Escape From New York

XX

EARLY EVENING

Plissken saw himself at the bottom of a deep, dry well-darkness all around, a pinpoint of light far overhead. A voice seemed to be calling to him down the hole, beckoning him to climb.

He reached out his arms and felt the walls on either side of him. They were slick, oozing slime. It seemed a lot easier and more comfortable to just stay where he was.

The voice called to him again. Curious, he decided to check it out. The bucket rope was hanging down, dangling in the middle of the hole. He felt for it, found it with his hands. Taking a deep breath, he jumped as high as he could and grabbed hold, using his feet to help him on the side walls.

It was a hell of a climb, and more than once he wanted to just chuck it away and go back down to rest, but the voice was getting louder, more insistent.

He pulled and strained and finally made it to the top. The light was bright, blinding. It hurt his good eye and made his bad eye throb uncontrollably, setting his head on fire.

He focused. An ugly face with a crooked nose and breath that smelled of kerosene filled all of his vision. The face was smiling obscenely.

“Let’s go, Snake,” it said.

He shook his head and looked around. He was lying on a table in a large, wrecked dining room. The place had been gingerbread house ornate at one time, but the gingerbread of ancient times had gotten stale and crumbled away.

Gypsies surrounded him. They were all grinning widely, nodding their shaggy, moustached faces.

Plissken tried to sit up, but the pain in his head nearly blacked him out again. Shutting his eye tight, he opened it slowly, letting the pain seep in. He looked down at his leg. The arrow was gone, a dirty rag tightly wound took its place. His pants leg was soaked with blood. The blood was dry. He realized that he had been there for a long time. His shirt was gone. He was cold.

“Come on,” said the man who had woke him up.

They were levelling crossbows at him, fearful of him even in his condition. A tribute, he supposed. Somebody poked him with an ax handle. He was kitten weak, barely able to hold himself upright. Putting up his hands, he feebly tried to ward them off. It was then that he noticed that the countdown clock was gone from his wrist.

“Get up!” the man said.

They pulled him to his feet, but it was like walking in a dream, a hazy, pain-filled dream. Besides the concussion that he must have surely had, he had probably lost enough blood to qualify him for an economy rate at the donor bank. They pushed him toward the door.

Plissken wobbled through the door. His leg hurt, but he could put some weight on it if he just concentrated on the incredible pain in his head. Small consolation.

They were in a long, dark hallway. It was a wreck, totally junked and of the same style as the dining room. He heard a rumbling sound in the distance, but couldn’t quite make it out.

A hand shoved him roughly along.

He started to turn, to breathe fire at them. But he saw something that made the words burn in his own throat. Something was coming from the other direction. It was two Gypsies bearing a stretcher.

As it went past, he glanced down at it. They were carrying a man, in pieces. It looked like he had been literally torn apart. The sound came up again. It was cheering.

Dying light filtered in tiny shafts through some high ceiling transoms, but he couldn’t tell how late it was. “How about the time?” he mumbled to his captors.

They all laughed. “Time to die, Snake,” one of them said.

The sounds got louder the farther they walked. Finally, they came to the end of the hall and turned a corner, walking directly into a stentorian wall of sound.

The cheering came from thousands of voices. They were in the huge lobby of Grand Central Station, with its cloud-scraping ceiling, wide open. The place was filled with chairs, and all the chairs were filled by gross human imitators yelling and stomping their feet. It wasn’t just Gypsies, but every gang was represented: Africks, Low Riders, Chinkas, Dollies, Octoes, all were there.

The cheering increased in volume as more and more of them saw Plissken enter the room. It rang up to the ceiling and rained back down. The Snake felt as if he were on the inside of a bell.

They kept pushing him along through the frenzied crowds. They reached for him as he went by, hands everywhere, but the guards kept him from falling into those hands. They had apparently planned something a lot more enjoyable.

The smell in the room was bad, all sweat and belly gas, the granddaddy of all locker rooms. He breathed through his mouth. They kept moving him toward the center of the room. There was something there, lit by torches. He got close enough to see. It was a ring, a boxing ring. He got all the way up on it. The canvas was completely covered with blood.

He was pushed through the crudely strung ropes, into the ring itself. He glanced around the sea of faces that leered up at him-not an ounce of sympathy in the whole lot. His name had apparently lost its magic. His eyes drifted upwards. The Duke sat in a special box, surrounded by his lieutenants. He had Plissken’s rifle strapped on his back and he wore a big, contented smile on his face.

Noise came from behind him. Someone else was being led up to the ring, and the cheering increased in volume again. Then there was a chant, a name being called over and over.

“Slag. Slag. Slag.”

The man climbed through the ropes. He was huge, the biggest man Plissken had ever seen. His muscles were toned and rigid, oiled to glistening in the torchlight. He was an ox, a machine. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on him. He wore black tights and shiny knee boots.

The Snake backed away, leaning against a corner post. His eye went to the man’s hand; he was wearing Plissken’s watch. He squinted and turned his head sideways to read the face. It read: 4:02:15.

He looked into Slag’s face. The man smiled slowly, evilly-almost as if he understood.

Hauk sat in the control bunker, the stationary eye in the middle of the swirling hurricane of activity. He watched the outside monitor screens. The choppers were warming up on the pads again. All of them. But this time there would be no holding back, no restraint. No discretion.

It was all out of control. This time the blackbellies would go in with their guns screaming, and they wouldn’t stop screaming until they ran out of ammo. Once unchained, the black-suited killers wouldn’t stop until they had destroyed everything they could find.

It wouldn’t get the President back. It wouldn’t help the Hartford Summit. It wouldn’t even find Snake Plissken. It was lust. The simple lust for death…

And he would be giving the order.

The microphone sat before him. He picked it up, Just as he had done so many times in the past hours. He stared at it, quiet, mocking. His lifeline of air. He flipped it on.

“Plissken,” he said, low, almost a moan.

“Plissken…”

The rules were ample: no rules. Plissken kept darting his head around, looking for a way out, but Gypsies with long knives and bows had formed a circle around the ring, making sure he stayed put. Slag was clenching and unclenching his massive fists. Nobody needed to tell the Snake that it was a fight to the death. He figured that out.

The Duke was making a speech. Through the pain and the tension and the noise, he tried to focus on it.

“… And they sent in their best man. And when we roll down the Fifty Ninth Street Bridge tomorrow, on our way to freedom, we’re gonna have their best man leading the way… from the neck up, on the hood of my car!”

And the cheering went up again, and applause. The room was awash with noise, drowning in it. The Duke held up his hands for silence, and the roar died down to a growl.

“Let’s do it!” the man screamed through cupped hands, and the cheering came up again.

A Gypsy climbed through the ropes carrying two baseball bats. Louisville sluggers. He gave one to Slag, then moved to Plissken, grinning wide enough to crack his face.

Plissken took the bat and watched the Gypsy get the hell out of the ring. He wished that he could enjoy such a luxury. A man wearing a grotesque Halloween mask that looked better than the real faces, stood at ringside with a hammer. As soon as the bat boy got out of the way, he struck it to a bell. The fight was underway.

The big man’s face was a sag of flesh, as if his muscles simply got tired that high up and were pulled down by gravity. He rearranged the flesh into a hard frown and began stalking the Snake.

Plissken limped as far away from the man as the ring would allow. Slag came for him slowly, bludgeon raised high above his head. The Snake gave it all his concentration, and the crowd noises disappeared completely from his hearing. All that remained was Slag. They were the whole universe, and one of them had to die.

Plissken figured that he still had four hours left.

The big man faced off slowly, weaving back and forth, and Snake, reptile that he was, never broke eye contact. Slag lunged, his eyes giving him away a second before. The bat swung out as Plissken ducked. It whooshed over his head.

The bat arced back the other way, faster than Snake could have believed possible. He rolled in the direction of the blow, going to the sticky canvas, all pain wiped from his body in the mental rush to survive.

The big man was right on top of him. He tried to get to his feet, but the bat was there, right there! It connected hard on his shoulder, picking him off the ground and sending him flying against the ropes.

He went down hard, and the bat was there again, coming straight down. He rolled and the thing whapped the ground, shaking the whole ring.

“Are you sure he’s down here?” Brain asked nervously as they walked the dark hallway toward the storeroom.

Maggie put an arm on his back, patting-also pushing. “I heard them say so. Just relax, would you? This is the easy part.”

Maggie kept reassuring him, kept him pumped up. She was positive that this was their only way out and there was no chance that she was going to let Brain fag out on her. The muffled cheering barely reached them where they were, but it never left her hearing. It was Plissken they were yelling about. He was in there getting his head knocked off by Slag. Too bad. He would have been a tremendous help to them. Now they were going to have to do it all by themselves-if Brain would just hold together.

“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.