And he could hardly tell anyone about that. Barbara might understand. Might. No one else would, even Ketch. No one else in the Store saw what they were building as anything but a lifeboat for an indefinite stay. Over the months he had seen each person in the Store realize that help, if it ever came, was not coming soon, that they had to make the Store work. Elena and Sandy had a school for the children; Barbara’s infirmary was stocked and equipped with the best they could steal; the garden Beth and Elena had planted was already showing life. It was all about survival.
Only Tietjen felt he was dying, bit by bit.
Bobby’s arm had been pronounced sound again. At least McGrath had examined it, made him bend the arm every which way, consulted two books, and admitted that since they had kept the arm immobilized for four weeks and he showed no discomfort, that was the only way she had to gauge his fitness.
Bobby grunted that he was fine, what was the fuss? But he grinned when Ketch and a few of the others threw a “coming out” party for his arm after Barbara removed the zipcast, and sat drinking beer and listening to the others gossip about the past. Greg Feinberg showed up with a battery-powered boomer and a pile of disks, and Ketch sorted through them, taking half a dozen from the pile and tossing the rest to one side, uncaring of Greg’s chagrin.
Tietjen and McGrath watched from a table against the wall as Ketch put music on and began to dance with Gellis. It was gaido, street music with a heavy thudding bass line and high, wailing vocals; Tietjen had never cared much for it. Ketch and Gellis moved together hip to hip, hands upraised and eyes closed, swaying.
He realized Barbara was watching him. “She’s good,” he said at last. He could not think of what else to say.
Barbara nodded.
Fratelone came over to join them, draped his healed arm across Barbara’s shoulders. “Dance?” There was something boyish about him when he asked, shy and daring at the same time; it sat oddly on blockish, undemonstrative Bobby.
Barbara smiled at him. “Sure. John?” she turned back to Tietjen, excusing herself.
“What? Oh, sure.” He was a little surprised to hear Barbara say yes; thought it was rather like a teenager asking the chaperone at a prom to dance, and anyway, Bobby would have to teach her the steps.
Only he didn’t; she taught him, moving with a loose, easy authority that startled Tietjen. Among the other couples moving in the center of the room to the percussive beat, Barbara looked at home, arms raised in a graceful, sensual curve above her head, rib cage swaying in opposition to hips, back and forth. Meanwhile Bobby ducked and hopped, hopelessly separate from the rhythm despite Barbara’s best efforts to guide him. Finally, laughing, she steered him off the floor.
Tietjen didn’t see what happened, only that one moment Bobby Fratelone was coming toward him, chagrined at his failure, head turned to listen to Barbara’s laughing reassurance. The next minute Bobby was on the floor screaming, his left leg bent at a sickening angle. As he moved forward to help, Tietjen could see nothing that Bobby could have tripped over, nothing that would have hit him, no one except Barbara near enough to have been able to strike or push or pull him down.
“What happened?” he muttered to McGrath as he knelt next to her.
She shook her head. “He just—dropped. Like that. I don’t know. Bobby? Bobby, we’ve got to straighten that leg, sweetheart.” Her voice gentle and steely at the same time, McGrath put one hand on Fratelone’s thigh, the other on his shin. She motioned to Tietjen to help her and he reached down to grasp the man’s shin, feeling the rough, uneven scar tissue on the back of the leg, where he had been flayed by Gable’s people. McGrath shook her head. “Hold his shoulders,” she murmured. “Okay, sweetheart, this is going to hurt like Holy Fuck-me,” she said, deadpan.
The shock of profanity worked. Fratelone gave a ghostly, painful smile. When Barbara grasped the shin and turned the leg to face its proper direction he jerked under Tietjen’s hands, but did not cry out, did not pull away. “Holy Fuck-me,” he agreed weakly, and fainted.
“Let’s take advantage of the faint and get him upstairs,” Barbara said to the crowd around them. “Four people—bring him up to the infirmary. I want to get some of the cast on while he’s still unconscious.”
The party broke up. Ketch and Gellis, holding hands unself-consciously, paused by Tietjen to ask what happened, but he shook his head, shrugged his shoulders. Jesus, what a hell of a thing. What could make a man’s leg just break like that, no fall, no blow, nothing.
“Delayed stress, I guess. Maybe the dancing set it off,” Barbara told him later that night when he stopped in the infirmary to see how Fratelone was doing. His leg was cased in zipcast and plaster from thigh to heel and he was sleeping. “He insists someone hit him—with a baseball bat, I think he said. I will say, it looked like someone had hit him with a baseball bat: lots of surface bruising, abrasion, that kind of stuff. But I think you can have spontaneous bone fractures if there’s been earlier damage. I think.” Barbara’s face settled into an expression Tietjen recognized from the night Kathy Calvino was so sick: a hard cold hatred of her own helplessness. “I set it the best I could, but God knows what that leg is going to come out looking like, working like. I may have crippled Bobby for life. Dammit, there has to be some way to get out of New York and get help.”
There was no use arguing about it; every couple of weeks a scouting party would attempt to cross the river to the Bronx, or to leave the city in some other way: by raft to Brooklyn or New Jersey. Something always stopped them; they were as sealed in as the rest of the world, apparently, was sealed out.
In the morning Fratelone insisted again that someone had hit him. “With a bat, Boss. Something like. I don’t fall for nothin’ less,” he maintained.
Tietjen, remembering the scene, Bobby, head turned, walking away from the dancers—no baseball bats, no attackers, no one behind him at all—nodded and agreed that something weird must have happened.
“Damn bet,” Fratelone said.
Then the room was filled with the Store’s children, the Calvino girls in the lead, who had come to sign Bobby’s cast. The tough-guy mask settled more securely over Bobby’s ashy features; he was gruff with the kids, pretending irritation. Tietjen was startled to realize that all the kids, not just the Calvinos, but the others as well, loved Bobby.
“No purple on my cast,” he was saying. “Purple’s some kind of sissy color. No purple, you kids,” he was saying loudly, as one of the boys wielded a purple marker over his knee.
Tietjen edged toward the door, feeling as though he had somehow invaded Bobby’s life and found something he wasn’t supposed to know. Bobby Fratelone is a sucker for kids. As Tietjen went out the door he passed Barbara, shook his head, and muttered, “It’s a zoo in there.” She grinned and answered, “I know. Great, isn’t it?”
Bobby’s accident was the first of the small accidents and catastrophes that beset the Store in the next few weeks. Small things, nearly explainable: a ball bearing rolled under a plank which slipped out from under one of the carpentry crew and sent him flying across the room; Elena’s arm scalded by boiling water from a cooking pot (“But I’d only started heating it,” she wept as Barbara took her upstairs to the infirmary. “It was just getting warm!”); a plague of battered thumbs and splinters and cuts among the work crews; a salvage crew that brought back nothing more than poison ivy.
“It’s like we broke a mirror or something,” Tietjen heard Greg Feinberg saying to Sandy Hochman one afternoon. “Everybody’s got bad luck.”
Sandy shook her head and said she didn’t believe in luck. Not since her husband’s death, Tietjen thought. She had changed, a rosy-faced, plump woman with an easy laugh, become gray and spare, tender with her daughter Missy, evenhanded and dutiful with everyone else. Like Barbara without the grace notes, Tietjen thought, and then felt ashamed of the thought. Sandy had been through enough.
They had spent weeks clearing a vacant lot three buildings to the east of the Store of rubbl
e, trash, and bodies—there had been an apartment building there before the disaster, not a beautiful building, Tietjen remembered: a solid square hulk of limestone with its one beauty, a pair of iron and glass doors, hidden by the security grille. Now they were building a fence to keep out scavengers from their garden. Lo-yi and some of the gardening crew were turning the earth over, breaking it up, preparing the soil. Sandy and Greg knelt to one side, making improvised grapestake fencing, nailing slats and pickets to one-by-fours. Tietjen was working in Lo-yi’s crew, hoeing up earth until his shoulders ached unmercifully, enjoying the freedom of being just another member of the crew, taking Lo-yi’s terse orders with pleasure. The sun had been brutally hot in the middle of the day, but now the air was gentled with a light breeze, and the worst of the day’s heat had faded. It was nearly quitting time.
Tietjen paused to wipe his forehead on his T-shirt, which he had stuffed into his back pocket like a rag once the heat got bad. So he was watching as Sandy Hochman leaned around Greg, dug her hands into a bucket of nails, pulled out a handful—
—and screamed, opening her hand to drop the nails, then shaking it as if something dreadful clung there, then cradling the hand in her arm and bowing over it, keening.
Greg turned away just long enough to yell for Tietjen, who had already started over to the fence. The boy was trying to tug Sandy out of her curl, to see what had happened to her hand. She kept rocking and saying, “Hot, hot, hot.”
“See if there’s anything in that bucket,” Tietjen said, thinking perhaps something had crawled into the bucket and bitten Sandy. Beth Voe, who had been putting up the fencing, dropped to her knees beside Sandy and, arm around her shoulder, coaxed the older woman to lean into her side, relax against her, let someone examine her hand.
He expected to see a welt or a bite, maybe even the marks of a snakebite. Instead, there were the stigmata of branding, as if the handful of nails Sandy had grabbed had turned suddenly white hot. As Tietjen looked, the burns began to blister. One of the men picked Sandy up and began to carry her off toward the Store.
“What the hell happened,” Tietjen asked Greg as Beth moved out of earshot.
“I don’t know,” the kid said desperately. “Sandy picked up some nails, and like, she was just about to start work again when she started screaming, like. Saying they were burning her.”
“Was the bucket hot?” Tietjen asked. The boy shook his head. “Was there any way the bucket could have gotten hot?” he asked.
Again, Greg shook his head. “I don’t know what happened. I thought maybe it was a hornet or something, but you saw what happened to her hand, sir.” The word made Tietjen uncomfortably aware that he was supposed to supply the answers.
“Where are the nails she dropped?” Tietjen asked.
Mostly they were scattered, flung down when Sandy felt the pain. But they found a clump of nails, welded together into a bristling lump. Melted. Tietjen and Greg and Lo-yi stared at the clump of nails. How much heat would it take to melt No. 10 flathead nails that way? And why did the bucket and the nails still in it show no sign of heat? They were as cool to the touch as the bucket itself.
“Close-up time, bring your tools!” Lo-yi called to the people who were still there. As he gathered up the hoe he had been using—and Sandy Hochman’s hammer and rule—Tietjen felt the others watching him. Resentfully, he thought.
“It’s beginning again, dammit.” He said it to himself. Something weird was happening. Things that shouldn’t happen, the sorts of things that he thought had died with Gable on the floor of Grand Central, were happening. The people of the Store thought everything was normal again. What the hell was this weirdness to break that deal?
When he got back to the Store Barbara was waiting.
“I’ve treated the hand best I could, and given her antibiotics to keep off infection.” It seemed to Tietjen that she, too, looked at him as if he had failed to keep the injury from happening. “What happened?”
He told her. As he was telling her, Barbara’s mouth straightened into a hard line.
“It’s after us again,” she muttered angrily.
“What?”
She turned back to him. “Come on, John. Haven’t you known there was something behind all the things that have happened since the disaster? Some kind of intelligence? We can’t get out of Manhattan; no one’s come in to help us; all this weird stuff keeps happening, the monsters, and the lions the day we went to Grand Central—”
“The lions were on our side,” he protested. Tietjen didn’t want to have this argument, certainly not with Barbara. Because if he admitted that something was directing Sandy’s accident and Bobby’s, and the rash of ill luck that had beset the Store in the last few weeks, he would have to believe that it must be the city itself doing it, and he couldn’t believe that. Nothing else, he thought, had that kind of power, and after so many losses he could not bear to believe that the city itself could turn against him. Rather than acknowledge the power or the blind faithlessness with which it seemed to operate, he would refuse to believe there was any logic to the things that had been happening.
“What do you think, it’s like the Wicked Witch of the West sending out her weirdness troops to get us? Come on, Barbara … This isn’t personal, it’s chaos, that stuff I talked about months ago. I think it’s chaos, and it’s left little pockets of weirdness here and there, that we keep stumbling over. Okay?” He needed to convince her, and was relieved when she seemed to be convinced. Her shoulders relaxed, and her face lost the stricken look.
“Sandy will be all right,” she said at last. “Her hand will. But she’s sort of shut down, right now. She won’t even see Missy.” Tietjen didn’t know what to say to her. “Give her time, I guess,” Barbara answered herself after a long silence. “I’ve got kitchen duty with Elena tonight. See you later, John.”
After Sandy’s accident the spate of injuries seemed to have run its course, but unaccountable accidents and things breaking, or running down, or going haywire, still seemed to haunt the Store. The batteries that supplied power for the lights and the few electric appliances the Store used—a refrigerator in the kitchen and one in Barbara’s infirmary—all died one morning, and the backups proved useless. A layer of cement poured over the broken slate floor in the basement of the building next door refused to harden and cure: after six days it remained as soupy as the day it was poured. Every single piece of lumber cut to measure for the new gate to the Store was found to be off in length or width by exactly half an inch, either too much or too little. The ax heads came loose from the handles—one flew across the alley and narrowly missed one of the kids playing handball there. Lo-yi almost fertilized the new garden with rat poison, and insisted later that the label on the bag had read Fertilizer.
But no one was hurt. Just a pocket of bad luck, Tietjen told himself. They’d been so lucky, really.
In the midst of all this it was a relief to go out with the salvage parties. Tietjen joined one that went as far down as Houston Street, where he saw for himself the drowned spires of lower Manhattan. Little Italy and Chinatown and all but the roofs of SoHo were under water; the ground seemed to dip down sharply just after Houston, making a new shoreline. The upper stories of the Puck Building still rose out of the lapping green water. Lulled by the soft slap of the water on the cobblestones at his feet, Tietjen imagined swimming from rooftop to rooftop, diving down through the windows to wander from room to room in the old tenement flats, seeing the lives there undisturbed, pictures in place, furniture ordered and waiting. In fact, when he tried swimming out to a rooftop and then down, into an apartment, it was too dark to make much out; even when he came back with a flashlight, he saw only barnacles clinging to the furniture, and a pair of bloated bodies bobbing along the ceiling, placidly nibbled at by fish. He turned and kicked back up to the surface and did not try again.
Drying in the sun, safe on the shore looking south, he could see the glittering uppermost floors of buildings which had been skyscra
pers. The Customs House was under water, he thought sadly. The Stock Exchange. Old City Hall. Beautiful old buildings, all of them, lost underwater while their characterless cousins of the last fifty years survived.
On the trip they found some salvage, picked up a couple of people who cautiously came along “to see what you got up there,” and as always on salvage trips, burned bodies they found. What did it say about him, Tietjen wondered, that he had become expert at locating dead bodies by smell? Now, nearly six months since the disaster, the smells were usually subtler, less horrible than in the first weeks, and the bodies more desiccated and less like something human. Still, it was agreed among everyone at the Store that one of their jobs was to dispose of the dead, and any salvage group might stop several times to say a word over dead bodies, then burn them. On this trip they stopped four times. The next day, after a night spent camping in the shattered atrium of a handsome new condo building in Chelsea, the party headed back to the Store. It was late afternoon when they got there; crews were still out, having rested during the fiercest part of the day’s heat. Lo-yi was in the garden with half a dozen helpers; the grapestake fence, painted white, shone in the late sun. A woman was sitting on a windowsill washing the window, one of Sandy’s crew. Near the roof a makeshift scaffold rocked slightly as three people moved back and forth. Repointing the brick near the roofline, he thought; Gellis and Ketch and Jimmy Weeks, one of Bobby’s recruits.
He stood for a moment, drinking in the sight of home and its activity. Barbara was probably in the infirmary, Elena in the kitchen or the basement room that had been turned into a classroom. The woman—no, there were two, in different fifth-floor windows—washing windows made him nervous. Leaning out too far, trusting to the sills to hold; were they secured in any way? Had Barbara permitted this?
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