LADIES' NIGHT
by
JACK KETCHUM


Gauntlet Press www.gauntletpress.com ',

Jack Ketchum

Gauntlet Publications

Mass Market Trade Paperback ISBN !887368353 Copyright 1997/2000 by
Dallas Mayr

Cover art copyright 1997/2000 by Neal McPheeters First printed by
Silver Slamander Press in 1997

This book is a work of fiction.  Names, characters, places incidents
are either the products of the author's imagination used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual events or location persons, living or dead,
is entirely coincidental.

Manufactured in the United States of America

FIRST MASS MARKET

TRADE PAPERBACK EDITION

Gauntlet Publications

309 Powell Road, Springfield, PA 19064

Phone: (610) 3285476

email: gauntlet66@aol.com

Website: http://www.gauntletpress.com

This one's for Paula White -usually a lady but not always.

And for Richard Christenson, who labored well and mightily.

"I deserve this fate.  It's a debt I owe for a wild and reckless life.
So long, boys!"  -Bill Longley hanged in Giddings, Texas, 1877

"If I'd the courage I would make my way home.

Too many antics in the forbidden zone."

-Adam and the Ants

"In the war between men and women there are no survivors."

-Norman Mailer

Inlrodudion

Truly attentive readers of mine, I mean real out-and-out detail
type-persons, may have noted that between 1981, when I published my
first book, OjfSeason, and 1984, when I published my second -a little
one-hundred-ninety-four-page thing called Hide and Seekthere was not a
peep out of Jack Ketchum anywhere.  No magazine work.  No short
stories.  Nothing.  And you might have asked yourself, so what in hell
was this guy doing for three years?  Sitting back counting his bucks?

I wish.

A good part of that time I was writing the novel you now have in hand.
And writing it massively.

Plus privately I was scared as hell.  Both during the writing and
after.

To explain I have to backtrack some.

When Ballantine bought Off Season it created a lot of inhouse

buzz precisely because it was so ferocious.  In 1980 nobody had seen a
book with quite so many teeth.  That this was eventually to be its
downfall had not yet occurred to anybody.  But practically the whole
damn house had read the book.  I'd be walking with my editor and people
would peer out at me from their cubicles, smiling and shaking their
heads.  This is the guy who wrote that crazy fucking thing about the
cannibals.  Marc Jaffe, who'd bought the novel, his first purchase as
the new editor-in-chief there, took me aside one day and said, this
book is going to make you rich, son.

Uh-huh.

I've written about all this before so I'll be brief.  What happened in
a nutshell was that they decided to mount this whole big campaign,
posters and point-of-purchase display stands and an edition of 40,000
copies just for distributors, trying to advance-hype the thing- and the
reaction of said distributors almost to a man was, excuse me?  This
shit is violent pornography and we want no part of it.  Are you guys
nuts?

But by the time they weighed in with that bad news I'd already
contracted for a second book.

In January of '81 I signed to do a novel called The Mantis Syndrome.
The title will become obvious to you once you've read the book.  I
changed it only because I liked the double entendre of Ladies' Night
and Mantis Syndrome seemed just a little too Michael Crichton to me.
I'd slaved over the outline and sample chapters- so much so that I've
vowed never to do it again.  The outline came to about forty pages. The
chapters another forty.  And then in writing the book I followed that
outline just as slavishly.

I'll never do that again either.

Why did I put myself through all this?  Because basically i was a
little terrified.

Patti Smith once said something to the effect that they give you
twenty-one years to produce your first album and six months to produce
your second.  She knows whereof she speaks.  The idea for Mantis from a
publishing standpoint was that the book was to be of the same flesh as
Off Season, only bigger.  Sort of my "Salem s' Lot to Off Season :"
Carrie.

Only Ketchum-style, with all the violence right in your face.  This
was, remember, months before the shit hit the fan with the
distributors.

The advance was to be $20,000.00.  Twice the advance for /y Season and
very nice money in those days for a second novel.  In fact it's very
nice money these days but that's another story.  I was still hearing
all this buzz about the first book, how it was going to make a huge
splash and how they had even bigger hopes for the second, I mean I was
gonna be launched, friends.  So there was plenty of pressure to top
myself with this one.

And I had Patti's proverbial six months to do so.  Literally.

I brought it in under the deadline, though.  I worked long hours and
followed the outline scrupulously because that was the outline
Ballantine had bought.  Scared every minute that I wouldn't pass
muster, that I had only a few licks as a writer and that I'd used them
all up in OffSeason.

I've later learned this feeling's common.  The I Only Have-OneBookIn-Me
complex.  I wish I knew it then.

But I brought it in and I brought it in big- over four hundred pages.
That's right, the book before you once had a very serious case
ofelephantitis: I had explanatory subplots involving the military and
science communities and another about a gay friend of my lead
character's and his lover, I had fake newspaper articles and TV
reports1 had all kindsa stuff.  To date it's still the biggest book
I've ever written.  I had yet to learn for sure that less is sometimes
more though I should have learned that from OffSeason.

My only excuse- and it's a poor one- is that I was scared again.
Ballantine wanted big and that's what I needed to deliver.  Accent the
word needed.  Hence my first and only doorstop.

That wasn't what bothered Ballantine, though.  They didn't seem to mind
the bloating one bit.  Does this surprise you?  They're mass market
publishers for god sakes

It was the violence, naturally.

By then the votes were in from the distributors.  I could now walk
through their 50th Street offices and almost hear the collective
whoops.  [ got a two-page letter from my line-editor Susan Allison
making lots of suggestions about how to bloat the book further and the
only mention of cutting was, "we agreed that much of the violence must
be taken out or held back.  The story works very well without

the gore."  I say piffle.  When you finish the book let's see what you
think.

1 didn't want to do the revisions.  I don't think I was being arrogant
about it.  I was probably still too worried to be arrogant.  It wasn't
just cutting the violence either.  Among other things they wanted to
throw the whole story into the future and despite the science-fictiony
premise this was decidedly not science fiction, this was horror, and
the notion of imagining New York City ten or a hundred year from now
held no appeal whatever.  With a few exceptions I'd rarely even read
science fiction.  So while I dickered with Ballantine my agent at the
time, Jack Scovil, quietly auctioned the book to pretty much every
paperback company in town.

Stealth and cunning.  It's an agent's job.

But we got no takers.  Everybody was offended by the violence,
particular the female editors, who thought I was misogynist in the
extreme.  One editor who shall remain nameless was kind enough to
enclose her reader's report by mistake along with her rejection letter.
I kept it.  The report said, "I stopped reading every pearly word after
the girls who work at the Burger King threw the would be (sic) holdup
man on the grill."  Actually it's McDonald's.  And the incident occurs
only about a third of the way through so he or she didn't read much. 
Which is probably all to the good because considering what follows that
scene's pretty mild.  But the reader went on to conclude, "I hope the
person who wrote this confines his aggressions to the page. This is
pretty dreadful."

Words to live by.

The bottom line is, we never did sell it.  Jack argued that i'd
delivered an acceptable manuscript, which had followed the outline in
every way.  An understatement.  And since it wasn't the writing- as I'd
feared- it was the whole idea that bothered them at this point, I got
to hold onto the advance.  Ballantine sweetened the pot slightly in a
contract for a third novel, the only caveat being that I was to hold
down the bloodshed level on this one.

Jack's a pretty good agent.

Trouble was, for a long time I couldn't write the book.  I was a one
book writer.  The failure of Ladies' Night proved it.  I was
convinced.

I'd used up all my juice on the first book just as I'd suspected.
Neither my agent nor the woman I lived with nor any of my friends who
read and liked the book could talk me out of it.  I could see myself
going back to magazine work or a steady job, a fate too awful to
conceive for anyone who has seen The Other Side.  It was a crisis of
confidence that lasted long and worked its way deep.

I spent a lot of time staying out late and getting up woozy in the
morning.  I was becoming Tom in Ladies "Night.

Then one day I got an idea for a small book, which would be written in
the first person, i was re-reading James M. Cain at the time and
thought, what if I do something like Cain does, draw characters who are
in way over their heads and don't know it- only do it with a bunch of
kids, teenagers.  In the first person I'd have to break through and
find some new licks.

Hide And Seek emerged.  Crisis over.

But I could never really quit on Ladies "Night.  Looking back I still
liked the damn thing, thought the premise pretty audacious.  But I kept
it in a drawer and went on to other things until 1988.  That year my
old friend Richard Christenson -- a playwright- and i were sitting in a
bar one night and he was bemoaning quite rightly how difficult it was
to make a buck in the business of writing drama, almost as tough as it
was to make a buck in poetry, hell you might as well have been trying
to sell pet roaches in this city and I found myself urging him to try
some prose instead.  I wasn't getting rich here but | was still afloat,
doing what i wanted to do.  Maybe so could he.  As we talked it became
clear he was game.  I said here's an idea, why don't you see what you
can do to trim some of the fat off Ladies "Night, whip it into shape
and make it salable.  We'll split the credit and the money
fifty-fifty.

He spent months on the book, adding here, subtracting there, mostly
subtracting- again to no avail.  He did a partial rewrite of about the
first quarter of the book and by the time he was finished 1 thought it
was a wholly viable new take on it so we attached a far less gargantuan
outline and Alice Marteil, my agent by then, sent it out again.

All new editors, same responses.

Too violent.  Too nasty toward women.

Personally I think it's just as nasty toward men.  But maybe that' just
me.

Anyway, once more | let it lie for awhile.  In 1990 I decided a
screenplay version.  Thinking low-budget horror-movie I switched the
locale from New York City to the suburbs to make for a far cheaper
shoot but kept the mayhem basically the same.  That script's still
being shopped around now and then and I figure you never know.
Especially with this yarn.  Its voyage has been a long one.

Finally a couple of years ago | was between ideas for a new book, lying
fallow, collecting this and that notion and waiting patiently for some
pattern to emerge and thought, how about taking a slash-and burn run at
Ladies "Night in the meantime?  Why not?  Might be fun.

And it was.  Trimmed by well over half its pages it closely resembled
its sister-book, Off Season.  it had the same simulated "realtime" time
scale and worked like a well-made play, everything going on within the
course of a single grisly night.  It had the same theme of ordinary
people being pushed to extraordinary acts of violence.  Like OffSeason
its protagonists are not necessarily the nicest of people -Tom's a
philanderer and morally something of a coward while Elizabeth's
seriously thinking about fucking him, even though his wife's a friend
and she baby-sits his son- the point being that nobody deserves to be
pushed to these extremes, not ever.

Like the first book it steals liberally from the movies | happen to
love, particularly- again like its predecessor- from Night of the
Living Dead.  Though this time the most obvious influence is David
Cronenberg's first full-length feature, Shivers, aka They Came From
Within.

| proceeded not from Richard's version but from the original, although
many of the cuts | made were cuts he and | agreed were absolutely
necessary- and i'm very much indebted to him for his fine eye and ear.
Richard's version, | felt, had tried to explain too much of the science
and its tone was more measured and serious than necessary for what was
essentially just goofy pulp-horror fiction.  | didn't want to be
distracted by that.  | wanted cheap thrills, period.

Ladies" night

Hey, this is basically a story about some guy trying to get home after
a really bad night at his local bar.

We've all had them.

The fact that it's also jabbing at the un-stuck nuclear family and male
female relationships in general's just gravy.  It's there if you want
it on your plate and practically unnecessary if you don't.

So I've kept the pulpy style, all the italics, all the exclamations,
even some of my less successful sentence constructions for the sake of
being true to the feel of the original and all the gore-hound excesses.
In recent years I've tried for some slight measure of subtlety, some
nuance of character and language, a few grace notes now and then.  This
has all the subtlety of a hooker selling blow jobs at the entrance to
Lincoln Tunnel but I figure that's the way it should be.

Since I wrote the book times have changed- enough so that, happily for
me, there are a few venues now for a story as extreme as this and
you're looking at one of them.

Thanks, John.

But New York has changed too and probably will have changed again by
the time you read this.  "People come and go so quickly here," is as
true of the Big Apple as it is of Oz.  Only it's businesses that
disappear overnight here, with new ones flinging themselves all tar ted
up in the morning.  Bars, florists, banks, everything.  If you're a
native New Yorker and especially if you know the West Side you're going
to note discrepancies in the novel as to setting.  I've updated the
neighborhood wherever I could, replacing a bank with, say, HMV Music if
that's what's there today.  But in some cases that wasn't possible. The
butcher shop on Broadway, for instance, is long gone and long lamented.
But I needed a butcher shop so I kept it.  Author privilege. To do
otherwise would be to write a whole new novel, not polish up and older
one.

Hollywood's a funny place.  You write a screenplay, you go out there
and you spend a whole lot more time pitching it than you did in the
writing of it or than anybody will ever spend in the reading.  Everyone
seems to want you to come up with the gist of the thing in a

single pithy line, like a sky-hook from which they can suspend the
thoughts about what to do or what not to do about "the project."  buy
or not to buy.  To amend or not to amend- or rather just what amend.
Casting, money, shooting schedule, everything.  It all seems hang on
that hook, depend on that line.  So I came up with the hook fi Ladies'
Night.

I had to.  Ladies "Night was the one that simply would not go aw

Think I'll leave you with that hook and then let you get on to the
novel.  Like the book itself I still kinda like the feel of it.

"In the war between men and women, the shooting has begun."  Pow.

If you could make an arrest for bad temper, thought Lederer, this
whole damn city would be on Rikers Island.

He stepped off the curb into the street.  Horns blared behind him.  The
uniforms had blocked off Riverside from 72nd up to 75th and the
diversion onto Broadway was causing an angry tangle.  He'd parked on
Columbus and walked over.  It was easier.

The warm wind gusting off the river tugged at his hat.

The stink was powerful.  Sweet.  Cloying.  He could not say what it
reminded him of.  But something.

The tanker lay like a huge cracked egg frying in the middle of the
street, its spill a great wide slick of dark thick liquid pooling from
the center line out along the western curb.

He stepped carefully around it.

A white Buick wagon lay sprawled on its side at the corner of 73rd.
There was very little left of its rear compartment.  The windshield was
shattered on the driver's side and spackled with blood.

He could pretty much guess what happened.  The Buick onto Riverside
against the light.  The trucker was moving fast and his brakes to avoid
it.  Much too late and much too hard.

They were tricky, these tankers.  Especially if you ran them full and
without baffles, the heavy sheets of steel which lay inside the tank,
separating the load into compartments so that they took some of the
wave-action when you braked.  Without the baffles you could still brake
fast if you had to.  But you'd better not turn the wheel.  Because if
you did you had maybe 9,500 gallons behind you and all this weight,
this huge wave of liquid back there starts to push forward, jackknifing
the cab at the fifth wheel and ramming you with every bit of its weight
like a battering ram.

You had to be one hell of a driver to control all that.  He guessed
this one wasn't.

There wasn't much left of him.

Again it was easy to imagine.  The tank had jack-knifed the cab all the
way around to what was probably no more than a ten degree angle.  Then
the wave effect started.  The first wave went forward, the second back,
and the third side-to-side- all of it one great heaving surge of
motion.  It was the side-to-side that killed the driver- toppling the
tank off its sub-frame directly onto his cab, squashing it like a
cardboard container.  The man inside was nothing but a wide smear of
red and grey between the crushed roof and the fake-leather seat.  A bug
against a windshield.

It had been fast, anyway.

The guy had that much luck.

McCann was standing by the traffic light.  He walked over.  "What's the
cargo?"  Lederer asked.

"Damned if [ know.  Smells sweet.  Liquid sweetener or something.  Take
a look at the logo there."

Painted in red letters along the side of the tank were the words

LADIES, INC.

"What the hews that mean?"  said Lederer.

McCann shrugged.  "I guess it means that at least we can assume our
feet won't glow in the dark."

Lederer lit a cigarette and watched the cleanup crew work the spill

and the wrecking crew try to pull fifty-five feet of steel off the guy
in the cab.

Uniforms held the perimeter.  A good-sized crowd had gathered.

Some were standing on park benches.  A few kids mostly- were perched in
trees, looking for a better view.  It would take a while but they'd get
their view all right, when the boys pulled off that tank.

"What about the wagon?"

"Woman in the driver's seat, no passengers.  Mid-twenties I'd say.

No seatbelt.  My wife does the same thing.  I tell her, use the goddamn
seatbelt but she knows better.  And me out here looking at this shit a
dozen times a month.  They took her down to Roosevelt half an hour ago.
You ask me, she's not going to make it."

The wind was up now, blowing west to southeast off the river, and
Lederer thought I ought to get those kids out of the trees.  A little
gusting, a few more miles-per-hour and they could get into some trouble
up there.  Riverside Park, with its thin dark soil and macadam
walkways, was a hard place to fall.

"I don't get it," he said.  "What the hell was a tanker even doing
here?"  He pointed to the sign on the streetlight behind them.  "Look
at that.  This whole damn street is posted.  Not just here, but back at
the corner of 72nd and Broadway and again right there at the entrance
to Riverside.  NO COMMERCIAL TRAFFIC.  Every couple of blocks.  Plus he
had to be really moving to do that much damage to the Buick.  So what
the hell was he doing in the first place, high balling it through
Manhattan?"

"Maybe we got a driver who can't read," said McCann.

"No way.  You can't read you don't move freight.  He knew where he was
going.  He knew it was illegal.  He did it anyway."

"The route-sheet in the cab," said McCann.  "Maybe we'll get it
there."

"Maybe."

But he had a feeling that the only thing they'd find in the cab was a
messy driver.  Without documentation.  Beneath the sickly-sweet scent
of the cargo he thought he detected another smell- the stink of greed
and corruption.

The usual.

Cut corners, cover-ups.  The cheap shot at the fast buck.  The city
was made of that.  More and more that was what it was all about these
lays as the economy and government and the whole damn shooting hatch
seemed to wind down slowly into disaster.

Naturally there were victims.  A young woman in a white Buick.  One
wrong turn and it all came hurtling down at you.

He watched the progress of the wrecking crew.  At this rate it would be
hours before they could pry the tank away.  In the meantime t would
probably be a good idea to talk with the boys in the lab.  Find ut what
this stuff was.  Check the plates on the tanker.  A company
'egistration, maybe, for LADLES, INC.  Punch it up on the computer.

"Listen," he said to McCann, "if anything breaks you call me, kay?"

"Sure."

"Especially on that route-sheet."

"Will do."

Lederer crossed the street, headed back to his car.  It was 2:30 in he
afternoon and the day was hot- hot and humid even with the breeze,
ennervating -and he suddenly had the feeling there was going to be a
whole lot of work to do before his shift was over.  Halfway down
Columbus it hit him.  The smell.

It was weaker here, weak enough so that he could finally get a andle on
it- something specific and not just a too-sweet reek.  It nade no
sense.  But what it reminded him of filled him with a kind of ;trange
elation.

Cherry, he thought.

Cherry lollipops, to be more exact.  That good bright artificial mell
he remembered liking so much as a kid, wafting along on a esterly
breeze.  Cherry-flavored lollipops.

His favorite kind.

The winds were island winds swirling off the Hudson.

At Riverside park a small black boy climbed out of the trees and chased
his baseball cap through the gutter as it tumbled away.  At Lincoln
Center in front of Avery Fisher Hall a fashion model returning home
from another round of go-sees stepped into a tiny whirlwind of swirling
city debris and felt a speck of grit lodge itself beneath her
green-tinted contact lens.  In mid-town a stack of the New York Times
tugged at its paperweight, inching it off-center.

The winds coursed through the wide city streets, swept upwards in a
sudden rush against skyscrapers and high rises to disperse slowly into
the calmer air above.  By far the winds blew strongest west to
southeast -the cool ocean breeze out of the east stopped them dead,
forcing steel-and-concrete superheated air up to the cloudless sky like
an uppercut to the chin of a boxer.  Random currents reached eastward
into the 80's and slid south down through the Village and Soho, though
much diffused in power.

But mostly they poured through the open mouth of the west of
Manhattan, down Riverside, down Columbus and Amsterdam, down Broadway,
until other currents scattered them, eviscerating their inland
thrust.

North as far as West 86th Street, south as far as 39th, east to Central
Park and in pockets beyond, Manhattanites, tourists, and bus and-tunnel
commuters to New Jersey, Westchester, Long Island and Connecticut could
be seen to pause a moment to sniff the air as some thing rushed by them
and then darted swiftly on, something sweet, redolent of memories of
near or distant pasts, of sunny summer days much like this one, when
their worlds were simpler, easier.

Before the world and they grew old.

"What you missed," Susan was saying, "was the security strike."  Tom
Braun looked at his wife and then at Elizabeth and thought, I've
probably got the two most attractive women in the building standing
here- so why do I feel like I need a real drink."?

"It was actually fun in a way," said Susan.  "They had no other choice
but to enlist the tenants so Tom and I sat desk-duty four nights
running.  You'd be amazed at what goes on around here."

Elizabeth smiled.  "Tell."

Susan looked around to see if anyone was in listening range.  She
needn't have bothered.  The party was winding down now, the food mostly
gone and the wine running low, only twenty-five or thirty of them left
up there on the rooftop, their laughter and conversation fading back
into the noise from the street twenty-two stories below, into the warm
evening breeze.

It was one of those amazing summer evenings where it almost would have
taken an act of will to have kept him indoors.  The day's

humidity had finally given way.  Had the Dorset Towers Tenants'
Association decided to hold their party elsewhere- in the lobby or
someone's apartment- he would have stayed home.

"Well, the Landrus feed their daughter Prozak, for one thing."  "You're
kidding."

"Risley lives next door.  it seems that little Carla has this habit of
running away nights, nobody knows where.  One night last month the
police got involved, brought her home drunk at three in the morning.
Risley says there was quite a commotion in the hall, with everybody
hurling guilt at one another.  Of course he listened carefully to the
whole thing.  And you know Sam Hardin, don't you?"

"The doctor?  The old retired guy who hangs around the mailroom all
day?"

"Uh-huh."

Elizabeth shuddered.  "I know him.  He stares at you," she said.  "He's
creepy."

"Okay, follow this.  You know Clan, the doorman?"

She pointed to the rooftop entrance.  Some of the security staff were
standing there talking next to a starved potted plant.  Clan- a tall
good-looking black man- was among them.  Elizabeth nodded.

"Well, Clan has something going with Eleanor Snow- you didn't know
that?  Oh yeah, for quite a while now.  Anyway according to Eleanor,
Clan says old Sam apparently likes a good hard thrashing now and then-
hires expensive hookers who bring along suitcases full of equipment.
guess the girls look okay, because management hasn't complained yet,
but the whole desk staff knows who they are and why they're there.  The
problem is Sam's getting kind of loud about it.  The neighbors are
getting nervous."

"I love it," said Elizabeth.  "Perversion!"

"No, Cros,/ire is perversion," said Tom.  "Sam's just kinky."  "You two
are turning into a pair of old gossips, you know that?"

"Yeah," said Tom.  "It's good the strike didn't last much longer.
Real-life neighborhood soaps can hook you."

He watched Susan sip her wine and thought how different these two women
were.  It wasn't just the disparity in their ages.  His wife made even
the plastic wineglass in her hand look elegant.  She had that

way about her.  A cool natural WASP patrician style.  This despite
that fact that in reality the former Susan Ackerman ran the drama
research department over at the Lincoln Center Library for the
Performing Arts -- a librarian- an important but distinctly un
glamourous job where what counted was smarts and efficiency, not
style.

Whereas Elizabeth looked exactly like what she was- a twenty year-old
singer-slash-dancer-slash-actress who would always be far more at home
on a stage with a top hat and tails than standing around sipping
sherry.

Maybe that was what he found so damned attractive about her.  That
straightforwardness.

Jesus, he thought.  You're thirty-nine.  She's twenty.

Grow up.

He had to admit, though, that having her home again after two months
out in L. A. already was making him nervous.

He watched Mr.  and Mrs.  Daniels walk slowly by arm in arm and smile
at them.

"You're not leaving?"  Susan said.

"Oh yes, dear," said Mrs.  Daniels.  "It's well past our dinner
time."

Her husband patted one liver-spotted arm.

"Have a lovely evening," said Susan.

"I believe we will.  You too, dear.  All of you."  They disappeared
through the doorway.  "You know what she told me?"  Susan said. 
"What?" said Elizabeth.

"Tonight's their thirtieth wedding anniversary.  And can you believe
it?  She's cooking.  Something special, she said.  Just for him."
"That's sweet."

"They're nice people.  | look at them and they always seem so happy
together.  They really still seem to be in love with one another."  "It
happens," said Tom.  Damned infrequently.

The crowd had thinned by now.  He recognized most of them but knew only
a few by name.  Risley was still there.  The dark sallow businessman
was talking to a pretty blonde girl near the Broadway side of the
rooftop.  The girl was half his age.  Risley did pretty well supposedly
and Tom could never figure why.  There was something

unctuous about the man despite his apparent friendliness, something
Tom disliked instinctively.

Maybe you're just jealous, he thought.

He watched another girl move past them and for a moment caught her eye,
a dark thin girl in a pale yellow dress who he recognized as another
dancer- this close to Lincoln Center there were a lot of them in the
building.  He remembered her saying that she studied at ABT.  He'd
spoken to her once in the laundry room on the second floor.  She'd been
open and friendly.

Now she frosted him as though he were a stranger.

He felt rebuffed.

For what he didn't know.

"How was the flight?"  he asked Elizabeth.

She sighed.  "Grueling.  We were two hours late out of LAX.  I haven't
even unpacked yet.  But it was too nice an evening to stay indoors.  I
had a glass of flat ginger ale and sat staring at my bags for a few
minutes and said to hell with it and came on up."

"It is a beautiful evening," said Susan.

He had to agree.  The sun lay low on the horizon yet already the moon
was out.  Bright streaks of red and gold on one side and the grey white
moon on the other.  It was going to be clear tonight.  Even in New York
you'd be able to see the stars.

"The moon's full," said Tom.  "Summer madness."

"Sure," said Elizabeth.

""It's true.  l did a piece on it for Parade once.  Years ago.  While l
was still- you know- writing.  Twice a day the ocean rises and falls
about four feet I think it is, pulled by the moon's gravity.  We're
seventy-five percent water so it pulls us too.  The puli's greatest at
full moon and new moon.  And so is emergency-room activity.  Assaults,
rapes, suicides.  That kind of thing.  They've computerized the police
statistics and there really is a correspondence.  Plus any nurse will
tell you that there are a lot more babies born when the moon's full.
Stirs the hormones or something."

"I remember that piece," said Susan.  "Aren't we supposed to lose about
a 100th of a gram of weight, something like that?"

"The full-moon diet!"  said Elizabeth.  They laughed.

"The moon's a woman.  And women do like their diets."

They ignored that.

"I never thought it was fair," said Susan.  "The sun's always a man and
the moon's always a woman, in just about every culture.  Take Diana.
She's goddess of the hunt and the moon.  Why that combination I don't
know.  Maybe because we were night hunters first, skulking around the
savannahs by moonlight.  Or men were, anyhow, I dunno.  But it's
Apollo- her brother- who brings light and prosperity.  You ever hear of
a man bringing light and prosperity?"

"Edison.  But not recently," Tom agreed.

"I really do think there's something to this tidal pull business,
though" said Elizabeth.  "I'm not much for the bars god knows but it
seems like every time I sort of get restless at night and want to go
out,

I look up at the sky and there it is.  A full moon."

"Same here," said Tom.

Susan gave him a look.  She didn't like him hitting the bars, moon or
no moon.  And she certainly didn't appreciate his mentioning this
particular form of recreation to Elizabeth.

Fuck it, he thought.  I do what I do.  Damned if I'm hiding anything.

"How's Andy.?"  said Elizabeth.  Changing the subject.  Susan's early
frost had not been lost on her.  A bright young lady.

"Andy's fine," she said.  "His head-cold's gone and neither of us
caught it for a change.  He and Matt Donovan are off to see some
ridiculous horror movie called Coven.  I think he missed you, though.

You should drop by and see him tomorrow."

"I will."

It was then that he saw the dancer again.

And heard the strange low moan all the way across the rooftop.  Heads
were turning.

He saw her crouched against the four-foot concrete retaining wall.
There was something in her hands but Risley and the blonde were in the
way so that at first he couldn't see.  Then what remained of the crowd
parted- he could almost feel a wave of shocked revulsion coming off
them as they moved away- and then he could see, and instantly wished he
hadn't.

She had a half-empty litre bottle of wine.  She was holding it i both
hands and moving it back and forth beneath the light dress.

Moving it inside her.

Her eyes were rolling, her teeth clenched and she trembled; moaning.

Her lips pulled away from grinding teeth, sweat poured off her face,
her long hair thrashing.

The hem of the dress was stained with blood.

"Jesus!"

"Let me by," somebody said behind him.  "I'm a doctor."

Tom watched the old man move through the crowd.  He was aware of Clan
and another security man, Gonzales, standing next to him and Susan.

The girl was pushing deeper.  Blood was running down both her legs.

The old man reached for the bottle.

"It's all right," he said gently.  "Easy now.  Give me the bottle. 
Come on."

Her eyes flashed open.

Her mouth twisted.

The doctor had a single sudden moment to recognize his danger and Torn
saw him stagger, unbelieving, as the base of the bottle slammed against
his chin, its force enormous, the bottle shattering and continuing
upward in a bloody are across his face and forehead.  Clan was already
moving.  Gonzales a step behind him.

The dancer dropped the broken bottleneck and turned to face the
retaining wall.

Raised one leg and began to climb.

Clan lunged at her low, wrenched her off the wall, wrapped his arms
around her legs while Gonzales grabbed her waist from the other side.
The girl struggled, screaming, a high-pitched furious wail as she
pounded Dan's head and shoulders.  The black man kept his head down
low, in what was almost a boxer's stance, and held on.

They hauled her flailing toward the door.

The doctor lay on his side trying to stop the pulse of blood with his

hands and then his handkerchief.  A wide flap of flesh depended from
his chin.  He kept trying to hold it in place.  Residents were coming
to his aid.  Now that she was out of there.

At the doorway the girl grabbed hold of the casing trim, resisting with
all her might.  Two big men, he thought, and they can barely move her.
Her mouth spewed foam, spittle flying as she struggled.  Two more
security guards appeared on either side, began to pry her fingers off
the trim one by one.  She screamed and tried to bite, lurching like a
snapping dog.

The fingers lost their purchase.

Stumbling on the staircase they hauled her down.

The door slammed shut behind them.

The screams from below faded.  They had got her into the elevator and
were on their way down.

Drugs, someone murmured.

Crazy.

She always seemed like such a nice girl

Risley and Bob Hobart were helping the doctor to the door.  The doctor
had all he could do to keep his bloodsoaked handkerchief pressed
against his face and keep from fainting.  Risley and Hobart practically
had to carry him.

Guests were leaving.  Among those who stayed behind a hush had fallen
and the cheap wine was suddenly popular again.  "What the hell was
that?"  said Elizabeth.  "Damned if l know."  "Let's go," said Susan.

They walked out the exit door, down the short flight of stairs and
through the hall to the bank of elevators.  Tom pressed the call
button.  They stood together waiting in a strange vivified silence.

The double doors opened and they stepped inside.  Tom hit number 2.
Susan leaned heavily against the wall.  No one spoke.  The elevator
slid seamlessly down the twenty stories to their floor and stopped.

They stepped out into the long, dimly-lit hallway.

Outside, it was not yet dark.

There was no escaping the voices once they started.

Some nights he'd lie here with a pillow over his head but it didn't
help, he kept listening, despite himself- trying to hear, almost, which
was weird because he sure didn't want to- and even if most of it was
just a muffled blur things still got through, especially his name,
especially that, especially when they said Andy.  And his name came up
a lot.

His Walkman was busted and he'd lost his tv and Sega Genesis privileges
for a week over that shouting-in-class thing (how come it was okay for
them to shout but not fir him?) so that left reading.  Sometimes he
could pick up a book or an old copy of Eerie or Creepy or Vampirella
and read until their voices were just a dull droning in his head, until
the stories got, to him.  Maybe he could do that now.

He was at the part in The Island of Dr.  Moreau where Pendrick goes to
the Beast People and hears the Saying of the Law.  Maybe that would do
it.

He could hear them in the living room yelling about Lizzy.  He

heard her name.  Elizabeth this.  Elizabeth that.  Something about his
dad and women.  He didn't know if his dad went out with other women
though he knew he did go out alone nights sometimes- but what Lizzy
would have to do with that he didn't know and didn't like to think
about.

Lizzy was okay.  He liked Lizzy a lot.  He didn't care what his morn
was saying.  She treated him like a person, not like some stupid kid.
She hardly ever yelled.  She didn't like horror movies much but she did
like movies, even the action stuff.  They'd pick up stuff at Tower
Video together and never argued about what to rent.  Lizzy wasn't just
a sitter, she was a friend.

He wondered what would happen if he just walked in there and told them
to please shut up.

He thought he knew what the answer to that would be.

So if you couldn't do that then what did you do?

You sat there.  You sat there in your room wishing they were happier,
wishing they didn't have to fight so much or that even if they did
fight you didn't have to hear it and feel bad for some dumb reason, as
though it were your fault, as though they'd been happy before you came
along and screwed things up for them.  His dad said they were always
happy at first.  Did that mean they'd started to get mad at one another
before they had him or only after?

He'd wondered that a lot.  But he couldn't really ask them.  Because
what if they said after?  Nobody was going to say, you rotten kid, it's
your fault.  No matter what the truth was they'd try to make it sound
like he had nothing to do with it.  But he'd know.  He'd know and then
what would he do?

He rolled over on his back and stared up at the ceiling.

He was glad he'd be going to camp in a week or two.  He had all his
gear ready in the closet- canteen, scout knife, and a forty-pound bow
with a quiver full of target arrows.  His mom hadn't liked the bow and
arrows but his dad had had one as a kid and sided with him for a
change.  Camp was probably stupid basically and it wasn't that he loved
the woods- in fact he was a little scared of sleeping out there -but at
least he'd be out of this place, away from this awful aching worrying
and caring and this anger whenever they got to doing this.

He reached for his copy of The Island of Dr.  Moreau and started
reading.

"Are we not men?"  said the Swine Men and the Leopard Men.

Misshapen and forlorn, they ambled him through the dark island forest.
\020She was almost finished stacking the dishwasher when the phone
rang in the hall.  Her headache was a killer.  The sound of running
water, clattering plates, and now the telephone, didn't help any. 
"Tom? Can you get it, please?"

Tension and cheap wine, she thought.  I ought to know better.  The
phone continued ringing.

She could hear CNN in the living room.

He wasn't moving.

She turned off the water, grabbed a hand-towel and walked into the
living room.  Tom was sitting in the easy chair scowling at the tv
screen.  She walked past him to the hall and the phone rang again as
she reached for the receiver.

"Hello?"

No one answered.

Now what the hell was this?  One of his goddamn girlfriends?  She did
hear breathing.  Only it wasn't the usual obscene-caller breathing.  it
was lighter, softer.

Like a woman's.

"Who is this?"

When the woman spoke she could barely hear her.

"Saint Luke's hospital?  I need... I need..."

My god.  That again, she thought.  The woman was one digit off.  It was
a six instead of a seven in the fifth number you dialed.  Once when
they'd been living over on 72nd Street it had been the Ginko Gardens. A
Chinese restaurant.  That was one digit off in the seventh number. She
didn't know which was worse, people phoning for take-out or the sad,
troubled voices that sometimes called for the hospital.

Like this one.

The woman sounded bad.

"Sorry, you've got the wrong number.  You want 3970644."  "... could
you, please..."  Pleading with her.  "I'm sorry."  She hung up.

It wasn't nice to do that just like that but the headache was
describing intricate whirls of pain inside her skull and there was a
misery in the woman's voice, almost a panic, that she simply couldn't
handle.  Let her dial it again, she thought.  She'll get through.  She
walked back into the living room.  "Thanks," she said.

He didn't even look at her.

It was always this way after a fight.  One or the other of them simply
stopped talking.  She was as bad as he was.

It hadn't always been this way.

There was a time they'd talked things through.  Before the affairs
started.  Before he started drinking.  Before he'd quit his job at the
agency with the ridiculous idea that he could write a novel.

The ridiculous idea that he could sell a novel.  Because he'd written
one, all right.  A literary novel.  It went on and on for about five
hundred pages.  Taking the high road to nowhere.

A novel just wasn't in him.

So he'd gone back to work as an editor, hating it.  Hating himself
for

that matter- she knew that- but unlike her he refused to try therapy,
which was what he really needed.

The drinking was compulsive.

He didn't realize it but Tom was on the run from her.  And from Andy.
He had been for a while now.  Ties to home and family were not so much
ties as a long leash.  He tugged at it constantly.

And unless things changed it was only a matter of time before he left
them altogether.

There was nothing she could do about it.

She had come to realize that with a growing sadness.  She started back
to the kitchen.  "I'm going out," he said.

She thought, now why doesn't that surprise me?  She wanted to cry.  The
headache was raging.  "All right."

She stood there a moment in case there was more.

There wasn't.

She decided to let the dishes go for a while.  She needed to lie down.
The Tylenol with codeine hadn't kicked in.  The headache was growing
roots in her head.  Maybe some aspirin.

On the way to the bathroom she passed Andy's room and thought, thank
god you'll be in camp soon.  At first she'd been against his going. 
For purely selfish reasons.  She knew how much she'd miss him.

But Andy didn't need this constant tension.  It seemed to her that
sending him to camp was yet another turning point in their relations, a
kind of surrender.  We can't quite accommodate you, Andy, it seemed to
say, not the way we are now.  We've tried to but we can't, l love you
with all my heart but this has got to be worked out between us once and
for all.  So go off and at least for now, have a good time, have some
fun- and maybe we'll screw you up that much less.

She closed the bathroom door behind her and looked at herself in the
mirror.

You look like hell, she thought.  There was a redness in her eyes as
though she'd been crying.  Her skin looked blotchy.

She opened the cabinet and reached for the aspirin.  Behind the bottle
she noticed Tom's old stained tortoise-shell straight razor.  The

razor had belonged to his father.  Tom never used it and she'd have
liked to throw it away especially with a child around but Tom had
insisted.  She couldn't argue.  He had precious little left of his
father.  She opened the bottle.

She heard the front door to their apartment open and then close again

Not even a goodbye, she thought.

What the hell's happened to us?

She shook out two aspirin and swallowed them dry, recapped the bottle
and returned it to the shelf.  She closed the cabinet door and looked
at herself again in the mirror

I look old, she thought.  I look old and tired and tense and... oh god
I look ugly.

Suddenly and without warning she felt an overwhelming sadness and
pressed her hands over her face to stifle the sob so that Andy wouldn't
hear.  There was a pressure in her chest that seemed at once to oppress
her and flood her with adrenaline It wrenched at her muscles and filled
her eyes with tears.  She felt dizzy and light-headed and thrust her
hand out to steady herself and heard the mirror crack

She looked up in surprise and drew her hand away.  She saw that she'd
been lucky- she wasn't cut.  But the mirror was shattered, a silvery,
crystalline spider-web that seemed to buckle inward

My god, she thought.  There's a quarter inch of glass on that mirror,
backed with stainless steel.

She opened it carefully so as not to jar loose the broken glass and
stared, barely comprehending There was a dent the size of a baseball in
the steel backing.

How could she be capable of that kind of impact?

She felt the urge to cry again.

God!  get to bed, she thought.  She carefully closed the cabinet
door.

Weaving and unsteady she walked across the hall to the bedroom and slid
into bed.  She was frightened.  It had come on so suddenly.  From
headache to... this.  If she'd known where Tom was going she'd have
called him.

Help.  Just this once.

She closed her eyes and tried to relax into the pillow, to block
everything out, all the events of the day that may have caused this
sudden panic.  But the tears kept coming, more quietly but unstoppable,
and there was still this strange feeling inside her and this surging
adrenaline.

She felt a slim thread of anger connect and tense the muscles of her
body.  It was alloyed with fear.  The anger was specific, its focus Tom
and Andy.  At Tom for leaving her alone again.  At Andy for being the
locus and nexus of her guilt.  The fear was more diffuse.  It rose
partly out of the anger, because she did not really know why the anger
should be there.  Certainly not when it came to Andy.

She loved Andy.

She could never hurt him.

But the thought was insistent.

She could crack them.  Both of them.  As easily as she'd cracked the
mirror.

No!

Pressure bore down upon her like rough hands.  She opened her eyes in
apprehension, struggling for control.  She felt a clutching between her
legs, an ache, demanding.  It connected somehow to Tom and Andy.  Her
eyes squinted shut and for a moment it was better that way.  The empty
darkness.

And then she saw that summer by the shore when she was a little girl
and her mother had coaxed her into water that was too deep and her
father was dying of cancer and she saw faces of friends she had lost
touch with years ago, in college, in high school for god's sake, heard
them accuse her of faithlessness, of never having loved them.  She saw
the moment of Andy's birth.

What in god' name is happening to me?

She was dying.

This was supposed to happen when you died, wasn't it?  In the seconds
before.  Faces, a life remembered.  But she knew she wasn't dying.  She
felt a deep, dreamlike restlessness- like a fever-dream, wakefulness
and a kind of hypnogenetic sleep driving one another like a mingling of
poison kisses.  And now she was the object of hate and scorn, the scorn
of complete strangers, people and shadow-images

chasing her through a bright empty landscape as she ran from them with
all her power.  Open your eyes, she thought.

She did.

The room was gone.

The running, the strangers, the deep water, the friends who were no
longer friends- all of them were still there.

Relax, she thought.  Relax and sleep.  Because this is all right if
you're asleep.  But if you're awake you're crazy.  Breath deep.  She
closed her eyes.

The images engulfed her, a film running just behind her eyelids.  She
submitted.

Eventually, after some time, her sense of desperation faded.  The ache
remained, and so did the fear and the anger but they were easier to
bear now, less at odds with one another, part of a whole.  She could
open her eyes and the room was as it should be, back to normal -though
she thought that she had never seen shadows so deeply formed and
textured.  But she preferred to keep them shut now.  A man was running
from her through the city streets.  That, at least, made a kind of
sense to her.

So that when it came at last and enveloped her completely she only
thought, this is not exactly sleep, and sank slowly into a silent
warren of dim nightmares and they did not unduly disturb her.  Outside
the wind was rising.  She felt it cool her cheeks.  It was her last
real sensation.

She- Susan- wife to Tom and mother to Andy, protagonist for
thirty-eight years to her own life story, began to disappear.

Elizabeth lay naked on her bed and felt the breeze from the big
screened window drift gently over her body, damp with sweat against the
fresh sheets.  As always after exercising, her body felt tight and
strong.  The temperature tonight was perfect, cooling, soothing.  She
stretched, her muscles expanding and then relaxing, tendrils of summer
wind reaching beneath her to the small of her back arched against the
bedsheets.

She heard laughter outside the window.  She got up and looked.

Tom Braun and Clan, the doorman.

As far as she was concerned, the two most attractive guys in the
building.

That she was attracted to Clan vaguely pleased her.  She'd never been
turned on by a black man before and it was nice to know that it was
possible.  A kind of skewed racism, she supposed, but there you had
it.

That she was attracted to Tom didn't please her one damn bit.  She was
younger than Tom and Susan by nearly twenty years but they were more
than neighbors- she considered them friends.  She considered Andy a
friend too and here she was, more than a little interested in his
father.

Not that she would ever do anything about it.

Not while he and Susan were together.

She watched him turn and walk away, headed east toward Broadway.  Clan
stood at the door, his smile gradually fading, looking out at the
street, unaware of her naked in the window a floor above.

In L.A. during the shoot a low-budget thriller called Hide and Seek-
her apartment had faced nothing more interesting than the generator.
She had missed this one.  She had missed watching the cabs pull up
through the circular driveway to the three glass doors, the big black
limos, watching people come and go, catching snatches of conversation
and the sounds of traffic, the rain in the garden, the birch tree
brushing against her window.

A second-floor front apartment in New York City.  You had only to open
a window to let the world inside.

On a still afternoon she could hear singing lessons being given
somewhere above her, voices and a firm piano.  Across the way a cellist
practiced daily.

Sometimes she thought she heard gunfire- though they were probably just
backfires.  Even this she enjoyed since they held no threat to her
directly.  Along with the police sirens and fire engines wailing
through the streets this was New York to her, its urgency, its drama.
It was good to be home.

Tom was the only problem.  A problem she couldn't let become a
problem.

There had been noises- shouting- coming from their kitchen earlier.
She'd gone into her own kitchen for a cup of coffee and she could hear
them faintly through the wall.  That she could hear them at all meant
they were pretty loud.  Which meant they'd been fighting again.

She felt awful for Andy.

It wasn't lair.  Half the men she met were absolute total luck-ups and
the other half were either gay or married.  Same old song.

Tom was a nice man basically.  She'd sensed that right away.  Maybe not
right now, maybe not to himself or Susan or even to Andy sometimes, but
she sensed that once he got out of this particular job and into another
that would change.  A job you hated could turn everything sour.

A man like Tom was temptation.

Because... maybe.."  you only had to wait.

Go unpack, she thought.  Get out of the window.  Before somebody sees
you up here stark naked and decides to climb a tree.

Instead of unpacking she sighed and rolled back onto the bed.  She ran
her hands slowly over the good firm flesh of her stomach.  Her skin was
dry by now and warm.  She remembered that Susan and some of the others
had been talking at the patty about smelling lollipops or something
this afternoon- some kind of candy- asking if she'd smelled it too. But
she was still in the air over Kennedy.  She smiled mischievously.

If she had a lollipop now, she'd suck it.

Cut it ottL she thought.

It was still early but it had been a long day.  She was exhausted.  She
closed her eyes and thoughts of Tom came unbidden while she listened to
the sounds of the street and the city night.  She moved a hand to her
breast and felt it pulse with her heartbeat.  You can unpack tomorrow,
she thought.  To hell with it.

A short time later she fell asleep.

 At the corner of 69th Street Tom waited while a black stretch limo
went by, and then he crossed the street.  The entrance to the Burnside-
a high-rise much like his own- was busy at the moment, not just the
usual tenants coming and going but couples lounging against the big
red-brick planters and a steady flow of well-dressed yuppies moving
through the revolving doors.  Somebody was throwing a party.

He passed a furniture store and a lighting store, long-necked chromium
lamps peering out through the windows like spacecraft from War of the
Worlds.  Across the street the vegetable market and butcher shop were
still open and doing good business.  The beauty parlor and Japanese
restaurant next to them would probably fold with the next rent-hike.

On the center strip of fenced-in scraggly grass and trees that divided
Broadway a drunk was doing a tap dance for the amusement of the
passersby.

He passed a drugstore, a Baskin-Robbins and a McDonald's.  On the
northwest corner of 71 st Street in front of a bar two young cops

were trying to pull a middle-aged woman into their cruiser.  They
couldn't seem to get hold of her.  She kept flapping her arms like some
huge gawky flightless bird.  A crowd was gathering, smiling, laughing.
Tom stopped for the light and watched them.

The woman's blue summer suit was expensive and so were the high-heel
shoes.  A BIoomingdales' bag sat beside her on the curb.  At the moment
she was using the shoes against the cops, trying to kick them where it
would do the most good.  So far they were managing to avoid her.  Then
she dropped the purse off her shoulder, swung it and hit the cop on her
left full in the face.  Thwack.  Good leather.

"Shit!"  said the cop and grabbed himself a fistful of summer suit,
pulling her backward by the shoulder and forearm while his partner went
for her thighs, lifting her off the ground.  A homeless guy opened the
back door of the prowl car for them with a flourish and they shoved her
inside.

Summer in the City.

The woman was calling them every name in the book, banging on the
windows, mad as hell.  The cop she'd hit in the face climbed into the
driver's seat while the other cop retrieved her Bloomie's bag and slid
into the passenger side.  They drove away.

He crossed 71st Street, passed a roller blade shop, a jewelry store, a
restaurant, a Photomat, a natural food store, and a vegetable market.
At a kiosk at 72nd Street he bought himself a Post in case there was
nothing doing at the bar and a pack of Winstons.  The girl who ran the
kiosk was very pretty, with long brown silky hair.  He'd seen her there
before and wondered how a woman that good-looking wound up in a
street-peddler's job.  He glanced at the headline of the Post.

16 DEAD IN LOVE-SUICIDE PACT.

He turned left on 72nd Street, wondering what the hell that was all
about.

There were still a few cigar-chomping old men in front of the OTB
discussing the day's action.  The TV sets were still on in the window
of

72nd Street Electronics, Murphy Brown hauling her new baby into the
office on a dozen screens.  Across the street the mannequins in Areil
posed lubriciously in silk camisoles, negligees and lace bodysuits
-bringing Elizabeth, similarly attired, right to mind.

Hands off, he thought.  Both physically and mentally.

Enough.  You've got enough problems as it is.

You bought into her, he thought.  Into Susan.  The problem is not Susan
but that you're too damn young to have a family.  You didn't buy into
them and supporting them in a job you hated.  Much as he loved Andy.

It felt too damn much like the end of things.

A light was still on in the mystery bookstore between the butcher shop
and the travel agency.  He'd worked in a bookstore once as a teenager
one summer and knew the light on this late meant they were probably
taking inventory inside.

Beside the bookstore was a fish market and beside the market was
Maclnery's.

Class, he thought.

His favorite bar was next to a fish store.

He peered through the plate-glass window.  It looked pretty lively.
Bailey was behind the bar and he recognized a few of the regulars.  He
saw that the women were out in pretty good number.  Maclnery's was a
neighborhood place and women tended to feel comfortable there.  So
instead of the usual New York quota of, say, four guys to every woman,
Maclnery's ratio was more like two to one, and sometimes it was dead
even.  He folded his Post, tucked it under his arm and pushed open the
door.

The jukebox blared.  Bailey glanced up from behind the bar and
smiled.

The crowd opened up for him like a mouth always hungry for more and he
moved on inside.

For a weekend summer night the streets were quiet.

At the World Cafe and the Aegean on Columbus and at the trendier China
Club uptown at the Beacon Hotel on Broadway the crowds were still thin
and would remain so until about midnight.

Further uptown, at Pearlie's on 84th Street, a young early drunk
stumbled on his way out the door- but here the long narrow bar space
was already so crowded with people drinking, shouting over the music,
hustling one another, that there was nowhere for him to go.  The drunk
stayed upright, blinking, spilling the beer of the guy in the cowboy
shirt in front of him.

Over on Amsterdam the well-dressed, polite young crowd at Sweetwater
were waiting for the show to start- Thelma Houston -and listening to a
Marvin Gaye song on the juke in the meantime.

On the streets the traffic was light, pedestrians few.

The wino on the center-strip divider of Broadway at 69th had quit

tap dancing.  Now he was sitting on a bench, waiting for the right
woman to pass by, a suitable target for attack.  His attack was always
the same.  "When ya gonna wake up and smell the coffee?"  he'd growl.
The words seem to yap inside him like hostile puppies.  Without a woman
around they could not get out.  He needed to be free of them but
without the appropriate woman he could not.  He pulled on the dark
brown bottle and watched and waited.

Inside MacDonald's Jim "Jumma" Jackson entered and looked around and
sauntered to the counter.  The girls behind the counter smiled at him.
Jumma was a handsome man.  He ordered three Big Macs and a chocolate
shake, large order of fries.

He carried the plastic tray to his table and sat down, arranging his
coat so that the gun lay flat in his raincoat pocket against his leg
and would not dislodge itself accidentally.  He was not at all nervous.
The nervousness would come later, when he went back to the counter and
pulled the gun.  For now he just looked around.

An old woman sat muttering to herself a few tables back.  Homeless, all
her shit stuffed into shopping bags at her feet.  He watched her pick
at the ulcerous sores on her legs, scratch her dirty face.

No trouble there.

No trouble anywhere he could see.

A couple of Chinese kids on dates, eating cheap.  An old guy.

A few tables down there was a brother with the twitchy kind of eyes
that marked you for a booster, strictly small-time- hot watches, tee
shirts rings.  That shit.  He'd known some real good boosters in his
day.  One sister in particular who was so fucking good she could boost
a full mink coat out of Bendel's or Bergdorf's, stuff it between her
legs and walk right out of there.

None of it was trouble.

He nibbled his fries.  He figured he'd wait till the booster drifted.
You never knew.  Could be somebody's boyfriend, one of the girls behind
the counter, and you could never say when some motherfucker'd go all
Bruce Lee on you.

You take your time, he thought.

He sipped the shake and ate his burgers, the weight of the pistol
reassuring at his side.

At the kiosk at 72nd Street Mary Silver handed the man his change.
|fthe man knew her and could have read her smile, he'd have seen the
contempt there.

She sold the shit but she didn't have to like it,

Screw, Playboy, Penthouse, Jugs.  They were all the same to her.  Night
after night she sat on the stool behind the newsstand surrounded by the
stuff.

It was always a man who would buy.  Never a woman.  Not once.

And always the contempt was there.  Another guy in rut without a place
to put it.

A woman in tights and Nikes handed her two dollars for a copy of the
Sunday Times.  She made change.

"Thanks," she said.  This time the smile was genuine.

On Saturday nights it was mostly the Sunday Times and the Sunday News
people were buying, and that made Saturday nights okay in her book.  By
six o'clock the front sections were delivered and she and the boys
would put them together by nine- and after that most of her business
was papers, not pore.

She could remember a time when it hadn't mattered.  She'd even been
curious enough to look at the stuff.

That was before the fat man with the scars on his neck and the breath
that stunk of Dentyne gum and cigarettes who- in the process of raping
her, while his big hands were on her breasts and her own on his cock,
trying to get his sad deflated cock up so he wouldn't turn lunatic and
kill her- had said she looked like something out of Playboy.

Playboy.

Nice.  It was supposed to be a compliment.

It was right after that that she'd decided to take the course in Dim
Ching and Karate and started keeping the twelve-inch blade beneath the
counter at night.  And started hating pornography.

She'd discussed it with the women in her group.  They all had reached
the same conclusion.  There was no excuse for pore other than

to debase women.  It was an instrument of terror, pure and simple -the
patriarchal society keeping the girls in line by turning them into
boy-toys.  As far as she was concerned Guccione, Goldstein and the
others were as bad as Hitler- freaks and genocides, all of them.  There
was irony here.

The only reason she'd gotten into the business in the first place was
that she'd looked around one day and realized that in all of Manhattan
there wasn't a single newspaper kiosk run by a woman.  She'd decided to
change that.  She'd... infiltrated.

She'd found that there were simply no profits in newspapers.  It was
all in cigarettes and magazines.

Skin-mags were the biggest draw of all.

So she had herself a situation here.  She'd decided not to buy the
kiosk.

"Thanks," she said as yet another asshole handed her a ten dollar bill
for a copy of Penthouse.  She gave him back his change]

Most nights she could carry this off with some measure of philosophy.
She had an application in as manager over at Barnes & Noble- this was
just temporary.  But tonight she was having a hell of a time.  Her head
was throbbing.  She'd been popping aspirin all evening but it didn't
seem to help.  If one more creep eyed her breasts beyond the wall of
newspapers she just might murder the bastard.

It'll pass, she thought.

But it did not pass, as the night drew Mary Silver slowly down to
morning.

"Five copies at $6.95," said Sheldon.  "Three at $7.50."

Lydia ticked them off on her check sheet

Sheldon took a step down on the ladder to begin the next row of books-
they were on the hard-boiled section now in the back of the store- lost
his footing, and damn near tumbled off the ladder.  "Sheldon!  Watch it
for god's sake!"  Sheldon just looked at her.

"Jeez, Lyd.  I was the one who almost broke his neck here, you know?"

He was right.  She was being testy.  Inventory was almost finished.

Another hour or so and they could get out of here.  She was exhausted,
though.  And nervous somehow.  Keyed-up.  She guessed that was the
price you paid for a little extra enjoyment sometimes.  She was
supposed to have driven back to town early last night from her week in
Davis Park but things with Ross had been so good she'd decided to stay
the night and return this morning.  Then they'd been sort of slow
getting started- slow getting out of bed, actually- and there was that
awful tie-up on Riverside Drive, and now they were running incredibly
late.

Sheldon was good even to be there at this hour and here she was yelling
at him.

"Sorry, Sheldon."

"It's all right."

It was the oddest thing, though.  She could not get Ross out of her
mind.  The inventory was important- damned important when you were the
owner and looking at another rent increase three months from now- but
all she could think of was Ross.

She kept feeling him inside her.  Actually feeling it.

She could close her eyes and see him naked and feel the strokes.

God!  were it not for the inventory she could've stayed where she was
and at this very moment they'd be... She felt faint.

And she felt regret.

But she could not have left the job to Sheldon.  Sheldon was sweet but
he was working here because he loved books, not money.  He could knew
every book by John D. MacDonald and Elmore Leonard practically by heart
but he could barely make change of a quarter.  No head for figures at
all.  Left to him the inventory would have been a shambles.

As it was she'd had to watch him like a hawk.  He'd miss whole clusters
of books, skip them over completely despite the bottle-thick glasses he
was wearing, and Lydia would have to point this out to him.  He'd blush
beneath the blister of pimples.  Sorry.

He was sweet but exasperating.  Especially after five hours on the road
and five more here in the store.

And these.."  images that kept distracting her.

Time for a break, she thought.  The last hour would probably go faster
anyway if they had a little coffee in them.

"Come on down, Shel.  Let's take five."

"Great."  He climbed down off the ladder and wiped his dusty hands on
his rumpled short-sleeve shirt.

Lydia took off her own glasses and put them on a pile of books beside
her and rubbed her tired eyes.

Immediately the images returned.  Ross inside her, his hands on her
breasts.  Her breasts actually tingled.

She blushed and turned away.

She poured them each some coffee and handed a cup to Sheldon and sat
down.

Can he tell?  she thought.  Just by looking at me?

She felt that transparent.

He was eyeing her somewhat.."  appreciatively.

She was not what you'd call beautiful.  Too short, for one thing, a bit
too small on top and a bit too wide in the bottom, attractive but sort
of plain-looking.  She had spent a good portion of her life watching
carefully for those appreciative looks- which rarely came.  So she knew
one when she saw it.

Could Sheldon have a crush on her?

She hoped not.  For his sake.

Sheldon was just terminally gawky.  And there was Ross.

She sipped the coffee.

Something stirred inside her, a memory that was only half a memory,
Ross squirming sweating writhing deep inside her.

She heard the wall-clock ticking behind her.  She felt faint again,
held on to the wooden stool she was sitting on until it passed and
stared at the wall of books.

And for Lydia too, the night wore on.

Maclnery's was nothing special but he liked it there.  The place was
small and dark, about a dozen seats at the bar and twenty tables
crammed together toward the back, serviced by a small kitchen.

There was a red brick fireplace opposite the bar which they actually
used in winter and which even now sported half a dozen logs piled on
the grate and an antique stand for the shovel, poker and tongs.  There
were cut flowers on the mantle over the fireplace and hanging plants
over the tables along with low-slung green-shaded lights which made
each table look as though there were a poker game in progress.

it was a comfortable place, relaxed.  Even on a night like this with
the crowd three deep at the bar.

He ordered a second scotch from Bailey.

Bailey was a friend by now.  He'd known him for years.  Closed the
place up with him plenty of times and helped him stack the chairs while
they had a couple on the house with the lights low and door locked
behind them.  When Bailey was drunk he just slowed down.

You could wait five minutes for him to finish a single sentence while
he stroked that blonde-red Berserker beard of his and sipped his beer
and took his time thinking things through- but when the sentence did
come out it was not going to be stupid.

Tom had never seen him lose control.

He could not exactly say that of himself.

He leaned back against the fireplace and watched the waitresses shuttle
back and forth from the kitchen.  Every table was filled and Chris,
Erica and Rita were obviously having a pretty busy night of it.  Erica
looked particularly beat.  As beat as a woman that good-looking was
ever going to look.  He watched her toss her long dark hair and slump
exhausted at the bar at the waitress station, handing Bailey a check.
You could almost read her mind.  One more down and good riddance.

One of the cooks- Dom or Dominick, something like that -came trotting
out of the kitchen and asked Bailey for a beer.  Bailey poured him one,
fast, and the man scuttled back toward the kitchen, wiping sweat off
his face with his free hand.

He passed Erica serving drinks to a table of four, smiled and patted
her once on the ass.  She shot him a glance.  The glance said it would
be her great pleasure to skin him alive right then and there.

He guessed there was trouble again in the kitchen.

There was a woman he recognized standing by the jukebox.  He'd seen her
in here a number of times and wanted no part of her.  She drank too
much and turned ugly when she did.  And she was already more than
halfway in the bag.  Something flickered across her face that was part
scowl and part come-on as she ran her finger along the list of
song-titles.  Somebody would take her home tonight- but it wouldn't be
him.

There was a very pretty woman at the telephone and two more -just kids,
really- talking beside him.  Another pair at the bar and a thin blonde
in a red sweater who appeared to be drinking alone.

Alone if you didn't count the scruffy guy in khaki who was drunkenly,
clumsily coming on to her.  He watched her shake her head no and smile.
Great profile.  Lovely pale complexion.  The guy hung on a while, then
shrugged and turned away.  He saw his opening and made for it.

She was drinking bloody marys.

Her arms were slim, the hands graceful.

He stood beside her, talking to Bailey, establishing that he was known
here, safe to talk to, finishing his scotch and ordering another.
Bailey knew the drill.  The fact was that good bartender could do half
your work for you.  And Bailey was a good bartender.

She was listening.  She couldn't help it.  The guy beside her was
listening too- Tom could see him sinking lower onto his stool in slow
alky oblivion.

Then Bailey pulled his usual masterstroke.

"Tom?  Do you know Cindy?"

An introduction.  She smiled and turned and they shook hands.  Her eyes
were deep blue and wide and absolutely gorgeous.  He owed Bailey on
this one.  He'd say so.  Later.

Bailey poured a rum and coke and watched Tom Braun laughing talking to
Cindy.  Good to see somebody having fun, he thought.  The bar's a
little weird tonight.

He'd thought that maybe you'd have to have worked here night after
night to notice it so he'd mentioned it to Erica.  But Erica just gave
him a look.  So he'd thought, well, maybe it's my imagination -but he
didn't really believe that.  Since he'd come on at six, before the bar
was even very busy, he'd been aware of some kind of thickness in the
air, a kind of tension, a sort of manic strain to the conversation.

Like the night was coiling up for something.

He'd seen it before.

New Year's Eve was always pretty strange, and Saint Patty's Day, and
sometimes even Christmas, when the bar was filled with people too
lonely to have anywhere else to go.  He remembered working a union bar
once on a night after a long hard trucker's strike had ended- how the
room was charged with a high mix of rising spirits and downright bloody
murder.  The kind of night when for whatever reason fights break out
and drunks get dangerous and you kept your eyes open and an empty
bottle handy just in case.

It was irrational, maybe, but he had one now behind the bar rail.

Because of the strangeness.

Since six o'clock he'd been feeling it, a sense of disquiet just below
the surface.  And despite Erica's response to him he thought that the
waitresses must be feeling it too.  They were all a little distant
tonight, working their jobs like it was sheer drudgery- when usually
they managed to have some fun here.  It was that kind of place.

So actually he was glad to have been able to give Tom a hand with
Cindy.

That, at least, was normal.

He wondered what Susan did the nights Tom was out prowling.  Or how she
took it in the morning.  He liked Susan, even though he didn't know her
as well as he knew Tom.  Not for him to judge.  But this kind of stuff
was not terrific for a marriage.

Down at the end of the bar a woman was crowing for a gin and tonic.  He
poured it for her, thinking he was going to have to cut this one off
soon if she kept on slugging them down like this, unusual for a woman
to get so loaded so fast and so intently, thinking this carrying the
drink over to her and looking at the two young girls who for some
reason were standing there glaring at him over by the jukebox, when the
weirdest fucking notion occurred.  What if it was the women? 
Customers, waitresses.  What if it was all of them?

Nah, he thought.  You're losing it.  That's nuts.

But he looked around.  He poured and served and looked around.  And the
thought refused to go away.  Every time there was the slightest lull in
business the thought would prick at him and he'd feel the thickness
start to rise in the room and the walls start to close a little.

It wasn't the guys.

It was the women who kept reminding him of those truckers blowing off
steam after four months of no pay and no work and the wife and kids
howling, who reminded him of bad Christmas Eves and bad Saint Patrick's
Days.

It was the women.

And then he thought, that's bullshit, just look at Cindy sitting
there

with Tom, nice woman, everything fine Check her out.  Look at her
looking at him like she'd like to reach over and just... eat him up.

I'm gonna have to watch this closely, he thought.

The wind was hot.

It was a burning wind- it burned through Susan's sleep like acid on
silk, reaching deep into each smooth furrow of her body.  The nightgown
was too much.  Her breasts felt as though covered with sand, with
insects, as though she lay buried to the neck in an anthill in a hot
summer storm.  By turns it was terrible and then sweet- a tickling,
moving, crawling sensation.  An awareness of the physical that not even
sleep could override.

Her fingers moved to the neck of her nightgown, traveled down its front
and parted it over her body.  The feeling remained but it was better
now, more purely pleasure, less frightening in the complexity of its
overwhelming sensuousness.

Her tongue moved over dry cracked lips.  Her fingertips went to her
breasts, plucked the nipples up, caressed them as through layers of
sand.  A groan escaped her open mouth into the blasting wind.

What was that?

Elizabeth sat bolt upright in bed, listening.

Some sort of cry.

The sound had poured through her sleep, snatched her into wakefulness,
its final tendrils dragging over her like scraps of vine.

It had come from outside.

She leaned toward the window, her fingernails brushing the wire mesh
screen.  She looked down through the branches of the tree to the
street.  It was empty.  A gust of wind slid a sheet of newspaper along
the sidewalk, rustled the shrubbery below.  The entrance to the
building was silent.

A dream, she thought.

The newspaper lay stir less in the gutter.  She listened to the sounds
inside her apartment.  The clock ticking, the distant hum of her
refrigerator, the dense silence.

She was beginning to feel sleepy again.

Something screamed, it sounded like a child's scream and just beyond
the screen something hurtled through her field of vision, a sudden pale
blinding flash of movement.  Then stopped.  And meowed.  A cat.

A slim white cat with a black-spotted tail.

You little shit, she thought.  You scared me half to death.

The cat stared in at her wide-eyed, wary.  It paced the ledge.  Must
have come from the floor above, she thought.  Living dangerously,
making a jump like that.

Her heart was still pounding.

The cat sniffed the ledge and window-screen, its pink nose twitching.
It gazed at the tree and seemed to contemplate the downward climb. Then
it glanced back at Elizabeth.  It did not seem terribly comfortable
with her there, close enough to touch were it not for the screen.  She
wondered why.  Cats usually took to her immediately.  Poor thing.  It
really did look scared out there.  The tip of its ear was missing.

There was only a little blood, it wasn't much more than a scratch, but
the wound looked very recent.  The blood was still glistening.
Catfight, she thought.  The eyes looked alert, frightened.

Frightened of her.  She could swear it.

"What's the matter?"  she whispered.

It was as though she'd hit it with a stick.  The cat jumped out onto
the nearest branch, ran to the main trunk of the tree and then raced
suddenly down, disappearing into the shrubs below.

She watched until it was out of sight and then fell back away from the
window into the cool softness of her bed.  She lay a moment staring at
the shadows playing across the ceiling and then closed her eyes.  Too
bad, she thought.  I could have patched her up a little.

The cat's amber-yellow eyes appeared before her, bright and full of
some strange knowledge, before she fell asleep.

This lady is terrific, he thought.

Close quarters had revealed a number of things.  Slim waist, small firm
breasts beneath the tight white sweater- with mercurial nipples that
went hard or soft according to some runic chemistry, some internal
winds of change- pale, smooth skin and delicate collarbones, a long and
graceful neck, and full wide lips.  Which smiled at him frequently.

Her name was Cynthia Jackson and she lived on 74th Street just off
Central Park West.  She was probably ten years younger than Tom and did
not seem to mind the fact that he was older, she had a sister from
Chicago whose visit last week she'd found very trying, and she was a
photo-retoucher by trade and worked at home.

She in turn had elicited from him that he was an editor and that he was
both married and had a child.  This did not seem to faze her either. 
If they got by Andy they were usually interested.

So that when she got up to use the john he knew she'd be back.  He
ordered another round of drinks and watched her walk past the

tables to the ladies' room, tight jeans promising equally fine slopes
of leg and thigh.

It was only when the drinks arrived that he noticed the woman beside
him.

She was drunk, leaning low over the bar.  Not much to look at to start
with and getting much worse by the moment.  Scrawny inside a faded red
tee shirt and tired-looking.  She smiled at him.  "Hi," she said.  She
licked her lips.

Uh-oh.  he thought.  This one wants to talk.

"I'm gonna make you a promise," she said.  Her words slurred together
like a bad erasure.

"Shoot."

"Somebody don't give me a job soon, say one week, I'm gonna fucking
murder myself.  I swear it."

"Uh-huh."

"Waitress job.  HMV.  Anything.  One week and then the hell with it,
I'm checking out.  That asking too much?  Job as a waitress in a place
like this?"

"No."

"Damn right.  It's something to me, though."  She took a slug of what
appeared to be a gin and tonic.

"Look," she said.  ""I'm not stupid.  Just finished my dissertation.
Been writin' it three and a half weeks- first time out in nearly a
month.  So what do I do?  Go out and drink up what's left of my money.
In a joint like this.  Drink so much I can hardly talk to anybody.
Nobody to talk to in a month and now I can't talk to anybody.  That
make sense to you?"

"No.  You're doing okay, though."

"Thank you.  But doncha see it's self-destructive?  I gotta have
something normal happen to me.  Got to make some money.  Maybe
waitress.  "S normal.  People tip you.  Know how much it costs to write
a dissertation?  How much they charge you for the privilege of writing
yourself to death?  Lotta money."

"What was the dissertation?"

"Schizophrenia."

He could think of nothing to say to that so they drank their drinks.
What a mess, he thought.  Hair long, limp and tangled.  Skin the color
of mushrooms.  Eyes all red and bleary- they were disturbing eyes.
Beneath the weird conversation you could sense real pain, and a lot of
it, just below the surface.  Beneath the eyes there was something else.
He didn't know what and didn't want to.

"It's the dissertation's made me crazy," she said, almost to herself.
"Dissertations break up a lot of marriages, you know that?  "S very
common."  She waved her hand in dismissal.  "Me, of course, | ain't
married."

He saw Cindy walking toward him through the crowded tables.  "You'll be
all right," he said.  "Sure I will.  "Course I will."

Bailey was looking at them and Tom nodded toward the woman.  Better cut
her ojf the nod said.  Bailey nodded back.

"Friend of yours?"  said Cindy, sliding onto the barstool.

There was a cattiness there he didn't like.  It surprised him.  She
hadn't seemed the type.  It was as though between the time she'd left
the bar and the time she returned something had changed about her.  "We
just met," he said.  His tone was cool.

"That's nice," she said, a sardonic smile playing at the corners of her
mouth.

But he saw that his tone of voice had not been lost on her.  She was
staring directly into his eyes.  And the look on her face said, I 'm
taking you home tonight.  So don't be a pain in the ass, please.  Not
over her, anyway.  Relax and enjoy it.

He looked at her.  She was lovely.  He guessed that compassion should
have its limits.

The drunk was not long for the world anyhow.  Her eyes kept closing.
The long blink, his father used to call it.  There was always a hot
plate down at the end of the bar with a full pot of coffee going and
Bailey was pouring her a cup.

He brought it over.  Said something to get her attention.

She waved him away.  Lurched suddenly to her feet and began to wobble
through the crowd toward the door.

"Hey!"

Her purse was lying on the bar.  The woman stopped.  "Your purse," Tom
said.

She wobbled back to them.  Tom handed it to her and she smiled.  The
smile was pretty ghastly.

"Thanks," she said.  Then her smile faded.  "Thank you very much.  "

She wasn't thanking him for the purse.  She was thanking him for
talking.  He felt a wave of pity.  Even concern.  There was something
so final about the way she'd thanked him- as though they were the last
words she ever expected to utter.  He'd not given it much credence
before but maybe the woman was a potential suicide after all, maybe she
was serious and this last drunken lurch back through a crowd of
strangers for a pocketbook she did not much care about and would not
need where she was going was the end of it.

Jesus, he hoped not.

He watched the door close behind her.  Through the window he could see
her ascend the stairs.

Maybe not, he thought.  Drunks were full of drama.

He saw that Cindy was watching her too, very closely.  Her eyes were
distant.

He heard a loud shriek of laughter from one of the tables behind him.
He turned.

In a corner to the back of the room a woman was standing- she was one
of a party of four- shaking with laughter.  She had just poured her
drink down the shirt of the small balding man in tie and jacket beside
her, probably her date.  The other tables had noticed and the laughter
was loud and general.  Even Erica, their table's waitress, stood there
laughing.

The man stood up to shake the ice cubes off him, his bald head red and
gleaming.

He wasn't smiling.

The Boot and Jimmy Diamond stood across the street two doors down in
front of the barber shop and watched the woman leave Mclnery's.

They watched her weave past the cleaners, bobbing her head like a
chicken, tits sliding every which way under the faded red tee shirt
purse dangling loosely from her hand.  Boot had to laugh.  She was
exactly what they needed.  A real stone aiky they had here.

They waited till she got to the corner and disappeared down Riverside.
Then they crossed the street and started after her.

The lady was barely conscious.  Boot had his blade ready inside the
jacket pocket but that was just a precaution.  This was gonna be
easy.

They picked up the pace.  No sense her getting home before they reached
her.  You grab a purse, that was one thing.  She opens her door, that's
BE, and there was no point upping the stakes for the same damn take.
From the look of her she wouldn't be carrying much.  But she'd been to
a bar.  And bars cost money.

It was dark on Riverside.  Streetlights out in a couple of places,
thank you New York City.  They hung tight to the shadows and closed the
distance.  Boot had a look around.  The street was empty.  A new

Mercedes glided by and passed them.  He gave the nod.

They broke into a run.

Streetside, Boot went for the purse-strap while Jimmy Diamond came up
directly behind her and they had this down, man, really down, because
the moment Boot touched the strap Jimmy would push her in the gutter,
they had done it a hundred times by now, best team in the city.  And it
happened just the way they played it.  Boot hit the strap and Jimmy
Diamond slapped her back hard with the palms of both hands and stepped
away.

Only she didn't go down.

Drunks fell down.  Women, you could push them.

But this one just stuck out her fucking leg to brace against the impact
and at the same time whirled so fast he'd never have believed it in a
million years, whirled on Jimmy Diamond and got hold of his aFm.

And then she sort of pulled herself onto him.

Crawled onto him like some sort of bug- only fast, real fast, looking
like maybe a spider would look to you if you were another bug and about
to be eaten.

You could see Jimmy's face go grey, even though it was dark, even
though it happened in just a second.  She had him belly-to-belly with
her legs wrapped around him like she was going to luck the sonovabitch,
like she wanted to fuck him, hips moving against him like that and it
was grotesque, man, it was almost funny for a moment until the one hand
came off his shoulders while the other tightened around his neck and
Jimmy pulled back because he could see where that free hand was going
but there was nothing he could do about it, the hand clawed across his
eyes and Boot blinked his own eyes watching it, he could almost feel
the pain himself and when the blink was over so were Jimmy's eyes.

There was blood pouring down his face.  Boot screamed.  They both
screamed.

And the women let Jimmy go then and turned to Boot.

He'd never moved so fast in his fucking life.  Because there was
nothing in that face you recognized as human.  Well, there was one
thing, it was smiling.  But it was not a smile you could look at
without getting scared sick that such a thing existed.  It was not just
crazy.  The face looked at him the way a sewer rat had looked at him
once down by the East River, eyes red with the pure love of biting and
killing.  And this face smiled.

He did not look back or worry about Jimmy.  Four blocks away he got the
guts to turn and saw she wasn't following.  Another two blocks and he
realized he still had her purse dangling from his fist.

He stopped and opened it half-blindly, breathing hard, not even knowing
why he was doing it except it was the right thing to do, it was normal,
you stole a purse you went through it.

He turned it inside out on the sidewalk.

Lipstick.  Hairbrush.  Matches from Mclnery's.  Gum.  Scraps of dirty
paper.  He found the wallet and opened it.  There was a single dollar
bill inside and a dime and a nickel in the change compartment.  It was
the worst night of Boot's life.  And it was just beginning.

Andy didn't know what the noises were at first but they woke him from
his dream.

He was at summer camp climbing a mountain.  There were shade trees all
around.  The quiver of arrows was slung over his back -though for some
reason the bow was missing- and the scout knife was in his hand.  The
knife was open to the big blade because there was something on the
mountain he was supposed to be afraid of.  He wasn't really afraid,
though.  He felt sure that whatever was up there wouldn't hurt him. The
knife was just in case.

As he climbed, though, the nature of whatever was up there began to
change.  He didn't know how he knew that but he did.  At first it was a
cat like a mountain lion, then something insect-like whirring out of
sight above his head as he crawled up the rock face  Then he was
walking past a storefront, somehow not out of place there, and knew
that whatever it was, it was inside the store now and had changed
again.

He was opening the storefront door when something woke him.  It
sounded as though she was crying.

He pushed off the covers and got out of bed and peered into the
hallway, listening.

She was crying all right.  In her sleep?

For some reason he felt she was asleep.

Little liquid crying sounds.  And the breathing wash 't right.

He wondered if he should go in there.  If he was wrong and she was
awake, she might feel bad about him seeing her like that.  He didn't
want to make her feel bad.  He walked out into the hall.

She'd left the door open.  There was light in the room from the
streetlight.  He could walk by, pretend he was going to the bathroom,
take a peek and keep on going.  That way if she was awake he wouldn't
have to embarrass her.  He rubbed the sleep from his eyes, assumed what
he thought was a normal, going-totakeaowhizinthemiddle-of the-night
pace, and walked by.  And stopped.  She was alone.  His father wasn't
there.  She was asleep.  And she was naked.

He was not supposed to see her that way.

She was lying atop the covers with her nightgown open, naked
underneath.  He had never in memory seen his mother naked before.  He
had never seen what she was doing either.

Not in real life.  In some of the R-rated movies they rented sure and
even then you didn't see much.  But not a real woman.

Not his mom.

He felt dizzy.  A wave of heat passed over him, then a wave of chilling
cold.

There was something.."  not right about it.

It wasn't the masturbation.  He knew about masturbation- at least he
knew people did it, though he'd never heard of anybody doing it in
their sleep before.  And it wasn't just that it was his mother
either.

Though it was partly that.  It was the sounds.  Whimpering, crying.

Then growling.  Low in her throat like an animal.

He didn't know how he dared but he moved closer, into the room, a few
feet from the bed.

She was sweating.  Her body was coated with sweat, plastering back her
hair, pooling where her breasts pressed together trembling -trembling
because both hands were down there now, her legs spread wide and the
fine pale hair of her thighs dewy with sweat and one of her hands- God!
her whole hand!  -glistening with what was inside her.  She was
writhing like a snake.  He saw four fingers disappear inside her to the
knuckle and the other hand rubbing something wet outside and there was
that noise, that hissing, crying, groaning sound like she was in pain,
like she was dying!  Rzm/ he thought.  No!  Wzke her!

But he was afraid to wake her and it was as though he were hypnotized,
he couldn't run.  He was afraid to wake her because he stared down at
what her hands were doing and the teeth grinding and the lips quivering
as though from some biting cold and the awful trembly smile and he
didn't even hardly recognize her, he was scared of her, what had
happened to his mother?

His stomach rolled and tumbled.  He was going to be sick.

He watched the hand glide back and forth, the head toss and shudder. 
He ran.  He stumbled into his room.  The dizziness was terrible.  He
fell into bed, trembling, sweating now almost as much as she had been. 
He pulled the covers up to his chin- the first time since the second
grade.  He really did have to go to the bathroom now but he was not
going to pass that door again.  No way.

He listened.  The sounds had stopped.

Had she heard him?  Was she awake, coming toward the bedroom?  He heard
nothing.

Maybe she's asleep now, he thought.  Really asleep.

Outside his window he heard a siren, a police car rolling by.  His
hands on the bedsheet looked ghostly pale.  The room seemed filled with
shadows.

He lay there for a long time, listening and hearing nothing,
remembering the look of her, the dark full nipples against the pale
breasts, the glistening public hair, the streams of sweat.  He
remembered

her face most of all, that rictus grin of pain and ecstasy. Remembered
it with horror.

Horror, he thought.  And I thought it was monsters and Freddy Kruger.

Slowly, a long time later, he was able to push the vision away from
him.  In the long silence his eyes began to close.  The shadows folded
back into the ordinary landscape of the room- dresser, closet, tv set,
window.

Once he seemed to hear her sigh.

She sounded as she always sounded.

r

There might have been an inkling on the evening news.  It might have
saved lives if there had been.  But as yet little anyone would consider
particularly newsworthy had happened.  What slept inside them slept
like a malefic shadow in the corner of a huge bustling room,
unnoticed.

By the time it erupted, for many residents of Manhattan the night had
concluded normally.  They had made love, gone to films and bars,
watched television.  And finally, slept.

If there appeared to be somewhat more police activity than usual on the
lower West Side or Chelsea or Central Park South, it was just another
busy night for the city's numerous thugs and crazies.  If a disturbance
erupted in a theatre it was hardly the first time.

Only on the West Side could you tell immediately- something so askew
now that stepping out of the subway at 72nd Street your impulse might
be to turn and run.  Elsewhere it was simple city madness,

more virulent than usual.  But here, in the very feel of the place,
you sensed something.

On Amsterdam and 66th Street a woman walked into a fire station wearing
nothing but a black half-slip and, laughing, accosted the nearest
fireman, smearing his face with cruelty-free Flame-Glo Honey Raisin Lip
Gloss, which she had applied on her own face from nose to chin.

Across the park on 5th and 81st Street, an old man recuperating from
his second coronary in as many years leaned out his fifth-floor window
and heard someone crying for help just out of sight around the corner.
The voice was male and terrified.  Heart pounding, he closed the
window.

On the northernmost border of Greenwich Village, a normally quiet
lesbian bar called Belle Starr's erupted into an orgy the likes of
which its proprietor, an ex-stripper named Lorna Dune, hadn't seen
since Albert Anastasia was alive and she was still more or less
straight.

In Soho, an aging ingenue hung her two-month-old infant son from the
bathroom shower-curtain rod using the white cloth belt she had worn as
the Girl in The Fantastiks and watched it strangle.

At 42nd and Broadway, three dancers in a peep show hurled themselves
through the nearest fifty-cent window and dragged its occupant
screaming through the broken glass.

The drunk at Broadway and 69th woke on his bench to stare at the world
through sore, soupy eyes.  Someone had kicked his bottle.

He was keyed to that sound.  It was probably the only sound that would
have woke him.  He reached for the bottle instinctively beneath the
flaking weatherbeaten green park bench but the effort was far too much
for him.  He wheezed a sigh and leaned back against the bench.  "Let me
help you."

The voice was young and female.  He looked up.  The woman stooped
beside him fishing for the bottle.  Her hair was short, cropped close
to her head.  He didn't much care for that.  He liked a woman to be
feminine.

"When ya gonna wake up and smell the c]e?"  he rasped.

The woman raised her head and stared at him.  Not bad looking despite
the hair.  She picked up the half-empty fifth.

"Hey, ya found it.  Good girl!"

She smiled.  "It's broken, though," she said.

lz zit

He tried to focus.

The girl was nuts.  The bottle wasn't broken.

"Is not," he said.

"Sure it is," she said, and swung it in a short arc, smashing it
against his mouth and chin.  His last two brittle teeth shattered into
his chalky gums.  He tasted blood and shards of glass redolent of sweet
wine.  He tried to spit them out but his lips were in tatters.

Nothing hurt, though.  Nothing ever hurt till morning.  If he had
another fifth maybe not even then.  So fuck her.

He'd survive.

He made a face, the kind of face he used on the little girls to scare
them of the drunk, to scare them home to their fucking mommies.  The
girl was looking at him like he was some sort of bug.  She was the
bug.

"Why doncha wake up..."  he tried to say but the words only gurgled in
his mouth and pushed a long shard of glass he wasn't even aware of out
over his chin.  He coughed, and that was bloody too.  And the girl
wasn't scaring.  He didn't like her eyes.

He thought, this is gonna be bad- and then it was bad, because the hand
with the pretty gold ring drew back the bottle and then pushed it
forward into his face and twisted it so that it tore a jagged trench of
flesh from the bridge of his nose across both cheeks and down as far as
his lower lip.

She released it and the bottle stayed there, like a false-face made of
glass.

He felt a quick burning flash of unexpected agony and then passed out
in broken shock, vomiting into the still-capped neck of the bottle.  He
gasped and began to choke.  His face went livid blue.

At the newspaper stand on 72nd Mary Silver walked quietly away

from the stack of papers and magazines which had surrounded her and,

knife in hand, proceeded down Broadway.

The knife got a lot of use.

The first was a Greek who had just come out of the subway station after
a strange little ride on the #2 line.  A woman on his car, a black
woman, had begun laughing at 14th Street and hadn't stopped until they
reached Penn Station.  Whereupon she leapt suddenly from her seat and
began to kick the subway doors with her imitation patent leather shoes.
The other riders on the train had witnessed her fury with varying
degrees of amusement.  All except the Greek.  The idiot sister he'd
left on Corfu made any such amusement impossible.  He left the subway
blindly, lost in remembrance.

When Mary came up behind him he was still brooding on his sister and
because the knife was sharp and the blade thin he felt no pain at
first.  His only thought was that the woman had punched him hard
between the shoulderblades.  Why she should do that he didn't know any
more than he knew what had happened to the woman on the subway.

He felt the wetness seeping through his shirt and a sudden faintness
overcame him and he fell to his knees.  He died in that position,
watching the woman continue past him down the street.

The second man was a young yuppie broker in suspenders and a baggy
white Ralph Lauren shirt which set his Hamptons tan off nicely.  As she
passed him she stabbed him in the kidneys.  The man watched the red
stain spread over his shirt like burning celluloid on a movie screen.
The shirt had been brand new.  It cost him two hundred dollars.

At 70th Street she passed a fat old man and smiling, stabbed him in the
ass.  A playful gesture.  The knife sunk only to the depth of an inch
or so but the old man howled and tripped and fell to the pavement and
lay sprawled there waving his hands and screaming.

She proceeded down Broadway, steel blade dripping.

He was staring at a copy of Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me,
wondering if he should steal it.  Lydia was still in the storage room
and his jacket had big pockets.  The cover of the book was badly ripped
but his copy at home was falling apart completely.  It would be like
taking day-old bread from a bakery.  Why not?

Because you're honest, that,s" why not, he thought.  And because you
like her.

Face it, you more than like her.

"Shel, come here a minute," she said.

He sighed and climbed off the ladder.  He could guess what was coming.
Lydia was going to ball him out again for something he'd done or failed
to do- which would make it about the fifth time that night.  She was in
a pissy mood.  Couldn't she see he was exhausted?  Up the ladder, down
the ladder.

Couldn't she see he was crazy about her?

Sure, she had ten years on him.  She had a boyfriend and a business too
but none of that mattered.  He knew she loved books.  They had that
very much in common.  They could talk books the next thirty years of
their lives together given the opportunity.  He knew it.  He'd like to
do just that.

That and.."  the other thing.

His shirt was plastered to his back.  The air-conditioner wasn't
working again.  It was miserably close in here, so that his thick heavy
glasses kept slipping down his nose.  He pushed them back and walked to
the storage room.

It was pretty dark.  There was just the single 30-watt bulb she refused
to change for a bigger one- Lydia was actually a little cheap, always
saving on the electricity- and they could have used a new
airconditioner too.  The light didn't do much more than push back the
murk into the corners.

"Where are you?"  he said.

"Back here."

He was relieved.  She didn't sound mad at all.

He walked inside.  The back room was wall-to-wall boxes set on rows of
metal shelving, filled with books.  They were the first things they'd
inventoried.

So what was she doing back here?

The dust got into his nose and made him want to sneeze.  He held his
breath so he wouldn't have to.  Even if he did love books he didn't
much care for the old musty smell of them, like the smell of mold in a
cellar.  He thought he was probably a little allergic.

He heard shuffling to his right.  Over there.

He stepped in front of the next row of shelves and saw her way down the
end of the row, facing the grey cinderblock walls, her back to him,
half in shadow, her head tilted down like she was reading.  In the
dark? "What's up, Lyd?"  She turned.  it wasn't reading.

What she'd been doing was she'd been working at the bottons of her
shirt.

She was almost finished.

He couldn't believe it.  All he could do was stand there gawking like a
dope while she slipped the shirt off her shoulders and he saw that she
had no bra on, that her breasts were naked- and god she was pretty
there,t

He braced himself against the metal shelving.  "Well?  What do you
think?"  she said.  "Huh?"

She flipped open the top button of her jeans and zipped the zipper and
pulled them down over her thighs, the thighs a little too big but that
was okay because her stomach was nice and flat and she had lovely
breasts and it was all so good he could barely look at her.  But he did
look.  She smiled.

"What do you think?"

This wasn't like Lydia at all.  Lydia was his boss.  Lydia was.."
modest.

He couldn't believe his luck.

But he couldn't answer her, either.  Not while he was looking at her
body anyway.  So he wrenched his eyes up to her face and held them
there, determined, her face in shadow, looking at it anyway because it
was the right thing to do even as she bent slightly to pull down the
pale-colored panties and then stood a moment and then took one step
toward him.

Out of the shadows.

And Sheldon wanted to scream.

Because the lips that were smiling at him were split in a dozen places
and gleaming with blood, her blood where she had bitten them, bitten
almost through them in some places and he started to say, Lydia, jesus
I what've you done."?  but he didn't really think there was a Lydia
there anymore to talk to.

Her teeth were grinding so hard he could actually hear them.  Her pale
blue eyes looked contaminated with red, twitching in their sockets like
caged birds.  And he did not even consider seizure, epilepsy or
something, because the look on her face was evil, terrible, the fear of
her went right to his bones and he screamed, long and loud and yet
without the strength to pull away as her cold arms wrapped around his
neck and she opened her ruined mouth and bit him, deep into his neck
and pushed him to the floor.

His glasses cracked beneath him.  He heard his own blood pulse and
splash the dirty concrete floor.

As consciousness raced away from him and she clung and bit deeper and
he felt her tongue move inside the open wound he gazed up at the boxes
above him and saw the one marked with red grease-pencil near his head
and even upside down he could read it.

FILE UNDER HORROR it said.

On 73rd and Broadway in front of the Beacon Theatre a stewardess who
had worked the first-class compartment on the very same night that had
brought Elizabeth in from LAX to Kennedy was walking her dog, a
miniature poodle named Marvin, her pooper-scooper, toweling, and
plastic baggie in hand, when a pair of teenage girls with leopard
jackets and red and green hair jumped out of a '74 Chevrolet and
approached the dog murmuring nice doggie, nice doggie, bent down and
with one girl holding and the other pulling tore its head from its
body.

Jim "Jumma" Jackson moved slowly off the yellow plastic seat and tossed
his food wrappers and the cup from his shake into the trash bing

It was about fuckin' time.

Over an hour, watching and waiting for the booster who was the

only potential trouble in the place to get the hell out of there like
he was doing now, ambling out the door.

He pretended to study the overhead menu, like here was a dude with one
real big appetite back for seconds and then moved up to the counter. 
It was only then he realized that there was nobody there.  What the. 
flick this?  Break-time, bitches?

The Man went by outside, siren wailing.  About the sixth in the past
hour.  But the squad car wasn't stopping here and that was what
counted.  He tapped the call-bell for some service.

Nobody home.  Come on, he thought.  He couldn't even see the cook at
work behind the rows of stacked-up burgers, fries and Big Macs.  He
tapped the bell again.  He could hear the burgers working on the grill
and he could smell the fat.  He fingered the pistol in his jacket
pocket.

"Hey!  How 'bout gimme some service here!"

He glanced around the restaurant.  The only one looking at him was the
old bag-lady by the window.  The kid and his girlfriend were playing at
some touch-me shit.  The old man wolfed his burger.

He hit the bell a third time.

"Hey!  What the luck you doin' back there!"

EaLsy; brother, he thought.  You be cool now.

The bag-lady was grinning at him.  The old man blinked up from his
burger.  The bag-lady wouldn't remember him, she was too fucking crazy
but the old man might.

Got to be cool.

He saw movement behind the counter and the familiar uniform finallyt.
One of the bitches was on her way out here.

But it was getting complicated now.  The fucking old bag lady was out
of her seat and moving in his direction.  No good.  You didn't want
nobody near you when you pulled this shit.  Only way to handle it was
to pull his piece right now and say fuck it.

Which was what he did.

The timing would be okay.  He glanced at the girl coming toward him
behind the racks of burgers.  He slid the gun out of his pocket and
turned and pointed it at the bag-lady.

"Hold it, bitch!"  he said and she did.

Okay.

He turned to the girl who had come up beside him at the counter,

turned cool and calm and pointed the gun at her face.

The girl was grinning.

And her face was covered with.."  what the fuck...?  catsup.

Unh-unh.  That shit was blood.t

The girl's arms were long, a warm light-colored brown.  They reached
out to him.  The palms of her hands were dripping.  Blood spotted the
counter.

He felt something knot up big as a man's fist inside his gut.  Not
fear- he had a gun on the girl for fuck's sake- but a shock of
recognition, that old Jumma had maybe got outclassed by this one, that
this bitch was bold as he was and a whole lot crazier, and all of a
sudden he was wondering where the other bitches were and where the cook
was and what the luck was happening here.

He was wondering that when the bag-lady wrapped her arms around him and
hugged him to her reeking body from behind and the gun went off in the
counter-bitch's face so that she went down like a tree.  He struggled
but the bag-lady bitch only woofed in his ear and hugged him tighter.

Damn.t she was strong.  He couldn't break her.

He couldn't turn around!

He saw two more girls coming out from in back, drifting toward him like
a pair of goddamn crazy ghosts and he fired at them but with only his
forearm free of the bag-bitch the shots went wild.  He didn't know how
many times he fired but all of a sudden the gun was empty.

He squirmed and began to whimper, feeling righteous terror as the girls
climbed up over the counter.

Behind him the front door slammed.  Somebody on the run.

The girls reached out to him, their little brown uniforms and little
brown caps splotched with blood- hands and faces too- and one of them
had been reaching into something because her arms were wet and red to
the elbow and that was not noficking hamburger.

He smelled fat burning and the urinal stink of the woman behind him.

He began screaming when they opened the counter and hauled him back
where the grill was, and then he was screaming so fucking loud one of
them held his jaw open while the other reached inside and her polished
red fingernails dug down and tore forward and he was looking at his
tongue in her hand, he had stopped screaming and was spitting blood.

The pistol dropped from his hand.

When the faintness passed he looked up from the floor and saw the mess
on the grill and knew what had happened to the cook.  He felt the heat
of the grill as they lifted him up and pressed his face slowly down.

Bitches, I was only gonna rob you he thought.  For that you gonna jhy
me?

The grill and Jumma sizzled.

Bailey was sure now.  He'd never seen a bar like this.  Not New
Year's, not Christmas.  Never.  He felt a black flash of vertigo.

The bar spoke only in murmurs, in subtle waves of heat.  Even the juke
was silent.  In some ways that was worst of all.  It occurred to him
that he'd been waiting for somebody to get up and feed it a quarter for
fifteen minutes now.

Whatever was happening here he was part of it- the nervous part.

Maclnery's had gone from crowded to damn near deserted in record time-
and it was early yet, but nobody was coming in.  He'd watched single
guys and couples walk out the door, glancing around in what looked to
Bailey like some weird sort of superstitious dread.  And when his
regulars left him- Sam and Bob and Tony- with out so much as a word to
him all doubts disappeared.  Something was seriously wrong here,
something fundamental.

Because other couples had left in a different way altogether.

Women leading their men like dogs on a leash- boyfriends, husbands,
pickups- leading them as though into some impossible ravenous night, to
something infinitely more private than anything they were expecting.

How did he know this?

He just did.  They wore it on their faces.

He wiped the bar, served the drinks.

The place was charged with gunpowder.  He was not about to go lighting
any matches.

He poured a cup of coffee from the pot on the burner.  There was not a
soul in the bar whose exact location he wasn't aware of.  He'd never
watched so hard in his goddamn life.

That writer- Patty something- kept looking at him.  He'd always liked
Patty but not now.  He dropped his eyes away from her and went back to
work.  A Ross Macdonald line scuttled through his mind unbidden, he
remembered it because it had always reminded him of his former
girlfriend.  The small chill presence that lived like a stunted child
in her.  fine body.

That was Patty now.  Again he marked her position.  Seated.  number two
table, nursing a tequila sunrise.

There were half a dozen women left at the tables, three at the bar. 
Five men at the tables.

And only Tom, with Cindy, at the bar.

You had the two cooks, Dora and Franco, in the kitchen, and the three
waitresses.

That was another thing.  The waitresses never hung out in the kitchen.
Too hot back there.  Usually they liked to drink cokes out here with
him and joke with the regulars.  But not tonight.  For the past half
hour he'd hardly seen them.

He'd never felt so alone in a bar in his life.

The only regular that was left was Tom and he was, shall we say, busy.
Cindy was keeping him busy.  Like some of the others he seemed
practically transfixed.  Spellbound.  The same glassy look half the
other guys had tonight.

Nobody else seemed to worry about it.  Just Bailey.

But the place was raw with sex.

Every guy in the place must have thought he was scoring.

In the farthest table to the right a couple were openly necking.  It
didn't seem to bother the guy at all that half an hour ago his date had
dumped her drink all over his shin.  A little more and he'd have good
cause to eighty-six the both of them.  If he dared.

Which he didn't.

And right here at table four next to Patty a woman in jeans and halter
top had her arm around the guy beside her and was fondling his nipple
inside his Hawaiian shin.

Jesus!  Didn't they know this shit was impossible?  Didn't these guys
jbel it?

Something was going down and sex was just pan of it- and maybe only a
small pan of it.  There was something else happening that was cold,
androgynous, sexless.  End-stop.  Like death.

What he really wanted to do was to clear the goddamn bar.

He'd considered it a dozen times but it was nowhere near closing time
and there was nothing to pin it to, no incident, and he was seriously
afraid of starting one.  But if nobody else sensed violence in the air,
he did.

Take it easy, he thought and let things take their course.  With a
little luck and some patience you'll get out of here fine.

The woman in the halter top got up and reached for her date's hand. The
guy in the Hawaiian shin stood up beside her stuporous and smiling. She
put her arm around him and they drifted out the door.  That lqfi
eleven.  And eight men.

He couldn't stop tallying, figuring the odds.

He glanced at the two women at the bar two seats down from Tom and
Cindy.  He got the same feeling from these two that you got from a bad
drunk- only they weren't drunk.  They weren't doing much of anything,
not even talking.  Just sitting there.  But he could hardly look at
them.

And one was downright beautiful.  A tall willowy brunette.

The other was shorter, blond, kind of dumpy.  But what they had in
common was the eyes.  He'd put their drinks down in front of them but
he couldn't meet their eyes.  Same with Patty.

Same with all of them.

These two were watching him, though.  He knew it the way you knew
somebody was staring at the back of your neck- you knew without
knowing.  Sending out strange little waves of allure.  Come talk to us.
Come on.

He wasn't having any.

His coffee tasted dark and sour.  He dumped it in the sink.  To hell
with it.  He'd made up his mind.

He was going to close the place.

Family emergency, he thought.  It was stupid to wait.  He was not going
to be happy until he was back in his apartment with the door shut.

He was definitely closing.

He'd been trying to think what she reminded him of and Tom had it now.
And he'd have left her right then and there had he not turned a corner
with her long ago, had he not felt suddenly and without warning that
blast of sensuousness that swirled out of her deep and greedy, a pure
bold vice that made the sensuality of his wife and Elizabeth and every
other woman he'd ever known seem childish by comparison.

She took his hand, pressed it between her own hands so he could feel
the heat of her, brought it close to her face so he could feel her
breath on his fingertips- and that was when he saw it, in the position
of head and hands and knew what she reminded him of.

A mantis.

He'd watched them often as a child.  Slow and deliberate until the
final blinding moment of predation, alert and thoroughly voracious.  A
cannibal who would eat her mate and preferred to devour him alive.  A
death machine, quick and deadly, its huge mandibles unstoppable,
forelegs gripping, the relationship of legs to head a sudden nexus of
horror.

He had watched them eat.  This was what he recognized.  And didn't
care.

Not while the urgent scent and electric closeness of her body

continued to press him deeper into the wind and promise a burst of
dreams.

Outside the bar, sirens and a sudden scream.

A man howl ofagonv.  Bailey looked up from the register, wiped the
sweat off his nose and stared hard through the windows.

The bar fell silent.

A man in a rumpled business suit ran by.  The man looked over his
shoulder and stumbled and then got to his hands and knees.  Bailey
heard the sound of a garbage can being knocked over as he disappeared
from view.

It " starting, thought Bailey.  It's right outside the window.

The silence in the bar seemed to hang from a single thread.  A gust of
summer wind whistled past the door.

And snapped it.

Tom thought, whats'fitnny?  What is that?

The laughter was Erica's, high and hysterical.  She was moving through
the kitchen doorway, a covered silver platter on a silver serving tray
balanced precariously on her hand and shoulder and shaking with
laughter so that he thought, she's going to drop that thing, Chris and
Rita appearing behind her, laughing too as Erica's knees began to
buckle.

He got up to help her and glanced at Bailey.  The look on Bailey's face
stopped him cold, made him hesitate.

The small balding man in the party of four wasn't as lucky.  Tom could
see the brown liquor-stain on his shirt as he reached out to take the
tray and steady her.  A good-looking young woman with long blonde hair
stood up beside him.  He had time to wonder, his date?  Then everything
happened fast.

Erica stopped laughing- and the man no sooner had his hand on her
shoulder than her own went to the cover of the serving tray and threw
it off.

The man recoiled as though bitten by a snake.

From where Tom stood he had a clear view of them, his senses

recording the scene in minute detail while his brain tried to do the
impossible and process it Dom, the cook, Mexican, illegally employed,
thirty-six or so, flirts with the waitresses, awkward, miserable grasp
of the language and... They'd hit him with something first, blood was
dark and matted over his face and hair and lay in a ripe blackening
pool at the bottom of the tray.  His mouth and eyes were open.
Protruding from the mouth was what at first looked like a tongue
engorged in size and split into long attenuated segments that curled
down at the ends into the bright gore pooling from the stump of neck-
but it wasn't a tongue, it was a hand severed at the wrist and shoved
deep down his throat, just the fingers and knuckles visible crawling
from the mouth like a great pale spider flecked with blood.

He remembered how Dom had patted her earlier.

The kitchen door flew open and Chris and Rita moved to her side, the
bald man stepping back and stumbling, terrified of the three of them
and the thing on the plate, into the arms of the blonde at his table,
her hand going to his chin and pulling his head back while the other
hand went to his neck with the butter knife, and there were shouts and-
horribly- laughter as the entire bar was suddenly on its feet, moving
in a strange distorted adrenal rhythm and he felt a silent warning
behind him.  Cindy.

He whirled and saw the two women at the bar reach for Bailey -but
Bailey was ahead of them.  His hand was already on the coffeepot.  The
coffee splashed scalding hot across the pretty woman's face and the pot
continued on its arc across the face and head of the woman beside her,
shattering.

Cindy was by the fireplace.

He knew instantly why.

He felt sudden panic and looked for a weapon.

She turned, poker in one hand and tongs in the other.  Foam drooled and
bubbled on her lips.  He picked up a stool.  Hurled it at her.  It
glanced off her shoulder and crashed into the clock behind her.  She
came on fast, snarling.

He vaulted the bar.  The poker cracked down across the bar just above
his head, splintering the wood.

Bailey was beside him just inches away.  The woman on top of him was
the one he'd hit with the coffeepot and there was blood flowing from
the side of her face but it was not enough to stop her.  His hands were
on her shoulders trying to force her back but the woman's strength was
amazing.  Her legs were wrapped around him, squeezing, she was gaining
on him by inches, crawling over him like an insect, mouth seeking his
neck and fingers gripping him like fierce talons.

He got to his knees.  He straight-armed the woman as hard as he could,
the open palm of his hand slapping so hard against her forehead it
jarred him to the shoulder, breaking her neck- so that her eyes rolled
up white and a bubble of blood burst across her lips and Bailey shoved
her off him like something contaminated, like a sac of poison.

The poker grazed his forehead and slammed into the shelf where Bailey
kept the wineglasses, showering him with broken glass.  Tom fell over
on his back and somewhere behind him back in the restaurant heard more
glass breaking like an echo and a long deep agonized cry.  He looked up
and saw the room painted in crazy swinging shadows, a dozen overhead
lamps lurching and whirling all at once.  He saw Cindy leaning over the
bar like some sort of gargoyle leering down at him, the tongs in her
left hand raised for another try.

He got to his knees and tried to move back but the tongs came down
across his shoulder.  He felt a sick dizzy pain rocket through his
body.  He started to fall again and put out his hand.

He felt a second bright slash of agony as a long sliver of glass slid
seamlessly into the palm of his hand.

He howled and pulled the hand away.  Pain wrenched at his stomach.  He
raised the hand and got to his knees again, fully expecting the next
blow to fall and end him but he couldn't bear the glass there and the
blow never came and fingers trembling he gripped and pulled away the
gleaming shard and dropped it and pressed his hand to his thigh to stop
the pulsing ooze of blood.

Bailey had come up fast behind the bar, a fifth of Dewar's in each
hand.

The grinding helplessness he'd felt beneath the woman had turned to
anger and even excitement now that open warfare had erupted all

around him.  He had Tom Braun to thank for saving his ass.  He owed
him one and that meant keeping the woman with the tongs and poker, the
Cindy-thing, at bay.  He'd seen Tom go down and the Cindy-thing come
after him and he hefted the bottles.

She looked at him and stepped back, wary, her eyes full of fathom less
calculation, a hunting animal faced with one of its kind.  She took a
small step back toward the jukebox and he pitched a bottle at her, a
full unopened litre.  Her reactions were good.  She stepped away and
brought the poker down and smashed the bottle, filling the air at once
with the heavy reek of whiskey- but the move had skewed her balance and
he heaved the second bottle and she couldn't move away.

It hit her in the neck and sent her sprawling back against the juke and
Bailey thought I've got you.  He grabbed a bottle of cognac and
scrambled across the bar.  On the jukebox Elvis started singing Blue
Hawaii.  He broke the cognac bottle across her face and that was
that.

He had a moment to look around.  The bar was careening its way to hell
and the only thing left was to get out of there.  There was a man lying
face up across one of the front tables, the television set with its
tube broken lying across his chest where they'd left it after using it
to smash his skull.  Another sprawled across the floor with a carving
knife from the kitchen embedded in his back and Rita was just moving
off the body.

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 ['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 some thing, 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 bar space  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 Torn 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 " there.

With Susan.

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 bat
shit 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.

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 body suit 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 body suit 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, 72rid Street Electronics, a hairstlist'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 hod of a parking meter.  The man's face pressed against the
window bubbling a thick froth of blood and saliva.

Stay on yourjLet, 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.  man lay
beside him half on the sidewalk and half in the street.  Th 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
and trying to work their way toward the basement-level door and back
inside and 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 worn
an in the shin and pushed her down, pushed another, grabbed yet another
by her long blonde hair and flung her away into the crowd- and then
they were tripping down the stairs into the bar and he was falling to
the floor and the door was slamming shut the bolt ramming home and the
room was filled with lights and they were not where he wanted to be not
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.  Nell?"

"I got it."  A dark, compact young man in a blue tee 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 table tops
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 tee 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 91 I."

"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 ajuke.  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.

Many had already died so quietly that, standing in the hall, a
passer-by might not have heard a sound.  Not even as tables cracked
under the weight of falling bodies or paintings came crashing off the
walls or lamps or vases to the floor.  Even the report of a .22 pistol
was only a gentle pop pop pop as a woman on the nineteenth floor shot
her entire sleeping family and then herself, splattering the foyer with
brains and blood.

Fireproof, nearly soundproof, the Dorset became great a beehive
necropolis in which no cubicle held any connection to the other except
that death was present in almost every one like a worker at its grubs
in a feast that lasted through the night.

Among the first to die was nice old Mr.  Daniels, so well-loved by his
wife that for supper this night of their thirtieth anniversary she had
prepared his favorite meal- leg of lamb cooked Greek style, with
oregano, mint and garlic.  Never mind that the night was much too hot
to have the oven on.  Howard deserved it.

She had begun to serve it before the change came over her and she lost
control of the knife.

She struggled against it- much harder than some of the others
struggled.  She loved him now just as she had so many years ago when he
was a young career soldier and had saved her from the long winter of
spinsterhood she already felt setting in.

There was a moment when she wavered, neither one woman nor the next,
standing over him with the knife.  Howard looked up and saw her
struggle and the tears in her eyes and somehow comprehended and knew
that something had happened immensely sad and horrible, that something
had sucked her dry and left her dangerous- and more to prevent her than
to save himself he reached for the knife.

It was too late.  She was- and had been for many years now -much faster
than him.  She neatly found the jugular.  Mr.  Daniels began to cough
and

shake his head, blood pulsing in tiny wavelets from his mouth as he
tried to speak one last time and call her back to normalcy even as he
died.  Blood collected on the plate in front of him and sprayed the
clean white tablecloth- and it was that field of red and white he saw
last and the candles burning in celebration.

In apartment 1633 on the sixteenth floor Barbara Carroll, mousey brown
twenty-four-year-old wife to local TV anchorperson Clan Carroll, opened
the screen to the nursery window.

Her husband, with two librium in him and having scored a good solid
lunchtime luck with one of the pages, slept soundly in the next room,
the handsome blonde eminently arc hable eyebrows with which- even more
than his voice- he delivered, impacted and inflected the nightly news,
these famous eyebrows now impassive in repose.  Three-month-old Linda
Ann lay crying in her crib as she had for twenty minutes now, her
diapers filled with sleep-dirt.

Barbara slipped the screen out of the window.  She moved with
difficulty- her body had never come back after the pregnancy.  "Hush,"
she said and took the baby in her arms, her left hand gently patting
the small pile of crap inside the diaper.  The baby cried harder.

Barbara frowned.  Linda Ann was already looking an awful lot like
Clan.

She walked to the window.  Sixteen stories down the streets were quiet.
So much so that when she tossed the baby out the window she heard its
wail for only three or four stories before it was drowned in silence.

She walked to their bedroom and watched Clan sleep a moment.  Then she
got a pair of scissors.

Never mind that her hands were shaking.

Those eyebrows needed trimming.

In the apartment above her a teenage boy was watching a rerun of Happy
Days in the living room.  The Fonz was showing uncommon nervousness
about his debut as a rock 'n roll singer.  He had just launched into a
terrible rendition of Heartbreak Hotel when the boy's twin sister
walked into the room and bashed him on the head with a

cast-iron pan, still dripping water from the sink.  His last thought
that this was ridiculous, she was taking their running nightly about
who did the dishes far too fucking seriously... Brian Campbell Risley,
self-made home furnishings tycoon and womanizer was alive until 10:35
that evening.

Alive and happy- because it had taken nothing more than a dinner at
Ginko Gardens to get the girl to go to bed with him, and Ginko Gardens
was cheap.  His bill with two drinks each was under fifty dollars.

Hell, the worst whore in town charged that much for a blow job.  And
this was no whore, this was young and pretty and didn't seem to mind
the yellowish cast to his skin or the slightly flabby belly.

He couldn't wait to tell the boys over at the World Cafe how he'd
peeled her out of the Adidas Marathon Trainers and sweat socks and the
brown Gore-Tex warmup suit and pushed her onto the big double bed.
Great tits.  Great butt.  Young and strong.

As it turned out, a bit too strong for Risley.

Because when she felt him start to come she moved her hands off his
pale skinny ass to his neck and pressed her thumbs into his throat
until his yellow face went blue and his tongue slid out to the tip of
his chin and wagged there like a dog's.

Which she thought was appropriate for Risley.

The fire began a slightly after midnight on the 21st floor in the
apartment right next to his- Carla Landru's apartment.

She had gone to bed at the usual time with the usual dose of Prozak but
the drug wasn't working, she lay in bed with the head phones on
listening to that old punk band The Clash ("... is the music calling
for a river blood..  . ") because all the music sucked these days just
like everything else sucked and she kept wondering if they'd given her
the wrong thing down at the drugstore.  She felt this tingling.." you
know, down there.."  and a dryness in her mouth and then a little later
a kind of blank open feeling that did not remind her of the drug at all
and then she thought of her parents.

She thought of her parentsJbcking.

YUK!

Then she thought of fucking her parents.

DOUBLE YUK.t

She didn't even like her parents!

And then she had a fun idea.  She took off the headphones and got out
of bed, turned on the lights in her bedroom and then in the hall and in
the living room, turned on every light she passed until she got to the
kitchen, turned that on too and stood grinning in the doorway.

Two doors down the hall Abe and Dee Dee Landru lay asleep in the only
room still dark in the apartment, tired after a long day of golf for
Abe and poolside drinks for Dee Dee at their Club out on Long Island.
Carla, who had elected to stay in town that day to see the new Mel
Gibson movie with a couple of girlfriends, on the other hand had never
felt so wide awake.  That cool weird blankness made her feel all giddy
and creepy.  She liked it.  A lot.

She opened the cabinet beneath the sink.  She rummaged through the
bottles of Drano and Fantastik and boxes of Brillo and cans of nails
and paint cans until she found the plastic bottle.  Twilight Lamp Oil,
it read.  She put it on the counter.

She took a couple of eight-ounce tumblers from the cabinet up top and
filled them, found a pack of matches in the container on top of the
fridge and put the matches in the pocket of her pink cotton
nightdress.

She picked up the coke glasses and walked into her parents' bedroom.
She didn't bother with the light.

Daddy was snoring.  That made her smile.

It also made her smile to see them both sit bolt upright sputtering and
cursing when she doused them with the cold oil and heard her mother
squealing- and then to see their faces change when they smelled the
oil.

She had some trouble with the match at first but only for a moment and
they were still together when she tossed it- they always slept real
close.  And then the bed was burning and they started rolling and
running around the room, knocking things over and burning other things
and pretty soon there was more light in their bedroom than in any other
room in the apartment.

And it moved

And it screamed.

And it writhed across the floor.

Clan heard the fire-alarm go off at the desk.

But by then he was in the mail storage room in back with the door
locked, hiding.

An hour earlier five teenage girls had entered through the revolving
door.  They walked right up to the desk where old Willie smiled and
said can I help you?  which was the last thing he ever said because one
of them grabbed him by his black tie and pulled him forward over the
counter while the girl beside her took a red fireman's ax out of her
yellow plastic slicker and lopped off Willie's head in two strokes.

Clan was on his feet and into the package room before she could pry her
ax free, thinking that his years of broken-field running from the Man
as a no-good street kid were finally paying off and now he huddled in a
corner close to the floor hugging the Louisville Slugger he guessed was
supposed to be a present for some kid in the building and waited for
the ax to come crashing through the door.

He wondered why it hadn't come but didn't wonder too hard, lest he
bring it on.

He heard the front door open once after that and heard a lot of sirens
on the street.  And now he heard the fire alarm.

He held onto the bat and stayed there.

The front door opening had been Sam Hardin's whore.

She walked through the empty lobby past the rows of mirrors and took
the elevator to the sixth floor.

At his door Dr.  Hardin greeted her in the usual way- head bowed,
properly subservient.  She pushed past him into the room.  "Good
evening, mistress."

She didn't reply.  He followed her into the bedroom.  She opened her
leather briefcase.  While she was doing that he stripped off his
clothes.  He wished she would give him permission to look at her.  The
cruel slit eyes, the naked contempt in her gorgeous face.  When he
looked at her face he saw himself as she saw him.  Human shit.

She was a goddess.

The cliches were routine of course but he loved them anyway.  She would
strip to leather bra and panties, black boots and black lace stockings.
He would lie face down on the bed and she would tie him to the wooden
posts with leather cuffs and then she would get out the whips.

He would beg her not to use them.  She would ask him if he had been bad
and he would have to say- quite honestly- yes I have, mistress,
describing what he'd done as she beat him.  Bad thoughts about his
younger, prettier patients.  Hatred of his ex-wife and distant married
daughter.  Overchargings.  Faulty examinations.  Useless expensive
tests.  Some sins went back twenty years or more, never to be
forgiven.

He wished she'd let him look at her though he knew what he would see.
The long red hair- her pubic hair was red too, though lighter the cold
green eyes, the slim heavy-breasted body, pink tips of nipples pushing
through the suck-holes in her leather bra, the strong jaw, the rouged
lips he had never once been permitted to kiss.

It was natural that she should despise him.  She was beautiful.  He was
an old mean man with breasts like a woman's, the hair on his chest a
smoky grey.  A fat mean man who was a bad doctor, a bad husband and a
bad father.

A very bad boy indeed.  He lay down on the bed.

"Over," she said.

That was something new.

She would change things slightly sometimes, just to keep him off
balance.  He didn't mind.  As long as it wasn't too different.  As long
as he got to confess and he got his whipping.

She reached down to tie his feet to the bedposts and then over him to
tie his hands and he stole a glimpse of her face.  He couldn't help
himself.  But she didn't seem to care.  The cold dead eyes looked down
on him.  Encouraged, emboldened, he moved his head up and took her
nipple into his mouth like a child, tasted leather and salt flesh.  She
let him nurse, watching him strangely.  And then pulled back abruptly.
Expecting rage, he closed his eyes.

But nothing came.

When he opened them again she was tying the cord around privates- the
one she used sometimes to lead him around the floor like a puppy,
lapping at her heels.  She had never used the cord in bed before.

He wasn't sure he liked this game.

And it was his money.

"Mistress..."  he said.  "If you don't mind... I'd rather not..."  She
looked at him once.  Then laughed.  Then pulled the cord so hard he
screamed.

And kept on pulling until he had to arch his back to lift himself off
the bed to ease the strain on his genitals and he looked at her with
astonishment and saw her reach behind her with the other hand -leaning
back in order to do so, pulling at him even harder!  with no regard for
him, her client, at ant.  -and then it was not the usual riding crop in
her hand but a cat 'o nine tails with brass studs and she was whipping
him across the facet where it would show.t And pulling, jerking at the
cord until he felt the wetness spread beneath him and the blood slide
down his face.

She stopped.  He fell back to the bed, sweating and unable to speak,
his old-man's smell filling the room.

He felt the thin light blade on him then and there was still enough of
a doctor in him to know what she was doing.  He felt the blade sink
deep into the top of his left thigh, pull down across the femoral
artery and slice through his genitals, withdrawing, its arc completed,
at the top of his right thigh.

And somewhere inside all his screams he heard the wet bubbling sound
from within and knew that everything was slipping out inside him,
sliding out into the light of the bedroom, all the secrets inside and
that she would see it all, finally.

He cried and felt an overwhelming shame.

On the second floor Elizabeth slept, silent and peaceful.

The birch tree brushed her window, a gentle scratching sound against
the screen.  The fine brown ringlets of hair across her forehead
stirred.  Her naked back glowed in the streetlight.  Her skin drank in
the cooling breeze.

In the garden below Lydia, her mouth caked with her own and Sheldon's
blood, stared up at the pale white glowing flesh of the tree and saw
instead another tree in the yard of her childhood home in Morristown,
New Jersey, a town she'd not revisited since she'd opened the
bookstore.

She and her brother used to climb it.  It was a beautiful tree.  It
almost made her want to cry.

She wondered if the branches would hold her.

Elizabeth slept.

Susan awoke from a dream in which her father, long dead, was giving a
press conference.

He was telling reporters that yes, he knew his daughter was a
homosexual but that she had committed no crime and he would support her
completely during this her hour of need.  Reporters scribbled in their
pads.  Behind them unnoticed on the lawn Susan lay in bed with her
lover, a woman much younger than she but whose face she could not see
because it was buried between her thighs.  She and her lover were
naked, writhing with passion.  Her father looked young and stern and
vigorous.

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
hang man'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.

"Wait a minute," said Phil.  "You're talking about the Dorset?  Big
fucking highrise 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 ifhe's not
there I know where to find them."  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
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 'em.  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

Jack leh:hum didn't have to worry about pedestrians because the
streets were mostly deserted by now except for stragglers here and
there who had 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 injOcted
were going to stay infected and that was that, that this was all some
crazy Pentagon Vietnam old-boy game plan 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 .r god: sake designed to drive them bat
shit and terminally homicidal, a final batch ?[" which somebody had
overlooked For years and decided to move through the city as.[bst as
possible before the talking head got wind of it, on its way to its
allotted final resting place in the Atlantic, but # 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.
H[her.  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 midthigh.  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 droplged 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,
laughing 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.  ]ut 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.t 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.

Bre out

"| 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, Nell, 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 Nell'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 failing like a
hatchet on her neck.  Blood spurted across his thighs.

He stood up as Nei 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 tee 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 kniJ.

He let loose a jet of powder but it was too little too late and the
hammer came whipping at Nell 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 number.

Ladies" night

"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."

He was holding the table leg away from him at an odd angle.  Tom saw
why.  The wood was dripping with blood, slippery from top to bottom-
and he remembered Bailey's mad charge toward him through the crowd.

"You're some piece of work," he said.  Bailey grinned.  "I never said I
wasn't."  They turned and looked down Broadway.

A lone figure stood under a streetlight about a block away.  Otherwise
it was clear.  "Let's go," Phil said.

They moved slowly.  The picture windows in both the furniture store and
the lighting store had been knocked out and there was glass all over
the sidewalk out to the street.  It was impossible to avoid.  It
crunched underfoot, disturbingly loud.

They kept to the shadows close to the building.

There was a police car over the curb with a body dangling out the back
seat- a black man in handcuffs, some poor bastard who never made it to
the station.  They found one of the cops a few feet in front of the car
with his nightstick gone and his holster empty, a bullet in his brain.
They never did find his partner.

Parking meters were broken away.  A hydrant was spewing water.  The
place had the kind of bombed-out look you see after a hurricane without
any time for cleanup.  Inside the ruined lighting store the naked body
of a little girl who could not have been more than four or five was
lying on a chrome and glass table under a Picasso print like some sort
of sick evil sacrifice to the modernist age.  A man's bloody arm hung
out over the window frame  He'd been strangled by a lamp cord.

Across the street there was a light on in the florist's and they heard
laughter from inside.  Far away they heard glass breaking and police
sirens.  It was good to know the police were somewhere.  Live police.
He could have used a little law and order right now.

The entrance to the Burnside, so busy a few hours ago, was silent.  He
wondered how the party'd gone.

Jac let chum

He and Bailey peered around the corner.

A doorman was wedged inside the revolving door.

The entrance was brightly lit, open to view from both Broadway and
Amsterdam.  The florist's shop was right across the street.  They were
going to be damn visible.  They paused in the shadows beside the
overgrown jungle of a garden, undecided.

Bailey nodded toward the florist's shop.

"What do you think?  You want to wait a while, see if they drift out of
there?"

"I don't think so," Tom said.

He looked at Phil and the man with the beard.  They nodded.  "Okay.
Let's go."

Bailey turned.  And for just a noment his back was fully to the
garden.

She came out of a tree.

They heard it rustle and Bailey whirled but he wasn't as fast as
gravity, she was on his back in an instant and the knife went into his
neck just under his right ear, pulled swiftly across the right carotid
artery and the cartilage of his adam's apple and the left carotid and
out the other side so that what they saw was a thin line of blood
moving along behind the knife which began to spurt and then pour out of
him in a wide sluice right to left and back again, the woman toppling
him to the sidewalk and holding on to him and pulling back so that the
wound opened further and washed them all in a great hot spill of gore.
Tom tasted it in his mouth.  Bailey blood.

He tasted Bailey's blood as Phil stepped past him and brought down his
hammer on the woman's skull so hard he had to pull it free of her.  She
fell to the side and shook herself like a wet dog.  Then lunged at him
with the knife.

As though he hadn't hit her at all.

And then it was suddenly as though something pushed them.  All three of
them.

Some inner signal thrumming inside made wholly of violence pouring
through them like an ecstatic bile and they went at her all at once,
Tom screaming heedless of the women across the street inside the

shop and staring at the ord of tension in her neck while he pounded
her face with his fist wrapped tight around the handle of the knife its
blade pointed up flashing in the moonlight and then kicking her while
the man in with the beard chopped two-handed at her back hacking at her
vertebrae with the cleaver in one hand and Bailey's table-leg in the
other while Phil saw her knife clatter to the sidewalk to the glass
from the broken plate glass window and stepped on the hand that had
held the knife and thrust it into Bailey and ground the hand into the
side walk into the glass until the fingernails popped while he pounded
her head with the hammer.

They looked up from her twisted body flowing its juices into the
littered black gutter.

Had they been attacked then it was possible they would not have had the
will or strength to run, that they'd have died like hamstrung cattle
pulled down by wolves, without fear or passion, too stupefied to care,
more dead than alive.

The street, the sidewalk seemed to drain them like a tap on a dying
battery.  They stood in the same light they had feared a moment ago and
felt nothing.

They looked in each others' faces.

The moment washed through them and was gone.

Goodbye, my friend, he thought.

]'ll get them for you.  As many as I can.

And ['[1 get her.

For the first time in his life he felt the depth of the cruelty inside
him undiluted by guilt or fear or any other emotion and he did not
dislike the feeling.  He did not know why he should be focused so
furiously now on Susan.  He did not know why he blamed her.  He knew
nothing of her yet.

But it was as though she had brought them here.  In a way she had.
"Come on," he said.

Lydia crouched in the treetop.  The girl was sleeping and her back was
naked.  The sight of her nudity pleased Lydia the way the sight of her
own body never had.  She knew what she wished to do.

She was patient.  She waited for the wind to rise or the sounds of the
city to mask the sound the screen would make when she slid it open and
climbed inside.

Gunfire sputtered a few blocks over.  A siren whined.  It was enough.
Her hands went to the window and lifted it an inch.  She pushed the
sliding screen together and lifted it away.  It made only a slight
metallic rustling sound when she dropped it into the hedges below.  Her
fingers gripped the windowpane.

She stepped inside.

His mother lay across his body, her.  fingers like cold bands' of steel
over his wrists.

His mother's breath was his breath.

Ja klet hum

Her tongue was in his mouth.

It dripped poison into his mouth and Andy tossed his head against the
pillow, dislodging her but the face would not go away, it followed him,
its mouth open.  He tried to free his hands but he couldn't.  She
tightened her grip and he felt like his wrists would snap.  He
struggled, felt silky breast flesh pressed soft against him beneath the
sheer parted nightgown, her hips grinding.

It was not his mother.  His mother was gone.  She was there instead. 
He wanted to cry.

But there was anger there too because of what she had done to his
mother and he tried to free one leg from under her, move it out from
under and get some leverage.  Get her ojf He couldn't.  She had him.

Her mouth sought him.  He tossed his head and screamed.

"Get off met Get offt"

Her breath was foul.  He thought he was going to vomit.  In a panic he
lurched side to side trying to shake her, to buck and kick and fight
her- and this squall-burst of movement on the bed jarred her away for
just an instant, only an inch or two but enough for him to bring up his
knee under and into her, into her there.

She howled and let go of one of his arms and slapped him hard.  Twice
three times bur but that was okay because that meant his own arm was
free too now and he balled up a fist and hit her in the face with
everything he had.

She screeched like a cat and sat away from him and brought her hands to
her face, releasing him, and he saw he'd made her nose bleed, she was
wiping it and looking at the blood unbelievingly with wide strange eyes
and he sat up and pounded at the face with both his hands as hard as he
could- and somehow he was strong enough or crazy enough because she
fell off him to one side.  In a split second he was off the bed and
scrambling for the open door.

He took one long running step and then another.  He felt a hand clamp
over his ankle and tripped and hit the floor head first, the right side
of his face smacking against the floorboards, the air whooshing

out of him.  Everything went yellow and black.  When he could see
again she had the ankle in that impossibly strong grip of hers and she
was dragging him like a sack into the living room.

He saw her glaring face and knew- knew better than he'd ever known
anything in his life- that she was going to kill him.

His mother.  This person who had been his mother was going to kill
him.

The thought was so enormous it stunned him.

She was going to hurt him so bad that he wouldn "t be there anymore. 
He would be... nothing at all

And then he was crying, pleading, he didn't know what he was saying
except that he was trying to get her not to kill him, to let him be. He
was calling her mommy mommy mommy whining like a puking little kid eyes
streaming tears nose dripping but he was so scared he didn't care, he
couldn't care.

And she looked at him.  Just looked.

Like he was so much garbage bagged and ready.  Like he was already
nothing.  And maybe he was.

Daddy, he thought.  Daddy please.

InsideOuf

At first they thought the voices and the now-familiar sounds of
breakage came from the florist's shop half a block away.  But no.
Someone was inside one of the darkened shops just across the street
-the Korean vegetable market, the beauty shop, the tv repair, the meat
market, maybe even the Food Emporium though the lights were on in there
and they could see no one.  They listened trying to pinpoint the sounds
but there was a good breeze blowing again and you couldn't be sure.

They were almost at the corner.  Anxiety tightened in his chest.  They
were really only yards away from Andy and Susan now.  He could not help
thinking- almost knowing- that the boy was still alive.  What was left
of his faith he put there- that somehow he'd avoided her.  That he was
waiting.

What about Elizabeth?  he thought.

He felt a pang of regret.  He had desired Elizabeth, yes, but he'd also
honestly liked her.  For a moment he wondered if they'd ever have

gotten together- and if they had, if it would have worked.  He guessed
they'd never know.

On the south side of 68th Street, in front of a bank, a woman stepped
out of the shadows.

She stood staring at them, her face a pale blank mask, her red cotton
dress billowing in the breeze.  She began to whimper.  Her face began
crumble with what seemed like relief.

And then she started to run, arms held wide to them imploringly.

It shocked him.  She was crying, tears bright on her cheeks.  She
okay.t he thought.  How can that be?  How can she not be one of them?

He suddenly remembered the little girl lying beneath the Picasso print
in the lighting shop.  It hadn't really registered before- there were
so many dead, so many bodies- but she hadn't looked changed.  She'd
looked murdered.  Period.

It threw all his thinking into question.  He'd been ready to kill Susan
and Elizabeth too if he had to.  But maybe some of them were still
okay.  Maybe Susan was okay.  He pictured them hiding together, Susan
and Andy, huddled safely in the darkness of their bedroom.

He glanced at Phil and the other man.  They see it too, he thought.
Amazing.

The woman was halfway across the street.  She was sobbing loudly.

The man in the white shirt reached out to her.  "It's okay, lady," he
whispered.  "Quiet down now.  You got to be quiet."

The woman was maybe twenty-three or twenty-four, attractive in a way,
very small and slightly on the heavy side.  She wrapped her arms around
the man and hugged him tight.

"You all right?"  he asked.

She nodded, sniffling.  The man turned to Phil and smiled.
"Unbelievable, huh?"

"We better get going.  Can you travel?"

The woman didn't answer.  She just hugged the man tighter and Tom could
see his face begin to change.

The man put his hands to her shoulders and gently began to push free of
her but like the rest of them she was fast.  When her head came up from
his chest she was snarling like an animal.

Ladies"

She was shorter than he was so she didn't try for the neck- so that it
was the sound of what she did that was so horrible, not the actual
damage, the sound of her teeth clamping down on his collarbone grinding
through shirt and flesh and scraping the bone as the man tried to throw
her off, too shocked even to scream at first, gasping.  But then she
burrowed deeper and he screamed long and loud.

She clung like a leech and by the time they pulled her off him the
women were everywhere all across the street.

They had been playing in the dark.

They came out of the beauty shop and they still had curlers in their
hair some of them and one still had a mud pack on her face and a little
pink sheet tied around her neck.  A shopping cart sailed out of the
Food Emporium heaped with steaks and roasts and sausages, a woman
running behind it.  A black woman with a Sorry portable cassette player
on her shoulder came running out of the tv shop.

It was the ones from the meat market who were the worst.

They carried things that glinted in the streetlight.

Phil had the woman by the hair but she clung to the man's collarbone
like a bulldog so he reached into his belt for the knife and shoved it
through the soft part of her neck just under the chin.  The jaws
opened.  The woman spun away pumping blood over the sidewalk.

And then he had to turn away and run because they were on them from
across the street and Tom saw the man's white shirt go suddenly awash
with blood, the point of a long steel sharpener protruding from just
beneath his breastbone.  She had it in him up to the handguard and the
woman was big and heavy and she lifted him off the ground with the
thrust of it and then dropped him and then there were half a dozen of
them crowded around him tearing.

They broke for the Dorset.  They heard his screams.

At the entrance Tom flung open the nearest door and they raced inside.
They turned and both their knives were up and ready when the first of
them came hurtling through the door.  Tom slashed her from eyebrow to
chin and she went down and Phil put his knife into the second one's
ribs.  Two more came through the door on the far side of the lobby, one
of them the big black woman with the cassette player blaring gangsta
rap.  The other was a svelte blonde jogger with a carving knife.

Jac let chum

They stepped out to meet them as a third came through the door they'd
just abandoned and Tom thanked god that she was just running at him
crazy and empty-handed, because all he had to do was turn and hold out
the knife and let her flaccid, naked stomach impale itself on the
blade.  She sank to the floor.

The music got suddenly louder and he felt something crack against the
side of his head and a damp coldness as he fell and heard the radio
crash down beside him, silent.

The woman whose face he'd cut was holding onto his ankle and hauling
herself toward him across the floor, her blood-trail glistening on the
maroon carpet.  The black woman stood over him, giggling.  In another
world entirely she'd have had a good smile.

He struggled to his knees.  His head was filled with lights.  He hacked
at the woman on his ankle blindly.  He blinked and shook his head and
when his vision cleared he saw Phil and the jogger circling each other
warily with knives drawn.

They can even be carfizl, he thought.

The black woman stooped to pick up the radio.  The woman at his ankle
was dead, her head lying in a widening pool of blood.

He tried to get up but it was impossible, he was too dizzy.  He fell to
his hands and knees.

He looked at the black woman as she raised the radio over her head.  He
heard the static crackle.  I 'm going to be killed by a./bt lady, he
thought.  There wasn't a thing he could do about it.  The radio was
poised above her head and he bowed his own to receive it like a good
bull taking his coup de grace, thinking I'm sorry And.v but god I tried
and then suddenly he heard a loud crack, looked up and saw the woman's
head dart off to the right as though jerked by a rope, her feet rising
up off the ground, her body falling like a sack of lead.

He stared down at her in amazement.  Her head was a shattered mess
lolling on her neck.  He looked up and his eyes slowly focused on the
black man standing next to him.

Clan.  His Louisville Slugger on his shoulder like he was waiting for
another pitch.

The other pitch was the jogger.

She'd backed Phil up to the door by now and somewhere along the

way she'd stabbed him in the shoulder.  She saw Clan coming and tried
to move away but there was nowhere for her to go.  The desk was right
behind her- old Willie, the deskman, headless, seeming to reach out for
her with both hands.

Clan walked over to her as confidently as you would swat a fly.  He
swung the bat one-handed at her midsection.

She put her hands out to block the blow and he heard wrists and
fingerbones shatter.  The knife spun away to the carpet.

Clan let the bat drift back behind him slowly, taking his time, placing
the shot.  The woman tried to raise her broken hands to protect
herself.  He swung the bat and hit her full in the face.  The head
whipped back.  The face exploded.  She sunk to the carpet.

Clan examined the bat.

He flicked two front teeth out of the wood with the tip of his finger.
"Damn!  It's good to see you, Mr.  Braun.  You all right?"  Clan helped
him to his feet.

"I was hoping you were cops," he said.  "You see Susan or Andy
tonight?" "Nope."

"You know Glen Sharkey?"

"Tenth floor?  Sure?"

"He's got guns up there," said Phil.

"No shit."

"First Andy," said Tom, "then the guns."

"You sure you don't want to think about that?"  Phil said.  "What would
you do."

He moved Phil's hand off the shoulder wound.  There was a lot of blood.
The cut looked deep.

"You up for this?"

"Tear up some of this shirt for me and tie it off.  Then we'll go and
get your boy."

Tom ripped Phil's shirtsleeve to the shoulder and tied it off just
above the wound.  He'd been right- it was deep.  But at least she
hadn't hit an artery.

"I'd rather not trust the elevators.  Let's take the stairs," he said.
They walked past the first bank of mirrors to the stairwell door.

Tom opened it carefully and looked inside.  It was clear.  He turned
to Clan and Phil and glimpsed the three of them reflected in the mirror
behind them.  In the harsh overhead light they looked like ghosts.
Bloodless, like dead things.

They hit the stairs.

Clarity had come immediately and with great force.

In the moment between awakening and her plunge off' the bed she
realized that the shape moving through the open window was a woman's,
but that didn't matter in the slightest- she sensed the threat.  Her
dancer's body did not betray her.  Her first leap off" the bed took her
halfway across the tiny studio apartment.  She heard the bed springs
creak behind her beneath the woman's foot and heard the woman growl and
by then she was at the door.

She'd double-locked it as always before she went to bed.  With perfect
economy of movement she threw the first lock and then the second and
her hand was on the doorknob when the woman crossed the apartment from
the bed to the door and slammed her from behind.

Cold damp hands fell across her naked shoulders and spun her around.
She stared into its face, its lips split open in a dozen purulent
lesions glistening pus and blood.  The mouth from cheeks to chin was

 brown and cracked like dry mud.  The eyes were rheumy yellow, not
white, and shot with red.

The death mask that was Lydia smiled.

Her torn filthy shirt was unbuttoned to the waist.  She felt cold soft
breast flesh press against her own as the powerful arms wrapped tight
around her back.  The mouth drooled against her neck.

She lurched back against the door so that for a moment there was a tiny
space between them and managed to wedge her forearms up into that
space, moving them up over the clammy graveyard coldness of the woman's
stomach and breasts, up to the collarbone, shaking herself violently
and throwing herself back against the door while the woman clung to
her, sucking at her neck, the lips pulling back and mouth opening to
bite, her arms finally rising up over the woman's and then the elbows
striking down hard against her forearms, breaking her hold.

The rest was instinctive.

Elizabeth went for the eyes.

Her fingers pushed deep and curled toward her.  The woman screeched and
jerked away, her own backward motion clawing the eyes from their
sockets so that they hung down her cheeks from long umbilical tendrils,
twitching as she backed away.  Elizabeth watched her- astonished-
stared as the woman groped for them wildly and felt her stomach heave
as she saw her paw the left eye off her face and watched it roll across
the floor trailing muscle fibre like a grisly ball of twine.

She flung open the door and ran out into the hall, screaming in

: horror and relief from horror, tears bursting from her eyes like
blood from a punctured vein, stumbling toward the elevator doors.  Her
voice echoed down the long hallway.

It did not go unnoticed.

All along the corridor doors began to open.

And even through her panic she recognized some of them.  Old

Mrs.  Strawn from 222 in housecoat and curlers, an ice-pick in her
hand.  The nurse in 226, Estha, in bloodsoaked camisole and tap
pants.

Two little girls she often saw playing in the lobby, one in powder-blue
pajamas and the other naked, peering out the doorway of 228, both of
them covered with blood from chin to chest.

For a moment it was impossible to comprehend.  An intruder even tkis
intruder- had been one thing.  But this... she'd stepped into madness.
She knew these people!  These... women.  Tkey were all women.  Not a
man among them.  Tom, she thought.  ,4ndy.

The Braun apartment was just next door.

The stewardess from 210 was moving toward her, naked except for a pair
of red silk panties.  Her shoulders and upper arms were scratched and
bleeding.

Suddenly they seemed to be everywhere at once- in back and in front of
her, by the elevator, by the stairwell door.  Some of them nameless to
her, strangers.  Moving together with a slow confidence, arms reaching
out to her, a dense web of deadly power.  Mrs.  Lyons almost near
enough to touch, shuffling toward her, ice pick rising.

Elizabeth shoved her aside and heard her hit the wall behind her.

She flung herself on Tom's door and pounded it with her fists "Tom!
Andy!  Sus... I"

She tried the doorknob.  It was locked.  She rammed it with her
shoulder.

"Tom!"

Her own apartment was cut off to her now.  The stewardess was blocking
the way.  The thing inside with the dangling eye would have been
infinitely preferable.  She slammed at Tom's door.

"Please!  Help me!"

A cold hand touched her naked thigh.  She whirled.

She slapped the little girl's hands away in revulsion.  Her sister was
beside her smiling, reaching for her, clotted blood smeared across her
pajamas.  Behind them the others moved steadily forward.  She shoved
the first girl back into the crowd, grabbed her sister's arm and flung
her into them too, but their combined weight was nothing.  And when
they saw that she was going to fight they moved with lightening
speed.

She darted to the right toward the stairwell door but they were on her
in an instant, hands reaching into her long hair and pulling her to the
floor.  Suddenly they were everywhere- and she realized the full,
terrible implications of her nudity.  The hands slid out of her hair
and

raked long sharp fingernails across her cheek.  Teeth sank deep into
her thighs, her breasts, her belly.  Old Mrs.  Strawn's ice pick
thudded into the floor an inch away from her neck.

She flailed wildly, kicking, pushing them off her body.  Powerful
fingers gripped her arms and wrists and pinned them to the rough
carpeting but her legs were free and she fought furiously, her ferocity
surging.

She felt a pang of agony and saw the nurse's teeth sinking into her
inner thigh.  She closed her legs over the woman's neck, locked her
ankles together and jerked them up and down once as hard as she could,
heard the neck snap, and rolled the body away from her like a broken
doll.  She planted her feet flat on the floor and pushed up into a
backward roll and kicked at the two women holding her arms, missed the
stewardess on the left but caught the other woman square on the chin.

She exulted in it.  She had one ann free again.

She rolled forward again and on the downswing her legs fell across the
shoulders of a middle-aged woman and knocked her to the floor.  She
pivoted left and struck the stewardess twice in the mouth.  The lip
split but the woman held on.  At the same time she felt someone bite
deep into her side just above the hip but the ann had to be free never
mind the teeth so she hit the stewardess again and kept hitting her
until the hands dropped away, then turned and brought her elbow down
across the neck of the woman at her side.

She sat up and pressed back against the wall and pushed herself to her
feet.

The door to Tom's apartment opened.

She turned to run inside and saw Susan standing in the doorway.  Teeth
grinding.  Eyes rimmed red.  Smiling, stepping toward her.  She ran.

The stewardess was rising.  Elizabeth rammed her and sent her flying
across the hall, used the impact to spin herself toward the door to her
own apartment She pulled the door open.  An arm went around her neck
and she turned inside it thinking fuck you, brought her knee up into
the woman's stomach and heard the whoosh of air, broke free

Ladies" ighl and stepped inside as the woman gripped the doorframe and
Elizabeth slammed the door on her fingers, heard the shrill cry of
agony with delicious satisfaction, opened the door and when the hand
fell away slammed it again, threw both locks and turned around.

The woman's eye was still dangling.

She was down on the floor next to the bed, mewling like a cat, trying
to find the other one.

"A little to your left," Elizabeth said.

She'd beaten them.

She walked around the woman to the open window and pushed it shut.  She
turned on the overhead light and went to the bathroom.  She turned on
that light too.

Her face in the mirror was bruised and scratched and dirty.  The
bite-marks were deepest on her thigh, her side, and her left breast
high up near the shoulder.  There was a surprising lack of serious
bleeding.

She held the washcloth under the tap water and gently bathed the worst
of it, smeared bacitracin into the wounds and then walked back into the
living room.

The woman had found her missing eye.  She was fumbling with it
insanely, trying to find a way to put it back again.

Elizabeth took her nightgown off the chair and put it on.

The woman seemed to sense the angry force of her.  She sobbed and
scuttled closer to the bed.

On a shelf beside the window stood a large ming aurelia- her only
potted plant.  Elizabeth thought it was a shame to destroy it but
whether from relief or fear she still was shaking uncontrollably, she
needed to be calm and think and she could not do that with the woman
there and she could not stand the mewling.

She wondered if Susan had killed Tom and Andy.  My god.

The aurelia must have weighed thirty pounds.  She lited it carefully
and moved over to the woman and let it drop.

The mewling sounds stopped.

She stared down at the woman's body and the scattered shards of
pottery.

I'll have to clean this up, she thought.  She guessed it could wait
till morning.

Morning, she thought.  And then what?

She shifted her gaze to the window.  It was hard to think clearly.  She
didn't know.

A dull pain spread through his chest and throat, a lethargy in the
pulse of his blood, a cold ache throbbing through his limbs.  He was
done with struggling.  Her thumbs maintained a slow even pressure on
his throat.

There was a strange little man hungry fir air inside him and all he
could do was to let the man die.

He knew she was enjoying it.  How his tossing and squirming had run
slowly down and then stopped.  She was looking at his face, taking her
time, her head tilted to one side watching him as though she were
curious about something.

He saw colors dance before his eyes and despite the pain saw how pretty
they were, the blues and greens and yellows.  There was an empty
feeling in his stomach.

He wondered how long it would take this way.

Probably so did she.

 and never knew that it was Elizabeth at the door who saved him.

Susan heard the pounding and the shouting, the commotion in the hall.
Her fingers loosened slightly.  She listened.  Then more pounding and
someone calling names that were familiar to her.  She dropped the boy
to the crimson persian carpet and went to the door... and his first
breath of air was the most painful thing he'd ever felt in his life. It
seemed to slide down his throat like a red hot poker.  Even the awful
wracking cough was a relief after that.  He began to feel a tingling in
his arms and legs, which amplified and distorted until his body seemed
one great slab of pain.

He knew he had to get out of there.  The physical SOS to that effect
was overriding even his agony.  He scrambled across the carpet into the
bathroom, his breathing so loud to his own ears he was terrified she
could hear him.  Only when he got inside did it occur to him to wonder
why she'd dumped him and how he'd got so lucky.

He locked the door.

To Susan the girl at the door was not Elizabeth.  She was just a kill,
someone who she clearly sensed was not like them.  When the girl turned
and eluded her she didn't mind.  She quietly closed the door.

And then went back to the other one.

Who was missing.

She looked in the kitchen.  He wasn't there.  She looked in the
bedroom.  He wasn't behind the bed or in the closet or hiding behind
his dresser.  She looked into her own room.  He wasn't there either.
She began to laugh.

She knew where he was.

He was in the bathroom.

Washing his face Taking a shower Brushing his teeth Shitting The
bathroom door was locked and the light was on inside, She rattled the
doorhandle.  She heard a rustling sound and that made her laugh again
because now there was no question that he was there and the door was
flimsy, she could break it down easily.  Flim,sy.  The word

posted itself in her mind like an advertisement on a billboard.  She
looked at the door.

And then methodically began to kick it to pieces.

Halfway up the stairs they heard the screams and laughter and the
sounds of struggle, of bodies falling and pounding into walls.
Goddammit!  Right in front of the fucking door.t

"Guns first," whispered Phil.  "We got to change our plan here."
"Bullshit.t "

"You love your son?  You want to live to see him?"

"He's right, Mr.  Braun."

"You assholes!  That could be Anv.t"

"Unh-unh, Mr.  Braun.  Listen to 'em.  Could And.v put up a fight like
that?"

Clan was right.  It sounded like maybe a dozen out there.  Whoever was
behind that door was struggling hard to keep on living.

"Whoever it is, Jesus, we should help!"  His voice sounded almost
petulant to him.

"Hey.  You can be a hero or you can save your son.  We need those
guns, " said Phil.  "We can be back here in minutes.  "

Tom knew they were making sense and he also knew he was verging on
hysteria.  He fought for control, trying not to fall apart right then
and there in the stairwell.  He wasn't going to be any goddamn help to
Andy if they went out there and got themselves killed but to be this
close was torture.

His connection to Andy was still alive and somehow he felt that that
meant so was Andy.

"Okay," he said.  "The elevators.  It's faster."

They hurried back downstairs and hit the first floor landing at a
run.

Clan pushed open the door and they were out in the mirrored corridor
and rounding the corner to the elevators when they saw the four young
women in front of them.  But by then they were moving fast and kept on
moving, Phil taking one of them by the arm and stabbing her in the side
then turning and hitting the call-button, Tom backing the second to the
mirror so that he stared at his own hard eyes as he stabbed her in the
stomach.  Clan was wielding the baseball bat like a two-handed sword,
the last two women falling in front of him like grass before a demented
reaper.  One of them scrambled away from him on her hands and knees
with her skull bleeding and Tom thought that it was the first time he'd
seen any of them show that kind of fear.  It was almost human.

The door to the middle elevator opened and they swung inside.  Tom hit
the button for ten.  The door slid shut and then there was nothing to
do but wait while the elevator ascended.  The very normalcy was
oppressive.  Here he was, doing the same thing he'd done a thousand
times, staring at the imitation brass of the wall surface, listening to
the hum of machinery, waiting.

Everything is' normal but us and them, he thought.  Just another little
ride in the elevator.  Sweat beaded Dan's forehead.  The bat rested
lightly on his shoulder.  Phil's fingers opened and closed on the knife
handle.  Clubs and knives, he thought.  Back to basics.  They stepped
out into the hall.  Apartment doors hung open all along it.

One had been pulled off its hinges and lay across the hallway.

There were traces of what looked like blood on its inner side. Garbage
was strewn around- wrappers, cans, melon rinds.  Near the elevator a
section of wallpaper had been torn away, the pasteboard behind it
bone-white.  Someone had smeared the wall with excrement.

They turned the corner.  In the laundry room- every floor had one- a
man lay face-up in the first tumble drier.  His eyes and mouth were
open and his hands were folded in his lap and he was covered with soap
powder.  They'd drowned two men in the top-loader washers, one of them
wearing a bathrobe and the other only a pair of boxer shorts.

They moved down the hall to Sbarkey's apartment.  Clan was ready with
his passkey.

The door to 1034 was closed- but not locked Phil pushed it open.  They
listened in silence.

He turned on the light in the living room and they walked inside.  They
knew immediately there was no point calling for Sharkey.  The smell was
strong here, a salt-sweet reek and the smell of human wastes, They
locked the door behind them and began to look for him.

The living room, dining area and kitchen were undisturbed.  In the
bedroom Phil went to the closet, reached up on to one of the shelves
and removed a small pistol from beneath a pile of sweaters.  Under
another pile he found a box of shells.  He felt around further.

"Shit, I can't find the Colt," he said.  "Maybe he sold it."  He loaded
six bullets into the pistol and slipped the box into his pocket. 
"Maybe he's got it on him," Tom said.  "Maybe."

"Mr.  Braun?"  said Clan.  The black man was on his knees holding up
the bed covers which had dropped partly off the bed.  The tip of the
sheet was shit-stained and beneath the bed they could see a dark
twisted form.

They pulled him out.

The face was bloated, blue and yellow.  The belt from his bathrobe lay
embedded in the swollen flesh of his neck and his fingers were frozen
still clawing at it.

Phil looked down at him.

"Guy drank too much but he was never mean," he said.  "It's a

goddamn shame.  You want to bet he figured he got lucky tonight?

Nobody broke into this place.  His door was open."  "Maybe that's where
the Colt went."  "Maybe."

Clan patted the pockets of the bathrobe and peered beneath the bed. 
"He didn't have it on him," he said.

"Let's go," Phil said.  "We got one gun.  It'll have to do."

The elevator was still there open waiting for them.  But this time
there was nothing familiar-feeling about it.  The air inside as they
descended felt thick with a terrible promise.  He heard a soft clicking
sound and looked at Phil and saw him staring down at the gun and knew
that he felt it too.

He'd just clicked off the safety.

Home Impro emenls

The lock was going to hold but the bathroom door was some sort of cheap
jack plywood and Andy gave her two or three more kicks before she got
inside.

"Noooo!"  he moaned.

His voice sounded low and hoarse to him, like he'd grown five years in
the last five minutes.

He pushed open the medicine cabinet.  Most of the bottles were plastic.
But there was a heavy jar of cold cream and some perfume and cologne
bottles.  She kicked the door again and he heard the panel shatter.

Behind the cologne he found his father's old straight razor.  He opened
it.  He ran his thumb over the edge.  It was stained and dirty but it
was still pretty sharp.

The razor and the bathroom gave him an idea.  The idea was right out of
Psycho and it scared the hell out of him but she scared him more.  He
left the cold cream and perfumes in the sink and with the

open razor in his hand slipped into the shower stall and threw the
clear plastic curtain.

He could hear the door splinter.

He turned the shower on and threw the dial over to HOT as far as it
would go, then quickly angled the shower-head away from him and stepped
up on the ledge of the tub behind the spray.

The shower-head was already too hot to handle so he peeled off his
pajama top and wrapped it around his hand.

Through the plastic curtain and the jbg of steam he could see the hand
moving through the hole in the panel.[bmblingjbr the lock then
withdrawing.  The door opening.  His mother suddenly inside.

He wanted to scream but he held it in, tried to stay calm because he
could not make any mistakes here, it had to be just right.  He could
hear the thunder of falling water.  It burned his hand through the wet
pajama top but he held onto the showerhead anyway, willing himself to
not let go.

She drifted to him through the pluming mist of steam and threw the
curtain.

He heard the sharp metallic sliding rip of the curtain-rings across the
rod and jerked the shower-head up in her direction.  The hot heavy
spray hit her full in the chest and she threw up her hands.  She backed
to the wall opposite the sink but his spray could still reach her and
he turned it on her.

He heard himself screaming, yelling in pure release, and followed her
with the spray.

She began to twist and howl but he saw that she'd fixed his position
now behind the spray and it was like they were connected, he knew what
she was thinking, she was thinking that it would be an easy thing to
face the pain for just a second and get to him, so he slipped off the
ridge of the tub, scalding his own naked back in the process, and
launched himself at her.

He cut her once, twice, a third time, felt the terrible resistance of
flesh beneath the razor and felt the warm spray of red.  He did not
know where he hit her, only saw her fall back against the sink and
stumble to her knees and he knew he should be staying there, standing
there, standing over her, killing her with the razor now that he had
the chance

but he couldn't, the awful sounds, the feel of the razor when it cut,
the terror was too much.  It was like he was in a room with every black
evil wicked thing in the world and some of it was him- some of it was
him with the razor.

It seemed that one second he was still in the bathroom and the next he
was at the front door pulling it open and then standing frozen there,
looking at them milling through the hall by the elevators and the
stairwell all the way down to Lizzy's apartment, turning with a quick
terrible purpose when they saw him, snarling.

He slammed the door.  Locked it.

His heart was roaring.  He wa s8in hell now, it was all hell, the
entire world, this" was what it was, tlot like he'd read or seen in the
movies but thi," exactly thi,".

He heard the shower die abruptly.

He had never known a silence so thick and filled with meaning.  He'd
hurt her.  And now he'd pay.

She was coming to make him pay.

Calm down, he thought.  You got to think.

He still had the razor but it was not going to be enough- not now, not
after he had hurt her.

There were things in the kitchen.  As quietly as he could he went to
the kitchen and closed the double louver doors behind him.  There were
no locks on the doors but they would give him an extra moment.  The
cleaver was on a peg on the wallboard.  He took it down.  The cast-iron
pans frying pans were on the stove.  The biggest was too heavy for him
so he took the next biggest.  He opened the cabinet and took out a
stack of plates.  The good china.  He was making noise and she'd know
exactly where he was but it didn't matter, she was going to find him
anyhow.

He put the pan and cleaver next to him by the sink where he could grab
them fast and took up the stack of dishes.

He put his back to the far wall and waited.

He saw a shadow through the louver doors.

The pause that followed lasted a billion billion years.

He felt a rush of terror tremble him like an electric jolt and the
doors burst open.

She stood there dripping wet with her nightgown plastered to her body
and he took in at once the damage he'd done.  The red skin blistering
across her arms and breasts, the bleeding lines across her hip and
belly.  But all of it was nothing.  The force of her was stunning.  The
dishes felt puny and ridiculous in his hands.

He threw them anyway.  She batted them away and they crashed on the
floor and counter.  He grabbed the cast iron pot by the handle and
threw it underhand as hard as he could like he was pitching a softball
and he was lucky, it caught her in the stomach and made her double up
for a moment and he rushed her with the cleaver.

She saw it coming.

She backhanded him across the face and sent him sprawling against the
wall.  He sat there dazed, pain careering through his face and jaw,
looked up through a film of tears and saw her advancing.

He slashed at her legs with the cleaver and felt it connect, the
resistance of meat, and heard her howl.  He got up moving faster than
he would have ever thought it was possible for him to move but it was
still no good.

He felt an immense bone-shaking blow to the back just above his
shoulder and then a second lower down, cracking his ribs.  All the
breath went out of him in a sudden rush and he fell flat across the
floor.  The tears were pain-tears now and he blinked his eyes to clear
them and saw her foot right in front of him and he brought the cleaver
down.

She stepped away.

He heard low evil laughter.

Goddamn you he thought and pain or no pain he rolled over on his side
pushing outward and up from the wall and lunged at her with the
cleaver-and if he lived forever he would never forget the sound of
it.

Nor what he felt and saw.

The blade had all but disappeared into the flesh of her thigh and
stopped against bone.  He'd heard it stop.  A huge flap of muscle and
skin enveloped it.  He saw muscles twitching, veins pumping bright hot
blood.  It sluiced over his hands still clutching the cleaver.  He let
go as though the handle were electrified.

She toppled over beside him and for a moment they were face to face
and he stared into her red-rimmed eyes.  And she opened her mouth wide
and roared at him.

It was not his mother.

He stood and backed away, watching her agonized attempts to remove the
blade, watched the hands go to the dripping handle and then fly away as
the slightest touch drew her through infinite waves of pain, the face
seeming to turn in upon itself, suddenly old, ancient, the mouth open
sucking air and whimpering.

Not his mother.

A gruesome evil heap on the floor.

She was nothing.

He stooped and reached for the cast iron pan.

You're got no choice, he thought.  The thing will get up again.  In the
movies they always do.

And you can't run away, you sure can't go outside.

He had no choice.

But suddenly he was sobbing like a baby.

He raised the pan high over his head and brought it down with all his
strength.

And she was silent.

He ran to his bedroom and closed and locked the door and lay down
carefully on his bed because his ribs throbbed terribly now.  It didn't
help that he couldn't seem to quit crying.

It was only a few moments later that he heard sounds from the
kitchen.

The clatter of metal on the floor and a cry of pain.

The cleaver, he thought.

He heard a scraping sound, something moving through the hall.  His ribs
felt so bad he could hardly move.

And it wasn't over.

Mary didn't like it anymore.

The man on the hood of the prowl car.

The gleaming red face which dripped through the hole in the windshield
onto the floormat.  The arm that waved whenever she made a turn.  He
bothered her.

She stopped two blocks east of Grand Central Station, got out and
walked to the front of the car and looked down at the second man, the
one wedged between the grille and bumper.  His head was gone.  She had
no idea when he'd lost it.  The ragged flesh of his neck had turned
black.

She grabbed him by the belt and tugged.

She got his legs down so that he was kneeling on the street, his arms
and chest still stuck in there.  His chest was soft when she reached in
under him.  She tossed the rest of him down and wiped her dripping
hands on the pants-cuff of the man on the hood of her car.  Then she
grabbed his feet and pulled.

He immediately slid free.  Almost free.  Pieces of him still clung to
the windshield.  She pulled him across the hood.  His head thumped down
on the bumper.  She threw him across the body of the first man and
stood there breathing heavily for a moment, then walked over and sat
inside the squad car.

She was feeling that tingling again.

She reached down and put her hand down there, and she was wet again
too.  She started the car and raced the motor.

She let the car idle a minute and threw it into DRIVE.  The left side
of the car rose slightly in front and then in back as it rolled over
the pair of bodies.  She cruised along slowly.

She kept one hand down inside her and the other on the wheel.

Waves of pleasure rolled over her.  She heard the siren wail behind her
and pressed her foot down on the gas pedal and the car burst forward.

"You look like something out of Playboy," she said.

She drove one-handed through the dark sea of bodies that populated her
memories.

Paintod Lad

The thing at Elizabeth's feet lay motionless, its head covered with
potting soil.  She sat on the bed and stared at it a long time.

It looked ridiculous, really.

She stood and walked carefully around it and into the bathroom.  She
peeled off the nightgown and, for the third time in just a few minutes,
began to bathe her wounds.

She was almost out of bacitracin.

She remembered that her mother had favored Mercurochrome.  She found an
old half-empty bottle in the medicine cabinet.  The orange lines on her
cheeks made her look like an Indian in warpaint.  There were teethmarks
and scratches on her thighs, legs, breasts, and stomach.  She dabbed
them with Mercurochrome.

There were stripes all over her now.

She walked back into the living room.  The body had not moved.  Of
course it hadn't.  There were sounds coming from the Brauns' apartment
next door but she barely registered them.  She turned on the

television.  There was nothing but a lot of static.  She turned it off
again.

A dullness, a lethargy had settled in.  As a dancer it was strange for
her not to feel in touch with her body.  But there was little sensation
except for the throbbing of her wounds.  Her arms felt weightless, the
soles of her feet, numb.  She realized she was naked.

Where had she l/i it?  The nightgown?

She walked to the bathroom again and there it was on the floor.  It was
streaked with dry blood.  It wasn't what she wanted.  She'd get dressed
instead.

She went to the closet and picked out a blue silk blouse and loose
fitting white linen pants.  Soft against the wounds.  She put them on
and thought, what next?  Everything tumbled in a gentle confusion.

She couldn't just sit there with that thing on the floor.

Her eyes kept returning to the window.  Her thoughts seemed bound up in
that cobalt sky.  Dawn was arriving soon and the window beckoned.

The woman had come through the window.  She opened it an inch.  She
felt a cool breeze on her bare hands, felt it billow the blue silk
blouse.  Sensation.  She opened it further and closed her eyes and let
the breeze wash over her, felt it brush the skin of her throat and
rustle her hair.

She heard screams from the street and simultaneously, laughter from the
hallway.  She slammed the window shut.

The woman had come through the window.

But (the woman had come in that way, couldn't she go out that way?

Sure she could.  She could wait till dawn, look for a policeman or a
man- any man- to walk by and call out to him below through the window
and climb out onto the tree and escape.  She only had to wait.

She sat down on the bed, willing the sky to brighten.  Soon, she .!
thought.  She glanced at the thing on the floor in the ruins of her
room and thought how it had not moved and now neither would she.  She
smiled.

We're two of a kind, she thought.

At first there was nothing to it.  The elevator doors slid open and
the men moved swiftly down the corridor.  The first thing they saw was
the body of a woman with her neck broken lying on the floor.  Then they
saw the others.  There were maybe twelve of them who had begun to drift
back to their individual apartments and who were scattered throughout
the hallway and now were turning slowly and deliberately like hunters
scenting new game.

Phil started firing and the first to fall was old Mrs.  Strawn because
she was closest and held an ice pick the explosion in the middle of her
blue housecoat shaking some of the curlers out of her hair as she
dropped.  The next was a young girl Tom didn't know, wearing pajamas,
shot twice in the ribs.

By that time the others realized they had a problem here and started
moving faster.

Clan stepped out three or four paces to the right of Phil and began
working with the bat, cutting a path to Tom's door.  Phil fired twice
and

a little naked girl went down beside him and a middle-aged woman fell
to her knees clutching at her neck, Phil began reloading.

Tom stood ready with a knife in each hand but there wasn't any need.
The bat was keeping them at bay.  He watched three of them flee around
the corner and recognized Mrs.  Strawn's older sister- a carbon copy
right down to the curlers except that the housecoat she wore was pink,
not blue- waving an curling iron at him as she stumbled out of sight. A
woman he knew to be a stewardess was backing away from Clan, who missed
her once and then connected with her knee.  When she fell to the
carpeting he was on her with the bat like the bat was an axe and the
woman was a log that needed splitting.

There were only two of them in sight by then and Phil had the gun
reloaded.  One was moving sadly, stupidly down the hall past Tom's door
to the right where the hall dead-ended in front of the apartment next
to Elizabeth's.  Nowhere to go but straight to hell and that was where
Phil put her.  The other was just a teenager hissing and clawing at
them with her back to the wall opposite.  Phil walked in close and shot
her execution-style in the forehead and she slid down the wall, her
head bubbling a froth of blood.

They went to the door.

Phil reloaded the two empty chambers while Tom used his keys.

The keys felt slimy in his sweaty fingers.  The top lock was giving him
trouble until he realized he was throwing it in the wrong direction,
Jesus, it wasn't locked!  it was only the bottom lock that'd been
thrown.  He slipped it out and fumbled through his keychain for the
other one.

And that was when Mrs.  Strawn's older sister stabbed him with her
sister's ice pick

She came out of nowhere, moving faster than any old lady had a right to
move and for a moment they'd let their guard down, Tom working with the
keys, Phil reloading, Clan concentrating on Tom and the door that was
going to open momentarily- and the ice pick went into him at the
collarbone near his shoulder and came out fast and down again into his
neck and suddenly there was blood everywhere.

He felt no pain, just shock and fear that he was not going to make it,
that he would never know what all the killing had been worth and

what had happened to Andy.  Andy, who had flogged him through a night
of terror.  The ice pick slipped into him a third time- into his chest-
as Phil fired directly into her face scattering blood and brains across
the hall.

No, he thought./t was not going to go down that way.  He pulled the ice
pick out of him and dropped it to the floor and stumbled to his
knees.

He heard the echo of the pistol and then nothing, a vast empty silence.
He struggled against a descending flood of color.

"Help me up."

He stared into Phil's eyes, read pity there.  Read sadness.  He focused
on the eyes.

"Get me up."

They lifted him to his feet.

"Now.  Give me the gun."

He saw them look at one another and knew what they were thinking.  That
it was crazy to give him the gun.  He was probably a dead man already.
But it was his son in there and his wife and it was his battle.  He
thought that as long as he could stand they couldn't refuse him.  And
he was standing.

"Please," he said.

He needed to dismiss the pain, the sense of something slowly trickling
away.  He put his back to the wall and held out his hand.  He felt them
hesitate.  Then heard Phil sigh.

The .22 didn't weigh much.  He had that to be thankful for anyway.

He found the key on his chain and handed it to Clan, heard it in the
lock.

The door swung open.

He moved inside ahead of them, the floor of his apartment bucking and
roiling beneath his bloodsoaked shoes.

He willed away the mist.

Andy crouched behind his bed.

The forty-pound fiberglass bow was strung and a soft leather quiver of
target arrows hung over his shoulder.  He fixed an arrow to the
bowstring.

Now, he thought.  Come on.

There was an awful pain in his ribs but he didn't think pain had messed
up his judgment, he thought he'd got it right.  As soon as he heard her
moving in the kitchen he'd ducked out into the hallway and turned on
the light.  Then he'd turned off his light and left the bedroom door
wide open.  That way he'd see her framed in the door so he could make
his shot but she couldn't see him- she wouldn't know where he was in
there.

He'd seen it in the movies.

He knew he'd hurt her bad- that was what the rasping dragging sounds
were about and why it was taking her so long and he just wished she'd
hurry up before this trembling got to him.  His ears were

keyed to the sounds as though they were a part.  of him.  She was only
a few feet from the door when they stopped again.

Come on.

Suddenly he heard gunfire- a series of short rapid popping sounds and
god!  they startled him he was so much into to these other sounds she
was making and he threw himself back against the wall and lost his grip
on the bow and the arrow slid off the bowstring.  He heard its wooden
shaft and metal tip clatter to the floor.  To be without the arrow even
for a moment terrified him.

He groped beneath the bed.  But it was dark, he couldn't see, his whole
plan was backfiring on him now and he couldn't find it!  It had rolled
somewhere.

A sudden panic seized him.

He couldn't hear her anymore!  There were more gunshots and shouts and
screams coming from the hall and maybe that meant somebody was coming
to get him but because of them he couldn't hear.

Where was she?

He looked up- it took all his nerve to do it- and the doorway was still
empty, thank god.  He could feel the hairs bristle at the back of his
neck.  Terror was robbing him of everything, of all his determination.
He was nothing but a scared little kid all over again because he
couldn't find the arrow and he couldn't hear her.

And then he almost laughed.

Because he had a whole quiver full of arrows right here on his
shoulder.  He heard more shots as be pulled one free and strung it,
turning it to fit the notch to the bowstring, and went back to his
crouch position behind the bed.

He'd get her.

He heard the dragging sounds over the others from the hall and knew she
was very near him, just at the door, just bending to the open frame. In
his mind he could almost see her.  He felt a tightness grip his throat
like an arid wind.

He heard more gunfire.  His staring eyes blinked once.  And she was
there.  Peering inside.

She stepped full into the doorway, her form in half-shadow, one eye
gleaming.

He pulled back hard on the bowstring.  The pull was heavy and it was
hard to keep it steady but he knew he had to do it right this time, it
had to be over.  He saw something glint in the light from the hall. The
cleaver- raised over her head, stained with her own blood.

If she can do that.  he thought, she can pull it out her and then come
back here to use it on me- my god!  how could you fight something like
that?

She was indestructible!

He suddenly saw himself lying flat on his bed while she cut off his
arms and legs and piled them up beside him, saw the cleaver pass
through his skull and face, cutting it in half, his dead eyes staring
up at her from a dreadful new proximity.

The bowstring cut into his fingers.  He pulled harder.  Steadied it.
Aimed.  And released the arrow.

Vicious, she thought.  Oily olly in./kee come out come out wherever you
are hiding in the dark, vicious, peekaboo eyeseeyou.  Yours something
said but the voice so dim and the evil little thing that hurt her
hiding in there in the dark so that she stumbled on the bad leg as she
peeked into the room and shook her head, no, denying it, denying the
voice.

How nice how good the evil cleaver.

lcious.

She moved just as he fired, the arrow aimed for her heart rising at its
predetermined angle with terrible swiftness in the small space between
them and sinking deep into the red cold eye.  Andy heard her scream, a
throaty roar of perfect agony from deep within, like she was burning,
and the impact drove her back against the wall so that he could see her
in the light, the open running burn-wounds like patches of decay, the
legs caked and clotted with blood, the deep meaty gash in her thigh.

He saw her twisted mouth fill with yellow bile like fast-flowing magma,
and bright spouts of blood pouring from her eye.

He stood up, terrified and fascinated, thinking, please, let her die
now.  Please.

But she wouldn't.

With the cleaver still clutched in her hand she reached up to the shaft
of the arrow and broke it in half midway down its length.  He heard it
snap and then his own wailing, his own screaming.  She shook her head
spraying the room and him with blood.  She raised the cleaver and
started for him.

He reached for another arrow inside the quiver, his fingers slipping on
the shaft, slick with her blood- and he couldn't stop crying.  He knew
she could hear him and that the dark wouldn't help him if she did but
he couldn't stop.

Suddenly the cleaver split the bed in front of him clear down to the
box-spring.  He threw himself against the wall.  The arrow he'd half
removed from the quiver fell to the floor.

She pulled the cleaver out of the mattress and he saw her wipe the
blood from her one good eye, almost seeming to smile at him in the
half-light.  He reached for another arrow.  He pulled it free.

There was no time to string it nor any distance now between them so he
dropped the bow to the bed and held the arrow out in front of him with
both hands.  The arrow felt thin, fragile.  He clung to its frailty.

She drew back, ready to split him this time.

"Andy!"

It seemed impossible but he heard it.  Once and then again.  Nearer.
"Andy!"

She heard it too.  She turned her head and listened.

"Dad!"  he screamed.  "Here!  Here!"

He saw her in profile for a moment, turning, the broken shaft of the
arrow tilting, rising with the upward sweep of the cleaver and then her
back was to him and she was poised to strike, down into the shadows at
some creeping ghost moving low across the floor in front of her and
thrusting something forward into her belly which exploded at her,
bursting bits of flesh and bone toward Andy out through the back of her
like a grisly sun shower

He saw the cleaver come down and heard it strike.  He reached for

the bow on the bed, a sudden powerful hatred rising in him because the
gunshot had not killed her, the bitch, the bitch nothing could kill
her, he would have to go on killing her.fireven

At her feet he saw his father fire again.  She had buried the cleaver
in the muscles of his chest and he could barely get the pistol up at
all so that the shot went wild into the ceiling.  He heard her wrench
the cleaver free.

The gun dropped to the floor beside his father's hand... and Tom didn't
care.  Because he knew by then.  There had been time enough to see the
boy alive and then to kill her.  He knew he'd killed her.  He knew that
Andy was alive.  He would have wished to live long enough to touch him,
he would have wished that very much, but he knew what he needed to know
and he'd done what he could For once... and Andy heard the muffled
chopping sound as the cleaver split his father's skull.

He had the arrow fit to the bow-string and he fired into her back.  At
the same time he saw a black man's hand reach over his father's body
and take the gun.

The bullet caught her in the chest and the arrow in the small of her
back.  She fell backwards onto the bed and he heard the arrow snap
beneath her weight.  A bright gaping wound seemed to spread itself
slowly across the middle of her chest.  He snatched another arrow out
of his quiver.  He knew she was dead but he did not feel safe and
without the arrow it was not enough.

And he guessed it was not enough for the black man either because he
saw him step over his father's body and fire pointblank into her open
mouth.

The room was still.

He smelled gunpowder.  He smelled blood.  He recognized the black man
as Clan the security guard.  Another man he didn't know stepped into
the room, looking ashen in the pale dawning light.

They looked at each another and no one made a sound.

Dawn, thought Elizabeth.  Oh yes.

The sky was a murky New York grey.  The streets were quiet.  The sounds
next door had stopped.

A cop would be perfect now.  There's a body in my room, officer. Please
check the people next door.  Look for the boy.  I haven ?  got the
nerve.

She opened the window.  The morning air was cool, scented with
burning.

She could probably use the hall now.  Everything seemed quiet there too
but she was not going to risk the hall.  Not again.

The tree was very close to the window and the branches were thick
enough to support her.  She stood on the heating unit and put one a leg
out and an arm and grabbed the tree.  There.  She stared back at her
open window.  She hugged the treetrunk, thinking of the woman lying on
her floor, until the shivering stopped.

She let herself slowly down.  I'm surprised someone hasn't tried to
break in here before, she thought.  It's not real hard.

The peat in the garden was wet with dew.  She'd forgotten her shoes.
There was broken glass on the sidewalk so she walked down the middle of
68th Street toward Broadway.

Bodies.  Abandoned cars.

If there are police around, she thought, I'll find them at 72nd Street.
There wasn't any traffic so she stayed in the middle of the street, it
felt amazing to be able to do that- to walk down the middle of Broadway
for god's sake in broad daylight.  The city was empty.

Apart from the dead.

She tried not to look at the dead.

She would tell the police first about Tom and Andy.  Get them to check.
She hoped they were okay.

The sky was brightening.  I wonder if anybody can see that I'm not
wearing panties under these pants, she thought.  She'd forgotten them
like she'd forgotten the shoes.  I don't suppose it matters but I
wonder if anyone can see.

Somewhere a few blocks uptown she heard a car door slam.  She walked
toward the sound.

Lederer kept shaking his head.  He couldn't believe the way his chase
had ended.

They'd picked up the woman in the prowl car again at Grand Central
Station, their own vehicle miraculously intact after going through the
porn-shop window except for two busted headlights and a dented
grille.

The woman was just cruising, looking for somebody to give the crunch
to.  Then there they were again, trying to broadside her off the road
or make her over-drive herself and smash into something.

She'd over-driven herself all right.

She'd turned onto the ramp to the Port Authority parking garage at
about forty miles per hour, ricocheting off half a dozen parked
vehicles on the first floor and then another half-dozen on the second-
and they'd thought, well, when she gets to the top we've got her.  One
more floor and she's got to stop.

She never did.

She never even got to the third floor.  It was an incredible sight,
really.  She rounded a long turn.  And then instead of making the next
one- instead of even trying to make it- she just kept going, right into
the brick wall.  And straight through it.  So that when Horgan slammed
on the brakes they saw a hole in the wall like somebody'd used a cannon
on it and the sound was still booming through the whole garage.  They
got out of the car and went to the hole in the wall and looked down. It
was a hundred feet to the sidewalk, maybe more.  The car was just
burning away to nothing.  It had landed on top of a newsstand,
magazines all around, and he could see them burning too like tiny
sparks off the main circle of flame.

They drove back down and saw the National Guard units set up and moving
traffic at the Lincoln Tunnel.  And just after that they got the
order.

The plan was for the police and the National Guard to round up and
evacuate every guy in New York City.  Cuff them if they had to but get
them out of there.  They had the city divided into sectors according to
precinct, bridge and tunnel exits all closed to inbound traffic.  Women
were to be brought in for testing.  Or else shot on sight.  Your
discretion.

Quite a goddamn order.

Take this one now.

Did you take her in or shoot her?

She was walking toward them up Broadway at about 69th Street, right in
the middle of the street.  Damned pretty girl.  Body of an athlete.

You could practically see right through what she was wearing.  "You
want her?"  said Horgan.  "Not much."  "Well I do."

Haven't you had enough?  thought Lederer.  Horgan stopped the car and
slid the gearshift into park, pulled his pistol out of its holster and
stepped out of the car.  She was running toward him as though her life
depended upon it- but they were tricky, some of them.  He'd seen it
happen.

He watched Horgan take his stance and bring the pistol up, take aim
and fire.  The girl crumbled to the pavement and lay there writhing.
Horgan got back in the car.

"I'm not sure you killed her."

"Maybe not.  She was moving.  Not that bad a shot though.  I'll do
better next time.  Practice practice."

"Do me a favor.  Hold off on the next one.  I want to get back to the
station, call the wife.  Okay?"

"Sure."

But Lederer could tell he didn't much care for the idea.  There were
always some cops who enjoyed their work a little too much and he
guessed that Horgan was one of them.  The man was sweating, mopping his
brow.  The car actually smelled of Horgan.

He'd never really liked the guy.

He settled back and wondered what in god's name he was going to say to
Millie about all this, wondered until they reached the station.

Elizabeth lay in the empty street, one arm flung across the yellow
line.

You had no reason, she thought, no reason at all to do this to me.

The chest-wound gave her no real pain.  There was only a heaviness and
a dull chill spreading through her body.  She felt a bitter
resignation.

I only wanted help, she thought.  Men, cops- they were supposed to give
it to you.

It was wrong to depend upon anybody.

She lay back on the pavement and listened to the sound of her
breathing.  She stared up at the sky.  The moon was still there-pale
white against the grey-blue dawn.  A full moon, looking scarred and
small.  What was it Tom had said?  The moon a woman.  But she couldn't
remember why.

A car rumbled past her.  The pavement trembled to her left but she
hardly noticed.  She watched the moon fade slowly into the brightening
sky.

The car had been easy to find.  It was an old '77 Chrysler lying
halfway up on the curb on the northeast corner of 68th Street.  Phil
told

him to turn away while Clan lifted the driver off the seat and set him
down on the sidewalk but Andy saw him anyway.  The man had hardly any
head left at all.

It didn't bother him.

Nothing much bothered him now.

Not even seeing Elizabeth lying in the street as they drove by.  At
least not at first.

He turned in the back seat and watched her through the rear window.

It looked like maybe she was still alive.  He thought he saw her
moving.

It was awful hard to kill them.

"Where are we going?"  he said.

"George Washington Bridge," said Clan.  "Radio says that's clear and I
got people on the Jersey side."

Lizzy got smaller and smaller, disappearing, her body just a small dark
spot blocks away.

"Clan?"  he said.  "I think that was Lizzy on the street back there.

You know, she lives next door?"  Lived he thought.  "Yeah?"

Clan looked at him.-Then shook his head.

"I'm sorry, Andy.  I keep saying that to you, you know?  I'm sorry." 
He wondered if it were possible.  That Lizzy might not.."  be changed

He wanted to tell them to go back and see just in case.  He guessed he
really had loved Lizzy.  And now to think of her just lying there...
But he'd loved his mother too.  And Clan and Phil said that all of them
were changed now.  That was all they'd seen all night long.

He felt so all alone.  He felt it like a physical pain squeezing at his
chest.  He wanted to cry.  He kept seeing his mom and dad.  Not like
they were but like they had been.  Like they were still there somehow.
He was just this close to crying all the time.

"Couldn't we go back?"  he said.  "I think I saw her move.  I think
she's maybe alive."

He saw Clan and Phil exchange glances.

"You better forget it, Andy," said Clan.  "You know how they are.  You
want to see her that way?  Besides Phil's in pretty bad shape here."

He knew it was true.  The man had lost a lot of blood and he was pale
and you could hear his breathing.

So he didn't insist or anything.  He just began crying.  He couldn't
help it.  He was thinking about Lizzy and about his morn and dad, and
he did it as quietly as he could, not wanting them to think of him as
just a kid- and after a while he guessed he just started to accept it,
felt his sadness yield to something else inside because he'd seen what
his room was like and that was how they all were, all the women.

At the bridge they stopped and the Guardsman checked their car and then
waved them through.

It was over.

On the Fort Lee side a pretty big crowd had gathered behind the Guard
troops as the cars came across the bridge and some of the people
standing there were waving and smiling as though they were heroes or
something, which was pretty stupid.  And some of them were women.  And
this one woman who was young and pretty with long dark hair, sort of
like his morn had looked in some of the old photos they'd had, leaned
in the window of the Buick and smiled at him, a sympathetic smile but
like she was happy for him too, and of course by then they'd already
surrendered up the pistol to the Guardsman at the entrance to the
bridge, which was probably all for the best Andy thought- because more
than anything else in the world he'd have liked to kill her.

 by Jack Ketchum

The first hardcover edition of JACK KETCHUM's third novel COVER
published by Gauntlet Press.  The book, about the disintegration of a
Vietnam War veteran, first published by Ballantine as a paperback in
1987 has long been out of print and copies are near impossible to
obtain.  As with all Gauntlet titles, this is a definitive edition of
the novel, not simply a signed limited edition.

Aside from the book itself, Neal McPheeters has provided wonderful
cover art and interiors.  Jack Ketchum has a long introduction
discussing his research for the book, and Thomas Tessier has written a
wonderfully insightful afterword.  Ketchum, Tessier and McPheeters have
all signed the book.

But, there's more.  There's a never-before published self-portrait of
the author, drawn in 1970.  And, there's additional written material

Jack Ketchum wrote in the late-sixties and early-seventies when the war
in Vietnam was at its peak.  This material, which he calls EPHEMERA,
provides a remarkable insight into the author and has never been
published before.  Lastly, Ketchum has given us the mock-up drawings
from Ballantine for the book they wanted to call Stalking Ground.

The author's introduction discusses this in detail.

COVER comes in two states:

1000 copy numbered edition with all of the above (except the Ketchum
self-portrait).  One McPheeters interior illo is included in the
numbered edition.  Signed by Ketchum, Tessier and McPheeters.  And, the
free chapbook, if ordered through Gauntlet.  Special price, mention
this ad from Ladies' Night and get the numbered edition of Cover for
just $40.00 + $4.00 postage.

52 copy leather bound, tray cased lettered edition that includes
everything from the numbered edition, plus an additional McPheeters
interior, additional EPHEMERA (never before published), Ketchum's
self-portrait, a 30-minute reading from the book by the author on CD,
and the free chapbook if ordered through Gauntlet.  Special price,
mention this ad from Ladies' Night and get the lettered edition Cover
for just $125.00 + $5.00 p& h. These copies are going fast.."  a word
to the wise.

SEE NEXT PAGE FOR "SPECIAL" GAUNTLET JACK KETCHUM CONTEST To order,
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