by Joe DeVito
Jack Driscoll scrambled aboard, and Denham, too, a moment before the truck screeched off in pursuit.
“Keep going!” yelled Driscoll to the driver as they neared the intersection. “He was heading east, toward Sixth Avenue. Go a block past where we saw him and stop.”
The truck whipped into the turn, sped on, and then shuddered to a stop. Denham leaped down, but he saw no trace of Kong.
Then a man in a taxi driver’s hat stumbled across the street, his face ashen. “It—it—there! That way!” he shouted, waving a frantic arm eastward, toward the dark shadow of the elevated tracks. The man’s eyes were wide, and his mouth worked soundlessly before he began to scream, “It jumped! I swear, I seen it! It jumped from that building there, to the El tracks, and from the tracks to the building on the other side! What was it? What—”
“Scatter,” shouted Driscoll. “Circle the whole block!”
To the east, yellow headlights in front of screaming sirens converged. The hunt was on.
* * *
“Come on, Jack!” Carl Denham mounted the fire truck and ordered the driver to speed on, but the man sounded the truck’s siren instead as other yellow headlights raced forward. They stopped abruptly. A stuttering string of motorcycles followed, and close behind another car stopped as well. Denham grimaced, seeing the chief of police emerge from one of the cars. The others were looking for Kong, but this man was looking for him—and saw him.
He grabbed Denham’s arm and pulled him from the fire truck, his face contorted in rage. “You’re the cause of this, Denham! I told your boys that this show of yours would end in disaster, but they went over my head. How many strings did you have to pull to get that beast into my city?”
“You’re not gonna stop him by shaking my teeth out,” Denham said, pushing forward. He saw from the corner of his eye that Jack had stepped down from the fire truck too and stood at his right hand, looking ready to take on the whole police department. Good man, Jack Driscoll, Denham thought.
The chief let go of Denham’s sleeve but stared in fury at the director. He waved his arm wildly and shouted, “Look!”
Denham did, and saw debris everywhere. Huge holes ripped into the sides of buildings showed where Kong’s hands had taken hold before swinging from one brick- or stone-lined window to another. The top of one structure had been partially caved in from the weight of his footfall. Pieces of overturned cars lay strewn like confetti after some macabre parade. Fires had erupted everywhere, and the fire trucks had gone into action. A low growling rumble echoed ominously up the street.
And the ambulances had spilled emergency medical workers into the streets. They rushed from huddled form to huddled form, sometimes stopping to treat an injury, sometimes feeling for a pulse and finding none before moving on. The police chief’s face was livid. “Look at those bodies, Denham. Innocent, hardworking people who had no stake in your get-rich-quick schemes, or your fame. It’ll take weeks to clean up this mess, and God knows how much it will cost! I hope you’re proud of yourself. If I were able, I’d cuff you and have you in front of a judge by morning. But we all got a message from the mayor telling us not to haul you in until we bring that monster down. Another one of your cronies?”
Before Denham could answer, Kong loomed from the darkness three blocks down the street, eerily illuminated by the surrounding fires. The giant saw the crowd, bellowed a challenge, and charged with unimaginable speed.
Driscoll’s reactions were quickest. He shot to one side, an outswept arm catching Denham and throwing him to the ground. Denham raised his head and saw Kong’s gigantic foot crush the chief’s car. A swipe of Kong’s arm cleared a whole squad of motorcycles, sending them and their drivers tumbling wildly end over end. He then turned and smashed the fire engine. He tore off an entire axle and flung it into the fourth story of a nearby building. “If I only had a camera!” Denham growled.
Kong paused to pound his chest, then with a grunt started quickly down Sixth Avenue, back the way he had come. Behind him the street seemed to writhe in agony. Denham pushed himself to his feet. The fires raged higher. The wounded lay moaning. The dead lay still.
Driscoll said, “Come on. We can’t let him get out of sight.” Denham pounded after him, hearing the chief, who had been knocked aside by a blow of Kong’s fist, calling after them to stop.
They did not. Like Driscoll, Denham valued Ann’s life even more than his own. He had glimpsed the soft, white-clad form of Ann Darrow in the monster’s grip and had seen that Ann was not moving on her own. Her motions were that of a juggled rag doll. And she hadn’t uttered a sound.
Denham could only hope they weren’t already too late.
23
NEW YORK
JUNE 30–JULY 1, 1933
Following the surreal hulk of Kong to the east, Driscoll and Denham found themselves running sideways into a squadron of vehicles that had been screaming down Fifth Avenue. The cars careened to a stop, their brakes screeching. The motorcycles swung in front, on either flank, and in the rear, of a fire truck, falling into formation like destroyers around a battleship. A shaking policeman was pointing south, yelling something unintelligible, but again Kong was nowhere to be seen.
Denham recognized the mayor and the commissioner in the back of the center car. It jumped the curb, the back door flew open, and a familiar voice barked, “Denham! In here, man!”
Denham gripped Driscoll’s arm and dragged him into the car. The driver didn’t even wait for them to close the door before gunning the engine, and nearly pitched the two men off their backward-facing seat.
Denham pushed himself back upright and said wryly, “Surprised to see you here, your honor.”
The mayor of New York met his gaze and snapped, “Not any more than I’m surprised to see you—alive.”
Denham knew what that meant. This man had pulled strings for him, and Denham had greased the palms of other politicians and had made extravagant promises to them just to get permission to exhibit King Kong in the city. Someone would have to pay.
But Denham had no time to think of that now. He realized there was nothing he could do to reverse what had happened, what was happening now, or what was going to happen. Forces larger than he had now taken such power from his hands. In Denham’s own mind, if only he could help save Ann, at least one person for whom he was directly responsible, then maybe he could in a small way redeem—
“We’ve got to save the girl!” yelled Driscoll. “That’s the point!”
“We need to get ahead of him!” barked Denham. “If we had some idea of where Kong will head—”
“I can make a guess,” Driscoll growled. “It’ll be someplace high up, as high as he can get. Kong is used to mountains. He lived in one. The higher he is, the safer he feels. There’s just one building in New York that towers over the others, and that’s the building we’ll find him on. On the very top of it!”
“The Empire State Building,” the mayor said slowly. “It’s the pride of the city. If that thing damages it—”
“Impossible!” said the blunt chief inspector.
“Driscoll’s right, though,” Denham shot back. “Kong will head for high ground. That’s our best bet, if we can beat him there!”
“I guess it’s our only bet,” the commissioner snarled. “Okay, driver, let’s go. Floor it.”
But the driver couldn’t speed through the crush of people filling the streets, jostling and pointing and shrieking, “There! Down there!”
Denham turned in his seat, craning to look over his shoulder. Kong appeared far down the street; again he crouched for a brief instant on the roof of a building and again disappeared. Cameras flashed. The mayor rolled down his window and yelled to a cop, “Confiscate those cameras! Every one! Now!” Denham smiled grimly to himself. That was a politician for you: Make it go away. Make people think they hadn’t seen what they knew they had. The cover-up had already started.
The driver sounded his horn, wrenched the wheel, and finally found an open
ing. Down a one-way street the wrong way, then a screeching turn on two wheels, then another. Denham held on with both hands, still turned to look toward their destination. Ahead, the spire of the Empire State Building pierced the night sky in a blaze of white light. They reached the building’s corner just in time to witness a scene which Denham would have sworn no one of them could believe, even as they sat watching. From a roof on the upper side of the street, Kong leaped. His black, monstrous body curved in a long arc, clear across the street to the skyscraping structure opposite. And then he pulled himself up, from window ledge to window ledge, until he turned the corner of the building and vanished.
Driscoll, Denham, and the commissioner quickly emerged from the car. The mayor stayed in the car and yelled an order, and the driver backed the vehicle, spun it in a tight turn, and left a cloud of exhaust and the reek of burning rubber behind.
The others reached the corner of the block and could see the beast-god high overhead, climbing from setback to setback as if he were scaling the cliffs of Skull Mountain. Six blatting motorcycles screeched in from the darkness, policemen leaping off them and raising their machine guns.
“No! Don’t shoot,” ordered the commissioner. “He’s still got the girl.”
There was no mistaking that. Denham could see the small, pale form of Ann. She seemed to be awake now, thank God, and appeared to be gripping the hair on Kong’s shoulder.
“Send some of those tommy guns up the elevators,” the commissioner ordered. “He’ll never be able to climb to the top. We’ll maybe catch him on the roof of one setback or another, have a clear shot.”
Driscoll struck down the commissioner’s pointing arm. “You’ll never catch King Kong on any roof!” he shouted, his voice furious. “He’s going to the top of the mountain, I tell you.”
“Easy, Jack,” Denham said, laying a hand on his friend’s arm.
Jack shook him off. “It’s true. Look! There he goes, up again.”
Kong was now so high that his figure seemed smaller than that of a man, and still he climbed. A black silhouette against the chalky walls, he drew himself from ledge to ledge until he rose into the bright floodlights which swept around the crest of the building. Still he ascended.
“That means the end of the girl,” a police sergeant muttered. “If we shoot him up there, she’s gone.”
“Wait a minute,” Driscoll shouted. “There’s one thing we haven’t tried.”
The commissioner looked at him.
“The army planes,” Driscoll explained, “from Roosevelt Field. They might find a way to finish Kong off and leave Ann untouched.”
“It’s a chance,” said the commissioner. “Call the Field, Mr. O’Brien. Burn up the wires.”
“I’m going up into the building,” Driscoll announced, loosening his collar. “I’ll take a try at Kong’s mountain myself.”
Denham felt a surge of energy. Risking it all had always given him a zest for life. He said, “I’ll go along, Jack.”
The commissioner motioned to half a dozen police officers armed with submachine guns, and they followed.
“Let me take one of those things,” Driscoll demanded when they were inside the cool corridor of the building.
The commissioner raised an eyebrow. “You know how to handle one of these, son?”
Denham laughed. “Say, Driscoll can handle any shootin’ iron on earth. The boy’s good, really good. Let him have one!”
“Hand it over, Sarge,” the commissioner ordered, and the man gave the weapon to Driscoll.
Denham sweated out the long ride up. They reached the last bank of elevators at last, and to his frustration they could go no farther. The doors out to the observation deck were locked, with no key, no custodian, to be found. Denham rattled the doors and growled, “Oh, for the love of Mike—”
“Quiet! Listen!” Driscoll whispered.
Denham paused with his hand on the door. From far off he could hear the drone of a plane. No, of a squadron of planes.
“The good old army!” Denham said, trying to laugh. “We’ve got to get these doors open, men. We can’t stay cooped up in here!”
Six planes came into sight, wings tipped with green and red lights. They cruised at an altitude of three or four thousand feet, Denham judged, far above the pinnacle of the skyscraper. Then Denham tensed.
The planes were diving, like birds of prey. One after another, they hurtled down beneath the paling stars.
* * *
Ann Darrow had been fully alert almost from the beginning of Kong’s relentless climb to the top of the Empire State Building. The rush of fear and the realization that she would not be harmed by Kong balanced against each other as she rose to complete consciousness. Now they were at the summit, as high as they could go. All around them lay New York, limned in lights. Above them the stars were fading as a faint glow of dawn washed into the eastern sky.
As Kong gently placed Ann on the ledge at his feet, the cold and the rush of the wind at this extreme height stung her, keeping her senses heightened. He loomed above her, impossibly large, scanning the sky.
For what? She couldn’t even guess.
And then Ann first noticed the dull hum of airplane engines above them in the night sky. Kong’s sharper ears must have detected them. As he had set her atop a dead tree to defend her against the flesh-eating dinosaur, he now tucked her safely at the base of the Empire State Building’s pinnacle to face a new challenge.
Ann caught sight of the planes just as they tipped their wings and began a coordinated dive.
Kong roared thunderously. Ann had heard that roar before: it was a battle challenge. As on the island, the very air vibrated with its fury. The drum note of his fists upon his chest rose to a wild tattoo. He stretched to his tallest stature.
The first plane came down in a long swift slide, momentarily illuminated by sweeping searchlights. It roared past, just beyond the reach of Kong’s extended fingertips. Another followed, then another, a whole squadron of them. They flashed by just above Kong.
Ann pushed herself up. What were the pilots doing? And then it came to her, with a shock: They’re looking for me! The planes climbed and circled, and then they dived again. The lead plane swooped down. For a split second it appeared to hover in front of its beast adversary, the broad canvas wings poised like those of some giant pterodactyl from the island. Then it curved upward and shot away.
But this time, in the instant before its turn, the plane’s machine gun poured burning lead into Kong’s chest. The other planes dived after it, relentlessly spitting fire into Kong’s back and sides. Kong bellowed his rage, his arms flailing wildly, vainly reaching for the strange tormentors, flashing past maddeningly out of reach.
Ann closed her eyes and covered her ears, huddling against the metal of the dome atop which Kong stood. The pilots hadn’t seen her, must have assumed that Kong had dropped her. Bullets screamed as they spanged off the metal dome, and Ann shrank away from them. Then, as abruptly as it had started, the gunfire stopped. Kong’s oppressors peeled away to circle at a safe distance, as if to gauge the effect of their assault. Ann couldn’t even hear them, for the wind swallowed the scream of their engines. The beast’s roars slowly subsided, and he turned to look down at her.
In the strange silence, the slow cones of the searchlights from the street below swept over Kong, over the planes. As one light lifted the veil of darkness from Kong’s shadowy figure, Ann saw with a shock that his expression had an odd touch of reproach and regret, like that of a child accused of some wrongdoing and not knowing what it was. His gaze was—
Ann had never seen that expression on a man’s face. Oh, she had received plenty of lascivious looks on the streets of New York. But Kong’s features were strangely innocent as he slowly reached down one finger to caress her. She realized he wanted her, but not in the manner of a city wolf.
His oddly human eyes shone with—with adoration, with a pure and innocent worship.
Perhaps he thought he was pr
otecting her. For a brief instant Ann felt a rush of—pity? Affection? Loathing? She could not tell. In her exhaustion and heightened state of fear, a heartbeat away from shock, her emotions fluctuated wildly, and she had the strange feeling of hovering between life and death. She could not for that moment tell if she was experiencing reality or a dream.
It was then she felt the warm drip of viscous blood flowing down Kong’s arm, off his fingers and onto her skin. Fear, terror she could not control, suddenly erupted within her, and Ann began to shriek hysterically, even as part of her mind told her no one would hear her voice.
The scream of airplane engines exploded in her ears, and immediately Kong’s roars challenged them as once more Ann heard the thudding drumbeat of his fists upon his chest. The blaze of multiple machine guns tore the night to fevered chaos. One of the planes ventured too close to Kong’s straining arms.
The giant struck, struck hard, and ripped the tail section from the aircraft. Ann heard a momentary cry of terror from its crew as the plane spun down, like some wounded bird, in a death spiral. Halfway down it crashed into the wall and burst into flames as it bounced off. Then it was gone, and the night fell strangely silent. Again Ann heard only the sound of whistling air and saw only the methodical searching of the lights.
Ann screamed no longer. Now in the relative quiet she could hear Kong’s low moaning, his soft gurgled cough. A plane swooped past, and in the wavering glare of a searchlight, Ann saw the bullets rip into Kong’s hide. She saw his coarse hair jerk and rip off his body in bloody clumps.
The great beast staggered. He brushed Ann as he painfully slid off the parapet, straining to gain easier footing below, on the circular roof space where Ann lay. Kong turned slowly, as though to pick her up.
He stopped, staring down at Ann with a puzzled, hurt look. He fought to stand erect, but weakness forced him to hold the spire with both hands as he began to cough again. Kong then gazed about himself and seemed unable to comprehend the flow of his blood, the creeping numbness in his limbs. As he alternately moved his arms to inspect himself, Ann could clearly see the many wounds in his torso, the crimson punctures over his heart. Ann knew Kong was dying.