The Stone War

by Madeleine E. Robins

  They wanted to fight Gable’s people, but didn’t know how. Jit floated from the Man to the old grandma woman to the others, around from mind to mind, tasting their helplessness. They couldn’t see as Jit did. So Jit told them something. He raided the thoughts of Gable’s people and passed the thoughts, the images and tastes and smells, on to the Man and his people. High ceilings, marble, shiny brass; the musty scent of the tunnels that smelled like safety itself; high black caging on the windows; painted ceilings. He let the Man and his friends savor the taste of that place until they knew it and gave it a name. See? Jit thought at the Man. Jit your friend too. Jit your best friend. The first rich flush of their pleasure and excitement made Jit laugh giddily, drunk secondhand on their triumph.

  Then they began to doubt again.

  Even knowing where Gable’s people were, the Man wasn’t sure how to fight them. And Jit wanted them gone: the thought that the monsters claimed him made Jit sick. He didn’t like the taste of their rage; even the attractive weirdness about Gable and his people didn’t compensate for having to wade through anger that tasted like before, when he was always near drowning in a broth of the voices’ rage.

  The Man would stop them. As Jit listened, the grandma woman said something that made them laugh, and the Man and the others were suddenly hopeful, even happy. Jit wanted to be a part of that, to say I give you one gift, I give you another. What gift could he give? He cast through his memories, the memories of the voices he had touched before and after things changed for the city. What would please the Man? What would help him fight? With his eyes closed, Jit rifled the memories, finding warriors and kings, gunmen and soldiers, creatures from other planets, winged men with flaming swords. Angels.

  Give them an angel, he thought.

  There was one. He had found the angel a day before, a woman who flew over the park like a bird, who had no hate in her, just joy. Jit had stolen into her mind to ride with her as she swooped over the city, watching what was below. She was one of Gable’s people, he thought at first, one of the twisted ones. When she flew her arms were extended, wings webbing from her wrists to her back, filling and spilling air; there were three clawed fingers at the end of each arm. She wore a long knit dress that fluttered around her skinny legs. Every part of her was skinny, like the bird she seemed to be, except her face, which was broad and fleshy with lines by the eyes and around the mouth. Her body was twisted out of human form, but her mind was clear and sweet.

  Her thoughts tasted like the sunshine that warmed her back as she flew. She swooped and arced across the sky, looking down on the ruined buildings, the lake that glittered in the sunlight where Hell’s Kitchen had been. In her, pity for the people who were gone was mixed with her own triumph. I guess I am an angel, she thought. Jit wanted to stay with her forever. Then she banked eastward, went into a stoop, and dived through an opening in a vaulted roof. Looking through her eyes Jit saw the misshapen bodies, rapacious faces. Gable’s people.

  But she wasn’t like them, he thought. He jumped away from her, deeply frightened and furious. He would have tasted the bloodlust if she were one of them. The others were filled with it; she was not.

  After a while, tentatively, Jit had reached out to the Angel again, and found what he had found before: love, and pity, and joy. The monsters were her kin, and she was sorry for them. Maybe understood them. But she was not one of them. This made him wonder, were there others like her, who had been changed and twisted on the outside only?

  Gingerly, because he did not want to draw Gable’s attention, Jit began to sample the thoughts of the people around the Angel. Most were what he remembered and expected: black as tar, filled with hunger and rage. But a few, a handful, were like the Angel, gentle or loving or filled with a liberated joy in their transformations, living with Gable’s people because they were their kind and it seemed to be the place for them. All of this Jit tasted and savored and understood, although he had no words for it.

  Now, in the leafy darkness, listening to the Man and his friends plan Gable’s destruction, Jit thought again, Jit your friend. Jit give you an Angel.

  14

  THERE was a peal of laughter from below, rising up from the alleyway behind the Store. It was a delicious sound, totally at odds with his mood. Tietjen went to the window and looked out to see DeeDee, Missy Hochman, and the Calvino girls sitting together on the pavement playing a game with stones and a ball. Jacks; he was surprised to realize girls still played jacks. DeeDee, with her claw-hands, couldn’t play, but seemed to take pleasure in tossing the ball or the stones for the other girls. They all sat cross-legged except for Kathy, who sat on a box, the stump of her leg still wrapped in gauze. She didn’t use a crutch; one of her sisters was always there to support her.

  Tietjen winced, looking at them all. He thought of his sons for a moment, but he had to make himself remember. Chris and Davy seemed less real to him now than the cluster of girls three flights below him in the alleyway. He was healing, or he was growing new calluses.

  “Kathy’s doing pretty well,” Barbara said behind him.

  Tietjen didn’t turn. “I never want to do anything like that again, Barbara.” He said it as lightly as he could.

  “Then we have to find a way to get the real world back in here.” She did not sound angry, but inexorably matter-of-fact.

  This time Tietjen did turn and looked at her. There was no trace of accusation in her eyes or in her voice; they both knew that finding a way out of the city had been the lowest of Tietjen’s priorities from the start. He believed that he did not care if the real world came or not—he was where he wanted to be, doing what he wanted to do, but that stance was dangerous to the Store, and couldn’t be allowed to go on for long. Still, every time the subject came up, he had turned it aside. He did now. “After we’ve dealt with the monsters, Barbara. It won’t be safe to try before that. Anyway.” He nodded at the stack of shabby books she held, pages yellowed and fraying, paper bindings taped. “What’s this?”

  She held them out to him, grinning. The Anarchist’s Cookbook. Organic Chemistry. Steal This Book. “Is there a theme here?”

  “Bombs,” Barbara said simply. “It’d be a hell of a lot better if we had a working laptop and access to the net, but hard copy’s a start. Have a good time: I understand fertilizer is very handy for making bombs, if we had any. Gas would work, if we want to waste it on mass destruction instead of running the generators. But, hey, it’s your call. So I brought you a little light bedtime reading—if Luisa lets you read in bed.” There was nothing in her tone to make him uncomfortable, but he was.

  “You don’t like Li, do you?” he asked.

  Now Barbara flushed and made a flicking gesture, as if to push the question away. “I like her well enough. I don’t think we’ll ever be best friends.”

  He had to leave it at that. Barbara turned and left, and Tietjen wondered briefly if the strain he sensed between Li Ketch and Barbara McGrath was in his mind. He opened The Anarchist’s Cookbook (Fifteenth Edition) and began to read.

  Late that afternoon he was up on the roof, helping string more loops of razor wire across the roof, to cut off access from adjoining roofs. It was hot; the unseasonable chill of the last month had ended. Tietjen and the other men had taken off their shirts; the women had stripped down to T-shirts. He cut his arm open on a piece of wire, and stood watching the others work, feeling like an idiot while Elena treated the cut. He didn’t think the wire would keep the enemy out, but if most of the Store’s people were going to war, they needed to buy the ones who stayed behind as much time as possible, every way possible.

  “Nice work, John,” someone said. He turned to see who had spoken. He was looking out over Seventy-second Street with the roof’s edge just a foot or two from his heels. The voice had seemed to come from above the street itself. Echo, he thought, and turned back. “John?” It was a woman’s voice, familiar to him, and it came from directly over his head. Elena swore softly. Tietjen looked up. What he saw almost
broke his heart.

  “Maia.” She was maybe thirty feet overhead, swooping back and forth in figure eights, winged. Her hands, which had been missing a few fingers before, now had three fingers each, a sort of bird’s claw. Her knobby, sinewy feet looked the same—all of her looked the same except for the wings that webbed her arms to her body. She wore a brown dress that somehow went over her wings. With the sun behind her her wings glowed, translucent, the color of a gilded rose.

  “Oh, Maia, no.” She’d become a monster.

  “John?” Her voice was the same as it had always been, raspy and humorous. “See, you were right. I’m an angel.” She laughed, teeth white in a dark face.

  Someone behind Tietjen threw something at the winged woman. Maia swerved, spilled air and had to swoop around to come back to her position overhead. Tietjen waved his arm at the people behind him: stop, wait.

  “I’m not with them,” Maia called down. “With Gable and the others. There’s some of us that’s changed but aren’t like them. You know. Sick in their hearts.”

  He wanted to believe her. Maia was a part of the old days, the only part left. She meant something, like the city itself.

  “Can I come down and talk? It’s hard to stay in mostly one place this way.”

  From behind him there was protest. He told the others to go downstairs. “I knew her before. I’ll talk to her.” When one of them—the kid who’d come on the Mt. Sinai raid with him, Ted—started to give him an argument, “Just go downstairs, will you? Look, we know one—” He hesitated. “One changed person that’s not a killer, the little girl we brought in from the raid. Maybe there are others. Maybe she knows something that will help us. Go downstairs. Now.”

  Elena took Ted’s arm and pulled him toward the roof door.

  “Come on down, Mai,” Tietjen called.

  She banked, swooped down, and landed at his side. She was smiling. Her pleasure was infectious.

  “Best thing that ever happened to me,” she said. “These wings are.”

  Tietjen looked around him. “Can you sit?” He pointed to the tar-and-shingle sill of a skylight. Maia nodded, folded her wings primly at her sides, and sat down. With her wings folded her elbows were pressed tightly to her ribs, and she kept her clawed hands in her lap. “So what happened to you?” he asked after a while.

  Maia shrugged. “You been back to our block? Don’t bother. The whole thing’s sort of a puddle: I guess some water main broke somewhere. And a bunch of the buildings on the block, it’s like they just sunk right down into the ground, like the water melted their basements right out from under ’em. That big five-story ’partment building right across from our house? All you can see is the top three floors, now. I was asleep in my place till the water started flooding, but then something dropped down—I think it was one of those big iron grates over Carolyn’s windows?” She made a face; neither he nor Maia had liked his downstairs neighbor. “It sort of locked me into my place, in water up to my belly button. And cold. I could smell fire, but I don’t know where that was. After a while I got sleepy, and I guess I went to sleep. Didn’t think I was going to wake up.” She looked at him shyly. “I missed you.”

  “Jesus, Maia.” He wanted to ask what had happened, but felt weirdly reluctant, shy, as if it were too personal a question. Maia made it easy for him.

  “When I woke up, my place was all collapsed around me, all my stuff was washed away, and I was covered in mud. I hurt all over, like I’d been beat up. I had to break through the wall, kind of kick my way out. My arms—I didn’t know till I got out and got some of the mud off me. My arms hurt the most, and my back. When I got out and cleaned up some, I was like this.”

  “An angel.” His Maia. He didn’t know that any of the others would accept this. If he hadn’t known Maia before, had only seen what the other monsters could do, he might not have trusted her. “But what have you been doing since it happened, Mai?”

  She smiled again. “Flying, mostly. Looking round the city. Roosting with the other changed folk at night, mostly.” As if in answer to his thought, perhaps only to a change in his expression, Maia added, “It seemed like the place for me, John. The couple few times I saw any normal folk, they threw rocks at me, like one of your people did just now. The changed ones, they let me alone.”

  Tietjen thought of his own people; who had thrown the rock at Maia? “Would you stay with us, Mai?”

  She looked away from him, across the roof, at the buildings that fronted Fifth Avenue and faced the Park. “I see you’re set up to take care of people pretty good here, John.”

  “We’re trying to,” he agreed.

  She nodded, still looking away. “What happened to your little boys, d’you know?”

  It didn’t feel like a change of subject. “I think—I feel that they’re gone.” He told her what he had found, Irene’s building in flames, the first day back.

  “You haven’t gone back to make sure?” She sounded unbelieving.

  “I know it—Mat, you know what the city’s been like since it happened. The weird things you see, the things you suddenly just know? I know Davy and Chris are gone, Maia. I know it.” The words felt as if chips of rust flaked off each word as it was spoken, as if the words would shatter if too much weight was put on them. “I know it more every day. It’s settled into my bones: the boys are gone. I can’t even cry about it.”

  “John,” Maia said gently.

  He was crying. It started with silence and tears filling his eyes. Then he began to shudder, as memory went through him like floodwater: his sons were dead. He cried without words and without apology. Maia sat beside him and said nothing until he was done, and words had dried up with the tears.

  The sun was slanting across the rooftops, and a fine breeze cut the afternoon heat. For a while it seemed like there was not a sound in the city except the faint whicker of breeze among the loose shingles. Then he heard the children laughing again, twelve stories below.

  “You’re takin’ care of people here,” Maia said.

  “Trying to,” he said again. “Filling the holes.”

  Maia smiled. When he looked at her face he could forget about the rest of her body. “Whose holes?”

  “My own,” he said baldly. “I need to get the city back, Maia. I have nothing else.”

  She cocked her head to one side, birdlike. “Would your folk take me in?”

  “They will when I explain.”

  “Would they take the others? There’s more like me, John. Not all of them, mostly they’re like Gable, full of hate. But there’s some like me, that don’t hate. Some of us stay with Gable’s folk down at the terminal—”

  “Grand Central?” It was confirmation of that weird group insight from a few nights before.

  “Yeah. There’s four of us there that I know of. And three others down south, camping by what’s left of the arch in Washington Square. We don’t none of us want to fight you, John. But Gable’s got the others thinking they got to.”

  He shook his head. “He’s right, now, Mai. There’s no way we can live in peace in this city until we settle it with the monsters.”

  Maia sighed. “I know that. Would your folk take us in? If we stay out of the fighting, will they come after us later?”

  “Not if I can help it. I can’t promise anything until I talk to people. But Maia—how much of the city have you seen? Flying, I mean.”

  “Whatever’s left.” She told him. Lower Manhattan was seven or eight stories under water. “Houston Street’s still clear, but you get a couple-three blocks south, it’s like everything just dropped way down. Both the Trade Center towers lying in the Hudson like a couple of logs—”

  “That’s not possible,” Tietjen interrupted, thinking of the infrastructure of the towers.

  “Maybe not, but it’s so,” Maia said blandly. “Looks like someone just swatted ’em right over, snapped off at the street.” Brooklyn and Queens—as much as she had been able to see from Manhattan, anyway—were under water too. T
he South Bronx, risen from chaos twenty years before when the Police Academy and the Medicare hospice settlements had been built there, was burnt out again. “Like someone dropped a real dirty bomb. Melted and burnt.” In the rest of what was left of Manhattan, the damage was more localized. It seemed, Maia told him, as if each neighborhood had been struck differently, by a different set of disasters. Some areas didn’t look damaged at all: there just weren’t any people.

  “And there’s places you just don’t want to go, by the riversides, especially. I don’t know why, but it’s like they give off this signal telling you to keep clear.”

  Tietjen remembered the feeling of dread and hopelessness he’d felt on his way toward the East River the day they first encountered the monsters, and he nodded.

  “And some things would be funny if they weren’t so damn queer.”

  Tietjen didn’t ask what; he was certain he didn’t want to know. “Your friends, the ones you say aren’t like the monsters—”

  “Don’t call them that, John. Am I a monster?”

  “No.” His denial was quick and vehement. “You’re changed. But you’re not a monster. You’re one of us.”

  “I don’t know your folk would feel that way, John.”

  “I’ll tell them. It will be all right. But if it comes down to war between the—Gable’s people—and us—”

  “Which side am I on?”

  He nodded. “And your friends.”

  “Can’t answer for them till I ask the question, John. Want me to ask?” He nodded. “Then I’ll go ask. If it comes to war between you and Gable’s folk, I’m with you. If you people will let me live peacefully, me and the others.” Maia stood up and rolled her shoulders, as if sitting for so long had made her wings cramp up.

  “We will,” he promised. Already he was thinking of who he would have to talk to, persuade, convince. Barbara, Bobby and Ketch, first. Alan, Sandy, Beth …