The Stone War (21 page)

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Authors: Madeleine E. Robins

Tags: #Fiction

BOOK: The Stone War
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They were all watching him, deadly serious.
“Okay,” he said. “Anyone who wants to sign up for foraging, see Barbara; anyone who wants to learn to shoot, talk to Bobby. Anyone with skills or ideas you think may be useful, see me. The floor is open, ladies and gentlemen.” And, lest he seem to be compelling them too openly, Tietjen looked down, studying the scrawl on his notepad.
Embarrassed silence, the scrape of shoes on the marble floor. Tietjen looked up and saw that Greg Feinberg was standing before Fratelone, muttering intensely. Allan Hochman was behind him. Slowly, the lines began to fill, in front of Barbara, in front of Fratelone.
Ketch, two behind Allan Hochman in Fratelone’s line, called out to him, “Hey, John, street fighting and a little cutting count for anything?”
Tietjen smiled; the atmosphere lightened slightly. “Anything counts. You want to teach?”
She smiled grimly. “Just watch me. Anyone wants to learn, it’s Bring Your Own Knife. And be serious. But I’ll teach.”
SOMETHING
was trying to break inside.
The sunlight on the floor was the syrupy gold of afternoon when Jit was wakened from sleep by a touch that lanced through him like a hot needle. Reacting from the well of dreams, he struck at the thing that threatened him.
Jesus, what a wind. Where’d that come from?
The sharp otherness of the outsider’s thoughts was choppy, fragmented. Reaching for it, Jit tasted curiosity and fear, a hint of bravado, and the bloody taste of horror. Through the outsider’s eyes Jit watched fingers quickly flipping toggles and levers, correcting for the killing breeze. Saw the drawn concentration of the pilot before the thinker turned away to watch the city below.
The strangers flew above the city, far above it, looking down on a wide ruined plain of rubble blackened by fire. Everything was dead.
The Bronx,
the watcher’s thought echoed in Jit’s head. The thinker looked bleakly across the Harlem River with a sick expectation of worse to come. Jit was pleased by the start of pleasure the man gave when he saw the green richness of Central Park.
The pilot’s mind was concerned with keeping the whirling, chopping, fiercely loud thing in which they were flying upright and on course.
Don’t look down,
Jit heard him thinking.
You don’t want to know.
This one had a sorrow eating at him, someone he loved had been in the city: Jit remembered a shadow face, a cloud of sweet-scented red hair, felt a remembered smoothness of skin.
You don’t want to know,
the pilot thought again, trying to shake loose from the memory, watching green-lit displays as they changed.
“Tommy, let’s swing down south of the island,” the other man said.
Jit felt the tight flexing of muscles in the pilot’s nod. The man kept his eyes on the lighted display or on the close-by blue of the sky; he did not look down.
The other man was pressed against the cool plastic of the door, his excitement rising as he watched. He knew what the island should look like, no longer looked like; as the man peered down at the drowned southern tip of Manhattan Jit felt his horror—an impersonal marveling thing—and pleasure.
Wait till we get back and tell them,
the man thought.
Man, what’ll I be able to sell the photos for! This is Pulitzer stuff.
The thought of reward warmed the man, diffused the awe and horror that was still with him.
Jesus, will you look at that?
he thought, as the tide splashed up and down the length of two immensely tall buildings that now lay side by side in the bay, steel and glass estuaries.
When the troops come in,
the man thought.
Jesus, won’t they have a job?
Jit shared the man’s imagining: men, crowds of them, in uniforms like and unlike those of the police and blockcops the boy recognized, swarming into the city, disturbing the quiet, taking it away from him. His no was a peal of panicked denial that rang in his own head and clamored like thunder across the sky above the city.
The sweeping rage of Jit’s anger fragmented the thoughts of the men in the helicopter; the pilot could barely see the changing displays before him, his partner shook his head, trying to see through a glare of pain. “What the fuck? Tommy, are we in trouble? What’s happening?” the watcher yelled, rubbing his eyes.
Jit tasted their sudden hot fear with pleasure:
I’ll stop you.
He reached into the heart of the flying thing and froze it still in the air. Then he unwrapped himself from his tight huddle and clambered up the ladder to the surface of the Park. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to daylight; then he scanned the sky until he found it, a dark blot hovering in the southern sky.
Inside the machine the pilot and passenger were frozen too, unable to move, hanging impossibly at an impossible angle, a thousand feet above the city. Jit touched them again and found the pilot looking down, staring into the splintered ruins of Midtown, dazzling in sunlight; again, the memory of a smile and scent, sure knowledge that his beloved was dead, somewhere in the ruins. The pilot wept and his tears dropped down from his unmoving face.
The passenger did not weep; he was frantic, trying to make something logical out of his captivity.
I’m dreaming,
he thought.
Lack of air, something, this can’t happen, something
…
Me, Jit thought. Me. But the voices did not know that.
Jit watched the dark blot as he unfroze it and pulled it down toward the ragged gray surface of the river. He’d done this before; he knew what to do, not to listen to the cries that reached out to him in disbelieving cacophony. It took a long moment for the falling shape to be lost behind the ruined skyline to the southwest; another minute and the voices rose to screaming halt. Orange light flared behind the trees and died and Jit nodded.
He was not sorry. He had defended the city before. “No men. No so’jers,” he said aloud. No intrusive faces, no shrill, reedy questions: whose little boy are you? where’s your mommy, son? where do you live? None of that. He was not sorry.
Still, he walked through the afternoon, waiting for the disquieting churning of excitement to die down in him. He amused himself by listening to the mindless thoughts of the squirrels, making a score of them follow after him with plumed tails raised high, bobbing in precise rhythm. His followers, his soldiers. That made him think of Gable. The thought was bleak and awful, but insistent. At last, emboldened by his triumph over the invaders, Jit sat down beneath one of the trees he had brought to flowering life, and reached out with his mind.
He searched gingerly, as one of the squirrels would have tasted around the edge of something foreign; he waited for the foul taste of Gable’s thoughts to mingle with his own, for the dulled hunger of Carol Ann or Gable’s other followers. Nothing in the first seeking. He reached farther, the reaching a thin net barely scented with his own thoughts, nothing that would alert Gable or Gable’s people. Dim pictures, thoughts, and sensations skittered through the net like mice, commonplace and restless. Jit was relieved and hopeful at the easy silence, but he could not leave it alone, kept searching, invading dreams, sampling. Then he touched a dream filled with blood hunger, and another that was nothing more than a smashing of things, over and over and over again, a whirling dance of smashing.
He had not imagined Gable.
Hastily Jit retreated lest they sense him. For a long time he simply sat. He thought briefly of reaching out for the Man, but Jit was afraid of what he might find in the seeking. It was safer to sit huddled into himself, hugging bony knees to chest, his cheek cradled on one wrist. So he sat and watched the sun set, and when full darkness had fallen and the Park was filled with the viscous shadow Jit knew best, he made his way back to the eastern edge of the park, near the place where the Man lived.
The Man and the people around him had been taken up with a new game lately, something with a silvery taste of urgency and danger. Jit had half-listened, enjoying the pulse of excitement that ran through everyone’s thoughts: the Man himself, the women and men and children who surrounded him. None of it made much sense to him, the work of carrying and hammering and dust, the acrid smell of sweat that hung in the air, the tastes of pulpy stew and rice and water that was never quite fresh. And fear, all the time, and resolve and a warm core of camaraderie which left Jit hungry.
He stood on the stone wall that faced Fifth Avenue, his long white fingers laced through the wire mesh that rose above the stone, and peered at the flickering lights of the Man’s settlement. Jit wore a black sweater and old black leathers: pants and jacket pulled in, hacked off, made to fit or grown into. In the darkness his hands and face floated, caught by the moonlight.
After a time Jit wanted more than light from the settlement. He reached out for the old woman—she was easy to find, a rich, warm pool of thought. She was stroking someone’s hair, a girl, smoothing the cool, dark length of it and listening to her. Jit felt a pang as he felt the weight of the girl’s slight body against the woman’s arm; he did not bother to make sense of the child’s words. The old woman was making nice with some baby-girl. So what? But he knew from the child’s mind that the gentle touch of those cool, roughened hands was very good. Gradually the girl slept, and the old woman drowsed too, her own soothing magic too powerful to resist.
She drifted, somewhere between sleep and waking, warm with recall and faint melancholy. Jit slid down the mesh to perch more comfortably on the stone fence, curious. What did the old woman see? It was herself, younger; the white hair was red-brown and longer, her face more angular, the touch of impatience about her full lips softened by sleep. The younger self had her head pillowed on someone’s shoulder, a man’s shoulder. Jit could not see the dream-man’s face, but the old woman knew him.
Gordon.
The name was a loving sound.
Gordon.
Jit savored the shades of affection and regret and puzzlement and gratitude.
To lie that way, her head awkwardly on the man’s shoulder, while her right arm went to sleep under her and her shoulder knotted with a tension she would carry throughout the next day. It was heaven. The memory was from long ago, but the feelings of it were real and immediate. The old woman’s breathy thoughts were half laugh, half weeping. Briefly a smile, a man’s grin, took the place of words, a smile of hush-and-never-mind and easy love.
Gordon
. A slow swelling heat rose in the old woman’s belly. She stirred in her dozing the way a cat stirs to catch rays of midday sun. Jit felt his own belly rumble and recognized the feeling as hunger he had encountered before, a thousandfold in a night, and never understood. He rested in the old woman’s thoughts as they tossed and darted from a lock of dark hair to the shifting planes of a shoulder, fingers touching, the press of flesh. She lay still with the girl child half-cradled in her arms, remembering. The memory of pleasure made her smile. Always, the image came back to the first one: her younger head pillowed on that shoulder.
At last,
Gordon, my dear.
The image shifted, tracing the pulse under her cheek, the veins in the neck. Her pulse quickened again, a quickening of nervousness or fear as the focus of the image followed from shoulder to throat to chin, until his whole face was revealed. The warmth in her abruptly became a fire of dismay and desire and confusion. It was the Man’s face.
John,
the old woman thought.
Oh, God.
She wakened and opened her eyes.
Barbara, you old fool,
she thought angrily.
Jit, still listening to her thoughts, trembled. He was leaning into the mesh fence, his cheek pressed to the wire, shivering in night air, which had not seemed cold before. The old woman’s hunger still churned in his stomach. The boy did not understand it, or the shame and confusion that went with it. Something to do with the Man, something to do with the other man, the Gordon.
The old woman shifted the child’s weight in her arms and tried to order her thoughts.
I won’t let him see me watching him like some imbecile kid. John
—the name was an ache. The image that Jit shared with her, of a dark woman’s fingers lightly brushing the Man’s jaw, hurt. Jit tasted guilt, and desire and self-anger. The thought of the Man’s face was a warm tangle of desire and love and amusement and, again, anger at herself.
Then, as he listened, the old woman forced a moment of calm, as if she had closed her eyes on a light too bright to stand and stood now in darkness.
For God’s sake, Barbara, stop the agonizing,
she thought. She laughed almost silently.
He doesn’t see any farther than his nose about people. Poor Luisa Ketch probably had to jump him to get his attention. John, John—no
ache now.
Jit slid down to sit at the foot of the wall, thinking. The cool silkiness of the little girl’s hair under the woman’s hand still played against his palm. The old woman wanted the Man. For what? And, he wondered, did the Man want her? He left her, still stroking the child’s hair, shaking her head at her own foolishness, letting the strong feelings of her dream drift away; he reached for the Man instead.
Jit found him in the dark, wrestling with the dark woman, tasting her sweat, the pressure of her skin against his, heat flowering between them. Even with his mind crowded with sensation, with immediate intention to touch, to feel, there were pockets of thought that claimed the Man’s attention: worry about the soundness of the south wall and how the marksmanship class was doing and how long they would have until the monsters came back. Jit ignored those thoughts; the pleasure, the foreign knowledge of what his body was doing, was overwhelming. He wrestled as the Man did, felt the woman’s touch on his back and her breath in his ear. When the Man’s back arched, Jit’s did too, and he cried out, his eyes closed. Panting, Jit fell off the wall.
He lay at the bottom of the wall, feeling heavy and tired. The ache in his belly was gone and his butt was sore where he had landed. After a moment Jit reached for the Man again.
“God, John,” the dark woman was saying. Her voice was slow and tasted pleased.
The Man lay still, as winded as Jit. A trace of memory, of a dark street freshened with breeze, fluttered in his mind for a moment, and Jit heard him wonder again about the south wall. He reached for a blanket and pulled it up to cover them. The Man’s pleasure was as heavy and languorous as Jit’s or the dark woman’s, but already he was pulling away from it, thinking of streets again, and Gable’s people, and work. “You cold?” he asked the woman.

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