The Living Will Envy The Dead (10 page)

“Once the Doctor has inspected them, we either push them back out or we take them into the town,” Isaac said.  “We can inspect their vehicles afterwards and check that they’re not irradiated either, and then bring them into the town as well.  The gas alone will be well-worth the effort of bringing them into the secure zone.”

I nodded.  We were going to run short of gasoline fairly quickly.  Mac would have ensured that the cars he’d used in the blockade had been drained first – it actually is fairly easy to do that using a hand pump, rather than that particularly idiotic cartoon episode where Otto uses a straw to drain a bus’s tank – but we were still short.  I smiled, slightly.  One of the little surprises we’d encountered in Iraq had been an idiotic insurgent who had
forgotten
to drain the gas tanks.  His cars had blown up nicely.

A whistle blew.  “Company’s coming,” someone shouted from the blockade.  Mac had placed someone on higher ground where he could see down the road.  I would have liked to have had some form of UAV, but sadly they hadn’t been considered fitting equipment for a small town.  If I’d had a few weeks to prepare for disaster…I shook the thought aside as wishful thinking and ran down towards Mac’s command post.

“Ed,” Mac said, when I arrived.  He was staring towards a set of minivans, driving towards us rather erratically.  My first thought was that they were being shot at, but I couldn’t see anyone following them.  The last time I had seen anything like that had been an ambushed convoy in Iraq.  The ambusher had been ambushed in turn by us and shot to pieces.  “Do you want to take the lead?”

“You know what you’re doing,” I said, in reply.  This was Mac’s game.  He'd done all the hard labour of setting it up.  “I won’t take over now.”

He snorted at me and stepped forward, barking orders.  The majority of the guards got to their weapons and took up position, while others removed themselves from the scene.  They’d be the reserve if we actually were attacked.  I wasn’t expecting violence at once, but I knew that it wouldn’t be long before ‘every man for himself’ became the rule of law in the cities.  It probably was already.  The vans came onwards until they saw the signs and skidded to a halt.

The man who climbed out of the lead van looked terrible.  He wore what had once been a several thousand-dollar suit, expertly cut and tailored.  It now looked torn and broken, stained with blood.  From the way he limped, I could tell that he had been in a fight.  He had a gun stuffed into his belt, but I wouldn’t have bet money that he knew how to use it properly.  I borrowed a pair of binoculars from one of the guards and scanned the vans carefully.  They looked to be holding several entire families…and as if they had shot their way out of town.  I could see several bullet holes and smashed windows.

Shit
, I thought.  This was going to be bad.

“Halt,” Mac bellowed, through a loudspeaker.  It made a hugely intimidating noise.  “You will remain where you are.  Keep your hands in the air.  Do not move or you will be shot!”

The man waited as Mac climbed over the blockade and advanced to meet him, weapon in hand.  I followed, clutching my own pistol, so that I could hear the discussion.  The man looked terrified, but when he saw my uniform, he almost collapsed in relief.  I wondered, later, what he would have thought if he had known how many people I had ordered killed earlier in the day.

“You have to let us in, man,” he said, finally.  It was hard to sort out information from his babbling, but it seemed that he was a real estate agent, with his family and a few of their friends.  I wasn't sure, then or ever, where he’d actually come from.  “There’s nothing out there, but chaos.”

“I can’t,” Mac said, calmly.  His smile had vanished behind a cold mask.  “We barely have enough for ourselves.  You will have to go someplace else.”

I tensed slightly.  “But my children,” the man protested.  “They can’t stand this…”

“I’m sorry,” Mac said, “but we can’t take them in.  Leave.”

The man’s hand dropped to his pistol.  Mac snatched it out of his hand before he could draw it, something for which I chewed him out later.  Fighting over a gun is dangerous.  The man cringed, as if he expected to be beaten with his own gun, but Mac merely held it away from him.

“You have to leave,” Mac repeated.  “If you don’t, we will open fire.”

After a moment, the man turned and walked back to the vans.

I knew, then, that I was witnessing the death of America.

Democracy is a poor system of government at best; the only thing that can honestly be said in its favour is that it is about eight times as good as any other method the human race has ever tried. Democracy's worst fault is that its leaders are likely to reflect the faults and virtues of their constituents - at a depressingly low level
.

-Robert A. Heinlein

“All right, settle down,” Mac snapped, a day later.  The Town Hall was packed with residents, some angry, some fearful and all concerned.  Normally, Town Meetings had only a few dozen visitors, but now it was standing room only.  The Mayor and the leading families, including Mac’s, would make the decisions, but now the Mayor was dead and everything was up in the air.  “Quiet down so we can get this meeting started.”

It took quite a bit longer than that, but finally the room was quiet.  “The Mayor is dead, as you all know,” Mac said, quietly into the silence.  The Mayor had been respected, if not always liked.  His suicide came as a blow, not least because he hadn’t been the last person to die at his own hand.  “The country is at war.  We have to decide what to do.  Ed, please take the stand.”

I stood up.  I don’t like addressing people in public, not when everyone was desperately looking at me to save their lives and property, but there was no choice.  The only other person who knew as much as I did was Mac, or perhaps Isaac Chang, but I couldn’t stand down in their favour.  I had accepted the post back when it involved little more than arresting someone who’d had too much to drink and I couldn’t stop now.

“This is what we know,” I said, and ran briefly through what we’d picked up before all communications had been lost.  The effects of the EMP pulses had been variable, and quite a few of the tactical radios seemed to be working, but the air was full of static.  They barely worked at anything above a local level and if there was someone broadcasting out in the wildness, we never heard them.  Not then.  “The war may be over, or it may be still going on, but we have to deal with the consequences.”

I paused.  “As far as we can make out, law and order has completely collapsed,” I continued.  We’d interviewed a handful of refugees we’d taken in and their stories had been uniformly horrific.  The entire country seemed to be dissolving into terror and horror.  “We are on our own.  We may be able to link up with other towns and villages later, but the Federal and State Governments appear to have been destroyed.”

“So much for the fucking IRS,” someone shouted, from the rear.

“And so much for everything else,” I snapped.  I wasn't too unhappy about the demise of the Internal Revenue Service myself – I doubted that anyone apart from its employees would have been upset – but matters were too serious for jokes.  “We are on our own.  There will be no supplies from outside.  There will be no seed corn, no artificial insemination for the cows, no more weapons and ammo, no more…”

I listed several dozen items that we depended upon…and came in from outside.  I had ordered all kinds of tiny matters, such as collecting brass casings for reloading, that might help stretch out our supplies, but very few of them would be effective in the long term.  Those guards at the stores had come in very useful already.  If we had a panic, we were going to be fucked.  There was plenty of coal about, luckily, but we were going to be short on a great many other things.  What would happen when we ran out of everything else…?

“That can’t be right,” Marc Schneider protested.  I kept my face blank, with an effort, but others weren't so shy about showing their feelings.  Marc wasn’t a popular man in Ingalls.  He'd been something in the city – I had a feeling that it was something that a gentleman’s gentleman had been employed to scrape off his master’s shoe – and had made enough money to buy a house in Ingalls and generally make a nuisance of himself.  It occurred to me that, now, there would be nothing stopping us from lynching him…except me.  There were times when I wished I didn’t have such a sense of duty.  “I know the country has taken a beating, but the government isn’t going to fall so quickly, is it?”

“The government has been seriously damaged,” I said.  I had a nasty feeling that I was understating the case.  It would have been easy to take refuge in believing that it would all be over in a few weeks and we could return to normal, but I knew better.  “Even if the President is still alive, he’s in no state to take control of the country.  The cities have been blasted and thousands upon thousands of refugees will be spilling out into the countryside.  Some of them will be carrying fallout with them.”

There was no dissent.  Everyone knew that we had been turning away what refugees arrived at Ingalls.  A couple hadn’t taken the hint and had had to be chased away with precisely aimed shots.  Don’t get me wrong; Ingalls wasn’t one of those places that really hate outside
rs – although most people made an exception for Marc and his snooty wife – but most of them lived close enough to the land to understand how fragile everything had become.  We were on the verge of being fucked.

Mac spoke into the silence.  “I propose that we move at once to place ourselves on a full defence position,” he said.  “I also nominate that Ed takes command of our defences and planning our survival.”

“He can’t do that,” Marc injected, quickly.  The big man looked honestly shocked.  “He killed over a thousand men…”

“All of whom deserved it,” Mac snapped back, angrily.  If there had been any
real
second-guessing to be done, Mac would have done it.  “Or would you have suggested feeding them all here, so close to the children and young girls?  Or would you have suggested leaving them in a well-stocked prison with all the guns and food they could possibly want to produce an army?  We would have been bowing the neck to them within a year, if we survived.”

“But
can
we survive?”  Tom Spencer asked.  He was semi-retired, like many others in Ingalls, and normally drove the school bus.  A more caring person it would be hard to find.  “If a nuclear war has taken place, aren’t we all going to die anyway?”

I paused, composing my thoughts.  “A lot of us will die,” I said, grimly.  “The cities will become charnel houses very quickly.  Disease and deprivation will stalk the land like…two giant stalking things.”  That got a nervous laugh, as I had hoped.  Personally, I blame Mac’s low taste in television.  “We have farms out here, though, and enough of a position to defend that we would have a good chance of holding out, if we start making plans now.  We have weapons and we have an organised defence force.  We can hold out long enough for most of our enemies to die.”

I explained as quickly as I could.  The cities were almost-certainly write-offs now, as far as we were concerned.  They had once been the heart of the United States, but now they were just burning embers.  Oh, large parts of the cities would have survived, but they were no longer tenable as part of the country.  The supply network that kept them fed would have been destroyed.  The countryside, however, was a different matter.  We could rebuild what we could, if we survived the coming year, and eventually rebuild the country.  It wasn't going to be easy – my decision to execute the prisoners was going to be the least of what we would have to do – but we had to try.  It wasn't in me to just give up.

“He’s right,” Rebecca Piazza said.  I was surprised by her support, for Rebecca was another character.  She’d come to Ingalls five years ago with a small group of followers to establish a commune.  A taste of living without modern conveniences had convinced about a third of them that the sinful cities were better places to live, while another third had ended up being arrested on various drug-related charges, encouraging most of the remainder to leave before the law caught up with them as well.  Rebecca and a pair of young men had stayed, struggling to survive and somehow eking out an existence.  “We could establish a whole new world order.”

“With him in command, no doubt,” Marc said, sourly.

“Well, I for one support Ed,” Herman said.  He glared at Marc, for the two men were old enemies.  Herman was the local gun store owner and the most extreme gun fanatic in the area, which took some doing.  He’d never been a soldier, unlike most of the population, but no one questioned his knowledge.  He had supplied the entire Jail Posse with standardized weapons.  Rumour had it that he had enough guns and ammo to fight a civil war.  “He knows what he’s doing.”