Escape From New York

by Mike Mcquay

“It’s a whole different world in there,” Rehme said. “It’s very tribal, very survival oriented.” He leaned against the counter and looked at Plissken, deadly serious. The Snake smiled at him through his mouthful of cake.

  “They split along race and ethnic lines. White, Black, Chicano, Indian, Oriental, European.” He took a breath. “It even breaks down farther: women, homosexuals, religious, old people… and the crazies. Some of them have cars. They took junkers left behind and converted them to steam. We think that they may also have a gasoline source in there. And power. They have it selectively, although God knows how they do it.”

  “He does?” Plissken asked, swallowing the dry lump of cake.

  “Who?”

  “God.”

  Rehme made a face and started talking again. Plissken listened with half an ear as he got into a tin of peaches. They thought they were telling him something. Plissken had been down so many roads that most of them were named after him.

  “They have greenhouses, and rigged-up generators. Some areas even have street lights. The crazies live in the subways. They have full control of the underground.” He stopped because Plissken was slurping loudly on peach juice. The Snake stopped, looking at the man over the rim of the can. “The crazies,” Rehme continued. “They’re night raiders.”

  Plissken set the tin back on the counter, wiping his mouth on the back of his sleeve. He sifted through the equipment laying in front of him. He held up a strange, round object with a push-button inset. “What’s this?”

  “Tracer,” Hauk said. “Sends a radio signal for fifteen minutes. If you push it we can track you on radar.”

  Plissken held it between thumb and index finger, examining. “Had these in the Army.”

  “This one’s different,” Hauk said, taking it from him. He twisted the thing hard against itself. Half the barrel turned. “Safety catch,” he said.

  “Nice toy,” Plissken returned and, picking up the peach can, he finished the rest of the juice.

  “We could brief you for days…” Rehme began.

  The Snake looked at him like a gambler looking at the tax man. “Let’s just get it over with, huh?”

  “Now just a…”

  “The man wants to get it over with,” Hauk said, his face hard. “By God, I’ll vote for that. Pack up your gear, soldier, and well get underway.”

  Plissken started stuffing the equipment back into the holster. “Yeah, I could use some fresh air,” he said.

  He got the bulky pack filled and strapped it around his waist. Hauk was already walking out the door. He sauntered, at his own pace, behind the man. Hauk was finally forced to stop in the middle of the hall and wait.

  “You mentioned the Gulffire,” Plissken said. “Where in the hell am I supposed to land it?”

  “Top of the World Trade Center,” Hauk returned, and he didn’t even flinch.

  “Just like that,” Plissken said.

  “You’re Snake Plissken, aren’t you?” Hauk shot back. “Besides, it’s the only place you can land.” He started walking again. “They won’t see you up there, and when you come back, you can take off from free fall.”

  Plissken chuckled softly. “You really expect me to make it back?”

  Hauk ignored him and kept talking. “You can locate the President from his vital signs bracelet. It gives off a sync pulse. Use this.”

  Getting into his pocket, Hauk fished something out. He handed it to Plissken, a small round object. It looked like a miniature compass. “Homing device,” Hauk said. “It shows direction and distance.”

  Plissken eyeballed it once, then threw the thing into the holster with the rest of the gear.

  They came to some stairs and went up. The surroundings were beginning to look familiar to Plissken. They had gone underground and ended up back in the in-processing bunkers where he had originally been brought.

  He couldn’t believe that Hauk would just give him a Gulffire and turn him loose. Judicious use of the jet packs and an expert at the rudder could give the Gulffire a virtually unlimited range. And Plissken was an expert.

  Hauk took him into a small examination room set off to the side of a dimly lit, totally empty ward. His eye was throbbing worse than usual, but he knew that it was the combination of the rain and the proximity of all the black-suited slime. The pain in his side had settled to a dull ache that would form an ugly black and yellow bruise by morning-if he lived that long.

  The examination room was just the same size as the steri-chamber. But in here, the table was padded and covered with a starched white sheet There was a cabinet in a corner, glassed in, but lockable. It was filled with small sealed jars of clear medicine. Next to that was a machine set on a table. It was not overlarge, but was literally covered with dials and gauges.

  An old man with a rugged face and a white lab coat stood near the examination table. He was filling a syringe from one of the small medicine bottles. The man seemed disturbed about something; it translated into silence as Hauk and Plissken came through the door.

  “Is everything ready?” Hauk asked, without a greeting.

  The man gave Hauk a sidelong glance. “Yes,” he said simply.

  Then the old man wandered over to Plissken. It seemed to the Snake that the man was almost afraid to look at him-that he wanted to see him, but not to see him at the same time.

  The man finished filling his needle, then just stood there holding it, like a hunter with his rifle grounded until something comes along to shoot.

  Plissken gulped, feeling queasy. He wasn’t much for shots. He disliked pain a lot more when he knew it was coming. “Is that for me?” he asked sheepishly.

  “Strong antitoxin,” Hauk said. “Stops bacteria and viral growth for twenty-four hours.”

  “Take off your jacket,” the man with the needle said. “Then roll up your sleeve.”

  Plissken crossed his arms over his chest. “That’s okay,” he said. “Don’t need it. I’ll be all right. Really.”

  “Let’s go, Plissken,” Hauk said.

  “But I don’t like needles.”

  “Plissken…”

  The Snake sighed and slipped out of his jacket, letting it drop to the floor. He walked over to the examination table, hopping up backward to sit on it. He rolled up his khakied sleeve. The man with the needle came closer.

  Trying to ignore the whole business, Plissken diverted his attention to Hauk, who had walked over to the machine with all the dials. He clicked some switches and a number lit up on the machine.

  23:00:05.

  He narrowed his gaze to take that in when he felt the sharp stab of the needle going into his arm. He grimaced slightly.

  “Over in a second,” Cronenberg said in his best fatherly voice.

  Hauk got into a small box next to the machine. He came out of it with a wristwatch. He walked back over to Plissken, setting the dial as he did.

  “There,” Cronenberg said, and pulled the thing out of Plissken’s arm. “That wasn’t too bad, was it?”

  “Then you sit down here and I’ll do it to you,” the Snake replied.

  He was just into rolling down his sleeve, when Hauk strapped the wristwatch on him. It had a readout like the machine’s. Hauk pushed a button on the side. The readout light began blinking. 23:00:01. 23:00:00. 22:59:59.

  Hauk watched the blinking numbers for a few seconds, then looked up at Plissken. He said: “Twenty-two hours, fifty-nine minutes, fifty-seven seconds.”

  The Snake looked from the watch to the man’s face. It was a countdown watch. “We talked about twenty-four,” he said to the Commissioner.

  Hauk looked at Cronenberg. It was the kind of look that said, get your ass as far away from me as you can get. The old man drifted to the other side of the room immediately and began fiddling with the machine.

  Hauk turned his glacier eyes back to Plissken. “In twenty-two hours the Hartford Summit Meeting will be over. China and the Soviets will go back home.”

  Plissken watched Cronenberg with hi
s good eye. The doctor had pulled two long rubber tubes out of the back of the machine and was fiddling with them.

  “The President was on his way to the Summit when his plane went down,” Hauk continued. “He has a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. The tape recording inside has to reach Hartford in twenty-two hours.”

  “What’s on it?” Plissken asked.

  He watched as Hauk worked his lips against themselves. “Do you know anything about nuclear fusion?” he asked.

  The Snake put up his hands. “Never mind,” he said, “I don’t want to know.”

  The doctor was walking back to the table, back behind Plissken. He had the tubes in his hands. They were attached to the machine, stretching back and bouncing like monstrous rubber bands.

  “We’re talking about the survival of the human race, Plissken,” Hauk said, but it lacked conviction. “Something you don’t give a shit about.”

  Cronenberg spoke from behind. “I’m going to inject you,” he said dryly. “It’ll sting for a second or two.”

  The Snake didn’t have a chance to complain. He didn’t even have a chance to ask the doctor what was going to be coming out of those two rubber tubes. The man just placed them quickly on either side of his neck and pushed a button. The tubes were compressed air guns. He felt a bite, then a pop, and for just a second it felt like someone was pinching the hell out of his neck. Then, just as quickly as it had come, the pain stopped. Cronenberg removed the tubes, and Plissken brought his hands up to feel the spots. They were tender to the touch.

  He heard Hauk sigh and looked up at the man. His face had relaxed somewhat, as if some good and positive thing had just happened. “That’s it, Plissken,” he said.

  Cronenberg’s voice was cold as January behind him, “Tell him,” the man said.

  “Tell me what?” Plissken snapped.

  Hauk moved across the room, almost as if he were physically needing to put distance between himself and Plissken. “About that idea you’ve got about turning the Gulffire around 180 degrees and flying off to Canada.”

  Plissken jerked his head around to Cronenberg. The man’s face was pasty white. His eye began twitching madly under the patch. “What did you do to me?” he demanded.

  “My idea,” Hauk said from the other side of the small office. He was puffed up, trying to look big and mean. He was out of practice. “Something we’ve been fooling around with. Two microscopic capsules lodged in your arteries. They’re already starting to dissolve.”

  He took his eyes from Plissken and paced his corner of the room in a tight circle. “In twenty-two hours, the cores will completely melt. Inside the cores are small heat-sensitive charges. Not a large explosive, about the size of a pinhead. Just enough to open up both your arteries.”

  He stopped walking, turned his head and stared hard at the Snake. “I’d say you’d be dead in ten, fifteen seconds.”

  The pain charged through Plissken’s eye, and he was off the table, jumping toward Hauk. He hit the man hard, hand in a death grip on his throat. The momentum carried them back to bang into a concrete wall. Hauk groaned loudly.

  “Take ’em out!” Plissken screamed, squeezing hard on Hauk’s neck.

  Eyes bulging, breath caught in his throat, Hauk had his pistol out, jammed into Plissken’s stomach. But the Snake was well beyond that. He’d go gladly if he could take Bob Hauk along with him.

  Plissken was vaguely aware of Doctor Cronenberg beside him. The man was shaking visibly, mouth working. He was talking. Plissken picked it up with half an ear, then listened to it all.

  “They’re protected by the cores!” Cronenberg was yelling. “But fifteen minutes before the last hour is up we can neutralize the charges with an x-ray.” His hands were on the Snake’s arm, touching, gently touching. “We can stop it, Snake. We can stop it!”

  Plissken looked at a gagging Hauk, then at Cronenberg’s deep worried eyes. He released the man’s throat.

  Deep, husky sounds came from Hauk, as he staggered away from the gray wall, hand up on his throat, massaging. He holstered his gun.

  Plissken tried to swallow the anger back down to the boiler within him. He looked at the watch. It read: 22:47:01.

  Hauk was taking deep breaths. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse. “We’ll burn out the charges… if you have the President.”

  Plissken glared at him. “What if I’m late?”

  Hauk straightened his tie. “No more Hartford Summit. No more Snake Plissken.”

  Plissken bent down and picked up his leather jacket, draping it over his arm. He was calm again, thinking, adjusting. He stared fire at Hauk. “When I get back,” he said, “I’m going to kill you.”

  The Commissioner accepted that at face value. He even smiled slightly. “The Gulffire’s waiting,” he said.

  X

  GULFFIRE

  COUNTDOWN 22:13:36, 35, 34…

  The rain had dissipated to a fine mist, the kind that you never really feel until you run your hands through your hair and come away wet. It was chill, autumn chill, and the misty rain seemed to act as a coating, sealing the chill right into the bones.

  Plissken walked alone down the deserted airstrip toward the distant hangar, the hangar lights casting long, shimmering reflections on the lonely puddles beneath his feet.

  There wasn’t a blackbelly in sight. Normally, that would have made him happy, but the fact that he was left unguarded made him feel that they accepted him as one of them. He couldn’t think of a single thing more disgusting to him in the whole world. It also tended to reinforce Hauk’s assertion that they actually had planted bombs within him.

  There he was, Snake Plissken, going back off to war. Of course, he had never stopped going off to war. Every hour of every day of his life, Snake Plissken fought his battles. Sometimes they were internal, and sometimes they were wild and freewheeling like at the Federal Reserve. But the feelings were just the same.

  None of it made any sense to him. What was one President more or less? What was one summit meeting? It was a President who decorated him after Leningrad, a President who thought he could buy his love and loyalty with a cheap slug of bronze and a bit of colored ribbon. It meant nothing to him. Less than nothing.

  That was a different President, of course. How many had there been since-four, five? It didn’t matter; there were plenty more where those came from. When the medals didn’t buy him off, they offered him a high position in the fledgling USPF. When that didn’t work, they cut him loose, just gave him a discharge and sent him home.

  Home.

  Orange fire.

  He felt the anger bolt through him and fought it back down. He needed his wits about him now. He came up to the hangar, pushed open the huge, sheet-metal door and went inside.

  It sometimes occurred to him that maybe he was crazy like the rest of them. Although crazy people, it seemed, would not realize that they were crazy. Everything would seem perfectly logical and natural to them. That was the one feeling that made him think he was still shuffling the right deck. He could look around him and know, really know, how out of control the whole business was.

  The inside of the hangar was lit with that creeping neon disease. The glider sat in the middle of the monstrous hangar, its only occupant. He crossed the cement floor, footsteps echoing loudly. Two cops were under the plane, taking the blocks out from in front of the wheels.

  He got up to the machine and felt his insides surge. It had been a long time. The Gulffire was sleek and bullet-shaped. It was painted slick black and the neon script reflected in lazy, distorted patterns off its contours. The wings were stubby. The jet pack stuck a bit out of the tail like some kind of metal beehive. The canopy was black, flat black. It was all instruments, no eyeballing. He was surprised to find himself getting excited about flying again. He had thought he was through with it. But old soldiers never die…

  “You Plissken?” came a voice from under the glider. The voice got caught in the echo and rebounded off the high walls until it sounded lik
e a whole choir shouting down at him.

  “What’s it to you?” Plissken returned, softly enough to avoid the echo.

  The blackbelly was out from under the plane and standing beside him. Another head popped up on the other side of the fuselage. Plissken fixed the man with his good eye. All of the hatred came through, and probably more than a little of the pain.

  The hard creases in the man’s face softened. Turning his head, he spoke to his partner. “Let’s get this thing outside,” he said.

  They rolled it toward the big doors. Plissken walked with them, a hand on the sleek side, trying to get the feel back. He didn’t worry too much. He figured that it was like sex: once you got the rhythm, you never forgot it.

  The blackbellies got the glider out of the hangar, and went to look for the truck and tow line. He waited until they were a distance away before jumping up on the wing and easing back the canopy.

  He climbed in and immediately slid the covering closed. There was a second of total darkness, then the life-support and preflight lights came up. He could hear the air hiss as he looked over all the green and red lights that blinked the board before him, and after a few seconds the bottled air made it cold in there. Cold like the grave.

  He sat, letting the sterile cold seep into his body, letting it become a part of him. It was like the grave, like the best part of the grave-the peace. He envied Bill Taylor just a little.

  Reaching out, he began playing with toggles. Screens lit up in a panorama around him, filling the cabin with an eerie blue glow that was tinged with green around the soft edges. More toggles, and the geometric outline of the runway and surrounding area lined out on the screens.

  He watched the outline of the tow truck pulling onto the runway, then saw the unreal stick figures of the blackbellies jumping out to hook on the tow line. He could feel the vibrations through the hull as they scraped the clamp against the glider to hook him up. Then they were waving their little stick arms obliquely at the canopy.

  Okay, he thought. Fine and dandy.

  He toggled the mike. “I’m ready,” he said.