The Living Will Envy The Dead (21 page)

“I think that we should work together,” I said, seriously.  Ingalls
needed
to know what was going on outside her borders, but most of all she needed to know that there were friends outside, that some semblance of America had survived the war.  We really didn’t need a feud with another surviving town.  “How many other surviving towns do you think there are?”

“No idea,” Dutch admitted.  “Until we ran into you, Ed, all we knew about were bandits and they’ve been dying off recently.”

“Pickings must have been getting slim,” I agreed.  The interesting thing about value is that it tends to alter depending upon the circumstances.  The
Mona Lisa
would be nothing, but a piece of firewood at the moment, exchanged for a bag of food.  The gang-bangers we’d killed had grasped that fact eventually, too late to save themselves from certain doom.  I was still sure that there would be individuals, mainly survivalists, hiding out in the various national parks, but anyone foraging through the remains of cities was probably doomed.  “Tell me something.  Do you actually
want
to fight a war with us?”

“Not really,” Dutch said.  He frowned and revealed that he did, in fact, have a brain.  I’d been wondering about that.  “You mean that if we continue as rivals, we’re eventually going to start fighting.”

“Of course,” I said.  “Look, we’re not in the best of shape to help others and I’m pretty certain you’re in the same boat.”

“The
Titanic
,” Mac injected.  We both glared at him, but it did serve to lighten the mood.  “A man could become King of the World here.”

“Shut up,” I said, not unkindly.  “Dutch, we could work together, on projects that we both need done, and perhaps survive.  We could build a new set of ties to link our communities together, or we could find ourselves at odds and eventually at war.  Can we really afford to fight a war that might wipe us both out?”

“…No,” Dutch said, finally.  He looked around the remains of Clarksburg, torn apart by a civil war within a much greater calamity.  It was a relief, somehow, that I hadn’t spent much time in Clarksburg before, mainly attending a brief course at the FBI office.  It would have been worse if I had known it better in its prime.  “I’ll have to check with the Mayor, of course, but I think that he will go along with it.”

“That would be Mayor Glass?”  Mac asked.  Dutch nodded.  “You’ll like him, Ed; he used to be a Marine, just like you.  I think he was a General or something before he left during the Clinton years.”

“Resigned in protest over something or other during those years,” Dutch added.  I smiled.  A Marine would be reasonable about not picking a fight that was impossible to win without suffering mortal blows.  Civilians like to talk about soldiers as being bloodthirsty bastards, intent on the next war, and the next after that, but the truth is very different.  Soldiers, particularly senior officers, are reluctant to go to war.  It is the civilians who really court war and then play politics with the result.  “Mac’s probably right.  He’ll go along with it at once.”

I smiled.  “Great,” I said.  I wondered if I might have met Mayor Glass during my own time in the Corps, but he would have left long before I joined up.  In any case, we would still share the same brotherhood.  There’s no such thing as an ex-Marine.  “If you don’t mind, I’ll send one of my people back with you, and one of you can come back with us.  We may as well prove your existence to our people.”

“Of course,” Dutch agreed.  He grinned up at Mac.  “Mac, do you want to come convince the Mayor that you exist?”  His smile broadened as he looked back at me.  “It comes of being a little shrimp, but Mac’s exploits on the field are well known.  They’ll be glad to see him.”

“The ladies will be very glad to see me,” Mac retorted.  “How’s your sister, by the way?”

Dutch’s face fell.  “She was in Richmond,” he said.  I winced.  “I haven’t heard anything from her since the bombs started to fall, but…”

I understood.  She was probably dead, along with the rest of the population of Richmond.  The city would be a Death Zone, just like Clarksburg.

“Never mind,” Dutch said, forcing the words out.  “I do intend to finish scavenging around here first, so…shall we start searching the ruins?”

It proceeded quicker, we discovered, when there were two groups.  We paired off and spread out, although we always kept our weapons at the ready.  We’d seen a few packs of feral dogs lurking in the city and I didn’t want to risk anyone getting bitten.  The dogs might have rabies, or whatever other canine diseases there were, and someone who was bitten might be beyond salvation with what we had on hand.  We found, much to my relief, a hardware store and broke into it, although I couldn’t understand why it hadn’t been looted right at the start.  There was an astonishing amount of tools left there, including some we were going to need desperately, if we could transport them all the way back to Ingalls.  I had a nasty suspicion that the city would be almost out of gasoline for trucks. 

Kit had supplied us with the addresses of a few surgeries and medical clinics in Clarksburg, but most of them had been completely stripped of everything, including the patients.  One of them had been turned into a battleground, judging from the damage, with all the patients caught in the middle.  I cursed such short-sightedness even as we tried to take advantage of it, taking what we could.  Some items, including painkillers and even other medicines, were still useable, other medicines had spoiled when the power had failed.  Kit had warned us, in no uncertain terms, not to trust anything that could have decayed and so we left them.  They would have to be buried or burned in the near future.  We couldn’t risk someone trying to use them.

Mac located one of the public libraries and we searched it quickly.  It had almost been untouched by the fighting, although we found a pair of bodies behind the counter and a pack of wild dogs had set up shop in the basement.  They were feral, beyond human control, and so we shot them before they could lunge at us.  I hated that more than shooting humans, in a way; the dogs had never asked to become monsters.  They’d just been collateral damage in humanity’s war.  Once we’d cleared them out, we searched the library and removed everything that might be even remotely useful, although I drew the line at Mac’s suggestion of post-apocalyptic science-fiction novels. 

“We’re going to have to go through this place a lot more carefully,” I concluded, a few hours later.  We’d barely scratched the surface.  Somehow, deep inside, I had fallen into the trap of thinking in terms of places like Ingalls, rather than a real city-sized…well, city.  There was treasure everywhere for people like us, who needed it to survive, but it would all have to be found.  Any surviving electronic equipment would have to be checked carefully, but everything else should work perfectly.  The store of cheap farming gear was very useful.

It made me smile when I saw it.  Washington had been issuing instruction after instruction to farmers, despite the massive pressure from farmer’s lobbies, demanding that farmers become more organic and ‘eco-friendly,’ to say the least.  It was stupid before the war, because farmers knew far more about farming than anyone in Washington or a part-timer who had bought a few fields and fancied himself an expert, but the greens had struggled to pass the laws.  They might have even done us a favour now.  Supplies of modern farming equipment, like pesticides, would be drying up all over the country.  We were going to be forced to go back to organic farming methods…

I didn’t know what that really meant, not then.

“We were on the verge of heading back,” Dutch said, finally.  They’d found little more than we had, although we divided up the finds between us.  If nothing else, we were going to have to come to agreements on how scavenging could be governed, even if it were just ‘finders, keepers’.  “Mac, are you ready to come?”

“Yep,” Mac said.  He gave me a cocky grin as he stood up.  “Ed, we’ll come to Ingalls in a couple of days.  We’ll see you then, promise.”

I waved him goodbye as Dutch led him back towards their vehicles, on the other side of the town, and then turned to my own people.  We’d loaded the trucks with as much as they could carry, but I still wanted them watched carefully, just in case.  A broken axel would mean a serious delay. I drove, this time, as we retraced our steps, looking at the landscape with new eyes.  If there were other survivors…an entire world of possibilities was opening up in my mind’s eye.

And I was right.  Ingalls was
delighted
to know that Salem had survived.  The details of the death of Clarksburg, a city many of them had known, hit hard.  It gave the disaster a shape and form it had lacked, despite the refugees, because it had so little connection to life before the war.  It still paled, however, compared to the central fact, the one we needed to hear.

We weren't alone any more.

Nations whose nationalism is destroyed are subject to ruin
.

-Muammar al-Gaddafi

As it happened, there were quite a few survivors.

We spent the next couple of months – among other things, about which more later – searching the surrounding area of West Virginia for more survivors.  It was an interesting and depressing experience.  Interesting, because we were finding survivors in places I wouldn’t have expected to find survivors, and depressing, because of how much devastation we encountered along the way.  It was bad enough for me, a child of the Big Apple, but worse for Mac and the others who had lived in Virginia all their lives.  They’d known it when it was fresh and new, then familiar and old, and seeing it utterly devastated was an unpleasant experience.  We discovered a dozen towns that had managed to preserve themselves – sometimes barely – and a hundred places, mainly bigger towns, that had failed the critical test, although sometimes there were survivors.

Clarksburg was a case in point.  We – and Dutch – had assumed that the town was completely deserted.  We weren’t far wrong, but it turned out that a few dozen former citizens – including some of Fart, Barf and Itch’s personnel – had managed to hole up nearby and escape the carnage of the final moments.  They’d hidden themselves when we’d first visited – apparently they’d had a bad experience with one of the bands of roving survivors wandering around the country – but when they realised that we were scavenging the town, they showed themselves and were welcomed into our growing community.

Yes, our community.  We had made contact with seven towns by that time and we were working hard on building up a communications network that would allow us to share information and remain alive over the coming months.  Mac and Dutch started it off when they were in Salem – and that town was just as glad to see us as we were to see them – and by the time we found the third town, we even had a protocol worked out.  As long as the town remained true to its American roots, we would welcome them into our community.  Anyone caught outside a town would be also welcome.  We needed all the manpower we could get.

It was a painful irony, I freely admit.  In the beginning, the days just after the war, the more city-slickers who died, the better for us.  They just swarmed out over the countryside like locusts and had to be repelled with deadly force.  If we had failed to repel them – those who were useless to us, at least – we would have lost Ingalls and probably any chance of survival.  We certainly saw enough examples of what happened to towns that didn’t immediately start barring outsiders from entry to know that we’d done the right thing, as heart-breaking as it was.  Tens of thousands, perhaps millions – no, there really is no doubt about it – died so that thousands could live.

But now we needed that manpower.  Can you imagine just how congested a single interstate had become, as a result of the EMP and cars running out of gas, to say nothing of blockades and silly sheep – not real sheep, alas, but people who depended on the government to save them from the inevitable effects of a nuclear war – running everywhere?  We wanted – needed – to clear as many roads as we could, but even clearing a small road took time.  It also led to a handful of unpleasant surprises.  The countryside didn’t just have survivors, but bandits, and some of them proved
adept at ambushes.  Why not?  They’d learned from experience.

We tended to discover that post-war communities fell into a handful of groups.  The first were the larger habitations, starting at around Clarksburg’s level – ten-twenty thousand residents – and going all the way up to New York City, with a population numbered in the millions.  (And, unless they were very lucky, at least a couple of nuclear warheads going off nearby.)  They tended to exhaust their supplies very quickly, even under the strictest rationing and the lowering of all social taboos, such as eating dog food.  As I have said earlier, if it’s a choice between eating food meant for your friendly neighbourhood mutt or starving, most people will eat the dog food and be happy to have it.  Those that weren’t willing to eat it, of course, starved and removed themselves from the equation.  It wasn’t long before they started eating their pets as well, ranging from common pets like cats and dogs to really wild pets like snakes and even spiders.  (Yeah, I  know.  Disgusting, right?)  Even so, they rapidly ate themselves out of existence and simply didn’t have the resources to keep feeding themselves once the supplies ran out.  They died off, leaving only a handful of ragged survivors to search for food and supplies elsewhere.