“Dimmy, Lou, Patsy, Ed—come over here, quick!”
Al got the driver to back the truck up to the end of the row where the generators were stacked. Then the six of them heaved and lifted and strained to get one of the big crates onto the back of the truck. Ron and Al helped, too. Ron felt its weight against his shoulders, felt sweat breaking out on him as they struggled to get the crate high enough to slide into the truck. He wished for a powered forklift.
More shots! Guys shouting, cursing. Somebody screamed with pain.
They got the crate into the truck. Ron’s arms seemed to float away from him once the load of the turbogenerator was taken away.
They scrambled up into the truck. The driver edged it out toward the gate and the other warriors who had been defending the gate against the Chelsea fighters clambered in. One of them was badly hurt. He had to be pulled in. His face and chest were covered with blood, and he moaned sickeningly.
Ron stared at him as they dumped him on the floor of the truck, next to the generator crate. The truck roared out into the daylight, and into a hail of enemy fire. Bullets whizzed by and clanged off metal. The guys flattened themselves on the track floor. All except Al, who knelt at the tailgate and fired back with an automatic rifle. The shattering noise of the gun’s blasting shut everything else off from Ron’s brain.
Only when the gun stopped firing could Ron open his tight-squeezed eyes. He smelled sharp, bitter, slightly oily fumes from the gun. He felt the wind ripping through the track from a hundred bullet holes in the plastic sides.
Then he saw that he was lying next to the wounded boy. Ron backed away, his hands and knees sliding on the blood-slippery truck floor. Ron found that his clothes, his hands, even his face were sticky with the kid’s blood.
“How’s he?” Al asked.
“Dead,” somebody answered.
And then Ron was leaning out of the truck, over the tailgate, vomiting. He could feel his stomach twisting inside him. All the strength left him.
Is that what it’s like here? Is this the way I’m going to have to live?
So Ron became a member of Al’s gang. Its formal name was the Gramercy Association, Ron found out, although no one ever told him why it was called that, or where the name came from. No one seemed to know. To each of the hundred or so members, it was simply Al’s gang. Al was their leader, tough, wary, totally without a smile in him, but as fair as any leader of a pack of wild teenagers could be.
It took several weeks before they made Ron a real member of the gang. But when the generator down in the basement of their building conked out and Ron had it fixed and running again in a few hours, Al reached out his hand and shook with Ron. That night the gang’s inner council met up on the roof and voted Ron in as a full gang member. Only Dino voted against him.
In the following weeks, Ron tried to get a firmer idea of where they were and just how large the gang actually was. He spent much of his time repairing things, from air-conditioners to rusted-out revolvers. In the evenings, though, he’d walk around the deserted streets and gawk at the high, empty buildings. Most of them had been lofts or factories. A few were once apartment buildings. One of the smallest in the area had a tiny plaque on it that Ron could barely make out through the grime and rust that had accumulated.
BIRTHPLACE OF
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
TWENTY-SIXTH PRESIDENT
OF THE
UNITED STATES
Every window in the four-story building was broken. Its stone front was blackened by fire.
There were at least a hundred members of the gang, two-thirds of them male, teenaged or in their early twenties. The number seemed to shift every day. On raids, Al would never take fewer than twenty warriors, usually more like thirty or forty. He always left a fair-sized group of fighters back at their home turf to defend their headquarters and the women and children.
After that first raid, Ron stayed strictly inside Gramercy turf. Al announced that Ron was a mechanic, not a warrior. He was too valuable to risk in fighting. Al had Ron repairing everything the gang owned, from generators to guns. Especially guns.
For there were raids every week. Raids on other gangs. Counterraids by neighboring gangs into the Gramercy turf. Ron nearly got caught in one of them, one evening as he was walking alone on the streets. He had to hide in a deserted basement until the shooting was over. It was scary, because the basement wasn’t totally deserted, after all: it was alive with rats.
There were raids to gain revenge for something that had happened the previous winter. Raids to get even for someone else’s revenge raid. Dino took a small group of warriors out one night and brought back a half-dozen girls, none of them older than fifteen, who immediately were voted into membership in the Gramercy gang. They didn’t seem to mind much.
One afternoon Ron was sitting in his room, tinkering with an automatic rifle. His room looked more like a workshop than a living place. And it was. Tools were stacked everywhere, in shelves that Ron had made himself. Not quite by himself: little Davey had become Ron’s helper and almost constant companion. The only place in the room where there were no tools or pieces of equipment waiting to be fixed was Ron’s bed, an old cot that Davey had found down in the basement.
Ron frowned as he disassembled the firing mechanism of the rifle. He didn’t like guns and didn’t like working on them. But Al gave the orders, and if Ron wanted to eat, he fixed the guns.
Sylvia walked in and stopped a few paces from the door. Even though the room was air-conditioned, she left the door open. She was wearing a sleeveless jumper and microskirt that had once been white, but would never be white again.
Ron forced himself to stay in his chair behind the work table. “Hello,” he said, keeping his voice calm.
“Hi. You seen Davey?”
“He’s outside playing. I told him he shouldn’t spend all day cooped up in here.”
“Oh. Yeah, I guess that’s good . . . Howya doin’?”
“Fine,” Ron said.
“Ever’body says yer great at fixin’ things.”
He nodded.
She wouldn’t come any closer. “Uh . . . you been eatin’ okay?”
“Sure.” It was a lie. Ron had been hungry from his first day with the gang. But no hungrier than anyone else. The kids just didn’t have much food. They had piled up some canned and other packaged foods during the summer, when most of the gang members had either found jobs among the tourist centers or stolen food. Some of their raids on other gangs had been for the purpose of “liberating” food supplies. And there was some sort of a market uptown somewhere, Ron had heard, a black market that somehow brought in fresh food from outside the Dome and sold it for enormous prices. Al wouldn’t let any of the gang members deal with the black market, however. Too expensive, he insisted. And they all obeyed him, despite their constant grumbling hunger.
“Ever’body been treatin’ you okay?” Sylvia asked. “Dino or nobody givin’ you trouble, are they?”
Ron put the rifle mechanism down. There was no sense trying to work while she was in the room.
“No. No trouble from anybody.”
