The Stone War

by Madeleine E. Robins

  “Scaredy cat, scaredy cat,” Gable sang lightly. He danced soft shoe on the railing, his balance flawless, his eyeless gaze focused on Tietjen. “Come on, Tee-jin,” he taunted. “Come on up here and dance.”

  Tietjen shook his head. “I don’t dance.” He lunged for one of Gable’s legs, but the monster stepped out of the way, impossibly quick and balanced. “Come on down here,” Tietjen offered, breathing hard.

  Gable looked past Tietjen. “Your woman’s dying, you know. The dark one …”

  Almost, Tietjen turned to look. Then he remembered he’d seen Ketch on the concourse below them, not behind him on the stairs. “You are a lying sack of shit. And a fucking coward, and we’re going—”

  Gable leapt on him.

  The machete went flying. Tietjen and the monster rolled on the floor, so close Tietjen could feel Gable’s heart pounding through the thin silk of his red shirt. Gable’s bony arms wrapped around him, one at the shoulder and one at the hip; Tietjen couldn’t move except to roll, but neither could Gable. They crashed into the base of the stone railing, rolled away again. Tietjen felt like the whole world was right there, concentrated in a few feet: Gable’s wiry, ferocious strength, his fetid smell like something rotting, the thunderous beating of his heart; the cold of the stone under them, the roar of fighting echoing all around them. Then Tietjen stopped rolling and listened and smiled. The roar of lions. First one, and then another, nearby, just outside the doors. Something is on our side, he remembered.

  Gable had stopped too. Now he reared away from Tietjen and grinned broadly. “Reinforcements,” he murmured. “The Father’s sending help to wipe you sad bastards out.”

  “Wrong,” Tietjen panted. “They’re on my side.” He rolled sideways and away from Gable, up to his feet. Now he and Gable circled each other slowly. Tietjen’s eyes were still locked on Gable’s face; he was afraid to look anywhere else. The lions roared again, closer. “They’re coming to get you, you fucking monster.”

  Gable scrambled back onto the railing again, and this time Tietjen followed him, a few yards away, balancing carefully as he moved closer.

  He was almost to Gable when something grabbed Tietjen around the waist and swung him down, grabbing one arm, the other, holding him exposed to Gable, who came back along the railing, still smiling. The mouthless woman handed Gable a knife. His smile broadened.

  Then something swept out of the air, knocked Gable off balance and crashed into whoever was holding Tietjen. Gable fell forward onto the balcony, dropping the knife, and Tietjen, fallen sideways, grabbed the knife and rolled to his feet. There was a groan behind them, but Tietjen didn’t turn to look. He advanced on Gable, who stood with one leg bent, leaning against the stone railing, a trickle of blood on his chin.

  “Why don’t you just give up?” he said. “You won’t kill me.” He pulled himself onto the railing, sitting, then standing, looking down at him. “You won’t kill me,” he repeated.

  Tietjen’s hand trembled. Was he right?

  “John.”

  He turned his head for a second: Maia lay on the floor, unable to raise her head, bloodied and crumpled, her wings torn. The mouthless woman was pinned under her, dead: a knife stuck from her throat.

  A cry tore out of Tietjen’s throat, wordless and brutal. The cry drove his arm up, drove the knife across from Gable’s hip to shoulder, slicing him open and pushing the monster backward, off the railing. Gable’s arms flailed as he fell, and he screamed. Tietjen looked over the balcony long enough to see Gable, on his back, broken upon one of the stone lions, staring sightlessly upward, slashed open where his knife had cut.

  Then he turned back to Maia. As gently as he could, Tietjen lifted her off the changed-woman’s body and cradled her on his lap, but the gentleness made no difference. She smiled and died in his arms and he did not even have the chance to thank her for what she had done.

  “Oh, John … .” It was McGrath. He raised his head to look blankly at her. There was a streak of blood painted across her face; she looked ferocious, but her eyes when she looked at Maia were filled with pity. “John, I’m so sorry. Gable?”

  “Dead,” he said. “What’s happening?”

  She smiled, her teeth white against the blood. “We’ve won.”

  16

  THERE was still some of Gable’s people left, but with Gable’s death the rage to fight had left them, and most simply ran away; the fires set by Ketch’s team had kept them out of the tunnels, and the lions had caught many of them. From what Tietjen could tell, at the moment of Gable’s death all the lions had returned to stone, or iron, or glass again, as if their job was done. There were only a few, a dozen at most in Grand Central itself, but when they left the terminal later they found more, stone lions lining the streets, converging on the terminal, frozen in the act of joining the fight.

  “Wow,” Barbara said when she saw them. To say the least, Tietjen thought.

  Some of the monsters they let escape. Without Gable Tietjen believed that they would be no threat. There were not many.

  It took a long time to find and gather in the wounded and the dead. Tietjen wrapped Maia in a velvet curtain as if it were a shroud, the first of their honored dead. They worked in teams to find the others. Allan Hochman was among them, a wooden stake through his neck. Tietjen thought of Sandy Hochman, waiting at the Store with their daughter Missy and Greg Feinberg, who had taken to calling Allan Dad. There were thirteen dead all told, and nine more wounded badly enough to need carrying back to the Store.

  “It’s a damned miracle,” Barbara muttered as she dressed Bobby Fratelone’s wounds. “We were outnumbered. Did you see the fighting, John? Our side was trying, but it’s a damned miracle any of us are alive.” Now that the fight was over, McGrath’s grin had been replaced with a frown as she moved from one of the wounded to the next. She was rigid with anger, as if the sight of so much human damage offended her. Tietjen and Ketch stood to one side and plotted the best way to get their wounded and dead back to the store.

  “She’s okay,” Ketch said, watching McGrath bandaging one of the fighters. “Ms. McGrath is all right.” From Ketch, who had bristled each time Barbara was in the room, it was great praise.

  “Yeah,” Tietjen said. It hardly felt adequate, but nothing felt truly adequate.

  The faun, Mack, was badly hurt. Tietjen saw him, sitting up on a plank, waiting to be carried up the terminal stairs to the street: someone had hacked at one of his thighs; the fur around the bandage was stiff with blood.

  “Hey, Chief,” Mack said weakly. He raised a hand in salute. “Where’s the others?”

  Tietjen had to work to recall their names: Janelle and Tom and Jose, who had come to the Store with Mack and Maia. “All okay, I think. Except—” He broke off, remembering Maia’s impossibly light, impossibly damaged body in his arms.

  “I saw.” Mack shook his head. “She went big, Chief. Great gesture. She saved your ass.”

  Tietjen and another man, a stocky black man, Gillis, Gellman, something like that, grasped the end of the plank and lifted. Mack sank back, wincing.

  “She really loved you, you know? You were the one thing she remembered from before that she really loved.” Mack’s voice became more insistent. “You know that, Chief?”

  “I know,” Tietjen said.

  Mack shook his head. “No you don’t. She talked about you. And your kids, and how you helped her build her new house—that’s what she called it, her new house, you’d think you’d built her a palace instead of a shack—and the things you did for people on your block. She thought you were fucking God on a plate, man. She loved you.”

  Tietjen didn’t know what to say. Clearly Mack didn’t think Tietjen appreciated what he was saying. He turned his face away and lay still while Tietjen and Gellis carried the stretcher out to the pavement where the wounded were gathered. The wound in his thigh was seeping blood through the bandages. Tietjen remembered stitching up Kathy Calvino’s leg, and wondered if they’d brought thread, n
eedles, anything useful for after the battle.

  “John?” It was Barbara behind him. She murmured in his ear.

  “Allan’s gone. I’ll take over here.” She squeezed his shoulder and pushed him away. “Hey, Mack,” she said.

  “Hey, Barbara.” The faun’s leathery face crumpled and he began to cry. “They got Maia, you know?”

  Heedless of the blood and dirt, Barbara sat down beside him on the pavement and put her arms around him. “I know, I know,” she said crooning. Tietjen waited for a moment before he went to find Allan Hochman. The high was gone; the deaths had punctured the moment of exhilaration. Tietjen didn’t have the words to tell Mack and the others that he knew what Maia had done for him; he did not even know how to tell them how special she was to him. He thought of coffee and a juicebox every morning, and of sitting on the stoop or fixing her lean-to in the evenings. She had waited up for him in the evenings, asked after his kids. His good angel, she had saved his life and gone again.

  Tietjen was among the first to reach the Store, sometime after noon. He had taken turns carrying a stretcher the thirty blocks from Grand Central to Seventy-second Street; his arms and back were in knots by the time they reached the building; his bruises felt like knots. He could barely open his hand when he set the stretcher down. The rest of the party straggled in behind, carrying stretchers, supporting the walking wounded.

  Sandy Hochman met them at the door, smiling, with her daughter and the Calvino girls and DeeDee behind her.

  “It’s finished,” she said positively.

  “It is,” he told her gravely. “Sandy.” He tried to think of what to say. “Sandy.” He tried again. She looked at him, still with the smile fixed on her face. “Sandy.”

  She turned to the girls. “Go inside and tell Elena they’re here,” she said. “Go,” she insisted, when they stayed clustered around her. “Go now. Go.” Not until all five little girls were back inside the building did she ask, her face turned away from him, looking at the door Missy had gone through, “How bad?”

  Tietjen wanted a word to replace the bald, cold, ugly one he had to use. “Allan’s dead. Sandy, it was quick,” he added. But it was not quick for her. She began a dry shaking that turned to tears and silent sobs. He realized that she was trying to keep quiet so the children wouldn’t hear. Feeling completely awkward and inadequate, Tietjen put his arm around Sandy’s shoulders and stood, waiting, while she wept on his chest. Around them others arrived and went into the Store, carrying, helping, holding. Tietjen stood there, feeling as if his arm were a shell through whose fragile surface Sandy Hochman’s grief might break. At last Elena Cruz came and took Sandy back inside.

  Mack’s stretcher arrived. The faun lay back, eyes closed.

  “Couldn’t stop the bleeding,” Barbara said. She sounded tired, all dried up. “He wouldn’t even try. His heart was broken.”

  Tietjen looked at her.

  “Maia. He really loved her, John.” When Tietjen opened his mouth to say that he had loved her too, Barbara shook her head impatiently. “She was—” She faltered, trying to find the words. “She was home for him, you know? Since the disaster, since Mack found Maia, she was—home. He couldn’t live without her. Didn’t you notice, wherever he was, he always had to know where Maia was?” Tietjen could not understand why she sounded so angry. He felt stupid and logy and couldn’t get what she meant. He had not realized he’d said that aloud until she answered. “Of course you don’t. Mack needed her, and she died, and he didn’t have the heart to go on living. At least we can bury them together.”

  In the end they buried all the dead together, in a trench in the ruin of a white-brick apartment building to the east of Madison Avenue. They had dug the trench weeks before, before the war had started, when they had decided to find a place farther from the Store for burying the dead from nearby buildings. Mack and Maia they placed side by side, Maia still in the velvet drapery from Gable’s tent. Sandy Hochman did not come, but all of the children were there, gathered around Elena. Except for the people in the infirmary, everyone in the Store was there. Barbara had told Tietjen he had to say something, but he didn’t know what to say to them. I’m sorry. I didn’t want anyone to die. Not quite right.

  He stood by the side of the trench, looking out across it to a row of wrecked brownstones on the south side of the block. Past the ruins, across Madison Avenue and down Seventy-second Street, the building that housed the Store was washed in honeyed pink light from the setting sun that blazed over Central Park. He could make out the fence and stakes of the vegetable garden Allan Hochman had helped clear and plant. Razor wire glinted at the edge of the roof, and he remembered standing there, watching Maia make figure eights as she yelled down to him. The boards were coming down from the windows of their building, and the glass shone in the late sunlight too.

  Tietjen cleared his throat and began.

  “There were ninety-seven of us when we left this morning, including the children and the ones who stayed behind. We lost fifteen—no, sixteen. There are eighty-one of us left. It’s a goddamned miracle. I mean that: we had help, and we helped each other, and we won because we wanted each other to live, because we’re doing something here, we’re building something.

  “I don’t know if we’ll ever know what happened to the city. I don’t know if anyone will ever come in and find us. We have to live as if they won’t. But I know we can do it, because we did this—” He gestured toward the Store. “And we did that—” South, toward Grand Central. “We won it. We had some kind of help I don’t even understand, just like there are things about the city now I don’t understand. But whatever helped us, it’s for the city. That means it’s for us, it wants us to be safe, to build and rebuild.”

  He looked from face to face to face. A breeze had risen and was fluttering hair, making clothes ripple with small snapping noises. Ketch looked at him impassively; Barbara was almost smiling; Bobby, arm splinted and in a sling, nodded from time to time. The color of the sky and sunset, something about the breeze and the warm, soft air, something perhaps about the exhaustion that he felt in every muscle, called a memory out of nowhere, the exaltation of a spring evening and a faint echo: I will live this way forever.

  “That’s what I wanted to say,” he finished. “Everyone who died today was part of the Store and part of our home. Everyone who died today was part of the city, the same way you all are.”

  One by one the people around the trench’s edge nodded or smiled or bowed their heads. Each seemed satisfied. Tietjen stepped back a pace, and the crowd started to turn away, head back to the Store.

  “One last thing,” Barbara called out. “Tonight, we’re having a wake. And a party. John’s right: we won this damned thing.”

  It was, as Ketch said, looking around the room, a pretty piss-poor excuse for a party. There was some food, nothing fancier than what they ate every day. A couple of cases of wine and many cases of beer, brought back to the Store that afternoon by four of the younger men still trying to work off the adrenaline of the morning’s battle. There were a couple of guitars, and Bobby brought out a cardboard box and a stick and began drumming happily, one-handed. The kids, even Missy Hochman and Greg Feinberg, chased through the room, giggling at whatever game it was they were playing. Not much of a party, but it didn’t matter. A few people began to dance, someone else started to sing. The pent-up emotions of the day were expressed in as many different ways as there were people, in dancing, in drinking, in weeping, in telling tales.

  Tietjen walked around talking with people, catching the tale ends of conversations and flirtations and reminiscences.

  “Working the crowd?” Barbara teased him when he passed close enough to hear her.

  He hadn’t thought of it that way. Mostly, he didn’t have more than five minutes’ worth to say to anyone unless it was about the Store, and tonight was not time for that. Ketch had given up trying to stay at his side and was standing against the wall, a bottle of beer in her hand, talking with two
men who had been in her knife-fighting class. Dressed in black tights and a shift that left her arms bare, she looked dark and powerful. She had a cut across her forehead which had been cleaned and dressed. Everyone carried a scar, a cut, a wound of some kind. Tietjen had been startled at the bruising that ran down the length of his left arm where Gable had brought the pole down on it.

  “Working the crowd?” Barbara asked again. Startled, Tietjen realized he had been pacing in circles.

  “Just too tired to know what I’m doing, I guess.”

  “Then go to bed.” She patted him carefully on the left shoulder. “It’s been a long day.”

  He thought about it and realized she was right. The party would go on without him; he wasn’t necessary to it. Barbara waved at him, waved him away toward the stairs, as if it were a big joke. Across the room Ketch was dancing with Gellis. If she saw Tietjen leave she gave no sign. Elena sat cross-legged on the floor, with DeeDee in her lap, telling a story to the girls who circled around her. God’s in his heaven, Tietjen thought lightly. As he wove through the crowd people reached out to touch him, pat his shoulder, brush a finger against his hand as if for luck; smiles, muttered good-nights.

  He felt light. Despite the aches that made climbing the stairs to his lookout an exhausting chore, despite the memories of the day and the losses, he felt light and young and hopeful, really hopeful, in a way that he could not remember having been—since forever. When he reached the twelfth floor and settled in against the windowsill to stare out at the velvety night of the city, it felt like coming home again. Like coming home for the first time.

  Now it begins, he thought.

  From the park Jit stared up at the building, watching for the Man. He wore the coat the Man had given him and stroked at the fleecy collar with one hand. It was too dark to see in through the unlit windows; Jit let himself nestle within the Man’s mind, warm in complicity. You won, Jit help, he thought. Beat our enemy. Gable had told the monsters that Jit was their father—Jit wanted to push the thought away with his hands, to make it wither and die like the grass did in winter. Gable was ugly, like the oily smudge of dirt that had marred the shoulder of Jit’s coat. He looked at the stain and thought: Hate you, bad man. You so dead.