Some Will Not Die Page 13

  Mary shook her head in angry frustration, and, for the first time, Jim saw all the emotion she controlled beneath her placid surface.

  “Aren’t you sick of killing? Why do you hide behind these plans and purposes for tomorrow? Can’t you, sometime, think in terms of now, of the people you are killing now?”

  Ted sighed, and for one stark moment the mask fell away entirely, until even Bob Garvin turned pale.

  “I’m sorry, darling. But I’m not building something for just now. And I can’t think in terms of individual people—as you’ve said, I kill too many of them.”

  A silence that seemed to last for hours settled over them. Bob held the unsteady sneer on his face, but kept quiet. Jim looked at Berendtsen, who sat with his gaze reaching far beyond the open window.

  Finally, Mary stood up awkwardly, her hands moving as though to grasp something that constantly turned and twisted just in front of her, there but unreachable.

  “I—I don’t know,” she said unsteadily. “That’s the kind of thing you can’t answer.” She looked at Ted, who turned his face up to her. “You’re the same man I married,” she went on. “Exactly the same man. I can’t say, now, that I’ve changed my mind—that I’m backing out of it all. You’re right. I’ve always thought you were right. But it’s a kind of rightness that’s terribly hard to bear. A man shouldn’t—shouldn’t look so far. He shouldn’t work in terms of a hundred generations when he’s only got his own to live. It’s more than his own generation should be asked to bear.”

  “Would you like to call it off between us?” Ted asked gently.

  Mary avoided his eyes, then bit her lip and faced him squarely. “I don’t know, Ted.” She shook her head. “I don’t know myself as well as you do.” She sat down, finally, indecisively, and looked at none of them.

  “Well,” Bob said. “What’s your move, Jim?”

  He’d been waiting for someone to get around to that, hoping illogically that the question would not be raised, knowing that it must. And he discovered that he was still afraid of his younger brother.

  “What do you think, Mom?” he asked.

  She looked helplessly at her two sons, her eyes uncertain. Her hands twisted in her lap.

  “I wish I knew,” she finally said. Her voice trembled. “When your father was alive,” she burst out, “it was so easy to decide. He always knew what to do. I could understand him.” She looked around helplessly again. “I don’t understand any of you.” She began to cry softly. “Do anything you like,” she finished hopelessly, too bewildered to cope with the problem any longer.

  So, in the end, the decision was given to him to face, without help from anyone. He braced his shoulders and met Bob’s sardonic gaze. “I guess I’ll follow Ted,” he said.

  * * *

  The sun shone with a fierce, biting glare that stabbed from a thousand windows. Jim squinted up the column, the added reflection of the ranks of upraised rifles needling his eyes. He swung his head and looked up at the window where Mary and his mother were watching. Bob was somewhere in the crowd that stood on the sidewalks.

  Through all the nights that he and Ted had spent in Berendtsen’s old apartment, alone except for Ted’s withdrawn, shadowlike mother, they had never talked. It had been as though one of the two of them had been a ghost, barely visible and never within reach.

  Was it me, or was it Ted? he thought now. Or was it both of them, each locked in the secret prison of his body, each haunted in turn, each unable to share?

  A whistle shrilled, and the truck engines raised their idling cough to a roar that seemed incredibly loud, here between the tall brick buildings.

  “All right, move out!” Jim yelled to his men, and the first crash of massed footsteps came from the lines of men.

  The army moved south.

  SECTION THREE

  PROLOGUE

  Custis had been asleep for about a half hour when somebody touched his shoulder. He turned over in one easy motion and caught the hand around the wrist. With his next move he was on his feet, and the girl’s arm twisted back between her shoulder blades. “What’s up, Honey?” he said quietly, putting just enough strain on her shoulder to turn her head toward him.

  The girl was about eighteen or twenty, with a pale bony face and black hair hacked off around her shoulders. She was thin, and the top of her head came up to his collarbone. She was wearing a man’s army shirt that bagged around her, and a skirt made by cutting off a pair of pants at the knees, opening the seams, and using the extra material to make gussets. The whole business was pretty crudely sewn, and came down to just above her dirty calves.

  “I was bringing you something to eat, soldier,” she said.

  “O.K.” He let go of her wrist, and she turned all the way around, putting the pail of stew down on the ground in front of him. There was a wooden spoon sticking up out of it. Custis sat down, folded his legs under him, and started to eat.

  The girl sat down next to him. “Go easy,” she said. “Half of that’s mine.”

  Custis grunted. “The commander send you over here with this?” he asked, passing the spoon.

  She shook her head. “He’s busy. He always gets busy about this time of day, working on that bottle of his.” She was eating as hungrily as Custis had, not looking up, and talking between mouthfuls.

  Custis looked over toward the guard. The man was squatted down, with an empty dinner bucket beside him, scowling at Custis and the girl.

  “That your man?” Custis asked her.

  She looked up briefly. “You could say that. There’s maybe six or seven of us that don’t belong in anybody’s hut. There’s maybe fifty men without any families.”

  Custis nodded. He looked over toward the guard again, shrugged, and took the spoon from the girl. “The commander here—what’s his name?”

  “Eichler, Eisner—something like that. Anyhow, that’s what he says. I was with the last bunch he took over up here, a couple of years ago. Never did get it straight. Who cares? Names come easy. He’s the only commander we got.”

  So that didn’t tell him anything. “What’s your name?”

  “Jody. You from Chicago, soldier?”

  “Right now, yeah. Name’s Joe Custis. You ever seen Chicago?”

  She shook her head. “I was born up here. Never seen anything else. You going back to Chicago, Joe? Go ahead—finish that—I’m full.”

  Custis looked around at the cliffs and huts. “I figure I’ll be getting out of here, maybe. Maybe Chicago’s where I’ll head for.”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “Don’t much care. I live where my car is.”

  “Don’t you like cities? I hear they’ve got all kinds of stores and things, and warehouses full of clothes and food.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Some of the fellows here came out from Chicago, and Denver, and places like that. They tell me. But Chicago sounds like it’s the best of all.”

  Custis grunted. “Ain’t never been to Denver.” He finished the stew. “Food’s pretty good here. You cook it?”

  She nodded. “You got a big car? Room for extra people to ride in?” She leaned back until her shoulder was touching his.

  Custis looked down at the stewpot. “You’re a pretty good cook.”

  “I like it. I’m strong, too. I’m not afraid to work. And I shoot a rifle pretty good, when I have to.”

  Custis frowned. “You want me to take you to Chicago?”

  The girl was quiet for a moment. “That’s up to you.” She was still leaning on his shoulder, looking straight out ahead of her.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  The guard had been getting uglier and uglier in the face. Now he stood up. “All right, Jody, he’s fed. Now get away from him.”

  Custis got slowly to his feet, using two fingers of his right hand to quietly push the girl’s shoulder down and keep her where she was. He looked over toward the guard with a casual glance, and jumped him. He chopped out with hi
s hands, and the rifle fell loose. Custis dropped the man, scooped up the rifle, and pulled out the clip. He worked the bolt and caught the extracted cartridge in mid-air. Then he handed the whole business back to the man.

  “You tend to your job and I’ll give you no trouble, son,” he told him, and went back to where the girl was sitting. The guard was cursing, but by the time he’d reloaded the rifle he’d come to realize just how much Custis had done to him. If he didn’t want the girl spreading his story all over the camp, his best move was to keep quiet from now on. He did it.

  The girl looked sideward at Custis as he sat down again. “You always move that fast?”

  “When it’s gonna save me trouble, I do.”

  “You’re a funny bird, you know? How come you’ve got that black smear around your eyes?”

  “Rubber, off my goggles. Some of it’s under the skin. Can’t wash it off.”

  “You must of been wearing those goggles a long time.”

  “Ever since I was big enough to go along with my dad. He had a car of his own—full-track job. Found it, scroungin’ around an old U.S. Army place called Fort Knox. That was back before everything got scrounged out. So he took the car and went out looking for people. What with one thing and another, he sort of got into working with people of one kind or another. I don’t know where my mother is; couldn’t be alive, I guess, if all I remember is being in the car with my dad.

  “It wasn’t a bad car. Too slow, though. On roads, I mean. We got caught that way in a town, once. This place was built around the only bridge standin’ over the river, and we had to go through it. There was a couple of birds with a bazooka—anti-tank rocket launcher, is what that is—down at the far end of the town, behind some piled-up concrete. We opened up on them, but this car only had a 35-millimeter cannon. High velocity stuff, and that wears hell out of the riflin’. It was pretty far gone. We kept missing, and they kept trying to fire this bazooka thing. They must have had ten of the rockets that fit it, and one after another they was duds. One of them fired, all right, but when it hit us it didn’t go off. Punched through the armor and got inside the car. The primer went off, but the charge was no good. The primer goin’ off smoked up the inside of the car so bad we couldn’t see. Dad was drivin’, and I heard him trying to stay on the road. Then we hit something with one track—maybe they got us with another rocket—so we went around in a circle and flipped over sideways.

  “Well, I crawled out and the car was between me and the birds with the bazooka. Then my dad crawled out. Both of us were busted up some, but our legs were okay. Meanwhile, these two birds were bangin’ away with rifles. Dad and I, all we had was .45s. I figured the only thing to do was try and run for it, and I said so. Dad said the way to do it was to split up, or they’d get us both. And I couldn’t see it, because if we got separated there was no tellin’ when we’d get back together again. Well, Dad got this funny look on his face and gave me a shove away from him, and he started running. He yelled: ‘Don’t you waste me, hear?’ and he was shooting at these guys. I got ’em both, later.”

  “Your dad must have been a funny kind of man.”

  Custis shrugged. He sat with the girl through the afternoon, making talk, until finally another rifleman came over to them from the line of huts.

  He looked down at Custis and the girl, his eyes flicking back and forth once and letting it go at that. “This Henley fellow you brought wants to see you, soldier.”

  “What’s his trouble?”

  “I figured that’s his business. He give me his wristwatch to come get you. I done that.”

  The man was a big, hairy type—bigger than Custis. But when Custis came smoothly to his feet, annoyance showing on his face, the rifleman took a step back. Custis looked at him curiously. The damnedest people were always doing that with him, and he had a hard time understanding it.

  “I’ll see you later,” he said to the girl, and walked off.

  * * *

  Henley was pacing back and forth in his hut when Custis stopped in the doorway. He twitched his lips nervously. “It’s time you got here. I watched you out there, lollygagging with that girl.”

  “Make your point, Henley. What’d you want to see me about?”

  “What did I want to see you about! Why didn’t you come here as soon as the commander released you? We have to make plans—we have to think this through. We have to decide what to do if our situation grows any worse. Hasn’t it occurred to you that this man might be planning to do almost anything to us?”

  Custis shrugged. “I didn’t see any sense in getting all worked up about it. When he makes up his mind, we’ll find out about it. No use making any plans of our own until we find out what his are.”

  Henley stared angrily at him. “Don’t you care? Don’t you care if you get killed?”

  “Sure I do. But the time to worry about that was back on the plains.”

  “Yes, and you decided quite easily, didn’t you?” Henley stared at Custis waspishly. “It wasn’t very hard for you to risk all our lives.” His eyes narrowed.

  “Unless—You know something, Custis. No man in his right mind would have acted the way you’ve acted unless you knew you weren’t in any danger.”

  “That’s a bad direction for you to think in.”

  “Is it? You drove up here like a man coming home. What do I know about you, after all? A freebooting car commander, off the same part of the plains where the outlaws run. Yes, I know you’ve worked for Chicago before, but what does that mean?” Custis could smell the hysteria soaking the officer’s clothes. “You’ve sold us out, Custis! I can’t understand how Chicago could ever have trusted you!”

  “They must have, or I wouldn’t of been hired for this job.”

  Henley gnawed his lip. “I don’t know.” He stopped and muttered down at the ground. “There are people who want my place for themselves. They might have planned all this to get rid of me.”

  “You’re a damned fool, Henley.”

  Custis was thinking that, as late as a few years ago, he would have felt sorry for Henley. But since then he’d seen a lot of men go to pieces when they thought they might get killed. More of them died than would have if they’d kept thinking. It seemed to be something built into them. Custis had never felt it, and he wondered if there might not be something wrong with him. But, anyhow, Custis had learned it wasn’t anything to feel one way or the other about. It was something some people did, and when you saw it you allowed for it.

  Henley suddenly said: “Custis—if we get out of here, don’t take me back to Chicago.”

  “What?”

  “No, listen—they’ll kill us if we go back without Berendtsen. Or maybe with him. Let’s go somewhere else. Or let’s stay on the plains. We can live off the country. We can raid farms. Put me in your crew. I don’t care—I’ll learn to shoot a machinegun, or whatever you want me to do. But we can’t go back to Chicago.”

  “I wouldn’t have you in my crew if I had to drive and fire the guns all by myself.”

  “Is that your final answer?” Henley’s lips were quivering.

  “Damned right!”

  “You think you know all the answers!”

  Custis growled: “Get a hold on yourself.”

  And Henley did it. He waited a moment, but then he stopped his pacing, and flicked one hand up to brush his perspired hair back into place. “I’ll get out of this. You watch me—I’ll get out and see you executed.”

  Custis said slowly, shaking his head: “Look, I want to get out of here just as much as you do. I think maybe I can. If I do, I’ll try and take you along, because I got you into this. But if you can’t stand the gaff, you shouldn’t of come out here in the first place.”

  “Never mind the speeches, Custis. From now on, I’ll look after myself. Don’t expect any help from me.”

  “Hey, you two,” the rifleman said from the doorway, “commander wants you.”

  The sun was going down behind the mountains. It was still broad dayli
ght farther up on the westward faces of the peaks, but the valley was filling with shadows. Custis followed Henley along the line of huts, feeling a little edgy in the thick gloom here at the base of the cliff, and wondering how all this was going to work out.

  He watched Henley. The officer was walking in short, choppy strides, and Custis could see him working his self-control up to a high pitch. His face lost its desperate set, and the look of confidence came back to him. It was only if you knew what to look for that you could still see the panic in him, driving him like a fuel.

  They reached the commander’s hut.

  “Come in,” the commander said from his table, and Custis couldn’t decide whether he was drunk on his home brew or not. The inside of the hut was so dark that all he could see of the old man was a shadow without a face. It might have been almost anyone sitting there.

  Custis felt his belly tightening up. Henley stopped in front of the table, and Custis took a stand beside him.

  “I’m glad to see you’re still here, Custis,” the old man said. “I was afraid you might be killed trying a break.”

  “I’m not crazy.”

  “I didn’t think you were.”

  Henley interrupted. “Have you decided what you’re going to do?”

  The commander sighed. “Just why would you want Berendtsen back, Major?”

  “Then, he’s available?”

  “Just answer the question, please. We’ll do this my way.”

  Henley licked his lips. Custis could hear the sound plainly. “Well,” the political officer finally said in a persuasive voice, “there’s been no hope of stability anywhere since he was deposed. Governments come and go overnight. A constitution isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. We’ve never been under Berendtsen’s rule, but his law stood up better than most. We need something like that in Chicago—the whole upper Middlewest needs it.” Now that he’d gotten started, he was talking much more easily. “Paper money’s so much mouse-stuffing, credit’s nonexistent, and half the time your life’s at the mercy of the next man’s good will. We don’t have a society—we have a poorly organized rabble. If Berendtsen’s still alive, we need him. He’s the only man anyone’ll follow with any enthusiasm.”