Algis Budrys - Some Will Not Die

A delegation from the next building in the block made a gingerly meeting with Matt Garvin and Gus Berendtsen, out on one of the windswept playgrounds.

Garvin watched the delegation leader carefully. It was an older man, fat and small-eyed—a man who’d been somebody before the plague, he guessed.

Matt knew he was being nervous for no clear reason. But he didn’t like dealing with older people. There was no telling how much they had time to learn—how many little tricks they remembered from the old days.

The man smiled affably, proffering his hand. “Charlie Conner,” he boomed. “I guess I run that shebang back there,” he said deprecatingly, jerking his thumb back over his shoulder toward his own building. But the young, wolfish riflemen with him did not twitch their eyes to follow the gesture.

“Matt Garvin. And this is Gus Berendtsen,” Matt noticed Gus was looking at Conner the same way he’d looked over each member of each new family they’d found in the apartments of their building. “I guess between us we do your job for our building.”

Conner grinned. “Tough, isn’t it? What’d you do—just spread out gradual, sweating it out every time you made contact with a different family?”

“Something like that,” Gus cut in. “Make your point.”

Conner’s eyes shifted. “Don’t get jumpy,” he soothed. “All I am is figuring now we’ve got our whole buildings organized, it’s time we joined up together. The more people we’ve got, the more we can control things. The idea is to make sure your own rules get followed in your own territory, right? Nobody wants any wild hares fouling things up. You want to be sure that as long as you follow the rules, everything’s all right, right? You want to know your family’s protected while you’re out someplace. You want to be sure there’s a safe store of food, right? Well, the bigger the community, the more sure you can be. Right?”

Garvin nodded. “Uh-huh.”

Conner spread his hands. “All right. Now, I’ve got my place organized nice as pie. Ought to. Fifteen years District Captain in this ward. Lots of experience. Now, I’m sure you boys have things going pretty well, but maybe there’s one or two things you could stand to have better. Okay, here I am. My people’re satisfied. Right, boys?” he asked his riflemen.

“Right, boss.”

Gus said: “What you mean is, we should join you.”

Conner chuckled. “Well, now, look, I’m not likely to want to join you, now, am I?”

He leaned negligently against the crudely painted sign Gus and Matt had seen planted through the playground’s asphalt: “Meet me here tomorrow, and we’ll talk joining up together. —Charlie Conner.”

Gus and Matt exchanged glances. “We’ll think about it,” Gus said.

“You do that,” Conner said. “Oh, look, I know you think you’ve been doing all right. And you have—no question about it. But now you’re ready to spread out into more than one building, and you’ve got to figure sooner or later you have to meet somebody with more experience, running things. It just figures, that’s all. You didn’t hope you could start a whole city government, did you? I mean, you boys weren’t going to run one of you for Mayor or anything, were you?” Conner chuckled uproariously.

“We’ll think about it,” Gus repeated. “You’ll hear from us.”

Conner’s eyes narrowed. “When?”

Matt said: “When we’re ready.”

Conner looked thoughtfully at the two of them. “Don’t stall me too long, now.”

“You worried you might die of old age?” Gus asked. They turned around and walked away. Conner looked after them, turned, and stalked back toward his own building. The rifle parties of both sides waited until everyone else was gone, and then they backed away from each other. Finally, the playground stood empty again.

In their apartment, Matt put his rifle down softly. “Well, now we know,” he said. “I thought we’d been running into too many rival foraging parties. They had to come from someplace nearby.”

“What do you think about Conner?”

“I think he’s lost more people than we have, or he would have let things go on the way they have been, with his foraging parties and ours leaving each other alone unless they were both set on picking up the same thing.”

“So what do we do?”

“I think we’ve got the upper hand. I think we can stick it out without him longer than he can without us.”

“And meanwhile we keep losing people?”

Garvin looked up sharply. “Not as many as he does. That’s the key. He’s hurting worse than we are.”

“You tell that to our widows.”

“I don’t have to tell our widows anything. All anybody can promise a woman these days is that her man’s safe as long as he stays inside his own four walls. Of course, that way they both starve, and so do their kids.”

“Look, if we make a deal with Conner, nobody dies.”

“You’re sure. You’re sure Conner means all he wants is to be the big frog in a bigger puddle. He’s not looking for extra women, or extra food for his own people. He keeps those gunmen of his in line by promising them no more than new friends to play gin rummy with.”

“All right—maybe. We can’t be sure.”

“We don’t have to be sure of anything. We just have to keep as alive as we can. Look, Gus—I’m not saying we should forget Conner. Or his offer, I’m saying that two or three weeks from now, he may not be so bossy. If we’re going to trade something with him, I want a 50-50 chance of an even deal. Right now, we don’t have that.”

“So we wait.”

“Well, we can try breaking into his building. How many widows do you figure that’ll make for us?”

“Okay. We’ll let it ride.”

A week later, the sign in the playground said:

NOTICE! Anyone Not A Member Of The East Side Mutual Protective Association, (Charles G. Conner, Pres.) is Hereby Declared An Outlaw, and is subject to trial under due authority. By The Authority Invested In Me By The Democratic Party Of The State Of New York, United States Of America.

“Oh, yeah, huh?” Matt Garvin said.

The little group of men returned to Stuyvesant from the east, cutting across the playground and access drives in the courtyards. As he led them back home, Matt Garvin shivered and hunched up his heavy collar to protect his ears. The wind was light, just strong enough to cover the quiet crunch of footsteps with its whispering, but he and the men had been out all afternoon, and the chill was beginning to sink deep into their bones.

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.