Algis Budrys: Some Will Not Die

Matt cocked his head and frowned.

“I mean. I watched the people going out across the bridge. It went on for days, after the plague died down. They went climbing over the old Isolation Squad barricades. and all the cars and cadavers. I timed it. Something like twenty or thirty an hour. And they weren’t going in groups. Twenty or thirty people an hour in Manhattan each got the idea of getting out into the country.

“They were hungry, Matt. And I saw a lot of them coming back—some of them were crawling. I’m sure they had gunshot wounds. Something over there is turning them back. You know what it’s got to be? It’s got to be the survivors on the Jersey side. They don’t have any spare food, either. And that means the surviving farmers are shooting them when they try to go for food.”

“Larry—”

“Listen, food shipments into Manhattan stopped seven weeks ago!”

“Warehouses,” Matt said, like a man trying to deliver an urgent message in the depths of a nightmare, watching the knife swing back and forth between Larry’s fingers.

“There are people in them. Holed up during the plague. I was just coming out of it, then I couldn’t get down the stairs yet, but there was still a little bit of radio, on the Police band—and the warehouses were full of them. Dead, dying, and live ones. They won’t let anybody in. You’ve got to remember Manhattan is full of crowd-control weapons and ammunition. You could pick ’em up anywhere—all you had to do was pry the dead fingers away. They’re all gone now, of course—they’ve all been picked up. Anybody who has a food supply is armed. He has to be. If he isn’t, some armed man has killed him for it by now.”

“There’s got to be food. There were two million people on this island! There were food stores on every block. They had to have some source of ready supply! You can’t tell me there still isn’t enough here to keep people eating for a while, at least. How many of us are there left?”

Larry shook his head. “Two hundred thousand, maybe. If the national average held good under urban conditions. I don’t think it did. I think maybe there’s really a hundred-fifty thousand.” Larry shook his head exhaustedly and walked away from the door with a clumsy, stiff-jointed gait. He dropped into one of the armchairs, and let the knife fall on the footworn carpet beside him.

“Look, you’re all right.” He motioned toward Matt’s gun. “You fall into this place naturally. But what about me? Look—you think about it. Sure, there’s got to be food around. But who knows where? The people who’d know are keeping it for themselves. All the obvious places are being emptied. And even when you have it, you have to get it home. And if you get it home, how long is it before you have to go out again? You can’t even have water, unless you carry it in!”

“All right, so you carry it.” Matt tapped his canteen. He had filled it from the water cooler in an abandoned office, this morning, and purified it with a Halazone tablet from the kit in his pack. “And you have to go look for food because there aren’t any more delivery boys. So what? There’s plenty of time, every day. And there’s time to think, too. You know what this is—what you’re doing? It’s panic.”

“All right, it’s panic! It’s panic When an animal chews its leg off in a trap, too—you trying to tell me it didn’t need to?”

“Larry, we’re not animals!”

Larry Ruark laughed.

Matt watched him. Very gradually, he was calming, but there was still a sound like a riptide in his ears. He knew he would remember this conversation, later, better than he was hearing it now. He knew he would act, now, in ways that later thinking would improve on. But for the moment he could not stop his eyes from trying to watch Larry and the knife at the same time. And he could not keep from trying to settle it now—right now—before it became intolerable.

“You can’t tell me anybody who can move is anywhere near starving to death in Manhattan. It’ll be years before the last food is gone.”

“What do I care, if I can’t get it? I’ve got to think my way!” Larry’s eyes jerked down toward where the knife lay, near his hand as it dangled over the arm of the chair. “You—you can go hunt for it. Listen, you know what they’d do to me, if I went outside? If they found out I was a med student? You know why I put those signs out all around this neighborhood? It’s not for the people with the gunshot wounds and the inflamed appendixes and the abscessed teeth—sure, some of ’em may be desperate enough to come here for help. But you know how I get most of my protein? I get it from people who come up here looking to kill me. You know why? Because we lied to ’em. The whole medical profession lied to ’em. It told them it would lick the plague. It told them that a world full of medical scientists couldn’t miss coming up with the solution.

“And what happened? You remember the last days of the plague—the Isolation Squads, the barricades, the machineguns and flamethrowers around the hospitals? Sure, we told ’em we were only protecting the research facilities from the mobs, when we fortified the hospitals. But they know better. They know their mothers and their wives and kids died because we wouldn’t let ’em in. What do they care about things like a plague that hits the whole world, from end to end, inside three days? A plague everybody gets. A plague that forces a delirious fever on your body, so you can’t see into the barrel of your microscope or hold two beakers steady? All they know is the biggest piles of corpses were lying around the aid stations and the research centers. And I was there, all right. I didn’t have the training to do any good on the research side, so they gave me a Thompson submachinegun, and that’s how I did my part, until I wore it out. And by then nobody minded if I went home. There wasn’t much of anybody to mind.

“I know what they want, when they come up here. They want the dumb Medic who’s idiot enough to advertise. Well, they don’t get him. No, sir. And that’s how I get my protein. ’Cause it’s all protein, you know—I mean, you wouldn’t eat a mouse or an earthworm, would you, Matt? But it’s all protein. Your body wouldn’t care where it came from. It would take it, and use it to keep alive, and be grateful. All your body wants to do is live another day.

“But I’m not doing too well, lately. They’re getting wise to me, in the neighborhood, and all I’m getting now is transients. I’ll have to think of something new, pretty soon.

“You and me.” Larry’s eyes darted toward Matt. “You and me—we’d make out together. You can go out and forage, and I’ll stay here and make sure nobody takes it away. How about that?”

Matt Garvin took a step toward the door.

Larry’s hand moved aimlessly toward the knife. He pretended not to see what his hand was doing.

“Please, Larry,” Matt said. “I just want to go.”

“Listen, you can’t go now. We’ve got plans to make. You’re the only guy I can trust!”

“Larry, I just want to get out that door; me, and my shotgun, too.”

“I’ll throw the knife at your back on the stairs, Matt. I will.”

“I’ll walk down backwards.”

“That won’t be easy. If you slip, you’re a loser.”

“I guess so.”

Matt Garvin opened the door, and backed out. He backed all the way down the stairs, without tripping, and watched the silent, motionless door of Larry Ruark’s apartment. Down on the street, he ran—silently, ripping down placards as he went.

Fourteenth Street lay quiet under the dawn. From the East River across to the Hudson, it ran its blue-gray length between the soundless buildings. Except for a flock of lean, restless pigeons that circled momentarily above Union Square and then fluttered back to earth, it was sucked empty of life and motion like a watercourse running between dry banks. The wind of Autumn swept down the width of the paralyzed street, carrying trash.