The Stone War (15 page)
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.
“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.
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.
Jesus.
Something with huge wings that beat slow as bellows, as if marking time. Two skeletal bodies linked like chain, moving awkwardly forward with the crowd. Misshapen flesh, skin that draped and quivered, deformities he couldn’t make sense of at first, miscolored, scaled, feathered; a man, apparently normal except for the bright ring of blood around his smile, smeared across his cheeks, down his neck. From the inkiness that welled up around the creatures’ feet something slithered forward, a dusky cloud, a tangible gibbering shadow with smoky amber eyes and the smell of death. There was no physical trace of humanity in the black form, only the hungry rage of the eyes.
Dear Jesus God.
Tietjen shuddered convulsively, wanting to deny what he saw.
You’re not real!
He clutched the stone at his left and a piece crumbled in his fingers.
This is real and I am real, the city is real … . You things …
He stared at the creatures but they did not vanish in the face of his outrage. And they—he and Fratelone and Ketch and the kid—had one pistol, a couple of knives, and two carts full of drugs and bandages. Defenseless. Tietjen wanted to turn to the others and tell them not to breathe so loud; it seemed he could hear them sweat, hear the echo of his own thoughts ringing clearly through the street.
You’re not real!
He clutched the stone at his left and a piece crumbled in his fingers.
This is real and I am real, the city is real … . You things …
He stared at the creatures but they did not vanish in the face of his outrage. And they—he and Fratelone and Ketch and the kid—had one pistol, a couple of knives, and two carts full of drugs and bandages. Defenseless. Tietjen wanted to turn to the others and tell them not to breathe so loud; it seemed he could hear them sweat, hear the echo of his own thoughts ringing clearly through the street.
He turned away from the street, pushing the others back with him. “Back—quietly,” he whispered, and they moved as one for the shadowy protection of a half-fallen wall.
Fratelone moaned almost soundlessly and sagged against the wall. “I thought I dreamed it, I thought—” The man closed his mouth tightly.
“Tietjen, how long are we going to stay here?” Ketch whispered. “We can’t defend this place—”
“Shut up. The only way out is right past them. We have to wait till they pass. And goddamned keep quiet.”
They pressed together, huddling for warmth in the purple dark, listening. In the street the high laughter continued, the muttering. Now and then a word or two of chillingly normal conversation drifted in to them, spoken in unhuman voices. “Is he bringing her?” one voice asked.
“He’s got her,” another confirmed. “I can feel it.”
Tietjen could not explain the horror in those words, the way they made him shudder. Fratelone sat on a chunk of granite, as still as if he were cut from the stone; the others leaned with Tietjen against the wall, breathing carefully, waiting and listening. With a peculiar obstinacy that Tietjen prayed was not deliberate, the crowd of monsters had stopped in the street almost in front of their hiding place, and were waiting there.
“Is he bringing her?—” someone asked again.
“I hear it.” Another voice.
A distant, thin wailing played on the air, a woman’s voice wavering between terror and hysteria, beyond pain. “I hear it too,” another voice said with satisfaction. The whine grew closer, the murmurs of anticipation and satisfaction rose: he’s bringing her, she’s coming, I hear her.
Tietjen edged past Ketch, motioning the others to stay still. Slowly, so as not to cause the least disturbance in the dust and stones under his feet, he made his way to the gray darkness of the shattered doorway. He was there to watch as they brought the woman in. The monsters lounged in a semicircle fifty feet away, like an audience waiting for the curtain to rise. The darkness still puddled and pulsed at their feet like a living thing—Tietjen believed that it
was
alive. At the end of the street a man emerged from the darkness, carrying a woman over his shoulder like a sack of grain. The man was enormously tall and thin, with lank dark hair that brushed his shoulders, and skin so fair that he had an almost greenish glow in the new moonlight. Among the creatures that had been waiting for him he looked comparatively normal, until you saw his eyes: the sockets were black pits rimmed with red and there was no eyeball. And yet he could see, it was obvious with every motion: he read his crowd, turning his head to acknowledge the presence of one, the hunger of another. That he was the leader was obvious in the way the others yearned toward him, followed his movements, let loose a breath of release at his arrival.
was
alive. At the end of the street a man emerged from the darkness, carrying a woman over his shoulder like a sack of grain. The man was enormously tall and thin, with lank dark hair that brushed his shoulders, and skin so fair that he had an almost greenish glow in the new moonlight. Among the creatures that had been waiting for him he looked comparatively normal, until you saw his eyes: the sockets were black pits rimmed with red and there was no eyeball. And yet he could see, it was obvious with every motion: he read his crowd, turning his head to acknowledge the presence of one, the hunger of another. That he was the leader was obvious in the way the others yearned toward him, followed his movements, let loose a breath of release at his arrival.
As the eyeless man reached the group of monsters he slung the wailing woman from his shoulder and draped her on the hood of a car, the altar of her sacrifice. She was stocky, hair a pale tangle and her skin pasty white with shock. Faced with the horror that ranged around her, she seemed unable to do anything but weep and laugh. She did not struggle, even when one of the creatures drew the hook that passed for his hand slowly, deliciously across her throat. No blood was drawn, but there was a sigh of satisfaction from the monsters. The eyeless man smiled broadly at his followers.
Unable to watch any more, Tietjen returned to the others with infinitely careful steps; it seemed he was hardly breathing. “We can’t go anywhere,” he told them, low. “They’ve got someone out there and—we can’t do anything.” Just be quiet. He thought longingly of the Store, of New York before all this, of his walks undisturbed through the cool air of uptown Manhattan at midnight, and he silently, venomously hated what had happened to the city. In the street the prisoner screamed. There was a low mutter of laughter. Against his will Tietjen listened, and watched the muscles bunch and release in Fratelone’s arms as the man clenched his fists rhythmically. There were sedatives in the laundry cart, Tietjen thought, looking at the other man. The search for them would make too much noise; if they had to run or fight, he did not want to have Fratelone drugged. Fratelone would have to cope. Like all of them. They could not go anywhere, they could do nothing except listen and wait.
Tietjen was so absorbed in the wait, straining to hear the smallest sounds, trying to drown out the larger more horrifying ones, that he missed the moment when the prisoner stopped screaming and the creatures began to drift away. Not until the silence they left behind them became a sound itself did Tietjen break out of his trance. Ketch was stock-still, leaning against the wall with grimy tear streaks down her face, her eyes closed. Fratelone stared into space, still clenching and unclenching his hands. The kid, Ted, was snoring slightly, sound asleep.
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