The Stone War

by Madeleine E. Robins

  Behind them, Ketch strode along as if she enjoyed the motion of her arms and legs, the sensation of moving strongly; she watched sharply from right to left, looking everywhere except where Ted, the fourth member of the raiding party, was. The word gangling was invented for this kid, Tietjen thought; and his awkwardness was in no way helped by his crush on Ketch. Ted kept trying to talk with her; Ketch maintained a pained silence. Tietjen, listening to the boy’s nervous chatter, found himself grimacing sympathetically.

  The streets were filled with quiet echoes. They passed a fire in a mesh trash can that flared, died out, then flared again, over and over as if it were on a timer. Each arm of flame reached out to them with bright fingers, imploring, grabbing out desperately before it was withdrawn into the fire’s hot core. They passed doorways sealed uselessly against the disaster, and doorways caved inward, displaying shattered walls and tumbled furniture. They passed two streetlamps that arched to meet and intertwine like courting swans.

  As they walked east Tietjen felt his stomach churning and tasted a sour, rotten taste in his mouth. Nerves, he thought. The strokes of his heartbeat got louder, heavier, until it felt as though his ribs were vibrating with the beat; the blood pounded behind his eyes, in his ears. Each step made it worse: he felt sweat beading at his temples and under his arms; a sense of dread began to work in him, rising up and burning in his chest. Heart attack, he thought, listening to the rapid heavy pounding; stroke, he thought, feeling the hard pulse of blood in his neck. I’m dying. He wanted to run, turned his head to look behind him. The kid, Ted, was wild-eyed and shaky, stopping and starting, he lagged far behind him. Ketch was still walking, but she led with one shoulder as if she were cutting through a gale-force wind, and her face was ashy and streaked with rivulets of sweat. Only Fratelone appeared to be unaffected; he kept up the same steady, angry pace. Tietjen turned forward again, the hardest thing he had ever done.

  Every step they took was through some heavy medium, a gel of fear. The air pushed against their forward progress and when they reached Second Avenue Tietjen was astonished to find how long it had taken them to cover the one block. He raised his eyes from the pavement and realized they would not need to go farther.

  From Second Avenue the land sloped into the East River. A dozen blocks south Tietjen could see the FDR Drive twisting out of the water to resume its course downtown, and the shore was dotted with buildings below that point, but from Sixtieth up to—he turned to look up the bleak new shoreline—up to about Eighty-fifth Street, there was nothing but a thin ribbon of land which looked as if the buildings that had stood there had slid or been dragged into the water, leaving behind a soft trail of muddy disturbance. First Avenue, York Avenue, the FDR, all gone. New York Multihospital had vanished.

  They backed up through the miasma, back along Seventy-second Street. Tietjen felt the sickness and terror recede with each step they took away from the river. No one said anything about what they had seen. Only when they reached Lexington Avenue again did Ketch speak. “I’m going back to the Store.”

  “Me too,” Ted said quickly.

  Ketch looked at him. “Okay, kid, if you want.”

  Tietjen held out a hand as if to keep them, but did not know what to say. “We still need the medicine.”

  “You guys can carry enough medicine for the kid. The kid’s nothing to me.” She looked sullenly at Tietjen.

  “Me neither,” the kid echoed.

  “Some goddman earthquake knocked the hospital into the river. So it’s creepy. Baby’s still sick.” Fratelone looked hard at Ketch, then at Tietjen, as if it were his responsibility to take the party onward. It was, Tietjen realized again.

  “We’ll go on to Mt. Sinai, up on Ninety-eighth Street. We’re still going to need people to carry things. Ketch, anything not medical you find, you keep; that goes for the rest of you. But this isn’t a scavenging trip: the Calvino girl is sick, and sooner or later someone—one of us, maybe—is going to need medicine we haven’t got at the Store yet. So we go. Now.” Tietjen watched the tightness in Fratelone’s posture ease slightly, watched Ketch make her decision.

  “Isn’t there somewhere closer?” she asked.

  “All the smaller private hospitals that used to be around here—Lenox Hill, Doctors, they got incorporated into New York Multi. Metropolitan is—was—too close to the river. We can’t be sure it’s not like this.” He waved a hand eastward, toward the disappeared landscape. “I’ve seen the nineties around Fifth Avenue; I know Mt. Sinai is still standing. There isn’t another hospital between here and there.”

  Ketch tilted her head to one side, studied the sky, then shrugged and nodded. Ted watched Ketch, reluctance warring with the wish to impress; finally he nodded too.

  “Good. Let’s go. We’re wasting time.”

  They started north on Lexington Avenue.

  The same silence reigned, out of which echoed their footsteps, the occasional scatter of pebbles and dust. The small shops, cramped in between bigger chain stores, had been crashed and trashed; there were spills of expensive clothing, piles of books, waterlogged stationery, shoes. As they passed an expensive women’s clothes store, Tietjen saw Ketch casually reach in and unwind a heavy scarlet shawl from around a mannequin and wrap it around her waist. Most of the larger stores were screened and grilled, sealed off from casual attack, but they passed one where the security grilles had kept the people inside from getting out, and they pressed, like flies caught in amber, against and through the grilles with grimaces of terror and rage on their faces. They were weirdly well preserved, but not all the bodies they passed were; sometimes they saw bodies several weeks dead, gnawed by vermin and decaying badly; sometimes only the familiar, sickening stench told Tietjen they were passing the dead.

  There were many dead, but no one alive. From every half-ruined apartment building or house, ghost-town sounds echoed: loose pipes and posts creaking in the March wind, plaster falling, bricks slowly sliding away from their mortar, dropping into beds of rubble. The sounds shocked and frightened Tietjen. He had begun to believe, seeing progress at the Store, that the same progress must somehow be taking place everywhere in the city. The dust of decay filled his nostrils and powdered his hair, made him suddenly angry.

  “No,” he said aloud. “Goddamn.”

  “Boss?” Fratelone at his shoulder. “Hey, Boss?—”

  Tietjen relaxed and turned to the others, embarrassed. “Thinking aloud. Nothing. Just thinking about all the things that have to be done.”

  “At the hospital?” Ted asked.

  “Right. At the hospital,” he lied. For a moment he cursed the city for being so damned big. It was going to be near impossible to learn the extent of the damage without more people, more competent people he could send out, who would report back, bring news of downtown, Brooklyn, Queens. And most of the people who had come to the Store just wanted to rest there, safe, and survive.

  Think about it later. Now, “Anyone ever been to Mt. Sinai?”

  No one. It would have to be potluck, take their chances and stumble on what they needed, wherever they could find it.

  At Eighty-first they went west to Fifth Avenue to skirt the crater that had sent Tietjen toward his disastrous visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He kept them on the far side of the avenue; Central Park made him anxious; he remembered the icy feeling of death in the park the morning he had walked across it, unrelenting eerieness that made the skin crawl and the hair rise. Looking across into the park he was surprised to see trees flowering, not just the first tentative springtime greening of new leaves, but extravagant masses of blossom.

  He would have sworn that the trees in the park had been dead a month ago.

  Finally, Ninety-eighth Street. At random they chose one of the newer buildings to start with—the Zimmerman Pavilion. There was no sign from the outside that the hospital had been occupied since the disaster; inside they found nothing, no one alive, no bodies, the population of the hospital might have been magicked away.
The air was stale and chilly, but there was no decay, no stench. The long hallways, with their gurney-width doors and linen wallpaper, might have been chambers in a modern pyramid. The first floor was all offices and lounge areas, useless. On the upper floors they found doors with MEDS. LOCKER–RESTRICTED stenciled on them. Each door needed a combination as well as mortise key and cardpass. On the fourth floor Tietjen stared in frustration at another door he could not unlock, and felt the others watching him.

  “Boss?” Fratelone nudged Tietjen aside. “Let me give it a try.”

  It took him two minutes, and the door swung open. “Pussy locks,” Fratelone said disdainfully. Tietjen blinked, startled as hell. “Okay. Fratelone, you go downstairs and start work on the door down there; Ketch, you look around and try to find where they keep things like bandages, cotton, that kind of stuff. You follow me,” he said to Ted, as the kid started off in Ketch’s orbit. Reluctantly the boy turned back and Tietjen began to read through McGrath’s shopping list.

  She had torn pages from a home guide to prescription drugs, circled names, whole categories of drugs, made notations in the margins. Tietjen read the list aloud: penicillin, any kind; tetracyclines, any kind. Aspirin. Darvon, codeine, ibuprofen, acetaminophen, Demerol. Anticoagulants. Dramamine, Benedryl, any antihistamines. Insulin and any antidiabetic drugs. Cortisone. Anitspasmodics. Nitroglycerin. Barbiturates, antidepressants, tranquilizers, amphetamines. Antipsychotic drugs and immune-system boosters. Distilled water. Antiseptics, cotton swabs, bandages, suturing needles and surgical thread, scalpels, forceps—did McGrath know how to use any of this stuff?

  Ted was dropping bottles into the plastic bag he carried with gleeful abandon. There was a giddy pleasure in grabbing everything in sight and carrying it off; Tietjen felt it himself. “There’re labels on those bottles?” he asked. “We don’t want to have to sort them out later and give someone the wrong stuff. And we want all the antibiotics they have, anything at all, IV or pill, whatever.”

  It took them fifteen minutes to empty the shelves, checking against McGrath’s list. Ketch returned before they were ready, pulling a wire cart with deep canvas bins. MT SINAI LAUNDRY was stenciled on the sides.

  “I didn’t think the hospital would mind.” She grinned. She had almost filled one of the two bins with cartons and bags of bandages, swabs, alcohol and iodine swipes, and sponges. “We should probably find out where Emergency is. They’ll have things like splints and tools—needles and thread and stethoscopes and like that. You guys ready?”

  “You know your way around emergency rooms?” Tietjen asked as the three of them negotiated the laundry-cart into the stairwell and down to the next landing.

  “They’re not that tough: they label everything. I used to be on the streets a lot, spent some time in the ERs. Nothing uptown like this place, though.” For the first time Tietjen heard the lowspeak lilt in her speech. He looked at Ketch with new interest, imagining her as a street kid, knife or billy hanging negligently at her side; she’d come up a way since then. She was too old to be street now, had probably been away from it for half a dozen years. Still, he thought: interesting.

  Fratelone had unlocked the door of the medications locker on the third floor; his bag was almost full when the rest of the party joined him. As Fratelone finished up, methodically reading each label before he dropped a box into his basket, Tietjen scanned the shelves quickly for anything they had missed upstairs. Then he turned his party back to the stairwell, where the laundry cart waited. Fratelone’s bag went in with the other treasure, and they went to look for the emergency department.

  It took nearly an hour to find; Mt. Sinai was spread over an area five blocks long. Emergency was in the basement of the Annenberg Building, a dark rectangle sealed away from the street, hidden behind the buildings that faced Fifth Avenue. An ambulance had been thrown through the glass and steel mesh of the front doors there, so that the signs that marked it as the ER were illegible, but the stench was unmistakable. All the other hospital buildings had been empty, or had seemed so. Here in Emergency, the smell of death and decay was everywhere. Tietjen and his people wrapped scarves and bandages around their faces, smeared mentholated salve on their upper lips, trying to drown out the stench. Then they climbed over the twisted steel and fiberglass of the ambulance, through the maze of steel and concrete and glass that filled the Emergency area lobby. There was a sea of bodies there, swollen, soft and corrupt. Many looked as if they had been brought in during the disaster and left to die, others looked as though they had died instantly, in a breath of fear or rapture. Ted threw up; Ketch’s dusky skin turned ashen. Tietjen felt faint himself. Only Fratelone waded in, unnoticing, looking for drugs.

  Splints. More cotton. Slings. Stethoscopes, most taken from the pockets of corpses. Suturing needles and thread. Surgical tools from two of the examining rooms. Sealed sacks of alcohol and distilled water. Vaccination guns, hypodermics. Ted found another laundry cart and they filled it, more cotton, more swabs, thermo-strips, aspirin, a cache of vitamins. All four of them became frantic, giddy, grabbing everything, tossing it into the cart, calling to each other from the examining rooms: what was this, could they use it, did they want it?

  “MAST pants?” Ketch called to Tietjen.

  “What are they?” Then he remembered: inflatable pants that would force blood from the legs back into the body, give a shock victim a transfusion of his own blood. “Forget ’em.” No point in being able to stabilize someone with a ruptured spleen if you couldn’t fix the spleen later. They took more iodine and bandages instead.

  They were at it a long time, filling a second cart. The light outside was fading when they emerged from the alley that led to Madison Avenue, tugging carts so heavily laden that the canvas bottoms scraped the pavement. The hectic flush of work faded slowly in the chilly air; all of them felt sheepish suddenly, a little edgy.

  “Let’s get home,” Tietjen said.

  He took point, with Ted and Ketch navigating the carts just behind him. The carts, on hard rubber wheels, barely made a sound as they rolled over the uneven sidewalk; the wire frames creaked and rattled, and sometimes the contents of the carts settled with a rustle. Fratelone brought up the rear, his square bulk casting a menacing shadow on the sides of the buildings. As they walked past the gutted boutiques on Madison, Tietjen kept hearing things, small sounds, disturbances so slight he wondered if he’d heard them at all, really. One footstep. The note of a high-pitched giggle, cut off immediately. A flurry like the beating of giant wings somewhere behind the shadows. Imagining things, Tietjen thought. He felt hollow, hungry and scared and tired, now that the adrenaline of the hospital raid was fading. Just imagination.

  “I heard something.” Fratelone had come up from the rear to mutter at Tietjen’s shoulder; he was half a head shorter than Tietjen. “I heard something,” he said again. It frightened Tietjen to hear a quaver in Fratelone’s voice; he thought of the guard as a rock, as unflappable in his way as Barbara McGrath was in hers. But she was upset over the little girl this morning, he remembered. And Fratelone had been taken and tortured by someone in the dark of the city, probably still had scars to show for it.

  “Let’s get off the street for a bit,” he said. They struggled with the awkward bulk of the laden carts, lifting them up a few granite steps to a doorway that had been destroyed, creating an artificial courtyard. The building above was simply not there—looking up, Tietjen saw the first dusty scattering of stars. Fratelone and Ted pushed the carts behind one of the walls; then the four of them peered out into the street.

  Darkness seemed not to descend from the sky with the dying of daylight but to well up, infusing the shadows with an unnatural inkiness. There was nothing but the blackness in the street, nothing to make Tietjen’s skin crawl as he scanned the street for motion. He forced himself to relax slightly, leaning against the crumbling granite of the old portico and taking measured breaths.

  “How long’re we going to stay here?” Fratelone muttered after a
few minutes. “Baby’s sick.”

  Tietjen flushed with irritation. Fratelone had been nervous, and now he wanted to go. No pleasing some people. “If it seems clear in another few minutes we’ll go,” he said. Almost as Tietjen spoke he heard a high thin wail of a laugh. He couldn’t judge where the sound came from, but suddenly he was aware of a murmuring, a distant crowd voice.

  “When are we heading back?” Ted echoed Fratelone.

  Tietjen resisted the hand at his elbow, the urgency in the boy’s tone. “I don’t want to go out there until we know what that is.”

  “What what is?” Fratelone snapped, but he looked on the street fearfully.

  Ketch shook her head at him, at Ted. “Don’t you hear it? Tietjen’s right; listen.”

  The swell of sound continued, echoed from the faces of the buildings. The blackness at the end of the block was impenetrable; something was advancing within it. Behind him Tietjen felt the others pressing forward, looking. A chunk of stone chipped from the portico and fell at his feet.

  “Stay back,” Tietjen whispered between his teeth. He turned to look at them all over his shoulder. “Just keep back, will you?” Ketch nodded, pursing her lips fiercely so that the skin stood in white ridges; Ted stood looking at her, listening for something he was not sensitive enough to hear. Fratelone was listening too, with cold intensity. He was terrified, Tietjen realized. He knew something about what was happening out there.

  High-pitched laughter rolled giddily down the street. Just behind the laughter the blackness rolled forward, a fallen cloud of oily darkness that pulsed. The pulses resolved into motion, the motions became separate. There were people out there.

  “No,” Fratelone breathed behind them.

  He was right. What was out there was not human. From the shifting mass of darkness, something resolved. It was appallingly human at first glance, standing upright on two legs, its narrow tapering shoulders sloping into two unnaturally long arms. The head was long and tapering, insect-like. A praying mantis? But it was, or had been, human; it was almost as tall as Tietjen, and still wore the tweed jacket and corduroy pants cut to fit a human body, now hanging around its spindly limbs. The large eyes were reflective, glittering slightly as the thing moved its head. Tietjen drew back farther into his own shadow, pressing his lips tight to suppress a cry of terror. Behind the insect Tietjen could see the shape of a head, but where the features should have been there were only teeth, grisly pointed canines radiating in a long mouth; as the thing raised one arm Tietjen saw that it had no hand, just a single hooked claw.