Mike McQuay - Escape From New York

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.

17:54:47, 46, 45…

The man was grinning up at him. “I’m the President,” he said happily. “Sure, I’m the President.” He pointed down at the vital signs bracelet. “I knew when I got this thing I’d be President.”

Plissken grabbed him by the lapels and shook him. “Where’d you get it?”

“That’s no way to talk to your chief executive,” he said with indignation.

“Where’d you get it?”

The man wiggled away from his grasp. “Woke up,” he said. “There it was. Like… like a miracle.” His eyes got far away.

The anger was all over Plissken. He grabbed the man’s arm and smashed the bracelet hard against the wall, shattering it.

“Does this mean I’m not President anymore?” the drunk asked.

Bob Hauk sipped coffee out of a paper cup, and it hit his already gurgling stomach like liquid fire. He had never been able to handle coffee very well; it was like a hand closing over his heart. But it did keep him on edge, kept his senses right there and ready. He grimaced and took another sip.

Things hadn’t worked out at all well with Plissken, but that was something that they’d both have to live with. The man was destined for prison anyway. Why should he expect any more than what he was getting?

He looked around at the bank of machines that surrounded him in the bunker, listened to them clicking and whirring in their own little machine language. He wondered what the machines thought of all this, and if that’s what they were talking about.

He heard Prather’s voice behind him and it chilled his blood. “Oh, Jesus…” the man said.

Hauk turned so quickly back to the monitor that he sloshed coffee all over himself. There were people blocking him from the screen. He pushed his way through them.

The signals were wobbling on the screen, distorting. Then they went in an explosion of static, leaving behind a band of clear, straight light. The room hushed to total silence.