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.