“You know what to do,” Plissken said softly, and slid down in the seat. Hellman just sat there, staring out the bullet-pocked windshield.
“Let’s get it over with,” Maggie said from the back seat and opened her door.
It got Hellman to moving. He opened his door, and they both got out of the car. The Snake slid up in the seat enough to peek out the windshield. Seven men stood staring at them around the campfire. This was the part he hated, trusting Hellman.
Sliding across the seat, he quietly opened the door and eased out of the car on the train side. He rolled along the ground using the car as a shield, and finally off the platform, next to the train.
He rolled under the thing, then began climbing a boxcar to get up above them. He moved quickly, the speed still controlling his tempo.
Getting to the top of the car, he crept along its length, toward the one that held the President. He made the first one, then bridged the gap to the second as quietly as he could. Below him, Hellman had made it to the campfire.
“Hey,” the man said, smiling broadly. “How’s it goin’? How are you boys tonight?”
A small one with chunky, compact features and a red and yellow polka-dotted bandanna seemed to be in charge. He stepped out of the group around the fire.
“What do you want. Brain?” he asked, and his tones were edged with suspicion.
Hellman hesitated, his eyes drifting up to Plissken’s form on top of the car. The Snake held up his rifle, so that the man could see its shadow in the darkness.
“Well, ah…” he took a breath. “We’re going inside to meet the Duke,” he said finally. “He’s on his way.”
The man stepped closer. “He never said nothin’ to us about it.”
Plissken started moving again, past the figures to the next car.
“You know the Duke,” Hellman said. “He don’t talk much anyway. Sometimes you gotta guess what he’s thinking.”
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.”
XVIII
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.