The Living Will Envy The Dead (11 page)

“As do I,” Simon Horvat agreed.  Simon owned the largest General Store in Ingalls, which, despite bitter competition from Wal-Mart, still managed to make a profit.  His service made up for higher prices, in pretty much everyone’s view.  “I second the nomination.”

There was a brief buzz of debate, but there were no other candidates.  Mac was nominated for the job by someone who owed his family a favour, but declined it, while Walter Loy – the local High School teacher – accepted the nomination, but lost.  I wasn't entirely happy about that.  Walter was a fairly decent sort who actually wanted to make sure that kids learned something and, unlike me, was better at convincing people to go along with him…

“But it’s useless,” someone protested, at the rear.  The despair in his voice surprised even me.  “America is dead!”

“No, it’s not,” I said, genuinely angry for the first time since the meeting had begun.   I had heard enough from defeatists in Iraq, mainly people who had done their fighting in Washington.  “America is
not
dead.  America isn’t the cities, or the land, or the President, or even the Stars and Stripes.  America is the
people
!”

I touched my heart gently.  “America exists here, in all of us, and as long as we are alive and true to ourselves, America won’t die,” I said, allowing my voice to grow louder.  “We can rebuild the country and make it great again if we have faith in ourselves and don’t give up.  Americans are not quitters!”

There were plenty of people in foreign nations that would have disagreed with that, but it didn’t matter, not now.  The nomination was confirmed quickly and I found myself in command of the defence and rebuilding effort.  Mac was nominated for Mayor – someone was earning their patronage tonight – but declined it again, leaving Walter Loy to be nominated.  That wasn't a bad thing, as far as I was concerned.  I liked Walter.

“All right,” I said, once order had been restored.  Having talked the talk, it was now time to walk the walk.  I’d spent several hours thinking about how to proceed and then discussing it with Mac, who had had his own suggestions.  It wasn’t going to be easy.  The reason the original Jail Posse had been so large had been because some of the members might not be able to make it if there was a real emergency.  They included farmers, engineers and other people we were going to need elsewhere.  They couldn’t be risked on the battlements.  “Here is what we are going to do.

“First, and most important, we are going to start a rationing system,” I said.  “Simon, I think, will be in charge of that.  People who work get fed.  We’ll organise the manpower allocations over the next few days, but a lot of people are going to have to be reallocated pretty quickly.

“Second, I’m going to have to conscript most of the boys from the school,” I continued.  There were around four hundred boys who could be considered military age if one squinted a bit.  It was against the new International Law – as opposed to the far more practical older International Law, but no one followed that these days, apart from the West – but I didn’t care.  I would sooner have the boys alive and fighting than dead.  “We’re going to have to strengthen the borders as soon as possible.  The Jail Posse can’t stay on duty forever.”

This provoked more argument.  Small towns, as I may have mentioned, tend to be more patriotic than the bigger cities, and no, not because bigger cities tend to be more liberal.  Ingalls had sent away thousands of young men – and dozens of young women – to various wars, almost as long as the town itself had been in existence.  Ingalls had sent men to the Civil War – we were very even-handed; nearly a third of our recruits went South – the Spanish War, the First and Second World Wars and most of the conflicts since then.  Mac himself had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan and he had a brother and two cousins who had been overseas when the Final War began.  God alone knows what happened to them.

But they didn’t like the thought of conscripting their young men, rather than the veterans, to man the barricades.  I didn’t like the thought either, but there was no choice.  The veterans would be used as the hard core of the defences, of course, but they were also needed elsewhere.  Ray Thompson, one of the Section Leaders, was also a highly-experienced Civil Engineer.  I was going to need him, so should I have sent him out to be shot at by refugees and the raiders I knew would be coming?

It wasn't elitist, as some people alleged about the protection details surrounding our commanding officers in Iraq, but a matter of sheer practicality.  A man like Ray – or General David Petraeus – is too valuable to risk needlessly.  They had spent years developing their art and couldn’t be wasted on sentry duty.  It sounds harsh, but I would sooner waste a PFC than a General, unless the General was a real incompetent.  The Army wasn’t always good at ensuring that the right people got promoted and was a living embodiment of the Peter Principle; men and women always rise to the level of their own incompetence.

“And we are going to have to tighten our borders,” I continued, once
that
argument had been concluded.  Democracy in action can be an ugly thing.  “We cannot take more refugees in than we can handle.”

A dry cough snapped my attention to the Reverend Thomas McNab.  He was Mac’s second cousin – or something; I was never quite sure how they were related – and the President of the Board of Deacons of the First Baptist Church.  He was also the preacher at the church, which counted about a third of the population as members.  He was pretty much the leader of Ingalls’ religious society and, therefore, a person regarded with considerable respect.  He looked a little like Dermot Morgan.

I eyed him carefully.  I respected Thomas; he was a decent man who never compromised his principles, but I was never a great respecter of organised religion.  I believed in God, but not in his human servants.  The Mullahs who had led the insurgency against us in Fallujah had been nothing, but a criminal racket, dressed up in the robes of Islam.  They’d taken their cut from each hit, each tribute and everything else the followers had done, while urging them out to die against us.  You don’t want to know what they did with the women and young boys…

“You are talking about turning away folks in need,” he said, gravely.  He would have gone far as a politician if he hadn’t felt that politics was an unworthy role.  “Do we not have an obligation to help those in need, as the Good Samaritan helped the Jew?”

I hesitated for a moment.  “The Good Samaritan, Father, was in no danger,” I said, finally.  “Every new mouth we take into our care will be a drain on our resources, which are limited enough.  If we can hold out long enough to start bringing in a new crop and cooperating with other towns and villages, we can care for more, but we cannot sacrifice ourselves to help others.”

Thomas scowled, but accepted the point. 

I ran through the rest of my agenda quickly, effectively creating a Cabinet.  Neil Frandsen, the
de facto
head of the farmers in the area, became Farming Manager, with the responsibility of coordinating with the other farmers to provide food.  Rebecca, who had had some success with microfarming, joined him.  Herman ended up doing logistics and weapons production, although he had warned me that when we started to run out of bullets, we were going to be in serious trouble.  The various armouries, gun clubs and suchlike had had plenty of supplies, but once they were gone, they were gone.  Replacing them would be difficult.  Simon agreed to carry on as rations manager and a handful of other tasks.  Walter had some ideas for weapons that could be produced with what we had. Marc angled for an appointment, but didn’t even get close to winning any support.  God alone knew what would become of him in the future.

“All right,” I said, finally.  There was a new sense of real hope in the room.  Perhaps we could survive after all.  “Let’s get on with it, shall we?”

We didn’t know about the Death Zones yet.

Only that can excuse our optimism.

Majority rule will only work if you're considering individual rights. You can't have five wolves and one sheep vote on what they want to have for supper.

-Larry Flynt.

I should have known about the Death Zones.  I have no excuse.

They were forming all over the world, zones where all human life was dying, swept away by the devastation.  I saw so little, at the time, from Ingalls, but we were incredibly lucky.  We were just far enough from the big cities, utterly unsustainable in the face of the calamity that had struck the entire world, to avoid the worst of the effects.  Others were not so lucky.

The Russians – and us, and everyone else – had three different kind of nuclear weapon delivery system.  I won’t trouble you with the technobabble.  Some of it is actively misleading, either purposefully or otherwise, while other parts are little more than notes that were proved useless in the face of the war.  I’ll treat them as simply as possible and call them short, medium and long-range weapons.  The short-ranged weapons were tactical nukes, deployed mainly against opposing armies, the medium-ranged weapons were intended for use in Europe, while the long range weapons were intended to be fired at the continental United States.  The Russians mainly used ICBMs for that purpose, although they had a hard core of bombers for more precise strikes.  I wouldn’t have wanted to be one of those pilots.  They might have been able to reach the United States, but they couldn’t return home…

(The Russians also based a squadron of Blackjack bombers on Cuba.  They were all destroyed within hours of the war beginning.  Ironically, their destruction might have helped spark off the first nuclear exchanges.  Our own bombers were much more capable, but very few of them made it out of Russian airspace alive.  Those that returned home found a devastated country.)

Let’s start with Europe.  Britain had served as a rear-area supply base for NATO forces – which effectively meant us, although they also hosted French and German air forces after their bases were bombed and shelled out of existence – and was a priority target for the Russians.  The British had had one great advantage over the years in their geopolitics.  It was very difficult, almost impossible, for any attacker to cross the English Channel and reach the heart of their power.  Hitler’s plans for invading Britain were founded on wet sand.  Even during the worst days of the Cold War, it was predicted that conventional warfare would barely touch Britain, but that left the nukes.  The British Government, as I have mentioned, barely even considered home defence.  Their population was certainly unprepared for nuclear war.

I have already said that the Russians didn’t go after civilian populations purposely.  That game was only played by terrorists and states like North Korea, which barely had enough nukes – and the ones they had were far from accurate – to be considered a nuclear power.  They didn’t intentionally target the British civilian population either, but in Britain, there were far too many vital targets that were close to civilian population centres.  The result was a devastating series of blows against millions of innocent people.  London, the British capital, was struck by over seven warheads – it would have been nine, if records are to be trusted, but two failed to detonate – and was utterly devastated.  Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Glasgow…all were targeted by the Russians, just for hosting vital targets.  Other nukes fell outside the population centres, striking at British military bases and industrial plants.  The British didn’t have military bases as big as our own.  The effects were proportionally worse.  The British Government, what was left of it, tried to declare an extreme and draconic state of emergency…and proved completely unable to enforce it.  Just like our own government, they were overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the crisis.  A single nuclear strike would have been bad enough, but this was worse.  Their government melted away too…

And the population stumbled out into the zone of death.  When I’d been a kid, I’d walked eight miles with Uncle Billy and thought it a great achievement.  It had been petty compared to what I’d had to undergo to become a Marine and even smaller compared to some of the forced marches we had pulled in Iraq.  The civilian population, eating their way through their sometimes-contaminated supplies at an incredible rate, fell out into the countryside and stripped it bare.  They thought, as our own population thought, that farms equalled food.  They raged out across the landscape like a pack of wild locusts and stripped it bare.  Sometimes, the farmers successfully defended their farms, but mostly the population ate…and then starved anyway.  Civilisation had collapsed completely.  Apart from the King, who had taken shelter in Ireland, and the lucky survivors who made it to Ireland or one of the other islands, the vast majority of the English population was wiped out.

The Scots fared better, marginally.  The lowlands of Scotland were devastated, but the highlands had been barely touched, directly.  Indirectly, there were plumes of fallout drifting northwards, poisoning far too many crops, or sheep.  The only places in the United Kingdom that could be said to have fared well were the Hebrides.  Despite the best efforts of successive governments, enough remained of the island sprit to allow them to hold on, struggling to survive.  They, like us, developed a ruthless attitude to refugees.  They had no choice.