by Mike Mcquay
“I’m glad you remember me, Harold,” he said in that low voice. “A man should remember his past, don’t you think? Remember Kansas City? Four years ago? Hmmm?” He shoved the gun in a little farther, choking the man with it “You ran out on me. You left me sitting there.”
He pulled the gun out of Hellman’s mouth and directed him to a chair with it. Fear overflowed the man’s eyes like a horn of plenty. He sat.
“We were buddies, Harold,” Plissken said. “You, me and Fresno Bob. You know what they did to Bob?”
The boiler threatened to explode in Plissken’s gut. Life was a war, and Hellman was a traitor. He raised his foot and planted it on the man’s chest. Kicking out, he knocked the chair back, banging it against the map. Hellman went to the floor with a grunt, sprawling there.
“Don’t kill me. Snake,” he whimpered from the cold marble.
“Where is he?” Plissken snapped.
“Who?”
“Don’t play with me!”
Hellman rolled over, lips trembling, beard bobbing with the vibrations. “I don’t know what you’re talking about! Jesus, Snake. Come on!”
Plissken crouched down, getting in his face. “Where is he?”
The man’s eyes were pleading, talking to a stone wall. “Why? Why do you want to know?”
“I want him, Harold.”
“The Man sent him in here. Brain,” Maggie said, and her voice was sharp, a razor blade.
Hellman tried to compose himself, tried to sit up. “Yeah,” he said. “Working with the Man now?”
“Wait a minute,” the cabbie said defensively, since he had his own axes to grind. “Snake don’t work for the Man…”
“Tell me, Harold!”
Hellman got into a crouch, then stood up slowly, his back sliding up the wall. “No,” he returned, using the woman’s strength of conviction. “And if you kill me, you’ll never find out.”
The Snake smiled again. “Too thin, Harold. Even for you.” He turned to glance quickly at Maggie. The sharp edge of her words was nothing like the homicide in her stare. He would have winked at her, but he didn’t have enough eyes. “I’ll just beat it out of your squeeze,” he said, and watched her face twist with hatred.
Hellman was talking faster now, selling his point. “Maggie doesn’t know exactly where he is, and if you don’t know exactly, precisely where he is, you’ll never find him.”
That made sense to Plissken. He’d already taken a look at the city. Maybe it was time to deal. He lowered the rifle.
“Is he still alive?”
The cabbie laughed loudly, brightening immediately. “Alive and kicking.”
“Shut up,” Hellman snapped.
Plissken walked to a chair and sat down. The others stood rigid, staring for a few seconds, then they sat also. “Okay,” he said. “Here it is. I’ll take you out of here. I’ve got a jet glider. It’s not far from here. You just get him to me.”
Maggie and Brain looked at each other. The hate began draining from her eyes. She was thinking, revolving the possibilities.
The cabbie was out of his chair, pacing excitedly. He looked at Plissken and wiped a palm across his weathered face. “No kidding?” he said quickly. “On the level? You take me, too?”
Plissken gave him a why not look. What difference did it make? He only had room in the glider for two anyway.
Hellman looked hard at Plissken. “We got a deal somewhere else,” he said, still not understanding the man’s desperation.
The internal boiler started stoking again. “No glider,” he said.
“We got the President,” Maggie said, face as flat as Hellman’s words. “And the Duke’s taking everybody out of here.”
“It’ll never happen,” Plissken returned. He sat up straight, leaning forward. “I know something you and the Duke don’t know. You only got so long before Mister President don’t mean a whole lot to anybody.”
“Bull,” Hellman shot back. Then, his eyes narrowed. “How long?”
Plissken laid his rifle across his lap and put his hands behind his head. “You ready to work something out?”
“You’re lying,” Brain said.
Maggie looked at Snake, and her face was at war with itself. She was a survivor, too. “Maybe he’s not,” she said.
Hellman stood up and waved Plissken off. “I know him,” he said, turning his back to look at the map. “Look at his face, he’s lying.”
Somehow, that was all okay with Snake. He needed to take Hellman out anyway. The penalty for treason was execution. He raised the rifle and aimed at the man’s leg. If he was going to do it, he may as well do it slow enough to get some enjoyment out of it. “Guess I’ll just kill you and keep looking myself.”
Hellman turned, his beard bobbing again. “Christ, Snake. Come on. Come on!”
Snake Plissken put his finger on the trigger and hugged the rifle up snug against his cheek. He began squeezing, very gently.
“Brain!” Maggie yelled.
“Talk to him, baby,” Plissken whispered, and squeezed a little more.
“He’s gonna kill us both if you don’t tell him.”
“You gotta tell him. Brain,” the cabbie said, high and fervent. “You gotta!”
Brain Hellman looked deeply into Plissken’s good eye and believed. He withered under the heat of the look. He made the decision, and he knew it was the wrong one. Turning back to the map, he bashed it with a fist. “All right,” he said, nearly a whisper. Then louder. “All right!”
Plissken, almost sadly, took his finger off the trigger and lowered the rifle. The pain in his eye eased somewhat. “Always knew you were smart, Harold.”
Hellman flared around angrily to him. “One thing right now,” he said, with as much vehemence as he could muster. “Don’t call me Harold.”
XVI
GYPSIES ON THE STREETS
16:45:21, 20, 19…
Plissken trusted Brain Hellman about as much as he’d trust a pickpocket with his safety deposit box. That is, if he’d had a safety deposit box. The man was as slippery as Vaseline, and as loyal as a seeing-eye dog in a hamburger factory.
He had run with Hellman for a time, but had never felt like he could trust him. Hellman could do all the fast talking, but he was never there to back it up with action. Finally, in Kansas City, he had flat driven off in a getaway car, leaving Plissken and Fresno Bob inside a bank. The Snake slithered away. Fresno Bob wasn’t so fortunate. The blackbellies caught him and skinned him alive.
“Got the best engine in the whole damned place,” Cabbie was saying to Plissken as they waited for Hellman to lock up the library from the outside. “Made the rounds of the junkers and the parts stores and got the best shit available. Nothing too good for my baby.”
His eyes were glittering, and he kept moving up close to Plissken, bumping him slightly.
“How far we got to go?” Plissken asked Hellman.
The man turned from his padlocking, and as usual, his face was poker steady, blank and wiped clean. “Nothing’s far away in this town,” he said. “Haven’t you heard, we’re on an island.”
Maggie was standing by Hellman at the top of the stairs. She watched the streets constantly, the survival instinct. Occasionally, she’d turn to look at Brain as he wound the chains through the ornate brass handles on the door. There was an admiration in her eyes that could almost be interpreted as love. The Snake couldn’t figure that one. Maybe the woman wasn’t as sane as he thought. Whatever else Brain Hellman ever was, though, he was apparently kind to his women.
“Did the fine tuning with jeweler’s instruments,” Cabbie said, twisting his fingers as if he were using a tiny screwdriver.
“Got it,” Hellman said, snapping the last of the big padlocks into place.
“Let’s go,” Plissken said, and waited while the others started down, so he could follow behind them just to be on the safe side.
“You work for this Duke?” he asked the Brain.
The man answered wit
hout turning to him. “Make gas for him,” he said, and every sentence came out sounding like it had been rehearsed. Hellman was still hedging his bets. “Figure out things for him.”
“Like what?”
This time the man did turn around. Plissken smiled. He wasn’t going to let the son of a bitch off that easily.
“Like how to get across the Fifty Ninth Street Bridge,” he returned finally, and he acted as if the words were being forced from his mouth with a crowbar. “It’s mined, but I think I know where they’re planted.”
Maggie spoke up, willing to talk as long as Hellman was. “We got a diagram from a guy who got all the way across before they shot the poor bastard.”
Hellman gave her a dirty look at first, but then just sighed, giving in. “They’re working up there now,” he said. “Clearing away the first barricade.”
“What a sight, Snake!” Cabbie yelled, coming out of his car fantasy. He started moving his arms out in front of him, rolling them like the ocean waves. “The whole place rolling right across the bridge. Mister President right up front.” He let his arms drop to his sides. “It would have been so fine.”
“Would have been?” Maggie said.
Cabbie shot her a fierce look, then said indignantly. “We’re goin’ with Snake now.”
“Wait a minute,” Plissken said, cocking his head. “Listen.”
They all stopped, and the sound was discernible to everyone. Engines. Closing in.
“It’s the Duke!” Cabbie yelled. “I know the sound of his machines.”
“The alley,” Plissken ordered, and they hurried down the remaining steps and around the corner of the building. They got quickly around, hugging the wall with their backs. Plissken turned his head. The cab sat about fifty paces farther down.
He turned back, and risked a look around the corner of the building. A convoy was coming up on them, consisting of ancient cars and trucks, sputtering and fuming through snorting clouds of gray and black smoke. The machines shuddered, backfiring white sparks, wobbling from side to side. There were between ten and twenty in all, and every one of them looked as if it was on its way to the automobile graveyard. None of them had mufflers, and their ripping sounds tore the night.
The lead car passed the mouth of the alley, an old Cadillac with the top cut off. A man sat in the passenger side of the front seat. He was large and bald-headed, with three scars, like claw marks, running down the side of his cheek.
“The Duke,” Maggie whispered.
He had a cigar in his mouth and a pair of sunglasses to cover his eyes. The glasses were taped together at the hinges with white surgical tape. A lavender, almost purple, snap-brim fedora sat stiffly on his cue-ball head. He had it turned down stylishly over one eye.
The others in the car were obviously bodyguards. They were dark, like the Duke, and had droopy moustaches. Brightly colored bandannas wound around their heads, and their earrings were large and gold. They wore dark suits with dark shirts. Their faces were lined with cruelty. Gypsies.
The lead car passed and others went by, filled with Gypsies. Their exhaust smoke stuffed the alley with dirty fog and Plissken, by habit, covered his mouth and nose with his hand.
They grumbled along slowly, like a funeral procession,
“Don’t cross the Duke,” the cabbie kept saying, shaking his head. “Everybody knows that”
“Button it,” Plissken rasped. He grabbed Hellman by the shoulder, forcing the man to get eye to eye with him. “Is the President with them?” he asked.
“No,” the man answered, and the Snake couldn’t read through the granite of his eyes. “He’s stashed away at the Duke’s place.”
The caravan stopped in front of the library, but didn’t shut down their engines, probably with good reason. Plissken watched as a man with a deathshead face and chiseled teeth jumped out of the Duke’s car and took the steps up to the library two at a time.
“He’s looking for you, Brain,” Maggie said, as the man began pounding on the door the same way Cabbie had done.
“What does he want?” Plissken asked,
“My diagram to the bridge,” Hellman answered. “When he finds out I’m with you, he’ll kill me. Shit, Snake, I knew I shouldn’t have.. ”
“We gotta get the President now,” Plissken snapped, “while the Duke’s busy.”
Hellman shook his head with resignation. “Forget it,” he returned. “He’s on the other side of town and we got no wheels.”
“Sure we do,” Maggie said. “Cabbie,”
They turned to the cabbie, but he was gone, his cab, too distant for them to catch, was backing down the alley, its sounds muffled by the incredible timbre of the convoy. The cab reached the other end of the alley and backed quickly onto the main street, a tiny squealing sound drifting back to Plissken’s ears.
“Slime,” the woman muttered, and for the second time that night Plissken got to see the range of extreme emotions that could mold her face.
“That’s it,” Hellman said, and breathed deeply. “Deal’s off. Snake.”
“Just calm down,” Plissken told him, and held up the rifle just to let Hellman know that this wasn’t going to be a replay of Kansas City.
The last car in the caravan stopped right in front of the alley. It was an old station wagon, with bars welded on the window like the cab’s. It sat there, quivering like it had caught a chill. One of its headlights had come out of its socket and was dangling, waving at the ground. The man in the passenger side got out, cursed and moved to the front to fix it.
“Wait here,” Plissken said, and his tone told them that he really meant it.
He walked up the alley, staying in the shadows. Getting close to the car, he casually sauntered up to the driver’s window. The man turned to look at him, but all he really got to see was a close look at the tempered steel, combat-gouged butt of the Snake’s automatic. And he didn’t get to see that except for a second.
The butt of Plissken’s gun connected solidly, cracking, across the man’s nose and cheekbone. He went over on the seat without a sound, as if he had just decided to take a little nap.
Plissken opened the door, shoved the unconscious man over and got behind the wheel. The other Gypsy was squatting down in front of the car, still fiddling with the headlight. Plissken slammed the door and hunched down in the seat.
He heard sounds from the front of the car, heard the other man calling a name. Then he saw the man’s shadow drift lazily across the windshield.
The man was at the door, bending down to look through the bars. The Snake came up sideways with the gun butt, slipping it vertically through the bars. He caught the man’s mouth and chin.
The Gypsy gurgled, hands to face, backpeddling toward the alley. Maggie ran out from the darkness, shoved the man back even more and cracked his head on the side of the building. He fell, splashing into a puddle. Maggie and Brain dragged him into the alley.
Laying his gun on top of the unconscious man, Plissken jammed the car into reverse and backed up enough to nose the thing into the alley.
He jerked to a stop in front of Hellman and Maggie. The Brain opened up the door and pulled the Gypsy onto the ground beside his buddy. Plissken grabbed his gun away just as the man was sliding out. Hellman climbed in front, Maggie in back and Snake Plissken screeched away down the alley.
“Oh shit,” Hellman said.
“What?”
“I just sat in something… wet.” He was raising himself up to look at his pants. The seat was soaked in blood. “Shit,” he said again. And then again, just for effect, “Shit”
“Where’re we going?” Plissken asked, pulling out of the alley and heading down a wide avenue.
“Well, ah… it’s a ways from here,” Hellman stammered.
“You’re in this,” Plissken said through clenched teeth. “All the way, Harold.” He stared intently at the man, reminding him of the fire that burned out of control within. “We’re like Siamese twins.”
“Grand Central S
tation,” Hellman said quietly. “They’ve got him at the station.”
“Which way?”
Hellman pointed straight on. “This is okay for now… no, wait” He was wiggling his hand. “Turn left here.”
Plissken squealed the brakes and took the quick turn. It was a big street, a huge street.
“Wait a minute, Brain,” Maggie said. “This is Broadway.”
“I know,” Hellman answered grimly. “The Duke’ll take Seventh Avenue. Broadway’s got five minutes on him.”
Plissken turned to the woman. Fear was molded on her face. He had never seen that emotion from her. “Brain, come on,” she said.
Hellman set his face. “Keep driving,” he said. “If we’re going to do this thing, we may as well do it.”
“What’s wrong with Broadway?” Plissken asked.
“Just go.”
He turned to the woman again. “What’s wrong with Broadway?”
“Hoodoo,” she answered, slumping back in her seat. And she wouldn’t say anything more.
Plissken kept moving his eye, watching. It was all right at first, but then they began seeing the fires, small fires, single fires burning here and there. They heard the drums, then the chanting, the deathly moan of the chanting.
“What the hell…”
The fires became more frequent and had been somehow treated with chemicals to make their smoke rise different colors: yellows and pinks and fine powdery blues, filling the street with drifting multicolored clouds. The stench of burning rubber drifted with the clouds.
Figures darted wraithlike through puffs of smoke-flitting, ethereal, always in motion, impossible to discern. The drums were loud, throbbing Plissken’s eye, making him rock physically in the seat. And the chanting was a siren song, indefinable, magnetic. The parking meters lined the smoky streets in long rows, metal display poles topped-with heads. Human heads with open screaming mouths. Then the people were everywhere, smoke people, moaning. They moved slowly toward the car.
Plissken felt his stomach muscles tighten. “Come on, Sweetheart,” he said and gave it as much gas as he possibly could on the smoke-filled street. They picked up speed, moving through the ever-growing street throngs.
