The Living Will Envy The Dead (26 page)

What we faced was almost unprecedented.  It had been five months since the war and most of the refugees had died out, or at least died down to a sustainable level.  The cannibal gangs had wiped themselves out through disease – a human body is not the healthiest of meat sources – and starvation.  The handful of remaining survivors had either found their way to us, or hidden out in the ruins, waiting for a chance to prey on the other survivors.  Some of them were really sick people who had long since lost any sense of right or wrong.  We found a gang who had kept a girl alive – after eating her limbs – for sexual use.  The poor bitch died just after we rescued her.  There was nothing we could do for her.  Others were just desperate to survive, whatever the cost…

And we had to deal with it.  We
needed
those roads clear and the surrounding area secure.  We had to expand our cultivated land as much as possible and that meant providing security.  It didn’t help that sometimes we lost people and never even realised they were missing until much later, although that was sometimes the only clue about the existence of a cannibal gang.  The stupid ones had managed to kill themselves off or get killed quickly.  The smart ones remained an ever-present danger.

We had another mission, of course, but I’ll get to that in a second.

Every one of the Principle Towns was obliged to provide a number of soldiers.  I had objected to that at the time – conscripts do not, in my view, make good soldiers – but we were lucky enough to have enough volunteers.  Ingalls provided two hundred soldiers for the regular army, as everyone was calling it by the end of the day.  I wanted Marines, others wanted everything from Rangers to Minutemen, but in the end we compromised on calling it the Regular Army.  A good compromise, as they say, leaves everyone mad.  I ended up leading one of the units personally while overseeing the training, wearing at least three hats at the same time, but Mac managed to wrangle himself a position where he could take some of the weight off my shoulders.  He did offer to do everything, but the commanding officer has to know what is going on…

Hell, in my rather less than humble opinion, there are three types of commanding officers.  There are the idiots who want a brigade command so that they can get their ticket punched on their climb to higher officer and pay, there are commanding officers who have risen to levels above their competence – a depressingly regular occurrence – and don’t have the slightest idea of what they are doing, and the ones who just have the knack for being a commanding officer.  I wasn't sure that I wasn't one of the second type, but I learned, and I suffered in the field besides them, and…well, no one rolled a grenade into my tent at night.  The trick to being a good CO is to delegate as much as possible to the Sergeants so you don’t get overwhelmed by the petty details.  It’s not an easy trick, but as I said, I learned.  It helped that there were, in some ways, less for me to do.  The old Marine Corps, or the Regular Army, no longer existed.

And so we started training.

I got my first surprise when Stalker’s Stalkers assembled in the training area.  It had used to be a college or university in Clarksburg, which had been designated neutral ground.  (I didn’t pick the name, by the way.  That was Mac’s fault.  I don’t know if he was teasing me or sucking up, but I suspect the former.  All of the designated Companies ended up being named after their Colonels, although I ended up forbidding some of the more outrageous names.  Richard’s Dicks was probably a bad idea from the start.)  Most of them I recognised, of course, but one of them was a surprise.  It had been almost a month since I’d last seen Roshanda and…well, let’s just say that her ordeal had left her sterile.

She’d not had an easy few weeks after we rescued her.  No one blamed her for her ordeal, of course, but we couldn’t afford a rape counsellor or any of the support that would normally be offered to a victim after such a horrific experience.  Rose had set up a few sessions with some of the other victims, but Roshanda had declined to attend them, although she’d kept the AK-47 we’d recovered and insisted on keeping it with her at all times.  People tended to walk nervously around her, suspecting that she was going to blow at any moment, but I hadn’t expected her to join the army.  God knows we could use her, if she was back to normal, but…well, none of us knew what normal was for her.  She wasn't a breeder, so technically she was expendable, but…

I just don’t like the idea of women in combat, not really.

I pushed the matter aside and addressed the Company.  “You have all volunteered to be turned into real soldiers,” I announced, as grandly as I could.  I wanted – needed – to impress them.  It was a shame that we couldn’t put them through a full Marine Corps-style Boot Camp, but we’d make do with what we had.  “This will not be easy.  You will end up hating all of us and cursing us until your first time in combat, whereupon you will realise just why we put you through hell.  Good luck.”

The Sergeants took control and started to run through everything from basic marching in formation to weapons safety.  The earlier training had given them all the basic skills – those who hadn’t already had it – but now we made it more formalised.  The fifty men – well, forty-nine men and one women – who made up the Company went through everything willingly, although I heard a few grumbles I wasn't meant to hear.  Perversely, I was rather reassured to hear them.  We were training real soldiers, not helpless sheep…and hell, they saw us suffering right alongside them.  Mac watched me carefully – I think he was worried about my health – but I refused to slow down.  I wasn't that old, damn it!

“They’re not a bad bunch,” he muttered, during a break.  “The last few months taught them a lot and they don’t have much to unlearn.  That girl isn’t doing badly at all.”

I nodded.  The problem with women in combat is that most women can’t keep up with the men, as I believe I have mentioned before.  I had little objection to having a woman in my forces who could keep up with the men, but I objected strongly to lowering the standards so that women could compete on a ‘fair’ basis.  It wasn't good for unit cohesion to have men doing fifty press-ups (or whatever) while the women did forty.  Resentment and distrust (not personally, but of their combat abilities) could tear a unit apart, or lead to lower standards for training and experience.  I believe – and I could be wrong – that that was exactly what had happened to the 507
th
Maintenance Company, whose weapons jammed when they were attacked.  If Roshanda could keep up with the rest of us, or even outpoint them, well…more power to her.

“Give me a week or so and they’ll be ready for action,” Mac continued.  “I believe that you wanted us to start heavy patrolling in the direction of Charleston, right?”

I nodded.  I didn’t have anything I could put my finger on, yet, but I was getting an odd vibe from the south.  There were just fewer refugees reaching our territory and some of them had hinted at someone else organising the country into something new, rumours repeated – time and time again – as fact.  I’d actually prevailed on the Mayor to send a small recon party down to the south, but so far they hadn’t reported back.  I didn’t like some of the implications, although anything could have happened to them.

“I think we should start probing there,” I agreed.  There were definitely at least two bandit gangs operating in the area and they were potentially a major problem.  The survivors were the ones who knew to find the root cellars or the mason jars or other survival stocks.  Some of them would quite happily join us.  Others would have to be burned out before they came hunting for new sources of food and women.  “A week, you said?”

“Yep,” Mac said.  “They’re good kids, Ed.”

I didn’t dispute that, but it still bothered me.  Marine Basic Training is twelve weeks at Boot Camp.  Yeah, we had given the kids training when we’d conscripted them, but it hadn’t been intended to turn them into a real deployable army.  One week of training wasn’t really long enough to turn them into real soldiers, was it?  They’d be learning on the job and death, as they say, keeps his pupils back. 

The week went by slowly.  I stayed with the kids as often as I could, going through the same training with them – and getting chewed out by the sergeants – and getting back into shape myself.  I hadn’t realised how badly I’d gotten out of shape until going through training again.  It might have been easier than
my
Boot Camp, but it was still a dry reminder that I wasn't as young as I once was.  Mac urged me to stay back, but I had to push myself…

And then came the call for war.

As it turned out, it was only a preliminary skirmish.

Only a fool or a fraud talks tough or romantically about war
.

-John McCain

There wasn't much to say about St. Marys, West Virginia, except that it should have survived the war intact.  It had a starting population of around two thousand people, including a fair number of military veterans, and a position that could be defended reasonably easily.  It might not have made Principle Town status, insofar as any such status actually existed, but it should have survived as we had.  Instead, it fell into a nightmare.

According to the handful of refugees we discovered trying to find help, St. Marys had been attacked only a day after the Final War by a heavily-armed band.  Not, I should add, another group of gang-bangers, or villains.  This band was a group of city-dwellers from Parkersburg who wanted – needed – a place to keep their families safe.  Parkersburg might not have been hit during the war, but it was in a mess all the same…and those men could read the writing on the wall.  They grouped together, took whatever transportation they needed, and drove out to St. Marys, whereupon they occupied the town and took over.  The Mayor of St. Marys had been rather ineffectual in the crisis.  By the time they realised that they needed defences against refugees, it was too late.  The newcomers had invaded and occupied the town.

As I heard later, the newcomers had all belonged to a part-time survival militia organisation.  I never took such groups very seriously.  They spent time on various shooting ranges, learning how to use weapons for the inevitable war against the Federal Government (or whoever) and generally did nothing else, but talk.  They sometimes collected illegal weapons and stroked them as if they were doing something naughty.  The war, however, had forced them to react to a crisis for the first time in their lives and…well, they’d felt that they had no choice, but to take over a town and run it for themselves.

The refugees had been very clear on that point.  The newcomers had claimed, at first, to be operating under orders from the remains of the federal government.  (If there was any truth to this claim, and it is possible that they had orders from what was left of Parkersburg’s government, we never found out about it.)  They’d moved in, taken over the defences, confiscated all the weapons and ammunition…and then revealed their true colours.  It wasn't as bad an occupation as some – there were no mass rapes or shootings – but the newcomers were very clearly in control, using the families of the townspeople as hostages to ensure compliance.  It was, in short, an intolerable situation.

There are, you see, two ways to live off the land.  You can be a farmer or you can live off farmers.  The newcomers – they called themselves CORA; Citizens Organised for Resistance Action (yeah, right) – had decided on the latter.  They sent the men of St. Marys out to farm and scavenge for them, while keeping a firm grip on their families and the remainder of the town.  Resistance would do nothing, but cost lives, particularly as all of the weapons had been confiscated right at the start.  I would have expected some of the weapons to be held back – farmers can be a paranoid bunch, but they hadn’t slipped over into full siege mode before it was too late – but as long as the families were hostage, they could do little.  Only a handful of them could escape to seek help.  Luckily for them, they found Pennsboro, one of the Principle Towns, and made contact with us.

The Constitutional Convention was still arguing over the precise form of the constitution – or amendments to the constitution – but everyone agreed that St. Marys had to be liberated.  CORA might prove an unwelcome neighbour in the next few years, or they might manage to kill their farming slaves and themselves off, costing us another source of manpower.  They decided, after a brief discussion, that we would send a force down to St. Marys to deal with CORA…and, if possible, bring the town to our side.  If we could liberate them, I had no doubt that they would be willing to join up with us.

Mac grinned up at me as the seven trucks made their way down the road towards the town.  St. Marys is on the Ohio River – which might not be a blessing for them, not when radioactivity might have entered the water chain – and there weren't as many possible angles of approach as there were to Ingalls.  I’d taken one hundred men and a considerable amount of irreplaceable equipment and vets.  I didn’t want a long battle, not when there were innocent civilians around, and so I needed to risk them.  I had also agreed to try to negotiate first, although somehow I doubted that CORA would be amiable to reason.  They had too much at stake.