The Stone War

by Madeleine E. Robins

  As he threaded the dark pathways, Jit raised his head and cried “Tee-jin, Tee-jin, Tee-jin,” like a battle cry or a challenge.

  Above the park the Man slept.

  11

  IT took a week or so for the focus of the Store to change. There was less building and more training, repairing, shoring things up. Tietjen hated the change he had insisted on, as the Store concentrated on survival today and tomorrow, and put the future aside. The foraging parties went out armed, and a part of everyone’s day was spent learning to shoot or fight; Elena Cruz, in charge of the kitchen, turned out to be fast and dangerous with a staff, of all things, and gave classes every afternoon; Ketch taught what she called “the cutting arts,” anything to do with knives. Fratelone was their expert with guns. Tietjen found himself frustrated with Fratelone; he would have put the man in charge of defense, made him the general in their army, but Fratelone refused the responsibility. “I can’t do strategy and stuff,” he said. “I’m a soldier, Boss. I don’t know how to do that other stuff.”

  What other stuff? Tietjen wondered. He would have kept after Fratelone and nagged him into taking the job, but Barbara talked him out of it.

  “It’s a wise man who knows what he can and cannot do,” she reminded him, late one night when Bobby Fratelone had slouched off to bed.

  “He’s the closest thing we have to a real fighter, Barbara. We need him.”

  She shook her head. “John, would you really feel comfortable following Bobby into a fight when he was calling the shots?”

  “Sure, of course—” Tietjen said.

  “Really?” Her tone was very dry. “Think about it for a second.”

  He did, and came to the crux of the problem. “I can’t do it! I don’t know anything about fighting—”

  “But you know about planning,” McGrath said. “You’re the strategy guy. Bobby’s the—what do you call it? The enforcer.”

  Tietjen gave up trying to change the way things were.

  When they weren’t learning to fight, they were making the Store secure. From buildings on Madison a party wrestled away whole sheets of shop-grade security grating, brought them home and secured them over the windows on the first few floors, arching the grating back at the top so that no one could climb up the grating itself. They found inner doors for the lobby that could be secured with chains rather than by piling furniture against them. The roof was ringed round with razor wire, and the alley behind the building, where the children played handball and hopscotch and other games too arcane for Tietjen to identify, was sealed up with grating and razor wire too. Tietjen was uncomfortably aware of the prison feel of the Store these days. When he stood in the street, looking at the graceful garlands and friezes, the stringcourse hidden under security grating, Tietjen made a promise that as soon as the threat was over he would set the building free again.

  And there was foraging, and storing, and cataloguing, and the making of ration plans in case of siege. It was unbelievably complicated; every time Tietjen thought of one thing they hadn’t done, two more things sprang from it. At the end of a day he trudged up to his room, shirt clinging wetly to his back, wrung with sweat. He and half a dozen others had been stowing treasure: a cache of two hundred five-gallon mineral-water bags brought in by a foraging party. His arms and legs hurt, his back was sore, there was a permanent crick in his neck from looking: looking at fortifications, watching Ketch’s knife-fighting class go through its paces, peering down Fifth Avenue or Seventy-second Street during his guard stint, reading Barbara’s daily notes, inspecting, approving.

  He was exhausted. Well, Barbara was exhausted, Bobby, Ketch, the Hochmans; Elena, who was cooking for eighty people, maybe more now, with assistance from the older Calvino girls that Tietjen suspected was more hindrance than help, and an occasional hand from someone else. Everyone was exhausted. We should add people to the regular kitchen rotation, Tietjen thought. And infirmary duty, too; Barbara was doing too many things; she was cheery and brisk as always, but her eyelids were purple with fatigue.

  He was always making lists: things they needed, things they wanted, things to be done. As he reached the top of the stairs and started down the hall he was revising the rotations: guard duty, kitchen duty, infirmary, messenger. The gardens, cleanup, trash burial. He was searching his mind for more when a shot rang out.

  He was on the ground before I’m not hit sank in. Cautiously be began to sit up, looking for the source of fire. If the shot was fired in the building that meant the monsters had somehow broken through all their sentries, killed them, probably. Who was on watch? A couple of new people, he remembered, and felt an instant flash of relief that neither Ketch nor Barbara had been out there. But if the monsters were in the building, everyone could be dead by now. Except him.

  Another shot, and a fainter ringing sound he recognized as ricochet. The fire was not in this hall. But the source sounded near. One of the apartments? How the hell had they broken through without a warning, at least a warning? Had they been betrayed to the monsters?

  As he crawled down the hallway toward the utility stairs there was another shot, sounding closer, as if he were moving toward it. What the hell? Then voices, chattering, normal voices, and one he thought was Bobby Fratelone’s: muffled, but recognizable. He figured it out. Jesus H. Christ. Tietjen stood up, rigid with anger, and went back down the hall, down the stairs, strode through the peaceful lobby of the building, nodded to the woman standing guard at the door, and went into the building that had just been cleared out next door.

  He found Fratelone and his class down one hallway on the fourth floor, targets tacked to the far wall, a mismatched assortment of handguns and rifles laid out on the floor. Two teenaged girls were lying prone on the floor, giggling nervously as they aimed at the targets. They, and the others in the room, had bits of cotton stuffed in their ears.

  As Tietjen watched, the girls fired. One bullet glanced off the wall, hit a metal doorframe, and buried itself in the opposite wall. The other hit the target, within six inches of its bull’s-eye. As the girls got up from the floor, the sharpshooter reminded her friend to put the safety on.

  “Very nice,” Tietjen heard himself saying. Preserve the image: el Jefe reviews the troops. He smiled at the two girls, at the others crowding around them, then turned to Fratelone. “Bobby, can I have a word or two with you?”

  He pulled Fratelone into the stairway.

  “Kids’re doing pretty good,” Fratelone began sunnily. “Some a the older people are—”

  “Bobby, aside from scaring me to death, what the hell are you doing in here?” Tietjen asked very quietly. “What the hell are you doing teaching these people to shoot indoors? Did you see what the girl’s bullet did?”

  “Almost hit the fuckin’ bull’s-eye—” Fratelone said. “Can you shoot that good?”

  Tietjen spoke very deliberately. “Not her bullet. The other one. Didn’t go near the target: bounced all over the place. This hall is too narrow to use as a shooting range, one of these times a ricochet is going to kill someone. For Christ’s sake, Bobby, use a little sense!”

  The big man sulked. “Where the hell you think I should be teaching them? Too windy out in the street. Where else is there room? In the lobby, with all that marble and brass stuff? I ain’t stupid, Boss. I was trying to do the best I could find. Jesus.”

  “Bobby—” His adrenaline was lower. Tietjen took two breaths before continuing. “Look, Bobby. I’m sorry I came on so strong. I was going up to my room and heard the shots. Scared me shitless.” He remembered himself, flat on the floor of the hallway, trying to find the sniper that wasn’t there, and grinned. “I think we need to relocate you somewhere safer.”

  Fratelone nodded. “Yeah, well. We could go out to the Park, I guess.”

  Tietjen still had a weird feeling about Central Park as he remembered it, dead and maleficent. It was green now, blooming, and no one else seemed to feel it, but the place still gave him an unsettled, queasy feeling. “There’
s wind in Central Park, too, Bobby. How about the basement?”

  “The basement?” They sat in the stairwell, discussing how, and how quickly, one of the basements could be turned into a shooting range. Fratelone broke off once to stick his head back in the hallway. “Take a break, you guys. Fifteen minutes. Then come back; we’re moving this stuff downstairs. I think.”

  Too much was happening like that, Tietjen thought regretfully as he climbed the stairs to his room that night. Ketch had pled exhaustion and was in her own room, polishing her nails and reading by flashlight. We’re making decisions too fast, we’re not planning things properly. We’re going to regret some of the things we’re doing now, and those goddamned things have forced us to panic. He felt a sudden urge to take a walk, a long desultory walk around the city, as he had in the old days. He needed to clear his head, and that had always been the best way; only now it wasn’t safe, wasn’t even possible.

  “John?”

  When he turned he saw Barbara on the landing below; she had a thermos under her arm and two mugs in one hand. She had changed into a clean sweater and skirt, and loosened her white hair around her face; but the small vanity had not erased the bruised look of her eyes.

  “Barbara, what is it?” He took a step down, then another, down the stairs. “Jesus, you look like hell.”

  She winced slightly, then waved a hand at him and smiled. “One of these days I’ve got to get my hair done. No emergency, John; I’m sorry if I scared you. I just—couldn’t sleep, and thought I’d bring some coffee up and go over some things. If you don’t have other plans … .” She peered up the stairwell, as if trying to make out Ketch’s form in the shadows.

  The light in Barbara’s face, tired and drawn as she was, dimmed more before Tietjen pointed out that he was alone. “I was just going to sit and look out the window. Come on up. I’ve been thinking about organizing rotating duty for the kitchen.” He held out a hand companionably, a gesture of invitation. Barbara looked at it for a moment, as if she couldn’t tell what it was for; then she handed him the thermos and started climbing the stairs.

  Tietjen took a couple of kerosene lamps from his apartment, and the two of them walked up several more flights, until they were both slightly breathless. Then they found an open apartment with a view and went in. There were three chairs, a coffee table, some paintings; most furniture from the upper floors had been brought downstairs for use in the communal living areas. Barbara put the mugs and thermos on the coffee table and went directly to the window that looked west over Central Park and south toward Midtown.

  “It’s so black,” she said softly. “Just pinpoints of light; I wonder what they are?”

  Tietjen came and stood beside her. The street below was washed with light from theatrical spotlights from an uptown warehouse, running on emergency generators: anything to keep the approach to the buildings well lit and secure. Beyond the splash of yellow light there were shadows, then darkness. The lights Barbara spoke of flickered in the distance. Tietjen calculated that one was in the vicinity of Lincoln Center, another farther downtown, at the edge of Central Park near the Fifth Avenue entrances, another a reflection in one of the office buildings in the Forties, just a dim glow. Probably a nest of monsters, he thought.

  “Pockets of civilization, you think?” Barbara asked dubiously.

  “Wish I thought so. Hey—” He put a hand out to get her attention. “Did you see that?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing,” she murmured softly.

  “There,” he breathed. “Across and over by the Park wall. It looks like a smear of white until it moves.”

  After a long moment Barbara nodded slowly. “Just one person, I think.”

  The pale blur moved closer to the light and suddenly Tietjen could see what it was: a man, or rather a boy, stick-thin and pale in the wash of yellow light, wearing dark clothes that made his hands and face seem to swim out of the darkness, phosphorescent. The boy looked up toward them, and Tietjen had the feeling he knew they were there, that the boy was listening to them.

  “He’s looking for us,” Barbara echoed his thoughts.

  Tietjen shook his head. “He could be one of their scouts or something. If he’s okay he’ll come back in the morning.”

  “If he’s alive in the morning, John. If he’s come to us for help, shouldn’t we help him?” McGrath turned toward the door. Tietjen put out a hand to stop her, but she was already halfway out the door. “I’ll get a closer look before I let him in, John.”

  He found himself following after. Common sense said to leave the kid out on the streets until morning, when they could get a better look at him. But Barbara was right: by morning the monsters might have torn the kid limb from limb. Beside, daylight was no guarantee against peril; the thing that Bobby had killed had come during the day.

  In the lobby Barbara was having an argument with the man and woman on guard duty. Tietjen resolved the question by backing her up: “Unbar the doors so we can get out, then bar them again quickly, and listen for the signal—” He rapped out a tattoo against the door sill. “Don’t let anyone in unless they give you that signal, okay?” The guards nodded doubtfully. “Let me borrow your pistol,” Tietjen added after a moment’s thought.

  While he examined the gun to make sure the safety was on (it was not; he made a note to speak to Bobby tomorrow about weapon safety) Barbara was helping the guards wrestle the bars off the door. She was halfway out the door when he stuffed the pistol into his back pocket and followed after her.

  “He was over that way, wasn’t he?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Don’t go out of the range of the light, Barbara. We can’t afford to lose you.”

  She smiled as if this pleased her, still scanning the edge of the darkness for movement. When it came it was so slight that they almost missed it. At the edge of the Park, by the old stone wall that had been reinforced with sloppily applied concrete and razor wire, something moved again. After a moment Tietjen realized it was the kid they had seen, scraping roughly at his nose with the back of one hand as if trying to suppress a sneeze. His pale skin was streaked and smeared with soot and earth; he had bitten his lip and there was a rough scab on his mouth. He stood leaning into the stone as if, if he pressed into it hard enough, it would absorb him. Yet what Tietjen sensed coming from the boy was not fear but shyness. We’ve startled a wild animal, he thought. There was a smell of earthiness, an unwashed animal smell, that came from the kid, not pleasant but not awful, either.

  “Hi,” Barbara was saying, softly. She took a tentative step forward, one hand held palm out, as she might have reached to an unfamiliar dog. “Hello. My name is Barbara; this is John. Are you okay?” Tietjen could not see her face from where he stood, but he imagined her smiling, not too broadly, as tentatively as she held her hand out. “Are you alone? Is there someone taking care of you?” Tietjen heard no reply, but she continued as if the boy had responded: “You take care of yourself, right? Do you live in the Park?”

  The boy flashed a brief smile, rubbed at his nose again, looked at Tietjen over Barbara’s shoulder. Tietjen smiled back without any awkwardness; the kid was maybe twelve, thirteen. A short, scrawny kid dressed in pieces of clothes meant for someone larger, as if he had been patched together out of spare parts from a Salvation Army thrift shop. Younger than Greg Feinberg. He didn’t stop to wonder why he immediately felt closer to this kid than to Greg. “Do you live alone? Are there other people there?”

  The boy just watched Tietjen, as if he didn’t understand the words. Barbara tried again. “Would you like some cocoa? Something warm to eat?” The boy shook his head. He was staring at them, Tietjen realized, as if he was trying to hear their thoughts. “Are you cold?” Barbara asked. Her voice was gentle enough so that the questions sounded merely curious, not intrusive or threatening. She kept one hand extended but did not move any farther forward. The boy watched her cautiously, but Barbara did nothing to spook him. Again he turned his attention to Tietjen.

&
nbsp; “Do you know about the—” He broke off, unsure of what to call the monsters. Would the boy understand him? “Do you know about the ones that are trying to kill everyone else?” he finished lamely. “The scary ones?”

  The boy nodded, and an expression of distress crossed his face. Misinterpreting the expression, Tietjen stepped forward quickly, thinking to tell the boy that they would protect him. The kid withdrew into the shadow of the wall, and Barbara turned briefly to frown at Tietjen. “No sudden moves, okay?” she whispered. Tietjen nodded.

  “Would you like to come stay with us?” Barbara asked slowly. “We have lots of kids staying with us, and we’ll protect you from the monsters.”

  The boy said something in a low-pitched, furtive mumble. It sounded like “Jokay.”

  “I didn’t hear you,” Barbara said gently. “I’m afraid I don’t hear everything I used to,” she added regretfully, gracefully. “What did you say?”

  “Ji’ be okay,” the boy repeated.

  “Are you Jim?” Barbara asked. “I’m Barbara and this is John,” she said for the second time.

  “Jit,” the boy said clearly, in accents unlike the street sound he had used before, in an accent much like Barbara’s, Tietjen realized. “Jit be okay, you ducks.” He hit the d in ducks hard and grinned broadly, as if sharing a common joke.

  Tietjen shook his head. “It’s very dangerous right now. I think you should come back with us—” Again he took a step forward. This time the boy started; with an expression like a rabbit caught in headlights, he stood frozen for a moment. Then he dashed forward, collided headlong with Barbara, reeled back a few paces and then charged forward again, knocking Tietjen down as well. By the time he and Barbara got to their feet the boy had vanished into the shadows cast by the big lights in front of the Store.