by Mike Mcquay
“I wish Snake was here,” he told her.
“That’s the first time I’ve ever beard you say that,” she responded, and smiled when he jerked his head to her. He smiled back, a nervous, frightened smile.
They came up to the storeroom door. Brain stopped and looked at it. Maggie reached out and knocked before he changed his mind.
The door opened, and Romero stuck his head out. He snarled with his pointy teeth, the skin on his skeletal face stretched tight as a drum head. He was wearing Cabbie’s hat, slightly tilted, to the side of his head.
“Where’d you get that?” Brain asked.
“Got it from Cabbie,” the man responded in a whisper voice. “Traded him.”
Brain was shifting his weight from foot to foot, pulling on the hem of his cloth jacket. “For what?” he asked.
Maggie pinched him on the back, trying to make him stand still. He was blowing the whole deal.
“What are you so nervous about?” Romero asked, his sunken eyes glaring.
“I gotta see the President,” Brain blurted out.
“Who says?”
“The Duke,” Brain said, nodding his head and looking around. He wouldn’t meet Romero’s eyes. Maggie reached a hand into her jacket and grasped the automatic.
“No, he doesn’t,” Romero answered, and his voice had gotten rough like sandpaper.
“I’ll tell him you said that,” Brain said with contrived self-righteousness. “Come on,” he snapped at Maggie and turned on his heel.
“Wait a minute,” Romero called after him.
Brain stopped, his back still to the man. Maggie looked up at him. He wiggled his eyebrows. She smiled, proud.
“Why?” Romero asked.
They turned back around. “He’s got something in his collar,” Brain said. “In the lining. The Duke wants it” They walked back to the man.
“What?” Romero asked, still blocking the doorway.
Brain shrugged. “Cyanide capsules,” he replied. “The Duke don’t want a dead President. Plissken told him about them.”
Reluctantly, eyes still wary, Romero opened the door. Maggie gave Brain a good shove and both of them were in right away. There were three other guards lounging around. The President sat like a lifeless mannequin in the corner.
“Cyanide?” Romero said, his voice climbing a hill.
Brain moved toward the President, taking a knife out of his jacket. Maggie moved away from the center of the room, hand still on the pistol, tightening.
“Might try to take it tomorrow,” Brain said.
The Gypsy put his hands on his hips. “Why would he do that?”
Brain got to the President and began messing with his collar. The man looked up at him, coming up out of a deep stupor. His eyes got wide when he saw the knife.
Maggie watched Romero, watched it all snap together in his mind. She eased the gun slowly out of her belt. Romero moved toward Brain.
“That’s just so much bull,” he said, putting a hand on Brain’s shoulder. “You’re not supposed to be in here, Brain…”
Brain flashed around with the knife, burying it to the hilt in Romero’s stomach. The man’s expression never changed. His face, already a deathshead, simply made that abstraction real. He sank slowly to the floor.
Maggie had the gun out and was firing before she even realized it. The room was small, the targets big. She blasted two of the guards down before they could even stand. The third got right up on her before the gun coughed again and took off his head.
She looked at Brain.
She smiled.
XXI
ROUND TWO
3:58:53, 52, 51…
Plissken never heard the bell, he was too busy rolling around on the bloody canvas, trying to stay alive. But Slag heard it, a recurring what-round-is-this nightmare.
The big man stopped immediately, like a trained seal, dropping his bat to the ground. He stomped over to his corner like a good little boy.
The Snake staggered to his feet, getting to the first vacant corner he saw. His body was one big welt. He was probably black and blue all over, but he couldn’t see beneath the blood that covered him from his tussle with the wet canvas.
Rolling his head around on his shoulders, he let his eye rove the crowd again. They were all yelling and sweating, getting warmed up, wagering for cans of tomato soup. Then he caught something, a glint.
A Gypsy with a red bandanna stood by the round ringer. He wore a medallion on a chain around his neck. Plissken blinked. The medallion looked familiar. It was the tracer that Hauk had given him.
The referee came back into the ring and collected the bats. He handed them to the red bandanna and got some others in their place. He went to them in turn, issuing one each: trash can lid and bat. These were bats plus. A long nail was jutting out of the end of each.
The crowd was on its feet, jumping with the lust and the excitement. Plissken put them out of his mind.
The radio was obstinate; it just wouldn’t answer. Hauk tightened the straps on his backpack and wished he was off asleep somewhere, curled up like a big dog in a sun spot.
But he wasn’t.
From habit he pulled the pearl-handled revolver out of its bed and snapped open the cylinder, checking the ammo. He flicked it closed just as Rehme came into the bunker.
“They’re ready,” the man said.
“Sure.”
“Is it go?”
Hauk looked at that damnable radio. It stared silently back at him. “Yeah,” he said finally, and let Rehme lead him out of the room.
Plissken heard the bell this time, listened closely to it since it could be the last one he’d ever hear.
He limped into the center of the ring and waited for the man-mountain. He didn’t have to wait long. Slag lumbered out, looking like some sort of crazed Roman gladiator.
The man smelled victory and came right for Plissken, no feints or parries. He growled loudly and came straight down with the bat.
The Snake got up his shield, but the force of the blow buckled him almost to the ground. His reflexes were going; he just couldn’t hold together much longer.
The bat came down again, hammering Plissken, driving him to his knees. If he was going to live to have his arteries blown up, he’d have to do something soon.
The bat was up, straining, coming down for the final blow. Plissken had one shot. Slag’s legs were unprotected. He swung out hard and low from his vantage point on the floor.
He didn’t have much strength left but what he did have went into the swing. He caught Slag on the shin, the nail sinking deeply into the man’s leg right through his boot.
Slag howled, bending to grab his leg. Plissken jumped up, jerking his bat out, a good hunk of Slag meat coming with it. The big man’s arms reached futilely for him through his pain, but the Snake slithered underneath his grasp.
He came up behind. This was it. Before the big man could turn on him, he levered the bat as far behind him as he could and came straight back over his head with it.
The blow caught Slag on the back of the neck, on the spine, and the nail sunk in all the way up to the Hank Aaron autograph on the varnished wood.
Plissken backed away; the bat stayed for supper. Slag couldn’t move. He was paralyzed from the blow. All he could do was stand there, gurgling cries seeping from his open mouth. His body, stiff, began weaving around like a top near the end of its spin. Then he simply fell over, stiff as a starched collar.
Plissken moved around him, exhaustion overpowering him. Once the fight was over, his will began to drain quickly away.
The crowd was still cheering, but this time they were cheering for him. King of the jungle. He fell against the ropes and tried to climb through, but someone rushed up to keep him in.
He saw the man through a bloody fog, focused on his warning color. Red. Red bandanna. He remembered something. Yes. The man wore his tracer around his neck.
Letting himself fall between the ropes, he made the red bandanna
catch him to put him back. When the man grabbed him, he reached out and twisted the safety catch on the tracer, then pushed the button. It was all he had the strength to do.
The choppers were churning, grinding the air. Ready. Hauk put on the headset and prepared to give the order. Prather stood just outside the pads, watching intently. More than anything, Hauk wanted to go get the man and force him into the city with them, force him to live, just for awhile, the hell that formed the substance of all their lives.
He was just turning to give the order when he saw Rehme. He almost ignored it, but the man was running, charging. He was waving his arms wildly above his head.
Hauk hesiated for a second, then pulled off the headset. Rehme passed Prather and kept on coming toward Hauk’s copter. He got there, breathing hard, and began banging frantically on the door.
The Commissioner popped it open and leaned out.
“What?” he yelled.
Rehme couldn’t get his breath, kept gulping air. The words were getting lost in his throat.
“What is it?”
“Plissken…” the man said through gasps.
“What about…”
“Plissken’s tracer.”
Hauk jerked around to his pilot and grabbed him by the front of his uniform. “You get on that horn,” he ordered. “Keep ’em down. Nobody moves. Nobody moves!” Reaching out, he tore off the man’s goggles, getting eye to eye with him. “Do you understand?” he said.
The man nodded, gulping.
Hauk let him go and climbed out of the copter, leaving his backpack behind him on the seat. He couldn’t feel his body as he ran. His concentration was all centered. He was moving eyes, moving toward the bunker.
Plissken stared at Slag’s motionless form on the canvas. He couldn’t tell whether the man was living or dead. He was just laying there, eyes staring abstractly at the high ceiling. The crowd was chanting again, but the words were different this time:
“Snake, Snake, Snake!”
He staggered over to the big man, and fell to his knees beside his prostrate form. The countdown watch was still hooked on his unmoving wrist.
“Excuse me,” Plissken said, and unstrapped the thing from Slag’s arm. He looked at it before he put it on, 3:39:22.
He put it on and slowly, painfully, creaked back up to stand on his feet. He raised his arms straight up, fists clenched in the victory salute. He looked defiantly up at the Duke’s box. The man wasn’t even watching him. He was listening intently to one of his men, and from the look on the Duke’s face, he wasn’t getting very good news.
Plissken kept his eye on them, even as he acknowledged the crowd. Something was up. Something big.
When the man finished talking, the Duke jumped up and ran from his box, all of his people hurrying behind. The man who had delivered the message stayed behind in the box. He began waving his arms for silence.
It took a while for everyone to see him, but they finally did. The noise in the room died down to nothing. Plissken couldn’t believe the change. Absolute silence ruled the mammoth room. The crowd got quietly to its feet, listening.
The man spoke loud enough so that his words were driven home on the crowd the way that Plissken had driven home the baseball bat. “The President’s gone!” he yelled. “Brain took him!”
It was like a fire in a madhouse. The whole place went immediately berserk; people were screaming, running in all directions, chairs overturned and flew through the air. These people had had one chance at freedom and it was suddenly snatched away from them.
They weren’t taking it well.
Plissken no longer mattered. Plissken was nothing. Brain was everything. Brain was all that mattered. They wanted Brain. Climbing through the ropes, the Snake limped away with the crowd. He wanted Brain, too. And he figured he knew where he could find him.
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
The tracer let out a steady piercing whine. It was at once the most grating and beautiful sound that Hauk had ever heard in his lifetime. He watched, impatient, as Rehme tried to triangulate the signal on the radar screen in the control bunker. The man kept fiddling with the dials, muttering to himself.
“Hurry up,” Hauk said, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.
The Secretary had wandered in after them and stood off to the side, straightening his tie, waiting to see which way it was going to roll before he committed himself.
“There,” Rehme said, pointing. A faint dot had appeared on the radar scan. “Grand Central Station.”
Hauk banged a fist happily down on the table top. “I knew that son of a bitch was alive!”
All at once, the transmit signal started faltering, breaking up. Then it died, choked off.
“It’s gone,” the Secretary said, and he sounded almost happy.
“The signal only lasts fifteen minutes,” Hauk told him, then turned to stare at Rehme. “Down load the choppers. We’re in a stand-by situation.”
Rehme gave him the thumbs up, and slapped him on the back as he hurried out the door.
“Is that wise?” Prather asked, walking up close to Hauk. “Anybody could have pushed that button.”
Hauk found a chair and sat heavily. “Only Plissken knew there was a safety catch,” he returned, leaning his head back. He would have closed his eyes, but he was afraid that they’d stay closed. He sat up straight, shaking his head. “Well give him a little more time, just to make sure.”
Plissken found his leather jacket back in the dining room. He slipped it on, though the pain in his upper body made it a laborious process. Finding an exit, he limped out into the already darkening sky. He had missed the whole day.
The streets were crazy. People and cars, moving, hurrying; they were directionless, scattered, mindlessly charging around. It was a futile search, a doomed mission. Plissken smiled. He knew exactly how they felt.
He zipped his jacket halfway and turned up the collar. “You’re not going to do it to me again, Harold. No way.”
He moved casually along the sidewalk. He came upon a tiny car painted rust red. A Gypsy was just opening the door to get in. Plissken jumped at the man. Grabbing him by his long hair, he jerked him away from the car and flung him to the ground.
“There’ll be a bus along in a few minutes,” he told the man. Jumping into the car, he crossed the starter wires and roared away immediately. He had a date with a glider.
Hauk sat in his chair and watched the Secretary of State pace the room like he was on guard duty. The man was angry, finally cracking. Good.
“You blew it, Hauk,” Prather said. “We’ve got to go in. Now!”
Hauk smiled up at him. “A little late to be taking charge now, isn’t it, Mister Secretary?”
The man tried to stare him down, but Hauk was in a class by himself when it came to staring contests. “Go in now, Hauk!” the man screamed.
Hauk stood and stretched. “We hold,” he said.
The man got right up in his face. “You’re countermanding my orders!”
Hauk jabbed him with an index finger, pushing him back. “This is my prison,” he said calmly. “I give the orders.”
“I override all that.”
Hauk put his hands on his hips, his right, by design, resting on his gun butt. “Just try,” he said.
“You sent for me?” came a voice from the doorway. They both turned to watch Dr. Cronenberg come ambling into the bunker, hands stuffed down in the pockets of his lab coat.
Hauk pushed past Prather. “Where’s your machine?” he asked.
“At the airstrip,” the old man said, smiling just a touch at the confrontation he had just witnessed, but smart enough to keep his mouth shut about it
“How long would it take to get it back over here?”
Cronenberg moved all the way into the room, nodding hello at the Secretary. “Twenty minutes, give or take,” he said. “But he’ll use the glider, won’t he?”
“If he can,” Hauk answered.
Hauk walked over to th
e instrument panel and picked up a mobile two-way. He handed it to Cronenberg. “Stay on this radio,” he said. “Talk to me when you get there.”
The doctor stuck the black box into a coat pocket. He looked at Hauk and smiled curiously. “Somehow, I think you’ve grown fond of Mister Plissken.”
“I love him,” Hauk grimaced. “When I see him, I’m gonna give him a big, wet kiss on the lips.”
XXII
FUN WITH GLIDERS
2:05:34, 33, 32…
The car died about a block from the World Trade Center. Plissken jumped out and hobbled the rest of the way on foot. He was in bad shape, but he kept moving, not dwelling on it, letting his simple momentum carry him forward.
He hurried across the broken streets and ran into the building without precautions. There was no time. He headed right for the stairs, but stopped long enough to take notice of a beat-up steam car that was sitting directly in the center of the lobby. It hadn’t been there the last time he had.
The climb was awful, never-ending. It turned his bad leg into a mirror reflection of his eye, pain coursing through the electrical connections of his body with every step.
He wound up the endless stairs in total darkness, gasping for breath, sucking in chunks of fetid air, tripping over the decomposing bodies, mindless of the pervasive stench. He was beyond all that. The horror had congealed itself in his mind and had become the norm.
He would get to the top-somehow. He was rapidly losing motor control of his body and his breath came up shallowly, in short gasps. The blow on the head kept him forever dizzy.
He got through the stairwell door and into the long hallway. Trying to move down the hall, his legs wouldn’t do what he wanted them to. Dark dripping walls seemed to sag inward to bounce him off them. He fell. More than once.
