The Stone War (19 page)

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Authors: Madeleine E. Robins

Tags: #Fiction

BOOK: The Stone War
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“Luisa. You can call me Li. Does it matter?”
Now Tietjen smiled. “I like to know. Second floor?”
“Yeah.” Ketch stood by the stairway, a shadow in the darkness, her head tilted to one side as she watched him.
“Maybe you’d better show me where,” Tietjen said at last, and left the windowsill.
IN
the morning Tietjen ate breakfast with McGrath. She was exhausted, her skin the translucent white of vellum … but Kathy Calvino’s fever was down. McGrath was certain the little girl would live; she sounded like a drunk in love with the world. “You were wonderful!” she slurred, stirring her oatmeal. Barbara leaned toward him and repeated, “You were wonderful.
We
were wonderful!” It was as if the surgery had bound them together in some new way. But Tietjen had woken early, unused to another body in the bed, left Ketch’s room silently and crept upstairs to his own to wash and change, thinking about the monsters. The operation had allowed him to put off thinking about what to do next. Now the operation was over, and he was going to need Barbara’s help. If he closed his eyes he could hear that woman screaming again; he thought sickly that it was the call to battle.
“John?” Barbara was looking at him, had obviously said something that required an answer. “I said I hoped you got enough sleep?” McGrath gestured wryly at herself. “I must look like I slept in a barrel, but we did it. The kid’s going to make it, I’m sure.”
“I’m glad, Barbara.”
“
But
…” she prompted. “But what, John?”
“There are some things I didn’t get around to telling you yesterday. Barbara, we saw something out there when we went to the hospital—”
He was interrupted by a hand on his shoulder and in his ear Ketch’s voice. “Hey, early riser. Can I join you?” Her breath was very warm.
He waited while Ketch settled herself at the table, caught between adolescent embarrassment and an equally adolescent pleasure. She could corroborate what he had to tell McGrath.
Across the table McGrath looked momentarily disconcerted, pursing her lips as she watched Ketch sit down. She smiled politely. “Good morning, Luisa.”
“Ms. McGrath.” Ketch turned back to Tietjen. “I didn’t hear you go.”
“Uh, no.” Tietjen felt his face go hot, and he willed Ketch to understand that this was not the time for morning-after chat. As if
she
read his thoughts, McGrath made a little noise of impatience and began gathering up her plate and silver to leave.
“Barbara, wait, we need to talk. We have to tell you—” He turned back to Ketch. “I’m glad you made it down; I was about to explain to Barbara about the, the people—”
“Oh,” Ketch said dully. “Right.” Her smile dimmed.
“The people?” All the tired ebullience that had characterized McGrath five minutes before had faded. She made no move to leave, but neither did she put her silverware and plate down. “John, later? I need to get some sleep.”
“Barbara, five minutes. Look, I’ll walk you up to your room. Li, you come too, you can tell her—”
McGrath shook her head. “I’m too tired to listen now, John. Give me a couple of hours; maybe then.” She walked away without a backward look.
“Barbara!”
“John, let her go.” Ketch had her hand on his sleeve and urged him back into his seat. “Like she says, she’s tired.”
That was not it, though. Something else was going on. “We need her to understand about what we saw out there. We have to get the Store ready: those things’re going to come down on us and we have to be ready.”
Ketch pushed her fork through the beans on her plate. “They won’t try to take the Store. We’re dug in here, we’re fortified. They’d be crazy to try anything.”
“They
are
crazy.” Tietjen looked at the knife in his hand. “Oh shit, maybe
I’m
crazy.”
Ketch looked at him levelly. “A little, maybe. Tilting-at-windmills crazy. Look, baby: most people here don’t give a shit except that they’ve found a safe place. Unless that’s threatened you’re not going to find a lot of fighters here, John. Everybody’s too tired.”
“You too tired?”
Ketch said slowly. “I heard that woman screaming. But she was one woman, alone. They won’t come here, after us. There’s a lot of people here. And I tell you: when I think of fighting those things I want to dig a hole and crawl in. Maybe take you with me, since you obviously don’t have the sense to run yourself.” She raised a hand to his neck in a light caress to soften the words.
He shrugged under the touch, aroused and discomfited by the casual intimacy. “So you think we should play business as usual unless the—what can we call them? Unless the monsters come after us?”
“When you get a better plan, let me know.” Ketch dropped her hand, made a face at her plate, pushed it away and stood up. “I’m on cleanup again. See you later.”
Tietjen waited until she was gone, then cleared away his plate. Something was going on with McGrath and with Ketch, and it was distracting him from a threat to the Store, and he couldn’t have that. Trying to think through that knot, he left the dining room for the building next door, where Fratelone had started workers clearing and cleaning out living space.
When he cornered Fratelone the man said, “We don’t need to go after no more trouble, Boss.” He waved Tietjen away and refused to hear anything more. The gawky teenager, Ted, looked pleased to be asked to advise, but he said the same thing, only with more words. “Jeez, Mr. Tietjen, like, they aren’t gonna bother us here, we’re, like, established. Nobody here wants to go after them, right?” The boy looked at him as if to see if he’d made the right answer. Tietjen could not tell him.
He filled the day with hard work and went to bed too tired to think. The next day was filled with work, and the day after that. The harder he worked, the less time to remember. Tietjen persuaded himself that Ketch was probably right, the Store was too strong for the nightmare people to attack.
After eighteen hours of sleep, McGrath had returned to work. Back to normal: competent, cheerful, dryly humorous. Much of her time was spent with Kathy Calvino, nursing and comforting; Tietjen did not know how Barbara had explained the loss of her leg to the eight-year-old, but when he went to visit her she was meekly polite and more cheerful than he would have expected. Barbara, standing by the end of the bed, was triumphant.
Sometimes Tietjen thought McGrath watched him when he was with Ketch; he thought she was laughing at his awkwardness around the younger woman. And Ketch was—herself. Since Irene he had seen other women, taken them out and gone to bed with them, but he had never lived with one or worked with one on the day-to-day level of life in the Store. When Tietjen expected Ketch to be possessive, she laughed and walked away, then surprised him by expecting responses he neither understood nor anticipated. And it was weird, living publicly, being watched as the leader. Ketch played the role of his lover comfortably, with a relaxed sense of what she could and could not grant on Tietjen’s behalf. She was not much of a talker, fairly handy with tools, and willing to help find and dispose of bodies in the buildings nearby. She was an active, rather fierce lover, and told jokes well. Tietjen liked her.
Still, without McGrath’s amusement to stiffen his spine, he might have been embarrassed into breaking with Ketch.
He and Fratelone and half a dozen others were in the basement of the building next door, clearing away rubble so they could examine the water heater. Hot and dirty, Tietjen sent Greg Feinberg back to the shop for a jug of water or juice, and called a break. In the sputtering yellow light of the lanterns the people sitting there, wiping sweat from hairlines with a forearm or a sleeve, looked like old sepia-tinted photographs Tietjen had seen of mine workers.
“Mr. Tietjen?”
Greg stood in the door to the boiler room, framed in more of the yellow lantern light from the basement hall. His voice was urgent. “Mr. Tietjen, can you come upstairs?”
Tietjen swung easily under a low hanging pipe and straightened up, wiping his hands on his pants as he went. “What’s up, Greg?”
“Can you
please
come upstairs, sir?” the boy repeated. His voice trembled, and he was pale beneath the freckles and slight tan. Tietjen did not argue with what he saw in the boy’s face. He let Greg lead him up the stairs and through the long marble lobby. In the doorway the sun was an assaultive glare. Tietjen blinked as he approached it, blinked as he looked outside.
Across the street, sitting with his back to the base of a fallen streetlamp, was one of the monsters. He was a little man, bandy-legged, dressed in a red T-shirt and black Bermuda shorts, with a round head with a fringe of dark, greasy-looking hair like an unkempt monk’s tonsure. And no features except for a huge mouth, lined with narrow, needle pointed teeth. The mouth watched them like a Cyclops’ eye for a moment; then, like a wink, the mouth smiled.
Tietjen felt the world tilt. He thought sickly:
We left you alone; you’re not supposed to be real.
“Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” Allan Hochman murmured, behind him.
“What is it?” Greg Feinberg asked. His voice wavered and cracked; Tietjen felt the boy’s stare and the urgency of his attention. “Mr. Tietjen?”
He made his voice very calm, dry, matter-of-fact. “I don’t know. We’ll have to find out.” He ignored the twisting of his gut and took a step forward; someone had to do something.
He
had to do something, God knew what. What could he say to a thing like that?
Hey there, how ya doing?
Another step; I’m getting brave, he thought with detachment. Or stupid. Another step and he was in the street, poised before the doorway with one hand raised. Maybe it wants to be friends. Immediately he remembered the screams of the woman he had heard tortured. Stupid.
“Yes?” he said.
The thing grinned wider. There was no sound except a soft whistle of wind through the street.
Tietjen raised a hand, a sort of halfhearted wave, a signal of good intent.
The blast of sound from behind him was so sudden that Tietjen thought for a moment that he was the one who had been shot. Across the street the thing with no face jerked suddenly, then sat rock still for a moment, braced against the streetlamp base. Then it slumped sideways and Tietjen saw the red on red of blood seeping through the creature’s scarlet T-shirt.
“Jesus.”
Tietjen spun around and found Allan Hochman behind him, staring; others stood behind Allan. Beyond Allan, in the doorway, Bobby Fratelone stood with a rifle under his arm. He was white-faced and his grip on the gun was not casual. “Teach ‘em,” he muttered. But he held the rifle out to Tietjen. Tietjen stared at it mutely for a moment. “That’ll fuckin’ teach ’em,” Fratelone repeated.
“Will it?” Tietjen asked. “Come on, we’ve got to finish what you started.”
He directed two men to drag the monster’s body to the cremation pit. Everyone else he herded back into the building. When Fratelone would have said something more Tietjen shook his head. “Later, Bobby. We need to talk later.”
Fratelone did not come to dinner. Tietjen had sent him back to the Store to get some rest while he and his work crew finished clearing the basement of the building next door. At dinner he sat between Ketch and McGrath, trying to talk with Barbara on the one hand; trying to amuse Ketch on the other; trying, with a show of self-conscious leadership, to set an example of good-humored calm for the others. By the end of the meal he felt like he had been through a battle more unnerving than merely walking out to face the monster that afternoon. Not a single acrimonious word was spoken by Ketch or McGrath, they seemed to go out of their way to be polite to each other, but it was a laden, terrifying politeness. He stood up from the table feeling wrung.
“Look, we need to talk,” he muttered to McGrath.
“All right,” she said coolly. “When?”
“Half an hour? Let me collect Bobby. Can we meet in your room?”
McGrath relented, smiling. “Of course.”
Twenty minutes later Fratelone, still groggy from a nap, was in the hallway outside McGrath’s room. “Gotta throw some water on my face.” He gave Tietjen a nervous sideways glance.
“Make it fast, Bobby. We’ll wait for you.”
While they waited for Fratelone, Tietjen explained it all to Barbara. Not just the incident that afternoon, but the surreal horror show he and the others had witnessed near Mt. Sinai. By the time Fratelone joined them Barbara was as quietly frightened as Tietjen could have wished.
She was for shoring up the Store’s defenses and waiting. “Don’t borrow trouble.”
Fratelone ducked his head and did not look Tietjen in the eye. “They won’t come after us here again,” he insisted. “They want easy kills; ’f we go after them they’ll pick us off. We showed ’em today; they’ll have to leave us alone now.”
Tietjen bit back his first angry response. Bobby was working from terror; even talking about the monsters had him working his hands together, rubbing and clenching, cracking the knuckles. Bobby the tough guy couldn’t face fighting the monsters. For the first time in weeks, Tietjen heard the warning voice that had accompanied him back into the city, wailing, insisting that he make the others understand.
“They
will
come,” he said at last. “You heard them that night: they won’t be happy until they’ve wiped us out or we’ve killed them all.”
“John, how can you be sure?” Barbara asked.

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