by Ed Naha
Lewis had had enough. She jumped in the TurboCruiser and, burning rubber, hung a sharp u-turn in the street. Cradling her shotgun in her free hand, she aimed the TurboCruiser directly for the van. Joe froze for a moment as the TurboCruiser two-wheeled it in a circle around the van. Lewis squeezed off a round. Joe leaped back inside the van as the shotgun blast shredded part of the back door.
Lewis barreled back down the street, screeching to a halt next to Robo. Robo was in the midst of climbing in when Joe reappeared at the van’s rear, firing another round. The shell sizzled past the Cruiser and took out what was left of the front of Lee’s Sporting Goods shop. The flying debris shattered the windshield of the Cruiser. Lewis yelped in pain as several shards of glass sliced into her cheek.
“You in?” she gasped.
“Yeah,” Robo grunted.
“Sonsobitches,” Lewis muttered, gunning the gas. She sent the Cruiser zooming down the street. The van ground gears and took off in pursuit. Lewis held the wheel tightly. Explosions roared to her left and to her right. Robo tossed a new clip into his Auto-9. He was bleeding from a gash in his cheek. He glanced at Lewis. She had an identical cut below her right eye.
“You okay?” Robo asked.
“Yeah. You?”
“I’ve been worse.”
“Hey, Murphy. What the hell was that?”
“A Cobra Assault Cannon . . . built by our friends at OmniCon for the Army.”
“Jeeez!” Lewis exclaimed as a battered SUX leaped out of a side street and sped for the Cruiser’s midsection. Lewis accelerated. Clarence’s car clipped the front end of the Cruiser with a crunch, sending it spinning along the street like a pinwheel. Leon, at the wheel, let out a war whoop as Clarence cheered him on. “We got them!”
“Now, let’s finish them,” Clarence said, lifting a Cobra of his own. Leon charged the police vehicle head-on.
Inside the patrol vehicle, Lewis fought the wheel, trying to stay in control. The SUX bore down on them. She threw the car into reverse and pressed the accelerator to the floor. The SUX kept on coming, aimed directly for the front grille of the police car. Lewis, looking over her shoulder, drove backward down a flame-strewn side street.
In the SUX, Clarence hoisted his Cobra out of the side window. Robo drew his Auto-9 and flipped his senses into Targeting Mode. He took a deep breath and squeezed off three rounds.
Clarence and Leon ducked as the windshield before them broke into a spiderweb pattern and collapsed inward.
The SUX slowed down, but continued coming. Lewis cursed under his breath. At the far end of the street, directly behind her, the white van pulled up. She had driven right into a classic bookend situation. Joe leaped out of the truck with a Cobra in hand. He dropped to his knees and drew a bead on the zigzagging Cruiser. Lewis glanced in her sideview mirror. “Hold on,” she barked.
She sent the Cruiser skidding into a narrow alleyway used for loading and unloading cargo. The SUX barreled right by the alleyway, unable to brake in time. Still driving in reverse, Lewis navigated through the narrow alleyway at a smooth 80 mph. Skidding out onto the next street, she jammed the car into drive and slammed on the gas.
She glanced in the rearview mirror. The white van rounded a corner and sped after them. Joe leaned out the rider’s window and fired his Cobra.
Explosions once again rocked the Cruiser. “We’ve got company,” Lewis said.
“With more on the way, no doubt,” Robo said, looking over his shoulder.
Clarence’s SUX skidded around the van, picking up speed. Inside the windshieldless car, Leon squinted his eyes as the 60-mph wind ripped through the front seat. Clarence calmly flipped on a pair of sunglasses and balanced his Cobra on the dented dash. He fired a round.
The shell sailed over the speeding TurboCruiser’s hood and smashed down into its right engine. Robo and Lewis hung on for dear life as the car reeled under the impact. The right rear flamed out. Half of the gauges and readouts on the dash sputtered and disappeared. Lewis slammed a fist down on the fire control button off the steering column. She wiped blood out of her eye. She gripped the wheel, white-knuckling it, pushing the damaged car for all the power it could muster. Warning tones buzzed and panel lights flashed on the functioning sections of the dash. Robo reloaded his Auto-9.
It was his last clip.
Lewis barked into the ComLink. “1-Baker-44 . . . Officers need assistance. Repeat, officers need assistance in Old Detroit.”
She was greeted by a wall of silence.
“Goddamn it,” she yelled. “Come on. I know you’re out there.”
Silence.
“Great. We’re going to lose the car.”
Robo looked over his shoulder. “We may lose more than that.”
Leon sent the SUX surging in front of the van. It was now right on the Cruiser’s tail. Clarence fired the Cobra once. Twice. The shells sailed harmlessly over the Cruiser. Lewis maneuvered the car around a corner and over a badly tattered bridge.
The SUX and the van sailed over the bridge after them.
Lewis skidded around a corner and into an alleyway. At the end of the decaying path stood an imposing twelve-foot cyclone fence. Lewis glanced at Robo. Robo nodded. Lewis put the pedal to the metal, coaxing the Cruiser to 60 mph. The car bounded down the alleyway, hitting the fence hard. The fence flew apart in several large sections. The TurboCruiser sailed through the remains of an abandoned steelyard.
Robo pointed to a decrepit foundry building.
The Cruiser zipped inside the cavernous building.
In the alleyway, the van and the SUX cautiously drove over the remains of the fence. Leon slowed the SUX down. Clarence glanced up at a rusted sign, OK STEEL WORKS—CONDEMNED . . . NO TRESPASSING . . . DOG ON DUTY.
Clarence pointed toward the foundry. The two vehicles cruised to a stop before the building’s massive doors. Joe jumped out of the van, gun still in hand.
Emil leaped out of the van. “Let’s smoke ’em.”
Joe smiled, calling into the building. “Hey, boys and girls, the wreckin’ crew is here.”
Clarence sighed and got out of his car. These morons could be so childlike at times. He turned to Joe and Emil as Leon stepped out from behind the wheel of the SUX. “Inside, we stick together. Nothing fancy. All you have to do is kill them. Understood?”
“You got it.” Emil grinned.
Clarence pointed to the van. “Get behind the wheel, Emil. You and I will drive in. Joe and Leon will walk point.”
The four goons entered the towering building. Inside, tiny shafts of moonlight filtered down to the ground from the holes in the roof. The place was huge and dark and damp.
The van and the SUX purred slowly through the building, Joe and Leon, carrying their Cobras, walking cautiously in the light afforded by the headlights behind them. Joe and Leon stiffened. A noise to the right. Drip. Drip. Drip. They relaxed and laughed. Rainwater dripping along reddened steel beams.
Leon began flicking his tongue against his wired jaw nervously. Somewhere, in the distance, a dog was barking.
In the SUX, Clarence peered nervously into the rearview mirror. In the van behind Clarence, Emil lit his third cigarette.
Darkness swirled around them.
Mist rose from the ground.
Joe began walking sideways before the vehicles. Another dog was snarling somewhere.
“Jesus!” Leon exclaimed.
Up ahead, behind a mound of debris, two dogs stood like hounds of hell. Their eyes gleamed red in the headlights of the van. A large and powerful doberman was in the lead. A second mutt, part shepherd, part dinosaur, bared his fangs.
Joe aimed his Cobra. “Fucking dogs.”
He let a charge fly in the dogs’ direction. The dogs galloped off before the shell hit, blowing a section of the floor sky high. Smoke cascaded through the foundry.
Joe and Leon exchanged hearty laughs. There was nothing like tormenting a lower species to buoy one’s spirits.
Joe heard some movement
behind him. He turned. The doberman. He raised his gun and fired quickly. The dog’s body shattered and fragmented. A plume of smoke slowly rose toward the ceiling. In the distance, the surviving dog howled mournfully. It gave Leon chills. Joe didn’t seem to mind. If he met that second critter, he’d turn him into hamburger as well.
When the smoke cleared, a voice boomed across the room. “Looking for me?”
Outside a large pair of exit doors, some thirty feet from the building Robo stood, gun drawn, under a cluster of decaying chemical tanks. The moon shone down from overhead, giving his helmet an eerie, medieval appearance.
Clarence’s gang hesitated for a moment. Emil lit another cigarette. Leon and Joe exchanged frightened looks. Finally, Clarence leaned out of his car. “Get him,” he ordered.
Before either Leon or Joe could move, the howl of a turbine engine sliced through the air. Clarence stiffened behind the wheel of his car. What the hell was going on here? In the front seat of the van, Emil turned around, not quite believing what he saw. Lewis, in the Cruiser, sped directly for the rear of the van. Emil, eyes agog, tried revving the van’s engines. It was too late. The Cruiser smashed into the back of the truck hard, lifting the rear in the air.
Lewis hit reverse, backed up and, tires squealing, smashed into the van again, tires digging in. Inside, Emil pumped the brakes in panic. The van began to move forward. Emil continued to play with the brakes, gripping the wheel madly. Lewis’s car pushed the whining truck out of the building and into the steelyard. Emil didn’t know how to handle this. The van was beginning to pick up momentum.
Lewis gritted her teeth, wiped the caked blood from under her right eye, and continued to floor the Cruiser. Clarence gunned the motor of his SUX, swerving so as not to be hit by the skidding truck behind him. Emil gazed out of the windshield in terror. The van was sliding toward a tank clearly marked DANGER: TOXIC WASTE.
In the Cruiser, Lewis kicked in the after-burner and then slammed on the brakes.
Emil wrestled with the wheel. There was no controlling the van now. It hit a large oil slick and rammed the tank broadside. Ten yards away, standing clear, Leon and Joe watched mesmerized as the van punched a hole into the tank. There was a dreadfully long second where time itself seemed to have come to a stop. Then, a scream. The back of the van blew open and a small tidal wave of chemicals washed out onto the ground, Emil sputtering within its grasp.
Emil writhed on the ground, surrounded by foam. He got to his knees and raised his hands to his face. He grabbed his burning skin. It came off in his hands in large, stringy wads. Emil began to melt, literally, as Joe and Leon decided that the time was right to open up on Robo.
Emil ran blindly into the fray. He tumbled into Leon. “Help me, please!” he screamed.
Leon brushed the screaming, melting henchman away from him. “Get the fuck away from me, man. Get the fuck away!”
Leon ran for cover, leaving Emil to run, dying slowly, out of the steelyard into the night.
Joe and Leon continued to fire their Cobras at Robo. They were using twist bullets now, deadly slugs that burrowed into their targets before exploding from within. Robo nimbly tilted his body this way and that as the bullets whirled above and beside him. He nudged his vision into Targeting Mode. He locked onto Clarence. The gangleader had swung his car across the steelyard and was now doubling back toward the cyborg.
Sweating behind the wheel of his SUX, Clarence ducked before Robo had the chance to fire. Boddicker slammed his foot down on the gas. He aimed the SUX directly at the cyborg cop. The cumbersome car picked up speed. Thirty. Forty. Fifty miles an hour. Robo fired at the zigzagging auto, his slugs slamming into the hood of the auto but doing no damage.
Clarence screamed with glee as the right front fender slammed into RoboCop, sending the officer tumbling onto the ground.
The SUX zoomed off across the yard and toward the largest building in the complex, the pressing plant. Lewis, in her TurboCruiser, roared after it. Joe and Leon scrambled across the steelyard, firing at the TurboCruiser.
RoboCop, dazed, ran toward the pressing plant. He was greeted with a hail of bullets. Robo dove, head-first, and tumbled across the macadam as the ground erupted around him. Calculating where the shots were being fired from, he leaped to his feet and fired two rounds twenty degrees to his left.
Behind a pile of girders, Leon and Joe hit the dirt as the two slugs pinged into the metal. By the time they got back to their feet, Robo had disappeared into the plant.
In the massive plant, the SUX weaved between the ancient hot rolling presses and the huge, Brobdingagian girders that supported the sagging ceiling. Lewis, in her Cruiser, paced the SUX, shadowing its every move.
Behind the wheel, Lewis was getting tired of playing cat and mouse. She floored the one-engined vehicle, smashing into the back of the SUX with a deafening crunch. Clarence cursed, spinning the wheel, twisting and turning the body of the car away from the Cruiser. Lewis braked slightly, allowing the SUX to surge ahead. She fed the Cruiser gas once more and came up alongside the large car. She cut the wheel hard to the right, slamming into the side of Clarence’s car with a thud. The screech of metal on metal echoed through the cavernous plant as Lewis forced Clarence’s car off on a sharp angle toward a large rolling press.
Clarence pulled further to the right, disconnecting his car from the Cruiser. He reached across the seat for his mighty Cobra. Lewis smashed into his car from behind again. The SUX lurched. Clarence, cradling the gun in his left arm, stuck the muzzle out the window. He was about to fire it at Lewis when he glimpsed something running toward his car.
He gaped at the apparition before him.
It was a monster.
He blinked.
No, it was the moving, shriveling, skeleton that had once been Emil. Emil staggered toward the car, the few remnants of his flesh hanging in large strips from his body. His muscle and tissue were exposed. His mouth was no more than a yawing hole in the center of a wad of semi-solid matter that had once been a face.
Emil opened the hole in his face wide, a gaping silent scream. The SUX smashed into him, hard. Parts of Emil flew into the front of the car. Clarence wrestled with the wheel. The large car smashed into the side of a rolling press and began to spin totally out of control through the plant.
Clarence fought to both regain control and remove the bits of steaming, chemically tainted flesh from his flak jacket. He didn’t see the girder until it was too late. The SUX crunched into a massive support beam, twisted, and began to roll the length of the floor. It seemed to pick up speed as it went. It hit a second beam and crumpled into a V shape.
The car landed upright. Clarence was slumped at the wheel. His head rested on the car horn. The SUX, looking like a 2,000-pound accordion, emitted a staccato beeeeep.
Lewis slowed the Cruiser to a halt. She glanced at the ground in front of the car. Clarence’s Cobra AC lay on the ground near his battered vehicle. There was a human hand wrapped around the barrel. Emil’s hand.
Lewis slowly got out of the car and approached the SUX. Clarence was still behind the wheel. Smoke began to ooze from under the hood. Lewis kicked the Cobra aside. She approached the front door. Clarence was bleeding from the forehead. She eased the door open.
Clarence lurched to life. Before Lewis had time to back away, Boddicker pulled a .45 and fired three rounds. Lewis flew back through the air violently, blood spurting from her chest, her side, and her leg.
“You’re dead meat, cop,” Lewis heard from above.
Landing on her back, writhing in pain, she stared at the ceiling. Joe and Leon were roaming the catwalks above. Leon stood in a glass operations booth. “And now, for the final act,” Leon announced, flicking a switch.
The lights in the plant went on. Lewis winced as the stark white light bathed her sweating flesh in a blinding glow. She began to shake. Everything hurt at once. She knew it was bad. Very, very bad.
“How about a little target practice.” Joe chortled, smiling down at
the bullet-riddled form of Anne Lewis.
A bullet sizzled by his head. “Sounds fine with me,” came a loud growl.
The two men looked down on the ground. Robo, gun drawn, was charging full tilt across the floor of the plant. Clarence, spotting the cyborg, climbed stiffly out of his car and made a move for his fallen Cobra AC.
Robo fired from the hip. Clarence screamed and went down on his knees. Coughing, he staggered to his feet. “Better living through science,” he cackled. A flattened bullet fell to the ground off his flak jacket.
Clarence ran off past the bleeding Lewis. Robo made a move to fire at the fleeing killer. The ground around him exploded. Joe was firing from the catwalk. Robo hit the ground, rolling, returning fire all the while.
Robo rolled up next to Lewis. Twist bullets tore into the ground around them. “Hang on, partner,” Robo whispered.
As gently as possible, Robo pulled the bleeding policewoman behind the wrecked SUX. They’d be safe there for a few seconds. The bullets stopped sizzling. Robo could hear footsteps above him. He realized that Joe and Leon were jockeying around for a clear shot.
He dismissed them for the moment. He gazed down at the ashen face of the woman. He cradled her head in his cold, steel hands. He touched her soft, white cheek with his left thumb. Tears were flowing from her eyes. “It hurts, Murphy.”
“I know.” Robo nodded. He gazed tenderly at her. She seemed to have the face of a sweet, dying child. Her body stiffened, then relaxed. She closed her eyes. She made no further effort to speak. “Lewis?” Robo called. “Anne?” The woman did not move. Robo heard the footsteps above him grow louder. He gently laid Lewis’s head down on the concrete. “I’ll be right back.”
Robo broke cover and ran the length of the plant. Above him, Joe fired until his clip was spent. Still running, Robo flipped himself into Combat Mode. He glanced at the catwalk above him. A complex schematic analysis of Joe’s position raced across his mind’s eye. Robo ducked behind a steel support girder. Joe, now reloaded, sent another volley of deadly twist bullets in Robo’s direction. The bullets slammed into the mighty girder, making it flex and shake.