Algis Budrys - Some Will Not Die

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.”