CHAPTER 3

A foul odor seeped out of the entrance to the subway station. Dan’s Scouts had already slipped on their gas masks. A portable generator had been set up and was running. Another masked team was stretching wire for lights. Even lit, the steps down were not in the least inviting-looking.

Beth returned from a visit to the bushes, muttering something about the ever-increasing beauty of cows.

“Cows?” Dan looked at Ben. “It appears that I have missed something.”

Ben had to laugh. “It’s a long story, Dan.

I’ll tell you about it sometime.” He slipped on his gas mask. “Let’s go, people.”

A Scout met them just as they were walking down the steps to the subway platform. “What you’re gonna see pretty well confirms it, General. The city took a chemical hit.”

The Scout led the way down into the now lighted subway and up to the platform, where subway cars were pulled up. Full of skeletons.

“Open the doors,” Ben ordered, his voice muffled coming through the mask.

Scouts had to use axes to break down the doors, the hinges long rusted closed.

Ben stepped inside the first death-car. Nearly every skeleton had a camera either on the floor beside the rotting shoes or still draped around the bones of the neck, depending upon the material and quality of the strap. The floor was covered with rat droppings.

With gloved hands, Ben picked up a purse and opened it, taking out a wallet. “Irene Golanski,” he read from the driver’s license.

“From Iowa. Tourists. All of them, or most of them.” He replaced the wallet and dropped the purse back beside the bony feet of Irene. Dust popped up from the impact. Ben turned and walked up the car, where Rebels had chopped open the doors.

Each car was the same. A steel and glass and chrome mausoleum for Jim from Mobile, Hazel from Hot Springs, Larry from Dallas.

Hardest for the Rebels to take were the skeletons of the children. Jersey picked up one little plastic purse, started to open it, then shook her head and put the purse back on the floor. “Whoever you are, I’m sorry.”

“Why should you be sorry?” a Scout asked her. “It wasn’t your fault.”

Jersey looked at him. “Jimmy, you’ll never be a mother. Well,” she smiled, “maybe one kind of a mother.”

Dan chuckled and patted Jimmy on the shoulder.

“You’ll think of something in the form of a repartee …

keep working on it.”

The Rebels left the cars. Ben stood on the platform for a moment, looking up the dark tunnel.

He removed his mask and sniffed the air a couple of times

just as Dan walked up to his side. “That odor is not the stink of the creepies, Dan. That’s stagnant water and bat shit.”

Dan pulled off his mask and took a whiff, grimacing. “Not quite as bad, but bad enough.

Do we press on into the darkness, General?”

Ben shook his head. “No. It’s strange, Dan.

Amid all that mess at the Cloisters, there was not one sign or smell of the Night P. So …

let’s go find them.”

The Rebels began working north, spending all that day in a search-and-destroy mission. They did lots of searching, but found nothing to destroy. Once outside of the Fort Tryon Park area, they did find lots of evidence that the night crawlers had once occupied this area … but no creepies.

They swept the area fast, with teams working Staff and Henshaw streets, Payson and Seaman avenues, and up Broadway. They found nothing alive. Not a bird, a dog or cat, or a human being.

Nothing.

By the time the teams had finished their sweeps, it was late afternoon. They had worked all the way up to Baker Field, but still had everything from Broadway over to the Harlem River to clear.

Ben called a halt to it. A team had been working clearing a building just east of Inwood Hill Park, on Seaman, for Ben to use as a CP, and several other buildings, along Dyckman, to use as quarters for the Rebels.

The weather was rapidly turning foul, with a light cold rain that was mixed with flakes of snow and pellets of sleet. The Rebels had found a warehouse filled with kerosene stoves and had brought along trucks loaded with them and five-gallon cans of fuel.

“I don’t like it,” Ben said, over a meal of MRE’S.

“The food?” Dan looked up, a twinkle in his eyes.

“The food is bearable. But I can’t figure out what kind of meat this is.”

“Don’t ask.”

“It has to be one of Chase’s highly nutritional concoctions.”

“Correct.”

“That old goat is going to starve us all to death in the name of proper nutrition.”

“I agree.”

“The lack of creepies, Dan. That’s what’s got me worried. All signs point to them pulling out about a week or ten days ago. But where did they go?”

Dan looked at what was dangling from his fork, sighed, and ate it. “A guess would be to beef up those in Lower Manhattan.”

“Maybe. But that is one of the reasons I wanted to split up, Dan. I don’t want the entire force trapped in a box. It’s going to be damned difficult for Monte and the creepers to trap us all, with Cec and West and Ike ten miles south of us. Unless,” Ben held up a finger, “I’ve badly miscalculated.”

“How could you have? You and I figured every angle.

What could we have left out?”

“How did the Henry Hudson Bridge look today?”

“Like it hasn’t been used in ten years. Car or foot traffic.”

“The creepies could have used the subways, though.”

“To do what, General?”

“To slip behind our lines. To slip out in any direction; to lie in wait for Monte. To somehow trick us into a trap. I tried to think of everything, Dan. But I have this sinking feeling that I missed something.”

“Has Chase concluded his interviewing with those creepie prisoners?”

“Yes. Obviously the only ones privy to that type of high-level information are the Judges. Whomever they are and wherever they might be in the city. Chase told me before we pulled out that the Night People he personally interviewed-if you want to call a drug-induced state an interview-had to be the most degenerate and disgusting people he ever encountered. They told him nothing of substance.”

Dan did not have to ask what Chase had done with the crawlers after interviewing them. He knew. He had also been briefed as to Monte’s location in the States. They were-or had been as of

yesterday-getting close to the bridges that his Scouts had blown. A couple more days and they would either cut east, as the Rebels hoped they would, moving away from Tina’s position, or smell a rat and cut west, circling and once more linking up with Interstate 87, putting them in line to hit Tina’s small force at the airport.

As if reading Dan’s thoughts, Ben said, “It could well turn out to be a series of boxes for all of us, Dan. Monte’s people might find themselves trapped between Tina’s small force and Danjou and Rebet’s people as they drive south. Cecil could find himself trapped if the creepies have-as I

suspect-swung around and infiltrated the areas we cleared along the waterfront. And if the creepies have moved up into Bronx County, putting themselves behind us, as I suspect, or are hiding in the subway tunnels-which is a possibility-when they surface, we’re cut off. It’ll turn into a war with a half a dozen fronts, none of which presenting any enviable situation for anybody.”

“Then we very well may end up depending on those survivors around Central Park to break through.”

“Yes.” A smile played around Ben’s mouth.

“And Emil Hite and the hippies.”

“Dad pulled one of his fast ones and broke away from the main group,” Tina told a few Rebels gathered around her, Jerre among them. “That was all the radio traffic we heard yesterday morning.” She pointed to a wall map in the airport’s radio room. “He took his battalion up here and is sweeping south.”

It was before dawn, the day after Ben’s wild push to the uppermost northern tip of Manhattan, and the skies were still gloomy and overcast, with occasional freezing rain and flakes of snow. Tina had a hunch that her father would contact her that day, and just after breakfast, that hunch became reality.

“Scramble this and talk through translators, kid,”

Ben told her.

The arrangements made quickly, Tina nodded at her translator. “Go, Eagle One.”

“Heads up, Tina. Go on full alert and maintain it.”

Ben then brought her up to date on all the certainties and possibilities that might be lurking around the corner of each day’s dawning.

“I’m sitting here with less than a hundred and fifty Rebels, Dad. No way I could hold out for very long against several thousand of Monte’s troops.”

“That’s why I’ve ordered the birds at Base Camp One to start flying day and night, munitions factories to work around the clock, and trucks to start rolling from Base Camp One immediately.” He brought her up to date on Emil Hite and the hippies.

There was a long pause from the Teterboro Airport radio room. “Are you joking, Dad?”

Ben laughed. “No. I’ve got Katzman trying to contact them now to advise them of the situation and if they want to continue, what routes to take.”

“Why do I have this feeling that you’re going to assign them to me?”

“Don’t you need the extra

manpower-person-power-whatever?”

“Emil Hite and a bunch of

hippies?

Probably middle-aged hippies at that!”

“Watch your mouth, girl. I’m in the middle-aged category, remember?”

“That’s different. You’ve been fighting all your life. Oh, hell, Dad. If you make contact with them, tell them to come on.”

“That’s my girl. You take care, baby.”

“Jerre is working out fine, Dad.”

Ben did not acknowledge the last transmission. He broke off.

“What did Ben have to say about the comment concerning me?” Jerre asked.

“Nothing. He broke off.”

“Typical.” Jerre walked out of the radio room.

“More than one war going on around this place,” Ham commented.

“Yeah. And I think I’d rather be in the middle of the shooting one.”

The Rebels under Ben’s command began their SandD

sweeps. And it was a duplicate of the sweeps of the previous day. They found nothing.

By noon the Rebels had worked their way over to the subway yards, covering everything from West 207th north to West 215th. They found no signs of life, friendly or hostile. Ben stood them down for lunch.

“Fastest sweeps yet, General,” Dan commented.

“My people are coming up empty.”

“Same here. And it just doesn’t make any sense to me.”

“You’re really worried about this lack of bogies, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am, Dan. I just don’t know where they’ve gone or why. We’ve posted guards at the bridges, and we’ll post guards at the University Heights Bridge-when we get to it.

But we don’t have enough personnel to adequately guard them all. I can’t mine them, Dan. I don’t want the structures destroyed or damaged. They’ve got to stand until we turn this country around and get technology on the upswing again.”

He paused and tossed his lunch wrappers into a garbage can. There was enough litter in the city; damned if he was going to add to it. He rolled one of the few cigarettes he allowed himself daily and lit up.

“Maybe that’s what the Night People want, Dan.

Maybe they

want

us to destroy the bridges. Or perhaps they

are going to destroy them and try to trap us over here that way. I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

“Now you’ve got me worried about it!”

“Well, don’t lose any sleep over it, Dan. Come on. Let’s go see if we can find some night crawler butt to kick.”

Nothing. At four o’clock that afternoon, Ben called a halt to it. His battalion, nearly a thousand men and women, had combed the area and found nothing. The Rebels now controlled-or, as Ben felt, thought

they did-everything north of Dyckman Street and west of Broadway from the base of Fort Tryon Park.

And that is where Dan found Ben just at dusk: just below Fort Tryon Park, squatting at the entrance to the 190th Street subway station. Surrounded, of course, by Cooper and Beth and Jersey and the squad of Rebels Ike had permanently assigned to him.

Dan squatted down beside him. “What’s going on in your mind, General?”

Ben pointed to the subway entrance. “That’s where they are, Dan. Down there. They left the cars and the skeletons undisturbed to throw us off. And they are so far back, their stench is covered by the stagnant water and the bat crap. Probably two or three miles back. Waiting.”

“For what, General?” But he knew. If Ben was right, they were in deep trouble.

“For us to push further on south. Then, when Monte gets into position, they’ll surface and hit us.”

“So we blow the subway entrance and seal them in.”

“All of them, Dan? There are only about five hundred. You really want to destroy what was, at one time, one of the greatest subway systems in all the world? Who knows, it could be again-someday. And how about the prisoners they might be holding down there? Some for food, yes. But how about the others? God damn

it!” Ben stood up, the Englishman with him.

Ben took off his beret and ran his fingers through his hair, salt-and-pepper hair. “And if we Claymored the hell out of the places? We’d get the first fifty or sixty of the creepies, and from that point on, they’d push the prisoners out in front of them. And I think under the city is where they’re keeping a lot of prisoners, Dan. It would be ideal for beings as odious as the crawlers. So that means chemicals are out.”

Dan remained silent, listening to Ben run over the options. But it was rapidly growing dark, and that concerned Dan. Not for himself, but for the general’s safety. But he also knew it was not his place to remind the general of the time.

Mouthy Jersey knew no such levels of position-or she didn’t pay any attention to them.

“It’s gettin’ dark, General.”

Ben looked over at her. “Damn, Jersey.

I’m not blind, you know?”

That bounced off Jersey like a rubber ball.

“Probably a lot of work on your desk, and you got to call generals Ike and Jefferys.”

Ben smiled and shook his head. “Come on, then.” As they walked back to Ben’s Blazer, he said, “Dan, here in America we had a saying that fits this situation. We’re fucked. Do the British have a better term for it?”

Dan thought about that for a few steps. “No, sir. I think fucked pretty well sums it up.”