“Yeah,” Plissken responded, but he wasn’t really listening. He was feeling the hairs on the back of his neck bristling. It felt bad. It felt all wrong. He began craning his head around as the moving stairs neared the upper lobby, trying to reassure himself.
“What’s wrong?” Taylor asked.
Plissken shook his head, lips tight “Something…” he started, then trailed off.
They got off the escalator. The lobby was totally deserted, not anything like the main lobby in the Atlanta terminal. There wasn’t even any Security here. They started walking across it, Plissken still glancing around.
Taylor slapped him on the shoulder. “Take it easy, Snake,” he said. “It’s four in the morning, man. Stop worrying. We made it.”
Plissken had about a second to appreciate the wisdom of that remark before the air exploded around them. There were sounds of automatic rifle fire, then Taylor spun off screaming, going for the floor which was coming apart in chunks around them.
Plissken went down with him, holding him. The man’s left arm had been chewed to pieces. He lay there, cursing through clenched teeth, his fatigue jacket already dyed red, blood-soaked, dripping in an evergrowing pool on the cement floor.
“God, Snake,” he rasped. “God… DAMN!”
Plissken tried to pull him to his feet. “Come on!” He looked across to the far side escalators. Blackbellies were spread across the escalator bank one floor up and were coming down. Kevlarred killers, crazies with badges. They carried AR-15s, up and ready. Black riot helmets with darkened visors covered their heads. The devil in black times six.
“Come on!”
He got the man onto his feet, but Taylor was already in bad shape. When he looked at Plissken, there was resignation in his face, resignation that hadn’t been there even in Leningrad.
They ran back the way they had come, and the guns started chattering again behind them. Taylor fell behind, blood loss and the bum leg taking their toll.
Plissken bounded down the escalator, and started eating up the platform in great leaping strides. He turned once to make sure that Taylor was all right. The little man was nowhere to be seen.
He slowed, then stopped. He looked back for Taylor, then turned to stare down the long platform that could mean escape.
He turned back. “Taylor!” he called. “Taylor!”
Taylor wasn’t coming, he knew that. He also knew that there was nothing he could do about it. Turning, he looked once more down the length of the platform. His instincts told him to run. But Taylor was all he had left. They were all gone, everyone else who knew Snake Plissken as a real human being. All dead.
He sighed once, then trotted back to the escalators and up. He reached the top. Taylor was on his belly on the floor, crawling, leaving a bloody trail behind him like a snail’s. The blackbellies, rifles ready, moved slowly in on him. They were drawing it out, teasing, giving him that last look at daylight.
Plissken felt his stomach muscles tighten. He hated blackbellies, hated the stench of death that rolled off them like fog off the marshes. He dropped his satchel on the floor and raised his hands.
Rifles came up to cover him. “Drop the bag, Taylor,” he said.
The man looked up, tore into him with pleading eyes. He clutched the now bloody satchel tighter and kept moving, sliding through his own gore. “Go on, Lieutenant,” he rasped, and his voice was like an old man’s. “Go on.”
Plissken’s eyes jumped back and forth between Taylor and the blackbellies. He could see them vibrating, smelling the blood and wanting more. He spoke slowly, nonthreatening, emphasizing each word. “Drop the bag, Taylor.”
The man opened his mouth to speak, but the words never came. One of the gunmen opened fire on the little man, and the others started in right after. Taylor’s body jumped and twitched the death dance as the troopers, one by one, emptied their rifles into him. It was quite a show. They were all very pleased.
Plissken just stared as they moved in to grab him. When Taylor died, he took a good chunk of Snake Plissken with him. He was all alone then, and for once, the grief was enough to push the pain out of his head.
They grabbed him, jerking his arms roughly behind his back to shackle him. He didn’t mind the pain, though. There were worse things.
III
October 23
7:30 P.M.
Bob Hauk let the sound of the copter blades mesmerize him as he stared out through the bubble at the churning black waters of the Hudson below.
It was going to rain; the air just reeked of it, but Meteorology told them that there was no gas in these clouds. They said that it would be a clean rain. The people at Meteorology were notorious liars.
They used to call him Big Bob when he was in the service. But that was a long time ago, back when there had been a spark within him. Back before the craziness. Now they just called him Hauk, and it was just the way he should be called.
He had once been a leader of men, a lover of people and a believer in ideals. Now he presided over the largest asylum in the history of the world. Now he sat in a chair and put his time in, counting off the days until he died. It was as worthwhile an occupation as he could think of. He had been hard once, hard and lean. But that was all decaying slowly to fat. His eyes were still commanding, though. He hadn’t lost that. They were ice blue and as direct as armor-piercing shells.
The radio squawked beside him, and he jerked his head to stare at it. The pilot reached out and juiced it. “Yeah,” he said.
“Gotham 4. This is Control. Do you read? Over.”
“Got you covered. Control. Go ahead. Over.”
Hauk continued to stare at the radio, almost as if it were a living thing talking to him there in the pale red light of the instruments. He shook his head and turned back to the window. Maybe the gas was affecting him, too.
“We have a radar blip in North Bay, section seventeen. Object moving toward the Jersey Wall. Can you check it out? Over.”
“Negative, Control,” the pilot said in a monotone. He wore his black helmet with the visor up to reveal his face. The tiny microphone bent around the side of the helmet, right up to his mouth. “I have Commissioner Hauk on board, and we are enroute to Headquarters.”
Hauk raised his hand without turning from the window and waved that off.
“Control. This is Gotham 4 again,” the pilot said, and he had an edge of excitement to his voice that made Hauk’s stomach turn. “The Commissioner gave me the go ahead. I am in pursuit of the bogey. Over.”
The chopper tilted forty-five degrees to curl back toward the city and for several seconds, Hauk found himself staring into the heart of the low-hanging cloud bank that the liars in Meteorology said contained no gas. Then they leveled off and came in at skyscraper level over the remnants of the west side elevated near Battery Park.
It had once been called New York City but that, like Hauk’s fortitude, had been before the craziness. Now it was the New York Maximum Security Penitentiary and it held three million killers, cutthroats, thieves and lunatics.
And Bob Hauk, God help him, was in charge.
He let his eyes drift over the corpse of the city. It was a blackened shell, a concrete forest of dead, towering trees. Its lifeless towers stretched like monstrous tombstones into the heart of the black night. Occasional fires flickered below him; the animals who now controlled those dead streets were playing out the disease that ruled their minds. But soon it would be winter, and the animals would grow a lot fewer in number. Hauk figured that couldn’t help but be a good thing.
New York City had been the first North American target in the war. It was under siege for three full weeks with fire bombs and gas. When it was over, those who were left alive were crazy. They roamed the streets in large packs, desecrating and cannibalizing what bodies they found. What remains there were got piled in layers up and down Wall Street, and that section of town became known as the boneyard,