The Living Will Envy The Dead (19 page)

We had lost contact with everyone outside our walls.  We might be alone, after all, the last outpost of civilisation.  The radio watch had picked up nothing, but static, ever since the bombs had started to detonate.  It was impossible, I thought, but had the human race somehow managed to fuck up long-range radio transmissions?  Short range radios – those that had survived the EMP – still worked, but reception was shaky at best.  Could we be all alone in the world?

Somehow, I found I had poured myself a second glass.  I drank it slowly, savouring the taste, knowing that I would never see any more after it had gone.  Even if Scotland – and Uncle Billy, the butcher of the IRA – had remained intact, we would not be able to make contact for years.  So much had been destroyed in the war.  My country was a pitiful wreck, leaving survivors like us to hold the line against the final darkness, and the only consolation I had was that Russia had suffered worse.  It was small consolation.  I saw the faces of those I had ordered killed, or driven away, just to give the rest of us some chance at life, and shivered again.  Had it been worth all those crimes, just to keep Ingalls alive?

I felt moisture on my cheeks and shivered.  It would be so easy to break down.

And then Rose came to me, and understood, and the darkness receded back into the corners of my mind.

Ingalls was my home now.

To travel hopefully is better than to arrive
.

-Robert Louis Stevenson

“You know what this looks like?”

I looked over at Mac and rolled my eyes.  “No,” I said. “What does it look like?”

“Road Trip,” Mac announced, triumphantly.  I am ashamed to admit that I laughed at that.  “We have vehicles, we have guns and we have two girls.  They may be wearing proper clothes rather than just their underwear, but…”

“Shut up,” I said, not unkindly.  He laughed again as I found myself sniggering.  All right, it was a stupid joke, but it was funny.  We hadn’t laughed much since the War.  “We’re on an reconnaissance mission to find out what’s been happening outside our borders, not hunting hot chicks in their underwear.”

“The men will be terribly disappointed,” Mac said, still grinning.  “I’ve been telling them that if any of them spot a hot chick, they get to keep her.”

I shook my head and led the way over to the small convoy.  We’d assembled five vehicles for the trip; two SUVs, two trucks and a surplus jeep from World War Two that one of the residents had kept for some reason.  The mechanics swore by it.  They said that it was easier to maintain than any of the more modern vehicles and, of course, it hadn’t been remotely damaged by the EMP.  We’d armoured the vehicles as best as we could, using skills that had been developed and honed in Iraq, but we weren’t looking for trouble.  I just wanted to be prepared for it if it came. 

The team straightened up into some semblance of attention as we approached.  We’d haggled over the team’s exact composition before agreeing to take eighteen of the new soldiers – the best of their class – and two of the nurses from Stonewall.  I’d been reluctant to risk exposing them to any radiation or diseases that might be lingering around, but they had skills no one else had, or at least no one else that we could spare.  In Iraq, we would have been better equipped, but unless we were lucky enough to locate a military base that hadn’t been destroyed or looted, we wouldn’t be able to match that.  We’d just have to take extreme care with the women.  The team had been outfitted in the best body armour we had and the nurses had been warned to stay firmly in the middle of the convoy.  Mac and the mechanics had worked wonders on the vehicles, but I couldn’t help being reminded of the technicals that the Iraqi insurgents had used against us.  They’d come to grim and unpleasant ends.

“All right,” I said, once silence fell.  I pushed a little drama into my voice, hamming it up for the benefit of the more nervous kids in the group.  They hadn’t really been under fire before.  “Our mission, should we choose to accept it – and you all volunteered, so it’s a bit late to back out now – is to advance to Clarksburg and find out what’s been happening there.  If we’re lucky, we’ll run into other survivors.  If we’re not lucky, we’ll carry out a brief search of the area, make notes for later scavenging teams, and then return home to the plaudits of a grateful town.  Any questions?”

“Yes,” one of them said.  “When do we leave?”

“Now,” I replied.  I raised my voice.  “Mount up!”

We’d cleared one of the barricades slightly just enough to allow the convoy to slip through.  Mac had insisted on driving the lead SUV – he had a qualification in advanced driving – so I took the other seat and studied the map as the remainder of the town waved us goodbye.  I would have preferred to have left Mac behind, but he’d insisted on coming this time and I couldn’t say no.  Walter and Richard, between them, could handle anything that might happen, even if the town was attacked again.  There were enough veterans to fight off a second bunch of gang-bangers and the training of the conscripts was coming along nicely.

I saw Rose standing with Jackson and waved to her.  We hadn’t said much about our relationship since the first night, but everyone knew…and everyone was doing it anyway.  Three girls had become pregnant since the war and there had been seven marriages, all between men and women who would probably not have married without the War.  It had had the effect of focusing the mind a little, although I had a suspicion that some of the weddings had been effectively shotgun marriages.  If the boy had gotten the girl pregnant…well, there were no social programs to help her any longer.

“I’m sure you’ll be back to see her again,” Mac said, as we drove off down the road.  His girlfriend had been just as unhappy to see us go.   “I promised I’d get you back in one piece and I meant it.”

“Thanks,” I said, dryly.  “Now, keep your eyes on the road and watch out for traffic.”

“Yes, Dad,” he said.

It quickly became apparent that we should have brought a bulldozer along with us, or maybe a tank.  (We didn’t have a tank so the point was moot.)  The roads were liberally strewn with cars and other vehicles, all abandoned by their former owners, most of them intact.  We paused to check out a convoy of trucks that had broken down, or run out of fuel, but found nothing of any great interest.  I’d half-hoped for food, or even weapons, but whatever the driver had been carrying, it was gone.  Someone had probably taken it after the truck had been abandoned.

“I think that someone needs to clear this entire mess up,” Mac said, tightly.  The sight was affecting us all, but he’d lived in the area for far longer than I had.  He could remember when it had been crammed with running cars, or aircraft flying overhead, while I could only think of New York and my family.  “Perhaps we should get the prisoners down here and strip the cars bare, once we push them off the road.”

I scowled.  The entire scene was almost perfect for an ambush and yes, I felt the sensation of
threat
at the back of my neck.  We were moving slowly, picking our way between stranded cars, and anyone could have hit us at any time.  We hadn’t seen any signs of human population, although we did see a handful of feral dogs in the distance, but the overriding sense of danger refused to fade.  I didn’t want to think about what the dogs might have been eating, but it was impossible to avoid.  The dogs had probably been eating human flesh.  I just hoped that they hadn’t developed a taste for it.  We could have used more dogs.

“No argument,” I said, finally.  The eerie silence was only making us all jittery.  We couldn’t hear anything, but the noise of our own vehicles, not even birds in the sky.  I found my hand clutching the butt of my pistol and forced it to unclench.  It was like driving through a nuclear nightmare, one of the ones raised by inaccurate movies and junk science, although it probably hadn’t mattered to anyone who had died in the blasts.  The living survivors were probably envying the dead.  “We just don’t have the manpower to do everything.”

It was a problem that had been worrying me.  I’d spared the prisoners because we were going to need them – and because I had no qualms about expending them if there was no other choice – but there weren't enough of them to make a real dent in everything we needed to do to start rebuilding the countryside, even if we weren't alone in the brave new world.  I was sure that there were other survivors around somewhere, perhaps in the west even if we were the only survivors in the east, but it was easy to believe that we were alone in the world.  It reminded me of some of the dumber westerns we had seen back at the barracks, when they’re all alone under the desert sky, strumming a guitar.  Where the hell were we going to get more manpower from?

The thought refused to fade.  I’d calculated that the two months since the war would probably have ensured the deaths of most of the refugee population and, indeed, the number who had tried to get into Ingalls had fallen sharply to nothing since the end of the first month.  Food stocks were either guarded heavily or had run out, condemning refugees to starve, while disease and deprivation would have taken their toll.  The rows and rows of abandoned cars bore mute testimony to that.

“There,” Mac said.  I followed his pointing finger and shuddered.  The cars there hadn’t been abandoned, not with so many bullet holes in their sides.  They’d been shot up by someone.  They might have run into the gang-bangers we’d killed, or they might have run into someone else, who had refused several expensive cars to rusting piles of cheap metal.  “Do you want to take a look?”

I nodded as he pulled the vehicle to a halt.  I wanted to go first, but Mac insisted on two of the younger men going first, leaving me to follow in their wake.  It bothered me – I had never thought of myself as a General, or someone too important to risk – and there were times when I wondered if some of them saw me as a coward.  The lead man looked into one of the cars and looked sick; I followed his gaze.  The bodies might have been human once, but they’d been stripped and torn by something, leaving only skeletons.  Their deaths hadn’t been the end of their suffering.  Wild dogs, or cats, or something else had gnawed their rotting flesh.

The entire ecology is going to be screwed up
, I thought, grimly.  I didn’t know much about ecology – and most of what I’d been taught at school had been progressive bullshit about the pristine condition of America before the white man arrived – but I knew that all kinds of animals would have been released since the war.  Dogs and cats might be the least of our problems.  What about animals from the zoos?  They could have been eaten too, but would their keepers know that?  I wouldn’t have wanted to eat any of my pets when I’d been growing up, so why would they have decided to eat their tigers, or lions?  Oh my…

“We’d better make sure that everyone carries a gun with them at all times,” Mac said, when I outlined my thoughts for him.  I’d hoped that he would poke a hole in them, but he seemed to take them seriously.  “There really can’t be too many of them, relatively speaking, but what if they breed?”

The wind changed as we started to drive down the remains of the Interstate down towards Clarksburg, carrying with it a sickening stench that I recognised from Fallujah, the sickly-sweet smell of decaying human flesh.  I gagged and coughed, reaching for a facemask desperately and covering my nose, trying not to breathe it in any more.  It was a ghastly smell and its presence now, two months after the war, suggested that whatever had happened in Clarksburg had happened more recently than that.

We held a brief council of war.  “They’re still dying,” one of the nurses said.  She had been unbothered by the stink, which made her unique among the team.  Everyone else was covering their faces as best as they could.  “We should go investigate and see if there is anyone we can save.”

I frowned.  “It’s a good thought,” I said, “but what about the risk of diseases?”

“We should be fairly safe as long as we take precautions,” the nurse insisted.  She was a pretty little thing, in her way, but there was no give in her voice.  “We need manpower and we need to know if they were attacked by someone else outside Clarksburg, someone who might come after us.”

She’d found, deliberately or otherwise, the argument that would sway me.  “Very well,” I said, calmly.  “Let’s go to town.”

The smell refused to fade as we drove onwards towards the outer buildings, but thankfully we started to get used to it, although I felt dirty and unwashed every time I thought about what was causing it.  We’d have to be careful when we returned to Ingalls.  If they caught a whiff of us, they’d probably open fire, just on general principles.  Some of the final waves of refugees had smelled pretty rank as well.