Algis Budrys Some Will Not Die
“We are not considering a man. We are considering men; if no man is an island in a world of nearly six billions, then how can any man be independent of others when the population is one-tenth that figure? Men who would have been lost and insignificant in the world before the plague now had their slightest whims and quirks magnified by a factor of ten. The ripples of any one man’s personality spread ten times as far, ten times as effectively. A man with nineteen neighbors need not consider any of them too much. A man with one neighbor has either a brother or an enemy, or both.
“So to understand the history of the world after the plague, we have to understand that no man—not even Theodore Berendtsen—could possibly serve as the single focus of that time.
“We are studying a man, yes. But we are considering men.”
SECTION ONE
PROLOGUE
This happened many years after the plague, at about the same time there was already talk of reviving the American Kennel Club in the east and south. But this happened farther to the northwest:
Night was coming down on the immense plain that stretched from the Appalachians to the foothills of the Rockies. The long grass whispered in the evening wind.
Clanking and whining, a half-tracked battlewagon snuffled toward the sunset. Behind it lay the featureless grass horizon, almost completely flat and with no life visible in it. The empty grass fell away to either side. Ahead, the first mountains lay black and blended by distance, a brush-stroke lying in a thick line just under the sun.
The car moved forward at remorseless speed, a squat, dark, scurrying shape at the head of a constantly lengthening trail of pulped grass. Its armor was red with rust and scarred by welds. The paint was a peeling flat dark green. On the side of the broad double turret, someone had painted the Seventh North American Republic’s escutcheon with a clumsy brush. The paint was bad here, too, though it was much recent. Another badge showed through from underneath, and, under that, someone else’s.
Joe Custis, with the assimilated rank of captain in the Seventh Republican Army, sat in the car commander’s saddle. His head and shoulders thrust up through the open hatch; his heavy hands were braced on the coaming. His broadbilled cap was pulled down low over his scuffed American Optical Company goggles, and crushed against his skull by an interphone harness. His thick jaw was burned brown, and the tight, deep lines around his mouth were black with dust and sweat that had cemented themselves together. His head turned constantly from side to side, and at intervals he twisted around to look behind him.
A speck of white, off to his left, became a freshly painted, well-maintained signboard nailed to a post planted at the top of a low, rounded rise. He dropped his goggles around his neck, and looked at it through his binoculars. It was a hand-lettered sign in the shape of a skull—not a new sign, but one kept renewed—reading:
Custis picked up his command microphone. “Lew,” he said to his driver, “you see that thing? Okay, well ease toward it. Get set for me telling you to stop altogether.”
He jacked down the command saddle until his face was level with the turret periscope eyepieces. He raised the scope until its slim, stiffly flexible length was fully extended above the turret, looking, with its many joints, like the raised and quivering antenna of something that bred and went to outrageous combat on the red plains of Mars.
“Slow, now, Lew…slow…hold it.”
The car stopped, its motors idling, and the periscope searched over the rise. Joe Custis reached up and pulled the turret hatch shut, close over his head as he sat awkwardly bent down, peering into the scope.
On the other side of the rise was a valley—what had been a valley, geologic ages past, and was now a broad, shallow bowl into which ten thousand centuries of rain had washed the richest topsoil—and in the valley were fields, and here and there low, humped, grass-grown mounds. There were no lights showing. The fields were empty of movement, but one was half-harrowed—the ground freshly turned, the surface still rich and greasy, until suddenly the marks of the spike harrow turned out of their course and swayed away toward one of the mounds, which was in fact a sod hutment. A farmer had interrupted his work and driven his horse—and the precious, hand-built harrow—into shelter.
The driver’s voice cut into Joe Custis’s headphones. “Want me to move in for a better look?”
“No. No, circle around this and let’s get back on the old heading. Don’t want to go no closer. Might be traps or mines.”
As Custis lowered the periscope, the car backed away. When it had back-tracked to where it had first turned off course, it swung around and began rolling forward again. The whine of the bogey motors built back up its original pitch. Joe Custis threw the hatch back again, and raised the seat to its old position. The signboard began to dwindle as the car left it behind. Back on the car’s turtledeck, the AA machinegunner’s hatch crashed open. Custis turned and looked down. Major Henley, the political officer, pulled himself up, shouting above the dentist’s-drill whine of the motors: “Custis! What did we stop for?”
Joe cupped one hand to his ear, and after a moment Henley kicked himself higher in the hatch, squirmed over the coaming, and scrambled forward up the turtledeck. He braced a foot on the portside track cover and took hold of the grab iron welded to the side of the turret. He looked up at Custis, swaying and jouncing. Custis wondered how soon he was going to slip and smash out his teeth on the turret.
“What did you stop for?”
“Fortified town. Independent. Wanted to look it over. Gettin’ to be a few of those places up this way. Interestin’.”
“What do you mean, independent?”
“Don’t give a damn for nobody. Only way to get in is to be born there. Or have somethin’ it would take a cannon to stop. I don’t think they got cannon. Would of hit us, otherwise, instead of buttonin’ up the way they did.”
“I thought you said this was outlaw-controlled territory.”
Custis nodded. “Except for these towns, it is. Don’t see any more open towns, do you?”
“I don’t see any outlaws, either.”
Custis pointed toward the mountains. “Watching us come at ’em.”
Henley’s eyes twitched west. “How do you know?”
“It’s where I’d be.” Custis explained patiently: “Out here on the grass, I can run rings around ’em, and they know it. Up there, I’m a sitting duck. So that’s where they are.”
“That’s pretty smart of them. I suppose a little bird told them we were coming?”
“Look, Henley, we been pointin’ in this direction for a solid week.”
“And they have a communications net that warns them in time. I suppose someone runs the news along on foot?”
“That’s right.”
“Rubbish!”
“You go to your church and I’ll go to mine.” Custis spat over the side, to starboard. “I been out on these plains all my life, workin’ hired out to one outfit or another. If you say you know this country better, I guess that’s right on account of you’re a major.”
“All right, Custis.”
“I guess all these people out here must be stupid or somethin’. Can’t figure out how come they’re still alive.”
“I said all right.”
Custis grinned without any particular malice, giving the needle another jab under Henley’s city-thin skin. “Hell, man, if I thought Berendtsen was still alive and around here someplace, I’d figure things were being run so smart out here that we ought to of never left Chicago at all.”
Henley flushed. “Custis, you furnish the vehicle and I’ll handle the thinking. If the government thinks it’s good enough a chance to be worth investigating, then that’s it—we’ll investigate it.”
Joe looked at him in disgust. “Berendtsen’s dead. They shot him in New York thirty years ago. They pumped him full of holes and dragged his body behind a Jeep, right down the main street at twenty miles an hour. People threw cobblestones at it all the way. That’s all there is left of Berendtsen—a thirty-year-old streak of blood down Broadway Avenue.”
“That’s only one of the stories you hear. There are others.”
“Henley, a lot more people have heard that one than have heard he’s still alive. And ’way out here. Maybe we should look around for Julius Caesar, too?”
“All right, Custis! That’ll be enough of your kind of wisdom!”
Custis looked down at him steadily, the expression on his face hovering at the thin edge between a grin and something else entirely. After a moment, Henley blinked and broke the conversation off into a new direction. “How soon before we reach the mountains?”
“Tonight. Couple more hours, you’ll get a chance to see some bandits.” Now Custis smiled.
Henley said “Well, let me know when you come across something,” and gingerly crawled back to the AA hatch. He dropped out of sight inside the car. After a moment he remembered, reached up, and pulled the hatch shut.
Custis went back to keep an eye out. At rest, his face was impassive. His hands motionlessly held the thick metal of the armor. But now and then, as his eyes touched the mountains in his constant scan around the horizon, he frowned. And at those times, his fingers would flex, as though it were necessary for him to reacquaint himself with the texture of wrought steel.
Custis had no faith in Henley’s hopes. Berendtsen’s name was used to frighten children—real children or politicians; it was all one—all over the Republic. It had been the same during all the Republics before it. Somebody was always waving the blue-and-silver flag, or threatening to. A handful of fake Berendtsens had been turned up, here and there all over the Chicago hegemony, trading on a dead man’s legend these past thirty years. Some of them had been laughed down, or otherwise taken care of, before they got fairly started. Some hadn’t—the Fourth Republic got itself started while the Third was busy fighting a man who’d turned out to be merely a better liar than most. Through the years, the whole thing had turned into a kind of grim running joke.
But the fact was that the politicians back in Chicago couldn’t afford to have the ghost walking their frontiers—or what they thought were their frontiers, though no one could truly say whose word was Law south of Gary. The fact was that somehow, in some way, the tale of Berendtsen had come drifting over the eastern mountains and contaminated the people with impatience. The fact was that Berendtsen was a man who had been able to take hold, after the plague scoured the world clean of ninety percent of its people in six howling months. —Or so the legend said; Custis had not much faith in that, either.
The fact you had to live with, in any case, was that Berendtsen had put together something called the Second Free American Republic—meaning probably the old American East and the eastern half of old Canada—and made it stand up for ten years before he got his. And nobody else had ever been able to do as well—at least not here, where the Great Lakes and Appalachians kept Berendtsen from ever being much more than a name and an occasional banner. But between the times his name frightened them, with its promise of armed men coming over the mountains someday, and ordering things to suit a stranger someday, people still thought of ten whole years with no fighting in the cities. It made them growl with anger whenever the local politicians did something they disliked. It made them restless; it left no peace in the minds of the politicians as they tried to convince themselves the cities were almost back to normal— That soon enough, now, the cities and the people of the plains would become part of a functioning civilization once more, and the scar of the plague would be healed over at last.
It was not a comfortable thing, being haunted by a man nobody knew. You could say, and say with a good part of justice, that Berendtsen was behind every mob that rolled down on Government House and dragged the men inside up to the dark lamp posts.
Thirty years since Berendtsen died—the story went. Nobody was sure of exactly who’d been behind the shooting; the politicians or the people. But it was a sure thing it had been the people who’d mutilated his body. And six months later the mobs’d killed the men they said killed Berendtsen. So there you were—try and make sense out of it, in a world where the towns went without machinery and the cities went without more than the barest trickle of food. A world where it was still worth a city man’s life to approach farm country alone.
You couldn’t. The man’s name was magic, and that was that.
Custis, up in his turret, shook his head. If he didn’t find this ghost for Henley, it was a cinch he’d never get paid—contract or no contract. But at least he’d gotten his car re-shopped for this job. Sourly, Custis weighed cutting the political officer’s throat right here and reporting him lost to bandit action. Or cutting his throat and not reporting back at all.
The battlewagon was a long way from Chicago at this point. The only drinking water aboard was a muddy mess scooped out of one of the summer-shrunk creeks. The food was canned army rations—some of it, under the re-labeling, might be from before the plague—and the inside of the car stank with clothes that hadn’t been off their backs in three weeks. The summer sun pounded down on them all through the long day, and the complex power-train that began with a nuclear reactor and a steam turbine, and ended in the individual electric motors turning the drive wheels and sprockets, threw off more waste heat than most men could stand.
Henley was just barely getting along. For Custis and his crew, any other way of life was too remote to consider. But it had been a long run. They’d stretched themselves to make it from the marginal, inexpert captive farmlands at the Chicago periphery, and they still had the worst part of the job to do. Maybe it would be easier to simply turn bandit himself.
But that meant cutting himself off from the city, at least until the next Republic needed the hire of the battlewagon. That was something Custis wouldn’t have minded—if oil and ammunition, replacement barrels for his guns, pile fuels, and rations for his crew grew on the plain as thick as the grass.
“Bear 340, Lew,” he said to his driver through the command microphone, and the car jerked slightly on its tracks, heading on a more direct course for the nearest of the dark foothills.
And so, Joe Custis thought, there’s no help for it—you have to chase after a ghost no matter what you’d rather do.
He looked back across the grass, with its swath of crushed, matted leaves, forever stretching away behind the car. Here and there, he knew, there were flecks of oil and dried mud that had dropped from the battlewagon’s underside. Here and there lay discarded ration cans, their crude paper labels already curling away from the flecked tin or enamel plating. Back along that trail lay campsites, each with its pits for the machineguns dismounted from the car to guard its perimeter. The ashes were cold. Rain was beginning to turn them into darker blotches on the bared black earth. The gun pits were crumbling. Who came to search these sites—what patient men came out of their hiding places to investigate, to see if anything useful had been left behind, perhaps to find some clue to the car’s purpose?
There were such men, even outside the independent towns and the captive farms on the cities’ borders. Lost, wandering hunters—mavericks of one kind or another—men like Joe Custis, but without his resources. Half-bandit, but unorganized and forever unorganizable. Rogue males, more lost than anything else that roamed the plains, for the bandits at least had their organization, and the independent towns had safety along with their inbreeding.
But the men on the plains would die, and their children would be few, and dying. And the bandits couldn’t go on forever. There was no weapon of their own manufacture that could stand up to a farmer’s shotgun. And the independent farmer would die, buried in the weakling seed he spawned, afraid to reach out across the miles of empty grass toward where other independent farmers would give him short welcome, scratching the ground with deteriorating tools, trying to raise food here on the prairie where there were no smelters—not even any hardwood trees—to give him implements.
And the cities—. It was different, elsewhere. So the Berendtsen legend said of the tightly packed East where an army could march from one city to another and establish one Law. And so also said the persistent legends of some kind of good living down in the agricultural southern plains.
But in the East the cities could reach out and control the farmlands—could send their citizens out to grow food, or could trade machinery to the farmer and so, gradually, make one society.
Out here, it couldn’t be done. Or it hadn’t been done, either Berendtsen’s way or in whatever way the middle South was doing it. The first wave of refugees out of Chicago after the plague had set the pattern, and nothing had broken it. Without readily available fuel, or replacement parts for their machinery, and without harvesting and planting crews, the surviving farmers had soon learned to shoot on sight. It was either that or be robbed and then starve, for farming was back to the point where one man and his family could grow as much food as would feed one man and his family.
Some city refugees had organized into bandit groups and managed to get along, killing and robbing—kidnapping women; no man wants to die without leaving sons.
Most city refugees—those who lived—went back into the cities. There was ten times as much room as they needed. But even with all the warehouses in a city, there was not ten times as much food.
The cities scraped along. Momentary governments subjugated bits of farmland here and there. Measures of one kind and another enforced various kinds of rationing and decreed various sources of protein; there were rat farms in Chicago, and other things.
One way or the other, Chicago scraped along. But it dreamed of legends.
Custis stared at the mountains. He wondered if he would ever be coming back this way again. And how many men before him, he wondered, had set out on the road toward Berendtsen?
Seven republics in Chicago. Bandits in the mountains, raiding across the plains, forcing the surviving farmers into a permanent state of siege.
Night was falling. In some parts of the world, the sun rode high in the sky, or the first ripples of morning lapped the fabric of the stars. But here, now, night was falling, and Joe Custis searched the edges of his world.
CHAPTER ONE
I
Matthew Garvin was a young, heavy-boned man who had not yet filled out to his mature frame. His grip on his automatic shotgun was not too sure. But he had been picking his way through the New York City streets for two days, skirting the litter and other obstructions left by the plague, and the shotgun made him feel a great deal more comfortable—for all that he still half-expected a New York City policeman to step out from behind vie of the slewed, abandoned cars, or from one of the barricaded doorways, and arrest him for violating the Sullivan Act.
His picture of the world’s condition was fragmentary. Most of it was gleaned from remembered snatches of the increasingly sporadic news over the TV. And he had heard those only while lying in delirium, on a cot beside the room where his dying father kept death watch over the other members of his family. He had not truly come back to alertness until well after his father was dead and the TV was inoperative, though it was still switched on.
All he could remember his father telling him, in all those days. was “If you live, don’t forget to go armed.” He was certain, now, that his father, probably delerious himself, had repeated it over and over, clutching his arm urgently and slurring the words, the way a man will when his rationality tries to force a message out through an almost complete loss of control.
And when he had finally wakened, and known he was going to live, Matthew Garvin had found the Browning lying on the floor beside his cot, together with a box of shells still redolent of woodsmoke and old cleaning solvent. His father’s old hunting knapsack had been there, too, stocked with canned food, waterproof matches, a flashlight, a compass, and a hunting knife, almost as if Matthew and he had been going to leave for the North Woods together. They had been doing that every deer season for the past four years. But this time it was his father’s gear that Matthew would be carrying; and it was the big Browning, instead of the rifle.
He had not questioned his father’s judgment. He had strapped the knapsack on, and taken the shotgun, and then he had left the apartment—he could not have stayed, though he did his best to leave his family in some semblance of decent repose.
At first, he had not quite known what he was going to do. Looking out the window, he could see nothing moving on the streets. A pall of gray mist hung over Manhattan—part fog, part smoke, from where something was burning and had not been put out. He had gone and taken the heavy binoculars from his father’s closet and studied the two rivers. They were almost clear of floating debris of various kinds, and so he assumed the great wave of dying was over—those who still lived, would live. He had probably been one of the last to be sick.
The streets and the waterfronts were a jumble of abandoned and wrecked equipment—cars, trucks, boats, barges—much as he had last seen them, on the night when he had realized he, too, was at last growing feverish and dry-mouthed. That had been after the government had abandoned the continual effort to keep the streets clear and people in their homes.
Here and there, some of the main avenues had been opened, with cars and buses towed out of the way, lying as they had been dropped on the sidewalks. He could see one crane—a Metropolitan Transit Authority company emergency truck—where it had stopped, with a bright blue sports car still dangling from the tow hook. So there had not been time after he fell ill for anything to litter up the opened streets again.
He tried the radio—he had read enough novels of universal disaster to know nothing would come of it, and for a while he had been undecided, but his human nature had won out—and there had been nothing. He listened for the hum he associated with the phrase “carrier wave,” and did not hear that, either. He looked down at the baseboard, and saw that someone—probably his father—had ripped the line cord out of the wall so savagely that the bared ends of the wire dangled on the floor while the gutted plug remained in the socket.
But he had not repaired it. The dead TV was good enough—in the end, he remembered, the final government announcement had been quite explicit—the President’s twanging, measured voice had labored from phrase to phrase, explaining calmly that some would surely survive—that no disease, however impossible to check, could prove fatal to all human beings everywhere—but that the survivors should not expect human civilization to have endured with them. “To those of you who will live to re-make this world,” the President had said, “my only promise is this: That with courage, with ingenuity, with determination—above all, with adherence to the moral principles that distinguish Man from the animals—the future is one of hope. The way will be hard. The effort will be great. But the future waits to be realized, and with God’s help it shall be realized—it must be realized!”
But that had not been much to go on. He had put the binoculars back—if someone had asked him, he would have replied that certainly he planned to come back to the apartment; he would not have stopped to think about it until he had actually heard his positive words—and he had left, climbing down flight after flight of stairs.
* * *
He was on his way to Larry Ruark’s apartment, he had realized at some point on his journey. Larry lived about fifty blocks uptown—by no means a difficult walk—and was a close friend from the time they had gone through the first two years of college together, before Larry had gone on to medical school. He had no way of knowing whether Larry had survived or not. But it seemed to him the chances were reasonably good. In part, they seem so to him because he was associating immunity with the word “doctor,” and because he needed to find a friend alive; an undergraduate medical student to whom he gave an inappropriate title because that made his friend likelier to have lived. But in part, he knew, his reasoning was sound. Larry had been young, and in excellent health; that was bound to have improved his chances.
Matthew Garvin had thought that surely he might find out more about the world, on his way to Larry’s. He had expected to meet other survivors, and talk to them.
He had expected that, between them, he and the other young, generally sound people could piece together an accurate idea of what the world’s condition was. There was nothing to fear from contact with each other, after all—either they had the plague, and would die, or had successfully resisted it, and would not. The time of the Carrier Panic—before it had been proven the disease agent, whatever it was, did not need to be transmitted from human hand to hand— that ugly time was over.
But he had begun to wonder whether the other survivors were aware of that. And he had begun to wonder whether some of them might not have become insane. For though he sometimes heard quick footsteps whose direction was disguised by echoes, he had been able to meet no one face-to-face, and when he had stood and shouted, no one answered. He knew he had come late to the inevitable sickness. He wondered what it was the more experienced survivors might have found out that would make them act like this.
Once he turned a corner and found someone who had survived the plague. It was a young man, canted awkwardly against a subway railing, dead, with fresh blood congealing around the stab wounds in his chest, and a torn grocery bag, empty, trampled at his feet.
The streets were badly blocked in places, and he had been moving more and more slowly, out of the same caution that made him hole up and lock himself in a truck cab overnight. So it was the next day when he saw the placards.
He was only a few blocks from Larry’s then. The placards were Civil Defense Emergency Posters, turned around to expose their unprinted backs. Hand-lettered on them now were the words “Live Medic,” and an arrow pointing uptown.
After that, Matthew Garvin hurried. He was sure Larry Ruark had survived, now. And the placards were the first trace of some kind of organization. He had begun to think of the world as a place much like a locked museum at night…except for a sporadic, distant hint of sounds that were too much like isolated gunshots. He had heard the sounds of police machineguns, during the Carrier Panic, and the deep thud of demolition as the Isolation Squads tried to cordon off the stricken areas—that had been quite early in the game—but this was different. This was like the sound of foot-snapped twigs in a forest infested by Indians.
The trail of placards led to Larry Ruark’s apartment house. The barricade in the doorway had been pulled aside, and the front door stood open.
It was the first open barricade he had seen since he had set out on his journey, though he had caught occasional glimpses of motion behind the windows of barricaded houses. He wondered if those inside had yet made their first ventures outside. It had begun to occur to him that perhaps they had—perhaps they had pulled down the barricades and then, after a day or so, put them back up. They were a defensive measure, of course—in the last days of the plague the sick, the drunk, and the stupid had roamed the streets wherever the diminishing police could not turn them back. Matthew Garvin himself had gone through a bout of hysteria in which he had laughed, over and over again, “Now there won’t be any war!” and the urge to go out—to get drunk, to smash something, to break loose and kick out at all the things society had erected in the expectation of war—the Shelter signs, the newspaper kiosks, the computer and television stores, the motion picture theaters—all the things that battened on desperation—that need to show that suddenly he, too, understood how miserably frightened they had all been under the shell of calm—all that had boiled and shaken inside him, and if he had been just a little bit different he, too, would have been roaring down the flamelit streets, and there would have been a need of barricades against him.
He moved tentatively up the steps to the foyer of Larry Ruark’s apartment house. The foyer and the stairs up were clean—swept, mopped, dusted. The brass handle on the front door had been polished. In the foyer stood another placard: “Live Medic Upstairs.”
There was nothing else to see, and there were no sounds.
He padded up the stairs, using only the balls of his feet to touch the treads. Yesterday he would not have done that. He did not entirely understand why he did it now. But it was appropriate to his environment, and he was young enough to be quite sensitive about conforming to the shape of the world around him.
Larry’s apartment was at the head of the stairs. The sign on the door said: “Medic—Knock and Come In.”
It was Larry! Matthew rapped his knuckles quickly on the paneling and pushed the door in the same motion. “Lar—”
The thin, hard arm went around his throat from behind. He realized that in another moment he was going to be pulled backward, off balance and helpless. He jumped upward, and that broke the hold enough for him to turn around, still inside the circle of the arm. He and Larry Ruark stared into each other’s eyes.
“Oh, my God!” Larry whispered. He lowered the hand with the butcher knife in it.
Matthew Garvin stood panting, still in his friend’s embrace. Then Larry let his other arm sag, and Matthew stepped back quickly.
“Matt…Jesus, Dear God, Matt!” Larry pushed back against the door and sagged on it, his eyes round. “I saw somebody coming, and I figured—and it turned out to be you!”
He was emaciated; his hair, always speckled with early gray, was wild and grizzled. His eyesockets were the color of dirty blue velvet. His clothes were stained and shapeless on his bones. Matt’s nostrils were still singed with the old, mildewed smell of them.
“Larry, what the hell is this?”
Larry rubbed his face, the butcher knife dangling askew between his fingers.
“Listen, Matt, I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was you.”
“Didn’t know it was me.”
“Oh, God damn it, I can’t talk. Sit down someplace, will you, Matt? I’ve—I need a minute.”
“All right,” Matt, said, but did not sit down. The room was furnished with an old leather couch, two shabby armchairs, and a coffee table on which sooty old magazines were laid out in a meticulous pattern. Very little light filtered through the cracks between the window drapes.
“Listen, Matt, is there any food in that knapsack?”
“Some. You hungry?”
“Yes. No—Anyway, that can wait. I just almost killed you—is this a time to talk about food? We’ve got to work this out—you’ve got to—look, do you know I can see the George Washington Bridge from my bedroom window?”
Matt cocked his head and frowned.
“I mean. I watched the people going out across the bridge. It went on for days, after the plague died down. They went climbing over the old Isolation Squad barricades. and all the cars and cadavers. I timed it. Something like twenty or thirty an hour. And they weren’t going in groups. Twenty or thirty people an hour in Manhattan each got the idea of getting out into the country.
“They were hungry, Matt. And I saw a lot of them coming back—some of them were crawling. I’m sure they had gunshot wounds. Something over there is turning them back. You know what it’s got to be? It’s got to be the survivors on the Jersey side. They don’t have any spare food, either. And that means the surviving farmers are shooting them when they try to go for food.”
“Larry—”
“Listen, food shipments into Manhattan stopped seven weeks ago!”
“Warehouses,” Matt said, like a man trying to deliver an urgent message in the depths of a nightmare, watching the knife swing back and forth between Larry’s fingers.
“There are people in them. Holed up during the plague. I was just coming out of it, then I couldn’t get down the stairs yet, but there was still a little bit of radio, on the Police band—and the warehouses were full of them. Dead, dying, and live ones. They won’t let anybody in. You’ve got to remember Manhattan is full of crowd-control weapons and ammunition. You could pick ’em up anywhere—all you had to do was pry the dead fingers away. They’re all gone now, of course—they’ve all been picked up. Anybody who has a food supply is armed. He has to be. If he isn’t, some armed man has killed him for it by now.”
“There’s got to be food. There were two million people on this island! There were food stores on every block. They had to have some source of ready supply! You can’t tell me there still isn’t enough here to keep people eating for a while, at least. How many of us are there left?”
Larry shook his head. “Two hundred thousand, maybe. If the national average held good under urban conditions. I don’t think it did. I think maybe there’s really a hundred-fifty thousand.” Larry shook his head exhaustedly and walked away from the door with a clumsy, stiff-jointed gait. He dropped into one of the armchairs, and let the knife fall on the footworn carpet beside him.
“Look, you’re all right.” He motioned toward Matt’s gun. “You fall into this place naturally. But what about me? Look—you think about it. Sure, there’s got to be food around. But who knows where? The people who’d know are keeping it for themselves. All the obvious places are being emptied. And even when you have it, you have to get it home. And if you get it home, how long is it before you have to go out again? You can’t even have water, unless you carry it in!”
“All right, so you carry it.” Matt tapped his canteen. He had filled it from the water cooler in an abandoned office, this morning, and purified it with a Halazone tablet from the kit in his pack. “And you have to go look for food because there aren’t any more delivery boys. So what? There’s plenty of time, every day. And there’s time to think, too. You know what this is—what you’re doing? It’s panic.”
“All right, it’s panic! It’s panic When an animal chews its leg off in a trap, too—you trying to tell me it didn’t need to?”
“Larry, we’re not animals!”
Larry Ruark laughed.
Matt watched him. Very gradually, he was calming, but there was still a sound like a riptide in his ears. He knew he would remember this conversation, later, better than he was hearing it now. He knew he would act, now, in ways that later thinking would improve on. But for the moment he could not stop his eyes from trying to watch Larry and the knife at the same time. And he could not keep from trying to settle it now—right now—before it became intolerable.
“You can’t tell me anybody who can move is anywhere near starving to death in Manhattan. It’ll be years before the last food is gone.”
“What do I care, if I can’t get it? I’ve got to think my way!” Larry’s eyes jerked down toward where the knife lay, near his hand as it dangled over the arm of the chair. “You—you can go hunt for it. Listen, you know what they’d do to me, if I went outside? If they found out I was a med student? You know why I put those signs out all around this neighborhood? It’s not for the people with the gunshot wounds and the inflamed appendixes and the abscessed teeth—sure, some of ’em may be desperate enough to come here for help. But you know how I get most of my protein? I get it from people who come up here looking to kill me. You know why? Because we lied to ’em. The whole medical profession lied to ’em. It told them it would lick the plague. It told them that a world full of medical scientists couldn’t miss coming up with the solution.
“And what happened? You remember the last days of the plague—the Isolation Squads, the barricades, the machineguns and flamethrowers around the hospitals? Sure, we told ’em we were only protecting the research facilities from the mobs, when we fortified the hospitals. But they know better. They know their mothers and their wives and kids died because we wouldn’t let ’em in. What do they care about things like a plague that hits the whole world, from end to end, inside three days? A plague everybody gets. A plague that forces a delirious fever on your body, so you can’t see into the barrel of your microscope or hold two beakers steady? All they know is the biggest piles of corpses were lying around the aid stations and the research centers. And I was there, all right. I didn’t have the training to do any good on the research side, so they gave me a Thompson submachinegun, and that’s how I did my part, until I wore it out. And by then nobody minded if I went home. There wasn’t much of anybody to mind.
“I know what they want, when they come up here. They want the dumb Medic who’s idiot enough to advertise. Well, they don’t get him. No, sir. And that’s how I get my protein. ’Cause it’s all protein, you know—I mean, you wouldn’t eat a mouse or an earthworm, would you, Matt? But it’s all protein. Your body wouldn’t care where it came from. It would take it, and use it to keep alive, and be grateful. All your body wants to do is live another day.
“But I’m not doing too well, lately. They’re getting wise to me, in the neighborhood, and all I’m getting now is transients. I’ll have to think of something new, pretty soon.
“You and me.” Larry’s eyes darted toward Matt. “You and me—we’d make out together. You can go out and forage, and I’ll stay here and make sure nobody takes it away. How about that?”
Matt Garvin took a step toward the door.
Larry’s hand moved aimlessly toward the knife. He pretended not to see what his hand was doing.
“Please, Larry,” Matt said. “I just want to go.”
“Listen, you can’t go now. We’ve got plans to make. You’re the only guy I can trust!”
“Larry, I just want to get out that door; me, and my shotgun, too.”
“I’ll throw the knife at your back on the stairs, Matt. I will.”
“I’ll walk down backwards.”
“That won’t be easy. If you slip, you’re a loser.”
“I guess so.”
Matt Garvin opened the door, and backed out. He backed all the way down the stairs, without tripping, and watched the silent, motionless door of Larry Ruark’s apartment. Down on the street, he ran—silently, ripping down placards as he went.
II
Fourteenth Street lay quiet under the dawn. From the East River across to the Hudson, it ran its blue-gray length between the soundless buildings. Except for a flock of lean, restless pigeons that circled momentarily above Union Square and then fluttered back to earth, it was sucked empty of life and motion like a watercourse running between dry banks. The wind of Autumn swept down the width of the paralyzed street, carrying trash.
East of First Avenue, lines of parked cars bleached at the flank of Stuyvesant Town. Here, finally, something moved. The creeping edge of sunlight touched Matt Garvin’s eyes as he lay asleep in the back of a taxi.
Garvin was instantly awake, but, at first, only a momentary twitch of his eyelids betrayed him to the day. Then his hand closed on the stock of his shotgun, and he raised his body slowly. His eyes probed at the streets and buildings around him. He smiled in thin satisfaction. For the moment, he was all that lived on Fourteenth Street.
He slid his legs off the folded backs of the lowered jump seats, and sat up. The cab was safe enough, with the windows up and the doors locked—no one could have forced them silently—but there could have been men out there, waiting for the time when he had to come out.
He bent over, unstrapped his knapsack, and took out his canteen and a tin of roast beef. He opened the roast beef and began to eat, raising his head from time to time to be sure that no one was slipping toward him along the line of parked cars. He ate without waste motion, taking an occasional swallow of the flat-tasting but safe soda water in his canteen. He had run out of Halazone long ago. When the roast beef was finished he repacked his knapsack, strapped it on his upper back, and, after one more look at his surroundings, clicked up the latch on the taxi door and silently moved out onto the cobblestoned island that was one of a series separating Fourteenth Street from the peripheral drive around Stuyvesant Town.
Cars were parked on both sides of the narrow island, their bumpers almost touching. The big red buildings towered upward on Garvin’s left as he moved eastward along the housing project’s edge, but the cars on that side protected him from any kind of accurate fire from the lower floors. In order to aim at him from the upper stories, a man would have had to lean so far out of his window as to expose himself to fire from the opposite side of the street. Garvin himself was protected from the south side of Fourteenth Street by the line of cars on his right. Moreover, one man and his knapsack were not generally a worthwhile target, any longer.
Still, worthwhile or not, he picked his route carefully, and held to a low, weaving crouch. Holding the shotgun at high port, he moved rapidly eastward between the twin lines of cars, his eyes never still, his feet in their tennis shoes less noisy than the wind, his head constantly turning as he listened for what his eyes might miss.
And it was his ears that warned him at the corner of Avenue A. He heard the quiet sound of a store’s latched door, which was bound to snap its lock no matter how carefully eased into place, and then there was the friction of leather shoes on a sidewalk.
He stopped, sheltered by an automobile’s curved flanks, and the shotgun’s muzzle swung almost automatically toward the source of the sound. He straightened his back cautiously and looked across the street through the car’s rear windows, his breath sucking in through his teeth as he saw her.
The girl was slim; sprinting across the sidewalk in nervously choppy strides as she left the drugstore. Her face was white, and her eyes were terrifiedly wide. Obviously panicked at being out in the street during daylight, she was running blindly, straight for where Garvin was crouched, trying to reach the comparative safety of the island before she was seen.
He took two rapid steps backward before he realized there was no place for him to hide, and the girl was across the street before he could think of anything else to do. Then she was on the island, ducking into the shelter of the double row of cars, and it was too late to think.
She hadn’t seen him yet. She was too intent on safety to see danger until he straightened out of his instinctive crouch, letting the shotgun’s muzzle drop. Then her mouth opened, her eyes becoming desperate, and he saw the unexpected gun in her other hand.
“Hey!” He shouted in surprise as he charged forward, throwing his arm out. He felt the shock of his forearm deflecting her wrist upward, and then the gun jumped in her hand, the echoes pattering like a hard-shoe dance down the empty street. His charge threw their bodies together, and his arm hooked like a whip and pinned her gun-arm out of the way. His thighs snapped together in time to take the kick of her driving knee, but he could only dig his chin into her shoulder and try to shelter his face against the side of her head as her other hand clawed at his ear and neck. Then his momentum overcame her balance, and they were safely down on the island’s cobblestones.
“Stay down!” he grunted urgently as he twisted around and slapped the gun out of her hand, catching it before it could be damaged against the stones. She sobbed an incoherent reply, and her nails drew fresh blood from his face. He fell back, but threw his shoulder into her stomach in time to keep her from forcing her way back to her feet.
“Haven’t you got any sense?” he cursed out hoarsely as she tried to break away. He flung an arm out and kept her scrambling fingers from his eyes. “Every gun in the neighborhood’s waiting for us to stand up and get shot.”
“Oh!” She stopped struggling immediately, and this unexpected willingness to believe him was more surprising than his first glimpse of her. As her arms dropped, he rolled away, wiping the blood off his stinging face.
“For Christ’s sake!” he panted, “What did you think I was going to do?”
Her face turned color. “I—”
“Don’t be stupid!” he cut her off harshly. “Do you have any idea how many women were left alive by that damn virus, or whatever it was?” She winced away from the sound of his voice, surprising him again. How did she manage to stay alive, this naive and sensitive? “Raping a girl sort of ruins your chances for striking up a permanent acquaintance with her,” he went on in a gentler voice, and was oddly pleased to see a smile lightly touch her face.
“Here.” He tossed her gun into her lap. “Reload.”
“What?” She was staring down at it.
“Reload, damn it,” he repeated with rough persistence. “You’re one round short.” She picked the weapon up gingerly, but snapped the cylinder out as if she knew what she was doing, and he felt free to forget her for the moment.
He pulled his legs up under him and got into a squat crouch, turning his upper body from side to side as he tried to spot the sniper he was almost sure the sound of her shot had attracted. One man was a doubtful target, but the two of them were worth anyone’s attention, and he did not trust that anyone’s eyesight to save the girl.
The windows of Fourteenth Street looked blankly back at him. For some reason, he shuddered slightly.
“Do you see anyone?” the girl asked softly, surprising him again, for he had forgotten her as an individual even while adding her as a factor to the problem of safety.
He shook his head. “No. That’s what worries me. Somebody should have been curious enough to look out. Probably, somebody was—and now he’s picked up a rifle.”
Apprehension overlaid her face. “What’re we going to do? I’ve got to get home.” She fumbled in her jumper pockets until she found a tube of sulfa ointment. “My father’s hurt.”
He nodded briefly. At least that explained why she’d been outside. Then he grimaced. “Gunshot wound?”
“Yes.”
“Thought so. That stuff’s no good. Not anymore.”
“There were so many kinds of things in the drugstore,” she said uncertainly. “This was the only one I was sure of. Is it too old?”
He shrugged. “Way past its expiration date, that’s for sure. And I’ve got a hunch we’re up against whole new kinds of bacteria that won’t even blink at the stuff. Every damn antibiotic in the world was turned loose, I guess, and what lived through that is what we’ve got to deal with. These days, my vote’s for soap and carbolic acid.
“Bad?” he asked suddenly.
“What?”
“Is he hurt bad?”
Her lip trembled. “He was shot through the chest three days ago.”
He grunted, then looked back at the blank windows again. “Look—will you stay here until I get back? I want to see you home. You need it,” he added bluntly.
“Where are you going?”
“Drugstore.”
Her lips parted in bewilderment. The innocence of trust did not belong on this deadly street. Her simple acceptance of everything he told her—even her failure to shoot him when he gave her back the gun—reacted in him to create a baseless but deep and sudden anger.
“To make a phone call,” he added with brutal sarcasm. Then he managed to smooth his voice. “If something happens, don’t you do anything but turn around and go home, understand?”
The anger fading, but still strong, he jumped to his feet and began to run without waiting for an answer.
Stupid kid, he thought as he weaved across the street. She had absolutely no business running around loose. He crossed the white center-line, and no one had fired yet.
If the snipers had any brains, they’d wait until he came out. They’d be able to judge whether his load was worth bothering with.
How had she managed to live this long? His sole slammed into the curb, and he drove himself across the sidewalk.
Just my luck to get shot by somebody stupid.
He tore the door open and flung himself into the drugstore, catching one of the fountain stools for balance as he stopped. He leaned on it for a moment while he waited for his breath to slow.
They were probably figuring the smart percentage. One man with his pack wasn’t temptation enough. He and the girl definitely were, once they were close together again, where a simple dash under cover of night would reach their bodies. But the girl by herself was safe from all but the myopic, and he, separated from her, was also moderately safe. A handful of packages from the drugstore might tip the scales against him—until you stopped to consider that the best thing to do was to wait until he had rejoined the girl, in which case, if the potential sniper already had a woman…
Sick with calculations, he slammed his palms against the edge of the Formica counter-top and pushed himself away from the fountain.
Among the jumbled shelves, he found a bottle of germicide, some cotton swabs, and bandages. He packed them carefully into his knapsack, cursing himself for not asking whether the bullet was still in the wound. He shrugged as he realized that surgical forceps were an unlikely instrument to encounter here, drugstore or no. Then he turned toward the outline of the doorway, light in the store’s darkness, and stopped.
The store was safe, he found himself thinking. The girl had proved that for him by coming out alive. He had reached it, and now that he was in, it was an easily defended place.
Outside lay Fourteenth Street—a gray bend of sidewalk, swept partially clean by the wind, and the dusty blue-black of the street’s asphalt. Beyond it hunched the sheer, blank-windowed brick buildings, and beyond these, the ice-blue sky. There were no waiting rifles—not where he would be likely to see them.
He looked about him. There must be something else he could find that might be useful. If he looked around, he was pretty sure to stumble across something. If he looked around long enough. If he waited.
He laughed once, shortly, at himself, and stepped out into the street, breaking into a run as frantic as the girl’s had been, his chest pumping, his stride off-balance from the shifting weight of the pack, the sweat breaking out on his face and evaporating icily.
He realized that he was afraid, and then he was across the street and safely on the island, sprawled out on his panting stomach, between the cars. He looked up at the girl and suddenly understood that his fear had been of losing the future.
He waited a few moments for the pumping of his lungs to slow. The girl was looking at him with some incomprehensible expression shining on her face.
Finally he said, “Now, let’s get you home. You start, and I’ll cover you from behind.”
The girl nodded wordlessly, putting aside whatever it was that she had been going to say, and turned up the island in the direction from which he had come. He followed her, and they worked their way back toward First Avenue, neither of them speaking except for his occasional growled monosyllable whenever her crouch grew dangerously shallow.
* * *
Moving quietly, they reached a point opposite the entrance to the Stuyvesant building on the corner of First Avenue. The girl stopped, and Garvin closed the ten-yard interval between them, crouching beside her.
He felt his left hand’s fingers twitch as the indecisive restlessness of his muscles searched for an outlet. The girl could simply leave him at this point, and it might be years before he saw another woman, particularly one who was free. At least, he assumed she was free. What kind of man would let his woman go out alone like this? If she had one, he didn’t deserve to keep her.
Garvin laughed at himself again, disregarding her surprise at the short, sharp bark.
“It was still dark when I went down to the drugstore,” she said, her voice betraying her helplessness. “But it took me so long to find anything. How are we going to get back across to the building?”
Once more, Garvin’s trained habits of thought protested their momentary shock at her foolhardiness. She had already betrayed the fact that her home was virtually undefended. Now she seemed to have unquestionably assumed that he was going home with her.
He shook his head, even while he jeered at himself because he was appalled at the girl for doing what he had feared she would not.
The girl was looking at him questioningly, and again there was something else in her glance, as well. A flicker of annoyance creased his cheeks at his failure to understand it completely.
He repeated the head-shake. “Going to have to run for it. It’ll be easier with two of us, though,” he said. “You’ll go first. I’ll cover you, and then you’ll keep an eye out when I try it. If you see anything, shoot at it.” He hefted his shotgun, grimacing. It was a good defensive weapon, suited to fighting in stores or houses, but its effective range was pitifully short. He wished now that he had a rifle instead.
He shrugged and made sure the shotgun was off safety. He jerked his head toward the building. “Let’s go.”
“All right,” she said huskily. She turned and slipped between two cars, put her head down, and ran blindly across the drive and sidewalk, down the short flight of steps to the terrace, and into the building’s doorway, where she stopped and waited for Garvin.
He took a quick look around, saw nothing, and followed her, running as fast as he could, his legs scissoring in long, zig-zagging strides, his back muscles tense with his awareness of how exposed he was.
He reached the steps, his momentum carrying him sideward, and had to catch himself against the rail while a sudden spray of bullets from across the street crashed into the concrete steps, raising an echo of hammer-blows to the flat, wooden sounds of gunfire. Lead streaks smeared across the concrete, and puffs of dust drifted slowly away.
Then he was under the rail and in the shelter of the sunken terrace, his hands and face bleeding from the laceration of the hedge, while his breath panted past the dirt in his open mouth and his heart pumped rapidly and loudly.
The girl began firing back.
He twisted violently, breaking free of the thousand teeth the hedge had sunk into his clothes, and stared at the girl in the doorway, one leg folded under her, the other bent and thrust out, her left hand gripping her knee and the muzzle of her revolver supported at her left elbow. As if she were firing at a paper target set up on the opposite rooftop. She squeezed off two shots and waited.
“Get out of that doorway!” he shouted. “Inside the building!”
The girl shook her head slightly, her eyes on the rooftop. Her lower lip was caught between the tips of her teeth, and her face was expressionless. There was no answering fire from the rooftop.
“I can’t see him anymore,” she said. “He must have jumped behind a chimney.”
Sweating Garvin squirmed his legs into position. “Try and keep him pinned down,” he shouted across the terrace, and, jumping to his feet, sprinted for the doorway in a straight line, trying to cover the distance as rapidly as possible. He threw one glance across the street, saw no movement on the roof, and pulled the girl to her feet with a scoop of his arm. He flung the lobby door open, and they stumbled through together, into shelter.
He slumped against the lobby wall, his ribs clammy with the perspiration streaming down the sides of his chest. He looked at the girl, his eyes shadowed by the darkness of the lobby, while his breathing slowed to normal.
Once again, she was neglecting to reload the gun. And yet she had squatted in that doorway and done exactly the right thing to keep them from being killed. Done it in her own characteristic way, of course, exposing herself as a sitting target not only to the attacker but to anyone else as well. Somewhere, she had learned the theory of covering fire, and had the courage to apply it in spite of her woeful ignorance of actual practice.
Thus far, he had simply thought of her as being completely out of place on the street. Now he found himself thinking that, with a little training, she might not be so helpless.
She looked up at him suddenly, catching his glance, and he had to say something rather than continue to stand silent.
“Thanks. You take your chances, but, thanks.”
“I couldn’t just let him…” She trailed the sentence away, and did not start another.
“Pretty dumb guy, whoever he was,” Garvin said.
“Yes.” She stared off at nothing, obviously merely filling time, and the thought suddenly struck Garvin that she was waiting for something.
“I can’t understand him,” she said abruptly.
“Neither can I,” Garvin said lamely. Perhaps she had not meant to let him in the apartment. It was quite possible—and logical—that she would ask him to help her get into the building, but would leave him then. Was she waiting for him to give her the supplies and leave? Or didn’t she know what to do now, with the sniper waiting outside? He cursed himself for not taking the initiative, one way or the other, but plunged on. “Exposing himself on a roof like that. Somebody’s sure to pick him off.”
“I didn’t mean… But you’re right. He is being foolish.”
No, of course she hadn’t meant what he meant. Garvin cursed himself again. To the girl, it was incomprehensible that anyone would want to kill someone else. He, to whom it was merely stupid to expose oneself to possible fire, had completely misunderstood her. He was a predator, weighing every move against the chance of becoming prey. She was a fledgling who had fallen out of her nest into his hungry world.
He caught himself sharply, derision in his mind. But, maudlin or not, he nevertheless did not want to leave her now, with no one to protect her.
She looked at him again, still waiting. He did not say anything, but kept his eyes away from her face, waiting in turn.
“You can’t go back out there now,” she said finally, hesitating.
“No—no, I can’t.” He tried to keep his voice noncommittal.
“Well, I… You can’t go out. You’ll have to stay here.”
“Yes.”
And there it was. His fingers twisted back into his damp palm and curled in a nervous fist. “Let’s get going,” he said harshly. “We have to see about your father.”
Her expression changed, as though some cryptic apprehension had drained away in her—as though she, in her turn, had been afraid that he would not do what she hoped he would. Her voice, too, was steadier, and her lips rose into a gentle smile.
“I’ll have to introduce you. What’s your name?”
He flushed, startling himself. A gentle, remembered voice chided him from the past. Matthew, you were impolite.
“Matth—Matt Garvin,” he blurted.
She smiled again. “I’m Margaret Cottrell. Hello.”
He took her extended hand and clasped it awkwardly, releasing it with abrupt clumsiness.
He wondered if he’d been right—if she had not wanted him to leave, and had not known what she could do to stop him if he tried. The thought was a disquieting one, because he could not resolve it, or reach a decision. He followed her warily as she turned toward the stairway behind the lifeless elevators. Just before she became no more than a darker shadow in the stairwell’s gloom, he caught the smile on her lips once more.
The apartment was on the third floor. When they came out of the stairway, she went to the nearest door, knocked, and unlocked it. She turned to Garvin, who had stopped a yard away.
“Please come in,” she said.
He started forward uneasily. He trusted the girl to some extent—more than he trusted anyone else, certainly—but for two and a half years, he had never opened any closed door before completely satisfying himself that nothing dangerous could be waiting behind it.
Yet, he could not let the girl know that he distrusted the apartment. To her, it would probably seem foolish, and he did not want her to think him a fool.
He stepped into the doorway, trying to hold his shotgun inconspicuously.
“Margaret?” The voice that came from inside the apartment was thin and strained. Worry flickered over the girl’s face.
“I’ll be right there, father. I’ve got someone with me.” She touched Garvin’s arm. “Please.”
The second invitation broke his uncertainty, and he stepped inside.
“He’s in the back bedroom,” she whispered, and he nodded.
To his surprise, he noticed that the place was heated. A kerosene range had replaced the gas stove in the kitchen, beside the front door, and there was a space heater in the living room. Both had their stovepipes carefully led into the apartment’s ventilation ducts, and the hall grille had been masked off to prevent a backdraft. Garvin pursed his lips. It was a better-organized place than he’d expected.
They reached the bedroom doorway, and Matt saw a thin man propped partially up in the bed, the intensity of the eyes heightened by the same fever that paled his lips. His chest was bandaged, and a wastebasket full of reddened facial tissues sat beside the bed. Garvin felt his mouth twitch into a grimace. The man was hemorrhaging.
“Father,” Margaret said, “This is Matt Garvin. Matt—my father, John Cottrell.”
“I’m glad to meet you, sir,” Garvin said.
“I rather suspect that I’m glad to see you, too,” Cottrell said, smiling ruefully. The pale eyes, sunken deep in their dark sockets, turned to Margaret. “Were you the cause of all that firing outside?”
“There’s a man up on the roof across the street,” she said. “He tried to kill Matt as he was bringing me home.”
“She pulled me out of a real mess,” Garvin put in.
“But Matt went back into the drugstore, after he met me and I told him you were hurt,” Margaret said.
Cottrell’s gaze shifted back and forth between them, his smile growing. “After he met you, eh?” He coughed for a moment, and wiped his mouth. “I’d like to hear about that, while Matt’s looking at this.” He gestured toward his bandaged chest, wincing at the pull on his muscles. “Meanwhile, Margaret, I think I’m getting hungry. Could you make some breakfast?”
The girl nodded and went out to the kitchen. Garvin slipped the pack off his back and took out the supplies from the drugstore. As he walked toward the bed, he caught Cottrell’s look. The man was too sick for hunger, and Matt had eaten, but neither of them wanted the girl in the room while they were appraising each other.
“A typical day in our fair city,” Cottrell said when Matt filled him in on what had happened this morning.
Matt grunted. He had washed the caked blood off Cottrell’s chest, and swabbed out the wound, which was showing signs of a mild infection unimportant in itself.
The bullet was deep in Cottrell’s chest—too deep to be probed for. And there was a constant thin film of blood in the old man’s mouth. Garvin re-bandaged him and threw the dirty swabs and bandages away. Then he put the bottle of germicide down on the table beside the bed, together with the rest of the supplies. He strapped his knapsack shut, testing its balance in his hand. He picked up his shotgun and took the shells out of it.
“Being busy won’t accomplish very much, Matt,” Cottrell said quietly.
Garvin looked up from the gun, his breath gusting out in a tired sigh. The blood in Cottrell’s throat and bronchial tubes made him cough. When he coughed, the wound that bled into his respiratory system tore itself open a little farther. And more blood leaked in and made him cough harder.
“I don’t know very much medicine,” Garvin said. “I’ve read a first aid manual. But I don’t think you’ve got much time.”
Cottrell nodded. He coughed again, and smiled ruefully. “I’m afraid you’re right.” He threw the newly bloodied facial tissue into the wastebasket. “Now, then, what are your plans?”
The two men looked at each other. There was no point to hedging. Cottrell was going to die, and Margaret would be left defenseless when he did. Garvin was in the apartment—a place he never could have reached without Margaret—and Margaret could not now survive without him. On the level of pure logic, the problem and its answer were simple.
“I don’t know, exactly,” Garvin answered slowly. “Before I met Margaret, I was going to find myself someplace to hole up with a couple of years’ worth of supplies, if I could gather ’em. There’s more in this town than most people know.”
“Or are expert enough to get away from other people?”
Garvin looked at Cottrell with noncommittal sadness. “Maybe. I’ve come to my own way of looking at it. Anyhow, I figure if I can hold out long enough, when they start getting desperate and break into apartments—if I can make it through that, then somebody’s bound to get things organized sooner or later, and I can join ’em. I figure we’re in for a time of weeding-out. The ones who live through it will have brains enough to realize turning wolf doesn’t cure hunger.
“Anyway—now that I’m here, I guess I’ll do what I was intending to. Carry in all the stuff I can, and just hope. It isn’t much,” he finished, “but it’s the best I can think of.” He did not mention the obstacle he was most worried about, but it was one over which he had no control. Only Margaret could say what her reaction would be.
Cottrell nodded thoughtfully. “No, it isn’t much.” He looked up. “I think you’re probably right in theory, but I don’t think you’ll be able to follow it.”
Garvin frowned. “I don’t see why not, frankly. It’s pretty much what you’ve been doing.”
“Yes, it is. But you’re not I.” Cottrell stopped to wipe his lips again, and then went on.
“Matt, I’m part of a dead civilization. I believe the last prediction was that ten percent of the population might survive. Here, in Manhattan, under our conditions, I’d estimate that only half that number are alive today. Under no circumstances is that enough people to maintain the interdependence on which the old system was based. Despite the fact that we are surrounded by the generally undamaged products of twentieth and early twenty-first-century technology, we have neither power, running water, nor heat. We are crippled.”
Garvin nodded. There was nothing new in this. But he let the old man talk. He had to have been a tough man in his day, and that had to be respected.
“We have no distribution or communication,” Cottrell went on. “I found this place for Margaret and myself as soon as I could, equipped it, and armed myself. For I knew that if I had no idea how to produce food and clothing for myself, then neither did the rest of my fellow survivors. And the people who did know—the farmers, out on the countryside, must have learned to look out only for themselves, or die.
“And so I took to my cave-fortress. If you don’t know how to produce the necessities of life, and can’t buy them, then you have to take them. When they become scarce, they must be taken ruthlessly. If you have no loaf, and your neighbor has two—take them both. For tomorrow you will hunger again.
“I am a hoarder, yes,” he said. “I carried in as much food as I could, continually foraged for more, and was ready to defend this place to the death. I moved the kerosene stoves in, and pushed the old gas range and the refrigerator down the elevator shaft, so no one could tell which apartment they’d come from. I did it because I realized that I—that all of us—had suddenly returned to the days of the cavemen. We were doomed to crouch in our little caves, afraid of the saber-toothed tigers prowling outside. And when our food ran low, we picked up our weapons and prowled outside, having become temporary tigers in our own turn.”
“Yes, sir,” Matt said politely. He couldn’t see why old bones, raked over now, had any effect on him and his plans.
Cottrell smiled and nodded. “I know, I know, Matt… But the point is, as I’ve said, that you are not I. It was my civilization that ended. Not yours.”
“Sir?”
“You were young enough, when the plagues came, so that you were able to adapt perfectly to the world. You’re not what I am—an average American turned caveman. You’re an average caveman, and you haven’t turned anything—yet. But you will. You can’t escape it. Human beings don’t stay the same all their lives, though some of them half-kill themselves trying to. They can’t. There are other people in the world with them, and, try as each might to become an island unto himself, it’s impossible. He sees his neighbor doing something to make life more bearable—putting up window screens to keep the flies out, say. And then he’s got to have screens of his own, or else walk around covered with fly-bites while his neighbor laughs at him. Or else—” Cottrell smiled oddly, “his wife nags him into it.”
Cottrell coughed sharply, wiped his mouth impatiently, and went on. “Pretty soon, everybody wants window screens. And some bright young man who makes good ones stops being an island and becomes a carpenter. And some other bright young man becomes his salesman. The next thing you know, the carpenter’s got more orders than he can handle—so somebody else becomes a carpenter’s apprentice. You see?”
Matt nodded slowly. “I think so.”
“All right, then, Matt. My civilization ended. Yours is a brand new one. It’s just beginning, but it’s a civilization, all right. There are thousands of boys just like you, all over the world. Some of them will sit in their caves—maybe draw pictures on the walls, before their neighbors break in and kill them. But the rest of you, Matt, will be doing things. What you’ll do, exactly, I don’t know. But it’ll be effective.”
Cottrell stopped himself with an outburst of coughing, and Matt bit his lip as the old man sank back on his pillows. But Cottrell resumed the thread of his explanation, and now Matt understood that he was trying to leave something behind before he was too weak to say it. Cottrell had lived longer and seen more than the man who was going to become his daughter’s husband. This attempt to pass on the benefit of his experience was the old man’s last performance of his duty toward Margaret.
“I think, Matt,” Cottrell went on, “that whatever you and the other young men do will produce a new culture—a more fully developed civilization. And that each generation of young men after you will take what you have left them and build on it, even though they might prefer to simply sit still and enjoy what they have. Because someone will always want window screens. It’s the nature of the beast.
“And, it is also in the nature of the beast that some people, seeing their neighbor with his window screens, will not want to make the effort of building screens of their own. Some of them will try to bring their neighbor back to the old level—by killing him, by destroying his improvements.
“But that doesn’t work. If you kill one man, you may kill another. And the other people around you will band together in fear and kill you. And someday, after it’s been demonstrated that the easiest way, in the long run, is to build rather than to attempt to destroy—after everyone has window screens—some bright young man will invent DDT and a whole new cycle will begin.”
Cottrell laughed shortly. “Oh, what a nervous day for the window-screen-makers that will be! But the people who know how to make sprayguns will be very busy.
“The plague was a disaster, Matt,” he said suddenly, veering off on a new track. “But disasters are not new to the race of Man. To every Act of God, Man has an answer, drawn from the repertoire of answers he has hammered out in the face of the disasters that have come before. It’s in his nature to build dams against the flood—to rebuild after the earthquake. To put up window screens. Because, apparently, he’s uncomfortable with what this planet gives him, and has to change it—to improve on it, to make himself just a little more comfortable. Maybe, just for the irritated hope that his wife will shut up and leave him alone for a few minutes.
“Who knows? Man hunted his way upward with a club in his hand, once. You’re starting with a rifle. Perhaps, before your sons die, the world will once again support the kind of civilization in which a young man can sit in a cave, drawing pictures, and depend on others to clothe and shelter him.
“But not now,” Cottrell said. “Now, I wouldn’t entrust my daughter to anyone but a hunter.
“And I’m making you a hunter, Matt. I’m leaving you this dowry: responsibility, in the form of what my daughter will need to make her happy. In addition, I leave you the apartment as a base of operations, together with the stove, the water still, and the fuel oil. The First Avenue entrances to the Canarsie Line subway are on the corner. That tunnel connects with all the others under the city. They’ll be a relatively safe trail through the jungle this city has become. You’ll be able to get water from the seepage, too. Distilled water is easily restored to its natural taste by aeration with an eggbeater.
“Last of all, Matt, you’ll find my rifle beside the door. It’s a mankiller. There’s ammunition in the hall closet.
“That’s your environment, Matt. Change it.”
He stopped and sighed. “That’s all.”
Garvin sat silently, watching the old man’s breathing.
What would Cottrell have done if his daughter hadn’t brought a man home? Probably, he would have found comfort in the thought that, across the world, there were thousands of young men and women. His personal tragedy would have been trivial, on that scale.
Yes, doubtless. But would it have made the personal failure any less painful? Cottrell’s philosophy was logical enough—but, once again, in the face of actual practice, logic seemed not enough. Just as now, with all the philosophy expounded, there was still the problem of Margaret’s reaction.
Sweat trickled coldly down Garvin’s chest.
“By the way, Matt,” Cottrell said dryly, “For a young man who doubtless thinks of himself as not being a cave dweller, you’re apparently having a good deal of trouble recognizing the symptoms of shy young love, American girl style.”
Garvin stared at the old man, who went on speaking as though he did not see his flush, smiling broadly as he savored the secret joke he had discovered in his first glances at Margaret and Matt.
“And now, if you’ll call Margaret in here, I think we ought to bring her up to date.” He coughed violently again, grimacing at this reminder, but when he flung the bloody tissue into the wastebasket, it was a gesture of victory.
* * *
Five months later, Matt Garvin padded silently through the dark of Macy’s, his magnum rifle held diagonally across his body. He moved easily, for his knapsack was lightly loaded, even when stuffed full of the clothing he’d picked up for Margaret.
Though he made no sound, he chuckled ruefully in his mind. First it had been one thing Margaret needed, and then another, until finally he was going farther and farther afield. Well, it was the way things were, and nothing could be done about it.
A shadow flitted across the lighter area near a door, and he stopped in his tracks, wishing his breath were not so sibilant. Damn, he’d have to work out some kind of breathing technique! Then the other man crossed the light again, and Garvin moved forward. There was a cartridge in the magnum’s chamber, of course, and he was ready to fire instantly. But he could almost be sure there was someone else down here, prowling the counters, and he didn’t want to fire if it could be avoided.
On the other hand, if he waited much longer, he might lose the man in front of him.
With a mental shrug, he threw the rifle up to his shoulder and shot the man down, dropping instantly to the floor as he did so. The echoes shattered through the darkness.
Another man fired from behind a display and charged him, grunting. Matt sprang to his feet, the magnum swinging butt-first, and broke his neck. He stopped to listen, ready to fire in any direction, but there was no sound. He grinned coldly.
He stopped to strip the packs from both corpses before he vanished into the darkness. He thought to himself, not for the first time, that a rifle was too clumsy for close-in combat—that if the man had been able to block the magnum’s swing, things might easily have worked out another way. What you needed for this sort of situation was a pistol.
But he was still reluctant to think of himself as a man with much occasion for one.
I
Matthew Garvin was a young, heavy-boned man who had not yet filled out to his mature frame. His grip on his automatic shotgun was not too sure. But he had been picking his way through the New York City streets for two days, skirting the litter and other obstructions left by the plague, and the shotgun made him feel a great deal more comfortable—for all that he still half-expected a New York City policeman to step out from behind vie of the slewed, abandoned cars, or from one of the barricaded doorways, and arrest him for violating the Sullivan Act.
His picture of the world’s condition was fragmentary. Most of it was gleaned from remembered snatches of the increasingly sporadic news over the TV. And he had heard those only while lying in delirium, on a cot beside the room where his dying father kept death watch over the other members of his family. He had not truly come back to alertness until well after his father was dead and the TV was inoperative, though it was still switched on.
All he could remember his father telling him, in all those days. was “If you live, don’t forget to go armed.” He was certain, now, that his father, probably delerious himself, had repeated it over and over, clutching his arm urgently and slurring the words, the way a man will when his rationality tries to force a message out through an almost complete loss of control.
And when he had finally wakened, and known he was going to live, Matthew Garvin had found the Browning lying on the floor beside his cot, together with a box of shells still redolent of woodsmoke and old cleaning solvent. His father’s old hunting knapsack had been there, too, stocked with canned food, waterproof matches, a flashlight, a compass, and a hunting knife, almost as if Matthew and he had been going to leave for the North Woods together. They had been doing that every deer season for the past four years. But this time it was his father’s gear that Matthew would be carrying; and it was the big Browning, instead of the rifle.
He had not questioned his father’s judgment. He had strapped the knapsack on, and taken the shotgun, and then he had left the apartment—he could not have stayed, though he did his best to leave his family in some semblance of decent repose.
At first, he had not quite known what he was going to do. Looking out the window, he could see nothing moving on the streets. A pall of gray mist hung over Manhattan—part fog, part smoke, from where something was burning and had not been put out. He had gone and taken the heavy binoculars from his father’s closet and studied the two rivers. They were almost clear of floating debris of various kinds, and so he assumed the great wave of dying was over—those who still lived, would live. He had probably been one of the last to be sick.
The streets and the waterfronts were a jumble of abandoned and wrecked equipment—cars, trucks, boats, barges—much as he had last seen them, on the night when he had realized he, too, was at last growing feverish and dry-mouthed. That had been after the government had abandoned the continual effort to keep the streets clear and people in their homes.
Here and there, some of the main avenues had been opened, with cars and buses towed out of the way, lying as they had been dropped on the sidewalks. He could see one crane—a Metropolitan Transit Authority company emergency truck—where it had stopped, with a bright blue sports car still dangling from the tow hook. So there had not been time after he fell ill for anything to litter up the opened streets again.
He tried the radio—he had read enough novels of universal disaster to know nothing would come of it, and for a while he had been undecided, but his human nature had won out—and there had been nothing. He listened for the hum he associated with the phrase “carrier wave,” and did not hear that, either. He looked down at the baseboard, and saw that someone—probably his father—had ripped the line cord out of the wall so savagely that the bared ends of the wire dangled on the floor while the gutted plug remained in the socket.
But he had not repaired it. The dead TV was good enough—in the end, he remembered, the final government announcement had been quite explicit—the President’s twanging, measured voice had labored from phrase to phrase, explaining calmly that some would surely survive—that no disease, however impossible to check, could prove fatal to all human beings everywhere—but that the survivors should not expect human civilization to have endured with them. “To those of you who will live to re-make this world,” the President had said, “my only promise is this: That with courage, with ingenuity, with determination—above all, with adherence to the moral principles that distinguish Man from the animals—the future is one of hope. The way will be hard. The effort will be great. But the future waits to be realized, and with God’s help it shall be realized—it must be realized!”
But that had not been much to go on. He had put the binoculars back—if someone had asked him, he would have replied that certainly he planned to come back to the apartment; he would not have stopped to think about it until he had actually heard his positive words—and he had left, climbing down flight after flight of stairs.
He was on his way to Larry Ruark’s apartment, he had realized at some point on his journey. Larry lived about fifty blocks uptown—by no means a difficult walk—and was a close friend from the time they had gone through the first two years of college together, before Larry had gone on to medical school. He had no way of knowing whether Larry had survived or not. But it seemed to him the chances were reasonably good. In part, they seem so to him because he was associating immunity with the word “doctor,” and because he needed to find a friend alive; an undergraduate medical student to whom he gave an inappropriate title because that made his friend likelier to have lived. But in part, he knew, his reasoning was sound. Larry had been young, and in excellent health; that was bound to have improved his chances.
Matthew Garvin had thought that surely he might find out more about the world, on his way to Larry’s. He had expected to meet other survivors, and talk to them.
He had expected that, between them, he and the other young, generally sound people could piece together an accurate idea of what the world’s condition was. There was nothing to fear from contact with each other, after all—either they had the plague, and would die, or had successfully resisted it, and would not. The time of the Carrier Panic—before it had been proven the disease agent, whatever it was, did not need to be transmitted from human hand to hand— that ugly time was over.
But he had begun to wonder whether the other survivors were aware of that. And he had begun to wonder whether some of them might not have become insane. For though he sometimes heard quick footsteps whose direction was disguised by echoes, he had been able to meet no one face-to-face, and when he had stood and shouted, no one answered. He knew he had come late to the inevitable sickness. He wondered what it was the more experienced survivors might have found out that would make them act like this.
Once he turned a corner and found someone who had survived the plague. It was a young man, canted awkwardly against a subway railing, dead, with fresh blood congealing around the stab wounds in his chest, and a torn grocery bag, empty, trampled at his feet.
The streets were badly blocked in places, and he had been moving more and more slowly, out of the same caution that made him hole up and lock himself in a truck cab overnight. So it was the next day when he saw the placards.
He was only a few blocks from Larry’s then. The placards were Civil Defense Emergency Posters, turned around to expose their unprinted backs. Hand-lettered on them now were the words “Live Medic,” and an arrow pointing uptown.
After that, Matthew Garvin hurried. He was sure Larry Ruark had survived, now. And the placards were the first trace of some kind of organization. He had begun to think of the world as a place much like a locked museum at night…except for a sporadic, distant hint of sounds that were too much like isolated gunshots. He had heard the sounds of police machineguns, during the Carrier Panic, and the deep thud of demolition as the Isolation Squads tried to cordon off the stricken areas—that had been quite early in the game—but this was different. This was like the sound of foot-snapped twigs in a forest infested by Indians.
The trail of placards led to Larry Ruark’s apartment house. The barricade in the doorway had been pulled aside, and the front door stood open.
It was the first open barricade he had seen since he had set out on his journey, though he had caught occasional glimpses of motion behind the windows of barricaded houses. He wondered if those inside had yet made their first ventures outside. It had begun to occur to him that perhaps they had—perhaps they had pulled down the barricades and then, after a day or so, put them back up. They were a defensive measure, of course—in the last days of the plague the sick, the drunk, and the stupid had roamed the streets wherever the diminishing police could not turn them back. Matthew Garvin himself had gone through a bout of hysteria in which he had laughed, over and over again, “Now there won’t be any war!” and the urge to go out—to get drunk, to smash something, to break loose and kick out at all the things society had erected in the expectation of war—the Shelter signs, the newspaper kiosks, the computer and television stores, the motion picture theaters—all the things that battened on desperation—that need to show that suddenly he, too, understood how miserably frightened they had all been under the shell of calm—all that had boiled and shaken inside him, and if he had been just a little bit different he, too, would have been roaring down the flamelit streets, and there would have been a need of barricades against him.
He moved tentatively up the steps to the foyer of Larry Ruark’s apartment house. The foyer and the stairs up were clean—swept, mopped, dusted. The brass handle on the front door had been polished. In the foyer stood another placard: “Live Medic Upstairs.”
There was nothing else to see, and there were no sounds.
He padded up the stairs, using only the balls of his feet to touch the treads. Yesterday he would not have done that. He did not entirely understand why he did it now. But it was appropriate to his environment, and he was young enough to be quite sensitive about conforming to the shape of the world around him.
Larry’s apartment was at the head of the stairs. The sign on the door said: “Medic—Knock and Come In.”
It was Larry! Matthew rapped his knuckles quickly on the paneling and pushed the door in the same motion. “Lar—”
The thin, hard arm went around his throat from behind. He realized that in another moment he was going to be pulled backward, off balance and helpless. He jumped upward, and that broke the hold enough for him to turn around, still inside the circle of the arm. He and Larry Ruark stared into each other’s eyes.
“Oh, my God!” Larry whispered. He lowered the hand with the butcher knife in it.
Matthew Garvin stood panting, still in his friend’s embrace. Then Larry let his other arm sag, and Matthew stepped back quickly.
“Matt…Jesus, Dear God, Matt!” Larry pushed back against the door and sagged on it, his eyes round. “I saw somebody coming, and I figured—and it turned out to be you!”
He was emaciated; his hair, always speckled with early gray, was wild and grizzled. His eyesockets were the color of dirty blue velvet. His clothes were stained and shapeless on his bones. Matt’s nostrils were still singed with the old, mildewed smell of them.
“Larry, what the hell is this?”
Larry rubbed his face, the butcher knife dangling askew between his fingers.
“Listen, Matt, I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was you.”
“Didn’t know it was me.”
“Oh, God damn it, I can’t talk. Sit down someplace, will you, Matt? I’ve—I need a minute.”
“All right,” Matt, said, but did not sit down. The room was furnished with an old leather couch, two shabby armchairs, and a coffee table on which sooty old magazines were laid out in a meticulous pattern. Very little light filtered through the cracks between the window drapes.
“Listen, Matt, is there any food in that knapsack?”
“Some. You hungry?”
“Yes. No—Anyway, that can wait. I just almost killed you—is this a time to talk about food? We’ve got to work this out—you’ve got to—look, do you know I can see the George Washington Bridge from my bedroom window?”
Matt cocked his head and frowned.
“I mean. I watched the people going out across the bridge. It went on for days, after the plague died down. They went climbing over the old Isolation Squad barricades. and all the cars and cadavers. I timed it. Something like twenty or thirty an hour. And they weren’t going in groups. Twenty or thirty people an hour in Manhattan each got the idea of getting out into the country.
“They were hungry, Matt. And I saw a lot of them coming back—some of them were crawling. I’m sure they had gunshot wounds. Something over there is turning them back. You know what it’s got to be? It’s got to be the survivors on the Jersey side. They don’t have any spare food, either. And that means the surviving farmers are shooting them when they try to go for food.”
“Larry—”
“Listen, food shipments into Manhattan stopped seven weeks ago!”
“Warehouses,” Matt said, like a man trying to deliver an urgent message in the depths of a nightmare, watching the knife swing back and forth between Larry’s fingers.
“There are people in them. Holed up during the plague. I was just coming out of it, then I couldn’t get down the stairs yet, but there was still a little bit of radio, on the Police band—and the warehouses were full of them. Dead, dying, and live ones. They won’t let anybody in. You’ve got to remember Manhattan is full of crowd-control weapons and ammunition. You could pick ’em up anywhere—all you had to do was pry the dead fingers away. They’re all gone now, of course—they’ve all been picked up. Anybody who has a food supply is armed. He has to be. If he isn’t, some armed man has killed him for it by now.”
“There’s got to be food. There were two million people on this island! There were food stores on every block. They had to have some source of ready supply! You can’t tell me there still isn’t enough here to keep people eating for a while, at least. How many of us are there left?”
Larry shook his head. “Two hundred thousand, maybe. If the national average held good under urban conditions. I don’t think it did. I think maybe there’s really a hundred-fifty thousand.” Larry shook his head exhaustedly and walked away from the door with a clumsy, stiff-jointed gait. He dropped into one of the armchairs, and let the knife fall on the footworn carpet beside him.
“Look, you’re all right.” He motioned toward Matt’s gun. “You fall into this place naturally. But what about me? Look—you think about it. Sure, there’s got to be food around. But who knows where? The people who’d know are keeping it for themselves. All the obvious places are being emptied. And even when you have it, you have to get it home. And if you get it home, how long is it before you have to go out again? You can’t even have water, unless you carry it in!”
“All right, so you carry it.” Matt tapped his canteen. He had filled it from the water cooler in an abandoned office, this morning, and purified it with a Halazone tablet from the kit in his pack. “And you have to go look for food because there aren’t any more delivery boys. So what? There’s plenty of time, every day. And there’s time to think, too. You know what this is—what you’re doing? It’s panic.”
“All right, it’s panic! It’s panic When an animal chews its leg off in a trap, too—you trying to tell me it didn’t need to?”
“Larry, we’re not animals!”
Larry Ruark laughed.
Matt watched him. Very gradually, he was calming, but there was still a sound like a riptide in his ears. He knew he would remember this conversation, later, better than he was hearing it now. He knew he would act, now, in ways that later thinking would improve on. But for the moment he could not stop his eyes from trying to watch Larry and the knife at the same time. And he could not keep from trying to settle it now—right now—before it became intolerable.
“You can’t tell me anybody who can move is anywhere near starving to death in Manhattan. It’ll be years before the last food is gone.”
“What do I care, if I can’t get it? I’ve got to think my way!” Larry’s eyes jerked down toward where the knife lay, near his hand as it dangled over the arm of the chair. “You—you can go hunt for it. Listen, you know what they’d do to me, if I went outside? If they found out I was a med student? You know why I put those signs out all around this neighborhood? It’s not for the people with the gunshot wounds and the inflamed appendixes and the abscessed teeth—sure, some of ’em may be desperate enough to come here for help. But you know how I get most of my protein? I get it from people who come up here looking to kill me. You know why? Because we lied to ’em. The whole medical profession lied to ’em. It told them it would lick the plague. It told them that a world full of medical scientists couldn’t miss coming up with the solution.
“And what happened? You remember the last days of the plague—the Isolation Squads, the barricades, the machineguns and flamethrowers around the hospitals? Sure, we told ’em we were only protecting the research facilities from the mobs, when we fortified the hospitals. But they know better. They know their mothers and their wives and kids died because we wouldn’t let ’em in. What do they care about things like a plague that hits the whole world, from end to end, inside three days? A plague everybody gets. A plague that forces a delirious fever on your body, so you can’t see into the barrel of your microscope or hold two beakers steady? All they know is the biggest piles of corpses were lying around the aid stations and the research centers. And I was there, all right. I didn’t have the training to do any good on the research side, so they gave me a Thompson submachinegun, and that’s how I did my part, until I wore it out. And by then nobody minded if I went home. There wasn’t much of anybody to mind.
“I know what they want, when they come up here. They want the dumb Medic who’s idiot enough to advertise. Well, they don’t get him. No, sir. And that’s how I get my protein. ’Cause it’s all protein, you know—I mean, you wouldn’t eat a mouse or an earthworm, would you, Matt? But it’s all protein. Your body wouldn’t care where it came from. It would take it, and use it to keep alive, and be grateful. All your body wants to do is live another day.
“But I’m not doing too well, lately. They’re getting wise to me, in the neighborhood, and all I’m getting now is transients. I’ll have to think of something new, pretty soon.
“You and me.” Larry’s eyes darted toward Matt. “You and me—we’d make out together. You can go out and forage, and I’ll stay here and make sure nobody takes it away. How about that?”
Matt Garvin took a step toward the door.
Larry’s hand moved aimlessly toward the knife. He pretended not to see what his hand was doing.
“Please, Larry,” Matt said. “I just want to go.”
“Listen, you can’t go now. We’ve got plans to make. You’re the only guy I can trust!”
“Larry, I just want to get out that door; me, and my shotgun, too.”
“I’ll throw the knife at your back on the stairs, Matt. I will.”
“I’ll walk down backwards.”
“That won’t be easy. If you slip, you’re a loser.”
“I guess so.”
Matt Garvin opened the door, and backed out. He backed all the way down the stairs, without tripping, and watched the silent, motionless door of Larry Ruark’s apartment. Down on the street, he ran—silently, ripping down placards as he went.
II
Fourteenth Street lay quiet under the dawn. From the East River across to the Hudson, it ran its blue-gray length between the soundless buildings. Except for a flock of lean, restless pigeons that circled momentarily above Union Square and then fluttered back to earth, it was sucked empty of life and motion like a watercourse running between dry banks. The wind of Autumn swept down the width of the paralyzed street, carrying trash.
East of First Avenue, lines of parked cars bleached at the flank of Stuyvesant Town. Here, finally, something moved. The creeping edge of sunlight touched Matt Garvin’s eyes as he lay asleep in the back of a taxi.
Garvin was instantly awake, but, at first, only a momentary twitch of his eyelids betrayed him to the day. Then his hand closed on the stock of his shotgun, and he raised his body slowly. His eyes probed at the streets and buildings around him. He smiled in thin satisfaction. For the moment, he was all that lived on Fourteenth Street.
He slid his legs off the folded backs of the lowered jump seats, and sat up. The cab was safe enough, with the windows up and the doors locked—no one could have forced them silently—but there could have been men out there, waiting for the time when he had to come out.
He bent over, unstrapped his knapsack, and took out his canteen and a tin of roast beef. He opened the roast beef and began to eat, raising his head from time to time to be sure that no one was slipping toward him along the line of parked cars. He ate without waste motion, taking an occasional swallow of the flat-tasting but safe soda water in his canteen. He had run out of Halazone long ago. When the roast beef was finished he repacked his knapsack, strapped it on his upper back, and, after one more look at his surroundings, clicked up the latch on the taxi door and silently moved out onto the cobblestoned island that was one of a series separating Fourteenth Street from the peripheral drive around Stuyvesant Town.
Cars were parked on both sides of the narrow island, their bumpers almost touching. The big red buildings towered upward on Garvin’s left as he moved eastward along the housing project’s edge, but the cars on that side protected him from any kind of accurate fire from the lower floors. In order to aim at him from the upper stories, a man would have had to lean so far out of his window as to expose himself to fire from the opposite side of the street. Garvin himself was protected from the south side of Fourteenth Street by the line of cars on his right. Moreover, one man and his knapsack were not generally a worthwhile target, any longer.
Still, worthwhile or not, he picked his route carefully, and held to a low, weaving crouch. Holding the shotgun at high port, he moved rapidly eastward between the twin lines of cars, his eyes never still, his feet in their tennis shoes less noisy than the wind, his head constantly turning as he listened for what his eyes might miss.
And it was his ears that warned him at the corner of Avenue A. He heard the quiet sound of a store’s latched door, which was bound to snap its lock no matter how carefully eased into place, and then there was the friction of leather shoes on a sidewalk.
He stopped, sheltered by an automobile’s curved flanks, and the shotgun’s muzzle swung almost automatically toward the source of the sound. He straightened his back cautiously and looked across the street through the car’s rear windows, his breath sucking in through his teeth as he saw her.
The girl was slim; sprinting across the sidewalk in nervously choppy strides as she left the drugstore. Her face was white, and her eyes were terrifiedly wide. Obviously panicked at being out in the street during daylight, she was running blindly, straight for where Garvin was crouched, trying to reach the comparative safety of the island before she was seen.
He took two rapid steps backward before he realized there was no place for him to hide, and the girl was across the street before he could think of anything else to do. Then she was on the island, ducking into the shelter of the double row of cars, and it was too late to think.
She hadn’t seen him yet. She was too intent on safety to see danger until he straightened out of his instinctive crouch, letting the shotgun’s muzzle drop. Then her mouth opened, her eyes becoming desperate, and he saw the unexpected gun in her other hand.
“Hey!” He shouted in surprise as he charged forward, throwing his arm out. He felt the shock of his forearm deflecting her wrist upward, and then the gun jumped in her hand, the echoes pattering like a hard-shoe dance down the empty street. His charge threw their bodies together, and his arm hooked like a whip and pinned her gun-arm out of the way. His thighs snapped together in time to take the kick of her driving knee, but he could only dig his chin into her shoulder and try to shelter his face against the side of her head as her other hand clawed at his ear and neck. Then his momentum overcame her balance, and they were safely down on the island’s cobblestones.
“Stay down!” he grunted urgently as he twisted around and slapped the gun out of her hand, catching it before it could be damaged against the stones. She sobbed an incoherent reply, and her nails drew fresh blood from his face. He fell back, but threw his shoulder into her stomach in time to keep her from forcing her way back to her feet.
“Haven’t you got any sense?” he cursed out hoarsely as she tried to break away. He flung an arm out and kept her scrambling fingers from his eyes. “Every gun in the neighborhood’s waiting for us to stand up and get shot.”
“Oh!” She stopped struggling immediately, and this unexpected willingness to believe him was more surprising than his first glimpse of her. As her arms dropped, he rolled away, wiping the blood off his stinging face.
“For Christ’s sake!” he panted, “What did you think I was going to do?”
Her face turned color. “I—”
“Don’t be stupid!” he cut her off harshly. “Do you have any idea how many women were left alive by that damn virus, or whatever it was?” She winced away from the sound of his voice, surprising him again. How did she manage to stay alive, this naive and sensitive? “Raping a girl sort of ruins your chances for striking up a permanent acquaintance with her,” he went on in a gentler voice, and was oddly pleased to see a smile lightly touch her face.
“Here.” He tossed her gun into her lap. “Reload.”
“What?” She was staring down at it.
“Reload, damn it,” he repeated with rough persistence. “You’re one round short.” She picked the weapon up gingerly, but snapped the cylinder out as if she knew what she was doing, and he felt free to forget her for the moment.
He pulled his legs up under him and got into a squat crouch, turning his upper body from side to side as he tried to spot the sniper he was almost sure the sound of her shot had attracted. One man was a doubtful target, but the two of them were worth anyone’s attention, and he did not trust that anyone’s eyesight to save the girl.
The windows of Fourteenth Street looked blankly back at him. For some reason, he shuddered slightly.
“Do you see anyone?” the girl asked softly, surprising him again, for he had forgotten her as an individual even while adding her as a factor to the problem of safety.
He shook his head. “No. That’s what worries me. Somebody should have been curious enough to look out. Probably, somebody was—and now he’s picked up a rifle.”
Apprehension overlaid her face. “What’re we going to do? I’ve got to get home.” She fumbled in her jumper pockets until she found a tube of sulfa ointment. “My father’s hurt.”
He nodded briefly. At least that explained why she’d been outside. Then he grimaced. “Gunshot wound?”
“Yes.”
“Thought so. That stuff’s no good. Not anymore.”
“There were so many kinds of things in the drugstore,” she said uncertainly. “This was the only one I was sure of. Is it too old?”
He shrugged. “Way past its expiration date, that’s for sure. And I’ve got a hunch we’re up against whole new kinds of bacteria that won’t even blink at the stuff. Every damn antibiotic in the world was turned loose, I guess, and what lived through that is what we’ve got to deal with. These days, my vote’s for soap and carbolic acid.
“Bad?” he asked suddenly.
“What?”
“Is he hurt bad?”
Her lip trembled. “He was shot through the chest three days ago.”
He grunted, then looked back at the blank windows again. “Look—will you stay here until I get back? I want to see you home. You need it,” he added bluntly.
“Where are you going?”
“Drugstore.”
Her lips parted in bewilderment. The innocence of trust did not belong on this deadly street. Her simple acceptance of everything he told her—even her failure to shoot him when he gave her back the gun—reacted in him to create a baseless but deep and sudden anger.
“To make a phone call,” he added with brutal sarcasm. Then he managed to smooth his voice. “If something happens, don’t you do anything but turn around and go home, understand?”
The anger fading, but still strong, he jumped to his feet and began to run without waiting for an answer.
Stupid kid, he thought as he weaved across the street. She had absolutely no business running around loose. He crossed the white center-line, and no one had fired yet.
If the snipers had any brains, they’d wait until he came out. They’d be able to judge whether his load was worth bothering with.
How had she managed to live this long? His sole slammed into the curb, and he drove himself across the sidewalk.
Just my luck to get shot by somebody stupid.
He tore the door open and flung himself into the drugstore, catching one of the fountain stools for balance as he stopped. He leaned on it for a moment while he waited for his breath to slow.
They were probably figuring the smart percentage. One man with his pack wasn’t temptation enough. He and the girl definitely were, once they were close together again, where a simple dash under cover of night would reach their bodies. But the girl by herself was safe from all but the myopic, and he, separated from her, was also moderately safe. A handful of packages from the drugstore might tip the scales against him—until you stopped to consider that the best thing to do was to wait until he had rejoined the girl, in which case, if the potential sniper already had a woman…
Sick with calculations, he slammed his palms against the edge of the Formica counter-top and pushed himself away from the fountain.
Among the jumbled shelves, he found a bottle of germicide, some cotton swabs, and bandages. He packed them carefully into his knapsack, cursing himself for not asking whether the bullet was still in the wound. He shrugged as he realized that surgical forceps were an unlikely instrument to encounter here, drugstore or no. Then he turned toward the outline of the doorway, light in the store’s darkness, and stopped.
The store was safe, he found himself thinking. The girl had proved that for him by coming out alive. He had reached it, and now that he was in, it was an easily defended place.
Outside lay Fourteenth Street—a gray bend of sidewalk, swept partially clean by the wind, and the dusty blue-black of the street’s asphalt. Beyond it hunched the sheer, blank-windowed brick buildings, and beyond these, the ice-blue sky. There were no waiting rifles—not where he would be likely to see them.
He looked about him. There must be something else he could find that might be useful. If he looked around, he was pretty sure to stumble across something. If he looked around long enough. If he waited.
He laughed once, shortly, at himself, and stepped out into the street, breaking into a run as frantic as the girl’s had been, his chest pumping, his stride off-balance from the shifting weight of the pack, the sweat breaking out on his face and evaporating icily.
He realized that he was afraid, and then he was across the street and safely on the island, sprawled out on his panting stomach, between the cars. He looked up at the girl and suddenly understood that his fear had been of losing the future.
He waited a few moments for the pumping of his lungs to slow. The girl was looking at him with some incomprehensible expression shining on her face.
Finally he said, “Now, let’s get you home. You start, and I’ll cover you from behind.”
The girl nodded wordlessly, putting aside whatever it was that she had been going to say, and turned up the island in the direction from which he had come. He followed her, and they worked their way back toward First Avenue, neither of them speaking except for his occasional growled monosyllable whenever her crouch grew dangerously shallow.
Moving quietly, they reached a point opposite the entrance to the Stuyvesant building on the corner of First Avenue. The girl stopped, and Garvin closed the ten-yard interval between them, crouching beside her.
He felt his left hand’s fingers twitch as the indecisive restlessness of his muscles searched for an outlet. The girl could simply leave him at this point, and it might be years before he saw another woman, particularly one who was free. At least, he assumed she was free. What kind of man would let his woman go out alone like this? If she had one, he didn’t deserve to keep her.
Garvin laughed at himself again, disregarding her surprise at the short, sharp bark.
“It was still dark when I went down to the drugstore,” she said, her voice betraying her helplessness. “But it took me so long to find anything. How are we going to get back across to the building?”
Once more, Garvin’s trained habits of thought protested their momentary shock at her foolhardiness. She had already betrayed the fact that her home was virtually undefended. Now she seemed to have unquestionably assumed that he was going home with her.
He shook his head, even while he jeered at himself because he was appalled at the girl for doing what he had feared she would not.
The girl was looking at him questioningly, and again there was something else in her glance, as well. A flicker of annoyance creased his cheeks at his failure to understand it completely.
He repeated the head-shake. “Going to have to run for it. It’ll be easier with two of us, though,” he said. “You’ll go first. I’ll cover you, and then you’ll keep an eye out when I try it. If you see anything, shoot at it.” He hefted his shotgun, grimacing. It was a good defensive weapon, suited to fighting in stores or houses, but its effective range was pitifully short. He wished now that he had a rifle instead.
He shrugged and made sure the shotgun was off safety. He jerked his head toward the building. “Let’s go.”
“All right,” she said huskily. She turned and slipped between two cars, put her head down, and ran blindly across the drive and sidewalk, down the short flight of steps to the terrace, and into the building’s doorway, where she stopped and waited for Garvin.
He took a quick look around, saw nothing, and followed her, running as fast as he could, his legs scissoring in long, zig-zagging strides, his back muscles tense with his awareness of how exposed he was.
He reached the steps, his momentum carrying him sideward, and had to catch himself against the rail while a sudden spray of bullets from across the street crashed into the concrete steps, raising an echo of hammer-blows to the flat, wooden sounds of gunfire. Lead streaks smeared across the concrete, and puffs of dust drifted slowly away.
Then he was under the rail and in the shelter of the sunken terrace, his hands and face bleeding from the laceration of the hedge, while his breath panted past the dirt in his open mouth and his heart pumped rapidly and loudly.
The girl began firing back.
He twisted violently, breaking free of the thousand teeth the hedge had sunk into his clothes, and stared at the girl in the doorway, one leg folded under her, the other bent and thrust out, her left hand gripping her knee and the muzzle of her revolver supported at her left elbow. As if she were firing at a paper target set up on the opposite rooftop. She squeezed off two shots and waited.
“Get out of that doorway!” he shouted. “Inside the building!”
The girl shook her head slightly, her eyes on the rooftop. Her lower lip was caught between the tips of her teeth, and her face was expressionless. There was no answering fire from the rooftop.
“I can’t see him anymore,” she said. “He must have jumped behind a chimney.”
Sweating Garvin squirmed his legs into position. “Try and keep him pinned down,” he shouted across the terrace, and, jumping to his feet, sprinted for the doorway in a straight line, trying to cover the distance as rapidly as possible. He threw one glance across the street, saw no movement on the roof, and pulled the girl to her feet with a scoop of his arm. He flung the lobby door open, and they stumbled through together, into shelter.
He slumped against the lobby wall, his ribs clammy with the perspiration streaming down the sides of his chest. He looked at the girl, his eyes shadowed by the darkness of the lobby, while his breathing slowed to normal.
Once again, she was neglecting to reload the gun. And yet she had squatted in that doorway and done exactly the right thing to keep them from being killed. Done it in her own characteristic way, of course, exposing herself as a sitting target not only to the attacker but to anyone else as well. Somewhere, she had learned the theory of covering fire, and had the courage to apply it in spite of her woeful ignorance of actual practice.
Thus far, he had simply thought of her as being completely out of place on the street. Now he found himself thinking that, with a little training, she might not be so helpless.
She looked up at him suddenly, catching his glance, and he had to say something rather than continue to stand silent.
“Thanks. You take your chances, but, thanks.”
“I couldn’t just let him…” She trailed the sentence away, and did not start another.
“Pretty dumb guy, whoever he was,” Garvin said.
“Yes.” She stared off at nothing, obviously merely filling time, and the thought suddenly struck Garvin that she was waiting for something.
“I can’t understand him,” she said abruptly.
“Neither can I,” Garvin said lamely. Perhaps she had not meant to let him in the apartment. It was quite possible—and logical—that she would ask him to help her get into the building, but would leave him then. Was she waiting for him to give her the supplies and leave? Or didn’t she know what to do now, with the sniper waiting outside? He cursed himself for not taking the initiative, one way or the other, but plunged on. “Exposing himself on a roof like that. Somebody’s sure to pick him off.”
“I didn’t mean… But you’re right. He is being foolish.”
No, of course she hadn’t meant what he meant. Garvin cursed himself again. To the girl, it was incomprehensible that anyone would want to kill someone else. He, to whom it was merely stupid to expose oneself to possible fire, had completely misunderstood her. He was a predator, weighing every move against the chance of becoming prey. She was a fledgling who had fallen out of her nest into his hungry world.
He caught himself sharply, derision in his mind. But, maudlin or not, he nevertheless did not want to leave her now, with no one to protect her.
She looked at him again, still waiting. He did not say anything, but kept his eyes away from her face, waiting in turn.
“You can’t go back out there now,” she said finally, hesitating.
“No—no, I can’t.” He tried to keep his voice noncommittal.
“Well, I… You can’t go out. You’ll have to stay here.”
“Yes.”
And there it was. His fingers twisted back into his damp palm and curled in a nervous fist. “Let’s get going,” he said harshly. “We have to see about your father.”
Her expression changed, as though some cryptic apprehension had drained away in her—as though she, in her turn, had been afraid that he would not do what she hoped he would. Her voice, too, was steadier, and her lips rose into a gentle smile.
“I’ll have to introduce you. What’s your name?”
He flushed, startling himself. A gentle, remembered voice chided him from the past. Matthew, you were impolite.
“Matth—Matt Garvin,” he blurted.
She smiled again. “I’m Margaret Cottrell. Hello.”
He took her extended hand and clasped it awkwardly, releasing it with abrupt clumsiness.
He wondered if he’d been right—if she had not wanted him to leave, and had not known what she could do to stop him if he tried. The thought was a disquieting one, because he could not resolve it, or reach a decision. He followed her warily as she turned toward the stairway behind the lifeless elevators. Just before she became no more than a darker shadow in the stairwell’s gloom, he caught the smile on her lips once more.
The apartment was on the third floor. When they came out of the stairway, she went to the nearest door, knocked, and unlocked it. She turned to Garvin, who had stopped a yard away.
“Please come in,” she said.
He started forward uneasily. He trusted the girl to some extent—more than he trusted anyone else, certainly—but for two and a half years, he had never opened any closed door before completely satisfying himself that nothing dangerous could be waiting behind it.
Yet, he could not let the girl know that he distrusted the apartment. To her, it would probably seem foolish, and he did not want her to think him a fool.
He stepped into the doorway, trying to hold his shotgun inconspicuously.
“Margaret?” The voice that came from inside the apartment was thin and strained. Worry flickered over the girl’s face.
“I’ll be right there, father. I’ve got someone with me.” She touched Garvin’s arm. “Please.”
The second invitation broke his uncertainty, and he stepped inside.
“He’s in the back bedroom,” she whispered, and he nodded.
To his surprise, he noticed that the place was heated. A kerosene range had replaced the gas stove in the kitchen, beside the front door, and there was a space heater in the living room. Both had their stovepipes carefully led into the apartment’s ventilation ducts, and the hall grille had been masked off to prevent a backdraft. Garvin pursed his lips. It was a better-organized place than he’d expected.
They reached the bedroom doorway, and Matt saw a thin man propped partially up in the bed, the intensity of the eyes heightened by the same fever that paled his lips. His chest was bandaged, and a wastebasket full of reddened facial tissues sat beside the bed. Garvin felt his mouth twitch into a grimace. The man was hemorrhaging.
“Father,” Margaret said, “This is Matt Garvin. Matt—my father, John Cottrell.”
“I’m glad to meet you, sir,” Garvin said.
“I rather suspect that I’m glad to see you, too,” Cottrell said, smiling ruefully. The pale eyes, sunken deep in their dark sockets, turned to Margaret. “Were you the cause of all that firing outside?”
“There’s a man up on the roof across the street,” she said. “He tried to kill Matt as he was bringing me home.”
“She pulled me out of a real mess,” Garvin put in.
“But Matt went back into the drugstore, after he met me and I told him you were hurt,” Margaret said.
Cottrell’s gaze shifted back and forth between them, his smile growing. “After he met you, eh?” He coughed for a moment, and wiped his mouth. “I’d like to hear about that, while Matt’s looking at this.” He gestured toward his bandaged chest, wincing at the pull on his muscles. “Meanwhile, Margaret, I think I’m getting hungry. Could you make some breakfast?”
The girl nodded and went out to the kitchen. Garvin slipped the pack off his back and took out the supplies from the drugstore. As he walked toward the bed, he caught Cottrell’s look. The man was too sick for hunger, and Matt had eaten, but neither of them wanted the girl in the room while they were appraising each other.
“A typical day in our fair city,” Cottrell said when Matt filled him in on what had happened this morning.
Matt grunted. He had washed the caked blood off Cottrell’s chest, and swabbed out the wound, which was showing signs of a mild infection unimportant in itself.
The bullet was deep in Cottrell’s chest—too deep to be probed for. And there was a constant thin film of blood in the old man’s mouth. Garvin re-bandaged him and threw the dirty swabs and bandages away. Then he put the bottle of germicide down on the table beside the bed, together with the rest of the supplies. He strapped his knapsack shut, testing its balance in his hand. He picked up his shotgun and took the shells out of it.
“Being busy won’t accomplish very much, Matt,” Cottrell said quietly.
Garvin looked up from the gun, his breath gusting out in a tired sigh. The blood in Cottrell’s throat and bronchial tubes made him cough. When he coughed, the wound that bled into his respiratory system tore itself open a little farther. And more blood leaked in and made him cough harder.
“I don’t know very much medicine,” Garvin said. “I’ve read a first aid manual. But I don’t think you’ve got much time.”
Cottrell nodded. He coughed again, and smiled ruefully. “I’m afraid you’re right.” He threw the newly bloodied facial tissue into the wastebasket. “Now, then, what are your plans?”
The two men looked at each other. There was no point to hedging. Cottrell was going to die, and Margaret would be left defenseless when he did. Garvin was in the apartment—a place he never could have reached without Margaret—and Margaret could not now survive without him. On the level of pure logic, the problem and its answer were simple.
“I don’t know, exactly,” Garvin answered slowly. “Before I met Margaret, I was going to find myself someplace to hole up with a couple of years’ worth of supplies, if I could gather ’em. There’s more in this town than most people know.”
“Or are expert enough to get away from other people?”
Garvin looked at Cottrell with noncommittal sadness. “Maybe. I’ve come to my own way of looking at it. Anyhow, I figure if I can hold out long enough, when they start getting desperate and break into apartments—if I can make it through that, then somebody’s bound to get things organized sooner or later, and I can join ’em. I figure we’re in for a time of weeding-out. The ones who live through it will have brains enough to realize turning wolf doesn’t cure hunger.
“Anyway—now that I’m here, I guess I’ll do what I was intending to. Carry in all the stuff I can, and just hope. It isn’t much,” he finished, “but it’s the best I can think of.” He did not mention the obstacle he was most worried about, but it was one over which he had no control. Only Margaret could say what her reaction would be.
Cottrell nodded thoughtfully. “No, it isn’t much.” He looked up. “I think you’re probably right in theory, but I don’t think you’ll be able to follow it.”
Garvin frowned. “I don’t see why not, frankly. It’s pretty much what you’ve been doing.”
“Yes, it is. But you’re not I.” Cottrell stopped to wipe his lips again, and then went on.
“Matt, I’m part of a dead civilization. I believe the last prediction was that ten percent of the population might survive. Here, in Manhattan, under our conditions, I’d estimate that only half that number are alive today. Under no circumstances is that enough people to maintain the interdependence on which the old system was based. Despite the fact that we are surrounded by the generally undamaged products of twentieth and early twenty-first-century technology, we have neither power, running water, nor heat. We are crippled.”
Garvin nodded. There was nothing new in this. But he let the old man talk. He had to have been a tough man in his day, and that had to be respected.
“We have no distribution or communication,” Cottrell went on. “I found this place for Margaret and myself as soon as I could, equipped it, and armed myself. For I knew that if I had no idea how to produce food and clothing for myself, then neither did the rest of my fellow survivors. And the people who did know—the farmers, out on the countryside, must have learned to look out only for themselves, or die.
“And so I took to my cave-fortress. If you don’t know how to produce the necessities of life, and can’t buy them, then you have to take them. When they become scarce, they must be taken ruthlessly. If you have no loaf, and your neighbor has two—take them both. For tomorrow you will hunger again.
“I am a hoarder, yes,” he said. “I carried in as much food as I could, continually foraged for more, and was ready to defend this place to the death. I moved the kerosene stoves in, and pushed the old gas range and the refrigerator down the elevator shaft, so no one could tell which apartment they’d come from. I did it because I realized that I—that all of us—had suddenly returned to the days of the cavemen. We were doomed to crouch in our little caves, afraid of the saber-toothed tigers prowling outside. And when our food ran low, we picked up our weapons and prowled outside, having become temporary tigers in our own turn.”
“Yes, sir,” Matt said politely. He couldn’t see why old bones, raked over now, had any effect on him and his plans.
Cottrell smiled and nodded. “I know, I know, Matt… But the point is, as I’ve said, that you are not I. It was my civilization that ended. Not yours.”
“Sir?”
“You were young enough, when the plagues came, so that you were able to adapt perfectly to the world. You’re not what I am—an average American turned caveman. You’re an average caveman, and you haven’t turned anything—yet. But you will. You can’t escape it. Human beings don’t stay the same all their lives, though some of them half-kill themselves trying to. They can’t. There are other people in the world with them, and, try as each might to become an island unto himself, it’s impossible. He sees his neighbor doing something to make life more bearable—putting up window screens to keep the flies out, say. And then he’s got to have screens of his own, or else walk around covered with fly-bites while his neighbor laughs at him. Or else—” Cottrell smiled oddly, “his wife nags him into it.”
Cottrell coughed sharply, wiped his mouth impatiently, and went on. “Pretty soon, everybody wants window screens. And some bright young man who makes good ones stops being an island and becomes a carpenter. And some other bright young man becomes his salesman. The next thing you know, the carpenter’s got more orders than he can handle—so somebody else becomes a carpenter’s apprentice. You see?”
Matt nodded slowly. “I think so.”
“All right, then, Matt. My civilization ended. Yours is a brand new one. It’s just beginning, but it’s a civilization, all right. There are thousands of boys just like you, all over the world. Some of them will sit in their caves—maybe draw pictures on the walls, before their neighbors break in and kill them. But the rest of you, Matt, will be doing things. What you’ll do, exactly, I don’t know. But it’ll be effective.”
Cottrell stopped himself with an outburst of coughing, and Matt bit his lip as the old man sank back on his pillows. But Cottrell resumed the thread of his explanation, and now Matt understood that he was trying to leave something behind before he was too weak to say it. Cottrell had lived longer and seen more than the man who was going to become his daughter’s husband. This attempt to pass on the benefit of his experience was the old man’s last performance of his duty toward Margaret.
“I think, Matt,” Cottrell went on, “that whatever you and the other young men do will produce a new culture—a more fully developed civilization. And that each generation of young men after you will take what you have left them and build on it, even though they might prefer to simply sit still and enjoy what they have. Because someone will always want window screens. It’s the nature of the beast.
“And, it is also in the nature of the beast that some people, seeing their neighbor with his window screens, will not want to make the effort of building screens of their own. Some of them will try to bring their neighbor back to the old level—by killing him, by destroying his improvements.
“But that doesn’t work. If you kill one man, you may kill another. And the other people around you will band together in fear and kill you. And someday, after it’s been demonstrated that the easiest way, in the long run, is to build rather than to attempt to destroy—after everyone has window screens—some bright young man will invent DDT and a whole new cycle will begin.”
Cottrell laughed shortly. “Oh, what a nervous day for the window-screen-makers that will be! But the people who know how to make sprayguns will be very busy.
“The plague was a disaster, Matt,” he said suddenly, veering off on a new track. “But disasters are not new to the race of Man. To every Act of God, Man has an answer, drawn from the repertoire of answers he has hammered out in the face of the disasters that have come before. It’s in his nature to build dams against the flood—to rebuild after the earthquake. To put up window screens. Because, apparently, he’s uncomfortable with what this planet gives him, and has to change it—to improve on it, to make himself just a little more comfortable. Maybe, just for the irritated hope that his wife will shut up and leave him alone for a few minutes.
“Who knows? Man hunted his way upward with a club in his hand, once. You’re starting with a rifle. Perhaps, before your sons die, the world will once again support the kind of civilization in which a young man can sit in a cave, drawing pictures, and depend on others to clothe and shelter him.
“But not now,” Cottrell said. “Now, I wouldn’t entrust my daughter to anyone but a hunter.
“And I’m making you a hunter, Matt. I’m leaving you this dowry: responsibility, in the form of what my daughter will need to make her happy. In addition, I leave you the apartment as a base of operations, together with the stove, the water still, and the fuel oil. The First Avenue entrances to the Canarsie Line subway are on the corner. That tunnel connects with all the others under the city. They’ll be a relatively safe trail through the jungle this city has become. You’ll be able to get water from the seepage, too. Distilled water is easily restored to its natural taste by aeration with an eggbeater.
“Last of all, Matt, you’ll find my rifle beside the door. It’s a mankiller. There’s ammunition in the hall closet.
“That’s your environment, Matt. Change it.”
He stopped and sighed. “That’s all.”
Garvin sat silently, watching the old man’s breathing.
What would Cottrell have done if his daughter hadn’t brought a man home? Probably, he would have found comfort in the thought that, across the world, there were thousands of young men and women. His personal tragedy would have been trivial, on that scale.
Yes, doubtless. But would it have made the personal failure any less painful? Cottrell’s philosophy was logical enough—but, once again, in the face of actual practice, logic seemed not enough. Just as now, with all the philosophy expounded, there was still the problem of Margaret’s reaction.
Sweat trickled coldly down Garvin’s chest.
“By the way, Matt,” Cottrell said dryly, “For a young man who doubtless thinks of himself as not being a cave dweller, you’re apparently having a good deal of trouble recognizing the symptoms of shy young love, American girl style.”
Garvin stared at the old man, who went on speaking as though he did not see his flush, smiling broadly as he savored the secret joke he had discovered in his first glances at Margaret and Matt.
“And now, if you’ll call Margaret in here, I think we ought to bring her up to date.” He coughed violently again, grimacing at this reminder, but when he flung the bloody tissue into the wastebasket, it was a gesture of victory.
Five months later, Matt Garvin padded silently through the dark of Macy’s, his magnum rifle held diagonally across his body. He moved easily, for his knapsack was lightly loaded, even when stuffed full of the clothing he’d picked up for Margaret.
Though he made no sound, he chuckled ruefully in his mind. First it had been one thing Margaret needed, and then another, until finally he was going farther and farther afield. Well, it was the way things were, and nothing could be done about it.
A shadow flitted across the lighter area near a door, and he stopped in his tracks, wishing his breath were not so sibilant. Damn, he’d have to work out some kind of breathing technique! Then the other man crossed the light again, and Garvin moved forward. There was a cartridge in the magnum’s chamber, of course, and he was ready to fire instantly. But he could almost be sure there was someone else down here, prowling the counters, and he didn’t want to fire if it could be avoided.
On the other hand, if he waited much longer, he might lose the man in front of him.
With a mental shrug, he threw the rifle up to his shoulder and shot the man down, dropping instantly to the floor as he did so. The echoes shattered through the darkness.
Another man fired from behind a display and charged him, grunting. Matt sprang to his feet, the magnum swinging butt-first, and broke his neck. He stopped to listen, ready to fire in any direction, but there was no sound. He grinned coldly.
He stopped to strip the packs from both corpses before he vanished into the darkness. He thought to himself, not for the first time, that a rifle was too clumsy for close-in combat—that if the man had been able to block the magnum’s swing, things might easily have worked out another way. What you needed for this sort of situation was a pistol.
But he was still reluctant to think of himself as a man with much occasion for one.
CHAPTER TWO
Three years went by.
His boots full of frigid water, and his rifle securely strapped to his pack, Matt Garvin was picking his way through the trash in the drainage channel between the subway rails. A hundred feet ahead of him, dim light from a roof grating patched out the darkness, and he ran his thumb over the safety catch of the Glock he had looted out of a littered pawnshop drawer on Eighth Avenue. He stopped for a moment, opened his mouth to quiet the sound of his breath, and listened.
Water dripped from a girder to the concrete of the station platform ahead of him. Behind him in the tunnel—at about the Third Avenue entrance, he judged—someone else was moving. That was all right. There were two long blocks between them, and he’d be out of the tunnel by the time the other man was within dangerous distance.
He listened again, disregarding the faint splash of water on the platform, the different but equally unimportant slosh up the tunnel.
He heard nothing, and his eyes, probing as much of the First Avenue station platforms as he could see, found nothing but dim gray, bounded by the converging lines of platform and roof, broken by the vertical thrust of girders.
Moving forward cautiously, he reached a point near the beginning of the north side platform, and stopped to listen again. Nothing moved.
He pulled himself up on the platform and lay flat, the Glock ready, but there was no scrape of motion, either on this platform or on the one across the tracks, and none of the indistinct shadows changed their shapes as he watched them. Nevertheless, as a final if somewhat inconclusive check, he listened to the water droplets as they fell steadily from the girder to the platform. Sometimes a man got careless and let such a drop hit him, interrupting the beat.
But there was nothing. He pushed himself up off his stomach, crouched, and padded quietly to the tiled wall beside the foot of the stairs.
A few months ago, he had tried putting up a mirror there, in order to see up the stairs without exposing himself. It had been smashed within a few days, and he had been especially cautious for a while, but no one had ever been waiting for him at the head of the stairs. He had finally come to the conclusion that someone else must have solved the problem ahead of him. A fresh corpse at the street entrance had tended to confirm this—the possibility that it was only a decoy had been discarded as an overcomplication.
It had been good to feel that he had an ally—if only in this vague, circumstantial way. It was no indication that the very man responsible might not be his killer tomorrow, but there was enough of an idealist left in Garvin to allow him a certain satisfaction at this proof that there was at least one other man somewhere near who could draw the distinction between self-protection and deliberate trap-setting. However, he had never tried to replace the mirror.
He listened again as a matter of routine, heard nothing, and waited. After ten minutes, there had still been no sound, and knowing that his own approach had been silent, he broke suddenly and silently for the opposite wall, gun ready to fire in his hand.
There was no one at the head of the stairs. He crept upward cautiously, found no one at the turnstile level, and reached the foot of the stairs to the street.
It was unlikely that there would be anyone up there, exposed to the daylight. Moreover, if he made his passage into the building fast enough, he was unlikely to have any trouble. Lately, there had not been any considerable amount of sniping from windows. Ammunition was running low, and the possible rewards of nighttime scavenging from the corpses were not usually worth the expenditure.
Shifting the straps of his pack into a tighter position, he moved carefully up the steps, took a sweeping look at the deserted length of Fourteenth Street, and zig-zagged across the sidewalk at a run. His beating footsteps were a sudden interruption in the absence of sound. As he reached the entrance to his building and slipped inside the door, silence returned.
In the darkness of the lobby, Garvin’s shoes whispered on worn rubber matting, for it had been raining on the last day the building staff had functioned. The firedoor on the stairwell clicked open and shut, and his steps on the cement stairs were regular taps of leather as he climbed. He was not completely relaxed—above the sound of his own footsteps, he listened for the noise that might be made by someone else in the stairwell. Nevertheless, though there were other people scattered throughout the fifty-odd apartments in the building, no one had ever attacked anyone else within the building itself. There had to be a sort of mutual respect between the families. The thought of fighting within the twists and corridors of the building, with every closed door a deathtrap, was not an attractive one. The stairwell, in particular, was the only means of passage to the world outside. Only a psychopath would have risked obstructing it.
He reached his floor and stepped out on the landing with only a minimum amount of precaution. He crossed the corridor to his own door, unlocked it, and stepped inside, holstering his gun. The shot roared out of the hallway leading from the bedrooms and crashed into the metal doorframe beside him.
Garvin leaped sideward, landing on the kitchen floor with a thud. His fingers slapped against his gun butt, hooked around it, and the gun was in his hand, his feet under him in a slash of motion as he rolled and flung himself backward behind the stove. The breath whistled out of his nostrils and back in through his mouth in an uneven gasp.
There was no sound in the apartment. He turned his head from side to side, trying to find some noise—a hand on a doorknob, a footstep on linoleum—that would tell him where his attacker was.
There was nothing.
The kitchen was beside the apartment door. Beyond it was the dining alcove and the living room, and beyond that were two bedrooms opening on a hall that ran the remainder of the apartment’s length. The bathroom was at the end of the hall, its door facing the apartment entrance. The man could have fired from either bedroom, or from the bathroom itself.
Where was the man—and where was Margaret? Garvin’s knuckles cracked as his hand tightened on the gun’s butt, and his face became almost stuporous in its lack of overt expression.
Keeping his gun ready, Garvin moved forward until he was barely hidden inside the kitchen doorway. His mind was busy searching out and separating the remembered impressions of the attack.
The shot had been fired in the hall. It was impossible to decide how far back. Had the man moved after firing? He tried to remember if there had been any other sound. No, he decided. Wherever the shot had come from, there the man still was.
What had happened to Margaret? His jaw tightened as he considered the possibilities.
If she had seen the man come in, she might have tried to shoot him—if she had been near her gun. If not, she might still be hiding somewhere in the apartment, waiting for Garvin to come home. If the man had gotten in without her knowing it…
The possibilities were indeterminate, he told himself savagely. Whatever had happened, in any case, there was nothing he could do about it now. If she were still hidden, it was up to her to handle that part of the situation as her judgment dictated. There was still no sound in the apartment.
How long had the man been here? If Margaret was still alive and undiscovered, would the hidden man stumble on her if he was forced to move on to another room? Her gun was probably in the larger bedroom. Was she there, waiting for a chance to get a shot in?
He could count on nothing to help him. He and Margaret had both learned all the tricks that life in New York demanded. He would have to act as though he could be sure that she would know how to take care of herself. But he was not sure.
The silence continued. He had to get the man moving; had to get some idea of his location. And he needed freedom of movement. He unstrapped his magnum and carefully set it aside.
Backing up noiselessly, Garvin reached behind him and opened the casement window, pushing the panel slowly. The guide rod slid in its track with a muted sound.
“Please!”
The voice, distorted by the echoes of the hallway, was frightened and anxious. Garvin snatched his hand away from the window.
It was quiet again. The man had stopped. but the quavering print of his voice was still playing back in Garvin’s mind.
And suddenly he understood how he would feel, unexpectedly trapped in a strange apartment. Every corner would have its concealed death, each step its possible drastic consequence. Was the pitiful hope of whatever goods could be brought away worth the stark terror of unknown deadliness?
He opened the window a bit farther.
“Please! No! I…” The words rushed out of the shadowed hallway. “I’m—I’m sorry! I was frightened…”
Garvin’s lips stretched in a reflex grin. If the man actually thought Garvin was somehow going to cross from window ledge to window ledge along the building’s sheer outside wall, he had to be in a room where he was open to such an attack.
He couldn’t be in the bathroom. The large bedroom was in the corner of the apartment. By the time a man inching along the building’s face could possibly reach it, it would be easy to take any number of steps to handle the situation. The man had to be in the smaller bedroom, the one nearest the living room. And he had to be standing at the door.
The door to the small bedroom was set flush with the wall, and opened to the left. In order to defend the room or fire down the hallway, the door would have to be completely open. Therefore, the man’s hand and arm were exposed, and, most probably, his face as well.
The man had to maintain his position in command of the hall. If Garvin could once get a clear lane of fire down the hallway, it was the other man who was trapped in an exitless room.
But the hall was dark, while the living room had a large window, the light of which would have made it suicidal for Garvin to step out.
Once again, he thought of Margaret. He fought down the urgency of the impulse to cry out for her. If the other man didn’t know about her, it was so much more advantage on Garvin’s side.
Grimly, Garvin worked the mechanism of the Glock as noisily as possible. The sound, like the slip of the window’s guide rod, was designed only to make his unknown adversary go into a deeper panic. There had already been a bullet in the chamber. He ejected it carefully into his palm and put it in his pocket. He pushed the window completely open, thudding the guide-rod home against its stop.
“Please! Listen to me!” The panicked voice began again. “I want to be friends.”
Garvin stopped.
“Are you listening?” the man asked hesitatingly.
There was no accompanying sound of movement from the bedroom. The man was maintaining his position at the door. Garvin cursed silently and did not answer.
“I haven’t talked to anybody for years. Not even shouted at them, or cursed. All I’ve done for six years is fight other people. Shooting, running. I didn’t dare show myself in daylight.
“It isn’t worth it. Staying alive isn’t worth it. Grubbing through stores for food at night. Like an animal in a garbage can!” The trembling voice was filled with desperate disgust.
“Are you listening?”
Unseen, Garvin’s eyes grew bleak, and he nodded. He remembered the odd touch of kinship he had felt with the man who had killed the stalker at the subway entrance. The mirror at the turn of the steps had been an attempt to make at least that small part of his environment a bit less dangerous. When the stalker smashed it, it meant that there were still men who would kill for the sake of a knapsack that might or might not contain food.
“Please,” the man in the bedroom said. “You’ve got to understand why I—I came in here. I had to find some people I could talk to. I knew there were people in this building. I got a passkey out of the Stuyvesant Town offices. I wanted to find an apartment for myself. I was going to try to make friends with my neighbors.”
Garvin twitched a corner of his mouth. He could picture an attempt at communication with the deadly silence and armed withdrawal that lurked through the apartments beyond his own walls.
“Can’t you say something?” the panic-stricken man demanded.
Garvin scraped the Glock’s barrel against the window frame, as though an armed man were beginning to clamber out on one of the nonexistent window ledges.
“No! Think! How much food can there be left, where we can get to it? There are whole gangs in the warehouses, and they won’t let anybody near them. The rifle ammunition’s getting low already. How long can we go on this way—fighting over every can of peas, killing each other over a new shirt? We’ve got to organize ourselves—get a system set up, try to establish some kind of government. It’s been six years since the plague, and nothing’s been done.”
The man stopped for a moment, and Garvin listened for the sound of motion, but there was nothing.
“I—I’m sorry I shot at you. I was frightened. Everybody’s frightened. They don’t trust anybody. How can they?”
Talk, talk, talk! What have you done with Margaret, damn you?
“But please—please trust me.” The unsteady voice was on the point of breaking. “I want to be friends.”
Despite his fear, the man obviously wasn’t going to move from his position until he was absolutely sure that Garvin was out on the window ledges. Even then… Garvin pictured the man, trembling against the door, not sure whether to run or stay, keeping watch on the hallway, ready to spin around at the sound of breaking glass behind him.
He was frightened, now. But had he been? Was it only after that one shot had missed, and the self-made trap had snapped home, that the terror had begun to tremble in his throat?
What had happened to Margaret?
Garvin moved back to the kitchen doorway.
“Come out,” he said.
There was a sigh from the bedroom door—a ragged exhalation that might have been relief. The man’s shoes shuffled on the linoleum of the bedroom floor, and his heel struck the metal sill. He moved out into the hall, thin, his hollowed eyes dark against his pale face.
Garvin pointed the Glock at his chest and fired twice. The man held his hands against himself and fell into the living room.
Garvin sprang forward and looked down at him. He was dead.
“Matt!” The door of the hall closet rebounded against the wall, and Margaret clasped her arms around Garvin. She buried her teeth in his shoulder for a moment. “I heard him fumbling with the key. I knew it wasn’t you, and it was too far to the bedroom.”
Garvin slipped his gun into its holster and held her, feeling the spasmodic shake of her body as she cried. The hall closet was almost directly opposite the door to the small bedroom. She hadn’t even dared warn him as he came in.
He looked down at the man again, over Margaret’s shoulder. One of the man’s hands were tightly clasped around a Colt that must have been looted from a policeman’s body.
“You poor bastard,” Garvin said to the corpse. “You trusted me too far.”
Margaret looked up, as pale as the man had been when he stepped out to meet Garvin’s fire. “Matt! Hush! There wasn’t anything else you could do.”
“He was a man—a man like me. He was scared, and he was begging for his life,” Garvin said. “He wanted me to trust him, but I was too scared to believe him.” He shook himself sharply. “I still can’t believe him.”
“There wasn’t anything else to do, Matt,” Margaret repeated insistently. “You didn’t have any way of knowing whether I was all right or not. You’ve said it yourself. We live the way we have to—by rules we had to make up. He was in another man’s house. He broke the rules.”
Garvin’s mouth shaped itself into a twisted slash He couldn’t take his eyes off the dead man. “We’re good with rules,” he said. “The poor guy heard somebody—so he took a shot at me.
“And what could I do? Somebody tried to kill me in my own home. It didn’t really matter, after that, what he said or did, or what I thought. I had to kill him. Any way at all.”
He pulled away from Margaret and stood beside the corpse for a moment, his arms swinging impatiently as he tried to decide what to do. Then he moved forward, as though abruptly breaking out of an invisible shell. His footsteps echoed loudly in the hall, and then he was back from the bedroom, a sheet dangling out of his clenched hand.
“Matt, what’re you going to do?” Margaret asked, her voice almost a whisper as her puzzled eyes tried to read his face.
He bent and caught the dead man under the arms. “I’m putting up a ‘No Trespassing’ sign.” He dragged the corpse to the living room window, knotted one end of the sheet to the metal centerpost, and slung the remainder of the sheet around the dead man’s chest, leaving just enough slack so his lolling head would hang out of sight. Then he lowered the corpse through the open window.
Garvin turned. Suddenly, all his muscles seemed to twist. “I hope this keeps them away! I hope I never have to do this again.” Even with the distance between them, Margaret could easily see him trembling.
“I’ll do it again, if I have to,” he went on. “If they keep coming, I’ll have to kill them. After a while, I’ll be used to it. I’ll shoot them down with children in their arms. I’ll use their own white flags to hang them up beside this one. I’ll ignore the sound of their voices. Because they can’t be trusted. I know they can’t be trusted, because I know I can’t be trusted.”
He stopped, turned, and looked at Margaret. “You realize what that poor guy wanted? You know who he sounded like? Like me, that’s who—like me, Matt Garvin, the guy who just wanted a place to live in peace.”
“Matt, I know what he said he—”
“Hey! Hey, you, in there!” The muffled voice came blurredly into the apartment, followed by a series of sharp knocks on the other side of the wall that separated this apartment from the next.
Margaret stopped, but Garvin slid forward, his boots making no sound on the floor as he moved quietly over to the wall. The knocking started again. “You! Next door. What’s all that racket?”
Garvin heard Margaret start to say something. His hand flashed out in a silencing gesture, and he put his ear to the wall. His right hand came down and touched the Glock’s holster.
“I’m warning you.” He could hear the voice more clearly. “Speak up, or you’ll never come out of there alive. I’m mighty particular about my neighbors, and if you’ve knocked off the ones I had, I’ll make damn sure you don’t enjoy their place very long.”
Garvin’s mouth opened. He’d known there was someone in there, of course, but, up to now, there had never been any break in the silence.
“Well?” The voice was impatient. “I’ve got the drop on you. My wife’s in the hall right now, with a gun on your door. And I can get some dynamite in a big hurry.”
Garvin hesitated. It meant giving the other man an advantage.
“Hurry up!”
But there-was nothing else he could do. “It’s all right,” he finally said, speaking loudly enough for the other man to hear. “There was somebody in here, but we took care of it.”
“That’s better,” the other man said, but his voice was still suspicious. “Now let’s hear your wife say something.”
Margaret moved up to the wall. She looked at Garvin questioningly, and he reluctantly nodded. “Go ahead,” he said.
“This is Margaret Garvin. We’re—we’re all right.” She stopped, then seemed to reach a decision and went on with a rush. “My husband’s name is Matt. Who are you?”
That wasn’t right. Garvin frowned. She was getting too close to an infringement on the silent privacy that had existed for so long, now. Men were no longer brothers. They were distant nodding acquaintances.
Surprisingly, the other man did not hesitate a perceptible length of time before answering. “My name’s Gustav Berendtsen. My wife’s name is Carol.” The tone of his voice had changed, and now Garvin thought he could make out the indistinct trace of a pleased chuckle in Berendtsen’s voice. “Took care of it, did you? Good. Damn good! Nice to have neighbors you can depend on.” The voice lost some of its clarity as Berendtsen obviously turned his head away from his side of the wall. “Hey, Toots, you can put that cannon down now. They straightened it out themselves.”
Out in the hall, a safety-catch clicked, and no-longer-careful footsteps moved back from the Garvins’ door. Then Berendtsen’s door opened and shut, and, after a moment, there was a shy voice from beside Berendtsen on the other side of the wall.
“Hello. I’m Carol Berendtsen. Is—” She stopped, as though she too was as unsure of herself as Margaret and Garvin were, here in this strange situation that had suddenly materialized from beyond the rules. But she stopped only for a moment, “Is everything all right?”
“Sure, everything’s all right, Toots!” Berendtsen’s voice cut in from behind the wall. “I’ve been telling you those were damn sensible people living in there. Know how to mind their own business. People who know that, know how to make sure nobody else tries minding it, either.”
“All right, Gus, all right,” Garvin and Margaret heard her say, her low voice still carrying well enough to be heard through the masonry. “I just wanted to hear them say it.” And then she added something in an even lower voice. “It’s been a long time since I heard people just talking,” and Garvin’s hand tightened on Margaret’s as they heard her.
“Sure. Toots, sure. But I kept telling you it wasn’t always going to be that way. I—” His voice rose up to a louder pitch. “Hey, Garvins! I gotta idea. Also got a bottle of Haig and Haig in here. Care for some? We’ll come over,” he added hurriedly.
Garvin looked at Margaret’s strained face and trembling lips. He could feel his own face tightening.
“Please, Matt?” Margaret asked.
She was right. It was too big a chance not to take.
“Sure, Hon,” he said. “But get my rifle and cover the door from the hall,” he added softly.
“All right,” he said, raising his voice. “Come over.”
“Right,” Berendtsen answered. “Be a minute.”
The words were jovial enough, Garvin thought.
He heard Margaret move back into the hall, and his mind automatically registered the slight creak of the sling’s leather as she lifted the rifle to cover the door.
And then he heard Carol Berendtsen’s voice faintly through the wall.
“I—I don’t know,” she was saying to Gus, her voice uncertain. “Will it be all right? I mean, I haven’t talked to another woman in… What’ll she think? I haven’t got any good clothes. And there’s a strange man in there… Gus, I look so—I’m ashamed!”
And Gus Berendtsen’s voice, clumsy but gentle, its power broken into softness. “Aw, look, Toots, they’re just people like us. You think they’ve got any time for frills? I bet you’re dressed just fine. And what’s to be ashamed of in being a woman?” And then there was a moment’s silence. “I’ll bet you’re prettier than she is, too.”
“You’d better think so, Gus.”
Something untied itself in Garvin. “I think you can put that rifle away, Hon,” he said to Margaret. He saw her look of uncertainty, and nodded to emphasize the words. “I’m pretty sure.”
Garvin poured out another finger of the Scotch. He raised his glass in a silent mutual toast with Berendtsen, who grinned and lifted his own glass in response. Gus chuckled, the soft, controlled sound rumbling gently up through his thick chest. The glass was almost out of sight in his spade of a hand, huge even in proportion to the rest of his body. He sat easily in the chair that should have been too small for him, the shaped power of his personality reflected in his body’s casual poise.
“Ought to be able to set up a pretty good combo,” he said. “One of us stays home to hold the fort while the other one goes out for the groceries. Take turns. Might try knocking a hole through this wall, too. Be easier.” He slapped the plaster with his hand.
Garvin nodded. “Good idea.” They both smiled at the drift of women’s voices that came from one of the bedrooms. “Make it easier on the baby-sitter, too.”
“My gal was a little worried,” Berendtsen agreed. He grinned again. “You know, we may have something here.” He raised his glass again, and Garvin, catching his train of thought, matched the gesture. “To the Second Republic,” Berendtsen said.
“All six-and-two-halves rooms of it,” Garvin affirmed. Then his glance reached the living room window, and he realized that there was still something undone. He got up to loosen the sheet and let the body fall to join the others that lay scattered among the dark buildings.
But he stopped before his hand touched the sheet. No one would know, now, how much honesty there had been within the fear of the intruder’s voice. But it was time somebody in the world got the benefit of the doubt. They’d carry him down to the ground, Gus and he, and give him a burial, like a man.
CHAPTER THREE
It was winter again, and seven years since the plague. December snow lay deep between Stuyvesant’s buildings, under the frosty night, while Manhattan raised its blunt stone shoulders up and, here and there, silent figures in the department stores took time from their normal foraging and climbed the prostrate escalators to the toy counters.
A delegation from the next building in the block made a gingerly meeting with Matt Garvin and Gus Berendtsen, out on one of the windswept playgrounds.
Garvin watched the delegation leader carefully. It was an older man, fat and small-eyed—a man who’d been somebody before the plague, he guessed.
Matt knew he was being nervous for no clear reason. But he didn’t like dealing with older people. There was no telling how much they had time to learn—how many little tricks they remembered from the old days.
The man smiled affably, proffering his hand. “Charlie Conner,” he boomed. “I guess I run that shebang back there,” he said deprecatingly, jerking his thumb back over his shoulder toward his own building. But the young, wolfish riflemen with him did not twitch their eyes to follow the gesture.
“Matt Garvin. And this is Gus Berendtsen,” Matt noticed Gus was looking at Conner the same way he’d looked over each member of each new family they’d found in the apartments of their building. “I guess between us we do your job for our building.”
Conner grinned. “Tough, isn’t it? What’d you do—just spread out gradual, sweating it out every time you made contact with a different family?”
“Something like that,” Gus cut in. “Make your point.”
Conner’s eyes shifted. “Don’t get jumpy,” he soothed. “All I am is figuring now we’ve got our whole buildings organized, it’s time we joined up together. The more people we’ve got, the more we can control things. The idea is to make sure your own rules get followed in your own territory, right? Nobody wants any wild hares fouling things up. You want to be sure that as long as you follow the rules, everything’s all right, right? You want to know your family’s protected while you’re out someplace. You want to be sure there’s a safe store of food, right? Well, the bigger the community, the more sure you can be. Right?”
Garvin nodded. “Uh-huh.”
Conner spread his hands. “All right. Now, I’ve got my place organized nice as pie. Ought to. Fifteen years District Captain in this ward. Lots of experience. Now, I’m sure you boys have things going pretty well, but maybe there’s one or two things you could stand to have better. Okay, here I am. My people’re satisfied. Right, boys?” he asked his riflemen.
“Right, boss.”
Gus said: “What you mean is, we should join you.”
Conner chuckled. “Well, now, look, I’m not likely to want to join you, now, am I?”
He leaned negligently against the crudely painted sign Gus and Matt had seen planted through the playground’s asphalt: “Meet me here tomorrow, and we’ll talk joining up together. —Charlie Conner.”
Gus and Matt exchanged glances. “We’ll think about it,” Gus said.
“You do that,” Conner said. “Oh, look, I know you think you’ve been doing all right. And you have—no question about it. But now you’re ready to spread out into more than one building, and you’ve got to figure sooner or later you have to meet somebody with more experience, running things. It just figures, that’s all. You didn’t hope you could start a whole city government, did you? I mean, you boys weren’t going to run one of you for Mayor or anything, were you?” Conner chuckled uproariously.
“We’ll think about it,” Gus repeated. “You’ll hear from us.”
Conner’s eyes narrowed. “When?”
Matt said: “When we’re ready.”
Conner looked thoughtfully at the two of them. “Don’t stall me too long, now.”
“You worried you might die of old age?” Gus asked. They turned around and walked away. Conner looked after them, turned, and stalked back toward his own building. The rifle parties of both sides waited until everyone else was gone, and then they backed away from each other. Finally, the playground stood empty again.
In their apartment, Matt put his rifle down softly. “Well, now we know,” he said. “I thought we’d been running into too many rival foraging parties. They had to come from someplace nearby.”
“What do you think about Conner?”
“I think he’s lost more people than we have, or he would have let things go on the way they have been, with his foraging parties and ours leaving each other alone unless they were both set on picking up the same thing.”
“So what do we do?”
“I think we’ve got the upper hand. I think we can stick it out without him longer than he can without us.”
“And meanwhile we keep losing people?”
Garvin looked up sharply. “Not as many as he does. That’s the key. He’s hurting worse than we are.”
“You tell that to our widows.”
“I don’t have to tell our widows anything. All anybody can promise a woman these days is that her man’s safe as long as he stays inside his own four walls. Of course, that way they both starve, and so do their kids.”
“Look, if we make a deal with Conner, nobody dies.”
“You’re sure. You’re sure Conner means all he wants is to be the big frog in a bigger puddle. He’s not looking for extra women, or extra food for his own people. He keeps those gunmen of his in line by promising them no more than new friends to play gin rummy with.”
“All right—maybe. We can’t be sure.”
“We don’t have to be sure of anything. We just have to keep as alive as we can. Look, Gus—I’m not saying we should forget Conner. Or his offer, I’m saying that two or three weeks from now, he may not be so bossy. If we’re going to trade something with him, I want a 50-50 chance of an even deal. Right now, we don’t have that.”
“So we wait.”
“Well, we can try breaking into his building. How many widows do you figure that’ll make for us?”
“Okay. We’ll let it ride.”
A week later, the sign in the playground said:
NOTICE! Anyone Not A Member Of The East Side Mutual Protective Association, (Charles G. Conner, Pres.) is Hereby Declared An Outlaw, and is subject to trial under due authority. By The Authority Invested In Me By The Democratic Party Of The State Of New York, United States Of America.
“Oh, yeah, huh?” Matt Garvin said.
The little group of men returned to Stuyvesant from the east, cutting across the playground and access drives in the courtyards. As he led them back home, Matt Garvin shivered and hunched up his heavy collar to protect his ears. The wind was light, just strong enough to cover the quiet crunch of footsteps with its whispering, but he and the men had been out all afternoon, and the chill was beginning to sink deep into their bones.
He looked up into the moonless sky, wishing there were clouds to cover the light that filtered down from the stars.
And a new star burst into searing life between the buildings.
“Scatter!” he shouted, while the parachute flare drifted slowly down, etching each man’s shadow blackly against the white of snow, and the first fingers of rifle fire reached out.
Garvin stumbled for cover behind a car parked at the side of one of the access drives, his feet floundering in the wet snow. He was almost blind from the sudden explosion of light into his eyes, but he skidded somehow into shelter, slamming against the cold metal. His eyes snapped reflectively shut while fire pinwheeled across his retinas, but he forced them open and aimed his rifle as best he could, trying to cut up the flare’s parachute. He missed, but it made no difference, for there was a triple pop from the roof of one of the buildings, and three more of the flares hung swaying and slowly dropping above the frantically running men. He cursed and huddled beside the car, snapping almost futile shots at the windows where the red sparks were winking.
The crash of rifle fire was like nothing he had heard since the height of the plague. There was never a complete break in the echoing hammer. He judged that there were at least thirty snipers, if not more, and they were all emptying their clips as fast as possible, reloading at top speed, and pouring out ammunition at a rate no one could possibly afford.
There had been twelve men in his group, counting himself. He saw three of them lying in the snow, two of them with their rifles pinned under their bodies. Those men had simply folded forward in their tracks. The third had possibly fired once. He had been looking up, at any rate, for his upper body had fallen back, and he lay stretched out, his rifle beside him, with his legs bent under him. The rest of the men had reached cover of some kind, for there was no movement in the courtyard. Most of them were not firing back, and not even Garvin could tell where they were.
He swore steadily, the words falling out in a monotone The trap had sprung perfectly. One man had stationed himself on the roof of the opposite building with his flares, and had simply illuminated the court when he picked out the shadows of Garvin’s party. The riflemen had been waiting at their windows.
The sniping fire cut off abruptly, and when Garvin realized why, a savage laugh ripped briefly out of his throat. The first flare was almost on the ground, and the men in the buildings were looking down at it, as blind as he had been.
He jumped to his feet instantly, shouting.
“Break for it!”
There was a flounder and the sound of running footsteps in the snow as the remaining men burst out of bushes and from behind cars. Garvin ran jerkily across the driveway, hunting fresh cover, and now he saw some of the other men running with him, like debris tossed by an explosion, nightmare shapes in the complexity of wheeling light and lurching shadow thrown by the flares as they oscillated under their parachutes.
He threw a glance over his shoulder and stopped dead. One of his men had stopped beside one of the bodies, and was trying to carry it away.
“Drop him!” Garvin shouted. The flare fell into the snow, silhouetting the man. “Come on!”
The three other flares, high in the air and drifting down slowly, were only a little below the tops of the buildings, still well above most of the snipers. The man tugged at the corpse once more, then gave up. But he was starkly outlined by the flare on the ground, burning without any regard for the snow’s feeble attempt to quench it.
The man began to run. Garvin and the other seven men, swallowed up by a trick of the complicated shadow-pattern, stood and watched him, silent now.
When he was finally shot down, Garvin and someone else cursed once, almost in unison, and then the eight men slipped around a corner of the building, ran across a final courtyard, and into Garvins’ building, while the three flares settled down among the four corpses, and a triumphant yell broke out from the snipers.
[Image]
“This is the worst yet,” Berendtsen said, his face taut and his eyes cold as he sat at the table in Garvin’s living room. “I never thought of flares. This tears it—it’s no longer a question of competing with them for forage. They’re cutting off our supply route.”
Garvin nodded. “We were lucky. If they hadn’t fouled up with their flares, it wouldn’t have been just four.” He turned in his chair and let his glance sweep over the other men in his living room. They represented all the families in the building. He saw what he expected in their faces—grim concentration, indecision, and fear, in unequal but equally significant mixtures. He turned back to Gus, one corner of his mouth quirking upward. There was nothing in these men to mark a distinction between them and the snipers. In a sense, they were afraid of themselves. But they had reason to be.
“All right,” Berendtsen said harshly, “we were lucky. But we can’t let it go at that. This is just the beginning of something. If we let it go on, we’ll be starved right out of here.”
“Anybody got any ideas?” Garvin asked the men.
“I don’t get it,” one of them said in a querulous voice. Garvin checked him off as one of the frightened ones. “We weren’t bothering them.”
“Smarten up, Howard,” one of the other men cut in before Garvin could curb his own exasperation. Matt recognized him. His name was Jack Holland, and his father had been one of the three men who were cut down at the attack’s beginning. He carried a worn and battered toy of a rifle that was obviously his family’s second- or third-best weapon, but even with his teen-age face, he somehow invested that ridiculous .22 with deadliness. Garvin threw a quick glance at Berendtsen.
Gus nodded slightly, in the near-perfect communication that had grown between them. As long as Holland was speaking for them, there was no need for their own words.
“We’re the richest thing in this neighborhood,” the boy went on, his eyes and voice older than himself. “What’s more, those guys have kids and women going hungry on account of us cleaning out all the stores around here. We’ve been doing plenty to them.”
Garvin nodded back to Berendtsen, and there was a shift in the already complex structure of judgments and tentative decisions that he kept stored in his mind. In a few years, they would have a good man with them.
He found himself momentarily lost in thought at the plans which now were somehow far advanced in his mind, but which had first had to grow, bit by bit, over the past years. The Second Republic—he still smiled as he thought of it, but not as broadly—had expanded, and as it grew to encompass all of this building, so he and Gus had more experience to draw from, more men to work with and assign to the constantly diversifying duties.
Strange, to plan for a future, in the light of the past. But somehow good to plan, to shape, to hope. Even to know that, though the plan had to be revised from minute to minute as unexpected problems arose, the essential objective would never change.
He cut through the murmur of argument that had risen among the men. “Okay. Holland’s put it in a nutshell. We’re an organized outfit with a systematic plan for supplying ourselves. That’s fine for us, not so good for anybody that isn’t with us. We all expected something to happen when we started. Some of us may have thought our troubles with Conner these last few trips were the most we could expect. We should have known better, but that’s unimportant now. Here it is, and we’re stuck with it. Once again, now—what do we do?”
“We go in there and clean the sons of bitches out,” someone growled.
“You going first?” another man rasped at him.
“Damn right, boy,” a third said, leaving it a moot point as to whom he was supporting.
“That’s what I thought.” Berendtsen was on his feet, towering over the table as much as his voice crushed the babble. He waited a moment for the last opened mouth to close, his bleak eyes moving surely from man to man, his jaw set. Garvin, drawing on the thousand subtle cues that their friendship had gradually taught him to recognize, could catch the faint thread of amusement in the big man’s attitude—perhaps because he, too, had recognized the wry spectacle of the no-longer-quite-uncivilized afraid of the still-savage. But the men swung their glances hurriedly at Berendtsen, and only a few held sly glints in their eyes as they did so.
“You’re acting like a bunch of mice when a flashlight spots ’em,” Gus went on. “And don’t tell me that’s exactly what happened to you, because there’s supposed to be a few differences between us and mice.”
Matt grinned broadly, and a few of the men twitched their mouths in response. Berendtsen went on.
“This thing’s suddenly become serious, and it’s like nothing we’ve run up against before. When people start knocking on walls all around you, telling you the building’s being organized, it’s one thing. But those birds are off by themselves. We can’t make them do anything.”
He stopped to sweep the men with his glance once more. “And we’re not going to try to go into those buildings and take them room by room. It can’t be done to us. We can’t do it to them.”
“We can’t lick them, and they can’t lick us. But we can chop each other up little by little, and we can all starve while we’re doing it. Because we sure as hell can’t forage and fight a war at the same time. There’s plenty of other people out there to make sure it takes a strong party to bring home the bacon.
“There’s one way out. We can join up with each other. If we can get Conner to settle for something less than us being his slaves. It’s not the most likable idea in the world, but I don’t see any other way to save what we’ve got. Conner’s no prince. He’ll try and make it as tough on us as he can. But maybe we can work something out. I say it needs trying, because it’s a cinch we lose too much, any other way.”
The argument broke loose again, and Garvin sat letting it wear itself out. He didn’t think Gus was right. It meant somebody would have to stick his neck out, and that went against all his grain.
But he couldn’t think of anything else to do. Gus was right about that part, at least. Matt had been hoping that giving it time would show some way out. Now he didn’t know what to do, so, again by instinct, he was willing to let somebody else move. He looked across the table at Gus, who sat brooding at the blacked-out window, as if he could see the other buildings huddled in the night outside.
“Well, if we don’t do something,” Jack Holland’s sharp voice emerged from the tangle of words, “we can go down in history as a bunch of people who almost got things started again but didn’t make it.”
“I don’t give no damn for history,” another man said. “But I got five kids, and I want ’em to eat.”
And that about settled it, Garvin thought. But none of them could honestly call it anything except a bad bargain. Especially Gus and he, for it would be they who would have to go out and talk to Conner.
“Almost Christmas,” Gus said in a low, brooding voice. He and Garvin stood at the window, the blankets pulled aside now that the men were gone and the lamps were out. “Peace on Earth, good will to men. Oh, little town of Stuyvesant, how still we see thee…” He snorted. “A hundred years from now, they’ll have Christmases. They’ll have trees, and tinsel, and lights. And I hope the kids play with toy tractors.”
“I got Jim a stuffed bear,” Garvin said. “What’d you get for Ted?”
Gus snorted again. “What do you get any four-year-old? Books with lots of pictures—Carol wants to start his reading pretty soon. A wooden toy train—stuff like that. That’s for a four-year-old. When he’s a year or two older, we can start explaining how come the books don’t mean anything, and the train’s a toy of something that just isn’t, anymore. It’s the question of what you get him then that bothers me.”
Matt, too, found himself staring dull-eyed at the cold city as Berendtsen’s mood communicated itself and seeped into his system.
Tomorrow would be better. Tomorrow was always better, for someone. The difficult task lay in ensuring that the someone was one of yours.
He had Jim, and one-year-old Mary. Moreover, Margaret was almost certain she was pregnant again. Gus and Carol had Ted.
The weight that rode Berendtsen’s shoulders slumped Garvin’s own.
“Think it’ll work?” Gus said expressionlessly.
“Up a pig’s tail, maybe,” Matt answered.
[Image]
Dawn slipped through the weave of the blankets over Garvin’s bedroom windows, and he shook his mind free of sleep. He swung off his side of the mattress, shivering.
“Stove’s gone out again, dear,” Margaret mumbled sleepily from under the blankets.
“I know. I guess I forgot to fill it before I went to bed. Go back to sleep,” he whispered, dressing hastily. She turned over, smiled, and buried her face in the pillow again. By the time he finished lacing his boots, she was asleep once more, and he chuckled softly at her faint snores.
He stopped to look in on the children before he went out to the kitchen to heat shaving water, and he lit the burner absently, staring down at the flame for a long while before he put the pan on. He walked quietly back to the bathroom with the pan in his hand, still bemused—less lost in thought than busy avoiding thought—washed, and shaved with a steady but automatic hand. He flushed the toilet with a pail of dishwater, filled and lit the stove, had breakfast, and finally sighed, pushed his dishes away, and stood up. He went over to the rough doorway that had been cut in the wall, and rapped on it lightly.
“Yeah, Matt,” Gus answered from inside. “Come on in. I’m just knocking off another cup of coffee.”
Garvin stepped inside, and sat down at Berendtsen’s table. Gus was leaning on his elbows, his neck drawn down into his shoulders, both hands on the big cup of yellowishly weak coffee that he held just below the level of his chin, raising it to his mouth at intervals. They sat without speaking until Gus finally put the emptied cup down.
“Cold day,” he said.
“Damn near froze in bed. Forgot to fill the stove,” Matt answered.
Berendtsen sighed from far back in his throat. He got to his feet and picked up his rifle. He pulled a square piece of white sheet out of his jumper pocket and tied two of the corners to the rifle barrel.
“Got yours?” he asked.
“Inside,” Matt nodded back toward his apartment. “Carol know what you’re doing?”
Berendtsen shook his head. “Margaret?”
“No.”
“I think now we should have told them,” Gus said.
“I started to tell Carol—. But the way I suddenly figured it, before I really said anything, was that it wouldn’t make any difference in what happened. Figured she might as well get a good night’s sleep, instead.” He grinned wryly. “Turned chicken.”
Matt nodded. “Yeah.” He moved toward the doorway. “Me too. Well, let’s get it done.”
They went out through Matt’s apartment, and made sure the other men were set at their covering positions in the windows that overlooked the next building. Then the two cowards went out into the cold.
They stepped out into the middle of the drive that separated the building from theirs, stopped, and looked up at the blank wall.
Garvin exchanged a glance with Gus. “What do we do now?” he asked.
Berendtsen shrugged. He held his white-flagged rifle more conspiciously, and Matt did the same. Finally, Gus threw his head back and shouted.
“Hey! Hey, you, in there!”
The echoes died on the air, and nothing moved.
“Hey! Conner! We want to talk to you.”
But somewhere in those banks of glass, there must have been a slowly opening window.
Behind them, in their own building, someone fired first, but it no longer mattered. It did not cause, but was a desperate attempt to prevent, the fire that suddenly burst from behind a half-dozen windows.
Because Matt had been half-afraid it would come, the crash of fire was not as shocking as the sudden collapse of his right leg. He fell on his side in the drive, his head cracking against the asphalt, and was completely unable to move for a frantic time that seemed fatally long. Then, finally, while the sniping from the enemy building was diverted by the heavier fire of his own men, he was able to use Gus’s body for cover, pushing it ahead of him until he reached the shelter of a car. He stayed there till nightfall, freezing and bleeding, with his eyes unwaveringly on dead Berendtsen’s face, while the sporadic fire continued over his head between the buildings. And gradually, through the long, long day until his men were able to get to him and take him back to his building, his eyes acquired an expression which they never quite lost again; which, for the rest of his life blazed up unpredictably to soften the voices of those around him.
Through his spasmodic sleep, Garvin heard the sobs. They rose, broke, and fell, and the beat of his quasi-delirium seemed to follow them. At intervals, as he shivered or strained his clamped jaw against the pain in his leg, he heard Margaret trying to calm Carol. Once, he himself managed to say “Easy there, Ted. I’ll explain later, when I feel better. Look after your mother meanwhile, huh?” to a bewildered and frightened child. But, most of all, he could not escape his mind’s indelible photograph of Gus Berendtsen’s sprawled body.
When he woke fully, after seventeen hours, the shock reaction had ended. His leg hurt, but the wound had managed to stay clean, and the bones were obviously unbroken. He sat up and looked around.
Margaret was sitting in the chair beside him, watching him silently. He took her hand gently. “Where’s Carol?”
“She’s asleep, back in her apartment. Mrs. Potter’s taking care of her. Ted’s with Jimmy.” Her expression was peculiarly set, her face unreadable.
“What are you going to do about those people?” she asked.
He looked at her blankly, his mind still fuzzy, not catching her meaning immediately.
“What people?”
She had kept herself under rigid control up to now. Now she broke—characteristically.
“Those savages.” Her face was still rigid, flexing only enough to let her lips move, but her voice cracked like a piano wire whip. “People like that shouldn’t be alive. People who’d do a thing like that!”
Garvin dragged a long breath, letting it seep out slowly. A wave of pain washed up from his leg, and he closed his eyes for a moment. What could he say? That people were not savage by option? Already she had forgotten what it meant to the unorganized people of the area, having to compete with armed foraging teams.
His own mind was clear now. He had thought of another solution to the Conner problem.
For Margaret’s sake—possibly for Carol’s as well, and for the sake of young Ted, who had to somehow grow up in this world, and do his man’s work in it—he was grateful that his next step now would be what it would.
He squeezed Margaret’s hand. “I’ll take care of it,” he said somberly.
Hobbled by bandages, Garvin ran clumsily across the driveway with his men. The narrow space between the two buildings roared and echoed with the sleet of gunfire between the enemy and the covering guard in his building. Ahead of him, he heard the spasmodic and much lighter fire of his advance men as they cleaned out the enemy in the building’s basements. He lurched under the shifting weight of the sack of dynamite sticks that he, like all the other men in his party, was carrying.
Holland, running beside him, put a hand under his elbow. “You making it okay, Matt? We would have handled this without you coming along.”
Garvin spat out a laugh. “I’ll have to touch it off.” He passed the corner of the building and limped rapidly toward the entrance that would take him into the basement, where some of the men must already be placing their charges against the girders and bearing walls.
Margaret stared at him incredulously. “Matt! All those people. You killed all those people just because I said…”
He stood wordlessly in his living room, his vision blurring with each new thrust of pain up his leg, his shoulders down, the empty sack dangling from his hand. He rubbed his eyes wearily.
“Matt, you shouldn’t have listened to me. I was upset. I—”
He realized he was swaying, but he did not try to control himself as strongly as he would have if any of his men had been present.
“I didn’t do it because of anything you said,” he tried to explain, the words blurring on his tongue. “I did it because it was the only way left. I had to order it and do it myself because I’ve got the responsibility.”
“You had to kill those people?”
“Because there are more people. Take a look out some other window—out some window that shows you the rest of this city, with the buildings still standing.”
“No, Matt, I can’t.”
“Have it your way, then.” He dropped into a chair, looking down at the gummy stain on his coverall leg, wishing in his weariness, that it had been Gus, of the two of them, who had happened to stand slightly behind the other.
Another night fell, and Garvin stood at a window and watched it.
“Christmas Eve, Jack,” he said to Holland, who was watching with him.
“Yes, sir.”
Matt grunted, half ruefully. “Can’t see it, can you, Jack?”
Holland hesitated, frowning uncertainly. “I don’t know, sir. I can see it—I can understand the reasons for it, all right. But it doesn’t…” He looked quickly at Garvin, obviously wondering whether it was safe to go on.
Matt chuckled again, more freely. “I won’t eat you just because you tell me that what we did doesn’t feel right. This is still a free republic.” He gestured at the dark buildings, and his face twisted with regret. “Out there, it isn’t, yet. But it’s the same as it was when Gus and I knocked on your father’s wall and told him what his choice was, the same way Gus knocked on my wall. Gus was wrong, that night after the ambush. He was right, but he was wrong. We can make them do things our way—if we knock louder than Gus ever thought we could make ourselves do.” He turned away from the window and put his hand on Holland’s shoulder.
“Better go change the downstairs guard, Jack.”
He looked down at the moonlit rubble that had been the next building. He could almost read the sign that surmounted the tumble of brick, metal, glass, and flesh.
“Yes, sir,” Holland said. He turned to go. “Merry Christmas, sir.”
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