The Stone War

by Madeleine E. Robins

  “Damn,” Barbara murmured mildly.

  “Will he be all right?” Tietjen asked. “It’s chilly tonight.”

  Barbara shook her head, but answered in the affirmative. “I think he’s been fending for himself for a long time. But where does he come from?”

  Tietjen’s turn to shrug. “At a guess I’d say his parents were part of that homesteading group in the Park from ten, twelve years ago. Who knows how long he’s been on his own.”

  Barbara shook her head fretfully. “He’s not connected to anything, is he. This is a dangerous time not to have a connection.” She turned to Tietjen. “Give me your coat, John.”

  “You cold?” He took the fleeced-lined flannel jacket off at once and would have draped it over her shoulders, but Barbara took it from his hands and started toward the shadows.

  “I owe you a coat,” she said quietly. Then she raised her voice. “Jit! If you’re there, this is for you, to keep you warm.” She paused to let her words sink in. Then, “And remember, if you need help, you come to us. Okay?” She bent in the shadows, a shadow herself, to lay the coat on the ground. Then, without a pause, she turned back and marched past Tietjen toward the doors of the Store. “Come on, John. He’s not going to get the coat with us standing out here.”

  Shivering, Tietjen followed after. Neither one saw Jit dart from the shadow of the Park wall to grab the coat. Neither saw the boy drape it over his shoulders, or saw the ridiculous way it hung, sleeves a good six inches too long, shoulders drooping comically, the whole thing looking like Daddy’s clothes on a six-year-old. Neither saw the way Jit stroked the fleece and nestled his chin in the collar, or heard him murmur “Teejin, Teejin,” as he disappeared into the Park again.

  12

  AFTER the first flurry of fear and hard work at the Store had spent itself, the hardest thing was waiting. Everyone became twitchy, restless. Sentries cried out at paper whisking down Seventy-second Street toward Central Park; quarrels began and ended in the space of half an hour; and Tietjen woke at least twice a night, listening for something that hadn’t yet come, hearing only Ketch’s even breathing and the faint whicker of breeze in the curtains. It was exhausting, being always on guard. Where Tietjen had worried before if they could be prepared enough, now he worried that they were too prepared, that they’d be worn out with waiting if something didn’t happen soon. People who had resisted getting the Store prepared for a fight were now nervously talking about taking the fight to the monsters, “no matter what Tietjen and Barbara say.”

  It was almost a relief when the attacks began. New refugees had brought word of a sporting-goods store on Fifth at Forty-third, unlooted so far because an MTA bus was wedged between its front doors. Freeze-dried camping stores, bags of water, water-purifying tablets, sleeping bags and camp linen, first-aid kits … and weapons and ammunition. They had to have it. Five people set out, including one of the new people; Tietjen didn’t know many of them by name yet—McGrath was good with names and somehow managed to make Tietjen look as though he were too—but Bobby Fratelone vouched for all of them when he talked with Tietjen about the expedition. They took the two large carts from Mt. Sinai, plus a few carts liberated from a supermarket, and set off on a muggy gray day, armed to the teeth but with a holiday air.

  Four hours later, working in the back of the building, where a crew was bolting steel plate onto the alley door, Tietjen heard a commotion before it found him. Bobby had a woman by the arm, supporting her weight. She was bruised and shocky-looking, blond hair streaked with dirt, dirt and blood on her face and arms. With difficulty Tietjen recognized Bobby’s sharpshooting student from the upstairs hallway: Susie something.

  “They were waiting for us when we started back,” she said, low, in between long breaths. “I got away to come for help. The others—I don’t know. I don’t know if they’re still alive—” Her voice broke, then steadied again. “We took cover in the lobby of a building on Fifth, a little below St. Pat’s. I can show you.” She showed no fear at the thought of returning to fight again, just a fearful hurry. “There were so many of them, please, we have to go now.”

  As the girl spoke Barbara had appeared in the hallway. She would have led Susie away to get cleaned up, to rest, but Tietjen stopped her. “Can you go out again?” he asked as gently as he could. Barbara frowned and shook her head; he ignored her.

  She nodded. “We have to. There’s so many of them, they just came out of everywhere.” Her voice cracked again. She turned and smiled wanly at Barbara, then turned back to Tietjen. “We have to get there soon.”

  Bobby was calling his people together; when Tietjen reached the lobby a dozen men and women were waiting, and others joined over the next ten minutes as Fratelone and Tietjen explained what they were doing and where they were going. Most carried rifles or guns, a few had lasers, a few carried cudgels or spears or shiny decorative swords taken from a martial-arts school on Eighty-third and Third. Looking at them Tietjen was frightened. He had no idea what he was doing, if he could fight, whether he would be able to kill one of the monsters if he had to. They looked to him to set the example. Aw, for the love of Christ, he thought.

  It was easier when he saw Ketch leaning against a pillar in the back of the lobby, wearing a dark, heavy leather jacket, leather pants, heavy boots. Her hair was braided and wound close to her head. She smiled at him and gave him a self-mocking thumbs-up sign, then turned to answer a question from one of her knife-fighting students.

  “Elena and I’ll be seeing to defense,” Barbara said behind him. She too was in dark, heavy clothes, hair pinned rigorously back. “Somebody has to mind the store, John. Come home safely.” She smiled at him, a smile of trust and confidence that was somehow girlish and inspiring. He could do this, the smile said.

  Well, he had to. “We stick together,” he said again. “Susie knows where the raiding party is holed up, she’s our guide, but basically we’re going down to Fifth and Fifty-first or -second. We’re going to get our people out and we’re going to get back here—we’re not going to take this fight to them unless we have to, is that clear?”

  Nods, shrugs, from the thirty or so people in the lobby. He turned again to Barbara. “See you later. Lock up after us, will you?”

  “We will. Safely home, boys,” she said to Tietjen and Fratelone as they turned away toward the door.

  They went east to Park Avenue, then started downtown, hoping they could get close before they were noticed. Susie Gollancz walked with Tietjen at the head of the troop; Ketch walked just behind with Bobby Fratelone. No one said much. The way was mostly clear, and there were almost no bodies; every now and then they’d move through an area that smelled bad, smelled like death; in another block the air was sweet and humid. It shouldn’t work like that, Tietjen thought. You can’t zone out decay. But the fact remained that some blocks smelled of death and others did not.

  At Fifty-second they cut west again, now walking single file, close against the building faces. As they crossed Madison Tietjen heard something, a gentle crowd sound punctuated by hoots and cries of excitement. For a moment his knees went watery; he was back uptown the night of the hospital raid, listening to the monsters torturing their captive, unable to help. A sideways glance at Ketch and Fratelone showed them as unnerved as he was; Susie Gollancz, at his side, was pale and grim. The rest of the troop seemed unmoved by the noise; he had to pass the word back to keep quiet. Then he said, “I’m going ahead to scout it out. Keep back.”

  Fratelone opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again. Ketch’s face went blank.

  Tietjen edged forward as silently as he could: each scuff of toe against concrete sounded loud to him, and twice he had to climb over the twisted mess of fallen security grilles that blocked the sidewalk, and the metallic clung of sound sent a shiver of panic through him. He reached the corner, peered gingerly around to look, pulled back fast, looked again.

  There was a ring of them, perhaps a dozen. He had expected more. The monsters sto
od in a semicircle twenty yards from the doorway of a cut-price jeweler’s; as he watched, one of them broke from the ring and advanced on the door with odd, dancing steps. His head, shoulders, and arms were huge and heavily muscled; his torso and legs seemed almost wasted in comparison. A few steps and he stopped, then began to dance, tap-dance. He looked like a gorilla doing Fred Astaire. Tietjen couldn’t see his face, but it sounded like the hoots were coming from the dancer.

  Then a volley of shots rang out from the jewelry store and the dancer stopped, twitched and shuddered, then danced back to the rim of the circle, one shoulder held higher than the other, bleeding.

  “Christ,” Tietjen murmured, and backed along the wall, backing all the way to Madison, where Bobby and the others were waiting.

  “You okay?” Ketch asked.

  He didn’t answer her. “There are about a dozen of them; one’s wounded. Our people have some ammo left—they fired the shots. I can’t tell if they—the monsters—have backup nearby. Susie, how many did you say there were?”

  She looked confused. “I don’t know. More than a dozen, but I don’t know—”

  He nodded. “So there may be more around here somewhere. Okay, I think what we’re going to have to do is draw their fire, some of us. If about half of you wait, close to the corner, we can go in and deal with the ones that are there. You guys watch our backs in case it’s a trap. Okay? Bobby, you’re in charge of the rear guard.” Fratelone frowned; Tietjen ignored him. “You, you, uh, you guys”—rapidly he chose ten people to come with him. Susie attached herself to that group, unasked; Ketch was with Bobby and the rest. “Okay,” Tietjen said at last. “We go.”

  They filed up the street, making too much noise, moving clumsily over the steel grillework. Tietjen didn’t believe this was happening. He was leading these people, nice normal people, with guns and a rifle and two spears and a golf club and trash-can lid brandished like a shield, into a battle. At the corner they stopped behind him.

  “Shit. Shitshitshit!” he murmured. Then, loudly, “We go.”

  They spilled out into the street. Susie darted ahead of Tietjen, flopped onto her belly and starting firing a pistol at the nearest monster. He dropped, and she stopped firing, startled at what she had done. “Don’t stop!” Tietjen barked harshly. She looked at him blankly for a moment, then, with a blink, turned back to shoot again. Behind him Tietjen felt the others fanning out, those with guns shooting at the monsters, who turned away from the door of the jewelry store slowly, as if the shots were not enough to distract them from their prey. By the time they had turned, three more were down. The others charged Tietjen’s group. The apish dancer darted like a broken-field runner, dodging bullets, waving one huge fist like a club while the other arm hung uselessly at his side. He dodged toward Tietjen, who ducked away from a blow aimed at his head; the next moment there was a meaty thud behind him, and Tietjen turned to see that the thin, reedy woman with the golf club had hit the dancer square between his eyes.

  Another monster darted through the bullets, coming for Susie again. As he fired, Tietjen realized that he recognized this one—his arms ended in thin, sharp claws. Tietjen’s shot missed the claw-man, but hit another monster who squealed and ran. A shot fired from the jewelry store dropped the runner.

  Then something grabbed Tietjen and he was rolling on the ground, staring up into red-rimmed eyes; ringlets of blond hair bounced around her face as the monster struggled, trying to bounce Tietjen’s head against the pavement. She had no mouth, no nose, just nostrils planted flush in her face like blowholes; her breath came in hot jets that scorched his face. She was strong. It was only luck that when they rolled to the side of the curb he had the leverage to bash her head into the stone, then her neck, then her head again, until the red light in her eyes dimmed and she let him go. Her breath rushed out, hot and foul.

  Tietjen rolled away in time to see the claw-man scuttling away, claws red with blood. He didn’t see who had been hurt, just rolled for his gun and fired at the claw-man. On the fifth shot he dropped. Tietjen awkwardly jammed a fresh clip into his pistol and rolled to his knees, trying to see what was happening. It was over.

  Across the street a face appeared cautiously in the door of the jewelry store. Then a face, and a voice. “Mr. Tietjen? Are they gone, sir?”

  He looked around. Behind him, waiting in the cross street with the rest of the group following, Bobby Fratelone nodded all clear. Ketch was just behind him, smiling broadly at Tietjen, her eyes wide and bright. Tietjen waved the raiding party forward, and they left the building, three of them, pulling carts as they came. “There’s two more carts left in the store,” the leader of the party said. Then his eyes lit on something and he said, “Oh shit.”

  Tietjen followed his gaze. Susie Gollancz lay on her back, face upturned, her throat slashed cleanly from ear to ear, so deep that he could see the bones in her neck. She was dead, but there was no blood. Tietjen swallowed hard to keep from throwing up; he thought the clean bloodless slit was worse than a gory show would have been. The damned weirdness, he thought, unable to get close to his real feeling. Aloud he said, “Damn.” Then he looked around him to see if there were other casualties. The woman with the golf club had a bruise starting on one side of her face, and the blank, stupid look of emotional shock. The others were all right, though Tietjen wondered if they felt as nauseated as he did.

  “We have to get home,” he said at last. He felt, rather than saw, Ketch appear at his side; she put her arm around his waist for a moment, and the contact warmed him, even as the public closeness made him uncomfortable. He heard Fratelone giving orders to have Susie carried back uptown with them, heard him send a couple of people to get the heavy carts that remained in the shop across the street. When someone balked at pushing a cart, Tietjen said curtly, “People died so we could get this stuff. You want to leave it here?”

  Leaving probably only took minutes, but it felt long to Tietjen, hours instead. He was sure that more monsters would arrive soon, that an alarm had been sent out, that they would never make it back to the Store alive. “Come on, come on,” he muttered under his breath, hands jiggling at his side. Finally they started uptown again, a somber caravan.

  They had won. He heard words being whispered behind him: “We beat the motherfuckers!” The words made him sick. Yeah, we won. Except for poor Susie, who was the best shooter we had. “Let’s not get cocky,” he said coolly. Don’t sound angry, it’s not their fault, it’s normal to crow. “Not until we walk in the front door of the Store.”

  They walked up Fifth, in the center of the avenue. Tietjen was wary of what might suddenly appear in a doorway; he assigned lookouts on the left and right at the head, middle, and end of the caravan, and hoped to God they would notice any little movement, any shadow, any breeze. As they walked, he talked with the leader of the scavenging raid, who agreed that the pack of monsters that had jumped them had been larger than the dozen Tietjen and his people had seen.

  “When they saw how few of us there were, I think they lost interest,” he said. “Do you think they’re around now?”

  Tietjen shrugged and tried to smile. “Do I know? Safest to assume they’re out there and keep our heads up.”

  Past St. Patrick’s Cathedral, badly quake-damaged, where a pile of precious vessels—gold, silver, brass—blocked the gaping doorway. Past Rockefeller Center—Atlas had fallen from his pedestal and lay draped over the globe as if it were a torture rack. Past the Plaza, flakes of gilding clinging to its massive security grilles. A doorman’s top hat with a chiffon hat band dangled from the hand of the statue in front of the Plaza.

  Every time a scrap of paper fluttered past, or a pebble was kicked, or a leaf fell from one of the greening trees of Central Park, Tietjen and his people flinched.

  At Sixty-fourth Street Tietjen stopped so suddenly that Ketch, walking behind him, stumbled into his shoulder. At her murmured apology he held up one hand to silence her and the others. He listened.

  The sound
was like a kitten mewling or a baby whimpering. It came from the door of an apartment building, behind a brushed-aluminum frame that masked the security grille. For a moment no one moved or spoke. The sound came again, more like a baby crying. Ketch took a step forward, looked sideways at Tietjen, and stopped.

  “It’s a kid,” she whispered between clenched teeth. “Maybe we can help.”

  “Do you know it’s a kid?” he hissed back.

  Then, as if on cue, a child peered from the doorway. She looked about five or six, about Davy’s age. She wore a sleeveless shift, grubby and torn at the hem; her pale red hair was dirty, and there were streaks of dirt across her face, arms, legs; there was a healing scab on her forehead. Her eyes were large and pale and her mouth was pursed worriedly. Tietjen was flushed with a sense memory, remembering the weight and warmth of a small child’s body in his arms.

  “Honey?” Ketch took another step toward her, one hand held out. I wouldn’t have taken her for the kids type, Tietjen thought. Something still felt subtly wrong and dangerous. “Wait,” he said. Ketch didn’t even turn, but held her hand out farther and repeated, “Honey?”

  The girl took a few steps forward toward Ketch, whimpering softly.

  A voice behind Tietjen: “Jee-zus, lookit her hands.”

  Tietjen saw it. He had thought she wore mittens or something. But her hands were encased in shells, black casing. No. Her hands were shells, or claws, or something. She was a monster. He reached to grab Ketch back but she was already halfway to the girl.

  “Li, get back here,” he said, as quietly as he could.

  She and the child had met. Ketch stooped, picked the girl up. The girl reached her arms around Ketch’s neck, with exquisite care, and tucked her claws under her arms, out of harm’s way. She stared at Tietjen over Ketch’s shoulder, serious and beseeching. Then Ketch whirled and came back, carrying the girl.