Merian C. Cooper's King Kong (26 page)

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Ann Darrow awoke to see the bright lights, hear the blaring horn and screeching brakes of the bus as it collided with the monster holding her in its grip. She clung on tightly as Kong staggered backward before recovering his balance and advancing on his adversary with the same unconquerable fury that she had seen on the island. With three crashing blows he caved in the top of the bus, almost flattening it to the ground. When the horn became stuck and blared continuously, Ann could sense Kong's fury redouble. He lifted the front of the wreck and sent it spinning across Broadway, taking out light posts and cars all along the street. Spilled gasoline flared with a
whump,
bursting into flickering light and heat. The street had become a living hell.

Ann barely had time to recover before going on the ride of her life. The hand that held her swung in a wide arc as Kong advanced rapidly down Broadway. The movement caused Ann's head to spin. She glimpsed cars that pulled to the side as the people leaped out and ran screaming. The fire, the sirens, the screams, all vanished behind them.

Ann could not yet fully grasp her situation. Suddenly she felt herself being thrust amid the thick, bristling fur in the crook of Kong's arm. Then she felt a cool rush of wind, mixed with a sudden feeling of weightlessness. The world below her fell away and the stars danced dizzily in the night sky above her. Ann weakly cried the name of the one who had saved her before: “Jack!” He did not answer, and as the darkness engulfed her, so did despair.

22

NEW YORK
JUNE 30–JULY 1, 1933

Jack Driscoll staggered to the window just in time to see Kong's shadowy form ascend the side of a building and swing out of sight.

“Denham!” he shouted in frustration and anger. “Denham! Where are you? Can't you stop this brute you turned loose on the city?” He threw open the door and hurried down the hall to the elevator.

In the streets below, he saw that New York was mobilizing for a fantastic pursuit. From all directions, police cars raced toward the hotel, their sirens screaming for clear traffic lanes. A hundred police nightsticks rapped the pavements and aroused a hundred more. Driscoll could only hope that even far south on Centre Street a dozen motorcycle cops, with tommy guns, were careening out of headquarters, and that in their wake rolled a squadron of the department's cars.

Driscoll wondered how the brute had broken loose. Those chains should have restrained even an army tank! Jack felt a moment of despair, but he could not let himself give up hope, not now, not after everything he and Ann had survived on the island. He had saved Ann once before, and there had to be a way to do it again. Driscoll caught sight of Denham, surrounded by policemen, as the director ran breathlessly around a corner in front of the hotel, pointing ahead. “He went up the side of the hotel, Officer! Don't shake your head at me, you half-witted flatfoot. He did! I tell you, that beast can climb smooth marble!”

Jack pushed through the cops surrounding his employer, yelling, “Denham! He got her.”

Denham stopped short and, lifting his clenched fists, let loose a torrent of profanity. One of the policemen hiked up his coattail and hauled out a revolver, his eyes darting feverishly as if he expected Kong to materialize out of thin air. The police radio cars screeched in six at a time in the cleared lanes.

Denham ran dry at last. “Which way did he take her, Jack? Did you see?”

“No, but he shouldn't be hard to—look!” yelled Driscoll.

The packed throng turned as one as Kong appeared two blocks down, swiping a mighty arm at an automobile. It went tumbling, its shattering windows reflecting the red and blue glare of a neon sign.

“Ann!” cried Jack, as he could see the white patch of her form in the crook of Kong's left arm. The policemen fired their revolvers.

“Stop, you idiots!” thundered Denham. “He's holding a woman! You're going to hit her!”

A sergeant bawled, “You heard him! Cease fire!” He rushed to a fire truck that had pulled up to the curb. “I'm commandeerin' this vehicle, sonny. Come on, pile on, men! Okay, waterboy, follow that ape, and don't use your siren!”

Jack Driscoll scrambled aboard, and Denham, too, a moment before the truck screeched off in pursuit.

“Keep going!” yelled Driscoll to the driver as they neared the intersection. “He was heading east, toward Sixth Avenue. Go a block past where we saw him and stop.”

The truck whipped into the turn, sped on, and then shuddered to a stop. Denham leaped down, but he saw no trace of Kong.

Then a man in a taxi driver's hat stumbled across the street, his face ashen. “It—it—there! That way!” he shouted, waving a frantic arm eastward, toward the dark shadow of the elevated tracks. The man's eyes were wide, and his mouth worked soundlessly before he began to scream, “It jumped! I swear, I seen it! It jumped from that building there, to the El tracks, and from the tracks to the building on the other side! What was it? What—”

“Scatter,” shouted Driscoll. “Circle the whole block!”

To the east, yellow headlights in front of screaming sirens converged. The hunt was on.

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“Come on, Jack!” Carl Denham mounted the fire truck and ordered the driver to speed on, but the man sounded the truck's siren instead as other yellow headlights raced forward. They stopped abruptly. A stuttering string of motorcycles followed, and close behind another car stopped as well. Denham grimaced, seeing the chief of police emerge from one of the cars. The others were looking for Kong, but this man was looking for him—and saw him.

He grabbed Denham's arm and pulled him from the fire truck, his face contorted in rage. “You're the cause of this, Denham! I told your boys that this show of yours would end in disaster, but they went over my head. How many strings did you have to pull to get that beast into my city?”

“You're not gonna stop him by shaking my teeth out,” Denham said, pushing forward. He saw from the corner of his eye that Jack had stepped down from the fire truck too and stood at his right hand, looking ready to take on the whole police department. Good man, Jack Driscoll, Denham thought.

The chief let go of Denham's sleeve but stared in fury at the director. He waved his arm wildly and shouted, “Look!”

Denham did, and saw debris everywhere. Huge holes ripped into the sides of buildings showed where Kong's hands had taken hold before swinging from one brick- or stone-lined window to another. The top of one structure had been partially caved in from the weight of his footfall. Pieces of overturned cars lay strewn like confetti after some macabre parade. Fires had erupted everywhere, and the fire trucks had gone into action. A low growling rumble echoed ominously up the street.

And the ambulances had spilled emergency medical workers into the streets. They rushed from huddled form to huddled form, sometimes stopping to treat an injury, sometimes feeling for a pulse and finding none before moving on. The police chief's face was livid. “Look at those bodies, Denham. Innocent, hardworking people who had no stake in your get-rich-quick schemes, or your fame. It'll take weeks to clean up this mess, and God knows how much it will cost! I hope you're proud of yourself. If I were able, I'd cuff you and have you in front of a judge by morning. But we all got a message from the mayor telling us not to haul you in until we bring that monster down. Another one of your cronies?”

Before Denham could answer, Kong loomed from the darkness three blocks down the street, eerily illuminated by the surrounding fires. The giant saw the crowd, bellowed a challenge, and charged with unimaginable speed.

Driscoll's reactions were quickest. He shot to one side, an outswept arm catching Denham and throwing him to the ground. Denham raised his head and saw Kong's gigantic foot crush the chief's car. A swipe of Kong's arm cleared a whole squad of motorcycles, sending them and their drivers tumbling wildly end over end. He then turned and smashed the fire engine. He tore off an entire axle and flung it into the fourth story of a nearby building. “If I only had a camera!” Denham growled.

Kong paused to pound his chest, then with a grunt started quickly down Sixth Avenue, back the way he had come. Behind him the street seemed to writhe in agony. Denham pushed himself to his feet. The fires raged higher. The wounded lay moaning. The dead lay still.

Driscoll said, “Come on. We can't let him get out of sight.” Denham pounded after him, hearing the chief, who had been knocked aside by a blow of Kong's fist, calling after them to stop.

They did not. Like Driscoll, Denham valued Ann's life even more than his own. He had glimpsed the soft, white-clad form of Ann Darrow in the monster's grip and had seen that Ann was not moving on her own. Her motions were that of a juggled rag doll. And she hadn't uttered a sound.

Denham could only hope they weren't already too late.

23

NEW YORK
JUNE 30–JULY 1, 1933

Following the surreal hulk of Kong to the east, Driscoll and Denham found themselves running sideways into a squadron of vehicles that had been screaming down Fifth Avenue. The cars careened to a stop, their brakes screeching. The motorcycles swung in front, on either flank, and in the rear, of a fire truck, falling into formation like destroyers around a battleship. A shaking policeman was pointing south, yelling something unintelligible, but again Kong was nowhere to be seen.

Denham recognized the mayor and the commissioner in the back of the center car. It jumped the curb, the back door flew open, and a familiar voice barked, “Denham! In here, man!”

Denham gripped Driscoll's arm and dragged him into the car. The driver didn't even wait for them to close the door before gunning the engine, and nearly pitched the two men off their backward-facing seat.

Denham pushed himself back upright and said wryly, “Surprised to see you here, your honor.”

The mayor of New York met his gaze and snapped, “Not any more than I'm surprised to see you—alive.”

Denham knew what that meant. This man had pulled strings for him, and Denham had greased the palms of other politicians and had made extravagant promises to them just to get permission to exhibit King Kong in the city. Someone would have to pay.

But Denham had no time to think of that now. He realized there was nothing he could do to reverse what had happened, what was happening now, or what was going to happen. Forces larger than he had now taken such power from his hands. In Denham's own mind, if only he could help save Ann, at least one person for whom he was directly responsible, then maybe he could in a small way redeem—

“We've got to save the girl!” yelled Driscoll. “That's the point!”

“We need to get ahead of him!” barked Denham. “If we had some idea of where Kong will head—”

“I can make a guess,” Driscoll growled. “It'll be someplace high up, as high as he can get. Kong is used to mountains. He lived in one. The higher he is, the safer he feels. There's just one building in New York that towers over the others, and that's the building we'll find him on. On the very top of it!”

“The Empire State Building,” the mayor said slowly. “It's the pride of the city. If that thing damages it—”

“Impossible!” said the blunt chief inspector.

“Driscoll's right, though,” Denham shot back. “Kong will head for high ground. That's our best bet, if we can beat him there!”

“I guess it's our only bet,” the commissioner snarled. “Okay, driver, let's go. Floor it.”

But the driver couldn't speed through the crush of people filling the streets, jostling and pointing and shrieking, “There! Down there!”

Denham turned in his seat, craning to look over his shoulder. Kong appeared far down the street; again he crouched for a brief instant on the roof of a building and again disappeared. Cameras flashed. The mayor rolled down his window and yelled to a cop, “Confiscate those cameras! Every one! Now!” Denham smiled grimly to himself. That was a politician for you: Make it go away. Make people think they hadn't seen what they knew they had. The cover-up had already started.

The driver sounded his horn, wrenched the wheel, and finally found an opening. Down a one-way street the wrong way, then a screeching turn on two wheels, then another. Denham held on with both hands, still turned to look toward their destination. Ahead, the spire of the Empire State Building pierced the night sky in a blaze of white light. They reached the building's corner just in time to witness a scene which Denham would have sworn no one of them could believe, even as they sat watching. From a roof on the upper side of the street, Kong leaped. His black, monstrous body curved in a long arc, clear across the street to the skyscraping structure opposite. And then he pulled himself up, from window ledge to window ledge, until he turned the corner of the building and vanished.

Driscoll, Denham, and the commissioner quickly emerged from the car. The mayor stayed in the car and yelled an order, and the driver backed the vehicle, spun it in a tight turn, and left a cloud of exhaust and the reek of burning rubber behind.

The others reached the corner of the block and could see the beast-god high overhead, climbing from setback to setback as if he were scaling the cliffs of Skull Mountain. Six blatting motorcycles screeched in from the darkness, policemen leaping off them and raising their machine guns.

“No! Don't shoot,” ordered the commissioner. “He's still got the girl.”

There was no mistaking that. Denham could see the small, pale form of Ann. She seemed to be awake now, thank God, and appeared to be gripping the hair on Kong's shoulder.

“Send some of those tommy guns up the elevators,” the commissioner ordered. “He'll never be able to climb to the top. We'll maybe catch him on the roof of one setback or another, have a clear shot.”