Algis Budrys - Some Will Not Die

“Okay, then, let’s get formed up. Matt’s taking the financial district, swinging up from the Battery. We go straight across town. Bill McGraw and another bunch are going in just below Forty-second Street.” He grinned and gestured perfunctorily and ribaldly. “That’s us—Lucky Pierre.”

Jim laughed, and Ted chuckled, winking at Jack again. The kid had been showing his nerves a little.

The three of them crossed the street to where the rest of the men in their group were waiting, scattered inconspicuously among the cars and doorways from old, vital habit. Ted looked up at the sky. It was growing dark. They’d move out pretty soon.

Jack dropped back and walked beside him. “Make sure Jim sticks pretty close to you, huh?” he said in a low voice. “I won’t be able to keep much of an eye on him myself.”

“Sure,” Ted answered. “I’ll take care of him.”

For two nights and three days, what had once been the lower half of Hell’s Kitchen had been tearing itself open. From that first cold morning when they had come out of their positions and dynamited their way into a packing plant, the slap of rifle fire and the occasional bellow of heavy sidearms had swept and echoed down the cluttered streets and wide, deadly avenues. Building by heavy building, they had blown gaps in walls, smashed windows, and shot their way from room to room in the first rush of surprise. Here and there, a firebomb had touched off a column of smoke that twisted fitfully in the breeze and light rain that had begun falling on the second day and was still coming down. A steady stream of runners was carrying ammunition up to them, and they supplied themselves from whatever miserable little they found, while scavenger squads cleaned up the weapons and ammunition left behind by corpses.

Two days, three nights. They had started on the uptown side of Fourteenth Street, with covering squads to clean out the downtown side and leave them a clear supply route.

They had reached Eighteenth Street by nightfall of the third day.

Ted slumped his head back against a wall and fed cartridges into a clip. “How’s it, Jim?”

Jim Garvin rubbed his hand over his face and shook his head in a vague attempt to clear out some of the weariness. “It stinks.”

Ted put the full clip in his bandolier and started on another. He grinned faintly. “Yeah,” he agreed. “You see Jack today?”

“Nope. Think he’s still around?”

“Chances are. He was doing house-to-house when we were just tads, remember?” He opened his pack and threw Jim a can of meat. “Tie into this, huh? I’ve been saving some. The slop they’ve been eating here is enough to make you sick.”

Jim shuddered and exhaled through his clenched teeth. “God, isn’t it just? All these bloody warehouses around here, too.” He opened the can and dug into it gratefully.

“A stinking set-up. Everybody just hung on to what they had, and to hell with you, buddy. Remember that bunch that’d been gettin’ no vitamins except out of canned fruit?”

“No organization at all,” Jim agreed, “What the hell’s wrong with these people?”

Ted shrugged. “Nothing, I guess. But they had a bunch of forts all ready made for them. These freakin’ warehouses were built to take it. And besides, they were warehouses. Up to the roof in supplies. Guess it looked like the simple way out.”

“How long d’you think we’ll be at this mess?”

“Depends. If Matt cleans up his end, we’ll get a push from him. If McGraw comes down, we’ll have ’em squeezed. I’d like it best if both happened, but I don’t know—that Greenwich Village is a rat-trap, from what I hear, and McGraw’s bound to be having it just as tough as we are. I wish I knew how this whole operation was going.”

“So long as Pop’s all right, I don’t give a hoot and a whoop for the rest of the operation. The part I worry about is right here.”

“Yeah, but the whole thing ties together,” Ted explained.

“That’s for somebody else to worry about,” Jim said.

Ted looked at him thoughtfully. “Yeah. Guess you’re right.” For the first time, the thought struck him that it didn’t look as if Jim was going to take over when his father left off. He was a good man with a rifle, and he never stopped after he started. But he didn’t do his own worrying.

That jarred him, somehow. He didn’t like the thought, because Jim was a friend of his, and because he was a first-grade fighting man, just like his father.

Only being a fighting man wasn’t good enough any more. It was a bigger sphere of operations now. New factors were coming into the picture all the time. This entire move against the West Side was not a foraging expedition, or an organizing process, though both would result. It was primarily a strategic maneuver against the day when Philadelphia began to move up the coast. Matt had started out a rifleman and learned, bit by bit, at the same pace with which the world grew more complicated. But Jim wouldn’t have that time to learn by practice what he didn’t understand by instinct. He was too young, and Matt was too old to give him that time.

What the hell, this was supposed to be a republic, wasn’t it? A republic lived by developing different kinds of leaders as it needed them.

But he didn’t like the idea, nevertheless. He’d have to think it over, think it out, before he could accept it.

“Might as well get some sleep, Jim,” he said. “Looks like we’ve closed up the big shop for the night. I’ll take the first watch.”

“Okay.” Jim rolled over gratefully, and pillowed his head on his arms. Ted checked the action on his .45, which had jammed on him twice already. He handled the truckhorse of a gun distastefully. The only good thing about it was the same thing that was good about Matt’s magnum rifle, which he wouldn’t handle either. The things kicked like bombs, burned out their barrels, took nonstandard ammunition, were nuisances to maintain, and had all the subtlety of a club. But hit a man anywhere at all on his body with a bullet from one of them, and hydrostatic shock would knock him out, if not kill him. Which, to Ted’s mind, was rarely an advantage. There was no point in killing a potentially good man if you could put him out of action some other way.

None of which instruction-manual thinking, Ted reflected, was really effective in keeping him from worrying about his big problem. He was beginning to understand why Jack Holland had never really teamed up with Jim on any job. Once you considered things in the proper light, all sorts of evidence began turning up.

Jack Holland. He hoped it would be Jack Holland who would be taking over from Matt, when the inevitable time came.

A week, now. Jack had finally had to abandon the planned straight-forward sweep, block by parallel block, and had sent his right flank out to clean up as many of the uptown blocks east of Ninth Avenue as it could. On that side of what had become the border of the warehouse gangs’ territory, the Republic’s men had made contact with McGraw’s group—Ryder’s now—which had executed a duplicate movement. But, effectively, as far as the warehouse gangs were concerned, Garvin’s forces were bogged down at Nineteenth Street and Thirty-first Street, with only minor penetrations into the periphery west of Ninth Avenue. Matt’s personal forces were moving slowly out of Greenwich Village, with isolated pockets still to be mopped up in the almost ideal defensive positions that twisted alleys and cross-streets provided. But there, too, the actual core of resistance had hardly been bruised, for almost all the heavily built docks, warehouses, and docked ships were still holding out.

Somehow, Ted had acquired a squad of his own from men who had fallen in with him. They were apparently willing to follow his suggestions without debating them, and, as long as he didn’t seem to be making costly mistakes, he was perfectly willing to let it ride that way. They certainly weren’t hindering him and Jim any. All of them were heavily stubbled and ragged by now, and none of them had had much sleep. The latter probably fogged their judgment, and the former operated in his favor as well, since his own beard, augmented by grime, was enough to hide the boyish roundness of his face.