Mike McQuay - Escape From New York

Plissken slipped between the cars, going in the door of the rusting passenger car that held the President. He slipped in quietly, moving through the long shadows.

The President was in there, about halfway along in a seat. He was dirty, his clothes ripped and shredded. His face was waxen, drained of blood. A lantern lit him to yellow pallor. A cloth was wrapped around his hand, around where a finger should have been, but wasn’t. He was facing Plissken’s direction.

Beside him, facing away, was a Gypsy with a hacksaw, trying to cut through the titanium chains of the cuffs that held the briefcase to the President’s wrist. Another one, red bearded and scarred, was down close to Plissken, watching out the glassless window at the exchange going on by the campfire.

And through it all, the only thing he could think about was Hellman. Hellman dead. Hellman with a railroad spike driven to the hilt between his eyes. Hellman on fire. Hellman without a head…

They banged on him, but he was removed from the pain. He had maxed out on pain, O.D.’d on it; and like too much of any drug, it left him numb and sedentary. Through the haze, he saw his own rifle leveled at his head, and he laughed to think that Hauk would be deprived of the pleasure of blowing up his insides. He figured that the bombs would go off anyway, doing their duty, desecrating the remains of already lifeless meat.

Hands were grabbing at his holster, pulling it off him.

“Hold it!”

A voice, strong with authority.

Figures moved away from the Snake. The black man with the fedora strode over to him, stopping only long enough to give Hellman a sidelong glance.

“Kill him quick,” Hellman whispered. “He’s slippery.”

The man ignored him and walked on. Plissken opened his eye wide to stare his hatred to the man. A feeling they could share.

There was a sound, a creak. The Duke turned to it. The President was trying to slip away between the cars.

“Don’t move, craphead,” the Duke said, then immediately turned his attention back to the Snake.

They stared at one another.

“Who are you?” the big man asked.

The Snake ignored him. If he was going to die, he would do it as he lived. In total defiance.

The Duke pursed his lips and put his hand on the arrow in Plissken’s leg. He pushed it in farther. The fire again shot through Plissken’s brain, threatening to short circuit him into unconsciousness.

“He’s Snake Plissken,” Hellman said. “From the outside. He had a gun, Duke. There was nothing I could do.”

Plissken turned for one more look at Hellman. Maggie stood behind him. She was slipping him something that he tucked under his coat.

The Duke released the arrow and stood up full, running fingertips lightly across the scars that gouged his face like planting furrows. “Snake Plissken,” he said from faraway. “I’ve heard of you.”

He walked up to straddle Plissken’s form. A tire tool was in his hand. He smiled through crooked teeth, and the Snake watched the metal bar coming toward him in slow motion. It came down on his head, but he never felt it. He just drifted away into the black, gas jumping night.

The last thing he heard before the dark mist came to wrap him up in taffy-like dreams, was the Duke’s voice echoing from another world somewhere.

“I heard you were dead.”

5:45 A.M.

Bob Hauk stood at attention atop the great wall, looking toward the mammoth towers of the World Trade Center across the bay. His hands held a deathgrip on the binoculars that were strapped around his neck.

The morning was coming up bright orange and purple, the polluted atmosphere refracting the early sunlight in beautifully vibrant rainbow colors that strung out across the width of the city in never-ending, shimmering streamers.

But Hauk wasn’t watching the sky. He was looking toward a tiny black dot overhanging the edge of the tall building. It may have been a glider. Then again, it may have been a shadow.

“Plissken,” he whistled low, wishing an answering tone would come floating back to him like a responsive echo. “Plissken.”

It had been over six hours since the man’s last radio contact. Plissken could have been dead. In six hours he could be dead and stiff with rigor mortis, and Hauk would be worrying about nothing. He could have just cracked under the strain and taken the glider and tried to put distance between himself and the prison, hoping that, somehow, distance would burn out the killers in his chest.

Bob Hauk didn’t believe either one of those scenarios, though. He knew Plissken, knew his kind of man. That’s why he picked him for the job. He knew that the Snake was out there somewhere, alive and fighting, and he wished more than anything in the world that he could get in there and give him a hand. Time was running short.

“Plissken.”

The air was crisp, fall air. It wafted gently, slowly dragging the morning light in with it. Maggie liked the morning. It made her feel that things were possible, new beginnings. There had never been anything in her life to make her feel that new starts were possible, but she was alive. Life was hope. She breathed deep, taking in a lungful of the morning air. It was laced with the aroma of roast dog.

It was a gray morning, just like all mornings. The Duke hadn’t let her and Brain leave after he got Plissken. He was thinking about them, thinking about whether or not to kill them. Brain was worried about it, but she wasn’t. The Duke needed gas, and Brain was the only one who knew how to get it to him. The Duke was running things because he was jungle smart; he knew what he needed to survive. No. He wouldn’t be getting rid of Brain.

The Gypsy men stared at her, let their eyes rove up and down her at will. Some of them had been sterilized, some hadn’t. She could always tell it in their eyes. The normal ones wanted her, wanted her down on the concrete or bent over a car fender. That, she could understand and deal with. The others, the neuters, they wanted her dead. They wanted to kill every reminder of their life before and the things they could never have again. They wanted to mutilate her; it was all right there in their faces.

She kept a long pin way back in her free-flowing hair. Its sole purpose was to go for the eyes of the animals with blood on their minds.

She stayed close to Brain, close so that everyone would know who she belonged to. Brain, in his usual fashion, was staying close to the Duke. The platforms spread out around them, the myriad campfires of the Gypsy horde slowly dying after the morning meal.

There was excitement in the camp today, more than the usual. It was food day in Central Park, the end of the month drop. It was also the day that they made their final arrangements about the President.

Duke and Brain had moved to the station wagon that had brought them last night In the daylight, the car was a mess. It looked like it had sat there undriven for years. It was badly battered, scraped and smeared with blood.

The Duke was tying the President to the fender of the thing, propping his briefcase up on the hood, chain extended. He carried Plissken’s rifle. Maggie stood at a short distance, watching them.

She had thought that Brain had made a bad mistake when he turned Snake over to the Duke. There was something about the man that made her trust him. He was too desperate, too determined, to be anything but what he said he was.

But Brain didn’t think about that. He was too scared of the Duke to even think straight about anything. His cowardice had messed him up more than once.

He couldn’t help it; she knew that. There were a lot of things about Brain that bothered her, that she would change if she were able, but he was all she had and she was going to hang onto him. He provided some sort of stability to her life, and Maggie realized that stability was the only thing keeping her sane.