Divvy up

Hardesty fondled the sight picture with his right eye, squinting shut his left eye, caressing the trigger of his rifle with the index finger of his right hand and waiting for the squad leader to issue his commands.

At times like this, Hardesty observed, time seemed suspended. He wondered if it worked that way for the condemned man, too. The sun was just coming up over the rim of the bomb crater, splashing the rubble there with rose and gold. A hungry dog howled somewhere north of the crater.

A dozen rifles were pointed at various parts of the condemned man's anatomy. Hardesty always selected the stomach, although there invariably was a softie in each firing squad to spoil the fun. The hungry dog began to yelp. Someone had probably left ground glass for it.

Before the squad leader could shout the command to fire, a rifle shot cracked flatly, with a complete lack of resonance, across the bomb crater. The condemned man jerked upward, then strained forward in death against the fetters which bound him to the firing post.

Jumping the gun had started some years ago strictly as a sport. Now it was business, though, and profitable if you could get away with it and trust your confederate.

No one spoke. The dozen members of the firing squad stood rigidly at the aim position, their weapons pointing like accusing fingers at the dead man slumping forward against the firing post. Two crows flapped by like black paper overhead, cawing raucously.

Rifle stocks were slapped in brisk unison as the weapons were brought down from the aim position through port to order arms. A trickle of sweat rolled across the bridge of Hardesty's nose. A bus rumbled by two blocks east, on what was left of Lexington Avenue. Hardesty wondered if the driver's union sanctioned passenger trapping. He had once traveled ten extra blocks on a bus which had slowed down without stopping at the designated spots. He had watched braver passengers than himself leap from the vehicle, risking broken bones. Well, they probably had time-clocks to punch; Hardesty was in business for himself.

"In-spec-shun—harms!" the squad leader screamed. Twelve rifles snapped up to port, twelve bolts were slammed back. The squad leader walked down the line, examining rifle chambers. Three rifles to Hardesty's left, he stopped. "Here she is," he said.

From the corner of his eye, Hardesty saw the girl, calm as murder, hurl her heavy rifle at the squad leader. The stock slammed across his face and knocked him down before he could parry it with his arms. The girl turned and fled up over the rim of the bomb crater.

"Catch her!" bellowed the squad leader, who stood up, wiped the blood from his lips and sprinted toward the crater rim. Ten members of the squad followed him on the double. The penalty for jumping the gun was severe; the reward for catching the culprit, considerable.

He waited until the last of the squad had scrambled up the steep slope of the crater wall, waited until the drumming sound of feet on the buckled pavement faded, then approached the dead man still suspended from the firing post. The man's face looked peaceful, as if he were only sleeping. He wore a mackinaw, a pair of patched trousers and heavy rubble-boots. Hardesty could not see where the bullet had gone in.

Approaching the corpse, Hardesty wondered if the girl who had fired prematurely would make good her escape. Lord knew there were places to hide in the bombed-out city. Hardesty began to hope they would capture her, though. It would simplify things. He did not know her name, but fifteen minutes before the execution he had tossed a coin with her. Hardesty had won. She would kill the condemned man prematurely, Hardesty would remain behind to go through his pockets for booty. Later on, they would meet at the stump of the Lever Brothers Building and divvy up. Provided she wasn't caught. Provided Hardesty remembered.

He reached the dead man and started through the big flap pockets of his mackinaw. A cold wind swirled into the crater, lifting a cloud of choking dust. The first red glow of the sun had faded, leaving a pale and watery orb to fight the gathering clouds in the eastern sky. It looked like snow was on the way. Hardesty found a tattered wallet in the left rear pocket of the man's trousers.

Startled, Hardesty looked around. He saw no one. He might hurl himself behind the corpse and the firing post, his rifle ready—but the woman could have been crouched behind the embankment there.

"What do you want?" Hardesty demanded in an arrogant voice. You were a goner if you showed fear. That's what they wanted, fear.

"I'm armed. I have you covered. I can see you but you can't see me. Drop your rifle."

And fire on two, you shrew, Hardesty thought. He wondered again about the other girl, the one who was fleeing across the city now. A confederate of hers? It was possible. Double-dealing invited triple dealing. Hardesty thumbed the safety catch forward on his rifle and dropped the weapon at his feet. He still held the dead man's wallet in his left hand.

The woman appeared over the rear embankment of the crater. She wore a cap with earlaps, a tattered leather lumber-jacket, a heavy black skirt, rubble-boots and no gloves. She carried a sawed-off shotgun in the cradle of her bent left arm. She was pretty, but did not look mean enough to be really beautiful. Her eyes were piercing.

"Give it to me." The young woman came forward, kicked Hardesty's rifle out of reach with her left foot and held out her right hand.

Just then an air-raid siren began to wail. Hardesty looked up at the pale cold sky. He saw no jets. He heard none. The spotters didn't give you much warning these days. They knew of the raid in advance, of course. They had received word from the spotters up and down the coast. While they would be executed if they failed to report the raid entirely, there was no stipulation on the time limit and no way of proving it if there had been. As a consequence, the spotters were rich men. You hardly had time to lock up or hide your valuables with only seconds to reach shelter.

He shrugged. He still heard no jets. False alarms kept you on your toes and made you wait until the last possible moment when the real thing came. False alarms? The spotters called them air-raid drills.

"I doubt it," Hardesty said truthfully. The bomb crater would make a fairly good shelter, anyway. The worst of the shock waves would pass over it. Hardesty hoped shelter-seeking pedestrians wouldn't find the bomb crater. He might be able to deal with the woman alone, but he'd lose whatever booty was left in the dead man's pockets if a few dozen scavengers came down into the hole.

Hardesty handed it over. "Who are you?" he said. "A friend of that blonde girl who—"

A head was silhouetted briefly against the pale sky above the rim of the crater. The widow fired a warning shot from one barrel of her shotgun, then quickly reloaded it. The head vanished.

"You have no right to your husband's belongings," Hardesty said. "You ought to know that."

"Because I saw what happened. You were in cahoots with that blonde girl, weren't you?" The widow went through her dead husband's pockets as she talked, stuffing what she found into the pockets of her mackinaw. Hardesty stared hungrily at the silver gleam of coins, the dull green of paper money.

"Lady," Hardesty said derisively, "you're a sucker. Your husband was holding out on you."

"Go scratch," said Hardesty in a taunting voice. He wanted the woman to search him. He thought he could take her if she got busy with his pockets.

"Hide what?" the woman licked her lips eagerly. She looked real pretty now. Hardesty had always preferred the mean, hard look to the unctuous one which stamped so many faces these days. The woman took a step toward Hardesty, who tensed himself. It was the little things like this which made life worth living. The cat and mouse game. Personal politics, it was called. It used to be called ethics. The woman put her hand in the pocket of Hardesty's coat, anxiously searching.

The sky shook itself, disgorging bombs. A bright flash blossomed beyond the western rim of the crater, and another. Seconds later, Hardesty heard the explosions. The woman had forgotten Hardesty and crouched in terror at the feet of her dead husband, who still stood there leaning forward from the firing post. Had the woman denounced him for some personal reason? wondered Hardesty. It happened all the time. Personal politics.

The second wave of jets came over, their roar all but drowning out the stacatto pop-pop-pop of the AA guns. The country had used up its entire supply of ground-to-bomber missiles. The enemy had depleted its store of fusion and fission bombs. Everyone settled for ack-ack and TNT.

The bombs rained down, exploding like firecrackers on a scale model of the ruined city. It always looked that way to Hardesty. Unreal. He supposed it was like that, unreal, to everyone until the one bomb which was too close and suddenly too real compressed the air before its warhead and shrieked earthward, growing and growing and not cutting off the shriek before the sound of the explosion like kids do when they play war and make vocal bomb sounds but terminating the shriek instantly with the explosion and killing you almost before you heard the sound with concussion or flying masonry or fire.

Like that bomb, right now, right there, which picked up a two-story building, uprooting it at the foundation and lifting it slowly into the air in defiance of gravity, then turning it over gently, teaching it tricks before it perished, flipping it carelessly, indifferently, showering a slow downpour of furniture to the ground through the now floorless bottom story and then turning the whole building once more, like a child's block caught in a gale, and suddenly sundering it, breaking the building into large pieces which floated lazily downward, exploding with a paradoxical lack of violence into smaller pieces, and the smaller ones into still smaller, until the whole thing came down, dust and shards now, like a multi-colored snowstorm, beyond the rim of the bomb crater.

Afterwards came the concussion, mitigated by the depth of the crater but still strong, flipping Hardesty across the crater floor. He let his muscles go slack, instinctively knowing there would be less likelihood of a broken bone that way. He tasted blood in his mouth and felt his head burrow into rubble and ashes. He stood up groggily as the all-clear sounded. You had to be cautious. Sometimes the spotters tricked you. Then you went out into the open and the bombs came down again almost as if the spotters and the enemy bombardiers were in secret entente with one another and would later meet in some undreamed of neutral place and share the booty collected from corpses and parts of corpses. It was a dog eat dog world.

The concussion had ripped loose the firing post, which had fallen with the dead man still dangling, like a drunk leaning backwards against a lamp-post, across the woman. She lay there under its weight, her legs drumming, her arms twitching.

"Help me," she called to Hardesty in a feeble voice. "Please help me." She was very ugly that way, with a look of supplication on her dirt-smeared face. Hardesty walked over to her and placed his foot on her shoulder so she wouldn't twitch so, then went through her pockets quickly. He found two five million dollar bills and a handful of small denomination coins, one and two hundred thousand dollars each, mostly. Shrugging his disappointment, Hardesty realized it would be only enough to keep him going a week, and that long only if he spent it frugally. Those were the breaks.

She would probably live, Hardesty figured. She was only pinned there; she didn't seem badly hurt. Naturally, he changed his residence in the bombed-out city every day, but if the blonde girl were caught and described him to save her own neck and if this woman confirmed the description to receive her share of the ten million dollars in denouncer's bounty, Hardesty might possibly be found. The penalty for jumping the gun or aiding gun-jumping was death. Other citizens didn't have their just opportunity to scavenge.

Hardesty went over and found the sawed-off shotgun. "Nothing," he said, and split the woman's skull open with the stock of the shotgun.

A digging crew was working with picks and shovels on a ruined building on 44th Street. It had been an office building of some dozen storys, but the whole façade had collapsed. The offices thus revealed looked like tiny cubicles with cardboard ceilings, floors and walls. The whole ruined structure looked like a giant compartmented eggbox lying on its side, the small square compartments cluttered with impossibly small office furniture carved to perfect scale.

Community effort. You had to dig out the ruins. In the early days of the war you looked for living people, but now personal politics had changed that. The diggers had clubs and knives ready in case any survivors were found to contest their booty. They were hacking away at the heaps of broken concrete with consummate effort, stopping every now and then for hot drinks which the Red Cross brought around. They had some union, those Red Cross workers. They were guaranteed ten percent of the booty in any building they serviced during digging. Often only the digging foreman got coffee, but it didn't matter.

The scene reminded Hardesty of a clever children's toy he had seen once. It was a hollow globe of plastic, with water inside. When you turned it upside down, tiny jet bombers dropped tinier bombs on a skyscraper which resembled the Lever Brothers Building. The building flew apart, spitting miniature corpses and furniture out of windows. Minute diggers started to dig at the base of the structure and a Red Cross vehicle spilled out tiny, spider-like Red Cross workers with armbands. When you turned the globe right-side-up again, everything assumed its place like before the air-raid. It was very ingenious.

Hardesty thought it would be a good idea to get out of his neighborhood. There was no telling what had happened to the blonde. If he were caught in her position, he certainly would have squealed. Anyway, Hardesty had heard that the pickings were good down by the old Navy Yard in Brooklyn, provided you could steal a boat and make your way across the East River under the ruined bridges. Some people claimed the waters of the river were still radioactive, but Hardesty suspected the radiation had long since flowed out to sea. It was probably a rumor promulgated and maintained by the roving bands of Brooklyn scavengers. Hardesty had always preferred being a small businessman. He just couldn't see scavenging for a salary, despite the comparative security it offered.

"All right, then. It's an order." Someone thrust a shovel at Hardesty. He glanced at the man's sleeve and saw the starred armband of a block captain. Damn these civil servants! You hated their guts but had to obey them. Oh, they were psychopathic enough. Hardesty admitted that to himself. You couldn't get any kind of a decent job with the city unless the Civil Service Board passed on your psychopathy. But they were too smug in an orderly, regimented way. They could quote ordinances to you until you wanted to wring their necks but they were right and if you did, you were as good as dead.

Hardesty took the shovel in his numb cold hands and began to dig mechanically where the pick-ax crew had already done its work. After an hour, he had uncovered nothing worthwhile. A teen-aged Red Cross girl brought him a cup of evil-smelling synthetic coffee, but he drank it to warm his stiff muscles.

All at once, he heard a tapping sound coming from a big bronze pipe which had probably carried water or refuse from one of the offices upstairs.

"Someone's alive in there," a youngster next to Hardesty said. He ran over with a pick-ax and began to hack furiously at the rubble.

The block captain rushed to the spot and said, "Are you crazy or something? There's no air in there. Give them a couple of hours and they'll be dead. Are you forgetting your ordinances, boy?"

"We got too many mouths to feed as it is. Anyhow, you want them contesting the booty? If they survive, they're liable to claim it all."

"I—I'm sorry." The youngster stopped hacking away with his pick-ax. He seemed genuinely contrite, but you never knew about that type. He might come back tonight and dig in private. By then, fortunately, it would be too late. But the city hospitals were full of just such people who couldn't adjust to the rigors of war. Hardesty had heard about a proposed bill which would have them all killed painlessly. That was no way to die, without pain, but it served them right. Of course, thought Hardesty bitterly, the city would claim all their booty—which was another matter entirely.

Five minutes later, Hardesty found a dismembered arm. It was already frozen with the cold and seemed more like wax than flesh. The arm was too muscular to have belonged to a woman. The man had worn a ring and a gold-plated wristwatch which, between them, might bring eighty or ninety million dollars on the black market. Hardesty got the watch loose and was working the ring off the frozen fingers when the block captain spotted him.

"I saw that," he said. He had a big beefy face with eyes so close together they seemed to be forever staring at the tip of his nose. "You think you're in business for yourself?"

"I'm sorry," Hardesty said lamely. "Habit. I'm a scavenger by occupation. Here. Here's the ring."

The beefy-faced man scrutinized the ring and pocketed it. "The wristwatch," he said,

"No, you must have been imagining things." What would it bring on the black market? Fifty million dollars in a quick sale? Decent living for a month. Hardesty was damned if the block captain would get it.

The other diggers had stopped their work to watch Hardesty's growing—and now perilous—discomfort. "Let's just get on with the work," Hardesty suggested. He had placed the sawed-off shotgun down near the curb when he started digging. He saw it there now, with one of the Red Cross teen-agers staring at it covetously. He wondered if he could reach it in time and blast the beefy block captain's face in. He decided the shovel would be quicker and every bit as effective.

Swinging the shovel like a baseball bat, Hardesty bounced it off his jaw. He didn't wait to see the results. He bolted for the curb, scooped up his sawed-off shotgun, and ran.

It was snowing now, big dry flakes which fell from a windless sky, slow patient flakes which would fall for many hours if the leaden sky was any indication, choking the broken arteries of the perishing city.

Let it, thought Hardesty. I don't have to go to Brooklyn, after all. I know where I can dispose of this wristwatch.

He was jogging along in no great hurry. He had darted down Vanderbilt Avenue by the ruins of Grand Central Station, then cut back and forth through the streets in the low forties. They had chased him for a while but had given him up by now, he supposed. Hell, it was only one wristwatch. He slowed to a walk along Park Avenue and watched the city die.

The city had been moribund ever since Hardesty could remember. It seemed the natural state of things, just as the public politicians had finally given in to the inevitable and now decried that war was the natural state of human society. With war, cities died. With dead cities, war became a more personal thing. That was where personal politics came in. War became an individual thing as well as a social enterprise. That was the way you lived.

An old woman came trudging along in the snow, her boot-shod feet making footprints clear down through the thin white covering to the broken gray sidewalk beneath it. She was selling poor-grade booty, trinkets and a few items of faded old clothing. "Anything I've got," she hawked, holding a yellow straw basket up for Hardesty's inspection, "anything in the basket for only a hundred thousand dollars."

When Hardesty shook his head, she tagged along, gripping his sleeve in clawlike fingers and tugging at it. "Go away, grandma," he said. The old lady went on ranting about her wares in a high, incongruously childish voice. Maybe a few of the diggers were still looking for him, Hardesty thought. The crone's piercing voice would attract people for blocks.

The hag cleared her throat and spat yellow phlegm in the clean white snow. "See this dress? See, it's second hand, but you could hardly tell. For you, a special price because you have a cruel face. For you—"

"Damn it!" said Hardesty, and fished in his pocket for a few coins. There was no one else on the street, no one else on the lonely landscape of battered buildings and stumps of buildings. A few feet to Hardesty's left, a fire hydrant had ruptured; a torrent of water gushed from it, freezing at the edges of the large puddle which had formed, as if the ice had started there and would approach the hydrant and strangle it. Hardesty was surprised that the city still pumped so much pressure through its water mains.

"Here," Hardesty said, handing the old woman a few coins and taking her basket. It was unexpectedly heavy. The old woman thanked him profusely in her childish voice. Hardesty had no use for the contents of the basket, but wouldn't return it to the hag. Later he could dispose of it. Returning it to her would be charity, and you just did not indulge in charity.

Hardesty heard the footfalls pounding behind him. The diggers. He began to run, hurling the basket away from him. He turned around to look and saw four or five shapes sprinting after him. Hardesty raised the shotgun without bothering to aim and fired both barrels. The hag clutched her throat and pitched forward in the snow. One of the men fell with her. Hardesty tossed the now useless shotgun aside and heard something clatter against the wall next to him. Sparks flew. It was a knife. The man's aim had been good, almost too good.

Hardesty circled the block twice, then hid in a doorway. It was a doorway to absolutely nowhere. On one side was the street, on the other was a rubble-filled bomb crater. This had once been a building, but only the doorway stood. Even the door had been blown to bits.

A sign over the door said WAL—RIA. Hardesty thought a hotel had stood here, long ago. He crouched in the doorway and waited, catching his breath. It was so cold, his teeth began to chatter uncontrollably. His lungs, though, were on fire, and his nostrils. He couldn't stay there too long. He would freeze to death. Perhaps they had taken a wrong turn over on Madison Avenue.

Ten minutes later, after hiding in a pile of rubble when he saw someone coming down the street, Hardesty found himself passing the stump of the Lever Brothers Building. The girl, he thought suddenly. He had forgotten about the blonde. He shouldn't be passing here. She might be waiting for him.

It was the blonde's voice. Hardesty had in mind to run again, but there would be too many people after him, too many people who, out of spite or patriotism, would identify him and denounce him. He would share the executed man's booty with the blonde girl. But not the wristwatch. She had nothing to do with the wristwatch. Maybe, he thought, she even knew of a good warm place to sleep.

"I had a little delay," Hardesty said. He didn't see the blonde anywhere. She was inside the building.

People came from all over Manhattan to see the Lever Brothers stump. Miraculously, some of the green-tinted glass was still whole. No one could explain this except to say it was a freak of concussion, and it had happened, hadn't it? The few panes which remained were almost the only unbroken panes of glass in New York City.

It was green in there, and dim. Looking out through the glass, the snow resembled tons of chopped spinach coming down. The blonde's hair was green. Her skin was green, and her eyes. She had a hard cold look on her face now.

The man was big and had probably used many times with success the gun he carried in his fist. It was the man who had spoken. He covered Hardesty with the gun while the blonde hastily went through the booty they had found.

"You're being held under city ordinance 217," the big man told Hardesty. Ordinance 217 was concerned with gun-jumping or aiding a gun-jumper. The penalty was death.

Not long afterwards, Hardesty was bound to a firing post near the embankment of a crater close to the Lever Brothers stump, but far enough away so none of the glass would be shattered. The firing squad lined up. The blonde girl was third from the right. Hardesty hoped someone would aim for his stomach and the others would miss. If he had to die, he wanted to die painfully.

"Ready!" barked the squad leader. Hardesty wasn't sure, but thought he was the same man who had led that other squad.

And then, before the squad leader could shout "fire!" Hardesty heard a gunshot. He didn't feel the bullet go in, but as he slumped forward away from the firing post he felt a warm wetness, and no other sensation, in his chest. With a final effort of will he looked up and saw the blonde girl's face. There was a faint smile tugging at the corners of her lips. All at once Hardesty knew. She had probably taken someone in this squad aside, as she had taken Hardesty aside. She had made a deal with him. Meet at the Lever Brothers stump, or someplace else? Divvy up. It was the surest way to catch gun-jumpers. The blonde girl was working for the government and probably collected a healthy slice of the booty.

The last thing Hardesty ever heard was the squad leader's angry voice as the man roared: "Who the hell jumped the gun?"

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