Mike McQuay - Escape From New York

“Plissken, come in.”

Climbing out was done by inches. The Gulffire shuddered with every movement. He got a foot out on the wing, nearly slipping on its wet surface. Then his other leg. He reached back and closed the canopy, shutting out Hauk-for once, having the last word.

He slowly slid down on his hands and knees and edged himself along the slippery wing. The glider moved as he did, tilting up slightly with his weight. When he was safely above the roof, he rolled off the wing to the cement, the Gulffire creaking back to overhang the edge again.

The wind was high up there; it was enough to cause the whole building to sway. He got up and, leaning into the howling beast, made his way toward the outside door.

Spread out all around him was the City of Death: dark towers, many ruins, pockets of light trailing wispy gray white smoke into the crying sky. And sounds. Not the sounds that he usually associated with cities. These were animal sounds, banshee screams and low-down growls and jungle drums beating maddening rhythms. Plissken’s hand automatically went to his holster, reassuring.

He passed the carcass of an old heliport control shack, viewport window gone, inside charred and gutted. The door housing was set about fifty feet past the heliport. He moved to it quickly.

The door was battered, hanging on one hinge. Stepping back a pace, he kicked at it. The force tore it off the remaining hinge, and it fell back inside, sliding noisily down the stairwell to rest against the bottom door.

Plissken followed it down… into Bedlam.

19:22:45, 44, 43…

The hallway was long and dark. He raked its length with the flashlight before proceeding. There was no sound, except the moan of the wind blowing through the dark tower’s glassless windows.

He felt relatively safe up there. At well over a hundred stories, very few people, even crazy people, would be willing to spend the hours it would take to walk that many stairs. It was a nice view, but not that nice.

It was probably time to get in touch with Hauk so that the man wouldn’t get his bowels in an uproar. A doorway was to his right; he looked in, playing the light around the shadowed corners before entering.

It was an old office that looked like the scene of a riot. The windows were gone, large frags of glass scattered over everything. What furniture there was, had been overturned and ripped to shreds in ways that rational human beings would never think of. The wind whistled in three octaves through the windows.

A large desk was overturned in the center of the room. He got it back upright and sat on its edge, swinging his legs. Lying the flashlight down to spotlight the wall, he got into the holster. Bringing out the small pocket radio, he telescoped the antenna.

Frowning once, he flipped the switch. “I’m inside the World Trade Center,” he said. “Just like Leningrad, Hauk.”

Hauk’s voice came back through the thing, loud and screeching. It blared, forcing Plissken to hold it at arm’s length.

“IS THE GLIDER INTACT?”

He pulled it back to himself, trying to adjust the volume knob. But it seemed to wheel freely, not attached to anything. “It’s okay, I guess,” he said into the thing, still turning the knob. “But taking off is for shit. I’ll work it out.”

The voice blared back, probably filling the whole floor. “YOU HAVE TO USE THE STAIRWELL. IT’LL TAKE YOU AWHILE TO GET DOWN TO STREET LEVEL. CALL ME WHEN YOU’RE OUTSIDE…”

Plissken shut off the radio just to get away from the sound. Nothing like a quiet entrance. He could almost think that Hauk gave him that radio purposely. He shook it off and climbed off the desk. He’d deal with Hauk later. After.

He put back the radio and routed through the pouch for a minute. He came up with a foil-wrapped package the size of a golf ball. Unwrapping it, he removed the contents-a block of crystal meth, looking like a chunk of rock candy.

Knocking it on the desk, he broke it into several chunks, the largest of which he picked up and tossed into his mouth, swallowing it dry. The poison bitter taste slicked a gully along his tongue and trailed in stringers down his throat.

He wasn’t tired yet, but he’d be needing his share of go-fast just to get down those stairs. Putting the rest of the meth back into the pouch, he moved cautiously into the hall.

He played the light down the hallway until he saw the exit sign at its end. The stairwell. As he moved toward it, he thought he saw the flash of a moving shadow ahead, but when he got to the spot, there was nothing.

The stairway door was gone. He started down.

It was a hell of a long way.

About six floors down, the speed took hold and began jerking his body to a new metabolic rhythm. He picked up the pace. Every floor down had its own landing, then the stairs would turn back upon themselves and go on for another landing. Each landing was a new world.

There were bodies on the landings in various stages of decomposition. Some without heads, some just heads. There were the remnants of campfires long past, piles of animal bones, probably dogs and cats, scattered through the ashes. The smell was always bad and often overpowering. Plissken found a roll of gauze in his survival kit and wrapped it around his nose and mouth in several layers to keep out the smell. It didn’t work very well.

It took longer to get down than he could have possibly imagined. Even with the meth, it seemed like he was destined to descend stairs for the rest of his life. The steps finally terminated in a small hallway.

He unwrapped the gauze and threw it aside. Then he moved forward, slowly, with care. He was on street level then, in the thick of it. The hallway ended with the building’s lobby. Plissken stood in the entryway, letting his eyes roam the shambles that spread out darkly before him.

Afraid to use the flash, he made out the lumpous forms of broken and overturned furniture through bits of dim lighting that filtered in from outside.

There was a flickering orange glow climbing on the wall farthest from him that formed strange, jumping shadows. Unable to make out the source of the light because of a dilapidated information desk, he began creeping toward it.

The smell reached him first. Food cooking-meat. It was mixed in with the smell of charred wood. He moved agilely, catlike, around the helter skelter destruction of the room. His eye hurt, always hurt, but the speed had somehow anesthetized the ache in his side. He reached the information desk and peeked over its top.

Three men were seated crosslegged around the small fire. They were roasting a straggly cat on an umbrella shaft. They were talking too low for Plissken to hear.

They were stripped to the waist, and something the color of rust was smeared over their chests and faces. They had waist-length hair that was held in place by headbands. One of them had green and yellow parrot feathers stuck in the band to make a crude headdress. Indians.

Their weapons lay close at hand, long knives that glinted in the firelight, hand-fashioned bows and quivers of arrows made from the shafts of fishing rods with ten-penny nails stuck in the ends. A long pole lay beside them, leaning against the shadow-jumping wall. At first Plissken thought that the things hanging from it were the pelts of small animals. Then he realized what they really were-human scalps.

He was backing away from the desk when he heard the snap of wood. He flared around and one of the shadows had pulled away from the room of shadows and was hurtling through the air toward him.

There was no reaction time-an Indian, screaming, was on top of him. His screams charged the atmosphere, icy and inhuman, and his eyes were wild and glazed.