Read Online The Stone War by Madeleine E. Robins - Free Book Online

southwest by the sun, watching out for dangers one-eyed, preoccupied with thoughts. If Reen could see this: the world she had believed in, where everyone was a killer. What if Corliss was right and they were all dead? Irene would never have had the skills to save them or herself, and Tietjen couldn’t imagine her trusting someone to help her. What if they’re all dead, he thought again. And kept on walking doggedly along the narrow tree-lined road.
    He was brought out of reverie by sound. It might have been the ocean, but the ocean was twenty-odd miles away. He listened, trying to make sense of the sound, until he realized that the deep, rumbling rhythm was made up of voices. The voices were angry, maddened, a sound of tidal wave. With little idea how far away the crowd was, Tietjen darted off the road and into a culvert, rolled down to a huge drainage pipe and crawled in, waiting and listening.
    Like a wave, the sound rolled ahead over the road. It took forever—perhaps a quarter of an hour—before the first walkers from that surge of voices passed overhead. These were different from the refugees he had seen in Connecticut the day before: they were not in shock. The voices he heard, and the steps and the threats, belonged to the jungle: furious and vicious. Twice he heard fights break out, settled by blows that sent one dark form tumbling from the side of the road into the culvert. Listening, Tietjen understood the cars burning, the shots fired from shuttered houses. He pulled himself tighter into the drainpipe and tried to breathe as softly as possible.
    The crowd passed and passed and thinned and filled again. He was cold and damp and cramped in the pipe, watching the shadows change and lengthen. Tietjen realized hollowly that he might not reach Manhattan tonight. Might not reach it at all. The feet fell and the voices rumbled overhead. Then the dark pile of clothes that had been tossed heavily over the side of the road began to move and Tietjen drew himself into an even tighter ball, watching the form resolve into a boy, a street kid in dusky green leathers, dark skin powdered with gray dirt.
    “Ey. Ma’. Help me.”
    Tietjen squeezed farther into the pipe, hoping desperately that the kid had not realized that he was there, that the cry for help was to anyone. God, maybe.
    “Ey, I know you dere,” the voice wheezed. “You wan’ I call ’em down‘ere? Pull me in dere wit’ you, ma’.”
    Tietjen weighed the risks and began to edge out to the boy. Getting him back toward the pipe was difficult, a scuttling, dragging movement. They accomplished the ten yards in silence, afraid that the voices would stop, that the crowd would hear them and descend and kill them both. Every inch was a victory; the boy had been slashed in the fight and was bruised and bloodied, one arm broken in his fall. Finally they were crammed, breathing each other’s breath, into the drainpipe.
    “Thans, ma’.” The kid was shuddering with cold and shock. Tietjen tried to wriggle out of his topcoat and could not; the space was too small. In the end he managed to wrap the tail of the coat across the boy’s lap, hoping that would help a little. They were quiet a long time, listening to the ebb and flow of the mob overhead.
    The boy mumbled something. “What?” Tietjen asked.
    “End of th’ worl’, ma’. Fuckin’ end of the worl’.”
    “But what happened?” Tietjen felt a spasm of excitement: the kid must know something. “What happened?”
    “Buildin’s fallin’; fires; rats in the street like dogs and rain fallin’ like shit. Monsters, ma’. ’M tellin’ you, ’s end of the worl’.” The boy’s face was shiny with cold sweat. “Din you see it? Or you come out early wit’ Uptowns?”
    “I didn’t—I’m trying to get back—I was—” The words stuck in his mouth. “I was out of town.”
    The boy coughed, laughing, trying to keep the consumptive rattle quiet. “Nob‘dy goin’ in, baby.” The word ended in