Algis Budrys - Some Will Not Die

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.

“Those savages.” Her face was still rigid, flexing only enough to let her lips move, but her voice cracked like a piano wire whip. “People like that shouldn’t be alive. People who’d do a thing like that!”

Garvin dragged a long breath, letting it seep out slowly. A wave of pain washed up from his leg, and he closed his eyes for a moment. What could he say? That people were not savage by option? Already she had forgotten what it meant to the unorganized people of the area, having to compete with armed foraging teams.

His own mind was clear now. He had thought of another solution to the Conner problem.

For Margaret’s sake—possibly for Carol’s as well, and for the sake of young Ted, who had to somehow grow up in this world, and do his man’s work in it—he was grateful that his next step now would be what it would.

He squeezed Margaret’s hand. “I’ll take care of it,” he said somberly.

Hobbled by bandages, Garvin ran clumsily across the driveway with his men. The narrow space between the two buildings roared and echoed with the sleet of gunfire between the enemy and the covering guard in his building. Ahead of him, he heard the spasmodic and much lighter fire of his advance men as they cleaned out the enemy in the building’s basements. He lurched under the shifting weight of the sack of dynamite sticks that he, like all the other men in his party, was carrying.

Holland, running beside him, put a hand under his elbow. “You making it okay, Matt? We would have handled this without you coming along.”

Garvin spat out a laugh. “I’ll have to touch it off.” He passed the corner of the building and limped rapidly toward the entrance that would take him into the basement, where some of the men must already be placing their charges against the girders and bearing walls.

Margaret stared at him incredulously. “Matt! All those people. You killed all those people just because I said…”

He stood wordlessly in his living room, his vision blurring with each new thrust of pain up his leg, his shoulders down, the empty sack dangling from his hand. He rubbed his eyes wearily.

“Matt, you shouldn’t have listened to me. I was upset. I—”

He realized he was swaying, but he did not try to control himself as strongly as he would have if any of his men had been present.

“I didn’t do it because of anything you said,” he tried to explain, the words blurring on his tongue. “I did it because it was the only way left. I had to order it and do it myself because I’ve got the responsibility.”

“You had to kill those people?”

“Because there are more people. Take a look out some other window—out some window that shows you the rest of this city, with the buildings still standing.”

“No, Matt, I can’t.”

“Have it your way, then.” He dropped into a chair, looking down at the gummy stain on his coverall leg, wishing in his weariness, that it had been Gus, of the two of them, who had happened to stand slightly behind the other.

Another night fell, and Garvin stood at a window and watched it.

“Christmas Eve, Jack,” he said to Holland, who was watching with him.

“Yes, sir.”

Matt grunted, half ruefully. “Can’t see it, can you, Jack?”

Holland hesitated, frowning uncertainly. “I don’t know, sir. I can see it—I can understand the reasons for it, all right. But it doesn’t…” He looked quickly at Garvin, obviously wondering whether it was safe to go on.

Matt chuckled again, more freely. “I won’t eat you just because you tell me that what we did doesn’t feel right. This is still a free republic.” He gestured at the dark buildings, and his face twisted with regret. “Out there, it isn’t, yet. But it’s the same as it was when Gus and I knocked on your father’s wall and told him what his choice was, the same way Gus knocked on my wall. Gus was wrong, that night after the ambush. He was right, but he was wrong. We can make them do things our way—if we knock louder than Gus ever thought we could make ourselves do.” He turned away from the window and put his hand on Holland’s shoulder.

“Better go change the downstairs guard, Jack.”

He looked down at the moonlit rubble that had been the next building. He could almost read the sign that surmounted the tumble of brick, metal, glass, and flesh.

“Yes, sir,” Holland said. He turned to go. “Merry Christmas, sir.”

The ground in the foothills was rocky, covered by loose gravel, and treacherous. The car heaved itself up over a sharp ridge with torturous slowness and pancaked down on the other side with a hard smash. The steering levers whipped back and forth just short of the driver’s kneecaps, and the motors raced.

“No more seeing, Joe,” the driver told Custis. “Lights?”

“No. Bed ’er down, Lew.”

The driver locked his treads, and cut the switches. The damper rods slammed home in the power pile, and the motors ground down to a stop. The car lay dead.

Custis slid down out of the turret. “All right, let’s button up. We sleep inside tonight.”

The driver dogged his slit shutters and Hutchinson, the machinegunner, began stuffing rags into the worn gasproof seal on his hatch. Robb, the turret gunner, dogged down the command hatch. “Load napalm,” Custis told him, and Robb pulled the racks of fragmentation shells he’d been carrying in the guns all day. He fitted new loads, locked the breeches, and pulled the charging handles. “Napalm loaded,” he checked back in his colorless voice.

“Acoustics out,” Custis said, and Hutchinson activated the car’s listening gear.

Henley, standing where the twin .75s could pound his head to a pulp with their recoiling breeches, asked: “What’re you going to do now, Custis?”

“Eat.” Joe broke out five cans of rations, handed three to the crew and one to Henley. “Here.” He squatted down on the deck and peeled back the lid of the can. Bending it between his fingers, he scooped food into his mouth. His eye sockets were thick with black shadow from the overhead light. His face was tanned to the cheekbones, and dead white from there to the nape of his recently shaved skull. The goggles had left a wide outline of rubber particles around his eyes. “We’ll see all the bandits you want in the morning.”