The Stone War

by Madeleine E. Robins

  “What’s your name, sweetie?” she asked.

  “DeeDee,” the child whispered in return. “You better not stay here, the bad people will come ‘n’ get ya.”

  “The bad people?” Ketch whispered.

  “Luisa, dammit—” Tietjen began. “We can’t—”

  “For God’s sake, John, she’s just a baby. You think she’s some kind of spy?”

  “The bad people’ll come soon,” DeeDee repeated. “They killed my daddy and Mickey ran away.” Up close, Tietjen could see a network of fine scabs on her face, where she must have scraped and cut herself with her claws.

  “Is that credential enough for you?”

  Fratelone came up from behind, “Boss, what’s the holdup? We’re getting antsy back there.”

  Tietjen felt like throwing something. “Li, are you suggesting we bring her back to the Store?”

  “John, they already know where the Store is. And what can she do, even if she is with them—”

  “They killed Daddy and Mickey ran away, and they wanted me to go stay with them, but I wouldn’t.” The child looked uncertainly from Ketch to Tietjen. Looking at her, he believed as Ketch did, that the girl was a baby, not part of the monsters’ gang; looking at Fratelone he thought of the eighty, ninety people at the Store. What right did he have to extend trust on their behalf?

  “Boss, we gotta get going,” Fratelone repeated.

  “Okay, okay. Li, you’ll stand for her good behavior, right?”

  “I’ll be good,” the child said earnestly. “I can even set the table the right way.”

  Tietjen smiled, smoothed the dirty hair away from her forehead. “Can you, honey? The right way? That’ll be a big help. Okay, let’s get going.”

  They went on. He sent the word back to close up the line; they were more spread out than he liked. At Sixty-eighth he heard cackling from the side street, but saw nothing. The group continued on watchfully, eyes left to the Park and right to the doorways, waiting. A flash of color, of something moving, but Tietjen couldn’t tell if it was something live or a plastic bag tumbling in the breeze. He thought they were being followed but couldn’t see anyone. He didn’t want to send anyone scouting. We stick together, he thought. That’s the only way.

  At last they were home. Barbara was at the front door to welcome them back. Her eyes lit when she saw DeeDee, clouded when she saw the girl’s hands; then—Tietjen could see the process—she decided that it made no difference, and opened her arms to hug the girl. DeeDee gave Ketch a backward glance, then went with Barbara. Ketch, with the girl safely home, seemed to lose interest.

  Susie Gollancz was taken to lie in state in the mail room until they could cremate her the next day; it was too dark by the time they got back, and everyone wanted a ceremony, something to honor her. She was one of their own, not one of the faceless dead they fished out of buildings and burned. Elena saw to it that there was always someone to sit with the body, which they draped with an embroidered throw; they used too many of their precious candles to light the room. The supplies were shelved, the weapons they’d taken were assigned to fighters, and the ammunition stored away until needed. Tietjen was called to inspect the welded plate at the alley door and gave it his approval. Elena served dinner. Everyone ate, and by the light of the lanterns they had gained from the camping stores, the story was told and told again, and Susie was each time braver, a better fighter, more remarkable. When the heat and the rushy hiss of the lanterns made them sleepy, one by one the people of the Store went to bed.

  In the darkest part of the night the voices started, one at a time at first, then two or three together in ragged chorus, then a single voice, then a jungle of calls and laughter from the street. When he looked out his window he saw nothing. Ketch had got out of bed behind him when the noise started, and stood peering groggily into the darkness. “What the hell is it?”

  In the hallways below his floor Tietjen thought he heard the question being echoed: “What is that? Who’s doing that? Why?”

  Tietjen knew: it was a song of war.

  13

  WE have the advantage of stronghold, Tietjen thought wearily, the next morning, after the funeral service. Sometime in the night blood, which had not flowed from Susie Gollancz when her throat was cut, poured out of her, and in the morning there was a sticky, coppery pool of drying blood all around her, like a moat. The blood had been cleaned away, the marble floor of the mail room scoured, and finally they had carried Susie, wrapped in the bloody coverlet that shrouded her, to the place where they burned bodies. Barbara said something appropriate that Tietjen barely heard. Then the body was drizzled with kerosene and a torch was touched to the sodden coverlet. It went up at once.

  We have the advantage of stronghold, Tietjen thought. But how long will that last? A few hours after the funeral, a raiding party from the monsters’ camp swarmed down the street from the east. The sentry Bobby had posted on that corner saw the monsters, four of them, and turned and ran, getting himself safe inside the Store before he managed to tell someone to pull anyone else outside off the street.

  The other sentries and two women who had been securing a floodlight over the grille entry were brought in safely. The doors were barred, the Store on alert, and Tietjen stood in the lobby watching the street, wondering what the monsters would do. Behind him, low, Tietjen heard Bobby giving the sentry who had run—a heavyset Asian man about Tietjen’s age—holy hell for deserting his post; he did not interfere, but he wondered what he would have done had he been the one on the corner. Every time he had to fight he had to battle his own incredulity first—how could this be me, I can’t do this stuff, I don’t know what I’m doing.

  There was a sound of breaking glass. One of the raiders, a huge, muscled man with a tiny head like a little girl’s doll, was throwing rocks at the windows of the building across the street. Then another crash, somewhere above in their own building.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  After a moment the answer was relayed from one of the sentries above. Arrows. The raiders were shooting arrows up at the face of the building. They’d hit a window.

  “Jesus. Tell everyone to keep well away from any window that isn’t sealed off.”

  If he listened he could hear the rhythmic clung and whir of arrows being loosed, and usually a dull clatter as the shafts bounced against the granite face of the building. In the next hour he heard two more crashes: two windows hit. He passed along instructions to the fighters on the upper floors. No firing down on the raiders, not while what they were doing was more an annoyance than a threat. No one knew how many friends the monsters might have waiting, just around the corner on Madison Avenue.

  He hadn’t realized how tightly strung he was until, three hours after they appeared, the monsters retreated, sauntering back down the street, turned the corner, and vanished. He and Bobby decided not to sound all-clear at once, but a sigh seemed to run through the entire building all the same.

  “We outlasted ’em,” he heard someone say triumphantly.

  “Outlasted them?” He wheeled around furiously. “A couple hours, that’s outlasting them? We don’t even know if they just took a break to go to the john, for Christ’s sake. You think we won the whole damned war just by hiding in here? Jesus!”

  A dozen faces stared at him, frozen by his anger.

  “Ease up, John,” someone said. It was McGrath. “None of us have ever done this before.”

  “Neither have I. Oh, Christ. Bobby, keep the lid on down here, will you?” Disgusted, Tietjen slammed up the stairs, heading for his own rooms.

  We have the advantage of stronghold, he thought again, as he looked down from his window to the empty street below. We can withhold a siege for three hours. In fact, Sandy Hochman, their quartermaster, had gone painstakingly over the stores of food, water, ammunition, medical supplies. With what the scavenging trip to the sporting goods place had brought in, and their other goods, they could withstand a siege for as much as a month, maybe mor
e if real rationing was set into effect. If they didn’t all go stir crazy. If no one got seriously ill, contagiously ill. If there weren’t too many dead bodies to deal with safely. If there were no more than the usual demands on supplies, time, energy.

  In other words, “We’re trapped,” Tietjen said aloud. “We have to take the fight to them.”

  That evening, in a council of war with Bobby, Ketch, Allan and Sandy Hochman, and a few others, he repeated the words. “We’re trapped here unless we take the fight to them.” Barbara was busy in the infirmary, but had promised to join them as soon as she could. He felt the lack of her keenly. Barbara always understood what he wanted to do, but he wasn’t sure he could make sense of it to these others. “We have to take the fight to them,” he said once more.

  But no one needed persuasion. “Okay,” Allan Hochman said. “How do we start?”

  “Thing is,” Ketch said, “most of us aren’t fighters by inclination, let alone by training. We have to take the fight to them, sure, but who do we take to that fight? That lard-ass who left his position this morning?”

  This time Tietjen defended the man. “If I were alone, even just down the block alone, and I saw four of those things coming straight for me, I’d probably run too. It makes a difference, being alone.” Ketch shook her head dismissively. “Okay, Li, so you’re nominated for all the solo kamikaze missions. Happy? I’d have run too, believe it. But you’re right. Do we have enough people to make a fight with?”

  Bobby nodded. “Yeah, if we gotta. It’s not like we got a choice. And we ain’t going to get no more, anyway, with those fuckers out there cutting us off.”

  “Bobby’s right,” Allan agreed. “Sooner or later we have to take the offensive, or we’re dead.”

  Ketch was right, Bobby was right. Allan had written Web code before the city went down. Barbara had been a housewife in the suburbs. Ketch had been a law student—and reformed gang girl. She and Bobby probably made up the Store’s entire warrior class.

  Tietjen had a flash of memory of a night when Chris had croup, in another lifetime. He and Irene had worried through the night, taking turns holding the baby in the bathroom while the shower ran hot and steamy. The fear that they might make a wrong decision, that a mistake might harm that small life … It came to him in a flash that the people he sat with were dear to him. How do you make the right decision?

  “If we have the people, how do we take the war to the enemy?” he asked at last.

  “We have to find where they are,” Barbara said from the doorway.

  “Their base,” Tietjen agreed, and pulled a chair into the circle for Barbara. He was sitting in an old armchair, and Ketch was perched informally on his left. As they talked, Ketch braided black cord with speed and inattention, her hands a blur of strong movement.

  “If they have a base,” she said, and nodded at Barbara.

  “They have one,” Bobby said grimly. “I was there. Only I don’t know where it was, exactly. Somewheres downtown, but I dunno how far. I was pretty messed up when we got out of there.”

  “Could the girls tell us?”

  Bobby shook his head. “I don’t want them messed with any more,” he said. “They couldn’t tell you nothing.”

  “I doubt they’d remember anything useful, John,” Barbara agreed. “The way they perceive has been stood on its ear: they can focus on a color, a logo, a shape, but not a whole thing.”

  He sighed. “Okay, so we storm the monsters’ base, somewhere downtown. If you were a monster, where would you be?” he asked singsong. “Anyone got any ideas?”

  There was one overhead light, a Coleman lantern, hanging low over the table; the faces in the circle were bleached by the light, and shadow pooled behind them. They looked from one to the other, Barbara to Bobby to Allan to Lo-yi to Ketch to Beth to Sandy to—Tietjen ran out of names—until the gaze fell on him again. The light seemed to draw them all inward, close to each other. Tietjen felt a charge building between them. But no answers came out of the light; he was about to shrug his shoulders at the impossibility of it when Ketch said, “It would have to be a big place.”

  “That’s half of New York,” Barbara said dryly. But, “Big, with a lot of open space,” she added.

  “Yeah, but with hiding places. Some of them want to burrow, to hide out.”

  “Tunnels, maybe,” Sandy Hochman suggested.

  “The leader, the man we heard that night. He’d want someplace special,” Ketch said. “Not just big but grand. Marble and crap like that.”

  “Palatial and baroque,” Barbara suggested. “High ceilings.” Ketch nodded.

  “Not too far downtown,” Lo-yi Quan said.

  “Or uptown,” said Beth Voe.

  “A place everyone knows.”

  “A place they could feel they’d grabbed from the normal people.”

  It was as if they were building up a rhythm of conjecture, each contribution speeding the rhythm slightly. “East Side, West Side?” he asked.

  “East,” Barbara said.

  “East,” Bobby agreed.

  “Why East? Bobby, you remember something about it?” Fratelone shook his head. “Maybe. I dunno. East feels right to me.”

  “East Side, Midtown, a place everyone knows. Palatial and baroque, a place seized back from the normal people.” The rhythm built, like an incantation.

  “A powerful place,” Alan said.

  “A place full of stars.”

  “And darkness.”

  What the hell is this? Tietjen wondered. The group turned to him as if he knew the next line in the incantation. He was about to ask, “Where did this bullshit come from?” Instead, he heard himself say, in the same singsongy way, “East side, Midtown, a place everyone knows. Palatial and baroque, a powerful place, full of stars and darkness, taken from the normal ones. A place of tunnels.” He broke off. “Tunnels and stars.” What was he thinking? The words came out of him from nowhere; he felt as if a channel into the dark had opened up inside him, and the words had come tumbling out. And the words sparked something: images from architecture classes, urban history. Tunnels and stars. Brass and marble and vaulted ceilings, tunnels and stars and stars and stars … . When he closed his eyes, Tietjen could see a vaulted ceiling with stars, constellations gilded across it, dimmed with years. He knew. It was as if the knowledge had been waiting in his brain, just waiting to be set free.

  “It’s Grand Central.”

  The others looked at him blankly. Then Barbara nodded. “The painted ceilings. The tunnels. The marble and brass.” One by one the others nodded. Again Tietjen had the sense of some kind of telepathy, as if they were literally on the same wavelength. The room had a pulse and they all shared it. Each of them looked around at the others, exchanging glances, excitement building into a silent earthquake.

  Then Bobby asked, “But how could we take out Grand Central?” The glow and energy faded, even the overhead light seemed to dim. “Those things could hide out in the tunnels. We’d never find ’em, then they’d come up and kill us.”

  Tietjen felt the welling excitement diminish until he felt too small for the armchair he sat in. “There are two levels of tracks, all underground, and tunnels clear out to Harlem. Offices. Catwalks. Crawlspaces. Stairways. Bobby’s right: there’s no way we could put Grand Central under siege—and if we went in after them hand to hand, they’d go to ground in the tunnels; they’d all get away.”

  Into the silence Barbara said, impatiently, “John, you’re thinking like a damned architect. You know too much, you’re letting what you know defeat you.”

  Ketch, on his left, bristled. “Knowing too much isn’t the problem, Ms. McGrath.”

  Barbara ignored Ketch’s tone and grinned. “It’s exactly the problem right now. John knows too much about Grand Central, so he’s decided it can’t be defeated. You have to be a little ignorant, like the bumblebee.”

  Beth Voe asked, “Bumblebee?” Her breathy voice made her sound bewildered.

  Tietjen finishe
d Barbara’s thought. “That old saw: the bumblebee can’t fly, but it doesn’t know that, so it flies anyway.” He turned to face Barbara. “Okay. So tell me.”

  Her grin grew wider; he had a feeling she was enjoying this, enjoyed having answers. “We don’t know that Grand Central is the same way you remember it, John. It could be in ruins. The tunnels could all be flooded, or collapsed. Even if it’s still just the way it was, you’re thinking like we’re going to fight them one-on-one. Maybe we will, but why start out that way? Let’s cheat. Doesn’t anyone in this place know how to make a bomb?”

  Tietjen found himself grinning in response. “Do you?”

  “I could fake it. I was a Scout den mother.” Everyone laughed. Then Barbara continued, “So what kind of wholesale mayhem can we come up with?”

  Sometime in the next few hours Elena brought up coffee. Tietjen was not sure how long after that the meeting broke up, but when they left each of them had tasks, people to talk to. Tietjen, McGrath, and Ketch walked down the hall together; at the stairway there was an awkward moment when he and Ketch turned to go up the stairs to his room and Barbara headed down to the infirmary.

  “Good night, Barbara.” There was something else he wanted to say to her. “Thanks for keeping me honest.”

  She smiled warmly. “Goodnight, John. Luisa.”

  “Ms. McGrath.” Ketch stood at Tietjen’s elbow, one foot on the stair, anxious to go up. Tietjen turned to follow her, feeling like he should say something more.

  “Good night,” Barbara said again, and left.

  Jit sat on a rock in the middle of the Park, his back against the fallen body of a bronze falconer, the textured metal cool through the fabric of his shirt. He had taken the sweatshirt off the body of an old woman, and wore black pants rolled up so his ankles showed whitely. In his hand was a grubby square of cloth he had cut from the coat the Man had given him, which he worried absently. There was the faintest slip of moon over the park, and no other light. Jit paid no attention to the moon or the darkness. He was listening to the Man and his people.