Ladies' Night (12 page)

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.

"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.”

“I've got a problem, Phil," Tom said.

"What's that?"

"I'm gonna have to go out into that again."

"Out there? Are you nuts?"

"I live three blocks down on 68th. My wife's there." He looked at Bailey. "With my son."

He watched the man's eyes and saw him comprehend.

"Jesus H. Jumping Christ."

He thought how Susan might already be lost to him — a thing like those outside. And he had to look away from the man's eyes then because the eyes seemed to accuse him. Or maybe he was accusing himself.

For all their bickering he realized he had never truly wanted an end to it with Susan but wanted only to turn the clock back to an earlier, simpler time. He'd been childish, selfish. And now there was so much that might never be said. So much left unpardoned and so many wounds.

Their years together seemed to dissolve as though they had no meaning. To pass on an evil wind.

"I need to get home to my son."

His fear for Andy's safety ran through him like poison. He knew it was possible — even, god help him, likely — that it was already too late, that he had not survived what Susan had almost certainly become. But if that was the case, he still needed to know that, or he was going to go crazy not knowing. For that too he was guilty. He had no choice but to try.

"I don't know how the hell you're going to manage that, partner," the big man said.

"I don't either. But I can't stay."

He was aware that practically everybody in the place was listening. Bailey got up and hauled himself painfully over to the bar. He poured himself another scotch.

"I guess you'll need some company," he said.

"Not yours. Thanks — but not with that shoulder."

"The shoulder's done all right so far. It'll go three blocks more if it has to. You saved my life, asshole."

"I thought that was sort of mutual."

"Excuse me," said Phil. "But you got any idea how you're gonna do this? You remember what just
happened
out there?"

"Let's sit down a couple minutes and talk about it," said Bailey. "See what you did and
didn't
do last time. See what we can come up with."

The women were at the windows. Their fingernails raked the table tops like someone clawing at the lid of a coffin.

The owner shrugged. "Sick of this place anyway," he said. "I been here all night. Maybe it's time I head on home."

There had been a fire in the Dorset Towers six months previously. An old woman was smoking a cigarette while cleaning out her clothes closet for the Salvation Army and dropped an ember into a pile of slips, bras and dresses. They began to burn. It was a small pile and consequently, the fire too was small. But the old woman panicked at the sight of smoke and began to run — out into the empty corridor to the elevator and took the elevator eight stories down the lobby. By the time the doorman managed to break through her apartment door — the door had locked behind her and he'd neglected to bring his master key — the fire had spread to the living room, and by the time firemen arrived flames were shooting out her bedroom windows.

The apartment was gutted. But otherwise the only damage to the building was confined to the hall just outside her door, and that was mostly smoke damage. Few flames had managed to crawl beyond the cinderblock cubicle and the sprinklers had taken care of those. To the apartments on either side no harm at all was done, not even smoke — so solidly was the Dorset constructed and so isolated was each apartment from every other.

At the time residents had cause to be happy with their building. Not now.