the voice was getting louder, more insistent.
He pulled and strained and finally made it to the top. The light was bright, blinding. It hurt his good eye and made his bad eye throb uncontrollably, setting his head on fire.
He focused. An ugly face with a crooked nose and breath that smelled of kerosene filled all of his vision. The face was smiling obscenely.
“Let’s go, Snake,” it said.
He shook his head and looked around. He was lying on a table in a large, wrecked dining room. The place had been gingerbread house ornate at one time, but the gingerbread of ancient times had gotten stale and crumbled away.
Gypsies surrounded him. They were all grinning widely, nodding their shaggy, moustached faces.
Plissken tried to sit up, but the pain in his head nearly blacked him out again. Shutting his eye tight, he opened it slowly, letting the pain seep in. He looked down at his leg. The arrow was gone, a dirty rag tightly wound took its place. His pants leg was soaked with blood. The blood was dry. He realized that he had been there for a long time. His shirt was gone. He was cold.
“Come on,” said the man who had woke him up.
They were levelling crossbows at him, fearful of him even in his condition. A tribute, he supposed. Somebody poked him with an ax handle. He was kitten weak, barely able to hold himself upright. Putting up his hands, he feebly tried to ward them off. It was then that he noticed that the countdown clock was gone from his wrist.
“Get up!” the man said.
They pulled him to his feet, but it was like walking in a dream, a hazy, pain-filled dream. Besides the concussion that he must have surely had, he had probably lost enough blood to qualify him for an economy rate at the donor bank. They pushed him toward the door.
Plissken wobbled through the door. His leg hurt, but he could put some weight on it if he just concentrated on the incredible pain in his head. Small consolation.
They were in a long, dark hallway. It was a wreck, totally junked and of the same style as the dining room. He heard a rumbling sound in the distance, but couldn’t quite make it out.
A hand shoved him roughly along.
He started to turn, to breathe fire at them. But he saw something that made the words burn in his own throat. Something was coming from the other direction. It was two Gypsies bearing a stretcher.
As it went past, he glanced down at it. They were carrying a man, in pieces. It looked like he had been literally torn apart. The sound came up again. It was cheering.
Dying light filtered in tiny shafts through some high ceiling transoms, but he couldn’t tell how late it was. “How about the time?” he mumbled to his captors.
They all laughed. “Time to die, Snake,” one of them said.
The sounds got louder the farther they walked. Finally, they came to the end of the hall and turned a corner, walking directly into a stentorian wall of sound.
The cheering came from thousands of voices. They were in the huge lobby of Grand Central Station, with its cloud-scraping ceiling, wide open. The place was filled with chairs, and all the chairs were filled by gross human imitators yelling and stomping their feet. It wasn’t just Gypsies, but every gang was represented: Africks, Low Riders, Chinkas, Dollies, Octoes, all were there.
The cheering increased in volume as more and more of them saw Plissken enter the room. It rang up to the ceiling and rained back down. The Snake felt as if he were on the inside of a bell.
They kept pushing him along through the frenzied crowds. They reached for him as he went by, hands everywhere, but the guards kept him from falling into those hands. They had apparently planned something a lot more enjoyable.
The smell in the room was bad, all sweat and belly gas, the granddaddy of all locker rooms. He breathed through his mouth. They kept moving him toward the center of the room. There was something there, lit by torches. He got close enough to see. It was a ring, a boxing ring. He got all the way up on it. The canvas was completely covered with blood.
He was pushed through the crudely strung ropes, into the ring itself. He glanced around the sea of faces that leered up at him-not an ounce of sympathy in the whole lot. His name had apparently lost its magic. His eyes drifted upwards. The Duke sat in a special box, surrounded by his lieutenants. He had Plissken’s rifle strapped on his back and he wore a big, contented smile on his face.
Noise came from behind him. Someone else was being led up to the ring, and the cheering increased in volume again. Then there was a chant, a name being called over and over.
“Slag. Slag. Slag.”
The man climbed through the ropes. He was huge, the biggest man Plissken had ever seen. His muscles were toned and rigid, oiled to glistening in the torchlight. He was an ox, a machine. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on him. He wore black tights and shiny knee boots.
The Snake backed away, leaning against a corner post. His eye went to the man’s hand; he was wearing Plissken’s watch. He squinted and turned his head sideways to read the face. It read: 4:02:15.
He looked into Slag’s face. The man smiled slowly, evilly-almost as if he understood.
Hauk sat in the control bunker, the stationary eye in the middle of the swirling hurricane of activity. He watched the outside monitor screens. The choppers were warming up on the pads again. All of them. But this time there would be no holding back, no restraint. No discretion.
It was all out of control. This time the blackbellies would go in with their guns screaming, and they wouldn’t stop screaming until they ran out of ammo. Once unchained, the black-suited killers wouldn’t stop until they had destroyed everything they could find.
It wouldn’t get the President back. It wouldn’t help the Hartford Summit. It wouldn’t even find Snake Plissken. It was lust. The simple lust for death…
And he would be giving the order.
The microphone sat before him. He picked it up, Just as he had done so many times in the past hours. He stared at it, quiet, mocking. His lifeline of air. He flipped it on.
“Plissken,” he said, low, almost a moan.
“Plissken…”
The rules were ample: no rules. Plissken kept darting his head around, looking for a way out, but Gypsies with long knives and bows had formed a circle around the ring, making sure he stayed put. Slag was clenching and unclenching his massive fists. Nobody needed to tell the Snake that it was a fight to the death. He figured that out.
The Duke was making a speech. Through the pain and the tension and the noise, he tried to focus on it.
“… And they sent in their best man. And when we roll down the Fifty Ninth Street Bridge tomorrow, on our way to freedom, we’re gonna have their best man leading the way… from the neck up, on the hood of my car!”
And the cheering went up again, and applause. The room was awash with noise, drowning in it. The Duke held up his hands for silence, and the roar died down to a growl.
“Let’s do it!” the man screamed through cupped hands, and the cheering came up again.
A Gypsy climbed through the ropes carrying two baseball bats. Louisville sluggers. He gave one to Slag, then moved to Plissken, grinning wide enough to crack his face.
Plissken took the bat and watched the Gypsy get the hell out of the ring. He wished that he could enjoy such a luxury. A man wearing a grotesque Halloween mask that looked better than the real faces, stood at ringside with a hammer. As soon as the bat boy got out of the way, he struck it to a bell. The fight was underway.
The big man’s face was a sag of flesh, as if his muscles simply got tired that high up and were pulled down by gravity. He rearranged the flesh into a hard frown and began stalking the Snake.
Plissken limped as far away from the man as the ring would allow. Slag came for him slowly, bludgeon raised high above his head. The Snake gave it all his concentration, and the crowd noises disappeared completely from his hearing. All that remained was Slag. They were the whole universe, and one of them had to die.
Plissken figured that he still had four hours left.
The big man faced off slowly, weaving back and forth, and Snake, reptile that he was, never broke eye contact. Slag lunged, his eyes giving him away a second before. The bat swung out as Plissken ducked. It whooshed over his head.
