The Living Will Envy The Dead (43 page)

Yes,
I thought.  The refugees and escapees had been quite clear on that point.  If we surrendered to the Warriors, or lost the war, they would break us down and rebuild us in their image.  Their control would be absolute and they would have all the time in the world, unless they ran into someone else even bigger than they were.  I had wondered, staring at a map of the former USA, where else might have survived and given birth to a new society.  Utah might have birthed a Mormon society; they’d believed, firmly, in preparing for disaster.  Where else?  Texas?  Kansas? 

I watched as Thomas nodded to me and headed off to offer what words of comfort he could to the wounded men, and then headed outside myself.  The air smelt vaguely of burning ash from the fires, but it was clear enough to allow me to take a few breaths before I walked around to the vehicles.  They were grouped at one end of the warehouse, some of them still intact, others with bullet holes punched right through them, and…

Mac
, I thought, and felt myself go weak at the knees.  My best friend, my comrade, my ally, my…and he was gone.  My memories rose up and mocked me, remembering our first meeting in the hospital after I’d been wounded, our joint missions into various bars and seedy dumps to pick up girls, his offer of a new job and a new purpose when I was told that I would have to retire from the Corps…and his welcome to Ingalls when I finally arrived.  He’d thought of me when I needed a new purpose in life…and he’d saved my life, more than once.  I couldn’t even go back to Ingalls and face his family, or his girlfriend, but what choice did I have?  I wanted to know, desperately, how he’d died…or had he been captured?

Somehow, I decided, having a body would have made it easier.  I would have
known
what had happened to him, but instead I had nothing.  I had spoken to everyone who might have known, the men who’d been on the last vehicles to escape the nightmare, but they hadn’t seen him fall.  Two vehicles had exploded at the end, blown apart by missiles or maybe just lucky shots; Mac could have been on either of them.  I wanted – needed – to know what had happened, but I probably would never know what had happened to my friend.

A dark shape moved near me and I reached for my pistol before the flickering campfire light revealed Roshanda’s presence.  The former cop looked as tired as I felt, with the same unholy light in her eyes I’d seen during training, but she looked a great deal more focused.  She’d fought well during the battle, the only woman to fight alongside the men, and hadn’t broken.  Rumour had it that she slept with the AK-47 we’d taken off her former captors.  Anyone who tried to touch her again would be in for a fatal shock.

“Don’t worry,” I muttered, as I stepped past her.  “It’s only me.”

I gave Brent strict orders to wake me if anything happened, found a relatively dry and uncomfortable spot on the ground, and closed my eyes.  It was almost as uncomfortable as being back in Boot Camp, sleeping on exercise, but it felt as if I’d barely had a moment’s sleep when Brent started shaking me.  I still felt awful, but at least my mind wasn't cloudy any longer.

“Report,” I snapped.  My cleared mind had suddenly suggested that we might be under attack, even though I couldn’t hear any gunshots.  The Warriors might have sent scouts after us to try to find out where we were hiding.  “What’s happening?”

Brent was laughing with delight.  “We’ve got visitors,” he said, smiling.  I wondered, from his tone, if we had actually made contact with the remains of the federal government.  If they’d sent an army to assist us…  “Sir, come and see who’s arrived!”

I pulled myself to my feet and allowed him to escort me around to the south of the warehouse.  Our rearguard was dug in there, hoping to deter the Warriors from attacking, but I had only briefly inspected it when we’d arrived.  We’d been in no shape for another battle so soon.  There were three figures there – and a horse, decked out in the strange Warrior garments – and I realised with a shock that I recognised two of them.

“Mac,” I shouted, forgetting my dignity and running towards him.  He looked equally pleased to see me.  The horse regarded the pair of us with dull unconcern.  “Mac, you dumb son-of-a-bitch!  What the hell happened to you?”

-Ed’s Iron Laws #23

“Easy, Ed,” Mac said, hugging me back as hard as I was hugging him.  “You’ll have me in traction.”

“What traction?”  I asked.  I doubted that we had the facilities to help someone who had been crushed anyway…and I wasn't crushing him that hard.  “What the hell happened to you?”

“It’s a long and complicated story, full of daring deeds of daring do and spectacular stunts that no one would believe a word of it if I told you,” Mac said, patting the side of the horse, which regarded him with dull tolerance.  It would make a useful addition to our breeding stock, if we took it back to the stables, but it looked as if it had been trained to be a warhorse.  “I’d much rather discuss what happened to you and everyone else.”

“Oh, there’s not much to tell,” I said, shaking my head in awe.  All of my previous dismay had been blown away by their miraculous return to our side.  “We fled down the road, reached here and set up camp.  We thought that you had bought the farm, Mac.”

“I hope that the girls were crying over me,” Mac said, dryly.  He gave me a wink that was held just long enough to make me smile.  “So, you want to know the dread story of our daring commando raid?”

I nodded.  “Well,” he said, as I escorted them both into the warehouse, “I found myself being taken prisoner by the goons, so I leapt into the air and found that I could fly.  I came down amongst them, snatched up Dutch and this rat bastard here” – he snapped the third figure, who glared at him with incoherent rage – “and flew back towards Ingalls.  When I got halfway, I found that my flying powers were fading, so we landed, picked up Trigger here and rode the rest of the way.  Great story, huh?”

I had to laugh.  “And the truth?”

“How dare you not believe my lies?”  Mac demanded.  “It’s all true, apart from the lies…”

“Which is most of it,” Dutch put in, unhelpfully.  “In fact, only one of those statements was true.”

Mac shrugged.  “All right,” he said.  “I found myself being taken prisoner, where this rat bastard identified me as one of the leaders of Ingalls, and ordered me to be tortured.  They tied me up in a chair and sent in a hundred naked women to start torturing me with great enthusiasm, but I convinced them that I really suffered every time they sucked me off, so I screamed every so often to convince them that I’d actually been telling the truth.  Finally, I told them a few lies, but the men didn’t believe me and sent in male torturers with the branding irons.  It was then that I decided that I’d had enough.”

He paused, dramatically.  “I broke out of my chains and snatched up a sword, waving it in the air and shouting a battle cry into the air,” he continued.  “Instantly, I felt myself transformed into a barbarian hero with muscles on his muscles, so I knocked the torturers out and smashed through the tent, where I saw Dutch being lowered slowly into a bowl of boiling water.  I think they were going to have him for lunch.”

“I would have given them indigestion,” Dutch said, deadpan.  “And what happened after you woke up?”

Mac ignored this.  “Naturally, I would have saved Dutch at once, but I was slightly distracted by a set of hot babes in underwear, so I spent about an hour making out with them, ignoring Dutch’s increasingly loud screams until it was almost too late to save him.  I leapt into the boiling water myself, punched my way out of the bowl, and saved him in the nick of time.  I then grabbed a horse, transformed it into a winged beast like Pegasus, and captured this bastard before we flew out and back here.”

I frowned.  “Shouldn’t it have been a unicorn?”  I asked, finally.  “I think that that would have suited you better.”

“He’s on to you,” Dutch put in.  He grinned, suddenly, rubbing his arm.  I gave him a quick once-over and saw the bruises.  Whatever else had happened, he had been badly mistreated by the Warriors.  “Yep, you definitely qualify for riding a unicorn.”

“Fuck you,” Mac said, affably.  I laughed.  The general qualification for riding a unicorn was virginity.  I knew that Mac was no virgin.  “You want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”  I nodded.  “Well,
you’re
not going to get far.”

I rolled my eyes.  “All right,” Mac said.  “The truth…

“I climbed onto the side of the last vehicle as it prepared to leave the FOB for the redoubt here,” Mac began.  “It might have been a bad choice, because bullets started to whip through it seconds later and nearly took off my balls.”  He laughed.  “A target like my pair.  How could they miss?  A second after that, the entire vehicle shook and I fell off the side, which saved my life as it exploded a second later.  I was badly stunned for a few seconds and lay still; the Warriors who searched the wreckage, looking for any survivors, missed me.  I crawled in the direction of the pond as darkness started to fall and finally managed to get enough water to revive myself, along with the candy bars.”

“Good thing you had those with you,” I said.  Mac had stockpiled a few dozen different types of candy bars, all his favourite types, and guarded them jealously.  I had stockpiled a few myself, but I’d almost finished them when we made first contact with the Warriors of the Lord.  “And then what happened?”

“They were sending pairs of searchers around to pick up everything they could, including the bodies,” Mac continued.  “I don’t know if they were actually eating them, as I joked, but I lay still until the searchers came up to me, and then went after them with a knife.  The poor bastards didn’t stand a chance.  I took the pair of them out before they could raise the alarm, confiscated everything they were carrying that might have been useful, and stole their clothes.”  He nodded at the outfit he was wearing, a drab collection of greens and blacks, rather like a civilian’s idea of a military uniform.  “This is the uniform of one of their lower level soldiers.”

I smiled grimly.  Mac had high marks for knife fighting and was deadlier with a set of knifes than many men were with assault rifles.  The Warriors of the Lord wouldn’t have known what had hit them until it was far too late; I had a vision of Mac sneaking through their encampment, wearing their colours, killing as he moved.  He’d be caught, of course, in the end, but holding him would be difficult.  He had also aced the escape and evasion course…and had actually operated undercover in very alien environments.  The Warriors, for all of their fanatical certainty in their rightness of their course, didn’t have half the resources of the Iranian government when it came to population control.  I doubted that their senior officers knew all of their juniors by sight.

“Anyway, I wandered around for an hour, watching everything I could without drawing unwelcome attention,” Mac said, smiling slightly.  “I didn’t dare pick off a few of their other officers, until I realised that they had a small collection of prisoners from the rearguard, including Dutch.”  He nodded at Dutch.  “They also had them under guard by a pair of incompetent assholes in silly black SS uniforms so I took them both out within seconds.  I doubt that the
Waffen-SS
would have tolerated such nincompoops in their ranks.  I killed them both quickly and quietly and smuggled them both into the stockade.”

He sounded pleased with himself, I saw, and it was clear that he had reason to be delighted with his own performance.  “I freed Dutch and the other five and they stole their uniforms.  We were just getting ready to leave when this rat bastard” – he nodded towards their prisoner – “arrived with a pair of guards and a bunch of sadistic instruments of torture, or sex toys.  Looking at them, it was hard to tell the difference and judging from the expression on his face, he found it hard to tell the difference as well.  We took him prisoner and put the guards in the stockade and, holding him at gunpoint, forced him to take us to the horses.  We’d just gotten Trigger here saddled when someone raised the alarm and we had to run for it.”

His face darkened.  “Two of the men chose to stay behind and hope to blend into the Warriors as later agents of retribution,” he said.  “The rest of us ran as they came boiling after us, shooting at us…luckily, as the targets, we were the safest people in the area.  We lost the other two along the way.  They both volunteered to try to hold them off long enough for us to get this bastard back to Ingalls.  I think we should ask him a lot of very pointed questions.”  He shrugged.  “The rest you know.”

I bent down to examine their prisoner.  He had once been a very fat man.  I could see the telltale signs, even though he had been on a forced diet for the last few months, and he positively radiated moral corruption.  Perhaps I was imagining it, but I was sure that I could see the darkness in his soul, a sense of pure evil and depravity that hung around him like a stink.  His piggy eyes glared up at me, trying to give voice to words that wouldn’t escape the rag stuffed into his mouth, making it hard to breathe.