The Stone War (14 page)
As if the act of setting things in motion had somehow made her nursing easier, McGrath smiled and went back to Kathy’s room.
Fratelone insisted on going. Tietjen would have been happier had the man stayed as Barbara’s backup at the Store, but Kathy was his kid, Tietjen could hardly tell him no. Two others volunteered: a gawky teenaged boy named Ted and a dark, slender, muscular woman who called herself Ketch. Tietjen suspected that Ketch was looking for good scavenging; Ted was looking for a way to impress Ketch. Fine, so long as both did what they were supposed to when he needed them.
The party left the Store about noon. McGrath was left in charge, but Tietjen doubted she would leave the infirmary except in direst need. Allan Hochman would back her. “See you in a little,” he told Hochman at the door.
At the end of the block, Tietjen turned to look back at the Store. For a moment he thought he saw McGrath at a window, watching. Dumb notion: he shrugged it off and fell into step with Fratelone, east down Seventy-second Street.
“WHICH
hospital are we going to?” Ketch asked Tietjen. She was hospital are we going to?” Ketch asked Tietjen. She was exotic-looking; long hair pulled tightly into a knot at the nape of her neck, long body, tight-pressed lips and narrow dark eyes. Her voice was low-pitched, her diction clear but slightly accented. She wore black: a heavy street fighter’s jacket and narrow black pants that accentuated her thinness. Her intensity made Tietjen a little uneasy, but she seemed comfortable to follow his lead.
hospital are we going to?” Ketch asked Tietjen. She was hospital are we going to?” Ketch asked Tietjen. She was exotic-looking; long hair pulled tightly into a knot at the nape of her neck, long body, tight-pressed lips and narrow dark eyes. Her voice was low-pitched, her diction clear but slightly accented. She wore black: a heavy street fighter’s jacket and narrow black pants that accentuated her thinness. Her intensity made Tietjen a little uneasy, but she seemed comfortable to follow his lead.
“New York Multi, Seventy-first and York. They’re big, and we’ve got a big shopping list.”
“What do we do if we find someone there?” Ketch pressed.
The question made Tietjen impatient.
If there were someone at New York Multi, we would have heard; if there were someone at New York Multi, they would have come out to help.
What he said was, “If there’s a doctor there, we bring her back to look at the little girl. Anyone else—we’ll figure it out when it happens.”
If there were someone at New York Multi, we would have heard; if there were someone at New York Multi, they would have come out to help.
What he said was, “If there’s a doctor there, we bring her back to look at the little girl. Anyone else—we’ll figure it out when it happens.”
Ketch nodded, apparently satisfied.
The sun shone with hard brightness in a brittle blue sky, and the air had a taste of river in it—salty water, mud, and chemicals. The breeze came and went, scattering scraps of paper and pebbles, exploding clots of brick-and-stone dust into clouds that stung the eyes. Tietjen walked slightly ahead of the others, not to establish himself as the leader, but because, as often, he could think of nothing to say. Except with Barbara, there seemed to be nothing he knew how to talk about, nothing he knew how to ask about, except the progress of the Store.
Fratelone followed after Tietjen by a pace or two, as quiet as Tietjen but angry. The man had gone dead quiet when McGrath explained why the antibiotics were needed; except to announce that he was going on the hospital raid, he had said nothing since. Fratelone’s trust in him—wholehearted and unquestioning—made Tietjen a little nervous; he didn’t feel he’d earned such obedience. Still, he had to admit it made him feel better to have Fratelone at his back on his first real foray outside of the Store’s neighborhood since he and Barbara had set up there.
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.
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.
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