“I
know
it,” he insisted. “If I were one of them it’s how I’d feel. They’re a part of what happened to the city, Barbara, the thing that hates the city. I’ve walked around more than you have since the disaster, you’ve worked closer to the Store, you don’t know—”
McGrath drew herself up, cold as death. “Don’t pull that I’ve-been-in-the-streets crap with me, John. I’ve seen what’s come in here; I’ve nursed people who’ve come to us and they’ve talked to me. I know what happened to the city was weird, John, but don’t try to pull experience points on me. I stayed
here
because you asked me to.”
Tietjen looked at her, exasperated. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t have stayed—”
“Just that I can’t know what’s going on out there because I’m not used to crawling around the city on my belly the way—” She broke off and began again, obviously getting her temper under control. “John, I told you what I saw, the day it happened. You think anyone else saw anything,
anything
weirder than I have?” There was something else going on that Tietjen did not understand, something that was making Barbara angrier than she should have been, and that scared him because he needed her and he had to make her understand what had to be done.
“What we heard out there was twisted, those damned things out there are twisted too, and sooner or later they’re going to want to bring the Store down; everything we’re doing is directly opposed to what they want. They
won’t
peacefully coexist. Unless we expect them they’ll win. Barbara—” He held his hand out to her. “I need you to back me on this. First thing is, we have to make sure the Store is safe. But after, we have to go to them before they come to us.”
“I have to think,” she said at last. Her voice was steady again, without the steely tone of control. She was working on making a good decision, Tietjen thought. “Let me sleep on it; I can’t decide all at once.”
Tietjen nodded. “In the morning.”
Fratelone shambled from the room with his head down. “N’a morning,” he muttered, and headed toward his own room.
McGrath and Tietjen watched him go. “John, I don’t like what this is doing to Bobby,” McGrath murmured. “Look at him.”
“I am,” Tietjen said. “I don’t like what this will do to any of us. What those things out there would do would be worse. Sleep on it, Barbara.”
He left her in her doorway and climbed the stairs to his own apartment, feeling manipulative and melodramatic and desperate. He reargued it all under his breath, worrying that he had left something unsaid. When he reached the landing and opened the door to his living room, Ketch was waiting for him.
In the dark later, with Ketch’s breathing a noiseless rise-and-fall against his side, Tietjen lay awake, listening to laughter that seemed to thread its way through the streets to find him.
He sat with Barbara at breakfast again and tried not to push too hard for her answer.
“I still don’t know,” she told him at last. “Everything,
everything
I know says that you reason with your enemies. Last ditch, you defend yourself. You don’t go out and kill preemptively-”
“Dammit, you can’t reason with monsters—”
“Loaded word.” McGrath watched Ketch settle at the table on Tietjen’s other side. He refused to be sidetracked.
“Call them whatever you damned well like. We wipe them out, or else they’re going to wipe us out, and every normal person left in the city.” He was sounding panicky and high-pitched; Ketch was nodding beside him, but he was afraid he would lose Barbara by being too shrill. “I’m not telling this right. Shit.” He paused. “Look. I do remember what you told me the night we met. About the subway tunnel. The kids, and the tunnel squeezing shut, and the feelings you had. I remember that guy at the Met that was collecting people. Those were a
part
of it, Barbara. These things out there are a
part
of it.”
Beside him Ketch murmured, “Tunnel?” Tietjen ignored her, concentrating on Barbara, willing her to believe. He watched the memory play across her face.
“Really like that?” she whispered.
“Like that. Whatever did that made these things.”
“Then they
will
come,” Barbara said.
Tietjen released the breath he had been holding. “They’re organized, they have a leader, the blind one. If they’re bringing people in to torture—they don’t want to live and let live, Barbara.”
“No, I imagine they don’t,” she said dryly. “They’re the ones that hurt Bobby?”
“I’ll back John up,” Ketch said.
McGrath nodded coolly.
“He
won’t want to fight them, John.” “We need him—we don’t have many real fighters; Bobby’s as close to an enforcer as we’ve got.”
Barbara nodded and leaned back from the table to wave at one of the Calvino girls who was passing. “Karen, can you find Mr. Fratelone for me?”
The little girl hesitated for a moment, then pillowed her head on her hands and made a snoring noise. “Sy—ee—pin’,” she managed, and Tietjen remembered that McGrath had said the girls had some sort of speech problem.
“Yes, dear, but I need him a lot. Can you wake him up and tell him that Mr. Tietjen and I need him—” She paused. “Up in my rooms, okay? It’s important, sweetie.”
Karen nodded and left them.
“Closed conference, Ms. McGrath? Maybe someone else has an idea could be useful.” Ketch looked at Tietjen from the corner of her long eyes.
McGrath smiled politely. “We’re not shutting anyone out, Luisa. Just chatting about how to … present this to the Store. Do you have any thoughts?”
Ketch made a face.
“Please.
John, I’m going upstairs.”
Tietjen was too grateful at having won his point with Barbara to worry about Ketch just now. “Li, we’ll talk later, okay?”
“Okay, baby.” Ketch ran a negligently affectionate finger along his collar, gathered up her plate and fork, and left them. McGrath watched her go.
Bobby was groggy and resentful. “Stay where we are, don’t go looking for no trouble,” he repeated stubbornly. It took all McGrath’s calm persuasion and Tietjen’s restrained passion to make him agree to take the fight to the monsters, and even then Tietjen believed his agreement came more from Fratelone’s loyalty to them than belief that the monsters could be beaten. The three of them separated after an hour and went to spread the word of a meeting that evening.
Looking across the lobby that night Tietjen was startled at how many people the Store had recruited—he hadn’t seen them all together at one time in weeks. They sat crammed one-too-many onto the couches, perched on the coffee table and useless radiators, sat cross-legged on the black and white marble floor, leaned against the walls or against each other. Fifty, sixty people, kids, adults, talking low in the torch and lantern light, already friendships and families forming within the community.
When he cleared his throat they—all of them—turned immediately to listen. Tietjen felt a flash of fear—
don’t look at me that way!
—that came and went too fast for him to think about. He cleared his throat again and cast about for the right words to say. So much of what he did seemed to be finding the right words.
“Everyone’s probably heard about the—uhh—visitor that Bobby Fratelone killed yesterday. Some of you may have seen these things around town before you got here—” A ripple of agreement in the crowd, as if he had struck a chord many would as soon have forgotten. “Bobby and Ketch and Ted and I ran into some of them last week when we went out for medical supplies. Until yesterday we hoped they’d leave us alone; I guess we could still hope for that, but I don’t believe it.” He paused and looked from face to face. “We know they’ve found us. I think the—thing—out front yesterday was sent in just to make us nervous, let us know they’ve found us. War-of-nerves stuff.”
He could feel the weight of absolute attention and picked his way between over- and understatement. “Look, people. Those things are monsters. I mean physically, sure, they look like Halloween walking. But we heard them torturing a woman, the night we were up at Mt. Sinai; we heard them talking. They hate us, they don’t want to be reasoned with. So first we have to make sure this place is damned well fortified. Then we’re going to have to fight. We have to win the damned war once, or be prepared to fight and keep on fighting.”
A hand went up. A youngish woman with pale brown hair and a round face stood up. Tietjen did not know her name. “What about when help comes? I mean, they won’t matter then, I mean, won’t the Guard or somebody take care of them? I don’t know how to fight anything, that’s what I pay taxes for, for the Guard and the Army and that. When
they
get here—” She looked around her for agreement. Some people nodded.
Behind Tietjen, McGrath spoke gently. “Gail, it’s been almost two months since the disaster. The only person I know of who’s come
in
to New York since that time is John, here, and he came in two days after. I don’t know what’s keeping the outside world from pouring in and starting the biggest damned relief program in the history of the modern world—all I know is that we’ve been on our own for two months, and we’d better plan on being on our own indefinitely. This isn’t an adventure; it’s
life.
Ask Kathy Calvino. That’s why we’re planting the garden and working on this place—we don’t know when—if—we’re going to be helped. If these monsters are as bad as John says, we have to count on dealing with them ourselves. I’m not a fighter either,” she added gently.
“Yeah, well.” A man stood up, someone from the cellar work crew. “How do we know these things are so dangerous? I mean, yeah, they’re frightening-looking, but the only word we have is Tietjen’s.” He looked at Tietjen apologetically. “If I’m going to fight, I need to know that I
got
to fight. I saw that thing out there yesterday, but it didn’t look dangerous to me. Just ugly.”
There was a murmur of amusement, agreement.
“Don’t take my word for it,” Tietjen began. “Ketch, Bobby, the Calvino girls, some of the rest of you must have—”
Fratelone cut him off. “He’s right. The Boss is.” His voice was hoarse. “They had me for a while. Them things. It ain’t just they want what we got, even that they want us dead. They
like
killing. They like the pain. They were going to do me real slow, then the kids. Look.” Fratelone ignored Tietjen’s cry of “Bobby,
don’t.”
He turned his back to the crowd and, startlingly, loosened his belt and dropped his trousers. Standing in front of the man, Tietjen could not see what made the crowd behind him gasp. “I’m sorry,” Fratelone said punctiliously to the cluster of older women who sat on one of the couches. “But you got to see it, and understand what those things are. I don’t want to go near them, but the Boss is right. They want to go after us.”
He turned around, pulling his trousers up as he went; Tietjen caught a glimpse of sickeningly new flesh on the back of Fratelone’s legs, pink and shiny as if it had taken the place of skin flayed away. He bit back his own nausea and stepped forward. He needed them to fight, but he didn’t want panic. “I guess other people have stories they could tell—” He raised one hand to forestall them. “Anybody has any doubts, they can talk to Bobby later, or me, or Ketch … but for now, we have to decide what to do.”
A voice from the back of the room, quaveringly: “Kill them.”
Voices rang out in agreement.
Tietjen shook his head. Looking out at the faces turned up to his he thought distantly that it was easy, dealing with a crowd, if you had made up your mind in advance what must be done. If you didn’t worry about what was fair. It was a dangerous, unsettling piece of knowledge.
“Before anything else, we have to make sure the Store is defended. We have to make sure this place is tight as a drum, that we have food and medicine and water stored up just in case.” There was murmuring as the meaning came through. “People who don’t know how to handle a gun but think they want to help will have to learn.”
McGrath added her voice to his. “We’re going to have to stop building for a while, until this is settled. The gardens, and repairs in this building, and regular chores—we can’t lose what we’ve started to gain. But no new projects until we know we’re safe.”
She was right, but Tietjen felt a fresh wave of fury; they should be building, not playing guerrilla freeze tag with a bunch of freaks.
“Okay. Barbara’s the organized one. She’s making lists of people who are willing to go on foraging raids—for food, for medicine, bottled water, hardware and batteries and anything else anyone can think of that we’d need in case of siege. Bobby has the list of people who want to learn how to handle a gun; anyone who knows how, or knows any other fighting skills well enough to teach, see me after the meeting. We’ll start taking names in a minute.”
There was a rustle of motion and whisper.
“Listen up, just a few more minutes. No one, and I mean absolutely no one, is to go out alone anymore. I don’t care where you’re going or how well you know the route, or whether you think this whole thing is a crock, or what your excuse is. Just don’t do it. Teams: two, three at a time, better still four or five. Someone with a gun should be part of each team.”