The Stone War

by Madeleine E. Robins

  Teitjen had not got over his first feeling of discomfort with the boy, although Greg clearly wanted his approval. He tried to be friendly to the kid, but felt awkward and uncomfortable. Let McGrath be comfortable, let Sandy Hochman or Elena or Allan Hochman. He had other things to think about.

  But it was Greg who told Tietjen there were monsters in the streets.

  Three children and a dark, thickset man staggered into the Store one morning. The children were bruised and dirty, the man feverish and on the verge of collapse with exhaustion and blood loss. He had a deep gash in his side and dozens of puncture wounds in the fleshy part of both arms. Hazy with fever, at first he would not let anyone near him to clean his wounds; even when he let Sandy Hochman and McGrath treat him, he refused to let them remove his pants. Barbara thought he was afraid he’d have to run at any moment. Finally, deciding after three days that he and the girls with him were safe, he let go an iron control and fell into coma-sleep. Barbara tended to him, finally dressing all his wounds—though in the name of preserving the man’s privacy, she would not tell Teitjen more about the nature of his wounds except to say that they were … disturbing. Sandy Hochman took charge of the three little girls who, solemnly quiet, refused the first day to go far from the man’s room. Greg and the Hochmans, McGrath and Elena worked individual magics; by the end of their second day at the Store the girls were all playing docilely with Missy Hochman. The eldest was talking, as best she could, to Greg.

  “It’s weird.” Greg told McGrath and McGrath told Tietjen. “They’re sisters, they lived down on East Sixtieth. I think that’s what she’s saying, but she talks really funny.”

  “They’ve been through a lot,” McGrath told Greg gently.

  “No, I don’t mean like that. I mean, like suddenly they don’t know how to speak English, like half their words were turned inside out. And it’s not the way they used to talk, cause it’s driving Karen nuts. She’s the oldest one. Their names are Karen, Colleen, and Kathy … uhh, Calvino. Karen says—”

  McGrath heard a good deal of what Karen had said. The girls had been waiting in a guarded bus shelter when the disaster struck; the man with them was a guard, and he had taken care of them afterward. For four days it had been just them. Then they had found what Kathy called the monsters.

  “I think you’d better tell Mr. Tietjen about this,” McGrath said at that point. To Tietjen she said, “I thought you should listen to this. I mean, kids exaggerate, but if there is some organized group of vandals or something out there, we need to be prepared for them.”

  What it was was worse than that, if Greg and the Calvino girls were to be believed. “Didn’t you know about them?” Greg asked. “The monsters? I just saw them once, and I stayed clear, and then I found you and Barb—Mrs. McGrath, and I figured they wouldn’t come near you. But I figured you had to know about them, Mr. Tietjen.” Tietjen was not much comforted by Greg’s confidence. The boy went on: “They’re scary, sir. Like really scary, awful. Like something out of a horror movie, monsters and stuff. Like, they just want to kill things, like they’re really crazy. If those kids and that guy ran into them, they’re really lucky they got away. Mr. Tietjen, you don’t think they’ll come here, do you?”

  No matter how Tietjen and Barbara pressed, they couldn’t get Greg to explain what he meant by monsters: did he mean a chainsaw-wielding psycho from a slasher film or something more monstrous? But Greg slid away from explaining, and asked again, “They won’t come here, will they?”

  Tietjen said something reassuring and sent Greg back to his chores. Kid’s stories, Tietjen decided. More likely gang kids, mean as hell and crazy too. They need not be physical monsters to behave monstrously: the people he had seen on their way out of the city had been monstrous—but human, too. Tietjen persuaded himself it was more of the boy’s imagination, but as an afterthought, he called after Greg and told him not to wander too far from the Store in his foraging. And that night he talked to McGrath about tightening security around the Store.

  He and Allan Hochman worked, boarding up lower windows, setting up a system of night watches, reinforcing the front doors; when, after a day or two, nothing happened, he began to feel sheepish at having worried. He told McGrath, as they sat talking one night, that thinking about security was probably long overdue; sooner or later someone was going to want to challenge them for what they were building.

  There was a daily trickle of new people to the Store. After the third week Tietjen stopped trying to remember all the names as he was introduced to newcomers; names would come back to him at odd moments. Strangely, he could never remember someone’s name to refer to that person; McGrath teased him that he thought everyone’s name was Whatsername, but whenever he had to say thank you, the name came immediately. McGrath laughed when she saw it happen, and told him he lived a charmed life. He believed it. “The thing that’s weird,” McGrath said: “Everyone talks about when the Guard shows up—but I don’t think anyone really expects it.”

  “It’s been a couple of weeks with nothing but us, Barbara.”

  “Well, where the hell are they?” she asked peevishly.

  Tietjen shrugged. “Stuck in traffic?” There was no real answer. Not one person among those who came to the Store gave him enough information to imagine an answer. It didn’t make sense. Thinking about what had happened and why the outside world hadn’t arrived to help yet, Tietjen felt as if he were dealing with blue-sky puzzle pieces—no shadows, clouds, straight edges, nothing to give a clue about how they fit together or what the picture really was.

  Once the bus guard, Bobby Fratelone, began to heal, his recovery was quick. Tietjen liked him: he looked like a thug, and talked slowly, as if each word had to be brought out specially, but he was polite, almost courtly with McGrath, brusquely tender with the little girls he’d brought with him. Whenever Tietjen stopped in to talk he found the three Calvino girls in or near the room, chattering in high-pitched gibberish or sitting in a solemn semicircle on the foot of Fratelone’s bed. Finally Tietjen decided he’d have to outwait the girls, and strolled into the infirmary just after dinnertime. The man sat up in bed, laboriously reading a comic book aloud to the girls, one thick index finger moving from picture to picture. Tietjen sat down and began to read a first-aid pamphlet. After a while Fratelone finished reading the comic and gently shooed the girls out of the room. “Go play or something. Ask Miz McGrath if you can help out.” The girls nodded and went.

  “So?” Fratelone asked.

  “I wanted to give you a little time,” Tietjen began. “But I need to ask you some questions. We need to know what’s out there. What hurt you.”

  Fratelone’s face closed up. He looked past Tietjen, out the window. “I don’t know. I mean, I was half-dead, they almost kilt me. How the hell d’I know what I saw?” His face was still shadowed with pain and fatigue; the stubble on his face was not much shorter than his cropped black hair. “Look. I got jumped, they tried to torture me. You don’t take notes, things like that happen to you. I kept the little ones safe, didn’t I? Their mother didn’t make it … .” Fratelone stared blankly out the window and said nothing more. Tietjen had a feeling that the man did remember something, but he didn’t know how he could question him any further. He had been through enough.

  When Barbara at last declared him well enough to leave the infirmary, Fratelone appointed himself Tietjen’s lieutenant and would-be enforcer. McGrath he treated as a combination of Mother Superior and nagging librarian; Tietjen was Boss, and Fratelone gave him an unswerving loyalty that Tietjen found unsettling. He spoke as though Tietjen had saved him, but Tietjen didn’t understand that; Fratelone had made it in to the Store on his own power, and all Tietjen had done was to have it waiting there. The only other bond Fratelone acknowledged was to the Calvino sisters. They were his: his responsibility, his family, and his way with them was unfailingly gentle. The girls had obviously adopted him, bringing their questions and fears to him, speaking still in the half-gibberish that Greg a
nd McGrath were beginning to understand.

  By the end of another week most of the dormitory apartments were full. The Hochmans had taken over a two-bedroom apartment on the second floor and Greg was living with them, tacitly adopted. The Calvino girls slept in the living room of McGrath’s apartment with Elena Cruz, and Fratelone slept lightly in the apartment next door. People discovered the Store in ones and twos, dazed and apprehensive when they arrived, and Elena or Barbara or Sandy or Allan Hochman took them in, comforted them, showed them where they would stay, and gave them work to do.

  The rules were simple. For as long as you stayed you worked, scavenging or building, helping in the kitchen under Elena’s supervision, cleaning up the apartments upstairs or in the neighboring buildings. This last was a job left to hardened recruits, since no day went by without the discovery of more dead. Some were badly decomposed, some seemed eerily well preserved. The worst were bodies deformed or amputated. McGrath was the one who found a body with no head: skin had tidily grown to cover the stump of a neck, the head nowhere to be seen. Tietjen found her afterward, sitting, her back to the macabre corpse, white-faced but in control. “The damned weirdness doesn’t stop. Just when you think it’s over, things are getting back to normal, it just—starts up again.” But she got to her feet and she and Tietjen dragged the body to the charnel cart themselves.

  He did not know what he would have done without Barbara McGrath. She was fifty-eight to his thirty-seven, but she kept the same hours, often rose earlier, and did the same physical work. She had a touch with people that Tietjen knew he did not have, a knack for close attention and immediate caring. Newcomers to the Store gravitated to her at once. The humor and common sense that he most valued in her kept the others on an even keel when the work they were doing was most depressing or difficult. Together, after others in the Store had gone off to sleep, Tietjen and McGrath sat up and planned, while Fratelone sat silently by, listening.

  When he looked at Barbara, tough and unruffled in skirt and boots, with her hair neatly combed, framing her face, Tietjen felt a vague awe, as if he was in the presence of a force of nature, a timeless goddess of the hearth, her warmth unerring and seductive. Then McGrath would leave a smut of dirt on her forehead while gesturing, or say something flatly sensible, and the illusion shattered; she was Barbara, his good companion, old enough to be his mother.

  They had each taken some work for their own, so Tietjen was surprised when McGrath appeared at his door one morning, tightlipped and anxious, and asked him to look at something in the infirmary with her. It took him a moment to realize that she still wore yesterday’s clothes, that her eyes were dark-ringed as if she had not been to bed.

  “It’s the littlest Calvino girl,” Barbara explained. “Bobby Fratelone brought her up last night. She had a limp, remember?”

  He didn’t remember; if someone had mentioned it, he had not paid much attention.

  “She’s got a scratch on her leg and it’s infected. Her damned sisters don’t have a clue when it happened—could have been days ago, even. They didn’t pay attention, didn’t even tell Fratelone until yesterday morning when Kathy couldn’t get out of bed, why the smell didn’t get to them I don’t know, and the damned leg’s swollen up like a grape and about that color—” She made herself stop. “It’s bad, John. I got out the books and read them last night and it’s blood poisoning and I’m scared.”

  Tietjen swallowed. “I don’t know anything—”

  “For Christ’s sake, nobody knows anything!” McGrath took a breath. “John, I have to share this. If we don’t do something the kid’s going to die. If we can’t help her, we’ve got to get her to someone who can. Outside New York.”

  The fear in her voice got through to Tietjen like nothing else. “Okay, let’s see her.” But the thought occurred to him: Barbara had seen it coming. This, or something like this. He had listened to her worrying about cholera and dysentery and tetanus, and hadn’t taken it seriously, but Barbara had. She’d known all along this would happen.

  He followed McGrath to the infirmary apartment. The smell of alcohol and disinfectant in the hallway masked something dying. Kathy was in a room alone. The smell was like a wall, and as hard to get through, but Tietjen swallowed and went to her bedside. Seven or eight years old: her skin was flushed, tendrils of dark hair hanging around her face were lank and dry-looking. She barely moved. Her leg had been left uncovered; it was red and swollen, with a darker streak of savage red stretching toward the groin. The cut was a small, ragged gash just below the knee, crusty skin broken in places where pus oozed out. The child stirred a little and made a high, unhappy sound. McGrath, behind him, echoed it.

  Sickened, Tietjen turned away, turned back to McGrath. She stood there, arms at her sides and her mouth pressed thin.

  “We’ve lanced it twice. Those streaks on her thigh mean lymph-node involvement, the book says. Which is bad. And the fever—nothing we do brings the fever down, John—” Her voice broke. McGrath was not crying; she was furious. “Dammit, she’s just a baby.”

  “What does the book say?” he asked helplessly.

  “Drain it. Keep it clean. Apply antibiotics. Keep the fever down. Hospitalization as soon as possible.” Her voice was mirthless but she said it as if it were a punchline.

  “Do we have antibiotics?”

  “We were going to. Remember? We were going to find drugstores, a hospital somewhere to get drugs and antibiotics and maybe some better first-aid books, if we couldn’t find ourselves a doctor to bring back with them. Every single goddamned drugstore in a ten-block radius was flattened, burned out; the stuff we found, we can’t identify. I can’t just give her a pill and hope it’s the right one. We don’t have anything.” This time anger vied with tears.

  Tietjen touched the skin around the wound. It felt tender and frighteningly hot. He reached up and put a hand on the child’s forehead, but the skin there was only slightly cooler. McGrath circled around the end of the bed and began soaking the towels in water and placing them on Kathy’s face and neck.

  “If we had antibiotics would you know how to use them?”

  “These days they mostly come in premeasured doses, freeze-dried. You add distilled water.” In answer to Tietjen’s bemused look she said defensively, “I was a hospital volunteer.”

  “Thank God for it. Look, I’ll take some people, we’ll make a run over to—” He thought for a moment, which hospital was closest. “New York Multi. Ought to find everything you need. Uh—” He thought for a moment. “Can you tell me what you want us to look for?”

  McGrath made him a list: antibiotics, antiseptics, bandages, reference books, splints, tape, “anything else that looks useful. Bring a lot.” She raised one eyebrow. “Bring a doctor if you find one.”

  As if the act of setting things in motion had somehow made her nursing easier, McGrath smiled and went back to Kathy’s room.

  Fratelone insisted on going. Tietjen would have been happier had the man stayed as Barbara’s backup at the Store, but Kathy was his kid, Tietjen could hardly tell him no. Two others volunteered: a gawky teenaged boy named Ted and a dark, slender, muscular woman who called herself Ketch. Tietjen suspected that Ketch was looking for good scavenging; Ted was looking for a way to impress Ketch. Fine, so long as both did what they were supposed to when he needed them.

  The party left the Store about noon. McGrath was left in charge, but Tietjen doubted she would leave the infirmary except in direst need. Allan Hochman would back her. “See you in a little,” he told Hochman at the door.

  At the end of the block, Tietjen turned to look back at the Store. For a moment he thought he saw McGrath at a window, watching. Dumb notion: he shrugged it off and fell into step with Fratelone, east down Seventy-second Street.

  6

  “WHICH hospital are we going to?” Ketch asked Tietjen. She was hospital are we going to?” Ketch asked Tietjen. She was exotic-looking; long hair pulled tightly into a knot at the nape of her neck, long body, tight-
pressed lips and narrow dark eyes. Her voice was low-pitched, her diction clear but slightly accented. She wore black: a heavy street fighter’s jacket and narrow black pants that accentuated her thinness. Her intensity made Tietjen a little uneasy, but she seemed comfortable to follow his lead.

  “New York Multi, Seventy-first and York. They’re big, and we’ve got a big shopping list.”

  “What do we do if we find someone there?” Ketch pressed.

  The question made Tietjen impatient. If there were someone at New York Multi, we would have heard; if there were someone at New York Multi, they would have come out to help. What he said was, “If there’s a doctor there, we bring her back to look at the little girl. Anyone else—we’ll figure it out when it happens.”

  Ketch nodded, apparently satisfied.

  The sun shone with hard brightness in a brittle blue sky, and the air had a taste of river in it—salty water, mud, and chemicals. The breeze came and went, scattering scraps of paper and pebbles, exploding clots of brick-and-stone dust into clouds that stung the eyes. Tietjen walked slightly ahead of the others, not to establish himself as the leader, but because, as often, he could think of nothing to say. Except with Barbara, there seemed to be nothing he knew how to talk about, nothing he knew how to ask about, except the progress of the Store.

  Fratelone followed after Tietjen by a pace or two, as quiet as Tietjen but angry. The man had gone dead quiet when McGrath explained why the antibiotics were needed; except to announce that he was going on the hospital raid, he had said nothing since. Fratelone’s trust in him—wholehearted and unquestioning—made Tietjen a little nervous; he didn’t feel he’d earned such obedience. Still, he had to admit it made him feel better to have Fratelone at his back on his first real foray outside of the Store’s neighborhood since he and Barbara had set up there.