by Mike Mcquay
Bang!
A rock hit the roof, then another.
“Oh God,” Hellman said softly.
Then a barrage of rocks pelted the car from all sides, like a hailstorm. One made it through the bars on Plissken’s window and hit him on the face. The car swerved as he fought for control. Glass broke out of the back window. Screams came from Maggie. More rocks, bigger. Fire came at the car. A torch flew up to hit the windshield, then rolled onto the hood. Plissken jerked some more, knocking it off.
The street in front of them was filled with people shaking rocks and clubs, black people with painted faces, wailing softly, not speaking. Plissken grabbed the pistol from his holster.
“Here,” he said, handing it over to Hellman.
He was slowing into the crowd. The rocks stopped coming.
Brain Hellman just stared at the weapon in his hands, lips working.
“You got the wrong man for the job,” Maggie said.
Plissken grabbed the gun away from Hellman and handed it back to her. “Here we go,” he said.
He plowed into the mob, moving through it. They were all over the car, grabbing, hanging on, pressing blank silent faces through the window slats. They were banging, banging, hands and clubs. They were squirming up the hood, the roof, dancing on the roof, rocking the car, tearing it up.
Plissken couldn’t see out of the windshield. Grabbing up the rifle, he aimed it out the front. He fired quickly, blasting off the lip-snarling head of a wildly painted man who lay on the windshield. The body jumped and rolled off the car. More people scrambled on the hood. Plissken squeezed them off, blasting spider web holes through the windshield. Exploding bullets flared the night clearing bodies off the car.
Maggie yelled from behind. One of them had jumped on the back of the wagon, reaching for her through the shattered back window. Bringing up the automatic, she fired point blank, and the explosion hurled the man back to the street.
They were getting through the mob, clearing it.
“Not bad, baby,” Plissken called back to her.
“Nothing to it,” she returned.
“Snake!” Hellman yelled, pointing back out the bullet-cracked windshield. Plissken turned. The headlight was catching something, something massive just ahead. They closed on it. A barricade, five feet high, blocked the entire street ahead. A congealed mass of cars, mailboxes, telephone booths and street lights. Plissken slammed on the brakes, gauging the thing.
“They’re coming!” Maggie called from the back seat, and he didn’t have to look to appreciate her words. There was only one way to go-over the top, just like in the army.
“Hold on!” he yelled and hit the gas.
He had thoughts of smashing through the mess, but it was too strong. They slammed the wall, full speed; the car cried with rending metal on the tooth-jarring impact. Plissken was back full in the seat, bracing the wheel stiff-armed. And they were airborne, their speed careening them over the wall.
The flying sensation lasted only a second, then they came down, they came down hard, crashing, metal shrieking, sparks flying, and Plissken thinking his spine would pop out the top of his head.
Then there was quiet.
They looked at each other. Plissken shrugged and turned off the key, then on. The engine complained, but started back up. He shrugged again, and eased the thing into gear. It moved, shaking and crying the whole time, but it did move.
“Son of a bitch,” Hellman said.
Plissken seconded that motion.
XVII
GRAND CENTRAL STATION
15:53:39, 38, 37…
The Station had been old for a long time. It had started being old when Mister Ford invented his assembly line and aircraft began to get large and quietly menacing. Then there were wars, terrible wars, and it got even older. It was a large, airy place, delicately toned, reflecting the simple-minded philosophies of the nineteenth-century technocrats. The Station became old as soon as technology became a dark and twisted thing, a thing to fear, a controller.
And now it was very old, indeed.
The car wasn’t doing too well. It was terminally ill, dying quickly of a compound fracture of the oil pan. It wobbled badly down the dirt road that led up to the rear of Grand Central Station. Gray-black smoke oozed thickly out from underneath.
The gullied road was choked with high weeds. It ran beside the tracks that had once moved people and commerce down its veins and arteries, pumping the lifeblood of the city to the whole nation. Now the city was dead, its veins deteriorated and collapsed.
“He’s down there,” Hellman said, pointing to a burned-out train farther along the track.
Small campfires dotted the area around the outside of the Station, around the platforms. Light also flickered from within the still distant, crumbling testament to a world that no longer existed. Figures moved around the fires, silhouettes going about the business of survival. Plissken kept watching, looking for trouble.
Hellman was still pointing. “He’s in the third car, by the campfire.”
The train was just ahead. It was a hulking ruin, tons of dead metal, useless. Plissken eased up on it slowly and carefully. He heard sounds, and turned his head.
Engines, thundering engines. They watched past the weeds, past the out buildings, to the streets beyond. In the distance, the Duke’s caravan rumbled toward the Station, homeward.
“It’s all right,” Hellman said, but his voice didn’t sound like it was all right “Duke’s gotta go the front way. He’ll never beat us.”
Plissken grunted and looked at the man. “When you get in there,” he said, “talk fast, understand?”
The dirt road terminated in the crumbling platform. They bumped up on the cracked cement and sputtered toward the distant fire.
“What if they recognize the car?” Maggie asked, as they closed on the dark figures who huddled around the fire.
“Then I guess we’re all out of luck.” The Snake smiled and shoved his rifle into Hellman’s ribs. “Isn’t that right, Harold?”
Hellman just frowned at him. “Stop here,” he said.
Plissken had to floor the brakes with both feet to get the thing to stop, but stop it did, about twenty paces from the fire. The train loomed silently beside them like the carcass of some monstrous prehistoric beast.
“You know what to do,” Plissken said softly, and slid down in the seat. Hellman just sat there, staring out the bullet-pocked windshield.
“Let’s get it over with,” Maggie said from the back seat and opened her door.
It got Hellman to moving. He opened his door, and they both got out of the car. The Snake slid up in the seat enough to peek out the windshield. Seven men stood staring at them around the campfire. This was the part he hated, trusting Hellman.
Sliding across the seat, he quietly opened the door and eased out of the car on the train side. He rolled along the ground using the car as a shield, and finally off the platform, next to the train.
He rolled under the thing, then began climbing a boxcar to get up above them. He moved quickly, the speed still controlling his tempo.
Getting to the top of the car, he crept along its length, toward the one that held the President. He made the first one, then bridged the gap to the second as quietly as he could. Below him, Hellman had made it to the campfire.
“Hey,” the man said, smiling broadly. “How’s it goin’? How are you boys tonight?”
A small one with chunky, compact features and a red and yellow polka-dotted bandanna seemed to be in charge. He stepped out of the group around the fire.
“What do you want. Brain?” he asked, and his tones were edged with suspicion.
Hellman hesitated, his eyes drifting up to Plissken’s form on top of the car. The Snake held up his rifle, so that the man could see its shadow in the darkness.
“Well, ah…” he took a breath. “We’re going inside to meet the Duke,” he said finally. “He’s on his way.”
The man stepped closer. “H
e never said nothin’ to us about it.”
Plissken started moving again, past the figures to the next car.
“You know the Duke,” Hellman said. “He don’t talk much anyway. Sometimes you gotta guess what he’s thinking.”
Plissken slipped between the cars, going in the door of the rusting passenger car that held the President. He slipped in quietly, moving through the long shadows.
The President was in there, about halfway along in a seat. He was dirty, his clothes ripped and shredded. His face was waxen, drained of blood. A lantern lit him to yellow pallor. A cloth was wrapped around his hand, around where a finger should have been, but wasn’t. He was facing Plissken’s direction.
Beside him, facing away, was a Gypsy with a hacksaw, trying to cut through the titanium chains of the cuffs that held the briefcase to the President’s wrist. Another one, red bearded and scarred, was down close to Plissken, watching out the glassless window at the exchange going on by the campfire.
And through it all, the only thing he could think about was Hellman. Hellman dead. Hellman with a railroad spike driven to the hilt between his eyes. Hellman on fire. Hellman without a head…
They banged on him, but he was removed from the pain. He had maxed out on pain, O.D.’d on it; and like too much of any drug, it left him numb and sedentary. Through the haze, he saw his own rifle leveled at his head, and he laughed to think that Hauk would be deprived of the pleasure of blowing up his insides. He figured that the bombs would go off anyway, doing their duty, desecrating the remains of already lifeless meat.
Hands were grabbing at his holster, pulling it off him.
“Hold it!”
A voice, strong with authority.
Figures moved away from the Snake. The black man with the fedora strode over to him, stopping only long enough to give Hellman a sidelong glance.
“Kill him quick,” Hellman whispered. “He’s slippery.”
The man ignored him and walked on. Plissken opened his eye wide to stare his hatred to the man. A feeling they could share.
There was a sound, a creak. The Duke turned to it. The President was trying to slip away between the cars.
“Don’t move, craphead,” the Duke said, then immediately turned his attention back to the Snake.
They stared at one another.
“Who are you?” the big man asked.
The Snake ignored him. If he was going to die, he would do it as he lived. In total defiance.
The Duke pursed his lips and put his hand on the arrow in Plissken’s leg. He pushed it in farther. The fire again shot through Plissken’s brain, threatening to short circuit him into unconsciousness.
“He’s Snake Plissken,” Hellman said. “From the outside. He had a gun, Duke. There was nothing I could do.”
Plissken turned for one more look at Hellman. Maggie stood behind him. She was slipping him something that he tucked under his coat.
The Duke released the arrow and stood up full, running fingertips lightly across the scars that gouged his face like planting furrows. “Snake Plissken,” he said from faraway. “I’ve heard of you.”
He walked up to straddle Plissken’s form. A tire tool was in his hand. He smiled through crooked teeth, and the Snake watched the metal bar coming toward him in slow motion. It came down on his head, but he never felt it. He just drifted away into the black, gas jumping night.
The last thing he heard before the dark mist came to wrap him up in taffy-like dreams, was the Duke’s voice echoing from another world somewhere.
“I heard you were dead.”
XVIII
THE WALL
5:45 A.M.
Bob Hauk stood at attention atop the great wall, looking toward the mammoth towers of the World Trade Center across the bay. His hands held a deathgrip on the binoculars that were strapped around his neck.
The morning was coming up bright orange and purple, the polluted atmosphere refracting the early sunlight in beautifully vibrant rainbow colors that strung out across the width of the city in never-ending, shimmering streamers.
But Hauk wasn’t watching the sky. He was looking toward a tiny black dot overhanging the edge of the tall building. It may have been a glider. Then again, it may have been a shadow.
“Plissken,” he whistled low, wishing an answering tone would come floating back to him like a responsive echo. “Plissken.”
It had been over six hours since the man’s last radio contact. Plissken could have been dead. In six hours he could be dead and stiff with rigor mortis, and Hauk would be worrying about nothing. He could have just cracked under the strain and taken the glider and tried to put distance between himself and the prison, hoping that, somehow, distance would burn out the killers in his chest.
Bob Hauk didn’t believe either one of those scenarios, though. He knew Plissken, knew his kind of man. That’s why he picked him for the job. He knew that the Snake was out there somewhere, alive and fighting, and he wished more than anything in the world that he could get in there and give him a hand. Time was running short.
“Plissken.”
The air was crisp, fall air. It wafted gently, slowly dragging the morning light in with it. Maggie liked the morning. It made her feel that things were possible, new beginnings. There had never been anything in her life to make her feel that new starts were possible, but she was alive. Life was hope. She breathed deep, taking in a lungful of the morning air. It was laced with the aroma of roast dog.
It was a gray morning, just like all mornings. The Duke hadn’t let her and Brain leave after he got Plissken. He was thinking about them, thinking about whether or not to kill them. Brain was worried about it, but she wasn’t. The Duke needed gas, and Brain was the only one who knew how to get it to him. The Duke was running things because he was jungle smart; he knew what he needed to survive. No. He wouldn’t be getting rid of Brain.
The Gypsy men stared at her, let their eyes rove up and down her at will. Some of them had been sterilized, some hadn’t. She could always tell it in their eyes. The normal ones wanted her, wanted her down on the concrete or bent over a car fender. That, she could understand and deal with. The others, the neuters, they wanted her dead. They wanted to kill every reminder of their life before and the things they could never have again. They wanted to mutilate her; it was all right there in their faces.
She kept a long pin way back in her free-flowing hair. Its sole purpose was to go for the eyes of the animals with blood on their minds.
She stayed close to Brain, close so that everyone would know who she belonged to. Brain, in his usual fashion, was staying close to the Duke. The platforms spread out around them, the myriad campfires of the Gypsy horde slowly dying after the morning meal.
There was excitement in the camp today, more than the usual. It was food day in Central Park, the end of the month drop. It was also the day that they made their final arrangements about the President.
Duke and Brain had moved to the station wagon that had brought them last night In the daylight, the car was a mess. It looked like it had sat there undriven for years. It was badly battered, scraped and smeared with blood.
The Duke was tying the President to the fender of the thing, propping his briefcase up on the hood, chain extended. He carried Plissken’s rifle. Maggie stood at a short distance, watching them.
She had thought that Brain had made a bad mistake when he turned Snake over to the Duke. There was something about the man that made her trust him. He was too desperate, too determined, to be anything but what he said he was.
But Brain didn’t think about that. He was too scared of the Duke to even think straight about anything. His cowardice had messed him up more than once.
He couldn’t help it; she knew that. There were a lot of things about Brain that bothered her, that she would change if she were able, but he was all she had and she was going to hang onto him. He provided some sort of stability to her life, and Maggie realized that stability was the only thing keeping her sane.<
br />
Brain and the Duke were walking back toward her from the car. They were talking.
“I don’t care,” the Duke was saying. “I want that diagram, Brain.”
“But Plissken said something about a time limit.”
They came up to stand beside her. Brain reached out and squeezed her arm reassuringly. She hugged him quickly, and under his coat she felt the jutting metal of the pistol she had given him.
“What time limit?” the Duke asked. He raised the rifle to his face, sighting down the barrel at the President.
“On him,” Brain answered, pointing.
The Duke fired, and the bullet exploded on the fender, near the President’s head. The man was shaking, mouth open.
“Hold still, damnit!” the Duke yelled at him, and aimed again. “That’s a lot of crap,” he told Brain. “He’s the President, for God’s sake.” He fired again. This one exploded on the hood, near the briefcase. “Aren’t you the President?” he yelled.
The man began nodding vigorously.
“He’s the most important man outside of me,” the Duke said, and drew his lips tight. “Right?” he yelled.
“Right!” the President yelled back, voice cracking.
“What did I teach you?”
The man’s lips moved for several seconds before the words came out. “You’re the Duke of New York,” he said. “You’re A-number-one.”
The Duke smiled slightly. “Can’t hear you!”
The President screamed, a piercing, shrill cry. “YOU’RE THE DUKE OF NEW YORK! YOU’RE A-NUMBER-ONE!”
The Duke looked at Brain. “Get me the diagram,” he said softly.
Brain turned to Maggie. She nodded, reassuring. She had spent the whole night selling Snake Plissken to him. Go on, she mouthed silently.
“Don’t kill Plissken, Duke,” Brain said. “We need him.”
“That’s not what you said last right.”
He looked at Maggie again. She nodded once more, proud that her man was standing up to the Duke the way he was.
