Then Tom was at the podium, telling reporters that in his opinion Susan ought to be walled up forever and fed through a slot in the door. Period.
She got up and led her lover into a forest. Her lover's hands were tied behind her back. Susan kept pushing her until she found a suitable tree and then slung the rope she carried over the tree and the hangman's noose over the woman's head and began to hoist her up. Her lover's feet kicked as though she were trying to run and then began to twitch. She felt a sudden sadness.
She woke up thinking of Andy.
Her thinking was unstructured, without logic, but obsessive. Andy, Andy and Andy again, his image, his name — a strange claustrophobic sense of him coming from deep inside her like a wound opening and closing, pulsing over her.
She got up and went to his room and stood silent at his bedside.
She knelt beside the bed and smelled the musty odor of sleep. She leaned forward, heart racing, something urgent and irresistible happening inside her — and only then, in the grip of it, knew why she'd come.
Her hands moved lightly, delicately over the small thin chest and arms and shoulders, his small tight musculature beneath the cotton pajamas.
He stirred but did not waken.
A cauldron shuddered within her. Inside it something rising.
Her fingers found his wrists and gripped them. His eyes flashed open. Hatred, hunger and something twisted but which was also love drew lines of fire through her veins. The ache inside was immense and horrible and bore his name.
A wash of tears quivered in her eyes.
His breath upon her face was a fluttering of wings.
She moved closer. Her pale lips parted.
Armaments
"Wait a minute," said Phil. "You're talking about the Dorset? Big fucking high-rise over at 68th and Broadway?"
"That's right."
"You're gonna love this. I know a guy's got guns over there.”
“What?"
"Sure. Real good friend of mine. Name's Glen Sharkey. You know him?"
"It's a big building."
"Glen's a retired cop, off the force maybe two years now. He's got a Colt .45 and a .22 something-or-other — guns aren't my specialty. But I've seen 'em both. Keeps 'em in his bedroom closet. Even if he's not there, I know where to find ‘em." The big man laughed and stepped behind the bar. "Hell, I've got his keys here! Glen drinks a little. I keep a set in case he gets forgetful."
He punched open the cash register and took a key out of the drawer and used it on a small metal box next to the register. There must have been a dozen sets of labeled keys in there. Evidently the cop was not Phil's only customer who drank a little.
He found the ones he wanted.
"Here we go," he said. "We're set."
"You mean you want to come along?"
"I guess we're all coming along, right? Just listen to that shit!" The pounding was incessant now. Nails were coming loose all the time and had to be hammered back again.
Their armor was looking decidedly frail.
"Besides I know that place," said Phil. "It's built like a concrete bunker."
"He's right about that," said Tom. "Built it that way for fire. The only way into an apartment unless you can scale the side of a building is through the front door, reinforced steel and aluminum plated. Again because of fire. That way you don't need sprinklers."
"That leaves the problem of getting out of here," said Neil.
"Okay, let's see what we got," said Phil. "Knives in the kitchen. Plenty of bottles. Got three fire extinguishers, one here behind the bar and one in the kitchen and one in the basement. And I think I can get us out through that door now without a hitch."
"How?" said Bailey.
"I got the idea looking at the first aid kit, the rolls of gauze there. Any of you guys do any cooking? Ever make anything flambe?" No one answered.
"Okay. No cooks. But suppose we took some of these hundred-proof bottles of cognac, some one-ten green chartreuse, some one-oh-one Wild Turkey and one-fifty rum and Polish vodka. Suppose we put 'em in a pot filled with water and heated 'em, then stuffed their mouths with gauze. Wouldn't we have some kind of low-grade Molotov cocktails we could brew up here?"
"Damn!" said Bailey.
"Throw the bottles at their feet," said Neil, "and point the extinguishers in their faces. They'd never know what hit 'ern. We could do it."
"We're gonna do it," said Phil. "Let's go!"
Procedures
For Lederer it was a first. He'd never given chase to a squad car before. He'd never expected to. It was a new experience.
But tonight was a night of a lot of firsts.
He'd never shot a kid for instance. But the little girls were as bad as their mamas, he'd found that out the hard way stepping out into a pack of them and got a screwdriver stuck in his leg for his trouble. The wound was just a flesh wound but when she'd raised it again going for his chest and the little girl beside her started swiping at him with the broken bottle, he'd shot them both and got the hell back in the car before the rest of them could get into the act.
And now they were chasing a squad car.
It was nuts.
The car swung west on 46th, fishtailing like a sonovabitch. Horgan pulled them neatly around and gained on her a bit. Lederer sat with his .38 in his lap watching her long dark hair tossing in the wind through the open window, waiting for a halfway decent shot at her. He didn't have to worry about pedestrians because the streets were mostly deserted by now except for stragglers here and there who had not found shelter yet. Or women. And the women were all lethal anyway. So he wouldn't have minded one bit if he could have piled her into one of these storefronts here with a bullet in her damn skull.
They knew now that it was not going to go away, that the women infected were going to stay infected and that was that, that this was all some crazy Pentagon Vietnam old-boy gameplan to make war on men by making war on their women but which they'd never dared to use because they knew what the press would do with it, an airborne chemical poison, a psychosexual hormone cocktail for god's sake designed to drive them batshit and terminally homicidal, a final batch of which somebody had overlooked for years and decided to move through the city as fast as possible before the talking heads got wind of it, on its way to its allotted final resting place in the Atlantic, but it had not made it to the Atlantic, it had stopped right here.
There was nothing to do but ride it out and let it take its filthy course and come in with the troops as soon as possible. He understood that was being arranged.
Wonderful.
Meanwhile they were engaged in a holding action. The holding action had cost them cop after cop tonight. It was not going to cost them Lederer. He had Millie to think of for one thing. He was glad she was up there out of it.
Not like this one.
~ * ~
Mary Silver saw a tall black man in her headlights and thought, Hitler. Hefner. Rape.
She slowed the squad car a little so she could go after him on the sidewalk. Her headlights and fender were already splashed with blood. Mary smelled more on the way.
The man saw her coming much too late and went over the grille like an acrobat, like a tumbler, leg bones turned to powder at mid-thigh. She felt the impact throughout her body and the sensation pleased her enormously. First the whack against the bumper, the slide across the hood, then the head-on crash through the windshield on the passenger side. The man stayed there too, his head halfway through the broken safety-glass, dripping blood on the dirty carpet.
She'd found the car at Lincoln Center. Its once uniformed passengers were lying in a steaming heap across the stone staircase leading to the fountain. They'd been doused with gasoline but that had already burned away and two large dogs were at the bodies. Mary avoided the dogs carefully and slipped inside the car. She dropped her knife out the window. She wouldn't be needing it now. The car was better.
She drove around the park and managed to hit three men in a group, laug
hing as they flew like bowling pins in front of her. She missed a fourth when he ran up on the grass into the trees. At Central Park South she saw a short fat man in front of the Plaza. His tuxedo had already been torn somehow and he was scared and running, probably running home, but when he saw the police car he stopped and Mary ran him over. She could still picture him alive and howling, pasted like a bug on the sidewalk, as she drove away.
She proceeded down Fifth Avenue, and that was where the second squad car started following her.
She didn't mind. Company was okay too.
~ * ~
Lederer saw her hit the black man but there was nothing they could do to stop it. By the time she picked up speed again they were almost abreast of her. He got off a shot at her. Horgan kept on her good and tight. She skirted a cab, grazed a hydrant. At Broadway she turned south so that now there was room for them to pull up next to her on the right. He squeezed off two rounds and saw one of them clip the inside driver side door. Almost, but no cigar.
Her car was swinging wildly now, as though the woman were losing control, but she kept it on the street at least, and Horgan was keeping up with her. The black guy on her hood stayed with her too, his right arm swinging up and down like Gregory Peck's on the back of the whale at the end of Moby Dick. It was dead weight keeping him up there — that and his head lodged in the fucking windshield.
At 42nd she turned west again, tires screeching. Come on, he thought, make a mistake. We almost got you. But then he and the woman must have seen the guy in front of the Lyric at exactly the same time because he knew she was going to swerve over in their direction and go after him way before it happened and he yelled look out! as the front fender glided toward them.
Horgan was good. But nobody was that good. She slid them off the road and over the curb at maybe fifty miles an hour into the plate glass window of the porn shop next to the Lyric and when he opened his eyes again he saw S/M magazines and lesbo and kiddie porn lying all over the floor and the hood of the car was plowed through a glass case full of dildos and fuck movies and the handcuffs in his lap were not his own, but had slipped off a rack that lay broken and leaning against the passenger side door.
~ * ~
There were two trophies on her prowl car now. This newest could not have been more than eighteen. He'd jumped the wrong way — exactly the way Mary was turning. When she hit him she was doing sixty and his body lay wedged between the hood and the fender like a foot-long hot dog on a steaming bun.
That made Mary cackle.
She kept on driving.
Breakout
"I want to see all you guys back in here Friday night," said Phil. "You hear me? Drinks are on the house."
Fourteen men would be a lot of drinks but Tom had a bad feeling that not all of them would be taking him up on that.
The eight-inch stainless steel carving knife felt oddly insubstantial in his hands.
He tucked it into his belt.
"We ready?"
Nobody's ready, thought Tom. We're going anyway.
Phil set one of the fire extinguishers behind him on the bar. He took the hammer out of his belt where he'd put it next to the knife and went to work with the claw on the crossbeams over the door.
They could hear them massing out there — how many? — moving off the windows to the door, attracted to the sound of breaking wood, concentrating on that now. Pounding, scratching.
He pulled off the last of the beams and used the hammer to loosen the pins on the hinges. Tom went to the locks, setting his extinguisher off to one side behind him.
The door would fall inward. They couldn't help that but they could see to it that it fell as straight and clean as possible into the room.
They had cleared a twelve-foot area in front of the door, pushed back the juke and the barstools, so that now all that remained there were the two big steaming pots which had just come out of the kitchen. The pots were filled with open bottles stuffed with gauze and rags. The men stood around them armed with knives and cleavers and broken table legs, whatever they could find, each of them carrying a dishrag against the heat from the bottles, and lighters or matches.
The younger man, Neil, stood directly in front of the door a few feet back with the third extinguisher ready. Bailey stood right behind him.
It felt like nobody was breathing.
Phil nodded.
He pulled the bottom pin on the hinges while Tom threw the slip bolt and then the top pin as Tom threw the second lock and the door fell forward just inches from where Neil stood rigid as a stone with the extinguisher. Phil was already standing over the first of two women who had pitched through the doorway. The big man's hammer had come down hard across her head. At the same time Neil stepped forward over the fallen door, Bailey right behind him. He heard the sudden rush of air from Neil's extinguisher clearing the women off the stairwell followed by the sound of breaking glass as Bailey pitched the first bottle into the shadowy forms out on the sidewalk. By then Tom was already bent over the second woman, the heavy blade falling like a hatchet on her neck. Blood spurted across his thighs.
He stood up as Neil pressed forward, a cloud of white powder spreading out ahead of him. The women in the stairwell fell away, tumbling over one another. More bottles exploded. Then Phil was beside him with his own extinguisher and Tom was moving too, hauling the third up off the floor and pointing it, pulling the pin and pressing down the handle, and they were up the stairs in an instant, Bailey and the others right behind, moving up to the sidewalk and the street.
My god! There were dozens of them!
They had broken the streetlight and in the grey semi-darkness they swarmed around the tight wedge the three of them made and Tom knew the extinguishers wouldn't hold them long. Most of the men were outside, bottles popping on the sidewalk like firecrackers. He saw ghostly blue-yellow flames crawl the curbside, saw one woman fall screaming, her light summer dress on fire, saw a hydrant glowing and flickering in front of him as though coated with St. Elmo's fire.
A fat dark girl in jeans and sweatshirt was moving toward him with what looked like a torn-up parking meter raised over her head and he sprayed her but it did no good, she just squinted and kept on coming. He turned the tank in his hands and pushed it into her face, saw the nose and mouth seem to burst and the girl fall away. He turned and two more were coming at him. He sprayed them with the powder and they screamed and ran, hands clawing at their eyes.
Men were breaking for the street, trying to find paths through the crowd of women as they stepped away to avoid the flickering flames. Bailey was almost free, nearly to the edge of a shifting knot of women. Tom saw the table leg in his hands rise and fall twice and thought, run, yes you've got the chance now but Bailey didn't run. He turned and launched himself at them from behind, working his way back to Tom, busting heads. You're crazy, he thought.
He tried to keep moving steadily forward and out in Bailey's direction. Phil and Neil were both to the right of him and he knew there were other men who were still trapped behind him. Phil's tank was suddenly empty. He saw him swing it like a sledgehammer into the body of a teenage girl, cracking her ribs so that she coughed up blood as she fell.
An old woman was running toward him with a raised pewter candlestick in her hand. He pointed the spray into her open mouth and eyes.
Behind her a man lurched through the crowd, the blade of a knife protruding from his chest from behind the shoulder, his black t-shirt glistening, then disappearing into the flailing hands and bodies of four young women. He saw another man take a blow across the genitals from a cop's nightstick. A third man stabbed in the cheek.
Beside him Neil screamed. Tom whirled.
The woman held a claw hammer just like Phil's and Neil was on his knees. There was blood and two deep gouges the claw had made across his cheek and forehead. A second woman reached into his hair and pulled back his head. She was trying to scalp him.
With a paring knife.
He let loose a jet of powder
but it was too little too late and the hammer came whipping at Neil sidearm. It fell across his throat and Tom heard it smash his larynx.
His extinguisher sputtered empty.
He went after her anyway, pulling the knife out of his belt and stepping across a line of blue fire on the sidewalk. He slashed at her and she ran, pushing two more women away from her on either side, opening a space in the crowd as she did — so that now Bailey was standing right there in front of him just a few feet away. There was only one woman left between them and Tom rammed his empty tank into the back of her head.
He tapped Phil on the shoulder.
They slashed their way to the street.
He didn't know anymore where he struck or what he hit. He swung almost blindly, trying not to fall amid the sprawl of bodies all around, slashing with the knife and feeling the deadness taking hold of his arm and the sudden shock running through it each time he struck, the warm rain of blood spilling over his hands and wrists and spraying fine mists across his cheeks.
And then suddenly they were free.
A car lay toppled on its side in front of the Savings Bank across the street. They hid behind it panting, trying to catch their breath. A short bearded man in a bloodstained white shirt broke through. They took the risk of being noticed and stood and waved him over. He was carrying a cleaver that had seen some use.
In front of the bar Tom counted four men left out of the original fourteen. He saw them moving in the shadows, heard screams and cries.
One bolted away up Broadway.
That left three.
They'd lost almost half their numbers.
"Dammit," Phil said.
"We can't help them," said Bailey. "They'll get out of this or else they won't. Let's keep moving."