Algis Budrys - Some Will Not Die

“Well,” Bob said. “What’s your move, Jim?”

He’d been waiting for someone to get around to that, hoping illogically that the question would not be raised, knowing that it must. And he discovered that he was still afraid of his younger brother.

“What do you think, Mom?” he asked.

She looked helplessly at her two sons, her eyes uncertain. Her hands twisted in her lap.

“I wish I knew,” she finally said. Her voice trembled. “When your father was alive,” she burst out, “it was so easy to decide. He always knew what to do. I could understand him.” She looked around helplessly again. “I don’t understand any of you.” She began to cry softly. “Do anything you like,” she finished hopelessly, too bewildered to cope with the problem any longer.

So, in the end, the decision was given to him to face, without help from anyone. He braced his shoulders and met Bob’s sardonic gaze. “I guess I’ll follow Ted,” he said.

The sun shone with a fierce, biting glare that stabbed from a thousand windows. Jim squinted up the column, the added reflection of the ranks of upraised rifles needling his eyes. He swung his head and looked up at the window where Mary and his mother were watching. Bob was somewhere in the crowd that stood on the sidewalks.

Through all the nights that he and Ted had spent in Berendtsen’s old apartment, alone except for Ted’s withdrawn, shadowlike mother, they had never talked. It had been as though one of the two of them had been a ghost, barely visible and never within reach.

Was it me, or was it Ted? he thought now. Or was it both of them, each locked in the secret prison of his body, each haunted in turn, each unable to share?

A whistle shrilled, and the truck engines raised their idling cough to a roar that seemed incredibly loud, here between the tall brick buildings.

“All right, move out!” Jim yelled to his men, and the first crash of massed footsteps came from the lines of men.

The army moved south.

Custis had been asleep for about a half hour when somebody touched his shoulder. He turned over in one easy motion and caught the hand around the wrist. With his next move he was on his feet, and the girl’s arm twisted back between her shoulder blades. “What’s up, Honey?” he said quietly, putting just enough strain on her shoulder to turn her head toward him.

The girl was about eighteen or twenty, with a pale bony face and black hair hacked off around her shoulders. She was thin, and the top of her head came up to his collarbone. She was wearing a man’s army shirt that bagged around her, and a skirt made by cutting off a pair of pants at the knees, opening the seams, and using the extra material to make gussets. The whole business was pretty crudely sewn, and came down to just above her dirty calves.

“I was bringing you something to eat, soldier,” she said.

“O.K.” He let go of her wrist, and she turned all the way around, putting the pail of stew down on the ground in front of him. There was a wooden spoon sticking up out of it. Custis sat down, folded his legs under him, and started to eat.

The girl sat down next to him. “Go easy,” she said. “Half of that’s mine.”

Custis grunted. “The commander send you over here with this?” he asked, passing the spoon.

She shook her head. “He’s busy. He always gets busy about this time of day, working on that bottle of his.” She was eating as hungrily as Custis had, not looking up, and talking between mouthfuls.

Custis looked over toward the guard. The man was squatted down, with an empty dinner bucket beside him, scowling at Custis and the girl.

“That your man?” Custis asked her.

She looked up briefly. “You could say that. There’s maybe six or seven of us that don’t belong in anybody’s hut. There’s maybe fifty men without any families.”

Custis nodded. He looked over toward the guard again, shrugged, and took the spoon from the girl. “The commander here—what’s his name?”

“Eichler, Eisner—something like that. Anyhow, that’s what he says. I was with the last bunch he took over up here, a couple of years ago. Never did get it straight. Who cares? Names come easy. He’s the only commander we got.”

So that didn’t tell him anything. “What’s your name?”

“Jody. You from Chicago, soldier?”

“Right now, yeah. Name’s Joe Custis. You ever seen Chicago?”

She shook her head. “I was born up here. Never seen anything else. You going back to Chicago, Joe? Go ahead—finish that—I’m full.”

Custis looked around at the cliffs and huts. “I figure I’ll be getting out of here, maybe. Maybe Chicago’s where I’ll head for.”

“Don’t you know?”

“Don’t much care. I live where my car is.”

“Don’t you like cities? I hear they’ve got all kinds of stores and things, and warehouses full of clothes and food.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Some of the fellows here came out from Chicago, and Denver, and places like that. They tell me. But Chicago sounds like it’s the best of all.”

Custis grunted. “Ain’t never been to Denver.” He finished the stew. “Food’s pretty good here. You cook it?”

She nodded. “You got a big car? Room for extra people to ride in?” She leaned back until her shoulder was touching his.

Custis looked down at the stewpot. “You’re a pretty good cook.”

“I like it. I’m strong, too. I’m not afraid to work. And I shoot a rifle pretty good, when I have to.”

Custis frowned. “You want me to take you to Chicago?”

The girl was quiet for a moment. “That’s up to you.” She was still leaning on his shoulder, looking straight out ahead of her.

“I’ll think about it.”

The guard had been getting uglier and uglier in the face. Now he stood up. “All right, Jody, he’s fed. Now get away from him.”

Custis got slowly to his feet, using two fingers of his right hand to quietly push the girl’s shoulder down and keep her where she was. He looked over toward the guard with a casual glance, and jumped him. He chopped out with his hands, and the rifle fell loose. Custis dropped the man, scooped up the rifle, and pulled out the clip. He worked the bolt and caught the extracted cartridge in mid-air. Then he handed the whole business back to the man.

“You tend to your job and I’ll give you no trouble, son,” he told him, and went back to where the girl was sitting. The guard was cursing, but by the time he’d reloaded the rifle he’d come to realize just how much Custis had done to him. If he didn’t want the girl spreading his story all over the camp, his best move was to keep quiet from now on. He did it.

The girl looked sideward at Custis as he sat down again. “You always move that fast?”

“When it’s gonna save me trouble, I do.”

“You’re a funny bird, you know? How come you’ve got that black smear around your eyes?”

“Rubber, off my goggles. Some of it’s under the skin. Can’t wash it off.”

“You must of been wearing those goggles a long time.”

“Ever since I was big enough to go along with my dad. He had a car of his own—full-track job. Found it, scroungin’ around an old U.S. Army place called Fort Knox. That was back before everything got scrounged out. So he took the car and went out looking for people. What with one thing and another, he sort of got into working with people of one kind or another. I don’t know where my mother is; couldn’t be alive, I guess, if all I remember is being in the car with my dad.

“It wasn’t a bad car. Too slow, though. On roads, I mean. We got caught that way in a town, once. This place was built around the only bridge standin’ over the river, and we had to go through it. There was a couple of birds with a bazooka—anti-tank rocket launcher, is what that is—down at the far end of the town, behind some piled-up concrete. We opened up on them, but this car only had a 35-millimeter cannon. High velocity stuff, and that wears hell out of the riflin’. It was pretty far gone. We kept missing, and they kept trying to fire this bazooka thing. They must have had ten of the rockets that fit it, and one after another they was duds. One of them fired, all right, but when it hit us it didn’t go off. Punched through the armor and got inside the car. The primer went off, but the charge was no good. The primer goin’ off smoked up the inside of the car so bad we couldn’t see. Dad was drivin’, and I heard him trying to stay on the road. Then we hit something with one track—maybe they got us with another rocket—so we went around in a circle and flipped over sideways.