The Living Will Envy The Dead (18 page)

“Its much more likely that they just decided to keep going because they were afraid of radioactive poisoning,” Mac said, afterwards, although a brief examination had revealed nothing beyond minor traces of fallout on their clothes.  It wouldn’t be anything pleasant, but they’d probably survive for years without developing cancer.  The ones who’d gotten ill, I guessed, had merely eaten bad meat.  Human flesh, as I believe I noted earlier, is not a healthy source of food.  “Do you still want to keep them?”

“It’s that or hang them,” I said.  I wasn't going to let them loose again, even stark naked as I had threatened, and I wasn’t going to waste my ammunition shooting them all.  The girls, it turned out, had been the mistresses of two of the senior gang-bangers and had known everything their men had done.  I wasn’t feeling sympathetic towards them, although I had a nasty feeling that perhaps I should be considering using them as mothers rather than brute labour.  I’d forced that feeling down – I wasn't going to do that, not under any circumstances – but it kept lingering at the back of my mind.  “What else can we do with them?”

The day afterwards, the prisoners arrived from Stonewall.  Richard and I had used the time well to go through the prisoner records and pick out a handful with skills that could be useful elsewhere.  A pair of doctors and a male nurse – all in jail for theft and abuse of medical supplies – had been transported into Ingalls to work under Kit.  I’d made sure that they had been warned of the consequences of doing anything stupid, but I had arranged for them to be kept carefully under observation.  Their skills made them valuable…and far from expendable.  The remaining prisoners, on the other hand…

I watched as they clinked their way down towards the outer barricades.  I had thought about driving them from Stonewall to Ingalls, but that would have cost us gasoline we could hardly afford to waste.  We had drained almost every car tank into the main supplies, but we didn’t have enough for everything we might need vehicles to do.  In the long term – the very long term – we could probably make more, but that was probably a project for next year at the very least.  Rebecca, on the other hand, had come up with a scheme for producing methane from human wastes and now most of our food was cooked on methane.  I hadn’t even considered that possibility, but she’d assured me that it was used in Africa as an aid project, improving the continent one step at a time.  It made me wonder how Africa was faring, cut off from all international aid, but I didn’t want to know.  There were some places in Africa that were probably faring better than we were.

“All present and correct,
sir
,” Richard said, as the final prisoner arrived.  He’d had their legs chained together, just to make escape impossible, although they had seen enough of the countryside to know that escape would lead to certain death even if they weren't shot – quite literally – trying to escape.  “Orders, sir?”

I stepped forward and started to issue orders.  The prisoners might be only good for brute labour, at the moment, but half of them could work now on improving our defences.  They started to dig ditches and build up the ramparts after I had finished issuing orders to that particular group, while a second group worked to clear away the wreckage from the gang-banger attack.  We’d skimmed through the vehicles quickly, just after the end of the battle, but I was surprised by some of the shit they found.  I’d been watching carefully for weapons, but they found cigarettes – which I sent back to be shared out among the addicts, those who weren't trying to kick the habits – and a small supply of drugs.  I confiscated the latter, but Kit convinced me to keep it around as a anaesthetic if more normal drugs ran out. 

The third group of prisoners was ordered to start moving out garbage to the landfill two kilometres away.  The landfill had been one of Washington’s ideas in hopes of cleaning up the landscape a bit, or more likely pleasing some of their contributors – ok, I’m a cynical bastard, but I’d be more depressed if I thought they really had no reason for doing what they did – but it hadn’t been so useful after the Final War.  Folks used to drive their cars and vans out to dump their shit – some of which might actually be useful now – but now, with so little gasoline left, there was zero enthusiasm for the task.  The best solution I’d come up with was to have the prisoners take out the garbage, after first sorting through it to ensure that nothing useful was being thrown out. 

I left matters in Richard’s capable hands and walked back through Ingalls towards the High School, which had now been fortified in a manner that would have given a Marine Company pause…although honesty compels me to admit that that pause would have been because they were sniggering their heads off.  We’d fortified the School as well as we could, but there was a shortage of real protection for the kids, even now.  It was something that was going to be a major problem in the future if the barricades actually fell and we were forced to fight house-to-house.  It was something that worried me greatly.

“And so you always remember to keep the units of measurement straight…”

Ray Thompson was in the classroom, lecturing a bunch of teenage girls who were watching him with scarily intent expressions.  I blamed Rose for that.  She’d convinced me that girls – and young women – should handle almost anything that didn’t involve fighting, and that included civil engineering.  This was actually Ray’s break, but he was spending it teaching the young women enough engineering to get by in Ingalls.  It did help that we weren't going to be considering skyscrapers any time soon, or massive dams to create reservoirs of water, but it was still a weakness.  The girls would be doing most of their learning on the job.

(And Rose had told them that if they didn’t develop a tradition of women working in the rear areas, they’d end up being treated like women in Afghanistan, forced to remain second-class citizens rather than fully equal to the men.  That would happen, as far as I was concerned, over my dead body, but Rose had made it sound like a certainty.  They wouldn’t be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, but clothed and working as anything, but soldiers.  She’d even started a whole series of competitions with the men.)

I walked down to the next few classrooms and saw Emily and Jane, two of the nurses from Stonewall, lecturing other girls – and a handful of boys – on emergency medical techniques.  They’d probably bent about a million rules about practicing medicine without a licence, rules the AMA had instigated for some reason that had probably made sense at the time, but I no longer cared.  If they could save lives, and teach other girls how to save lives, then it was fine in my book.  Besides, we were going to need to spread the knowledge out as far as possible.  The more doctors and nurses we had, the better our chances for survival in the coming few years.

The final classroom was a tactics class, taught by a pair of veterans who had served in the Gulf War and innumerable small unit engagements since then, for the boys who had showed promise in the conscripted classes.  They’d showed a remarkable increase in determination lately, as I had expected, after they’d seen the gang-bangers and their victims.  What had happened to poor Roshanda might happen to their sisters, girlfriends and even mothers.  I couldn’t have asked for a better lesson in the need for a strong defence if I had planned it myself.

I listened for a long moment, before continuing down towards the headmaster’s office.  Walter Loy – Mayor Walter Loy, now – had refused to move permanently into the Town Hall, although he did half his work there.  I hadn’t wanted to keep him from his
real
job, or what he saw as his real job, although his election probably meant that he should have devoted all of his attention to the job of leading the community.  Besides, I hadn’t wanted anyone else involved in the decision to kill two-thirds of Stonewall’s population and I didn’t want to place him in a similar position.  The blood could remain on my hands and not his.  He was a decent man and deserved better.

He looked up as I entered from where he was marking papers.  “You’ll be pleased to hear,” he said, by way of introduction, “that there have been more applicants for the various training courses than we could accept.”

I nodded briskly.  Rose and Roy, between them, had inspired students in ways that they hadn’t been inspired before the War.  It helped that we still saw spectacular sunsets and were, to all intents and purposes, cut off from whatever was left of the world.  We might not be producing lawyers, or bankers, or other grasshoppers, but we’d be producing people who were actually useful.  All of those professions were useful, in their way, but only when society supported their presence.  At the moment, they were only good for brute labour.

“Good,” I said, finally.  “How are you finding the two jobs?”

“Tiring,” Walter said.  He gave me a wan smile that didn’t fool me for a second.  He was pushing himself to the brink of collapse.  I wondered if I should insist on him becoming Mayor permanently, but that would probably spark off a constitutional crisis, or something like that.  Our exact legal status was something that we would have to give some thought to, later.  “Do you know that we’ve been making explosives from our own…ah, shit?”

I knew, of course.  There were all kinds of interesting things you could do with human waste, including making gunpowder – eventually – and fertiliser.  I knew several ways to make additional explosives with common items we had in great supply, but all of them would have cost us items we needed.  I was finding the complete absence of any supplies from outside to be a major nuisance.  If I had stocked up weeks before the war…

“Yes, Walter,” I said.  He had refused to be addressed as ‘Sir.’  I didn’t know why, although I had a few guesses.  We all needed someone we could relax with.  “Have you given any thought to my proposal?”

“I don’t know, Ed,” he said.  He frowned, scowling up at what had once been an accurate map of West Virginia.  God alone knew what the demographic landscape looked like now.  Cold logic told me that we couldn’t be the last town in the world, or even in the state, but it was hard to overcome the oppression of the horizon.  “Are you sure that it would be safe?”

“Nothing in life is safe,” I reminded him.  “I think that the sooner we find out what’s out there, the better.”

“True, true” Walter said.  “Give it a few weeks before you go, all right?”

I nodded and slipped out of his office.  We were working the entire town to death, myself included, and we were on the brink of collapse.  If my calculations were accurate, if we lived through the coming year, we had a good chance at permanent survival.  I spent the rest of the day supervising the prisoners, inspecting the rebuilt defences, and finally joining Rose and Deborah as they went through another batch of electronic equipment.  The damned EMP hadn’t fried everything, but we had to check it all carefully, just in case.

The thought made me smile bitterly.  Some civilian cars had been immobilised by the EMP, which had fried their computer chips.  They’d accepted the improved services that the manufacturers promised – and largely delivered – but they hadn’t expected the EMP.  Even if they had been aware of the possibility, they’d deluded themselves that it wouldn’t happen. A competent mechanic could have bypassed the chips, but so few city-dwellers had those skills these days.  A good mechanic in Ingalls would be worth his weight in gold.  So much had changed…

I left them and stumbled upstairs to my office.  I hadn’t been in the office for weeks, but it felt like years.  There was the plain unadorned desk, the map of Ingalls and the surrounding area, the list of emergency numbers, a useless laptop – damn EMP – and the bottle of whiskey I had stuck in the bottom drawer.  It had been a present from Uncle Billy, back when I first took over the job, and I had been drinking from it very slowly.  I poured myself a small glass and swallowed it in a gulp, faces rising up in front of my mind’s eye…

My mother, my father, my friends, my relatives, Uncle Billy, the men of my former Company…where were they now?  I would have bet on Dad and Uncle Billy against the world – and my mother was the toughest old lady on the block – but they’d been in New York.  My family had been in New York.  I hadn’t allowed myself to think of it before, but now I had a moment’s peace I found the barriers crumbling and images slipping out into my mind.  I knew – I didn’t think, I knew – that New York would have been a Russian target.  There were so many worthwhile targets near or in the city.  The loss of Wall Street alone would be worthwhile.

(It was probably pointless, under the circumstances, but I knew that Russian planners had had a particular mad-on for Wall Street ever since the Second World War and had included it as a priority target in most of their attack plans, ever since they developed the capability to hit the Continental United States.  For some reason, they had kept that targeting priority as they updated their plans, even as their weapons became more sophisticated and flexible.)

And what we’d heard of Charleston…was that a reflection of what had happened in New York?  Had my city been torn apart by gang warfare as well, what was left of it after the bombs had detonated.  Had Mayor Hundred and his administration been killed, wiped out in the blasts, or had they been lynched as Badgers after the dust had settled?  Was my sister stumbling around as a Zombie, or was she still alive, slaving for a gang leader…there was no way to know.  How could I know…?