Written by Terry Kaye

  Distributed by Progress Publications

  506 Miller Street, Cammeray, Sydney, Australia, 2062

  Copyright ® 1979 by Mad Max Pty Ltd

  This edition 1985

  National Library of Australia Card No.

  and ISBN 0-7255-1872-3

  A QB Book

  All rights reserved

  Printed in Australia by

  The Dominion Press—Hedges & Bell

  Sutton Road, Maryborough, Vic. 3465

  The Original

  MAD MAX

  KENNEDY/MILLER presents

  MEL GIBSON • JOANNE SAMUEL

  HUGH KEAYS-BYRNE • STEVE BISLEY

  TIM BURNS • ROGER WARD

  in “MAD MAX”

  Produced by BYRON KENNEDY

  Directed by GEORGE MILLER

  Music by BRIAN MAY

  MAD MAX will make you stab for the brake until the very last page.

  Your blood will turn to ice and your eyes will squirm with horror.

  Bullet down the spine of suicide highway with the Toe Cutter, Bubba Zanetti, and Johnny the Boy hissing with revenge for the death of their hero The Night Rider, killed after a frenzied car chase with mad-cop Max.

  Mad Max, Jim the Goose, and Fifi Macaffee follow a twisted trail of highway smashes, torture, and brutality in pursuit of the nomad bikies.

  MAD MAX will career you into a metallic volcano, exploding with fiendish crimes, lightning chase scenes and one man’s madness against a gang of bike riding psychopaths.

  Hit the road with MAD MAX and crash the hot metal nightmare of a lifetime.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The road lay like a ribbon carefully stretched across the sparse, barren landscape. Six lanes in either direction, separated by a no-man’s land of brown gravel, empty cans and scraps of paper, it sliced through what had once been rich, expensive grazing land. The cattle that once roamed the area, when the road was little more than a country lane, were long since gone—victims of a society which now relied on laboratory-produced proteins for nourishment, and fast-food pulp for taste. The few animals surviving when the last of the graziers had walked off their land to find work on the production lines had long ago been picked off by the Armalite Gangs—peculiar, fearsome groups of young men, named for the high-powered rifles they carried in racks along the rear windows of their super-charged pick-up trucks.

  Because this particular road had been the first of the super-highways constructed by the Central Bureaucracy, it had become a favourite haunt of the Armalite Gangs. Every Friday night, after clocking off from their mindless jobs in the useless factories which threatened to suffocate almost every city with vast palls of smoke, they would battle through the chaos of the inter-urban freeways and break for the freedom of the Transcontinental One.

  Stereo systems blaring and engines screaming, they’d throw their pick-ups hundreds of miles through the night to rendezvous at a spot far away from the terrors of the cities. Once out there, surrounded by nothing more than the black tarmac and the blighted landscape, they’d set about systematically creating their own kind of terror.

  First it had been the mangy cattle. When they were disposed of their targets became the massive road trains barrelling down the Transcon One at close to a hundred miles an hour. Some enterprising gang member had hit upon the idea that a carefully arranged cross-fire could knock out enough of the steel-toughened tyres to send the unfortunate rig off the road and into the scrub. Crashing at that speed, the impact generally sent the driver and his companions off to eternity. The Armalite Gangs—often with thirty or forty pick-ups—had found it not only great fun but a useful way to supplement their incomes. Like the wreckers of Penzance who, centuries before, had guided ships to their destruction and then pillaged the wrecks, the Armalite Gangs would strip the road-trains bare in a matter of hours, stowing tons of merchandise beneath tarpaulins in the back of their small rigs, then disappearing into the night to plan their next attack.

  The combination of profit and excitement proved attractive. The number of gangs grew. The rig drivers—many of whom used the large cabin of their prime-mover as a mobile home for their family—learnt the law of the road in the early initial crash. As he crawled from the wreck he provided one more target for the gathering vultures.

  The drivers took to travelling with a small arsenal within reach and, mounted along the top of their rigs, massive spotlights which were capable of turning the road and the area on either side into broad daylight. Of course the searing glare from the lights played havoc with oncoming traffic, but the first rule that anyone learnt on Transcon One was survival.

  However, the most effective deterrent against the Armalite Gangs had little to do with the drivers themselves. After the massive All National Retail Corporation declared Transcon One off-limits to all its rigs, the cost of consumer goods soared throughout the country. The public outcry was so loud that the Central Bureaucracy, meeting in emergency session, authorised the establishment of an elite group of highway patrol cops whose sole function was to destroy the Armalite Gangs by any means at their disposal. Their name—The Breaker Squad—was coined by the Controller himself, the head of the Central Bureaucracy, who demanded that his ministers “break the stranglehold which was choking Transcontinental One”.

  The police had moved swiftly. Within their own ranks they found a large number of young men who had the necessary qualifications: a love of fast cars and hard driving, combined with the cunning and disregard for life necessary to beat the Armalite Gangs at their own game. They took these men from all over the country and sent them to a two-week camp where they were forced to push themselves and their specially equipped cars beyond all conceivable limits. Eleven out of the hundred recruits discovered their limits and were dead by the time the course was over—their cars shattered, and their bodies smashed, beyond recognition. After that, ten days of training with the Special Commando Task Force, learning their brutal form of unarmed combat, and a week on the firing range seemed like child’s play.

  The Breaker Squad, in forty modified police compacts with crude but effective armour plating, long-range tanks and V-8s which could put them over 150 miles an hour without protest, met the first of the Armalite Gangs just before 2 am on a Saturday morning on the Transcon, not far from where Max—Mad Max to his friends—now stood beside his police pursuit car.

  Police Intelligence had informed the Squad that thirty or more Armalite Rigs were planning to leave Expocity, 320 miles to the north, for a series of major ‘hits’ along a section of the Transcon that cut through a jumble of low rugged hills. A police reconnaissance plane using classified infra-red tracking equipment had picked them up without any difficulty and radioed their rendezvous position to the chief of the Breaker Squad. Working to plan, the police allowed the gang their first ‘kill’, then barrelled in on them while they were stripping the wreck.

  The speed and strength of the police took the gang members completely by surprise. Most of them were congregated around the wreck, more than fifty yards from their rigs, and their first instinct when the police arrived, bathing the whole scene in searchlights, was to make a break for their pick-ups. The commanding voice of the Chief through P.A. ordered them not to move. Two shots quickly pinned down one of the gang who disobeyed. It was enough to convince most of the thirty or so larrikins that they were playing right out of their league.

  One of the gang standing next to his rig managed to get in and start the engine—only to have his front tyres shot out before he could even attempt crashing through one of the police road-blocks. Five other gang members, with two rifles between them, crouched behind the wreck. A cop stationed with binoculars on a nearby hill radioed a warning. They were ordered into the open by the Chief.

  And that, to the disappointment of most of the Squad, was that. Less excitement than you’d find while patrolling any of a hundred streets in Expocity after midnight. Or before, come to that.

  But after that first easy victory the Breaker Squad had more than its share of action. Other gangs quickly became aware of the existence of the elite police force, and never, in the eight months it took to eradicate the gangs after that first raid, did the cops take them by surprise or without a fight.

  The police were forced to split into small, more vulnerable groups in order to cover all the most dangerous spots along the length of the Transcon. The gangs posted look-outs before they even thought of trying a ‘hit’, and the police would find themselves playing a supercharged cat-and-mouse game for weeks on end. On at least two occasions small groups of cop cars were ambushed.

  The gang members were never a match for the speed and ferocity of the quickly battle-hardened Breaker Squad, but by the time the last of the gangs had decided it was safer to stalk the streets of the cities, only 62 of the original squad of 89 which had taken to the road had survived. One of them was Mad Max.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It was only 6 am but Max was already on to his fourth cigarette of the day. He flicked the ash from it and slammed the door of his black Police Interceptor closed before walking slowly to the front of the car and lifting his buttocks onto the bonnet. He gazed down the black length of the Transcon to a spot about half a mile away where, almost seven years ago as a brash and smart 18-year-old, he’d shot out the tyres of the Armalite rig during that first bust.

  “The best shot that damn Squad ever had,” he joked aloud.

  “The only thing that mattered on the road then,” he thought to himself. “That and

being as tough and cunning as those bastards.

  “Still tough, still cunning, but I wouldn’t want to count too much on my skill with the hardware. Too old for that—too old to go running around the countryside getting involved in all that guerilla warfare crap.”

  He continued out loud again: “Let ’em go, keep your head on your shoulders and go swimming. That’s the only motto that’ll get you into your thirties, Max,” he said with a laugh as he walked back to the car, opened the door and pulled his towel off the passenger’s seat.

  He began to walk down the incline toward the river, hesitated a second and then returned to the car. He leaned on the door and switched on the police radio, turning the volume up full.

  “Once a cop, always a cop, that’s what they say,” he muttered, heading for the river and welcome relief from the heat, already beginning to quiver across the asphalt of Transcon One.

  Max was well out into mid-stream, alternately duck-diving and stroking out against the current when the first of that day’s all points broadcasts blared from his radio: “All units, sections eighteen to thirty, Transcon One—two offenders now entering your area. Presently pursued at high speed by Highway Patrol vehicle. Wanted on charges including grievous bodily harm to police officer. Approach with extreme caution. Offenders have already seriously damaged four police cars and avoided two roadblocks. Descriptions to follow.”

  Max had barely broken stroke as the message crackled across the water, but he’d heard enough to realise that another bored car-crazy kid had decided on what the cops had come to know as a Big Run—a wild chase along the Transcon One in which the kid behind the wheel of his overpowered V-8 pitted all his driving skill, courage and cunning against the massed strength and resources of the Highway Patrol.

  It was a game which had been played often enough for Max to guess exactly what had happened. The kid would have prepared himself well several hundred miles to the south, tuning his car, fitting special road tyres, loading the gas tanks to the full and popping enough amphetamines to make sure he got the right buzz going in his head. He would then have headed out on to Transcon One, all the time twiddling the dial on his radio monitor until he picked up the frequency used by the Highway Patrol in that area—after all, half the fun of a ‘Big Run’ was to listen in on the mayhem and frustration you were causing and then taunt the cops with your CB. After that, with all the preparations made, it was just a matter of making contact—defying speed restrictions through the sleepy townships or forcing some day-tripper off the road. The game ended when either the police managed to corner him, he crashed, his car blew up or he made it through sections eighteen to thirty on the Transcon One and crossed the State Line.

  Although, years before, the Central Bureaucracy had established the nation-wide police force, they’d allowed the prosectuion of offenders to remain in the hands of the States. Max, like every other cop, knew that if you arrested a person in one State and charged him with crimes committed in another, then all you succeeded in doing was enmeshing yourself in a maze of legal technicalities and conflicting statutes which almost invariably ended with the case being thrown out of court.

  Sections eighteen to thirty of the Transcontinental Highway One were eighty miles of super-highway overrun by freight rigs, speed-mad larrikins, hot-as-hell tow trucks and patrolled by a handful of young cops in overwhelmingly overpowered pursuit cars. Sections eighteen to thirty-one—four years in a row it could boast more fatalities for every kilometre than any other superhighway in the country. Sections eighteen to thirty-one—the last blast for the kids who elected to make the Big Run; and right now there were two out there who’d done better than most. Just eighty miles to go; one crippled cop car in pursuit, two more police units waiting to try cutting them off. And Mad Max.

  Max dived towards the bottom for the last time, surfaced and struck out for the shore. Slowly, he walked out of the river and up the embankment, the water streaming from his head and down his powerful shoulders. He picked up his towel as the radio began to crackle out the descriptions:

  “Further to all points broadcast. Description of wanted offenders as follows. Note that offenders are using a stolen police pursuit vehicle.”

  “Oh, shit,” Max muttered to himself. “Someone’s going to have a nasty time trying to explain that to the Chief. Our runner must have blown up his own unit and then outsmarted some fool cop. Back to the city beat for him, the bloody idiot. No wonder our friend’s doing so well.”

  Max felt the first thrill of the chase start to pump through him. He pulled the towel from his hair to listen to the rest of the broadcast.

  “Driver identified as Bryson Williams, describing himself as the Nightrider. Aged 19, with both criminal and juvenile record, including robbery with violence, break, enter and steal, malicious damage and three counts of assault with a knife. Long list of motoring offences and known to be a highly competent driver. Repeating earlier warning to all units—approach with extreme caution. He is in possession of a police-issue high-velocity rifle and a police-issue 12-shot pistol.”

  Max let out a laugh of derision. “Oh great, he’s not only got a car, but we’ve armed him as well. And then they wonder why we find it hard to grab ’em before they reach the line.”

  The voice went on: “Williams is accompanied by an unidentified female. Aged about 15 and dressed in white t-shirt, blue jeans and high-heeled shoes. Long brown hair, parted in middle. Offenders travelling at high speed and now estimated to be entering section nineteen. All units within target area are ordered to make every attempt to apprehend offenders before the State line.”

  The radio crackled off while the operator took a break before continuing with his lists of stolen vehicles, descriptions of wanted men and the other paraphernalia which Max had long ago given up taking any notice of.

  “All units,” he sneered to himself. “There’s only Roop and Charlie in the pursuit car, Jim Goose, who’s such a yahoo he should have got a mentally defective certificate instead of an 1100 cc police bike, and me.”

  At twenty-five Max was the oldest—and the best—of the cops whose job it was to patrol the Transcon One. He was what the Chief called a “magic pursuit cop” who could combine remarkable driving skills, cunning and downright violence, when needed, with an overriding desire to preserve his own life. He was never guilty of the sheer recklessness and stupidity which wasted the lives of many young cops behind the wheel on Transcon One. For this reason the Chief himself had ordered Max into the last line of defence before the State Line. If anyone could grab the larrikins who turned the Transcon One into an adventureland for the demented before they made it to freedom, it was Max. His was, the Chief often thought, a special kind of madness. He could drive himself—and his car—harder and tougher than any cop the Chief had ever known, but it wasn’t part of the ignorance and foolishness which characterised so many of the do-or-die daredevils and simple-minded boy racers who ended up on his force. The Chief, like Max, had realised a long time ago that if most of them hadn’t decided to pull on the blue uniform and become a “bronze”, as the louts and hoons called them, then they’d be out there fooling with cycle gangs or planning for a Big Run themselves.

  Max had once been like that too. But he’d been good enough, smart enough and quick enough as a young cop to survive on the road. And then he’d met Jessie. He’d lived with her for four years now, and two years ago Sprog, his son, had been born. Unlike most of the other cops on the Transcon and all of the crazies they had to contend with, Max was no longer set to self-destruct.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Sixty miles down the road, Roop and Charlie had also heard the all points broadcast.

  Charlie had been asleep in the back seat of the car when the first part of the message had crackled across his radio. Roop had been settled for half an hour behind a tree stump sixty or seventy yards away, holding a high-powered rifle with a massive telescopic sight to his shoulder. At first he had cracked off a few careless shots at a couple of crows that had come within range; then, across the valley, he saw a late-model sedan bump its way down a rarely used side-road. He picked it up through his sight, carefully making adjustments until he had it razor sharp in the lens and saw, with mounting interest, that the car contained a teenage couple. Slowly the car pulled to a stop and he saw the boy get out of the driver’s seat carrying a travelling rug, while the girl, wearing a pretty, off-the-shoulder, sun-frock, quickly stooped through her door and ran round the front of the car to link her arm through his. They scrambled down off the road, kicking up a shower of rocks and dust as they made their way through what had once been a carefully tended paddock and climbed over a low stone wall.

 

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