The Living Will Envy The Dead (22 page)

The second were smaller habitations, like Ingalls, where it was possible to take complete control and prevent either a run on the stores, or outsiders coming in and demanding to be fed.  Ingalls, Salem and others survived, but not every town that had a chance actually survived.  We found towns that had failed to take sufficient steps to defend themselves and had been invaded by desperate survivors, who had either driven the original residents out or had enslaved them.  More on that later.  Other towns were just too close to larger habitations to stand a chance.  They got the tidal wave of refugees streaming out of the cities and simply couldn’t hold them all back.  The results were predicable and thoroughly unpleasant.  We found hundreds of places where the refugees had destroyed their country’s best hope of survival though mindless hunger.

I’m not saying that they were evil, never that.  A person tends to act in his or her best interest, as they see it, whatever the situation.  I would not be happy if someone said that I couldn’t eat, or survive, just to allow someone else to survive, even if my family wasn’t at risk.  If my family was at risk, I believe that I would do anything to get food for them, even if it meant invading a town like Ingalls and stealing all the food I could carry.  It was a problem for us at the start – we had to kill people whose only crime was wanting enough food to save their family’s lives – but we had no choice.  The blame, if such can be awarded, goes to those who started this war.  God damn them all to hell!

It did have its odd moments, though, sometimes heroic and sometimes sickening.  Like us, quite a few towns had taken in as many children as they could, even as their parents were left to starve.  We found that there were thousands of children in the area, ranging from babies to teenagers, all of whom could be taught to be useful on the farms and other areas we needed manpower.  Yes, we used children to help us survive.  We no longer had time for notions of a ‘proper’ childhood, as if anything of the sort existed.  We were able to find foster parents for most of the kids and most of them fitted in well with Ingalls or the other towns.  Kids are very adaptable, more than adults think, and can adapt to almost anything.  A handful of older kids had really bad habits and had to be broken of them, but otherwise…they fitted in.

Some of the sickening moments brought home to me just how much had changed.  A handful of towns – mainly smaller towns – cherry-picked refugees, taking only the prettiest girls, for example, and…well, you can probably guess how they used them.  A couple of others effectively enslaved refugees, something that I had been unable to bring myself to do – and besides, I had the prisoners for brute labour – and used them for every manual task that could be done with untrained labour.  They might have been alive, at least, but they didn’t like their conditions.  Was it really
that
much of a surprise when they revolted, turned on their masters, and killed most of them?  We ended up taking several hundred slaves – and girls, pushed into prostitution – away from such places and finding them better homes.  They were willing to work.

(And besides, as the cold part of my mind whispered, they had saved breeders we desperately needed…)

But such incidents were the exceptions, not the rule.  Why?  American society doesn’t sanction such behaviour.  We would be contemptuous, at least, of a man who had a private harem of enslaved girls, even if we joked about how much we would like it for ourselves.  Yes, men do have fantasies of what we would do if we had girls who literally couldn’t say no, but most of us refrain from enacting them, even when given the opportunity.  The knowledge that society, far from supporting us, would turn on us in an instant keeps us honest, or reasonably so.  I always kept my porn habit a secret when I was a kid, looking at magazines with topless girls and keeping them well away from my mother, and the same principle kept such atrocities from happening very often.  We might have no choice, but to turn people away from our food, but most of us wouldn’t enslave them…

Personally, I think it has something to do with trust.  A small society – take Springfield, for example, even though Homer Simpson’s town is fictional – has a considerable degree of trust.  Bart, Lisa and the baby – whose name I forgot, seeing I was never a very avid
Simpsons
fan – can trust pretty much everyone in their own and know them all by sight.  The thought of being seen, in a small town, as an outcast or villain keeps many people honest, while it also keeps them trusting in local government, rather than trying to save themselves on their own.  If Ingalls hadn’t trusted me – and Mac, Deborah and the others – to take the right action, if every man had been out for himself, we would have destroyed ourselves a long time before the first refugees arrived.  The larger the population, the smaller the relative number of people who knew one another…and the lower level of trust in the government.  The people there don’t
know
the Mayor personally, they don’t really trust him – probably after a string of decisions that were or looked irrational or against the interests of the community – and don’t place any faith in him.  Why should they?  They didn’t know him.  It worked fine as long as society wasn't placed under massive stress.  When the Final War happened…

Well, then it was Katie bar the door.

We found many similar stories in the surrounding area, sometimes from the handful of survivors, or from their diaries that we found as we scavenged for anything that might be useful.  You’d be amazed at how much was just abandoned, or simply left undiscovered in root cellars and other places that city-dwellers wouldn’t think to look.  Our growing community shared information and items; one town had nearly four times as many pigs as they needed – they’d been having a pig fair, of all things, before the war – and shared some of them with other towns in exchange for other animals, or goods.  We also started a breeding program for horses and other livestock.

Oh, and bikes.  We couldn’t waste gasoline in exploring too many places.  We used an armoured force – well, a force composed of technicals, which a single Abrams tank would have massacred once the tankers finished laughing – to visit everywhere first, and then it was horses and/or bikes.  It was amazing how much more polite people became when they thought that you were riding in a military convoy and that normally gave us a chance to talk to them before they opened fire.  The surviving towns had learned to fire first and ask questions later – if at all – after the first wave of bandits spread into the area and so we had to use the vehicles.  We salvaged hundreds of bicycles from various towns and put them to work convoying people from place to place.  It also helped keep people healthy, although most of the real fatties had been shrinking steadily on our rations…

The map that was taking shape in the Town Hall was just plain weird, in many ways.  There were towns that had survived intact, towns that were barely keeping themselves alive – we helped with that in hopes of keeping as large a population as we could, although by my best estimate we only had around a hundred thousand people at most – and places that could be scavenged for useful goods.  (We operated a first come, first served policy; whoever found something useful could keep it, or trade it.  It was the best way to encourage trade after the war.)  There were also the ‘last men on Earth;’ men and women, mainly survivalists, who had believed that they and their families were the only ones left.  I know, it sounds a little mad, but I believe that we were all a little mad after the Final War.  Some of them were delighted to see us and happy to join us, others were less happy – or mad – and greeted us with a hail of fire.  We either gave them a wide berth or went after them, depending on where they were.  One of them, in particular, had taken up a commanding position where he could shoot men on bikes.  The bastard had to be dug out of his nest and killed.

And then, finally, there were the Badgers.

We didn’t see many in our area, although we heard later that there had been quite a few near Washington and some of the other larger towns.  The only significant discovery was a few miles south of Ingalls and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth even to think about it.  I will write about it, however, for two reasons.  The first is that it is an important part of the story; the second is that I was blamed for it, later.  It wasn't my fault.  I only heard about it about two days after it had taken place.  I went there at once, mainly out of curiosity, but it wasn’t my place.

Anyway…there was this posse of men out searching for anything useful.  (Yes, they were almost all men.  The only women who went on search parties and scavenging teams were ones who had specialised knowledge we needed, like the nurses.)  One of the posse remembers this old house up near the Spruce Knob-Seneca Rocks National Recreation Area, located within the Monongahela National Forest of eastern West Virginia.  Some rich guy bought it, he thinks, and suggests that they go take a look at the place.  The leader of the posse – a soldier who served in Iraq on one of the teams searching for Saddam – agrees and so they travelled there, finding that the house is intact and apparently abandoned.  They break in and search the place carefully, finding some items that might be useful – including a fully-stocked gun cabinet and a massive and still operating freezer with enough luxury food for a small army– and little else, but the leader is suspicious.  His experience suggested that they were missing something.  As I heard it later, he insisted on another search, a more careful one this time.  They go through the house with a fine-toothed comb and finally discover the shaft built into the fireplace.  It takes them nearly an hour to figure out how to open it, but finally they get it open and slip down into an underground bunker, where they find…

Sorry, I still see red every time I think about it.  They find a man, his fat and ugly wife, his three fat and ugly children and a small number of hangers-on, twenty-five people in all, living in a bunker that had kept them completely safe from the war.  They’re actually glad to see the posse – they’ve been going stir-crazy down in the bunker – and perhaps if they’d left it at that, they would have been safe.  The guy who owned the house, however, wasn't that smart.  It turned out that he was number #467 (or something) on the Continuity of Government Plan – the list of people who would serve as President if everyone above them was killed by the war – and that he’d had enough advance warning to dive into his bunker, along with a bunch of friends.  He might even have survived that, were it not for the fact that he promptly started to try to take command.  He issued orders and expected them to be obeyed.

Now, the interesting thing about governments is that they depend on their population either being willing to accept them or are able to force their will on their population.  This guy had neither and believed, because of a piece of paper issued by a dead President, that he was in charge of the whole area.  The posse listened to him for five minutes and got angry.  Very angry.  This…person had hidden underground while they’d been fighting for survival, he’d been warned soon enough to stock his shelter with everything he could require, he’d hidden and had probably intended to keep hiding…and now he thought he could take control.  Their anger burst and they took him, dragged him and his friends out of the bunker, and hung them from the nearest tree.  They screamed and protested the whole way, but the posse ignored them, lost in their rage.  I don’t blame them for that.  They’d survived, no thanks to the Federal Government, while they hadn’t even known about this designated survivor.  The children, spoilt brats all, were spared, but they saw their parents die.

I think that that’s about the only thing I couldn’t forgive them for.

No one deserves to see their parents die.

The rule of law can be wiped out in one misguided, however well-intentioned generation. And if that should happen, it could take a century of striving and ordeal to restore it, and then only at the cost of the lives of many good men and women
.

-William T. Gossett

I hadn’t expected, at first, to be dealing with law and order in Ingalls.  Yes, I know, in hindsight that sounds stupid – and not without reason.  Ingalls was pretty much a law-abiding town – the only person who really broke the law was the last Sheriff, who was caught with his hand in the till – and the worst problem I had to deal with was the occasionally drunk and the Stonewall Prison.  All I can really say in my own defence is that I had expected everyone to be working overtime on keeping us alive, not trying to break laws and act in a way that threatened us all.  I should have worried more about human nature; see my prior remarks on self-interest and trust. 

Anyway, I ended up serving as Judge and Jury on several occasions.  It wasn't a job I relished.  The same lack of ties to the community that had prompted Mac and the others to nominate me for Sheriff had its advantages, but also disadvantages; I could do something unpopular and discover that I had little support.  The people in small towns are often of a practical breed, but when their community is challenged, they can become vicious.  If the wrong person was accused of a crime, that person would have the support of the community and things would get nasty.  The last thing I wanted was to create fault lines that would rip the entire community apart.