The Stone War

by Madeleine E. Robins

  He made it back to the safe enclosure of the Park without the sense of watching, but the encounter with the woman still bothered him. She was harmless enough, the bad strangeness of her arms was nothing, even the anger that Jit had found in her was vague and dreamy. But the taste of the man Gable on her, and the idea that someone knew of Jit, that was frightening. The boy shinnied down the side of the ladder to his home cave, started the fire and the stove and opened a can of soup for his dinner.

  When it was hot he leaned back against the wall, stared into the fire and, between bites, reached out with his mind, searching the city, trying to learn about Gable and the woman from the safety of his cave. He found others. Somewhere an old woman was kneeling, lighting a candle, muttering Blessed art thou Eternal our God, King of the world, who has sanctified us by thy commandments and ordered us to light the Sabbath candles, her head lowered and tears running down her face. Somewhere a man was laughing, hoarse and panicky. Jit touched the Man briefly and was tempted to stay with him. But now he was safe, and now he was curious.

  Jit reached around the city, touching and discarding voices, searching for the individual flavor of Gable’s woman. At last he found it: dull and angry except when she looked at the one she called Gable. Then her hunger rose and a warm fusion of wanting and fear lit her. Jit let the woman be his eyes, saw the crowd of people, each twisted by wrongness and sculpted into something strange. In the center of a crowded circle was a fire, and just to the side of it was Gable. He was tall and very pale, as if he had never seen the sun, and his eyes—the burning darkness where his eyes should have been—glowed like a torch in the firelight, sparked and beckoned to the others. He was speaking; Jit listened.

  “They are ours,” Gable was saying. His voice was hoarse. “I’ve told you they are ours. The city is ours, we just have to take it from them! When we take the city, the maker will come to us and we’ll rule forever.” The blind man looked over the crowd and stopped, looking at the woman in overalls. “Carol Ann found him today,” he announced. “Carol Ann was the first to find him.”

  Jit tasted a hot blossom of joy in the woman as she was singled out, and the confusion of hope and arousal and fear. Gable would remember her now, she would be special, Gable would love her. The flush of feeling was powerful. It took Jit a long moment to understand who it was Carol Ann had found: himself.

  Gable went on: “We will kill the others, the stupid ones, the ones who didn’t take the maker’s gifts. Gifts!” he repeated. With one long arm he pointed to a face that was all teeth, then to a dark shadowy figure flying overhead, then to a blocky man with one eye in the center of his forehead. “What were we before? Now we deserve to have the city, that’s what the maker did for us. Those others, they’re nothing, they’re food.” The blind man gazed round the circle, nodding his head, agreeing with his own words, fixing that agreement with his audience.

  Jit reached into Gable, testing. Through Gable’s eyes he saw faces watching him from the firelight, felt the strength of their need, their reliance. Jit tested deeper, for a moment nearly swept away by the erotic thrill of Gable’s power. Then, through arousal, Jit felt the blind man’s mind answer him.

  Jit sat bolt upright against the wall of his tunnel; no one had ever found him before. The blind man opened to Jit, welcomed him, brought him into a black storm of rage, the deepest core of Gable’s being, which he offered to Jit, waiting his praise. Master, Gable thought. This is your place.

  Jit felt the blackness swell up to drown him in its tarry substance. Bad. He panicked. He fled, drew his mind back. He would not be the master of that. Those were the things he had hidden away, those were the things that broke down the door. Those were the things old Nogai had told him would kill him.

  In the flickering light of his fire Jit cowered against the wall, staring at the coals, waiting into the dawn to see if Gable could find Jit as Jit had found him.

  8

  A LITTLE before dawn Tietjen’s party got back to the store. Allan Hochman was on guard in the lobby. His eyebrows were drawn together furiously, anger the best defense against worry.

  “Where the hell have you been?” he began. When he saw Tietjen’s face, and the faces of the others, “What happened?”

  “I’ll tell you in the morning. I don’t want to talk about it right now. Is Barbara asleep?”

  Hochman shook his head. “She’s up with the little girl. Did you get penicillin?”

  Ketch said wearily, “We got everything. Look, if you don’t need me—”

  “Go sleep,” Tietjen said. “Thanks.”

  “I’ll go to bed, but I’m not sure I’ll sleep,” Ketch said dully. “I don’t want to dream.”

  “If you have trouble, come up to the infirmary and Barbara’ll find you a sleeping pill,” Tietjen offered. “Ted? Bobby? You want something to help you sleep?”

  Fratelone and the boy refused. Ketch stood looking at Tietjen for another moment: “It’s been a slice. Can’t think of anyone else I’d rather have stayed up late at the horror show with. Later.” She smiled wanly, then shrugged her shoulders and went off down the lobby. In another moment Ted followed her, shambling down the hall after her, without a hope that she would notice him.

  “Let’s get this stuff up to Barbara,” Tietjen said, and he and Hochman and Fratelone worked on maneuvering the carts up the stairs one at a time, and through the hall to the infirmary-apartment. McGrath stood in the doorway with the light behind her.

  “We were worried,” she said grimly.

  “Yeah, well. I’ll tell you about it some other time. How’s the little girl?”

  McGrath chose her words carefully. “Rotten,” she said at last. “What drugs did you find?”

  Tietjen echoed Ketch: “Everything. I think the antibiotics are in the first cart.” He began to dig through the cart, but bending over made him dizzy; it occurred to him that he was tired.

  McGrath’s hand was on his shoulder. “I’ll find them. You get some sleep, you look like hell. I’ll manage here.”

  “How much sleep have you had?” he asked her.

  “Some. Go lie down, will you please?”

  “Yuh, Boss, get some sleep. I’ll stay and help,” Fratelone said behind him. Tietjen had forgotten he was there. “’S one a my kids in there, right?”

  “Go, John,” McGrath said.

  I must look really bad, Tietjen thought vaguely. “Okay. Call me in a few hours. You manage everything all right?”

  “McGrath smiled lopsidedly.”Manage better without you in a dead faint to liven things up,” she said.

  Tietjen climbed the stairs to his room and collapsed on the bed and fell immediately into dreamless sleep.

  He slept for nine hours. The room was filled with sunlight when he woke, and for a moment Tietjen lay in bed feeling the pleasurable schoolboy guilt of having slept too late. Then he remembered. He rose, splashed water on his face and brushed his teeth, dressed in fresh clothes. He had an impulse to burn the clothes he had worn on the hospital raid, as if that would burn out the memory of the monsters and their victim. He shook his head to clear out the memories, just for a little while, time enough to catch his breath. Then he went down to the lobby, toward Elena’s kitchen. There were half a dozen people sitting around, talking. They stopped when Tietjen entered; he saw Ted sitting in one corner talking to three others. God only knew what he was telling them.

  Elena handed Tietjen a plate with rice and beans on it. “Barbara needs you upstairs after,” she said. Tietjen thought it was the first time she had ever said anything to him directly. I’m moving up in the world, he thought. He ate quickly.

  Fratelone was asleep in the living room of the infirmary, his mouth slightly open, showing square, powerful-looking teeth. Tietjen went through to Kathy Calvino’s room. The smell of dying flesh was like a wall. Tietjen swallowed hard on the rice and beans that threatened to come up again, and stepped in.

  “Morning.”

  Barbara McGrath looked up from the pot in
which she was soaking a cloth; she had tied a cloth around her face, but it had slipped down and hung casually around her neck. “Hiya. Feeling better?”

  “Much. How’s she doing?”

  “I was just about to drain the wound again. See if that helps. I don’t know, though. I’d like it if you’d look at the books and tell me what you think.”

  “About what?”

  “I thought the antibiotics would do it, but with this mess—and I lost an hour realizing that I couldn’t fake doing a venipuncture, so I’ve been giving her antibiotics by mouth, and I’m not sure it’s going to work. The book says two point five million units—but I don’t know what that translates to with pills. If I had time I could look it up, figure it out, but I don’t know how much time we have—” Her look shifted from the girl on the bed to a metal cocktail platter that held an array of surgical and kitchen knives, razors, a bottle of alcohol, some matches, and, beside them, a stack of books and pamphlets. “I hate this,” McGrath added flatly.

  She looked old. The sunlight that filtered through the blinds lit her face in lemony splotches; the smudges under her eyes had deepened. There was a jerkiness to her motions, as if she was so in control of herself that the control itself had become a burden. She wore a white smock spattered with dots of blood and pus.

  She laid another cloth on Kathy’s forehead, then took a pan from beside the stainless-steel platter, dumped the knives and razors into it, and came around the foot of the bed. “I’m going to boil this stuff and try to lance the wound again. I’m glad you’re home.”

  She disappeared around the corner for the camper stove that had been set up in the kitchen. Tietjen watched her go. Glad he was home? Why? What in God’s name did she think he could do that she or someone else had not? For a moment he was furious, staring down at the medical dictionary and the first-aid books on a chair where McGrath had left them for him.

  He flipped open the top book and started looking at it, sat down and pulled the book into his lap and flipped through looking for information about blood poisoning.

  “Anything?” McGrath was back with the pot held out at arm’s length; the steam that rose from it made the neat waves of her hair kink up into a soft white froth around her face.

  “According to the book, we should have taken her to the hospital two days ago. Failing that, wait and watch. Want a hand?” Tietjen dumped the books on the floor and reached for the pot, but she pulled away from him.

  “You’ll burn your hands. You could lance the wound this time.” She put the pot down on the table, where it sizzled slightly, scorching the plastic surface. “You’ll have to wash up first.”

  He regretted that he had said anything, opened his mouth to say no and found that he could not. Not looking at the slope of Barbara’s shoulders and the tight set of her mouth. So Tietjen followed her into the bathroom, washed his hands four times with soap and water, as McGrath did. Back in the sickroom, she took a place at the girl’s head, both hands hovering near her shoulders. “I’ll hold her down if we need. Bobby did it for me while you were asleep.”

  The sheet was pulled away from Kathy’s leg. It had swollen since yesterday, and taken on an ominous purple color. There were small blisters across the skin, and the red stripe that stretched toward the groin had widened and deepened in color. It didn’t look like something human; it didn’t look like anything that should be attached to a little girl. When Tietjen’s hand hovered over the knives and needles McGrath had removed from the pot onto a piece of cloth: “The parer works best.” She nodded when he picked up a three-inch kitchen knife with a wooden handle. “That’s it.”

  She told him what to do, and Tietjen slowly opened the wound again. It was nearly impossible to make the first cut, slicing through the scab and skin to suppurating flesh to release a slow ooze of pus. The cutting got easier; Tietjen clenched his teeth and ignored the lurching of his stomach. Probed farther. Barbara poured a thin stream of Betadine solution into the wound, mopping it up with gauze before he went on again. At last, unsure that continuing would help, and not in any case sure that he could continue, Tietjen stopped, laid down the knife, and stood away. Through it all Kathy had not moved or made a sound.

  “Think that will do?”

  “I guess. You’re braver than I’ve been.” McGrath’s hands were still on the girl’s shoulders; she moved one now to smooth the lank dark hair from Kathy’s face. “It’s okay, sweetie, that’s the end of it for a while, you rest now. That’s my good girl.” There was no sign that the girl had heard.

  “Now what do we do?”

  She looked up from the child’s blank face and smiled. “It’s time for another round of antibiotics—unless you know how to put in an IV? Damn. Okay, another pill. After that, who the hell knows?” Again the tight smile.

  “Then go get some rest, Barbara.” It occurred to him that as long as he sat here, he did not have to deal with the monsters outside the store.

  She smiled again, and it was the familiar Barbara. “I could stand to change my clothes—maybe you’ve noticed?”

  “Then go change them. I’ll stay and watch for a while. You could even sleep a little.”

  She did not argue. When she was gone Tietjen picked up the books and continued to read. The Physician’s Desk Reference was studded with slips of paper: when he opened it Tietjen saw notes in Barbara’s neat writing, dosages for Cephalexin, Dolsephexin, Cafazolin, Clindamycin. He put down the PDR and spent the next hours picking up information he hoped he would never need to use. The medical dictionary, for example, listed ninety-six separate types of amputation. He looked up from the book and stared at the little girl on the bed, shuddered, and flipped the pages ahead: carbophilic, carboxy-lase, carbuncle, carcass … enough of that. He put down the dictionary and picked up one of the first-aid handbooks, a fairly comprehensive one. The entry on infected wounds and septicemia ended, “Hospitalization may be necessary; your physician will advise.”

  McGrath appeared with a plate of stew for each of them. Tietjen ate hungrily, so used to the smell in the room that he barely noticed it. When they had finished eating, she tried to get Kathy to drink some fruit juice with her pills.

  “Come on, darlin’, come on. Have to have some energy to fight this stupid infection on. Come on.”

  Kathy seemed to rouse a little, swallowing, muttering. Tietjen couldn’t remember if he’d ever seen the girl before this. She was how old? Maybe eight; near Chris’s age. Don’t even think about that. She looked nearer a hundred, like a paper doll no one had bothered to color. When she finished the juice McGrath settled her with her head raised a little on the pillow and combed out the limp dark hair, smoothing it gently away from the child’s forehead, keeping up the murmur of inconsequential, soothing words. “When you’re well again we’ll find you some ribbons and tie it up pretty for you, you’ll like that, won’t you? What’s your favorite color?” No answer, a pale flicker of smile that might have been deliberate. McGrath went on. “Mine is yellow, which is a shame because it looks terrible on me. Makes me look a like a lemon. You’d look nice in yellow, it would be pretty with your hair … .”

  She kept up the murmur for some time. Tietjen felt as if he was intruding, listening and watching her. Finally he turned back to the books, reading about German measles, swollen glands, lice, heart attack, an overwhelming array of ills. At the bedside McGrath put the comb aside and sat down, staring aimlessly across the room.

  An hour or so later they gave the girl another dose of penicillin, took her temperature, looked at the dusky purple, swollen flesh of the thigh, the blackening, crusty skin near the wound, and the nasty, pus-filled blisters that surrounded it. No change, despite the antibiotics.

  An hour after that, McGrath cleared her throat. “We have to do something.”

  Tietjen looked up from the dictionary. There was a morbid fascination in reading the entries. “Is it time to drain the wound?”

  “John, what’s the difference between septicemia and gangrene?�
��

  “Ask me something hard.” He thumbed through the book in his lap. “Septicemia is blood poisoning—infection that’s spread to the blood. Gangrene is the death of tissue, uh—” He paged through the dictionary. “‘Usually in considerable mass and associated with loss of vascular supply and followed by bacterial invasion and putrefaction.”’ With each word he felt a little sicker. “Barbara?”

  She looked at him. Tietjen felt he should put his arm around her, give her a shoulder to lean on. He could not. What he wanted more than anything was to walk out of the room, out of the Store, into the streets that were filling with dusk, into the March warmth. And he couldn’t. All he could do was sit in this room watching a ten-year-old kid die of septicemia and what looked like gangrene. McGrath was holding Kathy’s hand. Tietjen closed the medical books on his lap. Thinking.

  “Boss?” Fratelone edged in and hunkered down next to him, eyes on the bed. “How’s the kid doing?”

  “Lousy.” Tietjen grimaced.

  “All that medicine didn’t help?”

  “We aren’t sure, Bobby. What we need is a doctor or a hospital or someone who knows something.”

  Barbara spoke. “I shouldn’t have wasted time sending you out for drugs. We should have just sent her out of here on a stretcher, to Westchester or Jersey or somewhere. We could do it now—”

  Tietjen shook his head. “She wouldn’t last the trip, Barbara—”

  “Dammit, John, what else can we do? Do you really want to sit here and watch her die? I can’t. We’ve got to get help for her—”

  “Boss, I’ll take her,” Fratelone started. “I can hot-wire a car—”

  “Shut up! Christ’s sake, Bobby, Manhattan’s a fucking island. The bridge I came in on you could hardly walk on. You going to load the kid into a car—if you can find one that’ll run—and cruise around trying to find a tunnel or bridge that’s passable? Build yourself a raft and float across the Hudson? She’d die before you got to the river … .” Tietjen trailed off, remembering the overwhelming dread that had hung over the East River like a fog.