by Mike Mcquay
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.
Doctor Cronenberg pursed his weathered lips. “It may be just an impact on the mechanism itself,” he said, but he didn’t sound as if he believed it.
Then the radio crackled with Plissken’s voice. “Hauk!” it said angrily.
Hauk flipped the switch on the transmitter. “I’m here, Plissken.”
“I don’t know who you assholes are looking at,” the voice returned, “but it’s not the President.”
He looked at the blank speaker grill, then turned to look at the blank faces that surrounded him. Then a voice, another voice, came through the speaker. It was singing:
“Oh boo-tiful, for spasses skies.
For amber waves ’a grain.”
Turning down the radio noise, Hauk looked over at Prather. The man, no matter how upset he got, always looked just right, like he had stepped out of an ad for a men’s store somewhere. “Now what?” Hauk asked.
The Secretary didn’t even blink. “Your man’s still got some time left,” he returned. “Have him keep looking.”
“It’s a big city, Mister Secretary.”
The Snake’s voice replaced the singer’s on the radio. “All right, get your machine ready. I’m coming home!”
Hauk took a deep breath. He looked at Prather. The man nodded sternly at him. He toggled the switch, “Eighteen hours, Plissken.”
“Listen to me, Hauk,” the voice said. “The President is dead. Somebody’s had him for dinner. It’s all over.”
Hauk set his jaw and said what he had to say. “If you get back in that glider, I’ll shoot you down. If you climb out, I’ll burn you off the wall.” He stared at the unanswering speaker. “Do you understand me, Plissken?”
The voice came back low, almost pleading. “A little human compassion,” it said.
The coffee felt like it was trying to burn a hole right through Hauk’s stomach. His heart was on fire, sizzling, crackling. “Plissken,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“Get moving.”
Plissken, very slowly, very carefully, slid the antenna back into the radio. The pain was coursing through his eye, but he ignored it. He carefully placed the radio back into his holster. The man with the President’s coat wobbled to his feet. The Snake didn’t try to stop him, so he took that as a good sign and began to move off.
“Thank you,” he mumbled. “Thank you very much.”
Then he was gone, leaving Plissken alone with the hollow non-op boiler. So, that was how it was. The lay of the land. The hoot in the hollow. The way the wind blew. He had less than eighteen hours to find a man in the largest city in America with only three million maniacs to get in his way. Child’s play.
He rapped his knuckles on the side of the boiler. It came back, a deep, tinny echo. The way his insides felt right now, he could most probably take just a little of his own internal fire and stick it in the boiler to heat the entire building.
They had sent him home, but there wasn’t a home to go to. Some crazies had taken his home and held his parents hostage. The USPF didn’t care a whole lot about that; they just went in with their flamethrowers and took out everybody. They buried his parents together in a paupers’ grave, then the state took away all their savings. They tied them all together with the criminals and said that their money would be used for “restitution.”
The day that Snake Plissken came home, he blew up a state vehicle with a Molotov cocktail. It was the only thing that made him feel any better. He had done something of the like every day since then.
He wandered around the basement until he found an exit. There wasn’t any quit in him; he just didn’t know how. Maybe that was the beginning of insanity.
The night was getting colder. The speed was flapping his body like a marionette. He reached into the holster and ate another chunk, then another. There was no reality to adjust to here. Perhaps a chemical infusion could make it all seem logical, kind of like drinking yourself sober.
It seemed that square one would be the best place to start. So he retraced his steps from the theater and went back to the plane. The smoke had dissipated to a fine powdery spray and the jet, covered as it was by pieces of fallen building, was beginning to look like a part of the landscape. Someone had taken away the seat with the body strapped to it. He didn’t much want to think about that.
He saw the emergency pod imbedded in the building. He left the plane and went over to it. It had already been stripped bare. The chute was gone, the inside totally gutted, leaving nothing but a metal shell.
Standing away from the sphere, Snake Plissken drank in his surroundings. Streets branched off in several different directions, all blowing trash, whistling the fall wind, the air colder as it blew across the rain puddles. The streets were jammed with dead cars, wheel-less wonders. He picked a direction at random and started walking.
The streets were silent and deserted. No vultures now. No one. He didn’t like it. Every jungle had its nocturnal predators. He tucked his rifle more securely under his arm.
Then there was a sound, the clank of metal on metal. He stopped walking and listened, trying to decide whether the sound was real or just a product of the massive doses of methamphetamine that was bolting his body like chain lightning.
It came again.
He turned slowly around, tensed, ready. Not ten feet from him, a manhole cover was inching slowly upward. Plissken primed the rifle and sank into the shadows.
The cover eased up slowly, then fell back again. There was deathly silence for several seconds, then all at once the lid literally flew off the hole, like the stopper on a bottle full of expanding gases.
A head appeared, or rather, the caricature of a head. The face was dark, brooding; it was incapable of flexibility, like a mask made of human skin. It was a filthy, smeared head, hair plastered with the wet gook that encased it so that it was impossible to tell where the hair ended and dirt began. The eyes were wide and staring, unblinking.
Mist rose with the head, and noxious gases-like potato rot. Plissken felt revulsion climb up his spine as the head became a whole body that slithered out of the underground, crawling along the cracked and broken streets. The body was naked, covered with slime. The stench was odious, nearly overpowering, and Plissken had to fight to keep from gagging.
Another ghoul followed the first, then another. Some naked, others in rags, all covered with putrid slime and open, running sores. The crazies. Glassy-eyed demons from the vaporous pits of hell, up to make a mockery of the word human.
They moved down the center of the street, open gasping mouths breathing shallow, pleuritic rasps. Growls. They were the borderline, the netherworld between life and-what? Death? Surely death would be the long lost brother to them all. They were hungry, foraging for fresh meat.
He tried to move, to put distance between himself and the obscene devil dance that lined out down the street. But they kept coming, more all the time.
His legs didn’t want to work. He forced all his concentration on them, trying to squeeze the waking nightmare from his charging brain. Still they came, an army of them. The smell rose in quivering waves from the streets to laugh at the rumbling heavens.
Finally he moved. Slow steps at first, faltering, like a child learning to walk; then faster, more sure. He finally turned his head completely from the spectacle and raced through the long shadows, toward the dubious safety of the buildings.
They were everywhere then, filling the streets with inhuman gurgles. He came to a coffee shop, still relatively intact amidst a block of destruction. No door, glass gone from the windows. As he
raced inside, he
caught sight of the name above the door: CHOCK FULL O’ NUTS.
The inside was dark, but he dared not turn on the flash. The place was stripped bare except for a counter that remained intact toward the back. He moved toward it, stopping when his foot creaked loudly on the tile floor.
He looked down. Much of the tile was ripped up, the floorboards were rotted, some of them were missing. Darkness stretched below the floorboards, cavernous darkness.
Moving slowly, carefully, trying not to make noise, he made his way toward the back of the building. He heard a noise outside and stopped dead, frozen in his tracks. The crazies were running now, drifting shadows, floating past the window space, driven by some internal rhythm, some perverted pathological inner vision.
He heard their bare feet slapping the concrete outside. Reaching a wall, he flattened himself against it, breathing hard, and not from the exertion. More shadows-they played the walls, even the shades of their reality distorted to incomprehension.
And then they were gone. There was quiet, and even the calm became a source of horror.
“You a cop?” whispered a voice.
Plissken jumped, swinging around. He brought up his rifle, arm shaking, to point into the darkness.
A woman sat in the shadows, staring at him.
“No,” he answered in the same whisper.
She was young, and cleaner than the others he had seen. She had definitely been pretty once, still was, but her eyes commanded her whole face now. They were deep, sunken eyes. They were eyes that had seen too much, eyes that had survived all the great disasters of the world. He couldn’t look at the woman without being hypnotized by the pain in those eyes,
“You got a gun,” she said.
More shadows flew past. Plissken jerked his head to the sounds.
“Got a smoke?” she asked.
He turned angrily to her. “Would you shut up,” he whispered urgently.
“They won’t see it,” she returned. “It’s all right if we’re quiet.”
He looked at the woman, then back outside. Moving quietly over to her, he pulled a cigarette from his jacket pocket and handed it to her. Getting back in the pocket, he fished around until he found a lighter, then handed it over, too.
The woman nodded to him, then turned her back to light it, shielding the orange glow with her body.
She took a deep drag, and gave back the lighter. “Hey, this is a real one!” She looked up at Plissken, fixing him with those pain-filled eyes. “You just get in?”
He squatted down on the ground with her, wanting to talk low. “What’s going on out there?”
She pulled gratefully on the cigarette, obviously happy to be sharing her space with someone who didn’t want to eat her. “Crazies,” she said. “End of the month. They’re out of food.”
She pulled on the cigarette again. Plissken stared at the glowing end. “Keep your hand over it,” he said harshly.
She did as she was told. “My name’s Maureen,” she began, as if they were strangers on a train off on holiday somewhere. “I got caught on the street after dark. Now I’m stuck here all night.”
Plissken split his time between watching her cigarette and the broken windows. “Plane crash,” he said, talking every time his head turned back to her. “Eight hours ago. Near Eighth Avenue. Jet came down. You see it?”
She shook her head, totally disinterested. “No.”
Plissken slumped down, exhaling deeply. Another dead end and God only knew how long he would be pinned down.
“You’re a cop,” she said,
“I’m an asshole,” he returned.
“With a gun,” she said sternly, twisting her face. “Who are you?”
He didn’t even look at her. “Snake Plissken ”
She sounded surprised. “You’re Snake Plissken?”
“Yeah.”
“I heard you were dead.”
He reached out and clamped her hands around the cigarette again. “I am,” he answered.
She just held the smoker, forgetting it completely. “What are you doing in here with a gun?”
He was watching her cigarette, watching the barrel of ash get longer and longer on its end. He couldn’t believe that an ash could get so long without falling off. “Looking for somebody,” he said.
“Who?”
The long ash fell off, drifting in pieces to the floor. “The President,” he said, and glanced up to find that she was staring at him. “Our President.”
Maureen, who got caught out after dark, shook her head. There were some things that even an inmate in the New York Penitentiary wouldn’t believe. “Come on,” she said.
Plissken shrugged. He didn’t give a damn whether she believed him or not “That’s it.”
“He’s really here?”
He made a sweeping gesture with his leather-clad arm. “Somewhere,” he replied.
Maureen slid closer to him, touching with her body, side connected with his from shoulder to ankle. He liked it; it felt good. There could be worse people to be trapped all night with, worse people to be the last to touch in your life.
She cuddled close and put a hand on his arm. “And when you find him, you’re gonna take him out?”
“Yeah,” he said.
She touched his leg with a soft, gentle hand, dredging up some long-forgotten ritual practiced back when there had been rituals, a million years, a million life-times ago. She feather-touched up and down his leg.
“Take me out with you?” she cooed into his ear.
He played the game with her, played human being for just a little while. “If you give me reason to.”
Taking his face in her hands, she kissed him deeply. The lips were there, the tongue, but the passion was gone, burned out by too much chaos. “I can think of lots of reasons,” she whispered after breaking the pretend kiss.
All at once, she sat up stiff, horror-filled eyes wide, darting like an animal’s. She froze, listening.
Plissken heard it, too-a faint rustling from below, scratching. “Put it out,” he whispered.
Maureen stabbed the smoker against the wall, killing It. They heard another creak from below. Maureen was up, moving toward the door to the kitchen.
“Don’t move!” Plissken rasped.
A loud snap. Suddenly the floorboards gave way. A slimy, gnarled hand shot through the boards from below. The smell. The smell!
Screaming, Maureen went for the kitchen door. The floor cracked around her, rotted boards giving under her weight. She fell, gasping, right through the floor, disappearing waist down into the darkness below. Her face transfixed by fear, she scrabbled at the floor, clawing her way back up. Plissken moved toward her.
“Give me your hand!” he yelled, trying to break through the wall that her face had become. “Give me your hand!”
He was reaching, grasping for her.
The floor was giving way. Hands punching up, grabbing, ugly long-nailed charades of hands. They grabbed her, leaving slime trails on her clothes. Plissken began swiping at them with the rifle butt, but it was no use.
Screaming, Maureen disappeared down the hole, dragged down, leaving behind a long trail of scratches, grooves dug into the floor by her fingers. Hands still reaching. Screams turned to gurgles.
Sounds behind Plissken. He turned. A figure had pushed up through the floor to climb up. It stared at him with boring animal eyes, face unrecognizable through the crud that encased it. Long stringy hair dripped oozy globs, steam rose from the putrid body. In the hand-a long, gleaming ice pick.
XIV
CHOCK FULL O’ NUTS
17:29:55, 54.: 53…
Revulsion pushed through Plissken’s body, squeezed out by the survival instinct He clenched his teeth, aimed the rifle and began backing away.
Another sound. He turned quickly. Another crazy had come up behind him, through the hole that had swallowed Maureen. Then another.
Plissken moved without thought, bolted for open ground.
He vaulted the counter, then charged past the big hole and into the kitchen. They were right behind him, hollering.
He got through the dark, gutted kitchen to a hallway beyond, racing at top speed. A door swung open at the hallway’s end and more crazies poured in; shadows against the darkness, bottling him up.
Turning on instinct, he smashed, shoulder first, through a door in the hallway. They were closing on him, foul breath on his neck, hands grabbing.
He was in a storeroom, charging through it. Faint light seeped through a glassless window at the far end. He ran to it and jumped through. There were more of them on the streets, drawn to the hunt.
The fire escape was set by the window, a rusted iron ladder jutting down. Swinging up the rungs, he started climbing.
The crazies were there, smelling blood, right behind him. They grabbed at his legs as he climbed, and he kicked viciously back at them.
Reaching the first landing, he dove through the window, shattering what glass was left in it. They were streaming up the ladder; they kept coming, always coming.
He grabbed an old dresser and shoved it in front of the window, then pushed the frame of a bed to block the room’s door, bracing it firmly under the knob.
No good. The dresser rocked in the gray-black darkness. The legs began jumping, scooting across the floor. A hand came around it, scratching at the wall, looking for a hold.
Bringing up the rifle, Plissken pulled the trigger, muzzle flare lighting the room crackling white. He fired two, three times, and the hand on the wall exploded in blood and fire.
The hand severed at the wrist, its own gore tacking it to the wall. Plissken’s eye got wide. On the fingers of the hand, just below the knuckles, were tattooed the letters: H-A-U-K. The hand began sliding down the wall.
With a loud, prolonged crack, the door splintered behind him. He turned. The dresser fell from the window with a crash. He jerked back. A crazy leapt through the place.
Plissken charged, bringing the rifle butt down hard on its head. The thing flopped to the floor, its body jumping like a grounded fish.