Hellman held the diagram out in front of him, desperately scanning its face with a moving finger.
“You gotta slow down, Snake,” Cabbie kept saying. “Don’t hurt my baby.”
Hellman was pointing frantically at the paper. “I think there’s three mines ahead…”
“You think? ” Maggie said from the back seat.
Brain waved her off. “Just stay to the left, then jog right”
There was very little room anywhere. Abutments and latticed railings defined the outer edges, much of that already blown away. He skimmed the left, barely scraping the cement limits, knocking loosened bridge pieces over the edge.
Cabbie was reaching for the wheel, trying to take control of the car. “You’re pushin’ her too hard!” he yelled.
Plissken shoved him aside and looked quickly at his watch. He had ten and a half minutes left until his appointment with Death.
The car barricades had thinned to nothing, virgin territory. There were fewer holes in the bridge fabric, but more spikes. Hellman tried to hold back the cabbie and read the map at the same time.
“Okay,” he said quickly. “Here they come.”
The headlights reflected rows of spikes and an overturned pole coming right at them. Plissken hit the brakes and swerved around them. Cabbie was screaming.
Suddenly-a roar. The cab was lifted from behind with the force of a mine explosion. They skidded, out of control, into the side of the bridge, then bounced back, turning in circles. Finally, they shuddered to a stop. The cab was done for.
“Out of the car!” Plissken yelled, and they were piling out the doors.
“I said jog right,” Hellman kept saying.
Cabbie wasn’t getting out of the car. Plissken leaned in to him. The man sat there, huge grin on his face, dead in the seat. Not a mark on him. His car was all he had. When it died, he must have decided to go with it. The Snake tousled the dead man’s hair, then let him slump against the dashboard. It was the best coffin that Cabbie could ask for.
Plissken turned to look down the bridge. The Duke’s headlights were coming at them, steady, unrelenting. Plissken was running again, ignoring the agony in his leg.
“Here!” Rehme shouted. “Over here.”
Hauk and the Secretary rushed across the bunker to stand beside him. He was looking at the gridded wall map with the flashing light. Rehme was holding a headset up to his ear without putting it on. “It’s wall station nineteen,” he said. “They spotted two cars on the Fifty Ninth Street Bridge.”
Hauk looked at the map light that marked the station. “Is it Plissken?” he asked.
Rehme shrugged with his tired eyes. “Taxicab and a Cadillac,” he returned, trying to keep the catch out of his voice. “The taxi hit a mine. Four people on foot.”
Hauk looked at Prather just to read the man’s face. “Ten minutes,” the man said, and Hauk couldn’t figure exactly whether that was supposed to be good or bad.
He turned back to Rehme. “Get a jeep with a winch over there, fast.”
Running back to his previous station, he picked up the two-way and barked into it: “Cronenberg. Get over to wall station nineteen. They’re coming across the bridge.”
He put down the radio, and he felt his insides jump. Maybe he had something left in there after all. Without thought, he was out the door and running for the heli-pads.
They used the only resource left to them. They ran. They ran from the Duke, from his whining engine that wanted to eat them up. They ran from the City of Death.
There was a sound behind Plissken, a roar. He turned in time to see Brain Hellman flying through the air, tossed away by the unfeeling force of instantaneous combustion beneath his feet. No sound issued from him. He was a dead thing and would be left behind with the rest of the dead and dying.
Plissken stopped and turned. Hellman’s body hit the ground ten feet from where he started. Maggie had been knocked down by the blast, and she was moving along the ground, crawling toward Brain’s body. In the distance, he could still see what was left of the yellow cab with the grinning man inside. Leningrad. It was Leningrad all over again, and he was saving a man who nobody cared about for purposes that made no rational sense.
The President was still running. The Duke was closing in. He called to the woman. “Maggie! Keep moving!” He could see she wasn’t going to. She had defined her priorities. He looked at his lifeclock-0:07:49, 48, 47.
Maggie crawled to Brain. He was lying on his back, eyes closed. He could be sleeping. The fright wasn’t on his face anymore. There was peace there now, a contentment that she’d never seen before.
She embraced his inert form. “Oh, Brain,” she whispered into his unhearing ear. “You weren’t much, but you cared for me. I know you did.” She kissed the cold, bloody mouth. “I won’t leave you alone,” she said.
Far off in her mind somewhere, she heard a sound. An engine sound. She glanced up. The Duke was coming, bearing down on her. She hugged Brain one more time. “I’ll be there in a minute,” she told him, and stood up, facing the oncoming headlights.
“Come on!” a voice called from behind her. She turned to look at the Snake, the catalyst. She could have turned and run with him; it was the thing to do. But somehow, it just didn’t seem important anymore. Maybe being alive wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
She smiled, and waved to him. He nodded once, understanding instantly. The Snake knew what this was all about. He reached into his coat and pulled out the pistol, tossing it to her.
Drawing his lips tight, he turned and ran.
Maggie turned slowly back to face the Duke’s car. She had belonged to him once, long ago, and he had given her away because she was less than nothing to him.
She raised the pistol, stiff-armed, and began firing, mechanically, automatically. The headlights approached her as if in a dream, getting larger, farther apart. They were all of the car she could see, all she ever saw.
She sensed her death, rather than felt it. She was looking out, then up, and huge, heavy things were grinding her body beneath them. She was looking into the black, black night. She was looking for Brain.
Plissken heard the skidding and turned. The Duke lost control after hitting Maggie and slid hard into the side of the bridge, nearly punching through it to fall to the river below. But it didn’t fall.
He stopped running and watched. There was a second of stillness, then the driver’s door burst open and the Duke climbed out, rifle in hand.
Turning again, Plissken started running toward the lights of the wall far ahead. Running, for once, to police protection.
A barrier formed the terminus of the bridge. Old, junked cars in piles, then a large concrete barrier right in front of the big wall, which stretched out as far as he could see in either direction. He kept digging, keeping the President in front of him at all times.
The winch jeep was already at the wall when Hauk settled down a distance behind in his copter. He jumped out, running to the wall, yelling as he ran.
“Get that line over the wall,” he cried through cupped hands. “Move your ass!”
One of the blackbellies hurried to the line and tossed It up onto the wall, to one of the waiting guards at its top. They got hold of the thing, then frantically began attaching a pulley set up to the wall itself.
Hauk got up to them, breathing heavily. He had to get Plissken back. It had become vital to him in ways that he couldn’t even begin to understand or analyze. “Come on,” he whispered urgently. “Come on.”
They got past the wall of cars, and jumped at the retaining wall, grabbing the top to scramble over. Plissken got to the top and looked back. The Duke was no more than fifty steps behind, getting through the cars.