Algis Budrys: Some Will Not Die

“Bad?” he asked suddenly.

“What?”

“Is he hurt bad?”

Her lip trembled. “He was shot through the chest three days ago.”

He grunted, then looked back at the blank windows again. “Look—will you stay here until I get back? I want to see you home. You need it,” he added bluntly.

“Where are you going?”

“Drugstore.”

Her lips parted in bewilderment. The innocence of trust did not belong on this deadly street. Her simple acceptance of everything he told her—even her failure to shoot him when he gave her back the gun—reacted in him to create a baseless but deep and sudden anger.

“To make a phone call,” he added with brutal sarcasm. Then he managed to smooth his voice. “If something happens, don’t you do anything but turn around and go home, understand?”

The anger fading, but still strong, he jumped to his feet and began to run without waiting for an answer.

Stupid kid, he thought as he weaved across the street. She had absolutely no business running around loose. He crossed the white center-line, and no one had fired yet.

If the snipers had any brains, they’d wait until he came out. They’d be able to judge whether his load was worth bothering with.

How had she managed to live this long? His sole slammed into the curb, and he drove himself across the sidewalk.

Just my luck to get shot by somebody stupid.

He tore the door open and flung himself into the drugstore, catching one of the fountain stools for balance as he stopped. He leaned on it for a moment while he waited for his breath to slow.

They were probably figuring the smart percentage. One man with his pack wasn’t temptation enough. He and the girl definitely were, once they were close together again, where a simple dash under cover of night would reach their bodies. But the girl by herself was safe from all but the myopic, and he, separated from her, was also moderately safe. A handful of packages from the drugstore might tip the scales against him—until you stopped to consider that the best thing to do was to wait until he had rejoined the girl, in which case, if the potential sniper already had a woman…

Sick with calculations, he slammed his palms against the edge of the Formica counter-top and pushed himself away from the fountain.

Among the jumbled shelves, he found a bottle of germicide, some cotton swabs, and bandages. He packed them carefully into his knapsack, cursing himself for not asking whether the bullet was still in the wound. He shrugged as he realized that surgical forceps were an unlikely instrument to encounter here, drugstore or no. Then he turned toward the outline of the doorway, light in the store’s darkness, and stopped.

The store was safe, he found himself thinking. The girl had proved that for him by coming out alive. He had reached it, and now that he was in, it was an easily defended place.

Outside lay Fourteenth Street—a gray bend of sidewalk, swept partially clean by the wind, and the dusty blue-black of the street’s asphalt. Beyond it hunched the sheer, blank-windowed brick buildings, and beyond these, the ice-blue sky. There were no waiting rifles—not where he would be likely to see them.

He looked about him. There must be something else he could find that might be useful. If he looked around, he was pretty sure to stumble across something. If he looked around long enough. If he waited.

He laughed once, shortly, at himself, and stepped out into the street, breaking into a run as frantic as the girl’s had been, his chest pumping, his stride off-balance from the shifting weight of the pack, the sweat breaking out on his face and evaporating icily.

He realized that he was afraid, and then he was across the street and safely on the island, sprawled out on his panting stomach, between the cars. He looked up at the girl and suddenly understood that his fear had been of losing the future.

He waited a few moments for the pumping of his lungs to slow. The girl was looking at him with some incomprehensible expression shining on her face.

Finally he said, “Now, let’s get you home. You start, and I’ll cover you from behind.”

The girl nodded wordlessly, putting aside whatever it was that she had been going to say, and turned up the island in the direction from which he had come. He followed her, and they worked their way back toward First Avenue, neither of them speaking except for his occasional growled monosyllable whenever her crouch grew dangerously shallow.

Moving quietly, they reached a point opposite the entrance to the Stuyvesant building on the corner of First Avenue. The girl stopped, and Garvin closed the ten-yard interval between them, crouching beside her.

He felt his left hand’s fingers twitch as the indecisive restlessness of his muscles searched for an outlet. The girl could simply leave him at this point, and it might be years before he saw another woman, particularly one who was free. At least, he assumed she was free. What kind of man would let his woman go out alone like this? If she had one, he didn’t deserve to keep her.

Garvin laughed at himself again, disregarding her surprise at the short, sharp bark.

“It was still dark when I went down to the drugstore,” she said, her voice betraying her helplessness. “But it took me so long to find anything. How are we going to get back across to the building?”

Once more, Garvin’s trained habits of thought protested their momentary shock at her foolhardiness. She had already betrayed the fact that her home was virtually undefended. Now she seemed to have unquestionably assumed that he was going home with her.

He shook his head, even while he jeered at himself because he was appalled at the girl for doing what he had feared she would not.

The girl was looking at him questioningly, and again there was something else in her glance, as well. A flicker of annoyance creased his cheeks at his failure to understand it completely.

He repeated the head-shake. “Going to have to run for it. It’ll be easier with two of us, though,” he said. “You’ll go first. I’ll cover you, and then you’ll keep an eye out when I try it. If you see anything, shoot at it.” He hefted his shotgun, grimacing. It was a good defensive weapon, suited to fighting in stores or houses, but its effective range was pitifully short. He wished now that he had a rifle instead.

He shrugged and made sure the shotgun was off safety. He jerked his head toward the building. “Let’s go.”

“All right,” she said huskily. She turned and slipped between two cars, put her head down, and ran blindly across the drive and sidewalk, down the short flight of steps to the terrace, and into the building’s doorway, where she stopped and waited for Garvin.

He took a quick look around, saw nothing, and followed her, running as fast as he could, his legs scissoring in long, zig-zagging strides, his back muscles tense with his awareness of how exposed he was.

He reached the steps, his momentum carrying him sideward, and had to catch himself against the rail while a sudden spray of bullets from across the street crashed into the concrete steps, raising an echo of hammer-blows to the flat, wooden sounds of gunfire. Lead streaks smeared across the concrete, and puffs of dust drifted slowly away.

Then he was under the rail and in the shelter of the sunken terrace, his hands and face bleeding from the laceration of the hedge, while his breath panted past the dirt in his open mouth and his heart pumped rapidly and loudly.

The girl began firing back.

He twisted violently, breaking free of the thousand teeth the hedge had sunk into his clothes, and stared at the girl in the doorway, one leg folded under her, the other bent and thrust out, her left hand gripping her knee and the muzzle of her revolver supported at her left elbow. As if she were firing at a paper target set up on the opposite rooftop. She squeezed off two shots and waited.