“I know, Ted. Margaret knows too. But that doesn’t help, does it?”
“No, I suppose not. Well, there isn’t anything we can do about it, the way things are.” He bent over and kissed her cheek. “Going to stay up for a while?”
She nodded. “I think so, Ted. Good night.”
“Good night, Mom.”
He went down the hall to his room, undressed, and blew out the lamp. He lay awake, his eyes closed in the darkness.
It was a hard life, for the women. He wondered if that was why Jack Holland wasn’t married. He was twenty-nine already.
Damn. Thirteen more years.
Matt was either forty-two or three. Old Matt, who wouldn’t be so old in any other time and place. Old Matt must have been young, nineteen-year-old Matt sometime, trying to stay alive in the first few months after the plague. The vague plague, that nobody knew much about because he could only know what had happened to him or those with him, and had no idea what it had been like all over the world.
All over the world. There must be thousands of places like Manhattan, scattered out among the cities, with men like Matt and Jack in them, trying to organize, trying to get people together again. And, more than likely, there were thousands of guys like Ted Berendtsen, who ought to cut out this pointless mental jabbering and get some sleep, right… now.
“Man, I’m not going to like this,” Jim Garvin said as they loaded up their packs and jammed extra clips into their bandoliers.
Ted shrugged, smoking up his foresight to kill glare. “Be crazy if you did. But it’s got to be done faster than we figured, I guess.”
“Pop say anything to you about it?”
Ted shook his head. “Nope. But that report Jack and I brought back from Philly is what did it. We’ve got to have this area squared away in case they move up on us. They know where we came from.” He settled his pack snugly onto his shoulders, and twisted his belt to get the Colt’s holster settled more comfortably. He didn’t usually carry a pistol, but this was going to be close-range work, once they flushed their men out from cover. The thing weighed a ton.
“S’pose you’re right,” Jim admitted.
Ted frowned slightly. Jim should at least have thought of the obvious question, as long as he was in a questioning frame of mind. He’d wondered about it himself, until he realized that the attempt to take all of the lower West Side in one operation had to be made. Just perhaps, the slow process that had worked on the East Side could be modified to fit, and there was time enough, more than likely, but that territory had been completely impenetrable for twenty years. The men in it knew every alley and back yard. Any attempt to take it piecemeal would mean an endless series of skirmishes with infiltrators.
Of course, he had a year and some months on Jim.
“Set?” Jack Holland came up to them, his pack bulging with ammunition, dynamite, and gasoline bombs, his rifle balanced in his hand. Ted nodded shortly, and was vaguely surprised to hear Jim say, “Yes, sir.” He looked from Jim to Jack, and barely twitched an eyelid. Jack grinned faintly.
“Okay, then, let’s get formed up. Matt’s taking the financial district, swinging up from the Battery. We go straight across town. Bill McGraw and another bunch are going in just below Forty-second Street.” He grinned and gestured perfunctorily and ribaldly. “That’s us—Lucky Pierre.”
Jim laughed, and Ted chuckled, winking at Jack again. The kid had been showing his nerves a little.
The three of them crossed the street to where the rest of the men in their group were waiting, scattered inconspicuously among the cars and doorways from old, vital habit. Ted looked up at the sky. It was growing dark. They’d move out pretty soon.
Jack dropped back and walked beside him. “Make sure Jim sticks pretty close to you, huh?” he said in a low voice. “I won’t be able to keep much of an eye on him myself.”
“Sure,” Ted answered. “I’ll take care of him.”
For two nights and three days, what had once been the lower half of Hell’s Kitchen had been tearing itself open. From that first cold morning when they had come out of their positions and dynamited their way into a packing plant, the slap of rifle fire and the occasional bellow of heavy sidearms had swept and echoed down the cluttered streets and wide, deadly avenues. Building by heavy building, they had blown gaps in walls, smashed windows, and shot their way from room to room in the first rush of surprise. Here and there, a firebomb had touched off a column of smoke that twisted fitfully in the breeze and light rain that had begun falling on the second day and was still coming down. A steady stream of runners was carrying ammunition up to them, and they supplied themselves from whatever miserable little they found, while scavenger squads cleaned up the weapons and ammunition left behind by corpses.
Two days, three nights. They had started on the uptown side of Fourteenth Street, with covering squads to clean out the downtown side and leave them a clear supply route.
They had reached Eighteenth Street by nightfall of the third day.
Ted slumped his head back against a wall and fed cartridges into a clip. “How’s it, Jim?”
Jim Garvin rubbed his hand over his face and shook his head in a vague attempt to clear out some of the weariness. “It stinks.”
Ted put the full clip in his bandolier and started on another. He grinned faintly. “Yeah,” he agreed. “You see Jack today?”
“Nope. Think he’s still around?”
“Chances are. He was doing house-to-house when we were just tads, remember?” He opened his pack and threw Jim a can of meat. “Tie into this, huh? I’ve been saving some. The slop they’ve been eating here is enough to make you sick.”
Jim shuddered and exhaled through his clenched teeth. “God, isn’t it just? All these bloody warehouses around here, too.” He opened the can and dug into it gratefully.
“A stinking set-up. Everybody just hung on to what they had, and to hell with you, buddy. Remember that bunch that’d been gettin’ no vitamins except out of canned fruit?”
“No organization at all,” Jim agreed, “What the hell’s wrong with these people?”
Ted shrugged. “Nothing, I guess. But they had a bunch of forts all ready made for them. These freakin’ warehouses were built to take it. And besides, they were warehouses. Up to the roof in supplies. Guess it looked like the simple way out.”
“How long d’you think we’ll be at this mess?”
“Depends. If Matt cleans up his end, we’ll get a push from him. If McGraw comes down, we’ll have ’em squeezed. I’d like it best if both happened, but I don’t know—that Greenwich Village is a rat-trap, from what I hear, and McGraw’s bound to be having it just as tough as we are. I wish I knew how this whole operation was going.”
“So long as Pop’s all right, I don’t give a hoot and a whoop for the rest of the operation. The part I worry about is right here.”
“Yeah, but the whole thing ties together,” Ted explained.
“That’s for somebody else to worry about,” Jim said.
Ted looked at him thoughtfully. “Yeah. Guess you’re right.” For the first time, the thought struck him that it didn’t look as if Jim was going to take over when his father left off. He was a good man with a rifle, and he never stopped after he started. But he didn’t do his own worrying.
That jarred him, somehow. He didn’t like the thought, because Jim was a friend of his, and because he was a first-grade fighting man, just like his father.
Only being a fighting man wasn’t good enough any more. It was a bigger sphere of operations now. New factors were coming into the picture all the time. This entire move against the West Side was not a foraging expedition, or an organizing process, though both would result. It was primarily a strategic maneuver against the day when Philadelphia began to move up the coast. Matt had started out a rifleman and learned, bit by bit, at the
