Escape From New York

XII

18:17:34.: 33, 32…

It was the only building with any light on the whole block: an old theater, its jutting marquee blank and shattered, reflecting the state of the art.

Plissken came up on it slowly, using the line of gutted, rusting cars as cover. The front was all boarded up, glass long gone, as a defense against the elements. Hard yellow light peeked through the cracks between the boards, escaping into the night in tiny, narrow shafts.

He looked at the homer. The blip was pulsing, pointing directly at the theater.

Moving in a crouch from between the cars, he ran up into the shadow of the boarded ticket booth. There were muffled sounds coming from inside the theater which sounded like music.

Darting from cover, he got right up to the window slats, listening. There was music… and laughter. The sound was small and far away, but it definitely was coming from within. He bent down slightly to try and look through the cracks in the wood, when suddenly a boarded-up door flew open right next to him.

He tried to melt back into the shadows, rifle ready, but it didn’t matter; the man coming through the door was moving in the opposite direction. He was wearing a tattered top hat and tails. He wore no shirt, and his trousers were missing from the knees, trailing long stringy frays.

He wobbled as he walked, and was muttering under his breath. He flung the door wide and staggered off. Plissken grabbed the door before it closed and, hiding the rifle behind his back, moved into the building.

He was in the lobby of an old-time movie palace. Once a jewel, it was now a rhinestone. Its red carpeting was faded and water-damaged; the candy counter had been smashed to glittering slithers and long ago looted; its aquatint wallpaper was disfigured with large brown water rings and hand-painted obscenities. The lighting was dim; the gassy odor of kerosene lamps mixed with the carpet mildew to make the place smell like some sulphurous bog.

A small man wearing a filthy one-piece sat perched on a high stool near the door-the ticket-taker. His little round head was bent forward, lolling around on his chest. He snored lightly, easily. Plissken saluted him quietly and moved past him, toward the sounds.

He walked through the lobby, past the ragged curtains on the auditorium door and in. It was a big place, with enough seating for hundreds. The walls were lined with torches, big things with jumping orange fire on their ends and ugly black smoke curling from their tops. A hole had been cut through the ceiling to the outside to vent the smoke, and it rolled along the ceilings to tumble through the opening like a reverse drain.

Plissken looked at the stage. There was a chorus line of grizzled old men in outrageous female drag. They had linked arms and were kicking high as they sang:

“Happy days are here again.

The skies above are dear again.”

The band played in the orchestra pit, fiercely, intently: an out-of-tune piano, a section of jew’s harps, a few crudely fashioned stringed instruments that pounded out the sound. Off key, out of control, but music. It filled the hall, bottoming the singing voices, strengthened by the jumping feet that pounded the wooden stage.

“Let us sing a song of cheer again.

Happy days are here a-gainnnnnnn!”

He let his eyes rove the audience. There were about twenty of them-most of them were old, all of them out of luck. About half were asleep, heads rolled to the side, feet up over the seats in front. They looked comfortable, like they were born and raised right in those seats. The rest were shouting at the people on stage, laughing as they’d trip and fall. Their voices twisted with the singing, beating out the rhythm in time with the throbbing torches.

This wasn’t where the President was. Plissken looked some more. There was a man seated toward the back, listening intently, foot tapping with the beat. Almost like he felt the heat of that single, searing eye on his neck, he turned to stare at the Snake. His face was large, expansive, his hair thinned to nothing. His circumstances were apparently better than the others, because he wasn’t nearly as emaciated or dirty-looking. But that wasn’t the strange part. When he stared at Plissken, it seemed to the Snake that there was recognition in the man’s face. Some sort of familiarity.

The hint of a smile slowly seeped across the man’s face. Plissken tightened the slash of his mouth and started to move toward him, when a hard shot bolted pain through his shoulder.

He sagged with the blow, but didn’t go down. It wasn’t that hard. He came around to face it slowly, grimacing, keeping the gun behind him.

A large man stood before him. He was a bullet head: no neck, sloping, hairless skull. His eyes were dull, lips thick and twisting. He had a large, gnarled club in his hand that he kept slapping into the palm of his other hand. Splat. Splat.

Beside him stood the little man from the front door. And he looked scared, more scared of the man with the club than of Plissken.

“How’d you get in here?” the big man asked, and his eyes were two pissholes in a snow bank.

Plissken was rotating his shoulder, trying to work the pain out. “The front door,” he answered.

The big man turned to the ticket-taker, moving his whole body around as if his lack of a neck made it impossible to turn his head any other way. The little man was trembling.

“What the fuck is he doing in here, Boyle?”

Boyle gulped, eyes darting, looking for a way out. “Musta slipped by,” he said, just because it was all he could think to say.

The man with the club shook his head, his body turning with it as he did. Then, without warning, he swung out viciously with the thing, knocking Boyle to the ground.

“Okay, okay!” the man on the floor said, arms up to protect his face.

“Get back on that door!” the big man yelled, and the man crab-scurried across the floor back into the lobby. “You can be replaced, you know,” he called after him.

The big man turned back to Plissken and began beating the club against his hand again. “Two cans to see the show,” he said. “Three cans for a seat. Another can to sleep in it.” He held out his beefy paw, raising the club with the other. “No loitering.”

Plissken heard the homer beep and looked down at it. It was still pulsing, dead center in the dial. He brought the rifle up and jammed it in the big man’s stomach.

“You’ll have to excuse me,” he told him.

The man froze, club raised, like some statue in a horror wax museum. Jack the Bopper. Only his eyes moved, and they were cruising, running up and down the length of the barrel.

Plissken smiled quickly at him and moved into the shadows at the side of the auditorium. Keeping his eye on the big man, he moved down toward the front.

It didn’t make sense that the President would be kept here, but the homer kept contradicting his sense. He got up by the stage and turned his head toward it. When he turned back, the big man was gone. It didn’t matter.

He climbed the steps to the side of the stage. The old men were taking turns doing elaborate stripteases to some grind music coming from the Jew’s harps. They were intent upon what they were doing, deadly serious, fulfilling their avocation in life.

Plissken slipped around the worn maroon velvet of the stage curtain and worked his way around backstage. It was dark back there.

He got out the flash and slid the beam around. There was bare floor running back to a red brick wall. Toward the back, by the wall, was a stairwell leading down to a basement.

Moving to the stairs, he heard sounds. A faint light glowed from below, so he shut off the flash and started down the steep metal stairway. He kept an eye on the homer as he descended. If the thing was right, the President had to be in this cellar.

He heard a sound behind him and swung around with the rifle. The man from the auditorium was staring down at him from the top of the stairs. He had a rugged, ugly demeanor, and he grinned all the time. Plissken couldn’t tell if the grin was friendly or sadistic.

“You’re Snake Plissken, aren’t you?” the man asked him.

Plissken stared at him, tried to burn him with his eye. The man just grinned, showing a couple of missing teeth. He seemed to have a childlike way about him, an eagerness.

“What do you want?” Plissken asked in a monotone.

The man shrugged, with his arms and with his big, ugly face. “Nothing,” he said. Then his eyes narrowed. “I thought you were dead.”

The Snake turned from him and started back down the stairs. He wanted to put distance between himself and the grinning man.

“Hey,” the man said to him in a loud whisper. “You don’t want to walk down there. Snake.”

Plissken ignored him and continued on. The basement was damp, and the Snake shivered through his jacket. A few torches jumped their flames on the cinderblock walls. The place was piled full of theatrical junk: horses’ heads in papier-mache, racks of costumes and stacks of facades-the shadow of reality.

At the far end of the room were four men, leather boy rockers, trapped in the fantasy of a dream long dead. This was their place, the perfect place for them. Their hair was bleached blond and crew cut. They were shaved clean, and big, wraparound sunglasses hid the madness in their eyes. They wore all leather, and big jack boots. They all looked just the same, like quadruplets who had been brought up in a closet somewhere. Crudely rolled cigarettes bounced wildly between their lips as they talked, and filled the cellar with musty haze. They drank cloudy liquid from clear bottles. Their movements were jerky and erratic.

He walked quietly toward them. They had a woman down there with them, and she must have been drinking from the same bottle that they were. Her hair was unkempt; her clothes torn and dirty. She may have been pretty once, but it was impossible to tell under the layers of insanity. Plissken moved closer to hear their words.

“He’s the King, you know? I don’t care what youse say.”

“But, he’s dead, man. Been dead and stinkin’ for a long time.”

“You better watch that talk, man. The King don’t die. He just flaked out to one of them South Sea islands somewhere, that’s all.”

“He O.D.’d, turkey. O.D.’d on the fuckin’ terlet.”

“Did you see the grave, huh? Did you get down and look in the GD grave?”

“Well, shit no. I…”

“Then don’t give me none a’ that dead crap, okay?”

The woman was giggling hysterically, giggling like she’d just learned how to do it and was having the time of her life. The rockers began shoving her around, one to the other, and she giggled that much louder.

They began tearing at her clothes, shredding them as she bounced around the group.

“Oh, mama,” they’d call, and buck their hips at her while she bounded around, but it was all play-acting in the theater basement. It was an act, frozen in space and time; madmen acting the way they thought real people acted.

Plissken started to move past them, through a door that stood beside them. They stopped dead, staring. The woman, unaware that the game was over, kept bouncing around without being pushed, tearing at her own clothes.

One of the punks moved to block Plissken’s way. He reached into his belt and pulled out a scissor blade.

The Snake took a breath. “Not now,” he said.

The man regarded him without expression. His face was slick and lifeless, a wax face. “Precisely now,” he said without moving his lips.

Plissken shouldered his way past the punk, and caught the movement as the man’s blade arm plunged toward him. Tensed, ready, he sidestepped the swing, and came around hard with the metal butt of his rifle. He caught the man flush on the side of the head, sending him reeling to the cement floor, his glasses skittering out of reach. The bouncing woman tripped over the fallen rocker and fell, laughing, atop him. The others backed into the shadows, not willing to carry the drama to its logical conclusion.

“My glasses,” the fallen man whimpered. “Where are my glasses?”

Plissken got down in the man’s face. “He is dead,” he said softly, and straightened up.

He moved through the door and into the boiler room. He started moving through its dark recesses and nearly tripped over a form sitting on the floor. It was an old bum. From his looks, he had been a bum way back when the city had been a city. He was good at it, a professional. He wore a long wool coat and a fuzzy hat. Plissken stirred him out of whatever place bums went to when they were sitting on boiler room floors.

“Hey, Chief!” the old man said. “Nice night.”

Plissken ignored him, taking in the measure of the room with his flashlight. The man began brushing off Plissken’s boots with the arm of his coat.

“Nice boots,” he mumbled. “Nice boots. Spare some food, Chief? Just a can, just a can…”

The flash caught other faces, grim and waiting. Other bums, a platoon of old men, taking their survival wherever they could find it. They moved up to Plissken, brushing him off, hands all over him. Then he saw it-the glint of a knife.

The Snake whipped around, rifle butt face high. They fell back as a man, unwilling to accept conflict from a superior animal. The bum on the floor froze, eyes slowly drifting up to gaze into the hate-filled stare of Snake Plissken.

The rifle slowly lowered to point at him. “Easy, Chief,” the man said, getting to his feet. “I’m walking. I’m walking.”

Then, as if that had been some kind of signal, they all rushed back into the shadows.

Plissken moved on. He hated this. He was a visitor in the Land of the Dead, a one-eyed Dante in the lower levels of hell. He wanted to run back to the Gulffire and head it out to sea where the sun could shine sparkling diamonds on the clean, clear water.

He kept walking.

The boiler, a large silver cylinder, took up the whole center of the room. Plissken got around it and heard a muffled commotion. He beamed the light. A man, huddled in a corner, was being beaten by a dirty bum in a raincoat. The man was dressed in a brand new sharkskin suitcoat. He was bunched up in the darkness, but his arm was out in plain sight-the monitor. He was wearing it.

Plissken charged the man, banging full into his assailant. The bum fell, grunting, and crawled away.

Bending down, Plissken rolled the man over. “Mister President.. ” he began.

The man came into his light. He was a toothless drunk with more wrinkles than an elephant’s knee. He smiled stupidly up at the Snake, then, in gratitude, held out a clear bottle filled with a liquid the color of egg yolk.

Snake Plissken stood up. If this was the President, the country was in worse shape than he thought.