaware, and he cursed himself for dropping his guard. In the few seconds it took him to regroup and react, half a dozen Scraps had died.

  Spartan hardly noticed that he was pinned under a fallen piece of car body. He growled, threw the sheet metal aside, and jumped to his feet. The Baretta appeared in his hand and he fired rapidly, dropping one of the thugs with a perfect shot slapped right into his forehead.

  Suddenly, Spartan wasn't alone. Edgar Friendly had jumped up and was returning fire with his big old revolver. Seeing their leader up and fighting back, the other Scraps clambered out of the wreckage and brought their slow, rusty weapons into play.

  Phoenix let fly with another vicious blast from the AcMag. The explosion tore through the rickety electrical setup in the work areas, and the lights in the cavern began to flicker and dim, panicking the crowd, who still cowered in niches and holes in the middle of the gunfight.

  But it wasn't exclusively a gunfight for long. Neither side was rich in ammunition, and quickly the fighting became hand to hand. That was fine with the goon named Kodo. He liked to kill up close and personal whenever he got the chance-and attacking a bunch of unarmed civilians was right up his alley.

  Kodo was slicing and dicing his way through the crowd. Machetes in both hands, he slashed a bloody harvest. He swung one blade and dropped another Scrap, then turned, ready for more. Unfortunately, he spun straight into Spartan, who was waiting for him, a length of heavy pipe in his hands. He cracked Kodo a massive blow to the head and then caught one of the knives as the man headed south. Without hesitation Spartan planted the steel shaft in the tough guy's chest.

  "One less," said Spartan.

  Edgar Friendly had turned out to be a valuable guy to have on one's side in a fight. The instant the firefight erupted, the Scraps leader drew a bead on Beppo, and with about the same consideration he would give to cockroach, pulled the trigger and blew the man away.

  He swiveled and saw that Phoenix had the AcMag aimed right at John Spartan. A split second and John Spartan would be carried away in a great sheet of flame. Friendly fired before Phoenix did.

  The shot went wide-Edgar Friendly had intended to blow Simon Phoenix's head off-and struck the deadly weapon, the bullet blasting the AcMag out of his hand.

  Phoenix had always been a firm believer in the principle of strategic retreat. Unarmed and under the aim of a foe struck him as a good time to take off. He ran down a dark passageway, but Spartan sprinted after him.

  Phoenix had no idea where he was going, and when he came to a long, rusty iron catwalk spanning a natural gorge in the depths of the cavern, he did not hesitate. The bridge did not look too solid, but Phoenix had no alternative but to try and escape across it. He darted out onto the rusty girders and felt the beams tremble and quiver as they took his weight.

  Spartan was right behind him. He dashed out onto the catwalk, racing after his archenemy. But the combined weight of the two big men was too much for the tired twisted beams, and they gave way with a terrible groan. Spartan and Phoenix were pitched into the void, their frantic hands grabbing for anything to hold on to.

  The two men were hanging side by side on the support grid that braced the light track that ran across the chasm. The rebar creaked ominously and threatened to give way at any second.

  Spartan and Phoenix hung side by side, the job of killing one another temporarily forgotten with the business of staying alive suddenly so important.

  Gingerly, Spartan and Phoenix started inching their way along the pole, hand over hand, trying to pull themselves to safety. The bar sagged alarmingly, and the brittle joints in the iron creaked and flaked.

  Sweat poured off Spartan's brow as he crawled centimeter by centimeter toward some kind of safety. Phoenix, on the other hand, like the psycho he was, seemed to be enjoying himself immensely. He laughed so hard he almost tore himself from the bar.

  "So, Spartan," said Phoenix, "how do you like the future? A gas, huh?"

  "A laugh riot," said Spartan through gritted teeth.

  Phoenix continued to babble crazily. "Have you figured out that thing with the seashells yet? What's up with that shit anyway?"

  Then, although his voice remained light, amused and delighted with himself, what he actually said next was, to Spartan, absolutely horrifying.

  "Hey, you know that thirty something years you spent in the ice box? You remember, more than half your life-the time when your little girl grew up and your wife croaked and you weren't around to do anything about that? Remember that time? All that time you spent learning how to knit while people out here in the real world thought that you were some kind of crazy?"

  "Shuttup," snarled Spartan.

  Phoenix did not shut up. "Well, I don't know how to tell you this, but it was a complete waste. All thirty years. Remember those bus passengers you blew to pieces, trying to catch me?"

  Spartan would never forget them .. .

  Phoenix screamed with laughter. "Guess what? They were already dead, pal. Dead before you even touched the building. Cold as a pack of frozen string beans. I went to jail with a thirty-six-year smile- knowing you were right behind me." Phoenix shook his head. "Spartan, if you could see the look on your face!"

  "You son of a bitch!" roared Spartan.

  "Look, I gotta go. It's been good hanging with you. See ya."

  Suddenly, Phoenix started rocking back and forth on the bar, gaining momentum-then he launched himself out into space, twisting and arcing, like a diver falling from the high board.

  Looking down, Spartan could see Phoenix tumble into a pile of debris fifty feet below. For a moment he stayed very still, and Spartan fired off a fervent prayer that the man had broken his neck-it would be a less satisfying end, but right then Spartan would have taken Phoenix's death any way he could get it.

  But it wasn't to be. Phoenix stumbled to his feet and soon vanished into the labyrinthine system of passages that crisscrossed the Wasteland.

  Which left Spartan just hanging there. The bar was just about to give, and he tried as hard as he could to pull himself to safety, but the more he fought the more he damaged his spindly support.

  Seeing Phoenix escape meant that Spartan could do only one thing. He didn't want to do it, but he didn't have any other choice. With a powerful growl he let go of his handhold and plummeted straight to the bottom of the gorge. He landed in a huge pile of rubble and refuse, but scrambled to his feet in seconds, running like hell after Phoenix.

  Spartan raced back down the main street and saw the elderly rat burger vendor sprawled in front of her little stall, her charcoal grill overturned. The woman struggled up to her knees and pointed into her restaurant. The Scraps who had been lounging there a few minutes before, puffing on cigarettes, were gone.

  Spartan burst into the room, running low, his gun out. But the room was empty. T
he rickety chairs were stacked up in a haphazard pile. Spartan looked up. In the roof of the room was a trapdoor.

  "Son of a bitch!" Spartan jumped and hauled himself up into the gap, staring into the blackness. Running straight up into the rock was a wide steel-walled shaft split by a long steel cable. Phoenix was clambering up the line with easy dexterity.

  Spartan dropped back down into the restaurant. Lenina Huxley was waiting for him, panting and red-cheeked. She was both elated and horrified by the explosion of violence.

  "What's going on?" she asked.

  "This is an elevator," said Spartan. "This whole room is a freight elevator, the shaft goes straight up to the surface."

  Spartan stripped some old tattered posters from the wall, revealing a control panel and the old up-down handle.

  Huxley grinned. "Going up?"

  "Yeah," said Spartan. Then he thought. "No. Wait." He grinned devilishly. "Momentito, Seno-rita Huxley." He dashed down the main street of the Wasteland, running back toward the workshop.

  "Now what?" said Huxley, shaking her head.

  2 0

  One of the few pleasures shared by people of San Angeles 2032 and the people of Los Angeles in the twentieth century was the simple joy of shopping for a new car. There was only one car manufacturer left in the brave new world-the mega-corporation General Electric Motors-and the main showroom was in Century City.

  On any given day San Angelenos could be found wandering around the vast dealership admiring the 2033 models that had just been delivered to the distributor.

  There was the budget Serenity, the sporty Composure GT, a minivan aimed at families and marketed under the name Homebody; and for the more affluent there was a luxury car, a sleek, roomy automobile called the Equanimity. Not one of these automobiles did over fifty-five miles an hour-and why should they? After all, driving at fifty-six miles an hour would constitute an offense against the law.

  As the shoppers wandered among the shiny new automobiles, the gleaming tile floor suddenly began to tremble and there was a rumbling in the air. The people exchanged worried glances and glanced at the floor.

  "But . . . but," stammered one man, "earthquakes have been outlawed."

  Then the floor began to quiver, and a spiderweb of cracks snaked across it, tiles flipping up like fish out of water. The roaring got louder, and suddenly the freight elevator burst through the pavement like a whale breaking the surface, tossing aside a bright new Composure GT. The would-be car buyers stared for a moment-then ran screaming for the exits.

  From inside the elevator cab came the roaring of a powerful engine, then, a second later, the Oldsmobile blasted through the wall and skidded across the shiny floor and stopped just shy of the big plate glass windows enclosing the dealership.

  Spartan was at the wheel, Lenina Huxley crouched in the passenger seat.

  "Now what?" she asked, yet again.

  Spartan grinned. "Vaya con dios!"

  He dropped the Cutlass into gear, and the car blasted straight through the glass in a shower of crystal shards, zoomed across the green lawn in front of the dealership, and out onto the highway.

  One of the mystified and terrified car buyers watched it go, and frightened though he was, he did recognize a great car when he saw one.

  The throaty roar of the Olds awoke some deep, long-dormant atavistic impulse in the West Coast American male-the innate love of powerful, wasteful transportation. Never mind the sedate, polite, boring General Electric Motors, Serenity, Composure, Homebody, or Equanimity.

  "I want one of those,'' he said, his eyes bright with automotive lust.

  Simon Phoenix emerged from the lower depths tired, greasy, and dripping with sweat-but strangely exhilarated. The battle underground had gotten his blood pumping, and he was more hopped-up and crazy than he had ever been. He had tasted blood, and he wanted more . . . Specifically, he wanted the taste of John Spartan's blood. And, like a figure in a bad dream, he scuttled off into the night in search of his prey.

  Zachary Lamb had found the entrance to the Wasteland that John Spartan had used, the wrenched open sewer duct at the corner of Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevard. For some time now he had been standing watch over it, waiting for his old friend to reemerge from the depths.

  He had no doubt that Spartan was down there- particularly when he heard the explosions reverberating through the netherworld. That could only mean one thing. Zach Lamb looked concerned and pleased at the same time-the peace officer of San Angeles was disturbed that the public order was being interfered with; the old LAPD cop that lurked somewhere in his soul was elated that things were going back to ''normal."

  "Yeah," he said delightedly. "John Spartan, the Demolition Man is back."

  From behind him Simon Phoenix spoke. His words were as cold as ice. "So am I, rookie."

  Zach Lamb whipped around and found himself looking down the barrel of an old Colt twenty-two caliber handgun. Phoenix was festooned with the weapons he had stolen from the museum the day before and had stashed somewhere in the neighborhood.

  Far our in the night, from the direction of Century City, they could hear the powerful roar of the Olds. It was getting closer with the passage of every second.

  "You haven't got a chance, Phoenix," said Lamb, hoping to stay alive long enough until Spartan arrived.

  But it was not to be.

  "Neither have you," said Phoenix. He fired six times, each bullet blasting into Zach Lamb's body.

  He toppled to the ground, a bloody heap, and tried to crawl a few inches, but his strength was ebbing away, flowing out of him with his blood.

  Phoenix stood over the dying man, his pistol aimed for the final shot, the kill shot to the head.

  "Phoenix," Zach Lamb gasped painfully. "You're still. . . one ugly sonofabitch."

  Phoenix smiled. "You shouldn't have said that- now I'm going to have to kill you ..." Then he laughed his crazy laugh. "Ah damn! I forgot. I already did!"

  He fired the final shot, the bullet smashing into Lamb's brain. Then he ran for the fallen man's police car and zoomed out into the night.

  Fifteen or twenty seconds later the Olds screeched to a halt next to Zachary Lamb's lifeless body, Spartan leaping from the car even before it stopped moving.

  "Lamb!" John Spartan dropped to his knees next to his fallen friend and held his hand for a moment.

  Lenina Huxley stood over the two men. "I empathize with your loss," she said softly.

  Then Spartan looked down Santa Monica and saw the taillights of a car rushing away far faster than normal for a sedate San Angeles driver. He laid Zach's body back down on the warm asphalt. There was nothing he could do for Lamb now-except avenge him.

  Spartan stood up and ran back to his twentieth-century automotive behemoth. He wrenched the car into gear and floored it, peeling out so fast and furiously that Lenina Huxley felt the g-forces pinning her to her seat.

  "John Spartan!" she squeaked. "Be careful!"

  "What for?" he snarled, as the Olds zoomed out onto the shiny San Angeles boulevard.

  He drove like a man possessed, as if there was nothing on the road-nothing in the world-that could stop him. He muscled the car down the freeway, plowing through the gentle little automobiles of the new world like a bully swaggering through a crowd of schoolgirls. He passed on the left, the right, in the break-down lanes, and on sidewalks. If there wasn't room enough to pass between two cars, he made it.

  Spartan left a trail of destruction in his wake as dented and bashed-in cars skidded and slid, careening around the road, piling up a chain of accidents that stretched all the way back to Beverly Hills.

  Then he had Phoenix in view. The criminal was driving recklessly as well, but his stolen vehicle-a police-modified version of last year's General Electric Motors Imperturbable-Turbo-did not have anything like the power of the ancient Oldsmobile.

  Spartan thrust his left hand out the window and fired, the stream of slugs slamming into the body of Phoenix's car, but failing to stop him or ev
en to slow him down. The angle was all wrong-Spartan couldn't drive and shoot at the same time, not if he wanted to be effective.

  "Fuck it," he said, pulling his arm back into the car.

  With one hand on the wheel Spartan straight-armed the Beretta and aimed at his own windshield, drawing a bead on the rear of Phoenix's car. He had the wildly fishtailing vehicle in his sights for a split second, and he did not hesitate, firing through the windshield. The glass shattered, showering Spartan and Huxley with tiny nuggets of safety glass.

  This time Spartan's shells did a little more damage, blasting out the rear window of the police car, a bullet nicking Phoenix's neck, blood bursting from the wound.

  "Shit!" screamed Phoenix. He touched his hand to the injury and felt his own blood, warm and sticky. "Now I'm mad!"

  He grabbed a machine pistol from his bag of tricks, half turned in the driver's seat, and fired through the splintered rear window. The vicious little gun chattered, chewing up the front grille of the Oldsmobile and blasting out what little glass remained in the windshield. Quickly emptying the automatic, he tossed it aside and felt for another weapon.

  But Spartan had settled down, and his aim was improving. He fired two carefully placed shots at the retreating car and blew out both rear tires. With a scream of shredding rubber and superheated brakes, Phoenix's car swerved wildly out of control, sideswiping a couple of parked cars and taking out a row of parking meters.

  "Auto inflate!" he screamed at the sensor mounted in the dash, and instantly the backup tires inflated, throwing the car sideways. Phoenix wrestled the car on track, fighting to put himself back on a straight course.

  Spartan thought he had him that time. He pounded the wheel in frustration. "Damn!" He glanced to his right and saw that Lenina Huxley was holding on tight, her eyes wide with fright and excitement.

  "Take over!" Spartan yelled over the roar of the engine. "Take the wheel."

  "What! You must be out of your-"

  Spartan didn't have time to argue. He reached over and grabbed the young woman by the shoulder and hauled her out of her seat and into his lap. Then he pushed himself up and out through the shattered windshield, Lenina dropping down into the seat he had just vacated.