it, he thought he saw the flash of a moving shadow ahead, but when he got to the spot, there was nothing.
The stairway door was gone. He started down.
It was a hell of a long way.
About six floors down, the speed took hold and began jerking his body to a new metabolic rhythm. He picked up the pace. Every floor down had its own landing, then the stairs would turn back upon themselves and go on for another landing. Each landing was a new world.
There were bodies on the landings in various stages of decomposition. Some without heads, some just heads. There were the remnants of campfires long past, piles of animal bones, probably dogs and cats, scattered through the ashes. The smell was always bad and often overpowering. Plissken found a roll of gauze in his survival kit and wrapped it around his nose and mouth in several layers to keep out the smell. It didn’t work very well.
It took longer to get down than he could have possibly imagined. Even with the meth, it seemed like he was destined to descend stairs for the rest of his life. The steps finally terminated in a small hallway.
He unwrapped the gauze and threw it aside. Then he moved forward, slowly, with care. He was on street level then, in the thick of it. The hallway ended with the building’s lobby. Plissken stood in the entryway, letting his eyes roam the shambles that spread out darkly before him.
Afraid to use the flash, he made out the lumpous forms of broken and overturned furniture through bits of dim lighting that filtered in from outside.
There was a flickering orange glow climbing on the wall farthest from him that formed strange, jumping shadows. Unable to make out the source of the light because of a dilapidated information desk, he began creeping toward it.
The smell reached him first. Food cooking-meat. It was mixed in with the smell of charred wood. He moved agilely, catlike, around the helter skelter destruction of the room. His eye hurt, always hurt, but the speed had somehow anesthetized the ache in his side. He reached the information desk and peeked over its top.
Three men were seated crosslegged around the small fire. They were roasting a straggly cat on an umbrella shaft. They were talking too low for Plissken to hear.
They were stripped to the waist, and something the color of rust was smeared over their chests and faces. They had waist-length hair that was held in place by headbands. One of them had green and yellow parrot feathers stuck in the band to make a crude headdress. Indians.
Their weapons lay close at hand, long knives that glinted in the firelight, hand-fashioned bows and quivers of arrows made from the shafts of fishing rods with ten-penny nails stuck in the ends. A long pole lay beside them, leaning against the shadow-jumping wall. At first Plissken thought that the things hanging from it were the pelts of small animals. Then he realized what they really were-human scalps.
He was backing away from the desk when he heard the snap of wood. He flared around and one of the shadows had pulled away from the room of shadows and was hurtling through the air toward him.
There was no reaction time-an Indian, screaming, was on top of him. His screams charged the atmosphere, icy and inhuman, and his eyes were wild and glazed.
Plissken went back with the man, but didn’t fall. The Indian held his hands up taut, holding piano wire stretched between them. The throat was what he wanted. In flashes, Plissken watched the humming wire vibrate toward him. He got his hand up at the last second to protect himself.
The wire twanged on his hand-F# above middle C. It tightened the hand against his own neck, strangulating, cutting deeply into the side of his palm. The arms tightening the noose were impossibly strong, the strength of madness.
They pulled him backward. He went with it, forcing the flow, not fighting. When he connected with the man’s body, he jammed back with his free elbow, plunging hard into soft belly flesh.
The Indian’s scream turned to a gurgled choke and the man doubled over, releasing his hold on the wire. Plissken was around on him instinctively, his arm way above his head. He came down hard, like thunder on the exposed Indian neck. And even the choking stopped as the madman went to the demolished floor like someone had cut his string.
Plissken was off and running down the first corridor he saw. The shouts of the other Indians filled the hollow hall to cacophony all around him. They were too close.
Without turning or looking, his hand went to the survival pack, closing on the wide mouth barrel of a flare pistol. Still running, he got it out and cocked the less than precision hammer; he wheeled, skidded to a stop and fired.
His assailants were less than twenty feet behind him. The phosphorous ball whooshed from the barrel, exploding the hallway in brilliant light. It hit the floor, popping loudly, streamers of white-hot burning light squirting everywhere like a fountain, or like the Fourth of July. The Indians, in bold relief, lit to washed-out white, dove for cover. And Snake Plissken was off and running again.
The corridor ended in a metal door that looked like it had never been opened. He charged toward it, cocking the pistol again. Then, on a dead run, he fired. The door went up, blasting right out of its frame. On its other side, black night.
Plissken was through the door, in an alley. He just picked a direction and ran-free-at least for the moment.
Reaching the end of the alley, he skittered into the tangle of concrete jungle that was the city. He ran another block, two blocks, until he was sure that he wasn’t being followed.
Then he climbed the cracked, broken steps of a dead brownstone and squatted down in the shadows of its entryway. The building was intact for a floor above him. The rest of it was a pile of bricks and pretzel-twisted steel girders. Much of the block was bombed-out in the same way. It looked like the place where all the old buildings came to die.
He took his breath in measured doses, his eye roaming the deserted streets for enemies. It was a jungle, and he was both predator and prey in the chain of survival. There were no rational systems to apply here, no codes, no ethics. There was only life and death.
He wiped a hand across his sweat-streaming face and reached into the bulky holster. His rifle was in two parts. He took them out and snapped them together without looking; his eye was busy with the crumbling streets. The pieces locked together with a solid click, and he let his hands linger on the gun’s contours for just a second before reaching into the pouch for a clip of ammunition.
The ammo slid in slowly, sensuously, and locked into place. Snake Plissken stood up full and primed the bolt. He tucked the weapon under his arm and strode resolutely down the steps. If he had to survive here as an animal, let it be as a lion.
He moved into the street and turned around full. In the distance a wide avenue was filled completely with smoke. The plane. He moved toward it, eye wary, always watching.
Junked cars filled the street. He moved past each one carefully, checking for surprises. When he reached the smoke, he put on the ruby goggles and his field of vision became ghostlike; negative images drifted dreamlike before him. He felt removed from his body, like a spirit observing an unreal landscape.
Reaching into the pouch, he removed the tiny homer that was keyed to the President’s bracelet. Nothing. He wasn’t close enough to the source yet.
He kept moving through the smoke until he caught sight of the diffusing light from a dying fire. He moved toward the place. First he came to chunks of burned, twisted metal and scattered wreckage. Then a wheel. Then a seat-it was sitting upright, pretty as you please, right in the middle of the street. Something was strapped to it: it was a glob, an oozing broken glob. He had to assume that it had once been a human being, since he couldn’t imagine what else could have been strapped to a seat like that.
He moved on.
Most of the plane was in one spot. It had smashed into the building and then slid down its side, taking huge chunks of steel and concrete down with it. It had exploded at least once, and what had been a tail section was nothing more than a blackened hole. Part of the cabin remained intact, and the white fire came from in there.
He looked through one of the port windows. The whole inside of the cabin was charred black, fire apparently having flashed through the heavily oxygenated atmosphere to scald everyone in a matter of seconds. The bodies were black things, stiff and twiglike. The fire that still burned within the cabin was electrical, as wiring from reading lamps continued burning and shorting.
Plissken turned from the window and took off the goggles. His good eye caught movement and he turned
