Some Will Not Die

by Algis Budrys

  He rolled over in his bunk and clasped his hands behind his head, staring up at the lamplit ceiling.

  There was no use trying to beat the system of watchers they had set up. Even when it was only Pat who was with him, there was a pistol holstered to her belt, and Drumm had meant what he’d said about his going unarmed. That had been an uncomfortable feeling to shake off in itself. His rifle was so much part of him that he had grown accustomed to its weight to balance him. He found himself misjudging the height of his shoulder, or overestimating the muscular effort needed to lift his arm. He’d felt awkward and clumsy without it, and in this short time, hadn’t quite gotten over it yet.

  But he could get used to it, and get used to having it back, when the time came. Because the town’s weak spot was its smallness. He was in constant contact with everyone. In a while, they’d be completely accustomed to the sight of him. If he talked to them, and listened to what they had to say, he’d gradually become one of them. In time, too, he might start working a small field of his own. Perhaps he’d build a house. Give them a hundred signs that he was here to stay—tied to the town in the same way they were.

  And then, one night, he’d disappear, and they’d be left to look for a new sheriff. And, as he’d considered before, it was just barely possible that Pat might be willing to go along with him by then.

  He grinned quietly.

  “What have you got to be happy about?” Drumm asked. Jeff’s grin widened. At the moment, everybody in town tacitly accepted, small-town fashion, that Pat was Drumm’s girl.

  “Oh, nothing special,” he said. He lay awake for a few minutes longer, and then went quietly to sleep.

  Winter came, and during its first weeks, as the plains outlaws were driven to stock whatever miserable shelters they had managed for themselves, Jeff was busy day and night. He’d spent his last winter in a cave cut into a riverbank, and he knew what the thought-processes were that rose from the sort of life. By October, he’d nailed four figurative hides to the barn door, and then the snow blocked everything off until the desperate, half- starved men began floundering toward the town in mid-December. Meanwhile, he spent his time talking to Pat or Drumm.

  Drumm was as interested in his past as Pat had been, for an entirely different reason. He showed Jeff the boxed shears of paper covered by his father’s precise, economical handwriting.

  “A Study of the Effects of Personal Arms on Conventional Theories of Modern Government, by Harvey Haggard Drumm, with a bow to Silas McKinley,” Jeff read, and looked up at Pete in curiosity. “A History of Theodore Berendtsen’s Northern Campaign,” he read from the label of another box, “With Additional Personal Notes.”

  “Dad was in on that one,” Pete explained. “He was a corporal under one of Matt Garvin’s sons.”

  Well I’ll be triple goddamned! Jeff thought. He looked at another box of manuscript, labeled The Care and Feeding of the Intellectual Militant.

  “And you’re hanging on to these in hopes of getting them to a printing press sometime?” he asked.

  “Better than that,” Pete said. “I’m trying to add to them. That’s why I’m so interested in your story. I want to write it down. I want to be able to have other people learn from it. See, we’re doing all right, down here. Things starting up, even without Berendtsen’s people having gone through here. Because my father came through here.”

  “Just writing books?”

  “Just writing books, and telling people what was in them, and about how in the East things were getting better. It makes a big difference when you know somebody’s found a way out of the hole, even if you haven’t, yet. You keep looking. You don’t just curl up and die. I guess that’s the best excuse for Berendtsen and his bully-boys. They had to live so my father could talk about the way things were getting started. But we’re past that time, now. And I’m damned glad.” Pete looked at Jeff with shrewd appraisal in his eyes. “I wouldn’t want to see any more gunmen trying to keep going, around here.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What ever happened to your father, anyway?” Jeff asked. He didn’t like the way the conversation was going.

  Pete smiled softly. “I don’t know. I guess I was about ten or twelve when Ryder’s bunch came through here, heading for Texas. My mother had just died, and my older brother, Jim, was big enough to run our place with my help. Pop was a rotten farmer anyway, so he talked it over with us, and when Ryder’s bunch pulled out, he packed up all the blank paper he could carry and went off with them. I sort of wanted to tag along, but Pop stepped on that idea hard. He was right, I guess. Ryder wasn’t doing any fighting he could avoid, but it was still a hard life.

  “Worked out best in the end, too, when Jim got killed by one of you boys. If I’d of gone, there wouldn’t have been anybody left to work the place.”

  “What difference would that make, if you weren’t here to see it?”

  Drumm shrugged uncertainly. “I know. But I’m here. It just—I don’t know, it just feels that way.”

  Jeff tried to imagine that trait of character that would make a man think in those terms about a tract of land much like any other tract, anywhere. But he had to give up on that.

  Bit by bit, he told Drumm the story of what his life had been like, beginning with his father’s death and carefully ending with Alister’s marriage to Barbara, and his departure from home. He had to watch himself to make sure he didn’t let his real name slip, but otherwise he was able to let the story run almost automatically.

  For some reason, a comment that Pete made on Cot’s death stayed with him. He found himself thinking about it at unexpected times and places.

  “I’m sorry he died,” Pete said, “because I’m sorry for anybody who dies. But I’m glad for his sake he did. A man shouldn’t outlive his times.” He looked up and speared Jeff with his glance. “Once he’s decided for certain on what his times really are.”

  Jeff couldn’t seem to shake the words loose.

  * * *

  When he’d been there a year, his patient plan reached its first goal. He had kept up his duties faithfully, and had stayed away from the telephone wire crew, talking to them only when he encountered them by accident, and not trying to send out any messages or ask for help of any kind. It would have been a futile move in any case, for his kind of man had no friends, and no hope of help, but, more important, he had known the townspeople were watching.

  They gave him credit on a small plot of land, and he found time enough during the day to work it. He had to be awake most of the night, but he worked his land as hard as anyone worked theirs, while Pat showed him how. His face pinched while his shoulders broadened, and the thin layer of winter fat ran off him in muddy streams of perspiration. When he caught a raider stealing his young corn, he shot him through the elbow of his gun-arm.

  That complete unpremeditated move tipped the scales in his favor, he realized later. The one man who still rode out with him was confidently careless about enforcing the original rules, and if he hadn’t wanted Pat so much by then, he could have shot him and left any time he chose. He debated it briefly, but realized that Pat would never go with him on that basis, and stuck to his original plan.

  Wait a year, he told himself. In a year, they’d practically let him carry the town out on his back.

  That fall, he started building his house. Left to himself, he might have thrown up a one-room shack of some kind, but he had enough offers of help to make a bigger project possible. Moreover, if he built a place large enough for a family, there was something as good as a display poster to advertise his intention of settling down. He realized how right he’d been when he caught Pat’s mother and father looking at the two of them over the dinner table and exchanging sly glances.

  It seemed to help in his long campaign to wear Pat down, too.

  And finally, when the next spring came, he knew it was time. He slept in the house alone, riding in and out of town with his rifle in his saddle boot any tim
e he chose. He called everybody in the town by their first names, and he seldom had to eat his own cooking. The people of Kalletsburg had forgotten he was a raider, an outlaw.

  Even Pete Drumm had forgotten, for he was as sour toward him as he would have been toward any other equal who was winning the contest over Pat.

  Only me, he thought. I haven’t forgotten.

  He waited until the moon died, and picked a night when it was cloudy enough to rain, piling packs on one of his two horses and working on his rifle until even its slowly deteriorating barrel shone without a trace of pitting. Then he waited patiently, until he was sure Pat’s parents would be asleep. He sat in his darkened house and counted slow time. Finally, he moved.

  He walked his horses quietly to a stand of cottonwood near the Bartons’ house and hitched them there, moving the rest of the way on foot. Without a trace of having lost his old skill, he went into the shed and saddled Pat’s horse, and then circled the house.

  And he came, inevitably, to the dining room window, which was still the easiest. Well, he thought, it’s a full circle.

  Grinning with cold mirth, he slid through the loose window and stood once more in the Bartons’s dining room at night.

  He fumed inwardly in response to a by now automatic reflex. He’d told Arnold a dozen times if he’d told him once to fix that window. But the old man just smiled and insisted that Jeff was all the protection he needed.

  He shook his head angrily. Well, this’d teach him.

  “Look boy,” Pat said from the darkness, “the only bathroom in this house is still next to the dining room. Can’t you learn?”

  He sagged against the wall.

  Pat came over to him and took his hand. “You must want something awful bad to keep sneaking in here. I hope it’s me.”

  “I—” And all of a sudden, he couldn’t say it. He felt foolish, caught here, and somehow awkward, and completely ridiculous.

  “I—” he began again, and felt something break open inside him. “Damn it,” he said bewilderedly, “I was going to ask you to take off with me. But I can’t do it! I can’t leave this goddamn town!”

  Pat reached out and held him, her hand tousling his hair fondly. “You damn fool,” she said, “of course you can’t! You’re civilized.”

  II

  And this happened in the north:

  Joe Custis stepped out of the dead commander’s hut into the flickering shadows from the cookfires. There was a rifleman posted about ten yards away, and Custis looked at him thoughtfully. Then he called, in a voice pitched to reach the man and no farther. “Hey—the boss wants some light in here!”

  The man grunted and went to one of the near fires for a sliver of burning wood. He carried it back, shelding it carefully with his hands. “First no lights, and now lights,” he grumbled as he stepped through the doorway. He reached up to a shelf where an oil lamp was sitting, and stopped dead as he dimly saw Henley on the floor and the commander lying across the desk. “Now, who the hell’d be dumb enough to kill the commander right in camp…”

  Custis whipped the flat of his hand across the side of the man’s neck. He caught the burning light carefully, crushed it out on the floor. Then he stepped outside again, gently closing the door behind him. He walked slowly away until he was fifty feet away from the huts, in the shadows, and then he turned toward the fire where he had seen Jody working. He had the knife in his belt under his shirt, and as he walked he rolled up his bloody sleeves. His skin gathered itself into gooseflesh under the night wind’s chill.

  When he was fairly close to the fire, he changed his pace until he was simply strolling. He walked up to the fire, listening for the first sounds from the hut on the other side of the camp. “Jody.”

  She looked up, wiping the wet hair off her forehead with the back of a hand. “Hi, soldier! Come for supper?”

  He shook his head. “Still want to come to Chicago?”

  She straightened up. “Just a minute.”

  She stirred the food in the pot, let the spoon slide back into it, and picked up her water pail. “Ready,” she said.

  “Let’s go.”

  They walked toward the spring. Out of the firelight, she touched his forearm. “You’re not kidding me?”

  “No. You know how to get down to where the car is?

  “Yeah.” She put the water pail down. “Come on.”

  As they walked up the rise to the galley entrance, she gripped his hand. “Anything go wrong, Joe? You get hurt, or something?”

  “No.”

  “There’s blood on your shirt.”

  “Henley’s.”

  “You sure?”

  “He spilled it. It belongs to him.”

  She took a deep breath. “There’s gonna be hell to pay.”

  “Can’t help it. It worked out that way.” He was trying to remember the exact positions the grenadiers had been in.

  They came to where the two machinegun pits covered the trail into the valley, and one of the men there heard them walking. “Who’s that?”

  “Me. Jody.”

  The man chuckled. “Hey, Jody! You bringin’ me my supper?” The other man laughed out of the darkness.

  “Not right now, Sam,” Jody answered. “I got somebody with me.”

  There was more laughter in the shadows among the rocks, and then they were past. They made their way down the mountainside, walking as quietly as they could on the loose rock, and then Custis heard a man’s shoes scrape as he settled himself more comfortably in his position.

  “We’re there,” Jody whispered.

  “Okay.” Custis oriented himself. After a minute, he was pretty sure where he was in relation to the car, and where everyone else would be.

  “What now, Joe?”

  “You walk on down. Let ’em hear you. Talk to ’em.”

  “You sure, Joe?”

  “Yeah. It’ll be okay.”

  “You’re not gonna leave me?”

  “I told you I’d take you, didn’t I?”

  “All right, Joe.” Her fingers trailed over his forearm. “Be seeing you.”

  “Give me twenty minutes,” he said, and slipped off among the rocks.

  He moved as noiselessly as he knew how, the knife ready in his hand. Once he stumbled over a man. “Scuse me, Buddy,” he mumbled.

  “Okay, pal,” he man answered. “Take one for me.”

  Farther down the mountains, he heard somebody say loudly: “Hey, it’s Jody! C’mere, Jody, gal.” He could feel the ripple of attention run through the men among the rocks. Equipment rattled as men leaned forward, sick of this duty and glad of something to watch, and maybe join in on.

  Now he was behind one of the grenade teams. He inched forward, found them, and after a minute he was moving on.

  The men where Jody was were laughing and tossing remarks back and forth. He heard her giggle.

  He found the next team craning forward to look down into a cup behind some rocks where a small fire had been built on the side away from the car. When he was through, he looked over the edge and saw Jody standing in the middle of a bunch of men. Her head was thrown back, and she was laughing.

  When he’d left the third emplacement, and was working toward the fourth, he heard the sound of a slap. A man yelled: “Hey, girl, don’t you treat me like that!” The rest of the men were laughing harshly.

  The fourth team was easy to handle.

  Working on the fifth, he missed the last man. It was a tricky business, getting the first with one sure swing and then going for the other before he could yell. This time the man rolled sideways, and there was nothing for Custis to do but kick at his head. He hit the man, but didn’t even knock him out. The man slid off the rock, yelling, and Custis scrambled as fast as he could to throw the box of grenades one way, the rifle another, and jumped for the car.

  “Lew! Open up! I’m coming in!” he bellowed as the night broke apart.

  Rifle fire yammered toward him as he ran, ricochets screaming off the rocks. The
car’s motors began to wind up. It was still as dark as the bottom of a bucket, and then Hutchinson fired the car’s flare gun. The world turned green.

  Custis slammed into the starboard track cover, threw himself on top of it, and clawed his way over the turtledeck. He rapped his knuckles quickly on the turret hatch, and Robb flung it back. Custis teetered on the edge of the coaming. The car’s machineguns opened up, hammering at the rocks. Custis heard a man screaming: “Where’s the damned grenades?”

  Then he heard the girl shouting: “Joe.”

  He stopped. He looked back toward the sound of her voice. “Oh, Christ!” he muttered. Then he sighed. “What the hell.” and shouted down into the turret: “Cover me!”

  He jumped down off the battlewagon, his boots resounding on the foreplates before he hit the ground. He pitched forward, smashing into the gravel, then threw himself erect and ran toward the spot.

  Rifle fire chucked into the ground around him. He weaved and jumped from side to side, floundering over the rocks. Hutchinson fired the next flare in the rack, and now the world was red, laced by the bright glow of the car’s tracers as the machineguns searched back and forth in their demiturrets. He heard the tracks slide and bite on the gravel, and the whole car groaned as the bogeys lurched it forward.

  The girl was running toward him, and there were men back in the rocks who were sighting deliberately now, taking good aim.

  “Joe!”

  * * *

  “All right, damn you!” He scooped her up and flung her toward the car ahead of him, feeling a crack of fire lace across his back. And then the car was practically on top of them. Lew had his driver’s hatch open, and Custis pushed the girl through. Then he was clambering up the side of the turret and into the command seat. “All right,” he panted into the command microphone. “Let’s go home.”

  The hatch dropped shut on top of him. He fell into the car, landing very hard on his side. Lew locked a track and spun them around. The inside of the car sounded like a wash boiler being pelted with stones.