The Stone War

by Madeleine E. Robins

  He might have been invisible.

  Someone was saying, “What do you mean? Try another station.” Someone else said, “Bring the radio in here, for Christ’s sake.”

  He followed as a radio was placed in the center of the conference table. The news issued from the speakers in staccato bursts: “ … sketchy at this time, as some sort … ectrical interfe … missions. No telephone or broadc … ories from refugees are confused …”

  “Refugees?”

  “Jesus, from where?”

  Voices rose, ebbed, rose again over the sound of the radio.

  A brassy taste blossomed in Tietjen’s mouth. Blood was pulsing at his temples, and his hands and feet throbbed with the beat. “It’s New York.”

  “Shut up,” someone said angrily.

  “ … explosions may be from gas mains … cause of major dama … apparent paralysis of cit … no firefighting equi … in the uptown area looters have been sighted, there are reports of gunfights between block police and lo … ew Jersey has sealed access to all parts of Sovereign N … Manhattan may be hardest hit, but repo …”

  He was right. Tietjen felt a cold wind sweep through him. “New York,” he repeated dully. His voice was distant, it might have come from any of the shocked faces that surrounded him. “What happened?”

  “They don’t know. I mean, they keep saying different things. Just that it’s bad.”

  The web of discussion, disjointed opinion, fears, maledictions, and prayers from the others grew more urgent and agitated, but Tietjen heard none of it. He felt wrapped up, separate from the others, in a shroud drenched with adrenaline. His ears were buzzing; he could feel the strokes of his heartbeat. All to one purpose: to get him home. He was hooked by an absolute need to get back to the city, to see for himself, to know. He almost screamed it at them: I have to know! The need made no excuse, brooked no delay. Somewhere inside him there was a voice, a thin, nervous keening. He was left with his own, only thought.

  “I have to get back,” he said urgently. At first his words did not register over the murmurs, the tinny noise of the radio. Only when he asked one of the designers for the fastest route back to New York did protests begin.

  How? What good would it do? No one knows what’s happening, you don’t just walk into something like that. Wait. It can’t be as bad as it sounds. Wait. They’ll have asked for the National Guard, it’ll be cleared up in a couple of days. Family? Hell, man, you can’t help your family by getting killed. That’s what the Red Cross is for. They’ll get out if they have to. Wait. The police, the Guard. All media hype. Refugees, Jesus Christ. You don’t want to walk into that. Wait. Have a drink. Think it over. Wait.

  Tietjen shook his head and forced a cold calm over the terror, hoping that no one else could see what was happening to him. “What is the fastest way back to New York?” he asked again.

  3

  PROTEST grew from murmur to babble.

  “Jesus, John,” Westley said irritably, as if he had made a joke in bad taste.

  “We can’t do anything,” someone said.

  “Not until we know more,” another voice chimed in.

  “I’m not talking we,” he said curtly. “What’s the quickest way back to New York?”

  He looked around the room, meeting each person’s gaze and seeing their eyes fall before his gaze. I’m being rude, he thought. I don’t care.

  Finally, out of the silence, one of the engineers said, “The copter went into the shop this morning, you’d have to drive to New London—that’s due south. The MetroRail to New York from New London will be fastest. If it’s running. But look, you can’t really—”

  “I have to,” he said. He did not want to waste time arguing, but no one seemed to understand. His mouth was dry and there was a low buzzing in his ears. Shock, he thought. “Christ, I’m not doing this for fun.” Then, more quietly, said “I have a wife and two little kids there.”

  Someone nodded. “You’ll need a car.”

  Tietjen nodded. He looked at Westley. “You want to come?”

  Westley shrugged. “No point. Worse comes to worse, I’m down my CD collection and a couple of coleus. I’m staying until we know what the fuck happened. The news may be overreacting.”

  “Or not.” Tietjen couldn’t say how he knew it, but he was gut-certain that New York was in dire trouble, fighting for its life. “I’ve got to go.”

  In an hour he had crossed the state line into Connecticut, driving a shabby blue car with the RaiCo logo painted on the doors; the registration and single-passenger permits were in his breast pocket. The countryside was drab, the muddy gray of snowless March; here and there grimy white imitation colonial and saltbox houses dotted the landscape, and salt-rusted cars in blue or burgundy passed his. Tietjen saw none of them, thinking only of New London and the coast, the MetroRail ride back to the city. He kept the radio on, but reception was crappy: it gave only unsatisfactory bleats of information, and more than once chattered off into static completely. The low whine of the car’s engine seemed to wind him tighter, focus him more completely on the road ahead and the trip home. He drove with ferocious concentration, as if that itself would save his life.

  He got lost in New London in the mess of highways that wanted to bypass the town and take him across the Thames River to Groton or Providence. When he managed to get into the city itself, he got tangled up in the small streets that surrounded the downtown mall, always running one way away from where he wanted to go: the handsome old building that was the MetroRail station. The red-brick station had been designed by Stanford White, he remembered, but he could take no pleasure in it; the rest of downtown was characterless, the same as any other once-rehabbed, forgotten Main Street. Tietjen locked the car and circled the station looking for an open door. Instead he found an elderly man in a creased gray MetroRail uniform posting a sign at the front of the station.

  Westbound service had been temporarily suspended.

  Jesus. “What’s the fastest way into the city?” he demanded.

  “To New York?” The old man was plainly appalled. “Mister, you don’t want to go there. You heard what they’re saying on the radio?”

  Tietjen wanted to pick the man up and break him in two. He clenched his hands at his sides and said as levelly as he could, “Of course I have. That’s why I have to get back. My family is there.”

  The old man shook his head. “If they’re lucky they’re getting out, mister. Jeez, I’d stay out of it if I was you.”

  “You’re not. How do I get back?” Tietjen’s voice was icy.

  The old man looked at Tietjen warily, as if he’d suddenly realized the man he was talking to was dangerous. He leaned back against the wall of the station, considering. “You’d have to drive all the way down, I guess, if you got a car, and the highway permits and such. But I hear the Guard ain’t letting people past White Plains anymore, not till they get word from the city that it’s okay. And they got their own hands full with people coming out, now. Better stay here a few days, maybe. There’s a lotta motels out near the college—”

  Tietjen’s hands unclenched and he thanked the stationmaster over his shoulder as he went to find the car again. His hands shook as he unlocked the door, and when he was in and the door locked he sat for a long moment, just shaking all over, muttering “shit, shit, shit,” in a low, automatic monotone. Inside him the cold wind blew, and in the wind there was the faint keening of fear, a sound like an animal trapped alone in the dark.

  When his shaking stopped, Tietjen started the car.

  He drove straight down I-95, occupying his mind planning a route into the city, willing the deeper thing into abeyance. From time to time the panic would jitter upward to the edge of his consciousness, making his blood buzz in his ears. Then Tietjen would breathe slow, shallow breaths, counting eight between each breath and willing his shoulders to relax. Each time the fear subsided he told himself he was done with it for good.

  The first roadblock was just after New Haven.
For about twenty miles the traffic heading east had been getting heavier; westbound traffic was much as it had been: trucks, the rare private vehicle such as his own. Despite his assumption of calm, Tietjen felt his stomach churning when he saw the National Guard cars across the road. They seemed to be letting people by, but, “Where’re you headed?” the Guardsman asked.

  “Greenwich.” Tietjen lied smoothly and smiled, hoping for a sympathetic response. “My wife and kids are down there. I want to get them back up to Branford to stay with her sister until—”

  “Yuh, right, right. Go on through. But watch out when you get past Stamford. There’s refugees on the roads now, not enough places to put them all that close to the city, they seem to be just walking out on their own. Red Cross is going crazy. Most of them are on foot, and some of them are pretty nasty.”

  Tietjen nodded, asked casually, “Any word on what really happened?”

  A trace of human feeling crossed the young Guardsman’s face. “Mister, from what I hear, everything happened. Still happening.”

  Tietjen nodded and put his foot lightly on the gas as the Guardsman waved him on. He smiled, and cursed the necessity for amiable façade as he did so. What he wanted was to grab the Guardsman by the collar, to yell and demand an explanation, to know what was happening. Instead, he drove, listening to the persistent, howling rage of the voice inside him that was calling for home.

  He saw the first refugees around Milford, and for a few minutes the sight shocked even the banshee wail inside him to sober quiet. Men and women and children, dressed in everything they could not carry. All of them were dirty, scarred with smuts and grime, wavering with exhaustion. They shared, in their different faces and styles, a look of incredulity, a shock that overwhelmed fear. Where were they going, he wondered. Who would understand them when they got there?

  The walkers came in waves: a straggling group, then empty road, a few solitary marchers, then a mass of ten or fifteen again. It was in one of the empty patches of road that a woman stepped out from the shoulder into the path of Tietjen’s car and forced him into a skidding stop, half into the other lane. Furious beyond caution, he got out of the car.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Oh God, oh God, oh God—” The woman was small, haphazardly dressed. She had fallen on the asphalt and was crying.

  He felt his anger, partly a product of the panicky sudden stop, fade. “Ma‘am?” He went toward her to help her to her feet. “Ma’am?” In the back of his head a vague alarm was sounding, mixing with the terrible keening of the voice boxed up within him. But the woman was obviously in trouble, possibly hurt, and she was almost directly in the path of his car. “Lady.” He bent to lift her up. She clasped his arms with panicked tenacity and almost overbalanced him.

  “God, mister, I got to get away,” she whined. “Please, you got to understand, I got to, I got to—” Her small, strong hands bit deeply into his wrists. Behind him Tietjen heard the scuff of feet on asphalt. The keening inside him screeched so high it was lost to his inner ear. As he turned his head, unable to shake the woman loose, a fist caught him at the side of the head. He dropped sickly and the hands released him with a quick sideways shove. Dimly he heard voices, saw a blur of motion toward the car, but his body, stunned by the unaccustomed violence, refused to move for him.

  When he could stand again the car was gone, eastbound. Honest thieves: they had thrown his topcoat out of the car and, unknowingly, the RaiCo registration and private vehicle permits. There was little comfort in knowing that the woman and her accomplice would be stopped sooner or later. Tietjen dragged the coat behind him, made it to the side of the road before he was sick, damning himself for stupidity, wondering where his city smarts had got to. At last, shaky and cold, he shrugged the coat on and began to walk along the side of the road.

  It took almost an hour to reach an exit to the roadway, and it was dark in earnest now. At the end of the ramp he found himself on one of the small roads that honeycombed Fairfield County: there would be fewer refugees and less chance of trouble. Walking, he tried to calculate his distance from Manhattan, coming reluctantly to the conclusion that on foot, he would not see home tonight. If he was sixty miles out it meant a minimum of twelve, more likely fifteen hours of solid walking. If he could walk that far. If he kept up his pace and did not stop once. If there was no trouble. If he did not run into more like the crazy woman and her friend.

  Stumbling through the icy black night on the road he had chosen, Tietjen turned his thoughts over and over obsessively, worrying them like a sore tooth until the shock of walking into an abandoned car gave him a present pain to worry over. He leaned against the bumper of the car, unable to see the damage to his thigh, cursing roundly. A gust of wind cut through his topcoat; he ached for sleep, for rest, for the comfort of safety. Home, and the endless bass rumble of city noises like a heartbeat under his cheek. Fumbling. Tietjen found an unlocked door on the car and climbed into the back seat, tugging his coat over him. Better than nothing. Alone in the dark with the voice whimpering, demanding through his exhaustion, he closed his eyes.

  The sun woke him the next morning, a reluctant, watery, dirty sun that glared from a dirty gray sky. He climbed out of the car and willed his legs to work, to take him home. The car, he saw now, had no tires; a good camping place, that was all. He had slept badly, when his imagination permitted it. Sleeping in ignorance, he woke resolved to know what the hell was happening in New York as soon as possible, to lay the ghosts and quiet the voices that had wakened with him.

  He had been walking for almost an hour when the first car passed him, heading east, away. A passenger leaned out to shout something unintelligible as they passed. After that there were occasional cars, more occasionally people on foot, heading east. He tried a few times to talk with them; some ran away, one woman threw rocks at him, staring with dull, fearful eyes. The people who would stop to talk, sidling anxiously eastward even as they stood, told conflicting stories, as if what had happened to the city was so huge that no one touched by it could know the whole story. Fire, gas explosions, quake, bombs, flooding, riots, disaster. As bad as his dreams.

  So, he asked himself when he had stopped for a few minutes. Why am I in such a goddamned hurry to get back?

  The answer he’d given to Westley and the people at RaiCo, to the man at the train station, to the Guardsman below New Haven, was his family: Irene and the boys. Tietjen imagined himself as a hero, fighting his way in to save his sons from looters, perverts, dragons, or whatever the hell else there was in New York now. For a few moments, walking along in the cold morning light, he allowed himself to be mesmerized with the notion of a great rescue, but really, it was too ludicrous. He didn’t have the tights and cape; what was driving him back to the city was not heroic.

  When he focused on his kids, the idea of rescue seemed bizarre, anyway. All the images he conjured up were of the boys with him, in the city as Tietjen had left it. He balked at the notion that anything could get into the tower the boys lived in; it was warded round with Irene’s terrified magic, her refusal to let anything from the city reach in and touch her or the boys. When Tietjen stopped forcing the issue and thinking about his family, he forgot them. So maybe he wasn’t going home to be a hero.

  When he really listened to it, the thing that was driving him on had nothing to do with Irene or his sons. The voice that welled with insistence every time he stopped to catch his breath was not heroic. It cried for home.

  He kept walking.

  The horn that sounded behind him, almost in his ear, jolted him out of his reverie and nearly startled him off his feet.

  “Where’re you going?” the old man called from the window of his car. Smarter than I was, Tietjen thought.

  “New York. I mean, as far in toward Manhattan as I can get,” he amended.

  “You armed?”

  “No.” Tietjen winced at his own stupidity the moment he said it, but it seemed to be the right answer. The man made a noise t
hat sounded like damned idiot. “Look, you want a ride in as far as I can take you? Tuckahoe if we’re lucky, but that’s only if the Guard’s sleeping late.”

  Almost as he answered Tietjen was sliding into the car. When his hip hit something hard he looked down and saw the gun.

  “I am armed,” the man said conversationally, and stuck the pistol back into his coat pocket. “Just so you know. You can keep an eye out for the Guard. And for refugees.”

  They rode in silence for the first few miles. Tietjen let himself relax into the seat, weak with the pleasure of sitting. His leg muscles buzzed with fatigue. He had never known this particular kind of exhaustion, stress and panic on top of physical exertion. He felt unable to make conversation, but at last, feeling that some gesture should be made, he asked, “Why did you stop for me?”

  The older man smiled. “Anyone foolish enough to be walking toward New York this time of the morning in the state things are in … must have an interesting story. Anyway, you wouldn’t be a refugee, and they’re the real danger now.” He gave Tietjen a curious sideways look. “Which brings me round to asking why you are walking into the mess. I’m Corliss, by the way. Frank. And there’s coffee in a thermos somewhere back there,” he cocked his head toward the backseat. “Help yourself.”

  “John Tietjen.” As he poured coffee into the thermos lid—lukewarm, too sweet, delicious—Tietjen tried to think of something to tell the driver. “My family is in Manhattan: my ex-wife, our kids.”

  “You plan to single-handedly go in and rescue them, astounding the world?” Corliss’s tone was very dry. “Sounds fine, John. You have any idea what it’s like down there?”

  Tietjen ignored the sarcasm, swiveled in his seat to face the other man. “Do you? No one’s been able to tell me what happened.”