Escape From New York by Mike McQuay Read Free Book Online Page A

moving down.”
    He had the pilot take him down low, down to the rooftops. Straight ahead he could see a large cloud of rising smoke, lit from beneath. The pressure and humidity were pushing against the smoke, forcing it back down upon itself. It seemed to just hang there, suspended in space and time.
    Hauk was back on the mike, “Crash site ahead, Rehme.”
    “Roger,” came the reply. “I have you on the board.”
    “We’re going down.”
    They brought the copters down right on the streets. Deadly streets. Visions of perdition. They were in a valley, canyons of stone towering all around them. The streets were dark and desolate, the garbage of internal decay strewn everywhere. The burned-out and silent hulks of dead cars lined the roadway. They slept on rusted axles, tires long gone as good burning fuel for fires. The street was filled with smoke rolling back upon itself, a surreal landscape in the lower levels of hell. A fire burned in the midst of the smoke. A bright, sputtering fire that ignited the smoke and lit the street to a flickering nightmare.
    “Don’t shut down the engines,” Hauk told the pilot, and opened the door to the racket. The dark mouths of the other choppers had opened already, vomiting blackbellies with long, shiny rifles and glowing red goggles for eyes.
    Their flashlights came on, stabbing the darkness with small, symmetrical lines of brightness. The smoke came down on the beams, giving solid substance to them. Smoke danced in the light, made a game of it all.
    The blackbellies formed tight defensive lines and began to advance, flashlight beams dancing and jiggling with the smoke as they moved. Hauk narrowed his eyes to a squint, trying to see through the congestion.
    They moved slowly, carefully. Hauk was worried about the men. They were pumped up, ready to kill. If it came to that, he would have a difficult time controlling them.
    “Commissioner!” someone yelled. “Sir!”
    He moved out of the line, toward the voice. He waded through the curtain of smoke, unable to peg the sounds.
    “Where are you?” he called.
    “Here, sir. Over here!”
    A flashlight beam was wiggling through the haze, coming back at him. He walked to the beam, tracing it back like a lifeline. A uniformed captain was attached to the other end.
    “What have you got?” Hauk asked when he got up on the man.
    “Here . . . something.”
    He tilted the beam in the other direction. Something as bright and orange as a gasoline fire was billowing into the light
    “The chute,” Hauk said.
    They moved toward the thing, twenty yards in the distance. It was trying to rise in the natural updraft between the buildings, but the low pressure kept pushing it back down. They followed the chute lines for another thirty feet and found the pod.
    It was round, the size of a weather balloon and was solidly imbedded in the side of a building, only about half exposed. Hauk ran up to it. The hatch was already open.
    “Damn.” He leaned over the opening and looked inside. The monitor board was blipping happily, but the pod was empty. The President’s vital signs were there; he was gone.
    The captain was at his elbow. “Look.”
    He looked. The man was pointing.
    A figure was moving out of the smoke and the darkness toward them. It moved slowly, shuffling.
    The captain brought a rifle up beside Hauk. The Commissioner pushed it aside. He could hear the sound of weapons being primed off in the smoke.
    “Hold your fire!” he barked into the haze.
    The figure, gauzy and ethereal, came closer. It was a man or least it had once been. Hauk started moving toward him. He was thin like ice on the Hudson, pale and wispy as the gray smoke that stirred around him, clinging to his ragged clothes. He was living death, a walking corpse. He stopped
    “I’m Romero,” he rasped.
    Hauk walked right up to him, smelling the rot that rolled out of his mouth and passed for breath. “I’m Hauk.”
    “I know.”
    Romero smiled broadly, a grinning