The Stone War

by Madeleine E. Robins

  After eighteen hours of sleep, McGrath had returned to work. Back to normal: competent, cheerful, dryly humorous. Much of her time was spent with Kathy Calvino, nursing and comforting; Tietjen did not know how Barbara had explained the loss of her leg to the eight-year-old, but when he went to visit her she was meekly polite and more cheerful than he would have expected. Barbara, standing by the end of the bed, was triumphant.

  Sometimes Tietjen thought McGrath watched him when he was with Ketch; he thought she was laughing at his awkwardness around the younger woman. And Ketch was—herself. Since Irene he had seen other women, taken them out and gone to bed with them, but he had never lived with one or worked with one on the day-to-day level of life in the Store. When Tietjen expected Ketch to be possessive, she laughed and walked away, then surprised him by expecting responses he neither understood nor anticipated. And it was weird, living publicly, being watched as the leader. Ketch played the role of his lover comfortably, with a relaxed sense of what she could and could not grant on Tietjen’s behalf. She was not much of a talker, fairly handy with tools, and willing to help find and dispose of bodies in the buildings nearby. She was an active, rather fierce lover, and told jokes well. Tietjen liked her.

  Still, without McGrath’s amusement to stiffen his spine, he might have been embarrassed into breaking with Ketch.

  He and Fratelone and half a dozen others were in the basement of the building next door, clearing away rubble so they could examine the water heater. Hot and dirty, Tietjen sent Greg Feinberg back to the shop for a jug of water or juice, and called a break. In the sputtering yellow light of the lanterns the people sitting there, wiping sweat from hairlines with a forearm or a sleeve, looked like old sepia-tinted photographs Tietjen had seen of mine workers.

  “Mr. Tietjen?”

  Greg stood in the door to the boiler room, framed in more of the yellow lantern light from the basement hall. His voice was urgent. “Mr. Tietjen, can you come upstairs?”

  Tietjen swung easily under a low hanging pipe and straightened up, wiping his hands on his pants as he went. “What’s up, Greg?”

  “Can you please come upstairs, sir?” the boy repeated. His voice trembled, and he was pale beneath the freckles and slight tan. Tietjen did not argue with what he saw in the boy’s face. He let Greg lead him up the stairs and through the long marble lobby. In the doorway the sun was an assaultive glare. Tietjen blinked as he approached it, blinked as he looked outside.

  Across the street, sitting with his back to the base of a fallen streetlamp, was one of the monsters. He was a little man, bandy-legged, dressed in a red T-shirt and black Bermuda shorts, with a round head with a fringe of dark, greasy-looking hair like an unkempt monk’s tonsure. And no features except for a huge mouth, lined with narrow, needle pointed teeth. The mouth watched them like a Cyclops’ eye for a moment; then, like a wink, the mouth smiled.

  Tietjen felt the world tilt. He thought sickly: We left you alone; you’re not supposed to be real.

  “Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” Allan Hochman murmured, behind him.

  “What is it?” Greg Feinberg asked. His voice wavered and cracked; Tietjen felt the boy’s stare and the urgency of his attention. “Mr. Tietjen?”

  He made his voice very calm, dry, matter-of-fact. “I don’t know. We’ll have to find out.” He ignored the twisting of his gut and took a step forward; someone had to do something. He had to do something, God knew what. What could he say to a thing like that? Hey there, how ya doing? Another step; I’m getting brave, he thought with detachment. Or stupid. Another step and he was in the street, poised before the doorway with one hand raised. Maybe it wants to be friends. Immediately he remembered the screams of the woman he had heard tortured. Stupid.

  “Yes?” he said.

  The thing grinned wider. There was no sound except a soft whistle of wind through the street.

  Tietjen raised a hand, a sort of halfhearted wave, a signal of good intent.

  The blast of sound from behind him was so sudden that Tietjen thought for a moment that he was the one who had been shot. Across the street the thing with no face jerked suddenly, then sat rock still for a moment, braced against the streetlamp base. Then it slumped sideways and Tietjen saw the red on red of blood seeping through the creature’s scarlet T-shirt.

  “Jesus.”

  Tietjen spun around and found Allan Hochman behind him, staring; others stood behind Allan. Beyond Allan, in the doorway, Bobby Fratelone stood with a rifle under his arm. He was white-faced and his grip on the gun was not casual. “Teach ‘em,” he muttered. But he held the rifle out to Tietjen. Tietjen stared at it mutely for a moment. “That’ll fuckin’ teach ’em,” Fratelone repeated.

  “Will it?” Tietjen asked. “Come on, we’ve got to finish what you started.”

  He directed two men to drag the monster’s body to the cremation pit. Everyone else he herded back into the building. When Fratelone would have said something more Tietjen shook his head. “Later, Bobby. We need to talk later.”

  Fratelone did not come to dinner. Tietjen had sent him back to the Store to get some rest while he and his work crew finished clearing the basement of the building next door. At dinner he sat between Ketch and McGrath, trying to talk with Barbara on the one hand; trying to amuse Ketch on the other; trying, with a show of self-conscious leadership, to set an example of good-humored calm for the others. By the end of the meal he felt like he had been through a battle more unnerving than merely walking out to face the monster that afternoon. Not a single acrimonious word was spoken by Ketch or McGrath, they seemed to go out of their way to be polite to each other, but it was a laden, terrifying politeness. He stood up from the table feeling wrung.

  “Look, we need to talk,” he muttered to McGrath.

  “All right,” she said coolly. “When?”

  “Half an hour? Let me collect Bobby. Can we meet in your room?”

  McGrath relented, smiling. “Of course.”

  Twenty minutes later Fratelone, still groggy from a nap, was in the hallway outside McGrath’s room. “Gotta throw some water on my face.” He gave Tietjen a nervous sideways glance.

  “Make it fast, Bobby. We’ll wait for you.”

  While they waited for Fratelone, Tietjen explained it all to Barbara. Not just the incident that afternoon, but the surreal horror show he and the others had witnessed near Mt. Sinai. By the time Fratelone joined them Barbara was as quietly frightened as Tietjen could have wished.

  She was for shoring up the Store’s defenses and waiting. “Don’t borrow trouble.”

  Fratelone ducked his head and did not look Tietjen in the eye. “They won’t come after us here again,” he insisted. “They want easy kills; ’f we go after them they’ll pick us off. We showed ’em today; they’ll have to leave us alone now.”

  Tietjen bit back his first angry response. Bobby was working from terror; even talking about the monsters had him working his hands together, rubbing and clenching, cracking the knuckles. Bobby the tough guy couldn’t face fighting the monsters. For the first time in weeks, Tietjen heard the warning voice that had accompanied him back into the city, wailing, insisting that he make the others understand.

  “They will come,” he said at last. “You heard them that night: they won’t be happy until they’ve wiped us out or we’ve killed them all.”

  “John, how can you be sure?” Barbara asked.

  “I know it,” he insisted. “If I were one of them it’s how I’d feel. They’re a part of what happened to the city, Barbara, the thing that hates the city. I’ve walked around more than you have since the disaster, you’ve worked closer to the Store, you don’t know—”

  McGrath drew herself up, cold as death. “Don’t pull that I’ve-been-in-the-streets crap with me, John. I’ve seen what’s come in here; I’ve nursed people who’ve come to us and they’ve talked to me. I know what happened to the city was weird, John, but don’t try to pull experience points on me. I stayed here because you asked me to.
”

  Tietjen looked at her, exasperated. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t have stayed—”

  “Just that I can’t know what’s going on out there because I’m not used to crawling around the city on my belly the way—” She broke off and began again, obviously getting her temper under control. “John, I told you what I saw, the day it happened. You think anyone else saw anything, anything weirder than I have?” There was something else going on that Tietjen did not understand, something that was making Barbara angrier than she should have been, and that scared him because he needed her and he had to make her understand what had to be done.

  “What we heard out there was twisted, those damned things out there are twisted too, and sooner or later they’re going to want to bring the Store down; everything we’re doing is directly opposed to what they want. They won’t peacefully coexist. Unless we expect them they’ll win. Barbara—” He held his hand out to her. “I need you to back me on this. First thing is, we have to make sure the Store is safe. But after, we have to go to them before they come to us.”

  “I have to think,” she said at last. Her voice was steady again, without the steely tone of control. She was working on making a good decision, Tietjen thought. “Let me sleep on it; I can’t decide all at once.”

  Tietjen nodded. “In the morning.”

  Fratelone shambled from the room with his head down. “N’a morning,” he muttered, and headed toward his own room.

  McGrath and Tietjen watched him go. “John, I don’t like what this is doing to Bobby,” McGrath murmured. “Look at him.”

  “I am,” Tietjen said. “I don’t like what this will do to any of us. What those things out there would do would be worse. Sleep on it, Barbara.”

  He left her in her doorway and climbed the stairs to his own apartment, feeling manipulative and melodramatic and desperate. He reargued it all under his breath, worrying that he had left something unsaid. When he reached the landing and opened the door to his living room, Ketch was waiting for him.

  In the dark later, with Ketch’s breathing a noiseless rise-and-fall against his side, Tietjen lay awake, listening to laughter that seemed to thread its way through the streets to find him.

  He sat with Barbara at breakfast again and tried not to push too hard for her answer.

  “I still don’t know,” she told him at last. “Everything, everything I know says that you reason with your enemies. Last ditch, you defend yourself. You don’t go out and kill preemptively-”

  “Dammit, you can’t reason with monsters—”

  “Loaded word.” McGrath watched Ketch settle at the table on Tietjen’s other side. He refused to be sidetracked.

  “Call them whatever you damned well like. We wipe them out, or else they’re going to wipe us out, and every normal person left in the city.” He was sounding panicky and high-pitched; Ketch was nodding beside him, but he was afraid he would lose Barbara by being too shrill. “I’m not telling this right. Shit.” He paused. “Look. I do remember what you told me the night we met. About the subway tunnel. The kids, and the tunnel squeezing shut, and the feelings you had. I remember that guy at the Met that was collecting people. Those were a part of it, Barbara. These things out there are a part of it.”

  Beside him Ketch murmured, “Tunnel?” Tietjen ignored her, concentrating on Barbara, willing her to believe. He watched the memory play across her face.

  “Really like that?” she whispered.

  “Like that. Whatever did that made these things.”

  “Then they will come,” Barbara said.

  Tietjen released the breath he had been holding. “They’re organized, they have a leader, the blind one. If they’re bringing people in to torture—they don’t want to live and let live, Barbara.”

  “No, I imagine they don’t,” she said dryly. “They’re the ones that hurt Bobby?”

  “I’ll back John up,” Ketch said.

  McGrath nodded coolly. “He won’t want to fight them, John.” “We need him—we don’t have many real fighters; Bobby’s as close to an enforcer as we’ve got.”

  Barbara nodded and leaned back from the table to wave at one of the Calvino girls who was passing. “Karen, can you find Mr. Fratelone for me?”

  The little girl hesitated for a moment, then pillowed her head on her hands and made a snoring noise. “Sy—ee—pin’,” she managed, and Tietjen remembered that McGrath had said the girls had some sort of speech problem.

  “Yes, dear, but I need him a lot. Can you wake him up and tell him that Mr. Tietjen and I need him—” She paused. “Up in my rooms, okay? It’s important, sweetie.”

  Karen nodded and left them.

  “Closed conference, Ms. McGrath? Maybe someone else has an idea could be useful.” Ketch looked at Tietjen from the corner of her long eyes.

  McGrath smiled politely. “We’re not shutting anyone out, Luisa. Just chatting about how to … present this to the Store. Do you have any thoughts?”

  Ketch made a face. “Please. John, I’m going upstairs.”

  Tietjen was too grateful at having won his point with Barbara to worry about Ketch just now. “Li, we’ll talk later, okay?”

  “Okay, baby.” Ketch ran a negligently affectionate finger along his collar, gathered up her plate and fork, and left them. McGrath watched her go.

  Bobby was groggy and resentful. “Stay where we are, don’t go looking for no trouble,” he repeated stubbornly. It took all McGrath’s calm persuasion and Tietjen’s restrained passion to make him agree to take the fight to the monsters, and even then Tietjen believed his agreement came more from Fratelone’s loyalty to them than belief that the monsters could be beaten. The three of them separated after an hour and went to spread the word of a meeting that evening.

  Looking across the lobby that night Tietjen was startled at how many people the Store had recruited—he hadn’t seen them all together at one time in weeks. They sat crammed one-too-many onto the couches, perched on the coffee table and useless radiators, sat cross-legged on the black and white marble floor, leaned against the walls or against each other. Fifty, sixty people, kids, adults, talking low in the torch and lantern light, already friendships and families forming within the community.

  When he cleared his throat they—all of them—turned immediately to listen. Tietjen felt a flash of fear—don’t look at me that way!—that came and went too fast for him to think about. He cleared his throat again and cast about for the right words to say. So much of what he did seemed to be finding the right words.

  “Everyone’s probably heard about the—uhh—visitor that Bobby Fratelone killed yesterday. Some of you may have seen these things around town before you got here—” A ripple of agreement in the crowd, as if he had struck a chord many would as soon have forgotten. “Bobby and Ketch and Ted and I ran into some of them last week when we went out for medical supplies. Until yesterday we hoped they’d leave us alone; I guess we could still hope for that, but I don’t believe it.” He paused and looked from face to face. “We know they’ve found us. I think the—thing—out front yesterday was sent in just to make us nervous, let us know they’ve found us. War-of-nerves stuff.”

  He could feel the weight of absolute attention and picked his way between over- and understatement. “Look, people. Those things are monsters. I mean physically, sure, they look like Halloween walking. But we heard them torturing a woman, the night we were up at Mt. Sinai; we heard them talking. They hate us, they don’t want to be reasoned with. So first we have to make sure this place is damned well fortified. Then we’re going to have to fight. We have to win the damned war once, or be prepared to fight and keep on fighting.”

  A hand went up. A youngish woman with pale brown hair and a round face stood up. Tietjen did not know her name. “What about when help comes? I mean, they won’t matter then, I mean, won’t the Guard or somebody take care of them? I don’t know how to fight anything, that’s what I pay taxes for, for the Guard and the Army and that. When they ge
t here—” She looked around her for agreement. Some people nodded.

  Behind Tietjen, McGrath spoke gently. “Gail, it’s been almost two months since the disaster. The only person I know of who’s come in to New York since that time is John, here, and he came in two days after. I don’t know what’s keeping the outside world from pouring in and starting the biggest damned relief program in the history of the modern world—all I know is that we’ve been on our own for two months, and we’d better plan on being on our own indefinitely. This isn’t an adventure; it’s life. Ask Kathy Calvino. That’s why we’re planting the garden and working on this place—we don’t know when—if—we’re going to be helped. If these monsters are as bad as John says, we have to count on dealing with them ourselves. I’m not a fighter either,” she added gently.

  “Yeah, well.” A man stood up, someone from the cellar work crew. “How do we know these things are so dangerous? I mean, yeah, they’re frightening-looking, but the only word we have is Tietjen’s.” He looked at Tietjen apologetically. “If I’m going to fight, I need to know that I got to fight. I saw that thing out there yesterday, but it didn’t look dangerous to me. Just ugly.”

  There was a murmur of amusement, agreement.

  “Don’t take my word for it,” Tietjen began. “Ketch, Bobby, the Calvino girls, some of the rest of you must have—”

  Fratelone cut him off. “He’s right. The Boss is.” His voice was hoarse. “They had me for a while. Them things. It ain’t just they want what we got, even that they want us dead. They like killing. They like the pain. They were going to do me real slow, then the kids. Look.” Fratelone ignored Tietjen’s cry of “Bobby, don’t.” He turned his back to the crowd and, startlingly, loosened his belt and dropped his trousers. Standing in front of the man, Tietjen could not see what made the crowd behind him gasp. “I’m sorry,” Fratelone said punctiliously to the cluster of older women who sat on one of the couches. “But you got to see it, and understand what those things are. I don’t want to go near them, but the Boss is right. They want to go after us.”