Algis Budrys - Some Will Not Die

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 amusement 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.”