The little bald man's drinking buddy was probably worst of all. They had him dangling from a coat hook mounted on the wall, the hooks embedded in his back, arms and feet still twitching, blood sliding down off his chin. Erica stood gazing up at him admiringly.
There were only three of them now. Three men left in the bar — Tom and him and some poor bastard huddled against the far wall — with six of them converging on him like dogs on a dying bull.
He was a big man but they had him whining. You could see on his cheeks where they'd been at him with their nails or a fork or something, long straight scratches that looked deep. He was holding a chair in front of him like a lion tamer in a circus but it was just a matter of time. Patty was leading them, leaning forward, squeezing her bared breasts in some passionate, hallucinatory mockery and hissing like a snake. Behind her, Chris was slashing the air with a butcher knife. The others crouched together like a grim silent slavering pack awaiting the kill.
The stench of insanity climbed high above the whiskey and fouled the air like heavy musk.
It was bad to leave him that way but there were too many.
He bent low and moved to the open panel under the waitress' station. Tom was still on his knees gripping his bleeding hand like that was the only thing in the goddamn room that mattered.
Shock, thought Bailey.
"Tom," he said. "Braun."
Bailey watched the glassy blankness in his eyes slowly vivify into recognition.
"Stay low. We've got to get out of here. Come on."
Bailey moved him through the panel and out in front along the row of barstools. Behind him the man was screaming. The sound vibrated through his bones. A wail of the stockyards, the screams of dying cattle. Tom froze ahead of him.
"Move, dammit!"
He wondered where the bottle in his hand had come from.
"Take it slow. Nice and easy. When we get outside head for Broadway. I'll be right behind you."
The screams stopped suddenly.
He heard footsteps pounding toward them and tables and chairs pushed over and thrown aside and he pushed Tom hard ahead of him.
"Go!"
He turned and Patty was coming at him with a broken whiskey glass, hands and face and breasts covered with blood, bloody handprints on her breasts, and the others were right behind her. Knives threw shivers of light across the ceiling. Lurid faces, incomprehensible.
He swung the bottle at her head and heard it smash and saw her fall away stumbling over Cindy's body beside the jukebox, back into the rest of them crowded into the narrow barspace. He had the fraction of a second he needed and he stooped and retrieved the tongs from under Cindy and turned and kicked the poker back to Tom at the door and heard him scoop it up.
Then they seemed everywhere at once.
He came up swinging and felt the tongs connect. Rita tumbled away from him clutching her forehead. He shoved the woman beside her and brought the tongs down behind her ear. The woman grunted and fell like a sack. Tom's poker nearly clipped his shoulder as it cracked down on Erica's wrist. Her knife clattered to the floor and Bailey chopped at her with the tongs, shattering her nose.
He had the tongs up again when Chris pushed the carving knife into his shoulder.
He heard the scrape of blade against bone. It seemed to vibrate through his body. For a moment he was blind in its awful clarity and felt himself start to fall. Thick acid filled his throat. He felt hands on his face, reaching for his eyes, his hair and he smelled the spice of much too much perfume and then two hands grabbed him from behind and flung him through the doorway.
He crawled through the cool breeze on scraped, bloody knees, heard a door slam shut and the sound of metal on metal. He was on the sidewalk. He gave in to the feeling inside and vomited. He felt Tom's hand on his shoulder and then he was lifting Bailey to his feet. He heard glass breaking as Tom pulled the tongs from his hand — he'd been clutching them all the time — glanced back and saw that Tom had shoved the poker through the door's double handles and was beating at Chris with the tongs as she tried to crawl out through the window, slashing with the knife, her mouth drooling long white trails of spittle.
He felt a wave of anger and disgust and stepped toward her. Her knife darted out at him. He avoided it easily. He took one more step and kicked her in the chin as though she were a football, snapping her up through the jagged glass above and tumbling her back down into the bar.
He looked at Tom.
"Two points," he said. "Jesus."
"Can you run?" Tom was looking at his shoulder.
He heard them screeching inside, pounding at the door. Saw another appear at the window.
"I'll have to. Where?"
And suddenly it dawned on him. He knew what Tom would say before he said it. It froze and sickened him.
"Andy," he said. "My apartment. Andy's there."
Bailey did what he guessed Tom couldn't do and completed the thought.
Andy’s there.
With Susan.
The Call-Up
When the call came through Lederer was in his Brooklyn apartment, lying on his bed. Straddled by his wife Millie.
"Aw, for chrissake," she said.
He reached for the phone and Horgan started talking and Millie stayed put for a while, but then he could feel himself recede inside her like some time-lapse movie of a water-starved plant and she got off him and lit a smoke.
He listened to Horgan, wondering if the guy had gone completely batshit loony on him since he'd left the precinct and then hung up the phone.
"That was the damnedest call I ever heard."
If it was possible for somebody to smile disgustedly then that was what she did.
"What?" she said.
"We've got a citywide mobilization on your hands. Horgan's jabbering about the National Guard. He was his usual articulate self so it's hard to say what the hell's going on. And I was only halfway with him anyway."
Her smile brightened.
"I bet it's that goddamn tanker," he said.
"What tanker?"
"I told you. Over on Riverside. The one with no route sheet and the phony plates. But get this. They've got Lieutenant Anderson and Sergeant Dickenson in the cooler down there."
"Why?”
"That's what I said. Why? So Horgan says, 'they're women, aren't they?' Now what the hell do you make of that?"
He zipped his pants, found his shirt on the chair and put it on. He leaned over and kissed her cheek.
"That was nice," he said.
"While it lasted."
"Next time it'll last."
"Make it soon. I'm not getting any younger, y'know."
He smiled. "You're young enough."
He turned ready to leave and she reached over from the bed and slapped his butt.
"You take care of that for me," she said.
"Sure," he said.
It was love.
Midnight Companions
In the distance down Riverside, a convoy of prowl cars spread from corner to corner and out of sight down the block. They could hear guns popping like a string of firecrackers and muted howls and screams. They hurried up 72nd like a pair of scared rats.
All Tom could think of was Andy.
That he'd left him again. Maybe for the last time.
Coward. Cheat.
Fool.
The first one was alone across the street near the pastry shop and she was so damn old and fat it was impossible to take her seriously at first, half running and half waddling across the street with her arms held out to them, the flabby flesh of her upper arms bouncing, fingers clutching like mottled claws.
By the time she stepped over the curb he had the tongs up. The old, frail skull split open like a melon tossed in the gutter.
He felt his stomach heave. His legs felt rubbery. It was not the same as inside the bar. This was cold and brutal. This was execution. He stared down at her.
"Easy," said Bailey.
He pulled him into the
darkened doorway of a discount drug store.
There were four of them close by, all young girls — the oldest couldn't have been more than sixteen. They were dragging the man from the all-night deli out into the street, squealing delightedly as they threw him down over the double yellow line and two of them stepped on his hands while a third kicked him in the ribs and the fourth kicked his face.
They slid from one doorway to the next, stopping under the canopy of a restaurant. The restaurant was dark but it looked safe and there was a terrible urge to hide there, to simply get off the streets.
They moved to the lingerie boutique next door.
And they might have heard the women inside had not the pig-squeal screams of the man in the street become so horrible just then — because the women were making plenty of noise too. All the noise a dozen women can make in a riptide of destruction. They were tearing the place apart.
They watched through the broken window. The floor of the shop was a white ice-flow of silks and cottons ankle-deep under their feet, sparkling with broken glass. They'd torn down drawers and shelving and emptied it in heaps, hangers stripped clean, dangling from empty racks like twisted mobiles, their shadows casting cobweb patterns across the walls while the women moved through the shop like savages at random forage, like violent children, tearing at the clothes as they put them on and tearing them again as they took them off, not a word passing between them as they reduced the store to rubble.
In the far left corner a fat woman in her housecoat sat on the floor, methodically tearing a green silk blouse to pieces. Next to her, three younger women were trying on bras and nightgowns — but the bras were going on backwards and over the nightgowns instead of under them, and one of them had pulled on a sheer black camisole over that. Two teenagers stood naked in the middle of the store dismantling a mannequin.
A girl who was maybe seven or eight, her blonde hair in pigtails, her face made up like a Fellini whore, was trying to break through the glass countertop by lifting and dropping the cash register. She should not have been able to budge it.
Closest to them a woman in a red bodysuit with a black stocking pulled over her head like a mugger was stomping broken window glass to bits beneath her naked feet.
"Christ," Tom whispered.
"Go," said Bailey.
They could not have been more than shadows out there but the woman in the bodysuit suddenly flung herself through the window and Tom lurched back into the gutter. He brought up the tongs. The woman grabbed them and he tried to wrench them free but the woman held on. He pulled forward and she fell to the sidewalk struggling like a fish on a hook. She would not let go.
"Tom! Drop it!" Bailey said.
He looked up and saw them moving slowly, purposefully through the broken display window like so many mechanical dolls, saw one of the teenage girls step over the rim of the window. He pulled at the tongs but the woman only slid along the sidewalk, red smears following her in two broad lines behind her bloody feet. The girl was out the window.
He dropped the tongs and ran, Bailey ahead. He looked over his shoulder.
The women followed.
They passed a pharmacy, 72nd Street Electronics, a hairstylist's. He heard only his own footfalls and Bailey's and those behind him.
A face peered suddenly through a restaurant window and he almost fell. He grabbed hold of a parking meter. The man's face pressed against the window, bubbling a thick froth of blood and saliva. Stay on your feet, goddammit, he thought.
He ran and did not look back.
He saw that Bailey was hurting. He heard glass break again behind him and thought of the man in the window.
Across the street they were looting HMV Music, oblivious to Tom and Bailey. In front of the OTB he had to jump the body of a cop whose head dripped blood and brain matter into the gutter. Another man lay beside him, half on the sidewalk and half in the street. They turned the corner.
The newsstand by the subway station was on fire, flames painting Broadway a liquid red and gold.
"Got to stop," Bailey said.
Tom glanced over his shoulder. There was nobody behind them. Again he thought about the man in the window.
"Take it at a walk," he said.
The palm of his hand was throbbing. He could only imagine what Bailey was feeling.
They passed the jewelry store. The roller skating shop.
"Oh shit," said Bailey. "Oh Jesus."
The corner of 71st Street was a battle zone.
Men with bottles and broken chair legs and table legs were trying to stand their ground against dozens of women — mostly unarmed but formidable by sheer weight of number. Bodies littered the street.
It looked as though the men had been trying to break out of the bar on the corner. You should have stayed put, thought Tom. The bar had only two small windows and another on the door. It could be defended.
"Great. We got it on all sides now," said Bailey.
He turned. If it was the man at the window who had delayed them they were finished now, coming on fast behind them. Maybe a dozen. "I can't keep running anyhow," said Bailey.
"What do you want to do?"
"Play any football?"
"Sure."
"How are you at breaking defensive lines?"
"How are you at parting the Red Sea?"
"We find the place they're weakest. Then we hit them. And it better be good because right now I got only one hit left in me."
They ran and coming up on them saw their opening, only five or six women near the corner of the building and three men holding them back, trying to work their way toward the basement-level door and back inside. They gave it full momentum, ramming hard from behind so that three of the women went down right away and Bailey whirled and slammed another in the chin.
Suddenly he was inside a tight circle of five and he and Bailey were enough to change the odds, moving toward the door as he kicked a woman in the shin and pushed her down, pushed another, grabbed yet another by her long blonde hair and flung her away into the crowd. Then they were tripping down the stairs into the bar and he was falling to the floor as the door was slamming shut and the bolt was ramming home. The room was filled with lights and they were not where he wanted to be — home at his apartment — but they were not alone anymore.
~ * ~
"Good to see you. You were out for a minute there."
The big man was unsmiling, staring down at them with cool grey eyes.
"Thanks for the assist," he said.
He nodded, still trying to catch his breath.
He looked at over Bailey sitting beside him on the floor.
"Can you do anything for my buddy here? His shoulder's bad.”
“You got that right," grunted Bailey.
"First aid kit behind the bar. Neil?"
"I got it." A dark, compact young man in a blue t-shirt hopped the bar.
He saw a dead woman lying across one of the tables. Another with a knife in her back sprawled along the floor. A third and fourth atop one another back in the restaurant area.
The windows at street level had already been covered by tabletops upended and nailed to the wall. That left only the smaller window in the basement-level door, too small to crawl through.
The table tops were taking a pounding.
The ladies wanted in.
There were a dozen or so men in there, two of them working on the door, reinforcing it with crossbeams ripped from shelving and nailing them across the door. He looked at all the faces. The faces were scared. A few of the men were quietly drinking.
"Name's Phil," the big man said. "This used to be a bar. I used to own it. Now I don't know what the hell it is. I feel like I just survived the Alamo."
"Tom Braun."
"Bailey."
They shook hands.
The man in the blue t-shirt — Neil — came around the bar with a tackle box, opened it, and started pulling out gauze pads, alcohol, peroxide and bandages. Bailey peeled off his bloody shirt. br />
"Christ, you need stitches. This is all we got."
"It'll have to do," said Bailey.
"I'm going to need some of that too," said Tom. He held out the palm of his hand. It was still seeping blood.
"And a hefty scotch or something," said Bailey.
"Let's just say that what we have here's an open bar," Phil said. "Help yourselves."
A man in a v-neck sweater already had a bottle in his hand. "Cutty?"
"Whatever."
The man turned over a pair of glasses and began to pour. His knuckles were bleeding and there was a two-inch gash on his left cheek.
They drank, sipping slowly while Neil worked first on Bailey's shoulder and then Tom's hand.
The pounding outside never let up for a second. The sound of it seemed to cut through his nerves like a buzz saw — not just the pounding but the hissing, the moans, the growling, as though some evil alien fauna had collected out there and was calling to them, taunting them. Come out and play. Come out and die.
They heard gunshots and screams. No one spoke much.
"Why'd you try it?" Tom said. "Why'd you go out there?"
Phil shook his head. "We just got panicky I guess. We knew there were a lot of them, but not that many. Damn fucking stupid thing to do. We just walked out into it. We figured, well, you know, they're women. So what. We took care of the ones in here okay."
"I guess you tried 911."
"You kidding? They had us on hold for half an hour, nothing but a tape saying all lines are busy and please hold. The emergency line for chrissake! I don't even think there's anybody over there."
"What the hell is happening?"
"I don't know. But I got a feeling it's happening all over the goddamn city. Jesus. Maybe all over the world."
"Anything on the radio?"
"No radio. Just a juke. Bunch of goddamn useless CD's. And they busted my TV."
He looked up and saw the shattered tube.
"Heaved a chair through it. Just about the first thing that went.”