The Living Will Envy The Dead (20 page)

I found myself dragging up facts from the deeper recesses of my memory.  Clarksburg was a much larger place than Ingalls, at the crossroads of Route 50, the main arterial route for Clarksburg, and Interstate 79.  It also linked to West Virginia Route 20, West Virginia Route 58, U.S. Route 19, and West Virginia Route 98, all of which meant that it had a pretty low chance of survival.  Ingalls was easy to defend with enough firepower.  Clarksburg had far less chance of surviving the influx of refugees, unless its government took quick and decisive action, but from what we were seeing, it had clearly failed at that.  The silent accusing glare of countless skeletons bore mute witness to the end of an era.

“Shit,” I muttered, as I took in the scene.  “It looks like a bomb hit it.”

“It couldn’t have been nuked,” Mac said, seriously.  “We couldn’t have missed seeing a nuke if it had gone off so close.”

I nodded.  I couldn’t see the Russians bombing Clarksburg just because of the FBI building there, although there might have been a classified target nearby that I didn’t know existed.  It didn’t matter, anyway.  Clarksburg looked more like a city that had been torn apart by conventional warfare than one that had been nuked.  Buildings were marked and scattered by bullet holes, rifle cartages lay everywhere and skeletons suggested the path of the fighting.  It looked as if there had been a civil war, or worse…

We dismounted and carefully probed through the wreckage.  The city had once hosted around seventeen thousand people and surely some of them had survived, but we found nothing.  Buildings were empty, as dark and silent as the grave, while food stores had been stripped down to nothing.  We glanced into other stores as we went by, carefully, but most of them had been looted.  I smiled when I discovered that a lingerie store hadn’t been stripped, although some of the camping stores had been completely emptied as well, along with anything else that might help a person survive in the wildness.  I wondered if they had watched us as we drove into their city, wondering if we were friends or enemy, or if they’d all died out in the countryside.  We’d probably never know.

The shot caught me by surprise, but one of the soldiers knocked me down at once, before anything could hit me, while Mac crouched down beside me.  Someone was shooting at us from another building, firing neat precise shots; it was a wonder that no one had been hit.  Mac crawled over into cover, peering carefully towards the occupied building, and squeezed off two quick shots, while the rest of us fell back towards cover of our own.  We’d barely seen them, but they’d seen us.  A few moments later and they might have killed us all, if they had waited.

“At least four of them,” Mac muttered, as he crawled back to join us.  Quick hand signals sent our men around to flank them, but we hadn’t trained for urban operations at all.  We hadn’t had the time to run any kind of urban training program, not when there were a million and one other things to do.  “They’re pinned in that building up ahead.”

I looked.  It had once been a pizza bar or something similar, decorated in a flowery style that had probably appealed to kids.  They were firing careful shots, conserving their ammo, which already marked them as being more dangerous than the gang-bangers.  It was almost
professional
. 

“No worries,” I said, to the younger kids.  “We have them right where we want them.”

It was a blatant lie.  The problem with urban combat is that your horizons shrink rapidly to almost nothing.  There could be an entire army dug into the city, just waiting for us to stick our dicks into the meat grinder, or there might be only a handful of them.  There was no way to know, short of engaging them, but at the same time that would be costly.  I didn’t want to waste more lives.

“Start falling back towards the vehicles,” I ordered, quietly.  “Mac, Section Two will cover the retreat.”

Mac nodded.  Section Two, five men with rifles, slipped forward and started to return fire, aiming at anything that looked even slightly vulnerable.  The windows of the pizza bar had been shattered long ago, but they put bullets through them anyway, allowing them to ricochet around inside.  Even if we didn’t hit anyone, it would make their lives uncomfortable.  There’s nothing quite like the sound of bullets pinging off the nearby walls to make someone remember a previous engagement.

“Good,” I said, softly.  The remaining force had slipped back as ordered.  I hoped that they had enough sense not to stand upright, even when they were out of apparent danger.  Just because we hadn’t seen an enemy sniper didn’t mean they didn’t have one.  “Mac, can you put a grenade though their windows at this range?”

“Can a bear shit in the woods?”  Mac asked.  I assumed that bears did, although I had never actually seen one shitting at all, let alone in the woods.  “I’ll…”

He broke off as a big figure hurled itself out of one of the windows and bolted to the next building.  I pointed my pistol at him in one smooth motion, but Mac caught my hand and pushed it down towards the ground.  I stared at him, but he had eyes only for the retreating figure.

“Dutch,” he shouted, loudly enough to echo through the ruined city.  “Dutch, you stupid bastard!  What the hell are you doing here?”

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born
.

-Anaïs Nin

There was a brief embarrassed pause.

“
Cease fire,” someone shouted, loudly enough to be a Drill Instructor.  The firing tapered off and terminated sharply.  Well-trained bunch, I decided.  “Mac?  Is that you?”

I leaned closer to Mac’s ear.  “Friend of yours?”  I asked.  “What’s he doing here?”

“Not quite,” Mac said.  “I tried to go out with his sister when I was sixteen and he tried to pound the crap out of me.  After a long struggle we ended up in the jail, and afterwards we ended up getting roundly pissed together.  I haven’t seen him in years.  I heard he’d joined up, but nothing since.”

“Oh,” I said.  The whole scene was becoming rather surreal.  We were fighting an old friend of Mac’s - ok, kind of a friend – in the ruins of what had once been an all-American town.  That normally happened only in bad movies.  “Lucky you saw him then.”

“I guess,” Mac said.  He leaned forward as the massive figure emerged from his hiding place.  “He doesn’t seem to have changed a bit.”

Dutch - Dutch Schofield – looked suspiciously like an overbuilt version of Arnold Schwarzenegger.  If he had been that big when he and Mac had fought, I didn’t know how Mac had survived, although he could be a nasty bastard when he wanted to be.  He might have been short, but he could probably pick up Dutch with some effort, or punch him in the groin.  I doubted that their fight had been fought under Marquis of Queensbury rules.

“Mac,” he said.  He sound tired and worn, but there was a new spark of determination in his voice.  “Mac, you’re alive!”

“You don’t have to sound so unhappy about it,” Mac said, grinning his irrepressible grin.  “This is my friend and boss Ed, from Ingalls.”

“Ingalls survived?”  Dutch asked.  “We thought that we were the only ones left!”

We ended up sitting down with both groups, eating a handful of MRE rations – cruel and unusual punishment right there – and sharing stories.  Dutch had been in Salem, another small town quite some distance from Ingalls, and had found himself drafted back into uniform when the war broke out and society collapsed.  Their story wasn't that different from ours.  Their Mayor, a driving man with his eye on the Presidency, had pushed them into defending themselves when the first refugees arrived.  They might have had a smaller population, but they’d held out well, keeping out the refugees.  Others hadn’t been so lucky.  Dutch knew, from interrogating some of the refugees, what had happened in Clarksburg.  It had been one of the reasons why he had chosen that town for his first salvaging operation.

“They had a civil war,” he explained, as we ate quickly.  “Their government just didn’t manage to respond properly to the crisis at all and fucked up what little chance they had.  It wasn't a good place to be from the start and by the time they got their heads out of their rears and realised how bad it was going to get, it was too late.”

I nodded as he continued outlining the story.  Clarksburg was – had been - the county seat of Harrison County, West Virginia.  The Mayor had taken control from the start and, free of the chaos that had gripped Charleston and a handful of other towns, had tried to keep some semblance of normality going.  He had worked to bring in food from the surrounding country – I guessed that one of the groups of refugees we’d turned back had been involved in that, although they hadn’t gotten as far as presenting their credentials – and encouraged refugees to settle down in the town.  The latter had been a fatal mistake.  The vast majority of the refugees had been grasshoppers, unable or unwilling to adapt to their changed circumstances, and expected the government to do something about it.  They might have survived, if they had pushed the grasshoppers to work or starve, but the Mayor had tried to keep them fed without demanding anything in return.  The town, already too large to survive, had grown more populated.

Eventually, there had been an outbreak of common sense in the city and the Mayor had been deposed by some local residents.  The new Mayor had started to organise a harsh policy of evicting everyone who wouldn’t work, or wouldn’t be useful, or criminals – for some reason, the last days of Clarksburg had been the most crime-filled days of the city’s history – in hopes of reducing the population enough to allow a handful to survive.  It made cold bitter sense – a hundred people can last longer than a thousand people on the same amount of food – but it wasn't welcomed by many.  They needed to reduce the number of mouths they had to feed, but…

Remember that most of them were grasshoppers?  They weren't the type of people to put the interests of the entire group ahead of themselves.  They were taxpayers, by God, and the government was going to look after them.  What else had they paid their taxes for?  The smarter ones could get as far as making the sacrifices, but they didn’t want to sacrifice themselves, of course.  Every one of them wanted someone else to be put out to starve, regardless of how valuable they were, and they didn’t want to work for a living.  The town was on the verge of starvation and they still didn’t see all the writing on the wall.

And then the new Mayor ordered the police and a posse to start evicting everyone who wasn’t an original resident of the town.  The posse had worked in Ingalls because Ingalls was small enough for everyone to know who was in the posse and trust them.  The small town mindset strikes again.  Clarksburg might as well have been occupied by a hostile army as far as most of the residents were concerned.  It didn’t help that a few local businessmen took it as an opportunity to take out some of their rivals; social trust, such as it was, melted like snow.  The grasshoppers fought back desperately once they realised what was going on, desperate not to be pushed out into the wild lands, while parts of the city rose up in rebellion.  The ensuring civil war had been like all civil wars – confusing and bitter – and by the time it ended, the city had collapsed.  The remaining survivors had fled, but found little to keep them alive outside the city.  Places like Salem and Ingalls were barred to them, while the locusts had already stripped the remaining countryside clean.  There was no food to be had and so they starved.  It was a sad end for a once-proud city.

“It’s good to know that you dealt with the prison,” Dutch said, after we had finished hearing the tale of Clarksburg.  The city hadn’t been nuked, but the Final War had killed it as effectively as it had killed Washington, or New York.  “It was something that we were worrying about over in Salem, but we didn’t have the manpower to spare to deal with it.”

I nodded.  It was a shame that Dutch hadn’t sent over a posse of his own – we’d have met them earlier and known that we weren't alone – but perhaps it was a blessing in disguise.  Richard and some of the posse had fortified the prison as a last resort line of defence.  His posse might have been fired upon before we realised that they weren't actually hostiles. 

“You’re still a lucky bastard,” Mac growled.  “I was about to lob a grenade into your hiding place.”

“Good thing you didn’t, then,” Dutch said.  He stood up and wiped his hands on the remains of his uniform.  “I suppose that we now have to argue over who gets to ransack Clarksburg for anything useful.”

I leaned forward.  “Do we?”

“Well, we need what’s here to survive and so do you,” Dutch pointed out, reasonably.  “I think we got here first” – he’d answered one question of mine, anyway; they’d been in the city for two days before we arrived – “but you might feel differently.”