Some Will Not Die Read online

  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 survivor
s 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.