flexibility, like a mask made of human skin. It was a filthy, smeared head, hair plastered with the wet gook that encased it so that it was impossible to tell where the hair ended and dirt began. The eyes were wide and staring, unblinking.
Mist rose with the head, and noxious gases-like potato rot. Plissken felt revulsion climb up his spine as the head became a whole body that slithered out of the underground, crawling along the cracked and broken streets. The body was naked, covered with slime. The stench was odious, nearly overpowering, and Plissken had to fight to keep from gagging.
Another ghoul followed the first, then another. Some naked, others in rags, all covered with putrid slime and open, running sores. The crazies. Glassy-eyed demons from the vaporous pits of hell, up to make a mockery of the word human.
They moved down the center of the street, open gasping mouths breathing shallow, pleuritic rasps. Growls. They were the borderline, the netherworld between life and-what? Death? Surely death would be the long lost brother to them all. They were hungry, foraging for fresh meat.
He tried to move, to put distance between himself and the obscene devil dance that lined out down the street. But they kept coming, more all the time.
His legs didn’t want to work. He forced all his concentration on them, trying to squeeze the waking nightmare from his charging brain. Still they came, an army of them. The smell rose in quivering waves from the streets to laugh at the rumbling heavens.
Finally he moved. Slow steps at first, faltering, like a child learning to walk; then faster, more sure. He finally turned his head completely from the spectacle and raced through the long shadows, toward the dubious safety of the buildings.
They were everywhere then, filling the streets with inhuman gurgles. He came to a coffee shop, still relatively intact amidst a block of destruction. No door, glass gone from the windows. As he raced inside, he
caught sight of the name above the door: CHOCK FULL O’ NUTS.
The inside was dark, but he dared not turn on the flash. The place was stripped bare except for a counter that remained intact toward the back. He moved toward it, stopping when his foot creaked loudly on the tile floor.
He looked down. Much of the tile was ripped up, the floorboards were rotted, some of them were missing. Darkness stretched below the floorboards, cavernous darkness.
Moving slowly, carefully, trying not to make noise, he made his way toward the back of the building. He heard a noise outside and stopped dead, frozen in his tracks. The crazies were running now, drifting shadows, floating past the window space, driven by some internal rhythm, some perverted pathological inner vision.
He heard their bare feet slapping the concrete outside. Reaching a wall, he flattened himself against it, breathing hard, and not from the exertion. More shadows-they played the walls, even the shades of their reality distorted to incomprehension.
And then they were gone. There was quiet, and even the calm became a source of horror.
“You a cop?” whispered a voice.
Plissken jumped, swinging around. He brought up his rifle, arm shaking, to point into the darkness.
A woman sat in the shadows, staring at him.
“No,” he answered in the same whisper.
She was young, and cleaner than the others he had seen. She had definitely been pretty once, still was, but her eyes commanded her whole face now. They were deep, sunken eyes. They were eyes that had seen too much, eyes that had survived all the great disasters of the world. He couldn’t look at the woman without being hypnotized by the pain in those eyes,
“You got a gun,” she said.
More shadows flew past. Plissken jerked his head to the sounds.
“Got a smoke?” she asked.
He turned angrily to her. “Would you shut up,” he whispered urgently.
“They won’t see it,” she returned. “It’s all right if we’re quiet.”
He looked at the woman, then back outside. Moving quietly over to her, he pulled a cigarette from his jacket pocket and handed it to her. Getting back in the pocket, he fished around until he found a lighter, then handed it over, too.
The woman nodded to him, then turned her back to light it, shielding the orange glow with her body.
She took a deep drag, and gave back the lighter. “Hey, this is a real one!” She looked up at Plissken, fixing him with those pain-filled eyes. “You just get in?”
He squatted down on the ground with her, wanting to talk low. “What’s going on out there?”
She pulled gratefully on the cigarette, obviously happy to be sharing her space with someone who didn’t want to eat her. “Crazies,” she said. “End of the month. They’re out of food.”
She pulled on the cigarette again. Plissken stared at the glowing end. “Keep your hand over it,” he said harshly.
She did as she was told. “My name’s Maureen,” she began, as if they were strangers on a train off on holiday somewhere. “I got caught on the street after dark. Now I’m stuck here all night.”
Plissken split his time between watching her cigarette and the broken windows. “Plane crash,” he said, talking every time his head turned back to her. “Eight hours ago. Near Eighth Avenue. Jet came down. You see it?”
She shook her head, totally disinterested. “No.”
Plissken slumped down, exhaling deeply. Another dead end and God only knew how long he would be pinned down.
“You’re a cop,” she said,
“I’m an asshole,” he returned.
“With a gun,” she said sternly, twisting her face. “Who are you?”
He didn’t even look at her. “Snake Plissken ”
She sounded surprised. “You’re Snake Plissken?”
“Yeah.”
“I heard you were dead.”
He reached out and clamped her hands around the cigarette again. “I am,” he answered.
She just held the smoker, forgetting it completely. “What are you doing in here with a gun?”
He was watching her cigarette, watching the barrel of ash get longer and longer on its end. He couldn’t believe that an ash could get so long without falling off. “Looking for somebody,” he said.
“Who?”
The long ash fell off, drifting in pieces to the floor. “The President,” he said, and glanced up to find that she was staring at him. “Our President.”
Maureen, who got caught out after dark, shook her head. There were some things that even an inmate in the New York Penitentiary wouldn’t believe. “Come on,” she said.
Plissken shrugged. He didn’t give a damn whether she believed him or not “That’s it.”
“He’s really here?”
He made a sweeping gesture with his leather-clad arm. “Somewhere,” he replied.
Maureen slid closer to him, touching with her body, side connected with his from shoulder to ankle. He liked it; it felt good. There could be worse people to be trapped all night with, worse people to be the last to touch in your life.
She cuddled close and put a hand on his arm. “And when you find him, you’re gonna take him out?”
“Yeah,” he said.
She touched his leg with a soft, gentle hand, dredging up some long-forgotten ritual practiced back when there had been rituals, a million years, a million life-times ago. She feather-touched up and down his leg.
“Take me out with you?” she cooed into his ear.
He played the game with her, played human being for just a little while. “If you give me reason to.”
Taking his face in her hands, she kissed him deeply. The lips were there, the tongue, but the passion was gone, burned out by too much chaos. “I can think of lots of reasons,” she whispered after breaking the pretend kiss.
