by Mike Mcquay
Plissken turned to look down the bridge. The Duke’s headlights were coming at them, steady, unrelenting. Plissken was running again, ignoring the agony in his leg.
“Here!” Rehme shouted. “Over here.”
Hauk and the Secretary rushed across the bunker to stand beside him. He was looking at the gridded wall map with the flashing light. Rehme was holding a headset up to his ear without putting it on. “It’s wall station nineteen,” he said. “They spotted two cars on the Fifty Ninth Street Bridge.”
Hauk looked at the map light that marked the station. “Is it Plissken?” he asked.
Rehme shrugged with his tired eyes. “Taxicab and a Cadillac,” he returned, trying to keep the catch out of his voice. “The taxi hit a mine. Four people on foot.”
Hauk looked at Prather just to read the man’s face. “Ten minutes,” the man said, and Hauk couldn’t figure exactly whether that was supposed to be good or bad.
He turned back to Rehme. “Get a jeep with a winch over there, fast.”
Running back to his previous station, he picked up the two-way and barked into it: “Cronenberg. Get over to wall station nineteen. They’re coming across the bridge.”
He put down the radio, and he felt his insides jump. Maybe he had something left in there after all. Without thought, he was out the door and running for the heli-pads.
They used the only resource left to them. They ran. They ran from the Duke, from his whining engine that wanted to eat them up. They ran from the City of Death.
There was a sound behind Plissken, a roar. He turned in time to see Brain Hellman flying through the air, tossed away by the unfeeling force of instantaneous combustion beneath his feet. No sound issued from him. He was a dead thing and would be left behind with the rest of the dead and dying.
Plissken stopped and turned. Hellman’s body hit the ground ten feet from where he started. Maggie had been knocked down by the blast, and she was moving along the ground, crawling toward Brain’s body. In the distance, he could still see what was left of the yellow cab with the grinning man inside. Leningrad. It was Leningrad all over again, and he was saving a man who nobody cared about for purposes that made no rational sense.
The President was still running. The Duke was closing in. He called to the woman. “Maggie! Keep moving!” He could see she wasn’t going to. She had defined her priorities. He looked at his lifeclock-0:07:49, 48, 47.
Maggie crawled to Brain. He was lying on his back, eyes closed. He could be sleeping. The fright wasn’t on his face anymore. There was peace there now, a contentment that she’d never seen before.
She embraced his inert form. “Oh, Brain,” she whispered into his unhearing ear. “You weren’t much, but you cared for me. I know you did.” She kissed the cold, bloody mouth. “I won’t leave you alone,” she said.
Far off in her mind somewhere, she heard a sound. An engine sound. She glanced up. The Duke was coming, bearing down on her. She hugged Brain one more time. “I’ll be there in a minute,” she told him, and stood up, facing the oncoming headlights.
“Come on!” a voice called from behind her. She turned to look at the Snake, the catalyst. She could have turned and run with him; it was the thing to do. But somehow, it just didn’t seem important anymore. Maybe being alive wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
She smiled, and waved to him. He nodded once, understanding instantly. The Snake knew what this was all about. He reached into his coat and pulled out the pistol, tossing it to her.
Drawing his lips tight, he turned and ran.
Maggie turned slowly back to face the Duke’s car. She had belonged to him once, long ago, and he had given her away because she was less than nothing to him.
She raised the pistol, stiff-armed, and began firing, mechanically, automatically. The headlights approached her as if in a dream, getting larger, farther apart. They were all of the car she could see, all she ever saw.
She sensed her death, rather than felt it. She was looking out, then up, and huge, heavy things were grinding her body beneath them. She was looking into the black, black night. She was looking for Brain.
Plissken heard the skidding and turned. The Duke lost control after hitting Maggie and slid hard into the side of the bridge, nearly punching through it to fall to the river below. But it didn’t fall.
He stopped running and watched. There was a second of stillness, then the driver’s door burst open and the Duke climbed out, rifle in hand.
Turning again, Plissken started running toward the lights of the wall far ahead. Running, for once, to police protection.
A barrier formed the terminus of the bridge. Old, junked cars in piles, then a large concrete barrier right in front of the big wall, which stretched out as far as he could see in either direction. He kept digging, keeping the President in front of him at all times.
The winch jeep was already at the wall when Hauk settled down a distance behind in his copter. He jumped out, running to the wall, yelling as he ran.
“Get that line over the wall,” he cried through cupped hands. “Move your ass!”
One of the blackbellies hurried to the line and tossed It up onto the wall, to one of the waiting guards at its top. They got hold of the thing, then frantically began attaching a pulley set up to the wall itself.
Hauk got up to them, breathing heavily. He had to get Plissken back. It had become vital to him in ways that he couldn’t even begin to understand or analyze. “Come on,” he whispered urgently. “Come on.”
They got past the wall of cars, and jumped at the retaining wall, grabbing the top to scramble over. Plissken got to the top and looked back. The Duke was no more than fifty steps behind, getting through the cars.
The big wall was in touching distance of the one they stood on. A line was slithering down for them, a winch line, creaking on wheeled pullies.
Reaching out, they grabbed the line. Plissken turned his back to the big wall, waiting for the Duke as the President wrapped his hand around the thing.
“Hang on!” Plissken yelled and, with a jerk, the line started creaking back up the surface of the wall, taking the President with it.
Plissken looked down at his lifeclock. 0:01:33, 32, 31. He looked straight up. The line had made the top of the wall. Hands were helping Harker over the top. The line started back down again.
Suddenly a flash. It was the Duke, midway through the car forest. His rifle came up, firing. Bullets began exploding all around Plissken; he dove, rolling on the bridge, getting behind a dead car.
The aim went up, up for the guards. The President hit the ground, flattening himself on the wall top. One of the guards moved to shield him with his body and was picked off, his lifeless form falling the fifty feet to the bridge below. The other went spinning away, disappearing off the other side.
The Duke saw the dangling wire, went running for it. Plissken got back on his feet, waiting until the Duke got to his vantage point, then he jumped up on the hood of the Ford that was hiding him and dove onto the Duke from behind.
They went down hard, the rifle skittering away across the concrete. He was atop the Duke, the man stunned by the fall. Grabbing the back of the man’s head, he slammed his forehead into the hard ground, a muffled cry issuing from the Duke’s mouth.
There was no time.
Plissken climbed off the man and jumped back up on the retaining wall. He dove for the line on the big wall, catching it part of the way up.
He could hear the President calling from the top of the wall. “Pull it up,” he was yelling. “Hurry.”
With a jerk, he felt the line moving upward. He looked back down to the ground. The Duke was up on hands and knees, blood streaming from his forehead into his face and eyes. He was crawling toward the rifle.
Plissken looked up. There was a long way to go. He looked back down. The Duke had picked up the rifle and was wiping the blood out of his eyes so he could see. He was taking aim at a sitting duck.
His eyes traveled up again. The P
resident, face set in a grimace, was leaning over the edge of the wall. He had one of the guard’s rifles in his hands. He fired, pulling the automatic’s trigger and not letting go.
The ground kicked up all around the Duke, and he exploded blood from twenty places on his immense frame. He danced with the bullets, as they kicked him, already dead, through a lifeless mazurka.
Finally he reeled on one foot, falling in a heap to the bloody pavement, and lay still.
The line got Plissken to the top. The President helped him over. “Thanks,” he rasped, then, still holding the rope, went over the other side, motioning for the winch operators to bring him down.
As he descended, he saw Hauk looking up at him, then he saw a jeep carrying the old doctor and that damnable machine screech to a halt next to him.
Cronenberg jumped out of the jeep and hurried around to the machine, bringing out those long rubber hoses that had planted the bombs in him to begin with.
Ten feet from the ground, Plissken let go of the rope and dropped the remaining distance. He came down hard on his bad leg, buckling to the ground with the pain. He looked at his watch. 0:0:14, 13, 12…
Struggling to his feet, he moved toward the machine, limping, falling, pulling himself along the ground with the power left in his arms. He got up, leaning on the jeep for support. Hauk rushed over to help him. He pushed him away.
Cronenberg had flipped on switches and was holding out the tubes. “Turn on the power.” he told one of the blackbellies.
He was fading in and out, threatening to faint. The sound of a generator. The machine whirred to blathering life. He made it to Cronenberg. The man was smiling at him, preparing to place the tubes on his neck. Then, a hand pushing them away.
Hauk’s voice. “The tape, Plissken.”
Plissken put his hands in his pockets, digging, grasping. They wouldn’t work right. He couldn’t feel anything.
“Jesus!” Cronenberg said. “Five seconds, four, three…”
He pulled his hand out and it was there, lying in his feeble grasp. Hauk grabbed it and moved aside. Cronenberg’s tubes on his neck, the man’s weathered face showing concern.
The machine buzzed loudly, then was silent. It clicked off. Plissken’s eyes drifted down to the watch. It read zeroes all the way across the dial.
Everything stopped. They all stared at one another-waiting. Waiting. Waiting.
“That’s it,” Cronenberg said at last.
XXIV
GETTIN’ EVEN
LATE EVENING
So, they took him back to the bunkers and cleaned and bandaged his wounds. They gave him a cup of coffee, his amnesty papers and a pack of cigarettes; then acted like he should slither back under whatever rock he crawled out of.
But it wasn’t that simple with Snake Plissken. He had looked for Hauk, but the man had disappeared right after the rescue and hadn’t reappeared since. He smiled to think that maybe the man was afraid of him, afraid of his death threat. Somehow, though, he didn’t think that was the case.
It didn’t matter anyway. A good bit of the anger had been whipped out of him.
He walked around in the chill night air, smoking one cigarette after another, figuring where he’d go now that he had survived hell. The President was huddled under a blanket by a mobile radio truck. A doctor stood beside him, just in case he wanted one. Hauk’s man, Rehme, was working on a tape recorder that was hooked up outside the truck.
The Snake wandered over to listen. Rehme was talking to a half-listening John Harker.
“We radioed ahead, sir,” he said in a patronizing tone. “They know the situation and they’re waiting for your broadcast.”
Plissken got up close. The secret servicemen that came from God knows where stiffened, hands reaching inside of sports jackets.
“It’s all right,” the President said, his eyes traveling up to meet Snake’s.
Plissken needed attention, and he needed sleep. But right then he needed to suck on that cigarette and play the game all the way out to the end.
“I want to thank you,” the President said. “Anything you want, just name it.”
“A moment of your time,” the Snake replied.
The President moved his head very slowly to glance at Rehme.
“Thirty seconds, sir,” the man said.
Harker shrugged. “Yes?”
Plissken took a drag, let it out. He wasn’t much with words. “We lost some people back on the bridge,” he said, and he couldn’t separate New York from Leningrad. They both formed some horrible amorphous lump in his mind. “They died getting you here. I… I just wondered how you felt about it.”
The man answered perfunctorily, immediately. “I’m very grateful,” he said.
Plissken didn’t know what he wanted to hear, but that wasn’t really it. There was a void, a vacuum that he desperately needed to fill if he was to survive as anything even resembling a human being. “Yeah?” he said.
The President spoke again, mechanical, like a speech. “The nation appreciates their sacrifice.”
Plissken just stared at him. The man had already forgotten about it, had already shuffled it into the back dusty corners of his brain where he’d never have to take it out and look at it again.
“I’m really sorry,” he said, looking at the tape recorder. “But I have to go.”
The Snake knew that he was out of his element with the man. He simply nodded and limped away. Then he saw Hauk, standing by the bunker. They locked eyes and Plissken made his way over to the man.
“Gonna kill me now. Snake?” he asked.
“I’m too tired,” Plissken replied. “Maybe later.”
The man’s eyes softened somewhat, like an ice cream cone melting in the hot, summer sun. “Did you… did you see…” He was stumbling with the words, and the Snake flashed to a crazy in an old, dark building.
“Yeah, I did,” Plissken answered. He started to tell him, started to tell him the truth, but he couldn’t get it out. There had been too much murder already, both mental and physical. “He’s okay,” he said. “He’s… happy where he is. Doesn’t need anything.”
Hauk could probably have not believed him if he was bent that way. But he wanted to believe. He wanted to. Plissken watched years of tension drain out of the man’s face. He nodded quickly, thankfully, and that was the end of it.
“I got another deal for you,” he told Plissken.
The Snake fixed him with his good eye, the pain in the bad eye strangely dissipated.
Hauk took a breath and continued. “I want you to think about it while you’re taking a rest,” he said. Then, “I want to give you a job.”
The Snake’s cigarette had turned stale in his mouth. He threw it down and lit another. He didn’t know what he wanted out of life, but none of it included having anything more to do with Bob Hauk or the New York Penitentiary.
“We’d make one hell of a team, Snake.” Hauk said.
“The name’s Plissken, ” he said evenly. Then he turned and limped away down a long row of bunkers. He never turned around again.
As he moved away, he could hear the President’s voice coming through loudspeakers mounted on the truck’s roof.
“… and though I am unable to attend this historic summit meeting, I present this tape recording in the hope that our nations may live together in peace.”
The Snake smiled as he heard the familiar strains of Cabbie’s tape blaring through the speakers.
“Got the time for… gettin’ even.”
Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out the other cassette. Pulling a long strand of tape out of the plastic casing, he touched the glowing end of his cigarette to it. The thing sizzled, a small flame consuming the tape. He threw the burning thing away and walked, contented at last, into the cold, dark night.
His bad eye didn’t hurt anymore.
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