The flash caught other faces, grim and waiting. Other bums, a platoon of old men, taking their survival wherever they could find it. They moved up to Plissken, brushing him off, hands all over him. Then he saw it-the glint of a knife.
The Snake whipped around, rifle butt face high. They fell back as a man, unwilling to accept conflict from a superior animal. The bum on the floor froze, eyes slowly drifting up to gaze into the hate-filled stare of Snake Plissken.
The rifle slowly lowered to point at him. “Easy, Chief,” the man said, getting to his feet. “I’m walking. I’m walking.”
Then, as if that had been some kind of signal, they all rushed back into the shadows.
Plissken moved on. He hated this. He was a visitor in the Land of the Dead, a one-eyed Dante in the lower levels of hell. He wanted to run back to the Gulffire and head it out to sea where the sun could shine sparkling diamonds on the clean, clear water.
He kept walking.
The boiler, a large silver cylinder, took up the whole center of the room. Plissken got around it and heard a muffled commotion. He beamed the light. A man, huddled in a corner, was being beaten by a dirty bum in a raincoat. The man was dressed in a brand new sharkskin suitcoat. He was bunched up in the darkness, but his arm was out in plain sight-the monitor. He was wearing it.
Plissken charged the man, banging full into his assailant. The bum fell, grunting, and crawled away.
Bending down, Plissken rolled the man over. “Mister President.. ” he began.
The man came into his light. He was a toothless drunk with more wrinkles than an elephant’s knee. He smiled stupidly up at the Snake, then, in gratitude, held out a clear bottle filled with a liquid the color of egg yolk.
Snake Plissken stood up. If this was the President, the country was in worse shape than he thought.
XIII
17:54:47, 46, 45…
The man was grinning up at him. “I’m the President,” he said happily. “Sure, I’m the President.” He pointed down at the vital signs bracelet. “I knew when I got this thing I’d be President.”
Plissken grabbed him by the lapels and shook him. “Where’d you get it?”
“That’s no way to talk to your chief executive,” he said with indignation.
“Where’d you get it?”
The man wiggled away from his grasp. “Woke up,” he said. “There it was. Like… like a miracle.” His eyes got far away.
The anger was all over Plissken. He grabbed the man’s arm and smashed the bracelet hard against the wall, shattering it.
“Does this mean I’m not President anymore?” the drunk asked.
Bob Hauk sipped coffee out of a paper cup, and it hit his already gurgling stomach like liquid fire. He had never been able to handle coffee very well; it was like a hand closing over his heart. But it did keep him on edge, kept his senses right there and ready. He grimaced and took another sip.
Things hadn’t worked out at all well with Plissken, but that was something that they’d both have to live with. The man was destined for prison anyway. Why should he expect any more than what he was getting?
He looked around at the bank of machines that surrounded him in the bunker, listened to them clicking and whirring in their own little machine language. He wondered what the machines thought of all this, and if that’s what they were talking about.
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.