Some Will Not Die Page 7

  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.

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  “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 a
musement 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.

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  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 fe
ll 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.