Skeletons (25 page)

He was interrupted by the rat-tat-tat of gunfire.

He screamed into the microphone. "Close up, get off the road! Get off—"

There was a cutoff shout, a loud hiss, and then nothing.

Mrs. Garr snapped off the radio.

Behind us, in the distance, I saw a glowing ball of fire that might have been the George Washington Bridge.

Harlem was in flames. The darkness of the night was lit orange, the streets covered with debris and burned-out vehicles. A phalanx of police cars was burning on one corner, a hole punched through it by a sanitation truck that itself sat burning off to one side.

In the silent streets were stacks of dust. I didn't see one window that had glass in it, not one car without its windshield smashed. We drove through a maze of burning wreckage.

When we reached Ninety-fifth Street, it was no different. No lights were on; the city was lit by fires.

At Ninety-second Street we hit a roadblock that made Second Avenue impassable. It looked deliberate; wrecked cars and overturned buses had been plowed into a solid, high wall that sealed the road.

Mrs. Garr turned west. The same thing had happened at Third Avenue, at Lexington, at Madison. Solid barricades of vehicles had been pushed or parked or jammed across the road.

We continued west. We saw no one. It was as if the city had sealed itself off.

When we reached Broadway, the road was suddenly wide open.

Mrs. Garr turned south.

The shops along Broadway were gutted. I saw an occasional car creeping along, as we were, through the blackened buses, overturned cars, piles of dust. There were no police, no humans.

An endless line of stoplights blinked red, green, yellow, a repeat of what we had seen in the nearly empty village of Cold Spring Harbor.

At Fifty-seventh Street the city came suddenly to life. First, a single skeleton crossed our path, stumbling, a bag with a visible green bottleneck in the top. The figure stopped, ignored us, put the bottle up to its skeletal mouth, and drank. I saw nothing go down into the body, but the skeleton took a long drink.

In the flames from a nearby ladies' shop I saw the vague outline of a man in a three-piece suit around the skeleton.

The figure finished the bottle, dropped it in the street, and stumbled on without looking at us.

I saw more skeletons. Two sat in front of a store-front, the first we had seen with its glass intact. Shotguns on their laps, they studied our car as we drove by. One of them peered closely, trying to see through our windows, but did not get up.

Near Forty-eighth Street there was suddenly light. The poles overhead were on, theater marquees alive with neon. Skeletons were strolling, in twos and threes. Many bore guns.

Some of the movie theaters were smashed and closed, but some were open. A marquee announced, ALL NIGHT HUMAN REVIEW! LIVE TURNINGS! Another said, DEAD SEX SHOW! XXX!

On some of the light poles overhead, from some of the building fronts, were knotted nooses.

Out of a theater proclaiming LIVE! DEAD! WE'VE GOT IT ALL! a human woman, barely clad and screaming, ran into the street, tripped, and fell. A few passersby turned to watch as a tall skeleton strode from the theater and aimed a handgun at her back.

"One chance!"

She turned to look at him, sobbing. "I won't! I won't do it with that thing!"

The tall skeleton shrugged, pulled the trigger, putting a bullet into her.

She collapsed, and then a moment later her human form flaked away, turning her to skeleton. She rose, laughing. She went to the tall skeleton, attempted to put her arm around him.

"All right, Clyde, no
prob
—"

"I said one chance!"

The tall skeleton put another shot into her. She screamed briefly before turning to dust.

"Damned humans getting scarce," the tall one said to the dispersing crowd, turning to stride back into the theater.

We had reached Forty-second Street. The lights were brilliant, the crowds large. A short skeleton stumbled into the street, hit the car, tried to hold on. I saw the ghostly outlines of a needle protruding from his ghostly arm.

"Shi . . ." the figure said blurrily, trying to stand. Suddenly he looked into the glass, peered closer at Mrs. Garr, eyes widening.

"Hey . . . you're . . ."

Mrs. Garr gave the car gas, pulled around a yellow taxi, edging to the right, making the next turn as the figure behind us fell to all fours in the street, attempted to get up.

A line of theaters, the Shubert, the
Nederlander
, lay mostly dark, but one marquee, proclaiming CATS! BROADWAY'S BIGGEST HIT!, with a newly added drawing of a cat in skeleton form, was lit, with lines of skeletons down the block waiting to get in.

We encountered another roadblock of junked cars, forcing us to turn left. Ahead, a crowd milled outside a hotel, spilling into the street. There were cops among them. A shot was fired. The crowd moved into the street faster, nearly blocking it.

A few blocks up the street a wide column of military vehicles was making its way in our direction. There were mounted guns, tanks, convoys of soldiers.

Mrs. Garr made another left, down a darker street. A few skeletal figures straggled by, heads down.

On Fifth Avenue we were able to turn downtown again. We passed another huge roadblock with a single plowed lane through it.

The whole lower part of the city looked dark, and suddenly the streets were empty again.

On our right loomed the Empire State Building. It was completely blacked out, its spire pointing into a lonely sky.

Mrs. Garr stopped the car.

"Claire," she said, pointing.

In the doorway to the building appeared a human woman, who looked furtively out at us and ducked back into darkness. Beside her, briefly, I saw a man with a rifle.

Mrs. Garr turned the engine off.

"Quickly, Claire."

Up the street behind us came a dull boom, the chatter of machine guns.

Mrs. Garr took the gun and we ran to the front entrance of the Empire State Building.

It was locked.

Mrs. Garr pounded on the window glass. We peered in.

We saw no one.

"Let us in!" Mrs. Garr shouted. She held her gun up and hit at the glass with it.

Up the street, the gunfire drew closer. Between two buildings I saw a brilliant flash of light followed closely by a whump. The ground shook.

"We have to do something," Mrs. Garr said. We turned back to the car.

Behind us the door to the building was thrown open, a rifle aimed out at us.

"Get the hell in," a voice said.

We entered. Immediately the door was closed and locked by the man holding the rifle. He was about twenty years old, stout. He wore army fatigues, the shirt open at the top.

The young man took Mrs. Garr's gun from her hand, stuck it in his belt. Then he walked briskly past us to an elevator bank. Next to the elevator was a boxy-looking army radio, its dial glowing. The woman we saw was waiting inside an open, dimly lit elevator car.

"In," the man with the rifle said.

We entered the elevator.

"Go." The young man gestured to the woman, and she pushed a button. The man stayed in the lobby. We watched the doors close, leaving him behind.

The elevator rose with a metallic groan.

"It'll take a few minutes to get up, the auxiliary power's weak," the woman said. She was middle-aged, haggard looking. She kept fingering a wedding ring on her left hand.

"Do you—" Mrs. Garr said.

"Please don't talk," the woman said, looking away from us.

We rose in silence. Once or twice the elevator jerked to a halt. We waited for the doors to open, but the car just sat there. The woman looked nonplussed. In a moment the elevator jerked into motion again, rising slowly.

After what seemed an hour, the elevator rocked to a halt and the doors opened.

The woman stepped out into darkness. We followed. There was a window down the hallway, giving flickering light from the distant fires outside. In a few moments my eyes got used to the dimness.

We passed a sign that said, OBSERVATION DECK.

The woman turned into an opening, began to climb a bank of steel stairs.

There was a door at the top; she knocked on it twice.

The door creaked back, and a new face looked in, the face of a young boy of about thirteen with hard eyes.

"Those are the last ones," he said. "The next ones Randy lets in, I'll shoot."

He opened the door all the way, revealing the large handgun he held in one hand.

We walked out onto the observation deck.

There were two others, besides the boy. An old man and woman stood by one of the pay telescopes, taking turns peering through.

"Those two are nuts," the young boy said before he turned away. He sat with his back against the building, cradling the gun in his lap.

The woman who had come up with us in the elevator went back down the steel steps, closed the door behind her.

"She's getting it on with soldier boy downstairs. I know it," the young boy said, smirking.

There was a slight wind up here, blowing an acrid odor. The sky was orange black. Surprisingly, overhead a few stars shone steadily.

Mrs. Garr and I began at one corner of the observation deck and made a slow tour, looking out at the city. Far off to the north were the most fires, from the direction we had come. Close by, the city seemed to have been cut into sections, with some completely intact, others burning fiercely. Everything below us was dark.

"The fires have gone out downtown," the young boy said. He had risen from his rest and stood next to us. He still held his gun. "Yesterday they fought all through
SoHo
and the Village. You could see the guns booming, watch the holes they made. This morning they finished off the Bowery. Most of the action has been uptown today."

He made a disgusted sound as the old man and woman approached. The young man went back to his sitting and closed his eyes again. "Nutty old farts," he said.

The old man's eyes were bright with interest. He wore a tweed sports jacket with patches on the elbows. His tie was neatly knotted. He drew a pipe out of one pocket and attempted to light it, with no success.

"Lawrence, you keep forgetting you're out of tobacco," his wife said mildly.

Lawrence got a disappointed look on his face. He looked at the street below.

"And the Petersen Pipe Shop was only a few blocks away. . ."

His wife patted his arm.

Lawrence brightened. "But such a small price to pay for such gains," he said. "Do you know—"

"Oh, Christ, here he goes again!" the young man with the gun said.

Lawrence turned to face the young man. "As I've said, Ralph, I just don't understand how young people like yourself cannot see the amazing opportunities this all implies—"

"Can the lecture, Pops," Ralph said, keeping his eyes closed.

Lawrence turned back to us. "The young man has bullets for that gun of his. I really can't understand how Randy could allow such a young man—"

"If you don't stuff it, Dad, I'll use two of them on you," Ralph said, covering his ears now, cradling his gun in his lap.

Lawrence shook his head, turned back to us. "But as I was saying," he said, "do you know how remarkable all this is?"

"It's remarkable," Mrs. Garr said, "but horrible."

"Horrible, yes, that's true," Lawrence said thoughtfully. "But you must consider the entire picture. Before my retirement at Columbia University—"

"Christ, here he goes with the history lesson again!" Ralph rose and walked entirely away from us, to the other side of the observation deck.

"Go on, dear, tell them," Lawrence's wife said.

Lawrence watched Ralph leave, then turned back to us. "Unpleasant young man. But as I was saying, this event offers remarkable opportunities. We're actually living in the past right now."

"And it's trying to kill us," Mrs. Garr said.

`That's true," Lawrence said. "That's true. But at the same time we're seeing it. Did you know that before the television blackout three days ago we were able to hear Julius Caesar speak? And Archimedes? There was that one station, what was it, dear?"

"CNN, Lawrence," his wife said.

"Yes, CNN, that actually tried to make sense of this new world for a day or two—"

He was interrupted by a loud, nearby explosion. I looked down and to the right. A tank was moving across Thirty-sixth street, turning onto Fifth Avenue.

"Oh, heavens," said Lawrence, looking briefly but then turning his attention back to us.

"Do you have any thoughts on this, dear?" he said to me. "You look like an intelligent young person."

Mrs. Garr drew me close. "Claire doesn't speak.”