“Go and get some,” McGrath said. “And if there’s any kerosene or anything like that—I don’t know what these things will need to burn.” She bent over and picked up a cobblestone-size rock and put it near the stack of corpses, then another and another. “Go on, let’s get this done.”
He went, found a lighter and a gallon of lacquer thinner, which he hoped would work. What did it take to burn a human body, he wondered. He refused to think about how awful the question really was, and made his way back to find that McGrath had neatly ringed the burning pit with stones and rubble. “Fire containment,” she told him. “Boy Scout Merit Badge.”
A gallon didn’t do it. The sheets and clothes charred and then burned sullenly. It wasn’t until Tietjen went back and found several more gallons of lacquer thinner and turpentine that they managed a satisfactory blaze.
The light from the fire was golden in the fading daylight.
They decided at last to head back to the diner on Lexington Avenue to sleep, and to forage for provisions for the next few days. Tietjen went downstairs to the super’s office to leave the bundle of keys he had been carrying. When he came back he found McGrath arranging the soiled couches and chairs in the lobby in a semicircle facing the doorway, as if offering a civilized place to sit and chat. It was almost entirely dark inside now.
“What is this?” he asked.
McGrath stopped as if the question confused her. “I’m not certain,” she said finally. Then shrugged. “I’m building a conversation pit in Dante’s Inferno. No, I’m—decorating—trying to make this place as inviting as I can. With small materials, might I add. We’re going to need a lot of lanterns.” She propped up another sodden cushion from a pile they had found in a flooded storage locker in the basement.
It was nuts. It made all the sense in the world, Tietjen thought. Like everything they were doing, like opening this place up wide. He laughed suddenly: “Department of Futile Gestures. D’you realize we’re going to have to find a way to clear away all that crap out there”—he gestured to the grates and rubble that blocked the window—“and then find a way to seal it all up again?”
McGrath stared at him for a moment, then cracked up. When she got her voice under control: “So much for my career in interior decorating. Groo go out and kill something for dinner. Tomorrow Og try to figure out how to make the cave secure for the night.” Still laughing, and almost staggering with fatigue, they left the building together.
They took to calling the lobby and apartments on the lower floors the Store, as if they had set up to sell something. They began opening apartments on the first few floors, removing extraneous furniture, dragging mattresses and beds down from higher floors to make dormitories of them. The first few nights they slept in separate rooms in the same apartment, taking comfort in nearness. In a couple of days they had the building set up to their satisfaction, enough to handle a first wave of survivors.
They brought down whatever packaged and canned food they found in the building, collected spoiling food to be buried or burned nearby, and worried over the problems of water for drinking and cleaning. Bottled water now, until Tietjen could figure out how to tap into the water in the water tank on the roof. Sanitation. First aid. They set up an infirmary in a three-bedroom apartment at the far end of one first-floor corridor and stocked it with the first-aid supplies and medicines they had found in bathrooms throughout the building.
“But that won’t last long,” McGrath said as she looked over the inventory at dinner that evening. “John, have you ever taken CPR or first aid, anything like that?”
“First aid in high school. I remember a little: you keep people in shock warm, that sort of thing. Cold water on burns. I didn’t pay too much attention.”
McGrath nodded grimly. “I took a CPR course about fifteen years ago and had some first-aid training when I volunteered at the hospital. If you had a heart attack I could probably keep blood flowing to your brain until I died of exhaustion. But I don’t remember very much about the real mechanics of first aid. I hope to God we don’t get any really grave stuff walking in here before I can get to the library or a bookstore—”
“Barbara,” Tietjen said gently. “The really grave problems will have taken care of themselves by now.” He saw the look of pain that crossed her face and felt like a heel. McGrath had an astonishing range of odd, useful information and skills, but he didn’t know how deep those skills ran, or what she would do when her skills failed her.
She was saying something and he had not heard. “What?”
“I said there will probably be more serious injuries in the next few weeks. Or a pregnant woman with a breech delivery. Food poisoning, or cholera or diphtheria or whatever pestilence is supposed to overtake cities that get hit by disaster. People with chronic illnesses. People with HIV failing without their meds.” She tossed down the clipboard and stood up. “I don’t like being helpless, that’s all.”
He had no comfort for her. “We’ll cope,” he said at last, inadequately. “We’ll be doing something, anyway. There’ll have to be a doctor left somewhere in the city. And they’ll be coming soon,” he added lamely. They were the Guard, the Army, the Red Cross, rescuers, and day by day Tietjen grew more sure that they were not coming, not soon anyway. But he couldn’t say that to McGrath. “Meanwhile, we’ll get some books or something.”
“Brain Surgery for Beginners. Plague for Fun and Profit. I know, I know,” she waved his response away. “It’s better than nothing.” She began to collect plates and silverware. They had taken the kitchen fittings from one apartment and moved them into another, emptier of utensils and dinnerware but larger. They were still cooking on McGrath’s makeshift can-stoves, but Tietjen was hoping to find a wood-burning stove somewhere. The apartment they cooked and ate in was earmarked as the office and meeting place; it stood just off the lobby. Each of them had chosen an apartment upstairs, sparingly furnished with other people’s belongings, McGrath’s on the second floor down the hall from the infirmary, Tietjen’s above her on the third floor. At the end of the day they would sit in one apartment or the other, going over their lists by candlelight, making plans, talking about the old city.
Sooner or later, the conversation always came back to the same question: what happened? McGrath wryly suggested a cataclysmic breakdown in communication. “You know: all those agencies that were holding New York together just went on strike at the same time?”
“And blew up the city?” Tietjen remembered his walk through the patchwork rubble of the West Side and shuddered.
“Not all of it. Just enough to prove their point. They’re probably waiting for the union negotiators to show. The joke’s on them.” McGrath looked up from the sink and saw that Tietjen wasn’t laughing with her. Gently she asked, “What do you think, John?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Someone told me on my way back here that everything had happened. Sure as hell looks that way. Or maybe all the stuff I got in school was right.”
“What stuff? Which school?” McGrath asked, smiling again.
“When I was getting my architecture degree. I took some planning courses; about fifteen years ago there was this vogue for chaos planning. Guy named George Lymach had this whole theory of what would happen to an urban system if it got too big, that it would self-correct down to a more manageable size through a series of disasters. But this feels too damned deliberate to be chaos.”
“The wrath of God? Wouldn’t any right-thinking deity hit Los Angeles first?”
That startled Tietjen into a laugh. “That’s what I’d do if I were God,” he agreed.
McGrath snorted. “John, I’m going to bed. Long day.” She held out her hand. Tietjen took it and they stood, handfast but not shaking hands. More like recharging batteries, a nighttime ritual between two adults who were not close enough to kiss, but felt something was required to seal and acknowledge their bond.
“Thanks, Barbara,” Tietjen said, as he did every night.
“Sleep
well,” she answered, and left him.
Sometime after noon on the fifth day they got their first recruit, a ragged, skinny young woman with dark, tangled hair falling into her eyes, who hovered uncertainly near the lobby doors for the better part of the afternoon and, when she did come in at last, spoke only to Barbara. She was dirty and bruised, with a glazed, shocky expression; she jumped at noises and watched Tietjen move about the lobby with suspicious concentration.
“Raped, I think,” Barbara told Tietjen later. “Maybe she’ll tell me something after she’s a bit more … accustomed. Until we have more women staying here I’m going to have her sleep in my apartment. And I guess—here’s something I didn’t even plan for. We’re going to have to do some kind of informal counseling.”
Tietjen recoiled at the thought of sitting quietly and listening when there was so much work to be done. Something of it must have shown on his face. Barbara snorted in amusement.
“I’ll do the hand-holding, John. You think about generators, you guy, you.”
Tietjen grinned and ducked his head, a little embarrassed to be understood, and forgiven, so easily. He thought about generators. And fresh water. Sanitation. Simple things taken for granted in last week’s world. He began to make lists of places to scout and things to scout for: drugstores, stationery stores, hardware stores, supermarkets. As he thought of new things he made notes on slips of paper and each night pinned the day’s collection of notes to his wall until it bristled with little islands of ideas. McGrath, he noted, had found a clipboard somewhere, and took her own notes at the end of each day in firm, briskly arched handwriting.
Their first recruit’s name was Elena Cruz. By the end of her third day with them she was cooking over the can-stoves and talking easily with McGrath; Tietjen she still eyed uncertainly, and she started at sounds and watched the shadows.
She and Barbara were working in the lobby when a boy appeared as if out of nowhere. Elena shrieked, an eldritch wail that brought Tietjen down the stairs two at a time from the third floor to reach her. He found Barbara in the center of the lobby with one arm behind her, wrapped protectively around Elena. Across the room, shadowy in the light from the doorway, was a kid with freckles and a shock of sandy hair, a magazine advertisement for boyhood—except that his eyes moved too quickly from place to place. He stood stock-still, as scared by Elena’s scream as she had been by his sudden appearance. Finally he croaked in a voice breaking with nerves and adolescence, “My name is Greg. Do you have anything to eat?”
That broke the lock. Barbara shooed Elena up to the kitchen to get something to feed the kid; Tietjen brought the boy in and sat him down.
“This is nice,” the boy said finally. He sat carefully on the edge of his chair, feeling out what was expected of him by way of company manners. “My name is Greg,” he said again.
“I’m John,” Tietjen said. He had a million questions, but could not ask any of them. His hands were sweaty and it was difficult to make himself sit still. “Barbara will be back in a minute,” he managed at last.
The kid smiled. “Great.” He looked to be thirteen, maybe fourteen.
The silence fell again. Tietjen made himself ask, “Where have you been since …”
It was all the invitation the kid needed. “I was in my house for the first couple of days, but Mom never came back, and I ran through all the food there, and—” he went on, telling about the game he had made of survival, an adventure that would have sounded glossy and exciting in a boy’s book. But there was a harsh, manic ring when he spoke of his game, and Greg was obviously relieved to have an adult to turn to, to tell him what to do. Tietjen sat and listened, edgy and anxious, wanting to get back to work and, more and more, wanting to get away from the kid.
Finally Barbara came back. She had a plate of biscuits and stew; a thick brown sweater hung over her arm. “Here you go,” she said comfortably. She spared Tietjen a look of concern, then sat down matter-of-factly next to the boy and took over. After a few minutes Tietjen got up quietly and went back upstairs to where he had been working. There, he sat, folded over the grief he thought he had wept out, and shook. The boy was probably twice Chris’s age, there were no similarities, but “Mom never came back, and I ran through all the food.” Could his sons even have opened the door to their apartment, with the bristle of locks Irene had insisted on? He remembered again their building and the fire in the windows, the crumpled fire stair, and the mournful certainty that his sons were dead ran through him like a current.
But the boy in the lobby was alive, and the Store had done what it was supposed to do, attract survivors. Tietjen would make sure the kid took his instructions from McGrath, he decided. And hope there were other recruits soon to dilute the pain of the boy’s presence.
On the evening of the day that McGrath and Tietjen declared the Store officially open for business, a fair-haired, chunky middle-aged man approached the doors, hallooed, but did not come inside. Tietjen went outside to talk with him.
“You’re crazy, advertising this way.” The man gestured at Tietjen’s neat hand-lettered offer of sanctuary, posted by the door.
“Figure it’s easier than dragging people in off the street,” Tietjen said calmly.
“You’re making yourselves sitting ducks. If you’re for real.” He paused, looked around him. “I’ve got family out there. I won’t tell you where,” he added, before Teitjen could ask. “I want to watch you. I don’t want to walk into anything—after what I’ve seen.”
What have you seen, Tietjen wanted to ask. “What can we show you?” he said.
“Nothing. I’ll be watching. Maybe I’ll bring them down here if I think you’re okay.” He turned belligerently away and left Tietjen standing in front of the building, bemused.
Whatever the man’s criteria were, he was back the next day. The Store had passed: he had a woman with pale curling hair and a girl of seven or eight years with them. Tietjen went out again to greet them, and returned to the office grinning this time.
“Well,” McGrath prodded.
“Tell Elena to put on a lot of whatever she’s cooking,” he told her, as proud as if he had created the Hochman family himself from the asphalt and sawdust in the street. “Three more for dinner.”
With Hochman, his wife and their daughter, the boy Greg, and Elena, the Store had five recruits that night. Just before McGrath turned to follow Elena into the apartment where she slept, she said, “See? It’s begun.”
Tietjen went about the routine of securing the downstairs areas. They had worked out some precautions: the Store stayed open in daylight; at night the doors and windows were closed, the front doors blocked off with a barricade of furniture and plywood. As Tietjen heaved the boards into place he thought of the boy in black leather, the street kid he had spent so many hours curled up next to in the culvert. Months ago. Years. Only a little more than a week. There might be more kids like that boy, maybe. The madness had receded from New York like a tide, but Tietjen did not doubt that there were pockets of it still, and people who were no crazier than they had been before the disaster, ready to face ruin for a chance to rule or destroy.
When the planks were secure he went through the first-floor apartments, checking doors, thinking. Overhead the Hochmans slept in one of the dormitory rooms; Greg was in the room next to them. Tietjen had watched at dinner as Greg vacillated between Barbara McGrath and Sandy Hochman, playing orphan-son to each. In the end Tietjen thought Sandy Hochman would win the contest; McGrath was too amused to play Constant Mother to the boy. But Greg would get a mother of sorts—and Tietjen wouldn’t have to deal with him. The Hochmans were asleep by now, probably. The boy too, and Elena Cruz and Barbara McGrath above him.
Now he thought of Barbara’s words—“It’s begun”—and something wordless bubbled up in him. He was too rusty to recognize it at first as pure joy. It had begun; he wanted to share the feeling.
In the end he took his exaltation where he had always taken it. Twelve flights up, climbi
ng until the ache in his legs was no longer even passably pleasurable; he found a window at the end of the hall, opened it, and sat on the sill breathing the frosty night air, looking out over the city. There was a moon and the sky was clear. What New York had become was spread out before him, a view southwest over Central Park, velvety in the moonlight, and beyond that the wreck of cityscape as far as he could see, some buildings still straight and upright, others wholly demolished, still others spiderweb skeletons glittering distantly. The old Central Park statue of Alice and the Mad Hatter shone in the moonlight, lifted entire from its old place near the boat pond and plopped down on Fifth Avenue at the Inventor’s Gate to Central Park. What did that? Tietjen wondered. Far to the west there were a few flickering lights that reminded him that he and Barbara weren’t alone. He wondered about his old apartment, his street, but there had not been time to look—and he couldn’t face crossing the Park yet.
Below him nothing stirred. No movement, no streetlamps, buses, late-night bustle of carousers and their hired guards, taxis drawing up to enclave gates, street people skirting the patrols of block cops.
Tietjen looked out, wanting to make an offering, a demonstration of good faith. He counted up the people sleeping below him: one, two, three, four, five, six. He said to the night: “Tomorrow there will be more.”
After a while it got too cold to sit any longer with the window open. Reluctantly he gave up the windowsill and went downstairs to his room.
The kid, Greg, proved to have a genius for finding things. Some of the stuff the boy brought for Tietjen’s approval was useless: a smashed camera, DVD disks, two boxes of holographic name tags from a convention that had been held at the Armory on Sixty-seventh Street: magpie souvenirs of a life of plenty. But Greg also brought a full set of screwdrivers, two rolls of baling wire and, emptied one by one out of his many pockets, a set of two dozen crayons. The boy had dropped them into Missy Hochman’s lap, and with each one the little girl’s sober expression warmed until at last she was grinning delightedly. With the proven knowledge that his foraging was appreciated by his new family, Greg went after it with a vengeance, making two or three trips a day.
The Stone War Page 11
