Some Will Not Die

by Algis Budrys

  “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.

  II

  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.

  East of First Avenue, lines of parked cars bleached at the flank of Stuyvesant Town. Here, finally, something moved. The creeping edge of sunlight touched Matt Garvin’s eyes as he lay asleep in the back of a taxi.

  Garvin was instantly awake, but, at first, only a momentary twitch of his eyelids betrayed him to the day. Then his hand closed on the stock of his shotgun, and he raised his body slowly. His eyes probed at the streets and buildings around him. He smiled in thin satisfaction. For the moment, he was all that lived on Fourteenth Street.

  He slid his legs off the folded backs of the lowered jump seats, and sat up. The cab was safe enough, with the windows up and the doors locked—no one could have forced them silently—but there could have been men out there, waiting for the time when he had to come out.

  He bent over, unstrapped his knapsack, and took out his canteen and a tin of roast beef. He opened the roast beef and began to eat, raising his head from time to time to be sure that no one was slipping toward him along the line of parked cars. He ate without waste motion, taking an occasional swallow of the flat-tasting but safe soda water in his canteen. He had run out of Halazone long ago. When the roast beef was finished he repacked his knapsack, strapped it on his upper back, and, after one more look at his surroundings, clicked up the latch on the taxi door and silently moved out onto the cobblestoned island that was one of a series separating Fourteenth Street from the peripheral drive around Stuyvesant Town.

  Cars were parked on both sides of the narrow island, their bumpers almost touching. The big red buildings towered upward on Garvin’s left as he moved eastward along the housing project’s edge, but the cars on that side protected him from any kind of accurate fire from the lower floors. In order to aim at him from the upper stories, a man would have had to lean so far out of his window as to expose himself to fire from the opposite side of the street. Garvin himself was protected from the south side of Fourteenth Street by the line of cars on his right. Moreover, one man and his knapsack were not generally a worthwhile target, any longer.

  Still, worthwhile or not, he picked his route carefully, and held to a low, weaving crouch. Holding the shotgun at high port, he moved rapidly eastward between the twin lines of cars, his eyes never still, his feet in their tennis shoes less noisy than the wind, his head constantly turning as he listened for what his eyes might miss.

  And it was his ears that warned him at the corner of Avenue A. He heard the quiet sound of a store’s latched door, which was bound to snap its lock no matter how carefully eased into place, and then there was the friction of leather shoes on a sidewalk.

  He stopped, sheltered by an automobile’s curved flanks, and the shotgun’s muzzle swung almost automatically toward the source of the sound. He straightened his back cautiously and looked across the street through the car’s rear windows, his breath sucking in through his teeth as he saw her.

  The girl was slim; sprinting across the sidewalk in nervously choppy strides as she left the drugstore. Her face was white, and her eyes were terrifiedly wide. Obviously panicked at being out in the street during daylight, she was running blindly, straight for where Garvin was crouched, trying to reach the comparative safety of the island before she was seen.

  He took two rapid steps backward before he realized there was no place for him to hide, and the girl was across the street before he could think of anything else to do. Then she was on the island, ducking into the shelter of the double row of cars, and it was too late to think.

  She hadn’t seen him yet. She was too intent on safety to see danger until he straightened out of his instinctive crouch, letting the shotgun’s muzzle drop. Then her mouth opened, her eyes becoming desperate, and he saw the unexpected gun in her other hand.

  “Hey!” He shouted in surprise as he charged forward, throwing his arm out. He felt the shock of his forearm deflecting her wrist upward, and then the gun jumped in her hand, the echoes pattering like a hard-shoe dance down the empty street. His charge threw their bodies together, and his arm hooked like a whip and pinned her gun-arm out of the way. His thighs snapped together in time to take the kick of her driving knee, but he could only dig his chin into her shoulder and try to shelter his face against the side of her head as her other hand clawed at his ear and neck. Then his momentum overcame her balance, and they were safely down on the island’s cobblestones.

  “Stay down!” he grunted urgently as he twisted around and slapped the gun out of her hand, catching it before it could be damaged against the stones. She sobbed an incoherent reply, and her nails drew fresh blood from his face. He fell back, but threw his shoulder into her stomach in time to keep her from forcing her way back to her feet.

  “Haven’t you got any sense?” he cursed out hoarsely as she tried to break away. He flung an arm out and kept her scrambling fingers from his eyes. “Every gun in the neighborhood’s waiting for us to stand up and get shot.”

  “Oh!” She stopped struggling immediatel
y, and this unexpected willingness to believe him was more surprising than his first glimpse of her. As her arms dropped, he rolled away, wiping the blood off his stinging face.

  “For Christ’s sake!” he panted, “What did you think I was going to do?”

  Her face turned color. “I—”

  “Don’t be stupid!” he cut her off harshly. “Do you have any idea how many women were left alive by that damn virus, or whatever it was?” She winced away from the sound of his voice, surprising him again. How did she manage to stay alive, this naive and sensitive? “Raping a girl sort of ruins your chances for striking up a permanent acquaintance with her,” he went on in a gentler voice, and was oddly pleased to see a smile lightly touch her face.

  “Here.” He tossed her gun into her lap. “Reload.”

  “What?” She was staring down at it.

  “Reload, damn it,” he repeated with rough persistence. “You’re one round short.” She picked the weapon up gingerly, but snapped the cylinder out as if she knew what she was doing, and he felt free to forget her for the moment.

  He pulled his legs up under him and got into a squat crouch, turning his upper body from side to side as he tried to spot the sniper he was almost sure the sound of her shot had attracted. One man was a doubtful target, but the two of them were worth anyone’s attention, and he did not trust that anyone’s eyesight to save the girl.

  The windows of Fourteenth Street looked blankly back at him. For some reason, he shuddered slightly.

  “Do you see anyone?” the girl asked softly, surprising him again, for he had forgotten her as an individual even while adding her as a factor to the problem of safety.

  He shook his head. “No. That’s what worries me. Somebody should have been curious enough to look out. Probably, somebody was—and now he’s picked up a rifle.”

  Apprehension overlaid her face. “What’re we going to do? I’ve got to get home.” She fumbled in her jumper pockets until she found a tube of sulfa ointment. “My father’s hurt.”

  He nodded briefly. At least that explained why she’d been outside. Then he grimaced. “Gunshot wound?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thought so. That stuff’s no good. Not anymore.”

  “There were so many kinds of things in the drugstore,” she said uncertainly. “This was the only one I was sure of. Is it too old?”

  He shrugged. “Way past its expiration date, that’s for sure. And I’ve got a hunch we’re up against whole new kinds of bacteria that won’t even blink at the stuff. Every damn antibiotic in the world was turned loose, I guess, and what lived through that is what we’ve got to deal with. These days, my vote’s for soap and carbolic acid.

  “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.