Mike McQuay - Escape From New York

The cabbie was out of his chair, pacing excitedly. He looked at Plissken and wiped a palm across his weathered face. “No kidding?” he said quickly. “On the level? You take me, too?”

Plissken gave him a why not look. What difference did it make? He only had room in the glider for two anyway.

Hellman looked hard at Plissken. “We got a deal somewhere else,” he said, still not understanding the man’s desperation.

The internal boiler started stoking again. “No glider,” he said.

“We got the President,” Maggie said, face as flat as Hellman’s words. “And the Duke’s taking everybody out of here.”

“It’ll never happen,” Plissken returned. He sat up straight, leaning forward. “I know something you and the Duke don’t know. You only got so long before Mister President don’t mean a whole lot to anybody.”

“Bull,” Hellman shot back. Then, his eyes narrowed. “How long?”

Plissken laid his rifle across his lap and put his hands behind his head. “You ready to work something out?”

“You’re lying,” Brain said.

Maggie looked at Snake, and her face was at war with itself. She was a survivor, too. “Maybe he’s not,” she said.

Hellman stood up and waved Plissken off. “I know him,” he said, turning his back to look at the map. “Look at his face, he’s lying.”

Somehow, that was all okay with Snake. He needed to take Hellman out anyway. The penalty for treason was execution. He raised the rifle and aimed at the man’s leg. If he was going to do it, he may as well do it slow enough to get some enjoyment out of it. “Guess I’ll just kill you and keep looking myself.”

Hellman turned, his beard bobbing again. “Christ, Snake. Come on. Come on!”

Snake Plissken put his finger on the trigger and hugged the rifle up snug against his cheek. He began squeezing, very gently.

“Brain!” Maggie yelled.

“Talk to him, baby,” Plissken whispered, and squeezed a little more.

“He’s gonna kill us both if you don’t tell him.”

“You gotta tell him. Brain,” the cabbie said, high and fervent. “You gotta!”

Brain Hellman looked deeply into Plissken’s good eye and believed. He withered under the heat of the look. He made the decision, and he knew it was the wrong one. Turning back to the map, he bashed it with a fist. “All right,” he said, nearly a whisper. Then louder. “All right!”

Plissken, almost sadly, took his finger off the trigger and lowered the rifle. The pain in his eye eased somewhat. “Always knew you were smart, Harold.”

Hellman flared around angrily to him. “One thing right now,” he said, with as much vehemence as he could muster. “Don’t call me Harold.”

16:45:21, 20, 19…

Plissken trusted Brain Hellman about as much as he’d trust a pickpocket with his safety deposit box. That is, if he’d had a safety deposit box. The man was as slippery as Vaseline, and as loyal as a seeing-eye dog in a hamburger factory.

He had run with Hellman for a time, but had never felt like he could trust him. Hellman could do all the fast talking, but he was never there to back it up with action. Finally, in Kansas City, he had flat driven off in a getaway car, leaving Plissken and Fresno Bob inside a bank. The Snake slithered away. Fresno Bob wasn’t so fortunate. The blackbellies caught him and skinned him alive.

“Got the best engine in the whole damned place,” Cabbie was saying to Plissken as they waited for Hellman to lock up the library from the outside. “Made the rounds of the junkers and the parts stores and got the best shit available. Nothing too good for my baby.”

His eyes were glittering, and he kept moving up close to Plissken, bumping him slightly.

“How far we got to go?” Plissken asked Hellman.

The man turned from his padlocking, and as usual, his face was poker steady, blank and wiped clean. “Nothing’s far away in this town,” he said. “Haven’t you heard, we’re on an island.”

Maggie was standing by Hellman at the top of the stairs. She watched the streets constantly, the survival instinct. Occasionally, she’d turn to look at Brain as he wound the chains through the ornate brass handles on the door. There was an admiration in her eyes that could almost be interpreted as love. The Snake couldn’t figure that one. Maybe the woman wasn’t as sane as he thought. Whatever else Brain Hellman ever was, though, he was apparently kind to his women.

“Did the fine tuning with jeweler’s instruments,” Cabbie said, twisting his fingers as if he were using a tiny screwdriver.

“Got it,” Hellman said, snapping the last of the big padlocks into place.

“Let’s go,” Plissken said, and waited while the others started down, so he could follow behind them just to be on the safe side.

“You work for this Duke?” he asked the Brain.

The man answered without turning to him. “Make gas for him,” he said, and every sentence came out sounding like it had been rehearsed. Hellman was still hedging his bets. “Figure out things for him.”

“Like what?”

This time the man did turn around. Plissken smiled. He wasn’t going to let the son of a bitch off that easily.

“Like how to get across the Fifty Ninth Street Bridge,” he returned finally, and he acted as if the words were being forced from his mouth with a crowbar. “It’s mined, but I think I know where they’re planted.”

Maggie spoke up, willing to talk as long as Hellman was. “We got a diagram from a guy who got all the way across before they shot the poor bastard.”

Hellman gave her a dirty look at first, but then just sighed, giving in. “They’re working up there now,” he said. “Clearing away the first barricade.”

“What a sight, Snake!” Cabbie yelled, coming out of his car fantasy. He started moving his arms out in front of him, rolling them like the ocean waves. “The whole place rolling right across the bridge. Mister President right up front.” He let his arms drop to his sides. “It would have been so fine.”

“Would have been?” Maggie said.

Cabbie shot her a fierce look, then said indignantly. “We’re goin’ with Snake now.”

“Wait a minute,” Plissken said, cocking his head. “Listen.”

They all stopped, and the sound was discernible to everyone. Engines. Closing in.

“It’s the Duke!” Cabbie yelled. “I know the sound of his machines.”

“The alley,” Plissken ordered, and they hurried down the remaining steps and around the corner of the building. They got quickly around, hugging the wall with their backs. Plissken turned his head. The cab sat about fifty paces farther down.

He turned back, and risked a look around the corner of the building. A convoy was coming up on them, consisting of ancient cars and trucks, sputtering and fuming through snorting clouds of gray and black smoke. The machines shuddered, backfiring white sparks, wobbling from side to side. There were between ten and twenty in all, and every one of them looked as if it was on its way to the automobile graveyard. None of them had mufflers, and their ripping sounds tore the night.

The lead car passed the mouth of the alley, an old Cadillac with the top cut off. A man sat in the passenger side of the front seat. He was large and bald-headed, with three scars, like claw marks, running down the side of his cheek.

“The Duke,” Maggie whispered.

He had a cigar in his mouth and a pair of sunglasses to cover his eyes. The glasses were taped together at the hinges with white surgical tape. A lavender, almost purple, snap-brim fedora sat stiffly on his cue-ball head. He had it turned down stylishly over one eye.