"000001-some_wil" - читать интересную книгу автора (Budrys Algis)[Image] [Image]CHAPTER ONE: I Matthew Garvin was a young, heavy-boned man who had not yet filled out to his mature frame. His grip on his automatic shotgun was not too sure. But he had been picking his way through the New York City streets for two days, skirting the litter and other obstructions left by the plague, and the shotgun made him feel a great deal more comfortable--for all that he still half-expected a New York City policeman to step out from behind vie of the slewed, abandoned cars, or from one of the barricaded doorways, and arrest him for violating the Sullivan Act. His picture of the world's condition was fragmentary. Most of it was gleaned from remembered snatches of the increasingly sporadic news over the TV. And he had heard those only while lying in delirium, on a cot beside the room where his dying father kept death watch over the other members of his family. He had not truly come back to alertness until well after his father was dead and the TV was inoperative, though it was still switched on. All he could remember his father telling him, in all those days. was "If you live, don't forget to go armed." He was certain, now, that his father, probably delerious himself, had repeated it over and over, clutching his arm urgently and slurring the words, the way a man will when his rationality tries to force a message out through an almost complete loss of control. And when he had finally wakened, and known he was going to live, Matthew Garvin had found the Browning lying on the floor beside his cot, together with a box of shells still redolent of woodsmoke and old cleaning solvent. His father's old hunting knapsack had been there, too, stocked with canned food, waterproof matches, a flashlight, a compass, and a hunting knife, almost as if Matthew and he had been going to leave for the North Woods together. They had been doing that every deer season for the past four years. But this time it was his father's gear that Matthew would be carrying; and it was the big Browning, instead of the rifle. He had not questioned his father's judgment. He had strapped the knapsack on, and taken the shotgun, and then he had left the apartment--he could not have stayed, though he did his best to leave his family in some semblance of decent repose. At first, he had not quite known what he was going to do. Looking out the window, he could see nothing moving on the streets. A pall of gray mist hung over Manhattan--part fog, part smoke, from where something was burning and had not been put out. He had gone and taken the heavy binoculars from his father's closet and studied the two rivers. They were almost clear of floating debris of various kinds, and so he assumed the great wave of dying was over--those who still lived, would live. He had probably been one of the last to be sick. The streets and the waterfronts were a jumble of abandoned and wrecked equipment--cars, trucks, boats, barges--much as he had last seen them, on the night when he had realized he, too, was at last growing feverish and dry-mouthed. That had been after the government had abandoned the continual effort to keep the streets clear and people in their homes. Here and there, some of the main avenues had been opened, with cars and buses towed out of the way, lying as they had been dropped on the sidewalks. He could see one crane--a Metropolitan Transit Authority company emergency truck--where it had stopped, with a bright blue sports car still dangling from the tow hook. So there had not been time after he fell ill for anything to litter up the opened streets again. He tried the radio--he had read enough novels of universal disaster to know nothing would come of it, and for a while he had been undecided, but his human nature had won out--and there had been nothing. He listened for the hum he associated with the phrase "carrier wave," and did not hear that, either. He looked down at the baseboard, and saw that someone--probably his father--had ripped the line cord out of the wall so savagely that the bared ends of the wire dangled on the floor while the gutted plug remained in the socket. But he had not repaired it. The dead TV was good enough--in the end, he remembered, the final government announcement had been quite explicit--the President's twanging, measured voice had labored from phrase to phrase, explaining calmly that some would surely survive--that no disease, however impossible to check, could prove fatal to all human beings everywhere--but that the survivors should not expect human civilization to have endured with them. "To those of you who will live to re-make this world," the President had said, "my only promise is this: That with courage, with ingenuity, with determination--above all, with adherence to the moral principles that distinguish Man from the animals--the future is one of hope. The way will be hard. The effort will be great. But the future waits to be realized, and with God's help it shall be realized--it must be realized!" But that had not been much to go on. He had put the binoculars back--if someone had asked him, he would have replied that certainly he planned to come back to the apartment; he would not have stopped to think about it until he had actually heard his positive words--and he had left, climbing down flight after flight of stairs. [Image] He was on his way to Larry Ruark's apartment, he had realized at some point on his journey. Larry lived about fifty blocks uptown--by no means a difficult walk--and was a close friend from the time they had gone through the first two years of college together, before Larry had gone on to medical school. He had no way of knowing whether Larry had survived or not. But it seemed to him the chances were reasonably good. In part, they seem so to him because he was associating immunity with the word "doctor," and because he needed to find a friend alive; an undergraduate medical student to whom he gave an inappropriate title because that made his friend likelier to have lived. But in part, he knew, his reasoning was sound. Larry had been young, and in excellent health; that was bound to have improved his chances. Matthew Garvin had thought that surely he might find out more about the world, on his way to Larry's. He had expected to meet other survivors, and talk to them. He had expected that, between them, he and the other young, generally sound people could piece together an accurate idea of what the world's condition was. There was nothing to fear from contact with each other, after all--either they had the plague, and would die, or had successfully resisted it, and would not. The time of the Carrier Panic--before it had been proven the disease agent, whatever it was, did not need to be transmitted from human hand to hand-- that ugly time was over. But he had begun to wonder whether the other survivors were aware of that. And he had begun to wonder whether some of them might not have become insane. For though he sometimes heard quick footsteps whose direction was disguised by echoes, he had been able to meet no one face-to-face, and when he had stood and shouted, no one answered. He knew he had come late to the inevitable sickness. He wondered what it was the more experienced survivors might have found out that would make them act like this. Once he turned a corner and found someone who had survived the plague. It was a young man, canted awkwardly against a subway railing, dead, with fresh blood congealing around the stab wounds in his chest, and a torn grocery bag, empty, trampled at his feet. The streets were badly blocked in places, and he had been moving more and more slowly, out of the same caution that made him hole up and lock himself in a truck cab overnight. So it was the next day when he saw the placards. He was only a few blocks from Larry's then. The placards were Civil Defense Emergency Posters, turned around to expose their unprinted backs. Hand-lettered on them now were the words "Live Medic," and an arrow pointing uptown. After that, Matthew Garvin hurried. He was sure Larry Ruark had survived, now. And the placards were the first trace of some kind of organization. He had begun to think of the world as a place much like a locked museum at night...except for a sporadic, distant hint of sounds that were too much like isolated gunshots. He had heard the sounds of police machineguns, during the Carrier Panic, and the deep thud of demolition as the Isolation Squads tried to cordon off the stricken areas--that had been quite early in the game--but this was different. This was like the sound of foot-snapped twigs in a forest infested by Indians. The trail of placards led to Larry Ruark's apartment house. The barricade in the doorway had been pulled aside, and the front door stood open. It was the first open barricade he had seen since he had set out on his journey, though he had caught occasional glimpses of motion behind the windows of barricaded houses. He wondered if those inside had yet made their first ventures outside. It had begun to occur to him that perhaps they had--perhaps they had pulled down the barricades and then, after a day or so, put them back up. They were a defensive measure, of course--in the last days of the plague the sick, the drunk, and the stupid had roamed the streets wherever the diminishing police could not turn them back. Matthew Garvin himself had gone through a bout of hysteria in which he had laughed, over and over again, "Now there won't be any war!" and the urge to go out--to get drunk, to smash something, to break loose and kick out at all the things society had erected in the expectation of war--the Shelter signs, the newspaper kiosks, the computer and television stores, the motion picture theaters--all the things that battened on desperation--that need to show that suddenly he, too, understood how miserably frightened they had all been under the shell of calm--all that had boiled and shaken inside him, and if he had been just a little bit different he, too, would have been roaring down the flamelit streets, and there would have been a need of barricades against him. He moved tentatively up the steps to the foyer of Larry Ruark's apartment house. The foyer and the stairs up were clean--swept, mopped, dusted. The brass handle on the front door had been polished. In the foyer stood another placard: "Live Medic Upstairs." There was nothing else to see, and there were no sounds. He padded up the stairs, using only the balls of his feet to touch the treads. Yesterday he would not have done that. He did not entirely understand why he did it now. But it was appropriate to his environment, and he was young enough to be quite sensitive about conforming to the shape of the world around him. Larry's apartment was at the head of the stairs. The sign on the door said: "Medic--Knock and Come In." It was Larry! Matthew rapped his knuckles quickly on the paneling and pushed the door in the same motion. "Lar--" The thin, hard arm went around his throat from behind. He realized that in another moment he was going to be pulled backward, off balance and helpless. He jumped upward, and that broke the hold enough for him to turn around, still inside the circle of the arm. He and Larry Ruark stared into each other's eyes. "Oh, my God!" Larry whispered. He lowered the hand with the butcher knife in it. Matthew Garvin stood panting, still in his friend's embrace. Then Larry let his other arm sag, and Matthew stepped back quickly. "Matt...Jesus, Dear God, Matt!" Larry pushed back against the door and sagged on it, his eyes round. "I saw somebody coming, and I figured--and it turned out to be you!" He was emaciated; his hair, always speckled with early gray, was wild and grizzled. His eyesockets were the color of dirty blue velvet. His clothes were stained and shapeless on his bones. Matt's nostrils were still singed with the old, mildewed smell of them. "Larry, what the hell is this?" Larry rubbed his face, the butcher knife dangling askew between his fingers. "Listen, Matt, I'm sorry. I didn't know it was you." "Didn't know it was me." "Oh, God damn it, I can't talk. Sit down someplace, will you, Matt? I've--I need a minute." "All right," Matt, said, but did not sit down. The room was furnished with an old leather couch, two shabby armchairs, and a coffee table on which sooty old magazines were laid out in a meticulous pattern. Very little light filtered through the cracks between the window drapes. "Listen, Matt, is there any food in that knapsack?" "Some. You hungry?" "Yes. No--Anyway, that can wait. I just almost killed you--is this a time to talk about food? We've got to work this out--you've got to--look, do you know I can see the George Washington Bridge from my bedroom window?" 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. [Image] [Image]
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 immediately, 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. [Image] 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. "Get out of that doorway!" he shouted. "Inside the building! " The girl shook her head slightly, her eyes on the rooftop. Her lower lip was caught between the tips of her teeth, and her face was expressionless. There was no answering fire from the rooftop. "I can't see him anymore," she said. "He must have jumped behind a chimney." Sweating Garvin squirmed his legs into position. "Try and keep him pinned down," he shouted across the terrace, and, jumping to his feet, sprinted for the doorway in a straight line, trying to cover the distance as rapidly as possible. He threw one glance across the street, saw no movement on the roof, and pulled the girl to her feet with a scoop of his arm. He flung the lobby door open, and they stumbled through together, into shelter. He slumped against the lobby wall, his ribs clammy with the perspiration streaming down the sides of his chest. He looked at the girl, his eyes shadowed by the darkness of the lobby, while his breathing slowed to normal. Once again, she was neglecting to reload the gun. And yet she had squatted in that doorway and done exactly the right thing to keep them from being killed. Done it in her own characteristic way, of course, exposing herself as a sitting target not only to the attacker but to anyone else as well. Somewhere, she had learned the theory of covering fire, and had the courage to apply it in spite of her woeful ignorance of actual practice. Thus far, he had simply thought of her as being completely out of place on the street. Now he found himself thinking that, with a little training, she might not be so helpless. She looked up at him suddenly, catching his glance, and he had to say something rather than continue to stand silent. "Thanks. You take your chances, but, thanks." "I couldn't just let him...." She trailed the sentence away, and did not start another. "Pretty dumb guy, whoever he was," Garvin said. "Yes." She stared off at nothing, obviously merely filling time, and the thought suddenly struck Garvin that she was waiting for something. "I can't understand him," she said abruptly. "Neither can I," Garvin said lamely. Perhaps she had not meant to let him in the apartment. It was quite possible--and logical--that she would ask him to help her get into the building, but would leave him then. Was she waiting for him to give her the supplies and leave? Or didn't she know what to do now, with the sniper waiting outside? He cursed himself for not taking the initiative, one way or the other, but plunged on. "Exposing himself on a roof like that. Somebody's sure to pick him off." "I didn't mean.... But you're right. He is being foolish." No, of course she hadn't meant what he meant. Garvin cursed himself again. To the girl, it was incomprehensible that anyone would want to kill someone else. He, to whom it was merely stupid to expose oneself to possible fire, had completely misunderstood her. He was a predator, weighing every move against the chance of becoming prey. She was a fledgling who had fallen out of her nest into his hungry world. He caught himself sharply, derision in his mind. But, maudlin or not, he nevertheless did not want to leave her now, with no one to protect her. She looked at him again, still waiting. He did not say anything, but kept his eyes away from her face, waiting in turn. "You can't go back out there now," she said finally, hesitating. "No--no, I can't." He tried to keep his voice noncommittal. "Well, I.... You can't go out. You'll have to stay here." "Yes." And there it was. His fingers twisted back into his damp palm and curled in a nervous fist. "Let's get going," he said harshly. "We have to see about your father." Her expression changed, as though some cryptic apprehension had drained away in her--as though she, in her turn, had been afraid that he would not do what she hoped he would. Her voice, too, was steadier, and her lips rose into a gentle smile. "I'll have to introduce you. What's your name?" He flushed, startling himself. A gentle, remembered voice chided him from the past. Matthew, you were impolite. "Matth--Matt Garvin," he blurted. She smiled again. "I'm Margaret Cottrell. Hello." He took her extended hand and clasped it awkwardly, releasing it with abrupt clumsiness. He wondered if he'd been right--if she had not wanted him to leave, and had not known what she could do to stop him if he tried. The thought was a disquieting one, because he could not resolve it, or reach a decision. He followed her warily as she turned toward the stairway behind the lifeless elevators. Just before she became no more than a darker shadow in the stairwell's gloom, he caught the smile on her lips once more. The apartment was on the third floor. When they came out of the stairway, she went to the nearest door, knocked, and unlocked it. She turned to Garvin, who had stopped a yard away. "Please come in," she said. He started forward uneasily. He trusted the girl to some extent--more than he trusted anyone else, certainly--but for two and a half years, he had never opened any closed door before completely satisfying himself that nothing dangerous could be waiting behind it. Yet, he could not let the girl know that he distrusted the apartment. To her, it would probably seem foolish, and he did not want her to think him a fool. He stepped into the doorway, trying to hold his shotgun inconspicuously. "Margaret?" The voice that came from inside the apartment was thin and strained. Worry flickered over the girl's face. "I'll be right there, father. I've got someone with me." She touched Garvin's arm. "Please." The second invitation broke his uncertainty, and he stepped inside. "He's in the back bedroom," she whispered, and he nodded. To his surprise, he noticed that the place was heated. A kerosene range had replaced the gas stove in the kitchen, beside the front door, and there was a space heater in the living room. Both had their stovepipes carefully led into the apartment's ventilation ducts, and the hall grille had been masked off to prevent a backdraft. Garvin pursed his lips. It was a better-organized place than he'd expected. They reached the bedroom doorway, and Matt saw a thin man propped partially up in the bed, the intensity of the eyes heightened by the same fever that paled his lips. His chest was bandaged, and a wastebasket full of reddened facial tissues sat beside the bed. Garvin felt his mouth twitch into a grimace. The man was hemorrhaging. "Father," Margaret said, "This is Matt Garvin. Matt--my father, John Cottrell." "I'm glad to meet you, sir," Garvin said. "I rather suspect that I'm glad to see you, too," Cottrell said, smiling ruefully. The pale eyes, sunken deep in their dark sockets, turned to Margaret. "Were you the cause of all that firing outside?" "There's a man up on the roof across the street," she said. "He tried to kill Matt as he was bringing me home." "She pulled me out of a real mess," Garvin put in. "But Matt went back into the drugstore, after he met me and I told him you were hurt," Margaret said. Cottrell's gaze shifted back and forth between them, his smile growing. "After he met you, eh?" He coughed for a moment, and wiped his mouth. "I'd like to hear about that, while Matt's looking at this." He gestured toward his bandaged chest, wincing at the pull on his muscles. "Meanwhile, Margaret, I think I'm getting hungry. Could you make some breakfast?" The girl nodded and went out to the kitchen. Garvin slipped the pack off his back and took out the supplies from the drugstore. As he walked toward the bed, he caught Cottrell's look. The man was too sick for hunger, and Matt had eaten, but neither of them wanted the girl in the room while they were appraising each other. [Image] "A typical day in our fair city," Cottrell said when Matt filled him in on what had happened this morning. Matt grunted. He had washed the caked blood off Cottrell's chest, and swabbed out the wound, which was showing signs of a mild infection unimportant in itself. The bullet was deep in Cottrell's chest--too deep to be probed for. And there was a constant thin film of blood in the old man's mouth. Garvin re-bandaged him and threw the dirty swabs and bandages away. Then he put the bottle of germicide down on the table beside the bed, together with the rest of the supplies. He strapped his knapsack shut, testing its balance in his hand. He picked up his shotgun and took the shells out of it. "Being busy won't accomplish very much, Matt," Cottrell said quietly. Garvin looked up from the gun, his breath gusting out in a tired sigh. The blood in Cottrell's throat and bronchial tubes made him cough. When he coughed, the wound that bled into his respiratory system tore itself open a little farther. And more blood leaked in and made him cough harder. "I don't know very much medicine," Garvin said. "I've read a first aid manual. But I don't think you've got much time." Cottrell nodded. He coughed again, and smiled ruefully. "I'm afraid you're right." He threw the newly bloodied facial tissue into the wastebasket. "Now, then, what are your plans?" The two men looked at each other. There was no point to hedging. Cottrell was going to die, and Margaret would be left defenseless when he did. Garvin was in the apartment--a place he never could have reached without Margaret--and Margaret could not now survive without him. On the level of pure logic, the problem and its answer were simple. "I don't know, exactly," Garvin answered slowly. "Before I met Margaret, I was going to find myself someplace to hole up with a couple of years' worth of supplies, if I could gather 'em. There's more in this town than most people know." "Or are expert enough to get away from other people?" Garvin looked at Cottrell with noncommittal sadness. "Maybe. I've come to my own way of looking at it. Anyhow, I figure if I can hold out long enough, when they start getting desperate and break into apartments--if I can make it through that, then somebody's bound to get things organized sooner or later, and I can join 'em. I figure we're in for a time of weeding-out. The ones who live through it will have brains enough to realize turning wolf doesn't cure hunger. "Anyway--now that I'm here, I guess I'll do what I was intending to. Carry in all the stuff I can, and just hope. It isn't much," he finished, "but it's the best I can think of." He did not mention the obstacle he was most worried about, but it was one over which he had no control. Only Margaret could say what her reaction would be. Cottrell nodded thoughtfully. "No, it isn't much." He looked up. "I think you're probably right in theory, but I don't think you'll be able to follow it." Garvin frowned. "I don't see why not, frankly. It's pretty much what you've been doing." "Yes, it is. But you're not I." Cottrell stopped to wipe his lips again, and then went on. "Matt, I'm part of a dead civilization. I believe the last prediction was that ten percent of the population might survive. Here, in Manhattan, under our conditions, I'd estimate that only half that number are alive today. Under no circumstances is that enough people to maintain the interdependence on which the old system was based. Despite the fact that we are surrounded by the generally undamaged products of twentieth and early twenty-first-century technology, we have neither power, running water, nor heat. We are crippled." Garvin nodded. There was nothing new in this. But he let the old man talk. He had to have been a tough man in his day, and that had to be respected. "We have no distribution or communication," Cottrell went on. "I found this place for Margaret and myself as soon as I could, equipped it, and armed myself. For I knew that if I had no idea how to produce food and clothing for myself, then neither did the rest of my fellow survivors. And the people who did know--the farmers, out on the countryside, must have learned to look out only for themselves, or die. "And so I took to my cave-fortress. If you don't know how to produce the necessities of life, and can't buy them, then you have to take them. When they become scarce, they must be taken ruthlessly. If you have no loaf, and your neighbor has two--take them both. For tomorrow you will hunger again. "I am a hoarder, yes," he said. "I carried in as much food as I could, continually foraged for more, and was ready to defend this place to the death. I moved the kerosene stoves in, and pushed the old gas range and the refrigerator down the elevator shaft, so no one could tell which apartment they'd come from. I did it because I realized that I--that all of us--had suddenly returned to the days of the cavemen. We were doomed to crouch in our little caves, afraid of the saber-toothed tigers prowling outside. And when our food ran low, we picked up our weapons and prowled outside, having become temporary tigers in our own turn." "Yes, sir," Matt said politely. He couldn't see why old bones, raked over now, had any effect on him and his plans. Cottrell smiled and nodded. "I know, I know, Matt.... But the point is, as I've said, that you are not I. It was my civilization that ended. Not yours." "Sir?" "You were young enough, when the plagues came, so that you were able to adapt perfectly to the world. You're not what I am--an average American turned caveman. You're an average caveman, and you haven't turned anything--yet. But you will. You can't escape it. Human beings don't stay the same all their lives, though some of them half-kill themselves trying to. They can't. There are other people in the world with them, and, try as each might to become an island unto himself, it's impossible. He sees his neighbor doing something to make life more bearable--putting up window screens to keep the flies out, say. And then he's got to have screens of his own, or else walk around covered with fly-bites while his neighbor laughs at him. Or else--" Cottrell smiled oddly, "his wife nags him into it." Cottrell coughed sharply, wiped his mouth impatiently, and went on. "Pretty soon, everybody wants window screens. And some bright young man who makes good ones stops being an island and becomes a carpenter. And some other bright young man becomes his salesman. The next thing you know, the carpenter's got more orders than he can handle--so somebody else becomes a carpenter's apprentice. You see?" Matt nodded slowly. "I think so." "All right, then, Matt. My civilization ended. Yours is a brand new one. It's just beginning, but it's a civilization, all right. There are thousands of boys just like you, all over the world. Some of them will sit in their caves--maybe draw pictures on the walls, before their neighbors break in and kill them. But the rest of you, Matt, will be doing things. What you'll do, exactly, I don't know. But it'll be effective." Cottrell stopped himself with an outburst of coughing, and Matt bit his lip as the old man sank back on his pillows. But Cottrell resumed the thread of his explanation, and now Matt understood that he was trying to leave something behind before he was too weak to say it. Cottrell had lived longer and seen more than the man who was going to become his daughter's husband. This attempt to pass on the benefit of his experience was the old man's last performance of his duty toward Margaret. "I think, Matt," Cottrell went on, "that whatever you and the other young men do will produce a new culture--a more fully developed civilization. And that each generation of young men after you will take what you have left them and build on it, even though they might prefer to simply sit still and enjoy what they have. Because someone will always want window screens. It's the nature of the beast. "And, it is also in the nature of the beast that some people, seeing their neighbor with his window screens, will not want to make the effort of building screens of their own. Some of them will try to bring their neighbor back to the old level--by killing him, by destroying his improvements. "But that doesn't work. If you kill one man, you may kill another. And the other people around you will band together in fear and kill you. And someday, after it's been demonstrated that the easiest way, in the long run, is to build rather than to attempt to destroy--after everyone has window screens--some bright young man will invent DDT and a whole new cycle will begin." Cottrell laughed shortly. "Oh, what a nervous day for the window-screen-makers that will be! But the people who know how to make sprayguns will be very busy. "The plague was a disaster, Matt," he said suddenly, veering off on a new track. "But disasters are not new to the race of Man. To every Act of God, Man has an answer, drawn from the repertoire of answers he has hammered out in the face of the disasters that have come before. It's in his nature to build dams against the flood--to rebuild after the earthquake. To put up window screens. Because, apparently, he's uncomfortable with what this planet gives him, and has to change it--to improve on it, to make himself just a little more comfortable. Maybe, just for the irritated hope that his wife will shut up and leave him alone for a few minutes. "Who knows? Man hunted his way upward with a club in his hand, once. You're starting with a rifle. Perhaps, before your sons die, the world will once again support the kind of civilization in which a young man can sit in a cave, drawing pictures, and depend on others to clothe and shelter him. "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. [Image] 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. [Image] Please click here for the next chapter [Image] [Image]CHAPTER ONE: I Matthew Garvin was a young, heavy-boned man who had not yet filled out to his mature frame. His grip on his automatic shotgun was not too sure. But he had been picking his way through the New York City streets for two days, skirting the litter and other obstructions left by the plague, and the shotgun made him feel a great deal more comfortable--for all that he still half-expected a New York City policeman to step out from behind vie of the slewed, abandoned cars, or from one of the barricaded doorways, and arrest him for violating the Sullivan Act. His picture of the world's condition was fragmentary. Most of it was gleaned from remembered snatches of the increasingly sporadic news over the TV. And he had heard those only while lying in delirium, on a cot beside the room where his dying father kept death watch over the other members of his family. He had not truly come back to alertness until well after his father was dead and the TV was inoperative, though it was still switched on. All he could remember his father telling him, in all those days. was "If you live, don't forget to go armed." He was certain, now, that his father, probably delerious himself, had repeated it over and over, clutching his arm urgently and slurring the words, the way a man will when his rationality tries to force a message out through an almost complete loss of control. And when he had finally wakened, and known he was going to live, Matthew Garvin had found the Browning lying on the floor beside his cot, together with a box of shells still redolent of woodsmoke and old cleaning solvent. His father's old hunting knapsack had been there, too, stocked with canned food, waterproof matches, a flashlight, a compass, and a hunting knife, almost as if Matthew and he had been going to leave for the North Woods together. They had been doing that every deer season for the past four years. But this time it was his father's gear that Matthew would be carrying; and it was the big Browning, instead of the rifle. He had not questioned his father's judgment. He had strapped the knapsack on, and taken the shotgun, and then he had left the apartment--he could not have stayed, though he did his best to leave his family in some semblance of decent repose. At first, he had not quite known what he was going to do. Looking out the window, he could see nothing moving on the streets. A pall of gray mist hung over Manhattan--part fog, part smoke, from where something was burning and had not been put out. He had gone and taken the heavy binoculars from his father's closet and studied the two rivers. They were almost clear of floating debris of various kinds, and so he assumed the great wave of dying was over--those who still lived, would live. He had probably been one of the last to be sick. The streets and the waterfronts were a jumble of abandoned and wrecked equipment--cars, trucks, boats, barges--much as he had last seen them, on the night when he had realized he, too, was at last growing feverish and dry-mouthed. That had been after the government had abandoned the continual effort to keep the streets clear and people in their homes. Here and there, some of the main avenues had been opened, with cars and buses towed out of the way, lying as they had been dropped on the sidewalks. He could see one crane--a Metropolitan Transit Authority company emergency truck--where it had stopped, with a bright blue sports car still dangling from the tow hook. So there had not been time after he fell ill for anything to litter up the opened streets again. He tried the radio--he had read enough novels of universal disaster to know nothing would come of it, and for a while he had been undecided, but his human nature had won out--and there had been nothing. He listened for the hum he associated with the phrase "carrier wave," and did not hear that, either. He looked down at the baseboard, and saw that someone--probably his father--had ripped the line cord out of the wall so savagely that the bared ends of the wire dangled on the floor while the gutted plug remained in the socket. But he had not repaired it. The dead TV was good enough--in the end, he remembered, the final government announcement had been quite explicit--the President's twanging, measured voice had labored from phrase to phrase, explaining calmly that some would surely survive--that no disease, however impossible to check, could prove fatal to all human beings everywhere--but that the survivors should not expect human civilization to have endured with them. "To those of you who will live to re-make this world," the President had said, "my only promise is this: That with courage, with ingenuity, with determination--above all, with adherence to the moral principles that distinguish Man from the animals--the future is one of hope. The way will be hard. The effort will be great. But the future waits to be realized, and with God's help it shall be realized--it must be realized!" But that had not been much to go on. He had put the binoculars back--if someone had asked him, he would have replied that certainly he planned to come back to the apartment; he would not have stopped to think about it until he had actually heard his positive words--and he had left, climbing down flight after flight of stairs. [Image] He was on his way to Larry Ruark's apartment, he had realized at some point on his journey. Larry lived about fifty blocks uptown--by no means a difficult walk--and was a close friend from the time they had gone through the first two years of college together, before Larry had gone on to medical school. He had no way of knowing whether Larry had survived or not. But it seemed to him the chances were reasonably good. In part, they seem so to him because he was associating immunity with the word "doctor," and because he needed to find a friend alive; an undergraduate medical student to whom he gave an inappropriate title because that made his friend likelier to have lived. But in part, he knew, his reasoning was sound. Larry had been young, and in excellent health; that was bound to have improved his chances. Matthew Garvin had thought that surely he might find out more about the world, on his way to Larry's. He had expected to meet other survivors, and talk to them. He had expected that, between them, he and the other young, generally sound people could piece together an accurate idea of what the world's condition was. There was nothing to fear from contact with each other, after all--either they had the plague, and would die, or had successfully resisted it, and would not. The time of the Carrier Panic--before it had been proven the disease agent, whatever it was, did not need to be transmitted from human hand to hand-- that ugly time was over. But he had begun to wonder whether the other survivors were aware of that. And he had begun to wonder whether some of them might not have become insane. For though he sometimes heard quick footsteps whose direction was disguised by echoes, he had been able to meet no one face-to-face, and when he had stood and shouted, no one answered. He knew he had come late to the inevitable sickness. He wondered what it was the more experienced survivors might have found out that would make them act like this. Once he turned a corner and found someone who had survived the plague. It was a young man, canted awkwardly against a subway railing, dead, with fresh blood congealing around the stab wounds in his chest, and a torn grocery bag, empty, trampled at his feet. The streets were badly blocked in places, and he had been moving more and more slowly, out of the same caution that made him hole up and lock himself in a truck cab overnight. So it was the next day when he saw the placards. He was only a few blocks from Larry's then. The placards were Civil Defense Emergency Posters, turned around to expose their unprinted backs. Hand-lettered on them now were the words "Live Medic," and an arrow pointing uptown. After that, Matthew Garvin hurried. He was sure Larry Ruark had survived, now. And the placards were the first trace of some kind of organization. He had begun to think of the world as a place much like a locked museum at night...except for a sporadic, distant hint of sounds that were too much like isolated gunshots. He had heard the sounds of police machineguns, during the Carrier Panic, and the deep thud of demolition as the Isolation Squads tried to cordon off the stricken areas--that had been quite early in the game--but this was different. This was like the sound of foot-snapped twigs in a forest infested by Indians. The trail of placards led to Larry Ruark's apartment house. The barricade in the doorway had been pulled aside, and the front door stood open. It was the first open barricade he had seen since he had set out on his journey, though he had caught occasional glimpses of motion behind the windows of barricaded houses. He wondered if those inside had yet made their first ventures outside. It had begun to occur to him that perhaps they had--perhaps they had pulled down the barricades and then, after a day or so, put them back up. They were a defensive measure, of course--in the last days of the plague the sick, the drunk, and the stupid had roamed the streets wherever the diminishing police could not turn them back. Matthew Garvin himself had gone through a bout of hysteria in which he had laughed, over and over again, "Now there won't be any war!" and the urge to go out--to get drunk, to smash something, to break loose and kick out at all the things society had erected in the expectation of war--the Shelter signs, the newspaper kiosks, the computer and television stores, the motion picture theaters--all the things that battened on desperation--that need to show that suddenly he, too, understood how miserably frightened they had all been under the shell of calm--all that had boiled and shaken inside him, and if he had been just a little bit different he, too, would have been roaring down the flamelit streets, and there would have been a need of barricades against him. He moved tentatively up the steps to the foyer of Larry Ruark's apartment house. The foyer and the stairs up were clean--swept, mopped, dusted. The brass handle on the front door had been polished. In the foyer stood another placard: "Live Medic Upstairs." There was nothing else to see, and there were no sounds. He padded up the stairs, using only the balls of his feet to touch the treads. Yesterday he would not have done that. He did not entirely understand why he did it now. But it was appropriate to his environment, and he was young enough to be quite sensitive about conforming to the shape of the world around him. Larry's apartment was at the head of the stairs. The sign on the door said: "Medic--Knock and Come In." It was Larry! Matthew rapped his knuckles quickly on the paneling and pushed the door in the same motion. "Lar--" The thin, hard arm went around his throat from behind. He realized that in another moment he was going to be pulled backward, off balance and helpless. He jumped upward, and that broke the hold enough for him to turn around, still inside the circle of the arm. He and Larry Ruark stared into each other's eyes. "Oh, my God!" Larry whispered. He lowered the hand with the butcher knife in it. Matthew Garvin stood panting, still in his friend's embrace. Then Larry let his other arm sag, and Matthew stepped back quickly. "Matt...Jesus, Dear God, Matt!" Larry pushed back against the door and sagged on it, his eyes round. "I saw somebody coming, and I figured--and it turned out to be you!" He was emaciated; his hair, always speckled with early gray, was wild and grizzled. His eyesockets were the color of dirty blue velvet. His clothes were stained and shapeless on his bones. Matt's nostrils were still singed with the old, mildewed smell of them. "Larry, what the hell is this?" Larry rubbed his face, the butcher knife dangling askew between his fingers. "Listen, Matt, I'm sorry. I didn't know it was you." "Didn't know it was me." "Oh, God damn it, I can't talk. Sit down someplace, will you, Matt? I've--I need a minute." "All right," Matt, said, but did not sit down. The room was furnished with an old leather couch, two shabby armchairs, and a coffee table on which sooty old magazines were laid out in a meticulous pattern. Very little light filtered through the cracks between the window drapes. "Listen, Matt, is there any food in that knapsack?" "Some. You hungry?" "Yes. No--Anyway, that can wait. I just almost killed you--is this a time to talk about food? We've got to work this out--you've got to--look, do you know I can see the George Washington Bridge from my bedroom window?" 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. [Image] [Image]
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 immediately, 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. [Image] 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. "Get out of that doorway!" he shouted. "Inside the building! " The girl shook her head slightly, her eyes on the rooftop. Her lower lip was caught between the tips of her teeth, and her face was expressionless. There was no answering fire from the rooftop. "I can't see him anymore," she said. "He must have jumped behind a chimney." Sweating Garvin squirmed his legs into position. "Try and keep him pinned down," he shouted across the terrace, and, jumping to his feet, sprinted for the doorway in a straight line, trying to cover the distance as rapidly as possible. He threw one glance across the street, saw no movement on the roof, and pulled the girl to her feet with a scoop of his arm. He flung the lobby door open, and they stumbled through together, into shelter. He slumped against the lobby wall, his ribs clammy with the perspiration streaming down the sides of his chest. He looked at the girl, his eyes shadowed by the darkness of the lobby, while his breathing slowed to normal. Once again, she was neglecting to reload the gun. And yet she had squatted in that doorway and done exactly the right thing to keep them from being killed. Done it in her own characteristic way, of course, exposing herself as a sitting target not only to the attacker but to anyone else as well. Somewhere, she had learned the theory of covering fire, and had the courage to apply it in spite of her woeful ignorance of actual practice. Thus far, he had simply thought of her as being completely out of place on the street. Now he found himself thinking that, with a little training, she might not be so helpless. She looked up at him suddenly, catching his glance, and he had to say something rather than continue to stand silent. "Thanks. You take your chances, but, thanks." "I couldn't just let him...." She trailed the sentence away, and did not start another. "Pretty dumb guy, whoever he was," Garvin said. "Yes." She stared off at nothing, obviously merely filling time, and the thought suddenly struck Garvin that she was waiting for something. "I can't understand him," she said abruptly. "Neither can I," Garvin said lamely. Perhaps she had not meant to let him in the apartment. It was quite possible--and logical--that she would ask him to help her get into the building, but would leave him then. Was she waiting for him to give her the supplies and leave? Or didn't she know what to do now, with the sniper waiting outside? He cursed himself for not taking the initiative, one way or the other, but plunged on. "Exposing himself on a roof like that. Somebody's sure to pick him off." "I didn't mean.... But you're right. He is being foolish." No, of course she hadn't meant what he meant. Garvin cursed himself again. To the girl, it was incomprehensible that anyone would want to kill someone else. He, to whom it was merely stupid to expose oneself to possible fire, had completely misunderstood her. He was a predator, weighing every move against the chance of becoming prey. She was a fledgling who had fallen out of her nest into his hungry world. He caught himself sharply, derision in his mind. But, maudlin or not, he nevertheless did not want to leave her now, with no one to protect her. She looked at him again, still waiting. He did not say anything, but kept his eyes away from her face, waiting in turn. "You can't go back out there now," she said finally, hesitating. "No--no, I can't." He tried to keep his voice noncommittal. "Well, I.... You can't go out. You'll have to stay here." "Yes." And there it was. His fingers twisted back into his damp palm and curled in a nervous fist. "Let's get going," he said harshly. "We have to see about your father." Her expression changed, as though some cryptic apprehension had drained away in her--as though she, in her turn, had been afraid that he would not do what she hoped he would. Her voice, too, was steadier, and her lips rose into a gentle smile. "I'll have to introduce you. What's your name?" He flushed, startling himself. A gentle, remembered voice chided him from the past. Matthew, you were impolite. "Matth--Matt Garvin," he blurted. She smiled again. "I'm Margaret Cottrell. Hello." He took her extended hand and clasped it awkwardly, releasing it with abrupt clumsiness. He wondered if he'd been right--if she had not wanted him to leave, and had not known what she could do to stop him if he tried. The thought was a disquieting one, because he could not resolve it, or reach a decision. He followed her warily as she turned toward the stairway behind the lifeless elevators. Just before she became no more than a darker shadow in the stairwell's gloom, he caught the smile on her lips once more. The apartment was on the third floor. When they came out of the stairway, she went to the nearest door, knocked, and unlocked it. She turned to Garvin, who had stopped a yard away. "Please come in," she said. He started forward uneasily. He trusted the girl to some extent--more than he trusted anyone else, certainly--but for two and a half years, he had never opened any closed door before completely satisfying himself that nothing dangerous could be waiting behind it. Yet, he could not let the girl know that he distrusted the apartment. To her, it would probably seem foolish, and he did not want her to think him a fool. He stepped into the doorway, trying to hold his shotgun inconspicuously. "Margaret?" The voice that came from inside the apartment was thin and strained. Worry flickered over the girl's face. "I'll be right there, father. I've got someone with me." She touched Garvin's arm. "Please." The second invitation broke his uncertainty, and he stepped inside. "He's in the back bedroom," she whispered, and he nodded. To his surprise, he noticed that the place was heated. A kerosene range had replaced the gas stove in the kitchen, beside the front door, and there was a space heater in the living room. Both had their stovepipes carefully led into the apartment's ventilation ducts, and the hall grille had been masked off to prevent a backdraft. Garvin pursed his lips. It was a better-organized place than he'd expected. They reached the bedroom doorway, and Matt saw a thin man propped partially up in the bed, the intensity of the eyes heightened by the same fever that paled his lips. His chest was bandaged, and a wastebasket full of reddened facial tissues sat beside the bed. Garvin felt his mouth twitch into a grimace. The man was hemorrhaging. "Father," Margaret said, "This is Matt Garvin. Matt--my father, John Cottrell." "I'm glad to meet you, sir," Garvin said. "I rather suspect that I'm glad to see you, too," Cottrell said, smiling ruefully. The pale eyes, sunken deep in their dark sockets, turned to Margaret. "Were you the cause of all that firing outside?" "There's a man up on the roof across the street," she said. "He tried to kill Matt as he was bringing me home." "She pulled me out of a real mess," Garvin put in. "But Matt went back into the drugstore, after he met me and I told him you were hurt," Margaret said. Cottrell's gaze shifted back and forth between them, his smile growing. "After he met you, eh?" He coughed for a moment, and wiped his mouth. "I'd like to hear about that, while Matt's looking at this." He gestured toward his bandaged chest, wincing at the pull on his muscles. "Meanwhile, Margaret, I think I'm getting hungry. Could you make some breakfast?" The girl nodded and went out to the kitchen. Garvin slipped the pack off his back and took out the supplies from the drugstore. As he walked toward the bed, he caught Cottrell's look. The man was too sick for hunger, and Matt had eaten, but neither of them wanted the girl in the room while they were appraising each other. [Image] "A typical day in our fair city," Cottrell said when Matt filled him in on what had happened this morning. Matt grunted. He had washed the caked blood off Cottrell's chest, and swabbed out the wound, which was showing signs of a mild infection unimportant in itself. The bullet was deep in Cottrell's chest--too deep to be probed for. And there was a constant thin film of blood in the old man's mouth. Garvin re-bandaged him and threw the dirty swabs and bandages away. Then he put the bottle of germicide down on the table beside the bed, together with the rest of the supplies. He strapped his knapsack shut, testing its balance in his hand. He picked up his shotgun and took the shells out of it. "Being busy won't accomplish very much, Matt," Cottrell said quietly. Garvin looked up from the gun, his breath gusting out in a tired sigh. The blood in Cottrell's throat and bronchial tubes made him cough. When he coughed, the wound that bled into his respiratory system tore itself open a little farther. And more blood leaked in and made him cough harder. "I don't know very much medicine," Garvin said. "I've read a first aid manual. But I don't think you've got much time." Cottrell nodded. He coughed again, and smiled ruefully. "I'm afraid you're right." He threw the newly bloodied facial tissue into the wastebasket. "Now, then, what are your plans?" The two men looked at each other. There was no point to hedging. Cottrell was going to die, and Margaret would be left defenseless when he did. Garvin was in the apartment--a place he never could have reached without Margaret--and Margaret could not now survive without him. On the level of pure logic, the problem and its answer were simple. "I don't know, exactly," Garvin answered slowly. "Before I met Margaret, I was going to find myself someplace to hole up with a couple of years' worth of supplies, if I could gather 'em. There's more in this town than most people know." "Or are expert enough to get away from other people?" Garvin looked at Cottrell with noncommittal sadness. "Maybe. I've come to my own way of looking at it. Anyhow, I figure if I can hold out long enough, when they start getting desperate and break into apartments--if I can make it through that, then somebody's bound to get things organized sooner or later, and I can join 'em. I figure we're in for a time of weeding-out. The ones who live through it will have brains enough to realize turning wolf doesn't cure hunger. "Anyway--now that I'm here, I guess I'll do what I was intending to. Carry in all the stuff I can, and just hope. It isn't much," he finished, "but it's the best I can think of." He did not mention the obstacle he was most worried about, but it was one over which he had no control. Only Margaret could say what her reaction would be. Cottrell nodded thoughtfully. "No, it isn't much." He looked up. "I think you're probably right in theory, but I don't think you'll be able to follow it." Garvin frowned. "I don't see why not, frankly. It's pretty much what you've been doing." "Yes, it is. But you're not I." Cottrell stopped to wipe his lips again, and then went on. "Matt, I'm part of a dead civilization. I believe the last prediction was that ten percent of the population might survive. Here, in Manhattan, under our conditions, I'd estimate that only half that number are alive today. Under no circumstances is that enough people to maintain the interdependence on which the old system was based. Despite the fact that we are surrounded by the generally undamaged products of twentieth and early twenty-first-century technology, we have neither power, running water, nor heat. We are crippled." Garvin nodded. There was nothing new in this. But he let the old man talk. He had to have been a tough man in his day, and that had to be respected. "We have no distribution or communication," Cottrell went on. "I found this place for Margaret and myself as soon as I could, equipped it, and armed myself. For I knew that if I had no idea how to produce food and clothing for myself, then neither did the rest of my fellow survivors. And the people who did know--the farmers, out on the countryside, must have learned to look out only for themselves, or die. "And so I took to my cave-fortress. If you don't know how to produce the necessities of life, and can't buy them, then you have to take them. When they become scarce, they must be taken ruthlessly. If you have no loaf, and your neighbor has two--take them both. For tomorrow you will hunger again. "I am a hoarder, yes," he said. "I carried in as much food as I could, continually foraged for more, and was ready to defend this place to the death. I moved the kerosene stoves in, and pushed the old gas range and the refrigerator down the elevator shaft, so no one could tell which apartment they'd come from. I did it because I realized that I--that all of us--had suddenly returned to the days of the cavemen. We were doomed to crouch in our little caves, afraid of the saber-toothed tigers prowling outside. And when our food ran low, we picked up our weapons and prowled outside, having become temporary tigers in our own turn." "Yes, sir," Matt said politely. He couldn't see why old bones, raked over now, had any effect on him and his plans. Cottrell smiled and nodded. "I know, I know, Matt.... But the point is, as I've said, that you are not I. It was my civilization that ended. Not yours." "Sir?" "You were young enough, when the plagues came, so that you were able to adapt perfectly to the world. You're not what I am--an average American turned caveman. You're an average caveman, and you haven't turned anything--yet. But you will. You can't escape it. Human beings don't stay the same all their lives, though some of them half-kill themselves trying to. They can't. There are other people in the world with them, and, try as each might to become an island unto himself, it's impossible. He sees his neighbor doing something to make life more bearable--putting up window screens to keep the flies out, say. And then he's got to have screens of his own, or else walk around covered with fly-bites while his neighbor laughs at him. Or else--" Cottrell smiled oddly, "his wife nags him into it." Cottrell coughed sharply, wiped his mouth impatiently, and went on. "Pretty soon, everybody wants window screens. And some bright young man who makes good ones stops being an island and becomes a carpenter. And some other bright young man becomes his salesman. The next thing you know, the carpenter's got more orders than he can handle--so somebody else becomes a carpenter's apprentice. You see?" Matt nodded slowly. "I think so." "All right, then, Matt. My civilization ended. Yours is a brand new one. It's just beginning, but it's a civilization, all right. There are thousands of boys just like you, all over the world. Some of them will sit in their caves--maybe draw pictures on the walls, before their neighbors break in and kill them. But the rest of you, Matt, will be doing things. What you'll do, exactly, I don't know. But it'll be effective." Cottrell stopped himself with an outburst of coughing, and Matt bit his lip as the old man sank back on his pillows. But Cottrell resumed the thread of his explanation, and now Matt understood that he was trying to leave something behind before he was too weak to say it. Cottrell had lived longer and seen more than the man who was going to become his daughter's husband. This attempt to pass on the benefit of his experience was the old man's last performance of his duty toward Margaret. "I think, Matt," Cottrell went on, "that whatever you and the other young men do will produce a new culture--a more fully developed civilization. And that each generation of young men after you will take what you have left them and build on it, even though they might prefer to simply sit still and enjoy what they have. Because someone will always want window screens. It's the nature of the beast. "And, it is also in the nature of the beast that some people, seeing their neighbor with his window screens, will not want to make the effort of building screens of their own. Some of them will try to bring their neighbor back to the old level--by killing him, by destroying his improvements. "But that doesn't work. If you kill one man, you may kill another. And the other people around you will band together in fear and kill you. And someday, after it's been demonstrated that the easiest way, in the long run, is to build rather than to attempt to destroy--after everyone has window screens--some bright young man will invent DDT and a whole new cycle will begin." Cottrell laughed shortly. "Oh, what a nervous day for the window-screen-makers that will be! But the people who know how to make sprayguns will be very busy. "The plague was a disaster, Matt," he said suddenly, veering off on a new track. "But disasters are not new to the race of Man. To every Act of God, Man has an answer, drawn from the repertoire of answers he has hammered out in the face of the disasters that have come before. It's in his nature to build dams against the flood--to rebuild after the earthquake. To put up window screens. Because, apparently, he's uncomfortable with what this planet gives him, and has to change it--to improve on it, to make himself just a little more comfortable. Maybe, just for the irritated hope that his wife will shut up and leave him alone for a few minutes. "Who knows? Man hunted his way upward with a club in his hand, once. You're starting with a rifle. Perhaps, before your sons die, the world will once again support the kind of civilization in which a young man can sit in a cave, drawing pictures, and depend on others to clothe and shelter him. "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. [Image] 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. [Image] Please click here for the next chapter |
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