by Algis Budrys
“But not now,” Cottrell said. “Now, I wouldn’t entrust my daughter to anyone but a hunter.
“And I’m making you a hunter, Matt. I’m leaving you this dowry: responsibility, in the form of what my daughter will need to make her happy. In addition, I leave you the apartment as a base of operations, together with the stove, the water still, and the fuel oil. The First Avenue entrances to the Canarsie Line subway are on the corner. That tunnel connects with all the others under the city. They’ll be a relatively safe trail through the jungle this city has become. You’ll be able to get water from the seepage, too. Distilled water is easily restored to its natural taste by aeration with an eggbeater.
“Last of all, Matt, you’ll find my rifle beside the door. It’s a mankiller. There’s ammunition in the hall closet.
“That’s your environment, Matt. Change it.”
He stopped and sighed. “That’s all.”
Garvin sat silently, watching the old man’s breathing.
What would Cottrell have done if his daughter hadn’t brought a man home? Probably, he would have found comfort in the thought that, across the world, there were thousands of young men and women. His personal tragedy would have been trivial, on that scale.
Yes, doubtless. But would it have made the personal failure any less painful? Cottrell’s philosophy was logical enough—but, once again, in the face of actual practice, logic seemed not enough. Just as now, with all the philosophy expounded, there was still the problem of Margaret’s reaction.
Sweat trickled coldly down Garvin’s chest.
“By the way, Matt,” Cottrell said dryly, “For a young man who doubtless thinks of himself as not being a cave dweller, you’re apparently having a good deal of trouble recognizing the symptoms of shy young love, American girl style.”
Garvin stared at the old man, who went on speaking as though he did not see his flush, smiling broadly as he savored the secret joke he had discovered in his first glances at Margaret and Matt.
“And now, if you’ll call Margaret in here, I think we ought to bring her up to date.” He coughed violently again, grimacing at this reminder, but when he flung the bloody tissue into the wastebasket, it was a gesture of victory.
* * *
Five months later, Matt Garvin padded silently through the dark of Macy’s, his magnum rifle held diagonally across his body. He moved easily, for his knapsack was lightly loaded, even when stuffed full of the clothing he’d picked up for Margaret.
Though he made no sound, he chuckled ruefully in his mind. First it had been one thing Margaret needed, and then another, until finally he was going farther and farther afield. Well, it was the way things were, and nothing could be done about it.
A shadow flitted across the lighter area near a door, and he stopped in his tracks, wishing his breath were not so sibilant. Damn, he’d have to work out some kind of breathing technique! Then the other man crossed the light again, and Garvin moved forward. There was a cartridge in the magnum’s chamber, of course, and he was ready to fire instantly. But he could almost be sure there was someone else down here, prowling the counters, and he didn’t want to fire if it could be avoided.
On the other hand, if he waited much longer, he might lose the man in front of him.
With a mental shrug, he threw the rifle up to his shoulder and shot the man down, dropping instantly to the floor as he did so. The echoes shattered through the darkness.
Another man fired from behind a display and charged him, grunting. Matt sprang to his feet, the magnum swinging butt-first, and broke his neck. He stopped to listen, ready to fire in any direction, but there was no sound. He grinned coldly.
He stopped to strip the packs from both corpses before he vanished into the darkness. He thought to himself, not for the first time, that a rifle was too clumsy for close-in combat—that if the man had been able to block the magnum’s swing, things might easily have worked out another way. What you needed for this sort of situation was a pistol.
But he was still reluctant to think of himself as a man with much occasion for one.
CHAPTER TWO
Three years went by.
His boots full of frigid water, and his rifle securely strapped to his pack, Matt Garvin was picking his way through the trash in the drainage channel between the subway rails. A hundred feet ahead of him, dim light from a roof grating patched out the darkness, and he ran his thumb over the safety catch of the Glock he had looted out of a littered pawnshop drawer on Eighth Avenue. He stopped for a moment, opened his mouth to quiet the sound of his breath, and listened.
Water dripped from a girder to the concrete of the station platform ahead of him. Behind him in the tunnel—at about the Third Avenue entrance, he judged—someone else was moving. That was all right. There were two long blocks between them, and he’d be out of the tunnel by the time the other man was within dangerous distance.
He listened again, disregarding the faint splash of water on the platform, the different but equally unimportant slosh up the tunnel.
He heard nothing, and his eyes, probing as much of the First Avenue station platforms as he could see, found nothing but dim gray, bounded by the converging lines of platform and roof, broken by the vertical thrust of girders.
Moving forward cautiously, he reached a point near the beginning of the north side platform, and stopped to listen again. Nothing moved.
He pulled himself up on the platform and lay flat, the Glock ready, but there was no scrape of motion, either on this platform or on the one across the tracks, and none of the indistinct shadows changed their shapes as he watched them. Nevertheless, as a final if somewhat inconclusive check, he listened to the water droplets as they fell steadily from the girder to the platform. Sometimes a man got careless and let such a drop hit him, interrupting the beat.
But there was nothing. He pushed himself up off his stomach, crouched, and padded quietly to the tiled wall beside the foot of the stairs.
A few months ago, he had tried putting up a mirror there, in order to see up the stairs without exposing himself. It had been smashed within a few days, and he had been especially cautious for a while, but no one had ever been waiting for him at the head of the stairs. He had finally come to the conclusion that someone else must have solved the problem ahead of him. A fresh corpse at the street entrance had tended to confirm this—the possibility that it was only a decoy had been discarded as an overcomplication.
It had been good to feel that he had an ally—if only in this vague, circumstantial way. It was no indication that the very man responsible might not be his killer tomorrow, but there was enough of an idealist left in Garvin to allow him a certain satisfaction at this proof that there was at least one other man somewhere near who could draw the distinction between self-protection and deliberate trap-setting. However, he had never tried to replace the mirror.
He listened again as a matter of routine, heard nothing, and waited. After ten minutes, there had still been no sound, and knowing that his own approach had been silent, he broke suddenly and silently for the opposite wall, gun ready to fire in his hand.
There was no one at the head of the stairs. He crept upward cautiously, found no one at the turnstile level, and reached the foot of the stairs to the street.
It was unlikely that there would be anyone up there, exposed to the daylight. Moreover, if he made his passage into the building fast enough, he was unlikely to have any trouble. Lately, there had not been any considerable amount of sniping from windows. Ammunition was running low, and the possible rewards of nighttime scavenging from the corpses were not usually worth the expenditure.
Shifting the straps of his pack into a tighter position, he moved carefully up the steps, took a sweeping look at the deserted length of Fourteenth Street, and zig-zagged across the sidewalk at a run. His beating footsteps were a sudden interruption in the absence of sound. As he reached the entrance to his building and slipped inside the door, silence returned.
In the darkn
ess of the lobby, Garvin’s shoes whispered on worn rubber matting, for it had been raining on the last day the building staff had functioned. The firedoor on the stairwell clicked open and shut, and his steps on the cement stairs were regular taps of leather as he climbed. He was not completely relaxed—above the sound of his own footsteps, he listened for the noise that might be made by someone else in the stairwell. Nevertheless, though there were other people scattered throughout the fifty-odd apartments in the building, no one had ever attacked anyone else within the building itself. There had to be a sort of mutual respect between the families. The thought of fighting within the twists and corridors of the building, with every closed door a deathtrap, was not an attractive one. The stairwell, in particular, was the only means of passage to the world outside. Only a psychopath would have risked obstructing it.
He reached his floor and stepped out on the landing with only a minimum amount of precaution. He crossed the corridor to his own door, unlocked it, and stepped inside, holstering his gun. The shot roared out of the hallway leading from the bedrooms and crashed into the metal doorframe beside him.
Garvin leaped sideward, landing on the kitchen floor with a thud. His fingers slapped against his gun butt, hooked around it, and the gun was in his hand, his feet under him in a slash of motion as he rolled and flung himself backward behind the stove. The breath whistled out of his nostrils and back in through his mouth in an uneven gasp.
There was no sound in the apartment. He turned his head from side to side, trying to find some noise—a hand on a doorknob, a footstep on linoleum—that would tell him where his attacker was.
There was nothing.
The kitchen was beside the apartment door. Beyond it was the dining alcove and the living room, and beyond that were two bedrooms opening on a hall that ran the remainder of the apartment’s length. The bathroom was at the end of the hall, its door facing the apartment entrance. The man could have fired from either bedroom, or from the bathroom itself.
Where was the man—and where was Margaret? Garvin’s knuckles cracked as his hand tightened on the gun’s butt, and his face became almost stuporous in its lack of overt expression.
Keeping his gun ready, Garvin moved forward until he was barely hidden inside the kitchen doorway. His mind was busy searching out and separating the remembered impressions of the attack.
The shot had been fired in the hall. It was impossible to decide how far back. Had the man moved after firing? He tried to remember if there had been any other sound. No, he decided. Wherever the shot had come from, there the man still was.
What had happened to Margaret? His jaw tightened as he considered the possibilities.
If she had seen the man come in, she might have tried to shoot him—if she had been near her gun. If not, she might still be hiding somewhere in the apartment, waiting for Garvin to come home. If the man had gotten in without her knowing it…
The possibilities were indeterminate, he told himself savagely. Whatever had happened, in any case, there was nothing he could do about it now. If she were still hidden, it was up to her to handle that part of the situation as her judgment dictated. There was still no sound in the apartment.
How long had the man been here? If Margaret was still alive and undiscovered, would the hidden man stumble on her if he was forced to move on to another room? Her gun was probably in the larger bedroom. Was she there, waiting for a chance to get a shot in?
He could count on nothing to help him. He and Margaret had both learned all the tricks that life in New York demanded. He would have to act as though he could be sure that she would know how to take care of herself. But he was not sure.
The silence continued. He had to get the man moving; had to get some idea of his location. And he needed freedom of movement. He unstrapped his magnum and carefully set it aside.
Backing up noiselessly, Garvin reached behind him and opened the casement window, pushing the panel slowly. The guide rod slid in its track with a muted sound.
“Please!”
The voice, distorted by the echoes of the hallway, was frightened and anxious. Garvin snatched his hand away from the window.
It was quiet again. The man had stopped. but the quavering print of his voice was still playing back in Garvin’s mind.
And suddenly he understood how he would feel, unexpectedly trapped in a strange apartment. Every corner would have its concealed death, each step its possible drastic consequence. Was the pitiful hope of whatever goods could be brought away worth the stark terror of unknown deadliness?
He opened the window a bit farther.
“Please! No! I…” The words rushed out of the shadowed hallway. “I’m—I’m sorry! I was frightened…”
Garvin’s lips stretched in a reflex grin. If the man actually thought Garvin was somehow going to cross from window ledge to window ledge along the building’s sheer outside wall, he had to be in a room where he was open to such an attack.
He couldn’t be in the bathroom. The large bedroom was in the corner of the apartment. By the time a man inching along the building’s face could possibly reach it, it would be easy to take any number of steps to handle the situation. The man had to be in the smaller bedroom, the one nearest the living room. And he had to be standing at the door.
The door to the small bedroom was set flush with the wall, and opened to the left. In order to defend the room or fire down the hallway, the door would have to be completely open. Therefore, the man’s hand and arm were exposed, and, most probably, his face as well.
The man had to maintain his position in command of the hall. If Garvin could once get a clear lane of fire down the hallway, it was the other man who was trapped in an exitless room.
But the hall was dark, while the living room had a large window, the light of which would have made it suicidal for Garvin to step out.
Once again, he thought of Margaret. He fought down the urgency of the impulse to cry out for her. If the other man didn’t know about her, it was so much more advantage on Garvin’s side.
Grimly, Garvin worked the mechanism of the Glock as noisily as possible. The sound, like the slip of the window’s guide rod, was designed only to make his unknown adversary go into a deeper panic. There had already been a bullet in the chamber. He ejected it carefully into his palm and put it in his pocket. He pushed the window completely open, thudding the guide-rod home against its stop.
“Please! Listen to me!” The panicked voice began again. “I want to be friends.”
Garvin stopped.
“Are you listening?” the man asked hesitatingly.
There was no accompanying sound of movement from the bedroom. The man was maintaining his position at the door. Garvin cursed silently and did not answer.
“I haven’t talked to anybody for years. Not even shouted at them, or cursed. All I’ve done for six years is fight other people. Shooting, running. I didn’t dare show myself in daylight.
“It isn’t worth it. Staying alive isn’t worth it. Grubbing through stores for food at night. Like an animal in a garbage can!” The trembling voice was filled with desperate disgust.
“Are you listening?”
Unseen, Garvin’s eyes grew bleak, and he nodded. He remembered the odd touch of kinship he had felt with the man who had killed the stalker at the subway entrance. The mirror at the turn of the steps had been an attempt to make at least that small part of his environment a bit less dangerous. When the stalker smashed it, it meant that there were still men who would kill for the sake of a knapsack that might or might not contain food.
“Please,” the man in the bedroom said. “You’ve got to understand why I—I came in here. I had to find some people I could talk to. I knew there were people in this building. I got a passkey out of the Stuyvesant Town offices. I wanted to find an apartment for myself. I was going to try to make friends with my neighbors.”
Garvin twitched a corner of his mouth. He could picture an attempt at communication with the deadly silence
and armed withdrawal that lurked through the apartments beyond his own walls.
“Can’t you say something?” the panic-stricken man demanded.
Garvin scraped the Glock’s barrel against the window frame, as though an armed man were beginning to clamber out on one of the nonexistent window ledges.
“No! Think! How much food can there be left, where we can get to it? There are whole gangs in the warehouses, and they won’t let anybody near them. The rifle ammunition’s getting low already. How long can we go on this way—fighting over every can of peas, killing each other over a new shirt? We’ve got to organize ourselves—get a system set up, try to establish some kind of government. It’s been six years since the plague, and nothing’s been done.”
The man stopped for a moment, and Garvin listened for the sound of motion, but there was nothing.
“I—I’m sorry I shot at you. I was frightened. Everybody’s frightened. They don’t trust anybody. How can they?”
Talk, talk, talk! What have you done with Margaret, damn you?
“But please—please trust me.” The unsteady voice was on the point of breaking. “I want to be friends.”
Despite his fear, the man obviously wasn’t going to move from his position until he was absolutely sure that Garvin was out on the window ledges. Even then… Garvin pictured the man, trembling against the door, not sure whether to run or stay, keeping watch on the hallway, ready to spin around at the sound of breaking glass behind him.
He was frightened, now. But had he been? Was it only after that one shot had missed, and the self-made trap had snapped home, that the terror had begun to tremble in his throat?
What had happened to Margaret?
Garvin moved back to the kitchen doorway.
“Come out,” he said.
* * *
There was a sigh from the bedroom door—a ragged exhalation that might have been relief. The man’s shoes shuffled on the linoleum of the bedroom floor, and his heel struck the metal sill. He moved out into the hall, thin, his hollowed eyes dark against his pale face.
