by Mike Mcquay
Another immediately filled the window space. The door fell completely behind him, bulging inward. It flew off the hinges, bed and wood scraping across the floor. Four of them filled the doorway.
They were all over him, coming through windows and doorway-hands, arms and drool-snarling faces. The smell was choking, suffocating. He swung out with the rifle, using it as a bludgeon. They screamed aviary sounds and grabbed at him. And the darkness closed all around him. And they were the darkness.
Through the trellis of arms he saw a doorway to his left. His arms were pinned, his gun. Finger on the trigger, he fired, time after time. They fell away from him, going down in pain. He broke away and went for the door. The bathroom. Getting through the door, he closed and locked it just as their pounding began on the other side. It was shaking, rattling with the force of their blows. It wouldn’t hold long.
There was no more time for Snake Plissken. In desperation, he turned to the tile wall, leveled his blood-caked rifle and emptied the clip, yelling in unison with the deafening rattle of the gun.
Wood and ceramic chips flew back at him, shrapnel and plaster dust filling the tiny room with white, powdery smoke. The banging continued on the door, locked in dreadful symphony with the exploding wall.
He ran the gun empty, and the dust settled. He had broken a hole through to the next apartment. He looked to the door; it was already beginning to splinter and crack.
“Son of a bitch.”
He jerked the clip and threw it down with the clutter on the floor, then pulled another from the holster and shoved it to the lock into the bite.
Turning, he raked the door with bright flashes, then jumped through the opening he had cut for himself. Running through the shell-shocked remnants in darkness of the next apartments, he jumped without hesitation through the still-glassed window of the place. It exploded on impact, and Plissken fell into darkness.
It was one floor to the ground, and he reached it at the same time the glass did. He came down hard, rolled and was on his feet and running, the gut panic cancelling any pains he may have sustained in the fall.
He was in the alley, rain puddled, glistening slick. A high brick wall filled his vision at the end of the street, another obstacle. He never broke stride.
The screams were behind him again. He pumped, the wall getting closer, looming larger. There was no stopping now. He came to it on a dead run and jumped, his arm grabbing for a hold at the top of the thing.
He got it, scrambled over and risked a look back. They filled the alley behind him, pouring out of the building, still coming. He started over, then his eye caught something lying on the ground where he had jumped.
It was his radio, smashed on the pavement below. It must have jarred loose when he went up the wall.
He jumped down the other side and was running again, feet splashing sprays of dirty water up his pant-leg. He ran a block, two. He looked over his shoulder. The crazies had climbed the wall and were scrabbling over, the energy of their madness matching his chemically induced vigor.
The mouth of the alley lay a half block ahead. He went for it, trying to keep his pace strong and even. Then he heard a sound, distant, but drifting closer. Music. It was music. An amplified twang, rattling the night.
There were words with the music, easing up. A brash voice, loud with anarchy.
“Got the time for… gettin’ even.
Got the time for… gettin’ even.”
Something slid up to block the alley. A car. No, a cab, a yellow cab. Plissken put on the brakes, skidding into the side of the vehicle. The music was coming up from inside.
“If I plot…
If I plan…
Like as not…
Sure I can.”
A head poked out the cab window, a big, ugly face with an obscene, grinning mouth. It was the man from the theater.
“Where you goin’, buddy?”
Plissken looked hard at the man, then back down the alley at the crazies who were a block away and closing fast. There was no time for thought, no time to determine whether or not he could trust the man.
He grabbed the handle and pulled it. The cab was battered. It looked like it had been dropped from a ten-story building, then hammered back in shape. The headlights were strapped on the fender. The windows, glass long-gone, were heavily barred. The faded yellow paint job was scarred by deep gouges and long, raking claw marks. Perfect. The Snake jumped in the back seat.
The cabbie turned to grin some more at him. “Bad neighborhood, Snake,” he said, and reaching beside him on the seat, picked up a peaked cap with a black bill and put it on his head.
Plissken turned to stare down the alley. The crazies were getting closer and closer.
“That’s what I’m for…
Proper time for… get, get, get, gettin’ even.”
“You don’t want to be out walking this neighborhood at night,” the cabbie said. “No sir.”
The man’s picture, faded and cracked past recognition, was stuck to the visor. There was a meter stuck to the dash, and clear bottles filled with amber liquid and rag-plugged tops sat beside the man in the front seat. Cocktails. And not martinis.
The crazies were half a block away, their screams nearly drowning out the music.
The cabbie lit a cigarette and took a deep, satisfied drag. “I’ve been a cabbie for thirty years and, let me tell you, you just don’t walk around here and live to tell the tale.” He shook his ugly head, frowning, for once, to make the point. “No sireebob. They’ll kill you and have you stripped to the bones in ten seconds flat. I’m usually not down here myself. I wanted to see that show.”
Plissken put a squeezing hand on the man’s shoulder. The crazies were nearly on top of them. “Let’s go,” he hissed.
The cabbie, smiling again, picked up one of the bottles off the seat. He touched his smoker to the rag plug. It burst into flames, licking the cab ceiling. He held the bottle out to Plissken, shaking it.
“This stuff’s gold around here, you know,” he said.
The crazies hit the car, on the run. Shaking, clawing, reaching. The cabbie casually tossed the bottle out the window and it exploded in their midst, flaring fire.
The front ranks went up in flames and the smell of burning flesh stood out even above their slime stench. The cabbie hit the gas pedal, and the car screeched away from the conflagration, swerving on down the street.
Plissken watched the orange fire disappear out the glassless rear window, then sank back gratefully in the seat. The aches and pains began to creep up his body the moment he relaxed. He took some more speed out of his pouch and ate it.
The cab was moving at top speed down the deserted streets, the driver taking obvious delight in being able to do things he could have never done when the city was a city. The buildings lay in ruins all around them, crumbled, decimated.
“When’d you get in, Snake?” he asked over his shoulder. “I didn’t know they caught you.”
He took a corner too fast, screeching around, back end fishtailing. Plissken fell over partway on the seat. He was already forgetting about the crazies and remembering how short his time on Planet Earth was going to be if he didn’t find the President.
The driver was still talking. “Snake Plissken in my cab,” he said proudly. “Wait’ll I tell Eddie.”
He turned around, grinning quickly. “Hold on, Snake!”
Turning the wheel hard, they swung into an alley, the cab going up on two wheels, nearly toppling. The cabbie was laughing, enjoying the hell out of himself. Plissken wondered if he would have been better off back with the crazies.
“Gotta take a shortcut to get out of here,” the man was saying. “You can run into real trouble on the streets.” He shook his head. “Night before a food drop, hell! Forget it.” He started laughing again. “Hey, Snake. Watch this!”
They sped through the alley, then took another hard right, throwing Plissken to the other side of the seat. His gratitude was slipping quickly away.
They tore
through the empty streets, through the darkened towers of glass and stone.
“See her take that turn?” the cabbie asked, and his voice was high-pitched and excited, charged by his own mad adrenal glands. “Hell, I had this very cab before I got sent up. I locked her up before they walled us in. When they sent me back in, she started right up, like nothin’ changed.”
“And I’m tryin’ soft
And I’m tryin’ hard
Sneakin’ round to catch ’em
All off guard
Can I do it anonymously?
Can I do it?
You just wait and see.”
“Three years,” he kept saying. “Three fuckin’ years, and she started right up. What a beauty.”
Plissken was through with it. He just didn’t have the time. “Hey,” he said.
The cabbie jumped, startled. It was almost as if he’d forgotten that Plissken was back there. “What were you doin’ back there. Snake?”
“Looking for somebody,” Plissken answered coldly.
“Shoulda asked me,” he said. “I know everybody in this town. Been driving this cab for thirty years. This very same cab. Did I tell you that she started right up. After three years, she…”
Plissken jammed his rifle into the back of the cabbie’s neck. “Now, just shut up for a minute!” he said angrily. “I’m gonna ask you a question, and you got one second to answer.” He took a deep, rasping breath. “Where’s the President?”
“The Duke’s got him,” the man answered matter of factly. “Hell, everybody knows that. Sure, the Duke’s got him. Gee, Snake, you don’t have to put a gun to my head. I’ll tell you.”
“Who’s the Duke?”
The man’s head turned sideways, eyebrows up in surprise. “The Duke of New York!” he said. “The big man. A-number-one, that’s who.”
“I want to meet this Duke.”
The cabbie started chuckling again. “You can’t meet the Duke. Are you crazy? Nobody gets to meet the Duke, he’s the big guy. You meet him once, then you’re dead.”
Plissken pushed the rifle barrel a little harder into the man’s neck. “How do I find him?”
The cabbie shrugged his hands off the wheel. “Well, I know a guy who might help you. He’s a little strange, though.” The man stopped talking long enough to take another drag on his cigarette. “Gee,” he said at last. “You didn’t have to use your piece on me. I woulda told you.”
“One more thing,” the Snake said.
“Yeah?”
“Would you please slow this son of a bitch down?”
XV
150TH ST. MEMORIAL LIBRARY
17:10:19, 18, 17…
Plissken watched the streets as they drove. The cabbie droned without thought or meaning, talking in laborious detail about lube jobs and oil changes. The streets seemed infinite, caught as they were in the middle of their tangles. Twisting stone paths winding a petrified forest. An army, a hundred armies, could hide within those hollow trees.
They cut through a narrow alley, as scrawny rats fled the jabs of their headlights. Then, about halfway along the dark pathway, they stopped.
“Well, here we are,” the cabbie said.
“Where?”
“Here. Come on.”
The man creaked open his door and hefted his bulk out of a broken seat that had cradled him for those thirty long years. He looked up and down, hitched up his grease-stained pants and smiled.
“Can’t leave her on the street,” he said. “Usually don’t leave her at all. But you’re a special case, Snake.”
Plissken climbed cautiously out of the back seat and followed the cabbie down the length of the alley and out. They were moving toward a huge stone building that was relatively intact. Wide stone steps led up to the big, iron doors. Cement lions crouched by the steps, guarding this stone palace in the stone jungle. They started up the steps. It was a public building, a library.
“It’s okay. Snake,” the cabbie said. “Better neighborhood. You can relax.”
Plissken thought about the time bombs planted in his arteries. “No thanks,” he replied.
They got to the top of the steps and the cabbie banged on the iron door with the flat of his hand. It echoed hollowly, like knocking on a huge bell. He waited a few seconds, then did it again.
He smiled at Plissken, his eyes gleaming slits. “They got a great place here. Like a fortress.”
“They?” Plissken returned.
A voice from the other side, female, said, “Who is is?”
The cabbie rolled his eyes and cocked a thumb at the door. “It’s me!” he yelled, loud enough to wake up the dead-or at least the walking dead.
“Who’s me?” returned the muffled voice.
“Cabbie!”
“What do you want?”
“Somebody to see Brain,” he said officiously. “It’s important.”
“Go away,” the voice returned.
Plissken grimaced and started looking for accessible windows.
“It’s Snake Plissken,” the cabbie returned, then winked in the Snake’s direction.
There was a pause. The magic words, the passport to the asylum. Sounds, scratching sounds, came through the door. Locks slid, bolts scraped. The door opened a crack. An eye peered through.
“You’re Plissken?” came the voice connected to the eye.
“He wants to see Brain,” the cabbie said.
“Why?”
Plissken shoved the cabbie aside and got eye to eye through the door crack. “I want to meet the Duke.”
The eye stared, unblinking, at Plissken for a short time. It wiggled, looking up and down. Then the door closed softly and they could hear the rattling of chains. Then the big door slid quietly open.
Plissken stepped through and looked at the woman. She was clean, head to toe-clean face, clean clothes, clean fingernails. The clothes looked new, and fit her well-filled frame like they were made for it. She had dark hair, mid-thirties hair, but her eyes were younger. Plissken fell into those eyes. They were liquid and inquisitive and more than a little mischievous; and he couldn’t detect even a touch of madness in them. Well-maybe a touch.
She looked him over, too, and when she was finished, the corners of her mouth turned up a notch. Like a smile. Or maybe like a sneer.
She made a gesture with her arm toward some stairs that led down into the great hall of the place. Cabbie jerked his head and they started down, the woman staying behind to relock the door. The place was huge, a lifeless cavern. The ceilings were high enough to be swallowed up completely in the darkness. A few torches lit the walls, trying to warm the cold, bleak marble that gave the place its deathlike chill.
They got down the stairs and waited. Cabbie put an arm around Plissken’s shoulder. The Snake shrugged it off.
“Brain’s the greatest. Snake,” the man said. “Mister Fabulous. The Duke loves him.”
Plissken turned to the sound of footsteps. The woman was coming down the stairs, a torch throbbing in her hand. He watched the yellow light caress her body.
“Who’s that?” he whispered to the cabbie.
“Maggie,” he answered. “Brain’s squeeze.”
She was almost down the steps. The cabbie leaned close so she wouldn’t hear him. “The Duke gave her to Brain, just to keep him happy.”
That Plissken could understand. The woman walked up to them. She used the torchlight to look him over again, and this time, the look in her eyes was all mischief.
“I heard you were dead,” she told him.
He frowned. Maybe everybody else knew something that he didn’t.
She led them down the hall. They went through an ornate archway to enter a large room lit to semi-light by well-placed, flickering lanterns.
Hooking the torch on a holder by the arch, Maggie led them into the room. It was the reading room of the library, shelves stuffed with books, stacks of them everywhere, piled high. They were all covered with a thick layer of gray-white dust.
; There was a sound, a generator noise that got louder as they walked farther into the room. They came around a row of shelves and Plissken saw the source of the noise. A generator stood right in the center of the room. It ran a belt drive system that operated a pump, and the shaft of the pump was plunging up and down into a hole cut right through the floor-their own oil well, probably sucking gas or crude oil right out of an old underground storage tank somewhere.
Plissken was looking the well over when his good eye caught something else. On a near wall was tacked a large map of Manhattan. A figure stood before the map, well-dressed, like Maggie. He turned around. He was thin and brooding, but obviously well-fed. He wore a long, shaggy beard that covered a laughable, baby face. He stared at Plissken, then flicked out a thin tongue to lick dry lips.
“Brought someone to see you, Brain,” the cabbie said.
Plissken took in the man, studied him in the dim light. His bad eye was twisting the nerves under the patch, trying to get his attention. He mentally removed the man’s beard, and a tight-lipped smile stretched across his teeth.
“Harold Hellman,” he hissed, low and menacing.
The man’s eyes got wider. “Snake?”
“Harold?” Maggie squeaked.
Plissken eased his hand back on the rifle, back toward the trigger guard. “How have you been, Harold?” he asked. “It’s been a long time.”
“You never told me you knew Snake Plissken,” Maggie said, obviously impressed. Plissken wondered what it was he did that people thought was so special.
The cabbie was laughing again, having a ball. “Isn’t this great!” he said loudly, slapping his hands together. Then, “You know, Brain. If you could spare some more gas. I’m getting kind of low and…”
In a flash, Plissken had crossed the distance to Brain. He shoved the rifle’s barrel right into the man’s mouth. He started gagging around the thing. Maggie came forward to defend her man.
“Don’t move or I’ll spray the map with him,” he said, never taking his eyes from his prey.
The woman stopped, muscles tensed. The cabbie sputtered behind him, undoubtedly wondering where his next gas was going to come from. Plissken moved his face to within inches of Hellman’s.