Skeletons (27 page)

In a moment, as skeletal figures, among them Randy, tried to climb through the open door, the helicopter gave a mighty, groaning roll and flipped over, sliding away from the building, broken rotors clicking impotently.

In a moment it was gone.

After what seemed like an eternity, we heard a distant thumping roar as it hit below.

"Randy didn't know," Lawrence said. "But when I saw the markings on that helicopter I knew. The entire army group that helicopter was from was taken over by skeletons a week ago. There was a mighty battle, but the human side lost. All the armaments went into the hands of the skeletons. It was all on that television station. . ."

"CNN, dear," his wife said.

"Of course, CNN. If only Randy had asked me. His friends were treacherous indeed."

We left the office, went out to the observation deck to study the spot where the copter had hit below.

We heard a shout from over the edge of the building.

We looked over. Ralph was clinging to the upward curving metal grating that served as a deterrent to suicidal jumpers.

"Help me!" he shouted.

Below him, very far away, lay the still-burning hulk of the twisted helicopter.

"Hurry up!" Ralph screamed, shifting his weight, trying to gain a better grip on the bars.

"We must help him," Lawrence said.

Mrs. Garr said, "There was a hose in the hallway, wound up."

"Yes," Lawrence said.

Lawrence, Mrs. Garr and I went back to the hallway.

Ralph screamed behind us, begging us not to leave. "We're going to help you!" Katherine called down to him. "They're getting something to pull you up!”

“Jesus, hurry!" Ralph begged.

Mrs. Garr pulled the hose as Lawrence and I unrolled it. It stretched nearly to the edge of the observation deck, then stopped.

"It's not enough!" Mrs. Garr called into the building.

"I'll try to undo it!" Lawrence called.

Ralph begged for help. "I can't hold on!"

"You must hold on!" Katherine shouted down to him. "We'll have you in soon!"

Mrs. Garr stretched the hose taut. Suddenly it moved forward.

"I've taken it off its clamp!" Lawrence shouted.

I watched as Mrs. Garr and Katherine fed the hose out toward Ralph. Lawrence secured the other end to the nearest pay telescope.

The nozzle snaked down toward Ralph. He looked desperately up at it.

"I can't hold on!"

"Just a few seconds more," Lawrence urged. He joined us at the edge of the building. "Just a few seconds and we'll have you up."

The nozzle dangled inches from Ralph's hands. Then it dropped to hit him on the knuckles.

One hand lost its grip, grabbed wildly for the nozzle, got it.

"Good, Ralph! Now hold on!"

Ralph grabbed at the hose with his other hand, wrapped both of his hands tightly around it.

"Good! We'll pull you up!" Lawrence shouted.

Ralph shouted, "Do it!"

The four of us held to the hose and began to pull it over the edge of the building.

Ralph began to laugh. "Yes! I'm gonna make it!" He looked down at the burning wreck of the helicopter. He spat. "Bastards! Tried to fool me! Ha-ha! Bastards!"

"Ralph, pay attention!" Lawrence called. "You have to help yourself over the curve of the safety bars! We can't pull you straight up, you have to climb up around them!"

Ralph was still laughing, looking down.

"Bastards! Nobody fools me!" He held the hose tightly with one hand, pulled his handgun from his jeans. "Know what I'm gonna do when I get back up there?" he called up. "I'm gonna shoot every one of you bastards! You can't trust anybody! You're all dead. You—"

"Ralph!" Lawrence shouted. The hose had become tangled between two of the safety bars.

The hose moved up, pinning Ralph's hand clinging to the hose between the bars. By the time he noticed, his hand was already being crushed against the bar.

"
Owwww
!" he shouted, pulling his hand free.

He was thrown out away from the building, holding nothing.

"Jesus!" He let go of his gun, which dropped away. He made a wild grab at the hose, but his fingers were inches beyond it.

"
Jeeeeeesusssssssss
!"

He tumbled away from us, screaming, until he had shrunk to a tiny point, and then vanished altogether into the smoking wreckage of the helicopter below.

The four of us turned from the scene.

"I'm uncharitable for saying this," Lawrence said sadly, "but I believe all of this was for the best. I believed that young man when he said he was going to kill us."

That evening, the tanks continued to fire into the Empire State Building and surrounding structures. There was another thrilling, bizarre charge by a regiment that Lawrence thought he could identify as a home-guard unit that had put down the New York City draft riots in 1861. They, too, were crushed. We witnessed an aerial dogfight that ended inconclusively, both jets tearing off to the west after trading streaming rockets in the dark.

Sometime after midnight, with a near-full moon rising high over the decimated city, outlining the cratered streets and jaggedly broken skyscrapers in eerie silver-white light, Lawrence gathered us together and told Mrs. Garr, "You and Claire really cannot stay here."

"Where can we go?" Mrs. Garr said.

"I've been considering that," Lawrence said. "I think automobile transportation would be foolish. Most of the land routes out of the city have been demolished. As of two days ago the Lincoln Tunnel was collapsed and filled with water, and the Holland Tunnel was under attack. I haven't seen a commercial airliner in nearly a week. But the trains ..."

Mrs. Garr's eyes widened. "You think—"

"At this point it's the only logical choice. If you want to get to Pennsylvania, I can't see any other way of trying." He stopped to pull his pipe from his pocket, pinch some of his precious tobacco from his plastic pouch into it, light it. "Besides, staying with Katherine and me would be foolish."

"You're going to stay here?" Mrs. Garr said. Lawrence nodded, puffing smoke.

"But why?"

"Katherine and I made a conscious decision some time ago. We're not young, and our love of life is not tied to young things. I'm fascinated by what's going on around me. I want to study it as long as I can. Then. . ."

He puffed his pipe.

"We're going to let the skeletons turn us," Katherine said simply.

"What?"

Lawrence nodded. "They will be doing building-to-building searches for humans here soon, if they follow their pattern. I have no intention of letting someone like that unpleasant young man Ralph take me before my time. But when the skeletons come . . ."

"How can you . . . ?" Mrs. Garr said incredulously.

Lawrence patted her hand. "It's easy, my dear. When my time in this life is over, I want to study this other life. I don't mind, really. I would never betray the human race while a part of it, but this second existence presents such marvelous opportunities for starting over, for possibly teaching again—"

"But you'll be one of them! You'll want to kill the rest of us!"

"My dear," Lawrence said softly, "we're all going to become one of them. That doesn't mean you should give up, but—"

"No!" Mrs. Garr said. "I won't think about it! I won't think that they're going to get everyone, my husband . . ."

She began to cry.

Lawrence held her, let her cry on his shoulder, while Katherine looked on with understanding.

"It's just that we've thought it all the way through," Katherine said kindly.

"I won't, I just won't. . ."

She pulled away from Lawrence and sat hugging herself, and then called me to her and held me while Lawrence and Katherine left us alone.

"Claire, I won't let them do it to you, I won't."

Soon she stopped crying. A set, hard look was left in her eyes. She rose, went to Lawrence and Katherine, who stood hand in hand, looking out over the city.

"Tell me about the trains," Mrs. Garr said.

We left between midnight and morning. The last sight we had of Lawrence and Katherine was of them standing side by side, happy, wishing us well as the elevator doors prepared to close to take us down.

"If you were to meet us after our turning, I hope you realize you would have every right to try to destroy us," Lawrence said. He smiled. "You see, we've thought that out, also."

"Remember," Katherine added, "our first allegiance is always to the human race."

"Good-bye," Lawrence said.

"Good-bye," Mrs. Garr said. "Good luck."

The doors closed on the view of Lawrence puffing his pipe, looking thoughtfully after us.

The elevator wheezed and jerked downward. The trip this time took longer than it had before.

As we reached the bottom the doors creaked open on the unknown. Mrs. Garr held my hand very tight. "Just stay close, Claire," she said.

We passed Randy's abandoned radio, walked to the front glass doors, and looked out.

In the street were the ruins of a destroyed tank, its turret bent at a useless angle, one tread unraveled. The street appeared empty.

We pushed out through the door, stayed close to the building, and headed west.

We saw no one. The street was deserted, the ruins of battle left behind. The road was pocked with holes and ruts. Softly blown piles of dust lay everywhere.

We dipped into doorways, walked close to the faces of buildings.

We reached Sixth Avenue, waited in the dark shadows to cross the street.

"Let's go, Claire—"

There was sound north of us. Two blocks up, a tank column rumbled across Sixth Avenue, heading east.

We waited for it to pass. At its rear were two trucks filled with a skeleton army contingent. We crossed the street, ignoring a "Don't Walk" sign flashing at us. We walked on, moving west and then north.

When we reached Seventh Avenue, we found that we had gone too far north and doubled back.

Abruptly, Mrs. Garr pulled me into the open doorway of a shop whose neon lights flickered inside, on and off, on and off.

"In here, Claire."

We entered the shop. The walls were covered with party goods, costumes, party favors, paper napkins decorated with Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny.

I stayed low, thinking Mrs. Garr had spotted someone coming on the street. But instead, she was moving to the front of the shop window, leaning over the waist-high backdrop and trying to reach something. She grunted, strained her hand out, pulled it back clutching two rubber masks.

She handed one to me.

"Put it on," she said.

It was a full-head rubber skeleton mask.

I put it on and watched through the eyeholes as Mrs. Garr put hers on.

When the lights flickered out, she looked like a skeleton. When they flickered on again, she looked like a human wearing a mask.

"In the dark, it will help," she said.

We left the shop. Immediately we saw a figure across the street, a skeleton with an army helmet bearing a rifle. We walked, hands close to our bodies.

The soldier glanced at us, walked on.

We kept walking.

We passed hotels, the Broadway,
Penta
, to where Madison Square Garden squatted roundly amid the surrounding buildings.

The white billboard out front read MONSTER TRUCKS TONIGHT!

Another sign nearby bearing an arrow said PENN STATION.

A small crowd of skeletons milled out in front of Madison Square Garden.

"There's another way to get into Penn Station," Mrs. Garr said.

We passed to the right of the crowd, into an entry past the Madison Square Garden sign and under an overpass. There was a half circle where taxis picked up passengers. It was deserted. We found one of a rank of doors that was open.

"Walk fast, keep your head down," Mrs. Garr said. Out of a small lobby we ran into a swarm of people heading for trains.

Holding me back, Mrs. Garr said, "This won't work." She glanced around furiously. "There's another way, but I don't remember exactly where. I came into the city with Michael once, and we got lost in the tunnels. We saw no one for five minutes. If only I could remember where we came out . . ."

She found a sign overhead that said AMTRAK with an arrow pointing.

"That's it," she said.

We followed the sign. Soon we were in a maze of passenger tunnels under construction. One led us to a dead end. We backed up, made a turn, and found ourselves near a bank of sour-smelling rest rooms. Around a corner were the Amtrak ticket counters, on the wall behind them a huge arrivals and departures sign.

"One more turn . . ." Mrs. Garr said.