Some Will Not Die

  Some Will Not Die

  Algis Budrys

  The plague struck, and ninety percent of Earth's population died. Those who survived tried to maintain some sort of civilization… which meant more killing, as it turned out. But bit by bit, generation by generation, people began to succeed. With occasional setbacks.

  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.”

  Harvey Haggard Drumm,

  A Study of the Effects of Massive Depopulation on Conventional Views of Human Nature.

  Chicago, 2051 AD, mimeographed.

  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:

  NO FOOD—NO FUEL—NO WOMEN

  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 stup
id 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.