I had to go there even though I knew it would be sad. My memories of New York were still vivid, still precious. I had to see what was left to rebuild on.
It wasn’t promising, flying in along the Hudson. The Bronx was all but leveled by fire. Indira remembered that from before, though, and said it had been as bad down-town. The police and firemen had been more effective there, the night before the bombs started to fall. (I wondered whether New York had been spared nuclear destruction because the enemy wanted to save it, or because of automatic defenses like the ones that had protected the Cape long enough for our shuttles to escape.)
We dropped down to water level as we approached Manhattan. It still looked impressive—more impressive, in faict, than it had in the old days. With no pollution, you could see how tall the skyscrapers actually were, even the five-kilometer-high Trade Center twins. I suggested to Friedman that we might want to go up to the top of some of those buildings and work our way down. Without elevators, not many looters would have made it that high. He agreed but pointed out that we wouldn’t find any hardware stores up there.
We got almost as far as Chelsea without seeing anyone. Around Twenty-sixth Street we flew by four children walking on a dock. Three ran for cover and one dove into the water. We slowed down and turned inland at Twenty-third Street. Friedman remembered a large hardware-and-hobby emporium down by Second Avenue.
The city was a dead ruin. The street was clogged with burned-out hulks of delivery vans and robot cabs. Very few intact windows up to the third story, and the side-walks were heaped with glittering fragments of glass. After a couple of blocks we started to see skeletons; in midtown they were everywhere. Most of them were partly hidden inside brightly colored clothes of indestructible fabric. I noticed that there were more scattered bones than complete skeletons. “Dogs,” Indira said.
We passed the old Flatiron Building, which had been my favorite. It looked pathetic. Windows all out, stone facade blackened by fire. The park across from it, where I used to have lunch with Benny, was treeless and shoul-der-high in weeds. A terrible feeling of loss and hopelessness surged up; I bit my lip to keep from crying out. I walked back down the aisle to an open window and put my face into the wind. The air smelled of the sea and old smoke.
Friedman found an empty piece of street close to the hardware store and expertly floated down onto it. He checked our weapons as we left the bus. Indira and I had the lasers; the three boys had assault pistols. Friedman himself carried something he called a “meatgrinder,” and a belt of grenades. If any of those skeletons tried anything they’d be goners.
Glass crackled under our feet and a desolate wind sighed. The sun went behind a cloud. My whole body was one tense nerve, waiting for the first shot. Nothing happened.
We stepped through the shattered door. The store was dark and dusty and rank with mildew. One of the boys sneezed; then I did. Somehow that made the place suddenly less sinister.
I clicked on my flashlight and checked the list. “First we ought to try to find a wheelbarrow or cart or something.” I played the light around but didn’t see anything with wheels.
“I’ll check upstairs,” Friedman said. He and I probably had the only two working flashlights in the state.
“Here’s an axe,” the younger black boy, Timmy, called out. “Din’t we want a axe?”
“Yeah.” I took the light over to him. It was a fire axe, in a box on the wall. Somebody had broken the glass covering but for some reason left the axe in place.
Timmy tugged on it and it came free with a slow rusty creak. “Prob’ly set off a bell when he break the glass, he puke out an’ run.” He tested the edge with his thumb and smiled. It occurred to me that the children had only an abstract, second-hand, notion of the destructive power of the weapons they were carrying. But Timmy knew what an axe could do.
Friedman found a child’s wagon and a wheelbarrow upstairs. The boys helped him carry them down, then they went back up to raid the garden supplies.
There wasn’t much on the shelves downstairs. Indira and Timmy and I went up and down the rows without finding anything more useful than plastic kitchenware and spray paint. The bins that used to contain the hardware we needed had been thoroughly empt ied.
For once I used my brain. Underneath the display bins there were locked cabinets. I had Timmy bash open one of them, and lo: dozens of boxes of nails and screws. Inventory control. We stacked them up in the wagon and broke into the next cabinet. Screwdrivers of every description. Then hammers and drill bits and tape measures and levels and curious varieties of saw. We were laughing over our good fortune and I almost didn’t hear the faint sound, a throaty rasp.
“What was that?”
Timmy pointed toward the front of the store. “Fuckin’ dogs.”
There were ten or twelve of them, big ones, emaciated, teeth bared, staring in at us. One slipped through the broken glass door.
“Get down!” Friedman shouted from the top of the stairs. There was a quiet pop and the heavy sound of a grenade hitting the floor, rolling, then an impossibly loud explosion.
“Jesus Christ,” Indira said. Her voice was a barely audible whisper under the roaring in my ears. Most of the dogs lay about in bloody rags. One limped painfully away, yelping.
We got to our feet, brushing off dust. “I’ve never—”
“There’s one!” Timmy said. A big muscular hound was loping silently down the corridor toward us. I dropped the flashlight, fumbled, found the laser’s trigger and fired blindly. The floor burst into yellow flame that immediately went out, leaving thick black smoke, and then the dog ran into the beam and fell down with a thud.
I picked up the flashlight and aimed it at his howling. I had severed both the animal’s front legs. It was still trying to get to us, jaws snapping, hind legs scrabbling for purchase.
“I get it,” Timmy said quietly, then stepped forward and split the dog’s skull. I tore off my mask and spun away just in time to keep from vomiting all over Indira.
I’m not too clear on what happened after that, but I wound up sitting on the curb outside, Indira helping me wash up with an oily rag and canteen water. She patted my head and cooed reassuring nonsense. Great White Savior of the Groundhogs, that’s me. (Predictably, though, she was on my side from then on. Most good people would rather give help than receive it.)
We overloaded the bus so much that its failsafes refused to let us take off. We had to leave behind five bags of fertilizer, just inside the door. Friedman was in favor of taking it home and then coming right back, though it would mean working after sundown. He was afraid that the grenade blast had attracted attention, and other people would be waiting to take advantage of our market research.
Here was my opportunity to redeem myself: I said I would stand guard here while they dropped the stuff off. Timmy and an older boy, Oliver, volunteered to stay with me. We loaded two bags back on and watched them float away.
I supposed our best vantage point would have been inside, upstairs, hidden by the darkness but able to cover the door. But that was too much like being in a corner, and besides, the place smelled of vomit and gore and burnt plastic. Instead we walked down the street to where a floater had collided with a ground van. The V of wreckage hid us well and gave us protection from the wind, but afforded a good view of the store. The afternoon sun had gone down behind buildings, and it was getting chilly. We sat close together, hands in pockets, and talked quietly.
“What’s it like up there,” Oliver asked, “up there in the sky?”