The Living Will Envy The Dead (17 page)

They sat on the ground, shaking, all nine of them.  The defiance and vicious determination that they’d hoped would make up for lack of training or planning had vanished, replaced by fear and a certain knowledge that none of us had any reason to show them mercy.  Jackson had taken the step of piling up the dead bodies in their view, just as a reminder that we were prepared to kill them if they failed to convince us otherwise, while seven men kept their weapons firmly pointed right at them.  If they had started anything, it would have ended really quickly.

Two of them, I noticed with some surprise, were women.  They might have been pretty once, like Roshanda had been, but hard wearing had been unkind to them.  I wondered briefly if they’d been innocent victims, but we’d seen them shooting at us, freely taking part in an act of aggression.  I wasn't inclined to be merciful to any of them, but if any of them were spared, it would be the women.  I allowed my gaze to drift across the men and smiled coldly.  Like the prisoners from Stonewall, they would be easy to break.

Of the seven men, four were black, almost traditional gang-bangers.  Two were Chinese, from their appearance, and a third was white, making it a surprisingly racially-integrated gang.  I amused myself with a wry thought.  The PC thugs who had insisted on racially-diverse communities would have horrified to discover what had happened in their name, or perhaps they would have viewed it as vindication.  Crime, after all, is colour-blind.

I stared at them coldly until they were all looking back at me.  “Which one of you fucks is in charge?”  I demanded.  “Who’s the leader here?”

They said nothing, until one of the Chinese thugs nodded towards one of the dead bodies.  “You killed him,” he said, in a voice flavoured with Mainland China.  I guessed his story easily enough.  He, or his parents, had been an illegal immigrant from China.  Despite the Chinese Government’s long-standing complaints about us, the Chinese still thought that America was a good place to live.  The Final War had proved them wrong.  “I’m sorry and…”

I caught him and pulled him upright.  Cuffed, he could offer no resistance.  “You’re sorry?”  I demanded, angrily.  “You’re sorry?  You come here, you attack my people, intent on stealing our food and supplies, and you’re sorry?  Some of my people are dead because of you!  Are you sorry about that too?”

Up close, he smelt bad, like a boy who had remained unwashed for weeks.  It wouldn’t surprise me if that were indeed the case.  Ingalls had a fairly modern sewage system, but maintaining it without parts from outside was pure hell.  Ray Thompson had warned that if we didn’t modify the system soon enough, we might have real problems keeping it running past the next year.  It was bad enough dealing with the local water, which had to be filtered carefully because of all the past mining, but the sewers were a real point failure source.

“You’re sorry,” I repeated.  “Can you bring the dead back to life?”

I threw him to the ground and glared down at them all.  “You’re going to be fucking sorry all right,” I snapped.  It was easy to sound intimidating.  It would have been easy to just draw my pistol and blow their heads off and they had to know it.  They knew, also, that I wanted to kill them.  “You’re going to be working for us now, got that?”

We’re going to need labour
, I reminded myself, as they seemed to shrink inwards.  They’d never been treated like that in their lives.  They had always been the big men on the streets, the ones the law couldn’t touch, defended by an army of lawyers and civil liberties advocates if there was just a single touch more violence used than absolutely necessary…and the uncrowned kings of their world.  It was a delusion, but none the less real for all that; the men who’d brought them into that world had died, and their courage had died with them.  They knew I’d killed them.

And it was hard to banish the image of the naked and desperate girl from my eyes.

“The rules have changed,” I snarled.  I drew my pistol and held it to one of their heads.  “I can shoot each and every one of you and no one will fucking stop me, got that?  I can do as I fucking please with all of you, understand?”  There was a pause.  “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” one of the black men said.  He looked beaten, at least, but I knew better than to trust any of them.  Gang-bangers can’t be trusted outside their gangs.  “I…”

“That’s ‘sir’ to you,” I said, sharply.  He cringed.  “Now, listen good.  This is the only choice you get.  You will work for us for five years, doing exactly what we tell you to do, and you’ll get a pardon at the end of it.  Fuck with us during that time and you’ll be doing one final dance at the end of a rope.  If you refuse that, we’ll strip you naked and shove you out in the wildness to die, understand?”

I stared down at them.  “How many people want to work for us?”

In the end, they all agreed.  Somehow, I wasn't surprised.

“All right,” I said, nodding at Jackson.  “There are two facts you need to know about this man.  One is that he was an interrogator at Guantanamo Bay.  The second is that it was his sister you were having your fun with.”  They paled, blanching.  Both statements, as it happened, were outright lies.  The closest that Jackson had been to Cuba had been Florida, while his sister lived somewhere near Chicago.  “You will go with him and answer his questions.  Lie to us once and you will be beaten half to death.  Lie to us twice and you will be killed.”

I watched as Jackson and the Posse dragged them away.  Jackson might not have been a CIA interrogator, but he did have experience interrogating suspects.  He’d keep them separate, ask them the same questions and compare answers.  If they didn’t match, the discrepancy would be probed until the truth was revealed.  I doubted, given their condition, that there would be many discrepancies.  They certainly hadn’t had time to agree on a lie beforehand.

“We lost four people, with five more injured,” Mac said, as I walked away from the scene.  The remains of the truck had scattered parts of the barricade, but fortunately it hadn’t been too large a breech to fill.  “Kit says that he can probably save the injured men, but that if there are more injuries…”

I nodded.  “We’d run out of supplies,” I said, grimly.  It was something else we would have to start making for ourselves or scavenging from the ruins.  Jackson’s interrogation session might tell us more about what was happening outside our walls.  “I’m heading over there now.”

Mac nodded.  “Of course,” he said.  “AAR this evening?”

“Yep,” I said.  I had hated paperwork when I’d been a Marine, but After Action Reports were very important.  It would allow us to examine what had happened, what had gone wrong, what had gone right…and why.  “Keep them working, Mac.  Don’t give them time to brood.”

“Teach your grandma to suck eggs,” Mac said, rudely.

I found Doctor Kit Nelson in the temporary ward he'd established next to the decontamination centre.  Kit was middle-aged, older than me by about five years, but looked younger.  He was the most flamboyant homosexual I had ever encountered, starting a career in the military as a medical corpsman, followed by a stint in several trouble spots across the globe, and finally as an EMT before he had retired to Ingalls.  He had been a very good medical corpsman and his disgrace and expulsion had been…well, a disgrace.  He had neither been asked, nor had he told, but he had been forced out.  There were times when I could happily strangle uniformed politicians.

And his sexuality didn’t make him a bad doctor.

“This is a preliminary diagnosis,” he said, once we had discussed the injured from the battle.  They would recover fairly quickly, thank God.  We didn’t have the facilities for serious injuries that I had enjoyed in Iraq.  “I have not had time for an intrusive examination, if I can convince her to allow me to make one, but I believe that she will make a full recovery, physically.”

He paused.  “It was hard enough to give her a basic examination,” he added.  “A raped woman, regardless of how much or how little she fought, feels violated on a very primal level.  I can tell you, for example, that she is going to have nasty scars for the remainder of her life, but I don’t know just how badly she is hurt internally.  I think that she will make a physical recovery, but I don’t know if she will be able to have children, or even if she will be able to have sex again.  The damage might be quite severe.”

I winced.  “I see,” I said, angrily.  I – I and the rest of the rough men standing guard – had been meant to protect people like Roshanda.  I felt almost as if I had failed her, even though I had barely known her for more than a few hours.  It wasn't based on logic and reason. “And mentally?”

“That’s more debatable,” Kit said.  He scowled in disgust.  “The issue behind rape is that it is primarily a loss of control; control over one of the most important functions of a woman’s body, that of having sex.  Roshanda did not choose to open her legs for the rapists and that loss of control is tearing away at her, assuming that she’s a typical victim.  The vast majority of rape victims go through long periods of depression and paranoia, although a handful tend to go the other way and try to have as many men as possible.  You’ll note that it wasn't a bad date that went wrong, or even a one-night stand, both incidents where she had some control, but a violent assault that deprived her of all control.  She knows that she lost that control over her own body.

“Did I tell you that I spent time in Afghanistan?”  He asked.  I nodded.  “I spent some weeks helping in a woman’s support clinic there for refugee women.  Most of them suffered from some kind of mental disorder because they had never had any kind of control over their bodies at all.  They were kept in seclusion, kept firmly under control, sold to their husbands and forced to copulate with them whenever he wanted to have sex.  They resented their treatment at a very primal level, but were unable to break free.  They even discovered that if they were raped – if their father’s control or their husband’s control was stolen by another man – they were held responsible for it and killed.  They were blamed for something they
knew
wasn’t their fault.

“And that, Ed, is why there are so many flame wars over abortion.  It’s all about control.  Control over women and their bodies.”

He grimaced and continued.  “Our society, thank God, is just a little more civilised,” he said.  “We’re not going to blame her for getting raped.  She came out fighting and is still fighting, so I believe that she will make a full recovery.  The other girl, however…

“I have tried several things to snap her out of her own mind, but nothing seems to work,” he said.  “I think that she was shocked so badly by the war and the sudden changes in her life that she just zoned out completely.  It’s not uncommon to see that in disaster relief situations, where a person’s mind cannot cope, but this is an extreme case.  Roshanda says that the gang-bangers used to force-feed her.  We might have to do the same.  Practically, I don’t know what else we can do with her.”

“Yes,” I said.  I pushed that issue out of my mind and cast my thoughts back to the battle.  “There’s nothing more costly than a battle lost, Doctor, apart from a battle won.  This won’t be the last battle in the next few months.”

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty
.

-John F. Kennedy

The next few weeks passed in a blur.

We held the funerals for the four dead men the day after the battle, when we all gathered together for a brief service and a heartfelt sigh of relief.  The four men had left a hole in our ranks – three of them had been veterans who shouldn’t have been out on the barricades at all – but we couldn’t despair.  We had no choice, but to continue the struggle for survival.  I sat next to Rose as the Reverend Thomas McNab eulogised the dead and found myself wishing, again, that it had been me who had died in their place.  They had had so much more to life for than I had.

Jackson’s interrogations hadn’t turned up much more than we’d already learned from Roshanda, although the gang-bangers had been too scared to lie.  They’d come out of Charleston, not entirely to my surprise, although I had never thought of it as a big gang town.  It would have been a target for Russian attack, however, and had probably absorbed at least a couple of nukes.  I wasn't too surprised to hear that law and order had broken down so quickly, although the gang-bangers had warned that someone had been busy organising the gangs into a united force.  I wasn't sure if I believed them or not.  The smarter gangs would have left the cities at once before they became untenable…and this bunch hadn’t been the brightest cookies in the bunch.