The Living Will Envy The Dead (33 page)

I might have seriously considered accepting the terms they offered us.

All Faith is false, all Faith is true:

Truth is the shattered mirror strewn,

In myriad bits; while each believes,

His little bit the whole to own
.

-Richard Francis Burton

I nearly burst a gut getting down to the Forward Operating Base, but I didn’t feel that I had much choice.  I had sent messengers to St. Marys to ask Mac to take one of the Companies of soldiers and come join me, but for the moment I would only have three Companies under my direct command.  It didn’t help that our definition of ‘Company’ was somewhat variable.  We had Companies composed of over a hundred men and companies that barely had fifty men.  It was a compromise that, like all good compromises, satisfied no one.

Dutch Schofield had been Mac’s friend a long time before I knew him – if only for a given value of friend – but I’d grown to trust him in the months since we’d met at Clarksburg.  He’d organised Salem’s defences and had played a major role in organising the new army.  He’d once confided in me that he preferred playing soldier to being a farmer, but I didn’t hold that against him.  No one would have called me a farmer either.  It was lucky, as it turned out, that we hadn’t placed the FOB in Summersville, West Virginia, itself.  Summersville might have been one of the Principle Towns, but it had been lucky to survive with Charleston so near and thousands of refugees pouring out of the remains of the city.  The defenders were tough and well-armed, but we’d started keeping the army away from the Principle Towns.  It was, again, one of those damn compromises.

The FOB itself had been some city-dwellers idea of a countryside home before it had been taken over by our forces and converted into a base.  It was larger than any sane person would want if they lived on their own – and we found no evidence that the nameless owner had ever had a family – but perhaps he used it as a love nest for his affairs.  Hell, I don’t know; all I know is that it was looted once, but left largely intact and fit for use.  The handful of squatters on the estate had been delighted to join up with us. 
They
knew almost nothing about taking care of themselves in the wildness.

“Sir,” Dutch said, with a very precise salute.  Our army didn’t have much of a saluting tradition – we hadn’t had the time for such things, not when we needed to train them to
fight
, and besides, salutes are dangerous in a combat zone – but Dutch saluted anyway.  I think he missed being a soldier.  “We have the refugees in the medical centre, sir.  They’re under guard, but Lucy is taking care of them.”

Lucy was one of the nurses from Stonewall, a short black woman, who would have been remarkably pretty were it not for the nasty scar on her nose.  A criminal, according to Richard, had once been tied down for treatment, only to carry out a form of social protest by biting her nose off, literally.  The bastard had been released only a few months before the Final War on some kind of technicality.  Being tied down, apparently, stifled his free expression and therefore he was justified in whatever he did to strike back.  Call me old fashioned if you like, but I believe in punishing violent actions against unarmed nurses, or against anyone who didn’t deserve it.  The meme that blames everything on everyone, but the prisoner, doesn’t solve crime at all.  You might as well refuse to declare anything a crime and claim, therefore, that you have beaten crime.  What sort of nonsense is that?

“I took a look at the recovered bodies,” Lucy said, as Dutch showed me into her emergency ward.  It would have horrified me in Iraq to think that I might be treated under such conditions, but now all I could do was approve.  It was clean, at least, and that was the best that could be said for it.  I hoped she was remembering to boil her tools before using them.  “There’s not much on them to identify them – not that it would matter these days – but they were showing signs of having been whipped, some time ago.”

I blinked.  “Whipped?”

“Whipped,” Lucy confirmed.  “I did a brief spell in a woman’s rescue centre in Detroit, sir, and some of the women there were whipped by their partners.  The wounds were similar, although there was something odd about them, almost as if it wasn't intended to be just a punishment.”

“The Shia Muslims sometimes flagellate themselves,” I said, remembering a ceremony I had watched once in Iraq.  It had been oddly moving, in hindsight, but at the time I’d been more worried about suicide bombers and the prospects of outright civil war.  There’d also been Uncle Billy’s jokes about what happened to boys who went to British Public Schools.  “Could it be something like that?”

“I don’t know,” Lucy said.  “The wounds were probably not self-inflicted, but other than that I couldn’t tell you any more about it.  They’re both in surprisingly good shape, suggesting regular exercise and good food, but that could mean anything.”

I nodded, looking down at the bodies.  They were both in good shape, but that meant very little these days.  The real fatties had died off in the collapse following the nuclear bombardment, or had been eaten by cannibal gangs, or had been forced to get into shape.  We hadn’t been cruel about it – well,
I
hadn’t been cruel about it – but I wasn't going to give fatties extra rations just because they were used to eating more before the war.  It was amazing how many of them had slimmed down and were now in better shape than they had been in their entire lives.

“And the refugees?”

“They’ve been whipped as well,” Lucy said.  “The woman was raped at least once, judging by the wounds in the…ah, affected area.”  Her voice darkened as she spoke, losing her clinical objectivity.  “They also have signs of having been chained up from time to time, with bruises on their wrists and ankles.  They’re not faked, sir.  They’re also suffering from malnutrition and are going to be very vulnerable to disease.”

“Ouch,” I said.  Kit had been worried, more than anything else, about the spread of disease within our little enclaves.  It was why we had instigated a firm policy of regular baths and medical check-ups.  There were places, refugees had told us, where Smallpox and the Black Death had broken out and exterminated entire groups.  It wasn’t something to take lightly.  “Are they healthy?”

She gave me the kind of look you would give to a particularly stupid child.  “They’re in the best shape they could be, given their treatment,” she said.  “They’re holding themselves together, somehow, but I suspect that the woman, in particular, is on the verge of complete mental collapse.  I suggest that you use care when you interrogate them.”

“I will,” I promised.  “Have they been kept together?”

“They have,” Dutch said.  “They appear to be related, so…”

We peered in through the window into a small bedroom.  It was guarded, but other than that there was little to suggest that it was a prison.  There were three people in the room.  A black man, wounded but unbowed, a black woman and a white teenager.  The woman – she couldn’t have been more than thirty – looked shattered, but the teenager looked determined to fight, if they had to escape.  They all looked worn out beyond endurance. 

“I'm going in,” I said.  “Dutch, stay behind me.  I don’t think they will offer any trouble, but keep an eye on them anyway.”

I stepped into the room and instantly they looked up at me.  “I’m Colonel Edward Stalker, United States Marine Corps,” I said.  If I were pressed, I would have had to admit that I was a retired Marine and that the USMC no longer existed, but it sounded better than anything more accurate.  “I understand that you wanted to talk to someone in authority?”

“Yes, sir,” the black man said, coming to his feet and standing to attention, snapping off a salute that was surprisingly impressive, given his condition.  I had seen worse salutes from exhausted infantrymen after Fallujah.  “Sergeant Samuel Ellsworth reporting for duty,
sir
!”

“At ease,” I said, automatically.  The man should have been in hospital, not reporting for duty.  “You’re safe now, you and your…wife?”  I frowned at the teenager.  It was pretty obvious that they were not related.  “And your…?”

“Brother-in-law, actually,” Samuel said.  “This is Debbie Ellsworth, my wife, and this is Gary Jordan, who married my sister a year ago.”

Gary didn’t look old enough to marry, but perhaps he was older than he looked, and in any case it was none of my business.  I listened, briefly, to a discussion of his service in the National Guard – it turned out that he’d been on leave when the war started and hadn’t reported back before the nuclear missiles started to fire, which I thought was a little odd, but never mind – and their terrifying escape from Frankfort in the midst of chaos.  The city had been a target and it had been all they could do to escape, taking with them only what they wore on their backs.

“And then we were caught by the Warriors,” Samuel continued.  It was the first I’d heard their name, but I would become too familiar with it in the coming months.  “They killed Sharon – my sister – and...” – he broke off, helplessly – “and they did other things to us.  They turned me into a slave, said that that was all I was fit for, and raped Debbie to prove they could.  They nearly broke me and so…”

“I managed to find a way to communicate with them,” Gary said, a new and bitter tone in his voice.  “I swallowed their shit and spouted it back and smiled when they encouraged me to lord it over Samuel.  It wasn't long before we had an escape plan and when they moved us up here to dig ditches and build defences, we took our chance and ran.”

I focused on the important word.  “Defences?”

“Oh, yes,” Samuel said.  He sounded more like a soldier now he was talking about military affairs.  “I told them that I was just a bricklayer; I used to do that just to earn some extra cash and I could pass as one, so they didn’t watch me with particular care.  They’re planning to take over everywhere, sir; they kept knocking over towns and adding new slaves to their slave markets.  First, it was just brothers, and then it was everyone who displeased them…and anyone who objected was beaten to death.  They want everything.”

I winced.  Were we facing a new threat, worse than gang-bangers or CORA?  “You escaped,” I said, finally.  We’d have to pump them for all the information in their heads, no matter how unpleasant it was for them.  I always hated doing that when I’d been on deployment.  “How did you do that?”

“They got lazy,” Samuel said, a grim note of triumph in his voice.  “They kept us chained up and thought that that was enough, but we had a man on the inside.  One night, Gary came into the tent, unhooked us, and we fled, leaving the others to rebel or flee as they chose.  I didn’t realise that they had tracker dogs, sir; they were on our tail far quicker than we had realised.”

I frowned.  “Where did you think you were going?”

Samuel looked at me as if I had gone mad.  “Away,” he said.  “They were taking out the girls, one by one, and raping them in front of us, just to grind our faces in the dirt.  I wanted to die a free man and…I was sure that somewhere out there, there was a working government.  If the Marines are here…”

“I'm sorry,” I said, and told them, in general terms, about Ingalls.  I didn’t tell them any specifics – I suspected that they weren't spies, but what they knew they could be forced to tell others – but I let them know the outline.  “It’s just us, sorry.”

“You’d better get ready to defend yourself,” Gary said, with quiet vehemence.  “I was listening to them ranting and raving all the time, convincing everyone that they had to follow them and march onwards to glory.  They’re going to be coming for you next.”

“I see,” I said, grimly.  I believed them.  The possibility of post-war movements seeking permanent change had always been part of my work on nuclear war and other post-apocalypse scenarios.  If half of what they said was true, the Warriors of the Lord would hardly be content with leaving us alone.  They’d be coming for us in their multitudes and lay waste to our lands.  “We’ll do our best to defend ourselves.”

I left the room.  “Keep them under observation,” I ordered, “but treat them well.”

“Yes, sir,” Dutch said, gravely.  “Do you believe all that they said?”

“I think that we can’t take the chance,” I said.  Intelligence work isn’t as easy as it seems in the movies.  Intelligence agencies, far from being all-seeing, rarely see even half of the entire picture and, sometimes, make mistakes.  Normally, when that happens, it is seen as a sign of criminal intent.  “I want you to push our pickets and wait for reinforcements.  Once we have some additional forces here…”