Algis Budrys - Some Will Not Die

“Never did any street fighting,” Custis said. “Don’t know a thing about it.”

“What do you know, then?”

“Open country work. Only thing a car’s good for.”

“One car, yes.”

“Hell, mister, there ain’t five cars runnin’ in the Republic, and they ain’t got any range. Only reason I’m still goin’ is mine don’t need no gasoline. I ran across it in an old American government depot outside Miles City. Provin’ grounds, it was. My dad, he’d taught me about runnin’ cars, and I had this fellow with me, Lew Gaines, and we got it going.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Seven years.”

“And nobody ever tried to take it away from you?”

“Mister, there’s three fifty-caliber machineguns and two 75s on that car.”

The commander looked at him from head to foot. “I see.” He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “And now you’ve practically handed it to me.”

“Not by a long shot, I ain’t. My crew’s still inside, and it’s kind of an open question whether you’re ready to get your troops barbecued just for the sake of killing us and making the car no good to anybody.”

The commander cocked an eyebrow at him. “Not as open as all that.”

“Open enough. You set it up so we can both pull back from each other if that turns out best; if we come to some kind of agreement.”

“You’re here. Your crew’s down the mountain.”

“My crew’s just as good without me, Mister.”

The commander let it ride, switching his tack a little. “You’ll admit you’ve come to a peculiar place for a man who only knows open country work.”

Custis shrugged. “Car needed shopwork. Chicago’s the only place with the equipment. If I use their shops, I do their work. That’s the straight up and down of it. And it’s one more reason why gettin’ the car’d be more work than it was worth to you. Anything you busted on it would stay busted for good. And you know it. You’re so fond of cars, where’s yours? Wore out, right? So now you’re walkin’.”

“Horses.”

“Horses!”

The commander smiled crookedly. “All right. It takes a good deal to budge you, doesn’t it, Custis?”

“Depends on the spot I’m in. My dad taught me to pick my spot careful.”

The commander nodded again. “I’d say so. All right, Custis, I’ll want to talk to you again, later. One of my men’ll stay close to you. Other than that, you’re free to look around as much as you want to. I don’t imagine you’ll ever be leading any expeditions up here—not if Henley’s plans work out. Or even if they don’t.”

He turned away and reached under the cot for a bottle, and Custis hadn’t found out what the old commander was driving at.

Outside, they were cooking their noon meal. The camp women were huddled around the firepits, bent shapeless as they stirred their pots with charred, long wooden spoons, and the smell of food lay over the area near the huts in an invisible cloud that dilated Custis’s nostrils and made his empty stomach tighten up. Whatever these people ate, it was hot and smelled different from the sludgy meat in the car’s ration cans.

Then he shrugged and closed his mind to it. Walking upwind, he went over to a low rock and sat down on it. One of the commander’s riflemen went with him and leaned against a boulder fifteen feet away, cradling his rifle in the crook of one thin arm and looking steadily at Custis through coldly sleepy eyes.

A bunch of kids clustered around the fires, filling oil cans that had crude handles made out of insulated wire. When they had loaded up they moved out of the little valley with a few riflemen for escort, carrying food out to the men who were in position around the battlewagon. Custis watched them for a while, then ignored them as well as he could.

So Henley was working for a group that wanted to set up the next government. It wasn’t particularly surprising that the Seventh Republic was financing its own death. Every government was at least half made up of men from the one before. They played musical chairs with the titles—one government’s tax collector was the next government’s chief of police—and whoever wasn’t happy with the graft was bound to be figuring some way to improve it the next time the positions moved around.

It looked a helI of a lot like, however the pie was cut, Custis wasn’t going to get paid. The Seventh wouldn’t pay him if he didn’t come back with Berendtsen, and if he did find him the Eighth wouldn’t hold to the last government’s contract.

Custis twitched his mouth. Anyhow, the car was running as well as you could expect. If he got out of here, Kansas City might have a job for him. He’d heard rumors things were happening down there. It wasn’t familiar territory, and there were always rumors that things were better somewhere else, but he might try it. Or he might even head east, if the highways over the mountains were still any good at all. That could be a real touchy business all around, with God knew what going on behind the Appalachians, and maybe an organization that had plenty of cars of its own, and no use for half-bandit plains people. Going there wouldn’t be the smart thing to do. As a matter of fact, he knew, inside, that he’d never leave the northern plains, no matter how he reasoned. It was too risky, heading for some place where they were past needing battlewagons.

He wondered how the boys in the car were making out. He hadn’t heard any firing from over there, and he didn’t expect to. But it was a lousy business, sitting cooped up in there, not knowing anything, and looking out at the men on the rocks as time went by.

When you came right down to it, this was a lousy kind of life, waiting for the day you ran into a trap under the sod and the last thing you ever did was try to climb out through the turret while the people who’d dug the hole waited outside with their knives. Or wondering, every time you went into one of the abandoned old towns on the far prairie, where supposedly nobody lived, if somebody there hadn’t found some gasoline in a sealed drum and was waiting to set you on fire.

But what the hell else could a man do? Live in the damned cities, breaking your back in somebody’s jackleg factory, eating nothing that couldn’t be raised or scavenged right on the spot—and not much of that—living in some hole somewhere that had twelve flights of stairs before you got to it? Freezing in the winter and maybe getting your throat cut for your coat in some back alley?

Custis shivered suddenly. To hell with this. He was thinking in circles. When a man did that, he licked himself before he got started.

Custis slid off his rock, stretched out on the ground, and went to sleep thinking of Berendtsen.

This is what happened to Theodore Berendtsen when he was young, having grown up in the shadow of a heap of rubble with a weathering sign on top of it. That was all he had in the way of a portrait of his father. And this is what he did with it.

Ted Berendtsen opened the hatch and shouted down over the growl of the PT boat’s engines. “Narrows, Jack.”

Holland nodded, typed the final sentence of his report with two bobbing fingers, and got up. “What’s the latest from Matt?”

“Nothing new. I just checked with Ryder, on radio watch.”

Holland scrambled up on deck, stretching his stiff muscles. “Man, next time Matt sends out a mission, somebody else can go. I’ve had PT’s.”

Ted nodded sourly. “I’ve had Philadelphia, too,” he growled in conscious imitation of Jack’s voice. For the hundredth time, he caught the faint smile on Jack’s lips, and resolved, for the hundredth time, to stop his adolescent hero-worship. Or at least to tone it down. “Brotherly love. Wow!”