down.
“Cold day,” he said.
“Damn near froze in bed. Forgot to fill the stove,” Matt answered.
Berendtsen sighed from far back in his throat. He got to his feet and picked up his rifle. He pulled a square piece of white sheet out of his jumper pocket and tied two of the corners to the rifle barrel.
“Got yours?” he asked.
“Inside,” Matt nodded back toward his apartment. “Carol know what you’re doing?”
Berendtsen shook his head. “Margaret?”
“No.”
“I think now we should have told them,” Gus said.
“I started to tell Carol—. But the way I suddenly figured it, before I really said anything, was that it wouldn’t make any difference in what happened. Figured she might as well get a good night’s sleep, instead.” He grinned wryly. “Turned chicken.”
Matt nodded. “Yeah.” He moved toward the doorway. “Me too. Well, let’s get it done.”
They went out through Matt’s apartment, and made sure the other men were set at their covering positions in the windows that overlooked the next building. Then the two cowards went out into the cold.
They stepped out into the middle of the drive that separated the building from theirs, stopped, and looked up at the blank wall.
Garvin exchanged a glance with Gus. “What do we do now?” he asked.
Berendtsen shrugged. He held his white-flagged rifle more conspiciously, and Matt did the same. Finally, Gus threw his head back and shouted.
“Hey! Hey, you, in there!”
The echoes died on the air, and nothing moved.
“Hey! Conner! We want to talk to you.”
But somewhere in those banks of glass, there must have been a slowly opening window.
Behind them, in their own building, someone fired first, but it no longer mattered. It did not cause, but was a desperate attempt to prevent, the fire that suddenly burst from behind a half-dozen windows.
Because Matt had been half-afraid it would come, the crash of fire was not as shocking as the sudden collapse of his right leg. He fell on his side in the drive, his head cracking against the asphalt, and was completely unable to move for a frantic time that seemed fatally long. Then, finally, while the sniping from the enemy building was diverted by the heavier fire of his own men, he was able to use Gus’s body for cover, pushing it ahead of him until he reached the shelter of a car. He stayed there till nightfall, freezing and bleeding, with his eyes unwaveringly on dead Berendtsen’s face, while the sporadic fire continued over his head between the buildings. And gradually, through the long, long day until his men were able to get to him and take him back to his building, his eyes acquired an expression which they never quite lost again; which, for the rest of his life blazed up unpredictably to soften the voices of those around him.
Through his spasmodic sleep, Garvin heard the sobs. They rose, broke, and fell, and the beat of his quasi- delirium seemed to follow them. At intervals, as he shivered or strained his clamped jaw against the pain in his leg, he heard Margaret trying to calm Carol. Once, he himself managed to say “Easy there, Ted. I’ll explain later, when I feel better. Look after your mother meanwhile, huh?” to a bewildered and frightened child. But, most of all, he could not escape his mind’s indelible photograph of Gus Berendtsen’s sprawled body.
When he woke fully, after seventeen hours, the shock reaction had ended. His leg hurt, but the wound had managed to stay clean, and the bones were obviously unbroken. He sat up and looked around.
Margaret was sitting in the chair beside him, watching him silently. He took her hand gently. “Where’s Carol?”
“She’s asleep, back in her apartment. Mrs. Potter’s taking care of her. Ted’s with Jimmy.” Her expression was peculiarly set, her face unreadable.
“What are you going to do about those people?” she asked.
He looked at her blankly, his mind still fuzzy, not catching her meaning immediately.
“What people?”
She had kept herself under rigid control up to now. Now she broke—characteristically.
“Those savages.” Her face was still rigid, flexing only enough to let her lips move, but her voice cracked like a piano wire whip. “People like that shouldn’t be alive. People who’d do a thing like that!”
Garvin dragged a long breath, letting it seep out slowly. A wave of pain washed up from his leg, and he closed his eyes for a moment. What could he say? That people were not savage by option? Already she had forgotten what it meant to the unorganized people of the area, having to compete with armed foraging teams.
His own mind was clear now. He had thought of another solution to the Conner problem.
For Margaret’s sake—possibly for Carol’s as well, and for the sake of young Ted, who had to somehow grow up in this world, and do his man’s work in it—he was grateful that his next step now would be what it would.
He squeezed Margaret’s hand. “I’ll take care of it,” he said somberly.
Hobbled by bandages, Garvin ran clumsily across the driveway with his men. The narrow space between the two buildings roared and echoed with the sleet of gunfire between the enemy and the covering guard in his building. Ahead of him, he heard the spasmodic and much lighter fire of his advance men as they cleaned out the enemy in the building’s basements. He lurched under the shifting weight of the sack of dynamite sticks that he, like all the other men in his party, was carrying.
Holland, running beside him, put a hand under his elbow. “You making it okay, Matt? We would have handled this without you coming along.”
Garvin spat out a laugh. “I’ll have to touch it off.” He passed the corner of the building and limped rapidly toward the entrance that would take him into the basement, where some of the men must already be placing their charges against the girders and bearing walls.
Margaret stared at him incredulously. “Matt! All those people. You killed all those people just because I said…”
He stood wordlessly in his living room, his vision blurring with each new thrust of pain up his leg, his shoulders down, the empty sack dangling from his hand. He rubbed his eyes wearily.
“Matt, you shouldn’t have listened to me. I was upset. I—”
He realized he was swaying, but he did not try to control himself as strongly as he would have if any of his men had been present.
“I didn’t do it because of anything you said,” he tried to explain, the words blurring on his tongue. “I did it because it was the only way left. I had to order it and do it myself because I’ve got the responsibility.”
“You had to kill those people?”
“Because there are more people. Take a look out some other window—out some window that shows you the rest of this city, with the buildings still standing.”
“No, Matt, I can’t.”
“Have it your way, then.” He dropped into a chair, looking down at the gummy stain on his coverall leg, wishing in his weariness, that it had been Gus, of the two of them, who had happened to stand slightly behind the other.
Another night fell, and Garvin stood at a window and watched it.
“Christmas Eve, Jack,” he said to Holland, who was watching with him.
“Yes, sir.”
Matt grunted, half ruefully. “Can’t see it, can you, Jack?”
