by Diane Duane
She stopped at the corner, waiting for the light to change, while traffic streamed by in front of her. This, she thought, could be something. Now, is that a phone over there? Okay—
She crossed hurriedly, pulling out her address book. By the time she reached the phone, someone else was using it already, but the guy in question was mercifully brief. A few moments later, she was dialing.
The phone at the other end rang, picked up. The first thing MJ heard was a yawn.
“Mau-reeeeeeeeeen” MJ said, very amused, for this sound she had heard often before. Maureen liked to sleep in.
“Oh, MJ,” her friend said, “what’s your problem? Where are you, anyway? It sounds like a parking lot.”
“Nearly. Seventh Avenue, anyway. Look, are you still working at that soup place?”
“The shelter? Yup.” Another yawn. “I have a shift this afternoon.”
“That’s great. Can I come with you?”
Another yawn, mixed with an ironic laugh. “Having a sudden attack of social conscience?”
“I should, I know. But no. Listen, this is what it’s about—” She quickly told Maureen about that morning’s job-nibble. “It would be real smart if I went into this reading Thursday knowing what I’m talking about as regards homeless people, anyway.”
“Stanislavsky would approve, I guess. Listen, no problem. How’s your cooking?”
“My cooking? Not bad.”
“Good. I can always use another hand in the kitchen. Come on by and I’ll take you in to the shelter with me, and you can help me out while I’m getting ready. Then you can do your research while we’re serving.”
“Sounds great. Maureen, you’re the best.”
“You just keep telling me that. See you in a while.”
About two hours later MJ and Maureen were walking in the front door of the Third Chance Shelter on the Lower East Side. MJ had had a mental picture of a dreary, spartan kind of place, but Third Chance totally overturned it. The outer brick wall was bland, true, but inside the front door MJ found herself in a courtyard full of green plants with an open skylight, and beyond that lay several stories’ worth of meeting rooms, workrooms, a cafeteria, bedrooms, game rooms, and offices.
“We don’t have a lot of beds,” Maureen said, leading MJ into the kitchen area of the cafeteria, where people were finishing the cleanup after lunch. “Mostly we’re about feeding people, and after that, teaching them new job skills—office work, computing, things like that.” She paused a moment by one of the big stainless-steel industrial stoves, tying up her long blonde hair. Maureen was small, with one of those faces that people usually called “severely pretty,” and her gorgeous hair went almost down to her knees, causing envy in everyone who saw it.
“That was how you got into this, then?” MJ said. “The job part.”
Maureen nodded, pulling out a long apron and handing another to MJ. “They brought me in as a consultant on the computer end. Came to teach, stayed to serve.” She chuckled. “Here—”
She pulled a paperback down from the shelf, handed it to MJ. “Potato soup today,” Maureen said.
MJ turned the book over. “Alexis Soyer. Why is that name familiar?”
“He was the founding chef of the Reform Club in London. Also the last century’s greatest expert on nutrition on the cheap—he got started working in the soup kitchens in Dublin during the Great Famine. ‘A Frugal Kitchen’ there is still one of the best sources for recipes designed for maximum nutrition and minimum money.”
MJ smiled as she put on her apron. “Better than macaroni and cheese?”
“Much. There’s the potatoes. Let’s peel.”
For at least an hour, they did just that, potato after potato, hundreds of them, until MJ didn’t want to see another potato for the rest of her life. Then they started making the broth—chicken broth, as it turned out, using stripped chicken carcasses donated by one of the local places that did “fast-food” roast chicken. Herbs went in, and both sliced and pureed potatoes, and when the soup was done about two hours later, MJ could hardly stay out of it. “Old Alexis,” Maureen said, “he knew his stuff. You’ve got time for just one bowl before the customers start arriving.”
MJ was almost drowning in sweat from working over the hot stove in this humidity for two hours. All the same, her stomach growled assertively, and when Maureen handed her the bowl, MJ grabbed a spoon and finished it right to the bottom.
Maureen looked up approvingly. “It’s just four-thirty,” she said. “First shift will be in shortly. Help me get that pot onto the trolley. We’ll take it up front by the serving window.”
Together they handled the big twenty-gallon pot onto the low trolley and trundled it forward. As they passed the serving window, MJ saw that there were already a lot of people gathering out on the cafeteria side. She shook her head slightly. “Why do so many of them have their coats on?” she said. “In this weather!”
Maureen looked, shook her head. “Some of them are just old. Others—you can’t carry the stuff in your hands all the time, and most of them don’t have anywhere they can leave things. Simpler to wear them—even though in heat like this, they get so dehydrated sometimes that they pass out. We go through a lot of bottled water here. Come on—here comes the first shift.”
The two of them grabbed ladles and started filling bowls and putting them out on the cafeteria side of the serving window. Other workers were filling water pitchers, or putting out pitchers of homemade Gatorade-type drinks. “Electrolytes,” Maureen said. “This weather, you can sweat all your salts out before you even notice, and die of it.”
The soup quickly vanished. MJ lost count of how many shabbily dressed people came up to the counter, took a bowl and a spoon, nodded, said a word or two, and went off. She knew that there were a lot of homeless people in the city, but had never had it borne in on her so straightforwardly how many of them there were. She started feeling somewhat ashamed of herself for not having noticed. The single lone figures on a streetcorner, in a doorway, you could ignore, turning your head as you went by. But not these.
When she realized there wasn’t any more soup, MJ found herself suddenly not having any idea what to do. She looked up into the face of the person standing outside the serving window with an empty bowl, and could only stammer, “Uh, I’m sorry, we’re all out—”
The man nodded, walked off. MJ almost felt like crying. “Maureen—” she said.
“I know. Take a break. There’s some iced tea out here. Then we’ll go out and have a chat with people.”
“Do they mind?” MJ said a little shakily, sitting down with the iced tea.
Maureen looked at her with a small quirk of sad smile. “You mean, do they think you’re patronizing them? No. Do they know that this hurts, on both sides? Yes. But it’s better than doing nothing. Drink the tea.”
She drank it. Then they went out into the cafeteria.
It did hurt, talking to people who had had busy lives, and proud ones, and who now spent most of each given day working out in which underpass, tunnel, or doorway they would spend that night. But Maureen’s example made it easier to listen to them. By and large, though there were angry people in the cafeteria, and sullen ones, most of them were curiously and consciously kind to the first-timer, as if they were more embarrassed for their predicament than for MJ’s.
A few of them were people she felt she would have been pleased to meet socially, and the knowledge made her ashamed, considering that had she today met them in the street, MJ knew she would have looked away. The least I can do is look at them now, MJ thought, and concentrated on doing that.
Three of the people finishing their soup at one table had waved at Maureen, calling her over: she and MJ sat there, and Maureen made the introductions. “Mike,” she said, indicating one big redheaded, broad-faced man, “our newest computer nerd. He’s learning C++ during the days. Marilyn—” This was a little old lady of about seventy, from the looks of her, well wrapped in coats and sweaters, thin but a
pple-cheeked and cheerful. “She’s a few months ahead of Mike. Writes the fastest code I ever saw.”
“Only problem is,” said Marilyn, “to get me employed, we’re going to have to pass me off as a twenty-year-old.”
“Online,” Maureen said, “who’ll know the difference until it’s too late? And Lloyd.” Lloyd was a young handsome black gentleman with a face that reminded MJ of something from Egyptian monumental art, noble and still, except for when the rare smile broke through. “Lloyd is still seeking his metier. Typist, possibly. He’s got good speed.”
The chat came easily enough after that. MJ was instantly recognized and teased about her own job loss: the others seemed to think it made her more accessible, and shortly she found herself talking to them about the difficulty of getting an apartment and keeping it, the fear of losing it, how tough it was to hang on.
They told her how they did it. All of them used shelters when they could: all of them wound up in the occasional favorite doorway or tunnel. Lloyd favored the tunnels under Grand Central. “They keep trying to clean them out,” he said, “trying to get rid of us and the cats. Us and the cats, we keep coming back.”
“Not so many of us, lately,” Marilyn said. “I’ve been hearing stories—”
Glances were exchanged. “Not the transit police again,” Maureen said.
Marilyn shook her head. “Something else. Something big and dark… down in the train tunnels. A couple of people who usually sleep down there haven’t been seen, last couple of days.”
Lloyd’s eyebrows went up. “Not George Woczniak?”
“George,” Marilyn said. “Rod Wilkinson, you know Rod, told me he saw some big black guy—not black like you: black black—down there on the lower level, not far from the Lexington Avenue upramp where the maintenance tracks are. Saw him the other night, over by where George usually sleeps. Then, the last couple of days—no George. And you know how George is: predictable. This isn’t like him.”
Mike looked up and said, “Now, you know… that’s funny. Jenny McMahon, you know her, the blond lady who stays around 49th and Ninth—she was telling me she’d heard somebody telling some kind of story about something in the sewer tunnels under Second—you know where those access tunnels are—”
“Alligators again,” Marilyn said.
Mike shook his head. “Nope. This was going on two legs. Teeth, though. She said whoever told her the story said the thing had teeth like a shark’s happy dream. Lots of teeth.”
MJ’s eyes opened a little at that, but she kept her thoughts to herself for the moment.
Lloyd said, “Some of the regulars told me they didn’t want to come up topside now, because of the chance that while they were leaving, they might run across… whatever it was. Makes you wonder whether above-ground might be safer for the time being.”
Mike shrugged. “After those two guys got aced in the warehouse last night? Naah. It’s just that there’s no place safe in this city, not really safe. Not an apartment, not the top of Trump Tower, no place. The crime rate’s a disgrace.”
The conversation started to take the same kind of mildly complaining tone to be heard sooner or later from every city dweller anywhere: things are going downhill, the place is a mess, it wasn’t like this ten years ago, the city really ought to do something… MJ was having trouble concentrating on it. She was thinking about someone in black, someone with big teeth, someone around whom people vanished. “And the worst of it,” Marilyn was saying, “is that all their hair is falling out.”
“All of it?” Mike said, unbelieving. “Maybe it’s bad water.”
“Helen told me Roedean’s hair was coming out in handfuls, in patches. And a whole bunch of them over there were coming out in weird splotches on their skin.”
“This is over by Penn?” Maureen said curiously.
“Yeah,” Marilyn said. “Roedean just moved over there a couple of weeks ago, and it started. Other people took longer, but they’re doing it too. Some have moved already—they say they don’t care how comfortable the digs over there are.”
Maureen shook her head. “Are they all getting their water from a common source?”
“I don’t think so—”
“Can’t be that, then.”
Lloyd shook his head. “Lyme disease, maybe? There was just an outbreak of it up in the Park last year.”
Marilyn shook her head. “Takes longer, doesn’t it…?”
The conversation wandered on again, and MJ found herself thinking, Hair falling out. Patches on the skin. Sounds more like radiation. It was hardly a revolutionary concept for her, or any great leap of imagination. She had married a man who was very interested indeed in the effects of radiation on human beings, for very personal reasons. She had heard more than enough dissertations on the subject. And her thoughts went again to the huge dark shape with the teeth.…
Peter, she thought. Peter needs to know about this, as fast as I can find him. Wherever he is.
* * *
PETER was not available for comment just then. But on the top of a fire-hose drying tower at the southeastern edge of the Brooklyn Navy Yards, Spider-Man crouched and looked out over the place, thinking.
Hard to know where to start. Even the military doesn’t routinely paste big signs all over the outside of buildings saying, RADIOACTIVE STUFF, GET IT HERE! But all the same.… He looked over the expanse of the place, considering. You wouldn’t leave it at the outskirts, routinely. You’d put it as far inside the installation as you could—making it as difficult as possible to get in and out without detection.
Or, alternately, you would keep raw fissile material close to the subs. That’s one of the most secure parts of the base. He had seen the anti-dive nets below the surface of the entry to the Yards as he swung in. Those would routinely be moved only when a sub was about to enter or leave. Keep the fissiles near the missiles. He grinned under the mask. And the vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true….
He shot out a strand of web and began swinging in closer to the heart of the Yards, where the subs would dock. There was only one of them present at the moment, and he intended to take his time approaching it. His reconnaissance was a friendly one, but he wasn’t sure the Base security people would immediately recognize it as such.
The Yards were not as easy to swing around in as, say, midtown: there were fewer tall structures, most of the buildings being one-or two-story jobs. Still, you had to work with what presented itself. Dusk was coming on—that much help he had. He busied himself with avoiding lighted windows, staying away from routes passing doorways from which people might suddenly emerge—say, people with guns.
On top of one middle-sized office-type building nearest the docks, he paused, eyeing the local traffic. Not many people were in the narrow streets that went between the buildings. Dinner time? Staff cuts? No telling. He pulled out the camera and its tripod from a web pouch slung over his shoulder. This was as good a spot as any—
It was the sudden faint whining noise in the air which brought his head up, not his spider-sense. That was still absent. He tracked with the sound, then glanced away and hurriedly turned the camera on too. It tracked as well, following the faint gleam of brightness as something fell down from where the sun still shone between the shadows of the skyscrapers falling across the water. The sun’s brightness left the tiny shape, but not before Spider-Man saw it and knew it for the angular arrowhead-shape of Hobgoblin’s jetglider.
My hunch was right, he thought. He watched the shape arrow downward, heading right for the sub. Don’t know what good that’s going to do him—
But a closer look at the sub told him. Its biggest hatch, the one used to service the missiles back at the rear end, was open. And anything big enough to install a missile through, was big enough to let the jetglider through as well.
He shot out web and instantly threw himself in Hobgoblin’s direction as fast as he could. It was no simpler a business than getting across the base had been, but this time at least he was
n’t going to worry about avoiding attention. Hobby was already attracting enough: he could hear shouts below him, and at least once, the sharp crack of a warning shot. If I can just keep from getting caught in a crossfire. Well, my spider-sense—
He felt like swearing. Won’t do a thing.
Never mind!
He swung toward Hobgoblin’s plummeting sled. For once luck was with him. Hobby was so intent on the sub that he didn’t hear or see Spider-Man coming at him. I am not going to let him just waltz in there, Spidey thought. The thing is as full of nukes as a subway car’s full of commuters.
But how to stop him?
Hobby was dropping lower, was certainly no more than a few hundred yards away. Now here is a truly dumb idea, Spidey thought, whose time has come.
He took the best aim he could manage, and shot a line of web straight at the sled. It caught—
He was yanked off the building with dreadful speed in Hobgoblin’s wake. At first he had entertained some wild hope that his weight would slow the glider down, maybe even make Hobby fall off, but that was too much to hope for. The thing was fast, overpowered, and adaptable, and it just kept flying. Hobby staggered briefly, turned, noticed what sudden unwelcome cargo he was suddenly dragging behind him like a towed dinghy, and turned hard, so that Spidey was whipped hard to one side at the end of his line of webbing, like a kid at the end of a line of skaters playing snap-the-whip. He hung on desperately, thinking, This is not a good place to fall off. A hundred fifty feet above land, a hundred fifty feet above water, it’s pretty much the same result from this height. Splat—!
“You just can’t keep out of my business, can you?” Hobby yelled at him, curving around so sharply in the air that for a moment Spidey was still going in the original direction while Hobby was going the other way, and they passed one another in the air. For that brief moment, the effect was comical.
It stopped being funny as the snap at the end of the whip caught Spidey again, harder this time. About 3 g’s, if I’m any judge, he thought, his jaw clenched and his fists locked on the webbing. He thought the jerk as he came around again would break his wrists, but somehow he hung on, even without his spider-sense to warn him of exactly when the most dangerous stresses would come. “Let’s just call it civic duty. Hobby,” he yelled back. “This is government property—”
