The Living Will Envy The Dead (37 page)

We didn’t realise just what had happened until a few days afterwards, when we found dozens of refugees fleeing the town; dozens, out of a population in the thousands.  The Warriors had taken advantage of their complacency and their desperate need for manpower, and had done it in a way that utterly swamped the defenders.  They knew us far better than we knew them…and it showed.  Whoever was in command on the other side, I reluctantly had to admit, was no slouch.

A week ago, a group of refugees, mainly men with a handful of women, had presented themselves at Summersville, claiming to be refugees from the Warriors of the Lord and their slave camps.  You can imagine the group as it waited fearfully outside the barriers; thirty black men, whipped and bleeding, fifty white men, their eyes haunted with shadows, and thirty-two women, broken by all they had experienced the end of the war.  Their leader, a tall black man who had been forced to carry a heavy bag everywhere to teach him a lesson, told Summersville that they had fled the Warriors and desperately required shelter and asylum.  The townspeople let them into the town.

It should have been obvious from the start, but Summersville – like everywhere else – was suffering from a shortage of manpower.  The irony was painfully amusing, in a sense; five months ago, we’d all been killing refugees just to keep them away from the vital food supplies we needed to keep us alive until we could grow more crops and rebuild our farming industry.  Now, we needed everyone we could get and the Warriors took advantage of that.  The refugees, unarmed and seemingly harmless, were welcomed into the town.

You’ve probably guessed the punch line by now; Trojan Horse.  For those of you who don’t read history, one side in the Trojan War decided to build a massive wooden horse as a ‘gift’ to the defenders of Troy, in hopes of breaking the siege.  Once they had completed the horse, they seemingly left, leaving the enemy to take the horse into their city for the night.  Unfortunately for them, it was concealing an armed force that killed the defenders and took the city.  You can look the rest of the details up in a history book, but the net result of this particular use of the idea was fifty men inside Summersville’s defence perimeter.

Fifty men?  Yes.  It turned out, afterwards, that the blacks had been genuine slaves, as had the women who’d come with them…and they thought that the escape plan had been their idea.  They’d been taken from their slave quarters, paired up with resentful workers from another captured town – or so it seemed – and had been offered the opportunity to escape in the direction of Summersville.  The news of the contact between the Warriors and us – and the safe escape of three of their slaves – had spread through the remaining slaves and they’d taken the chance when they’d seen it, allied with the women and the resentful workers.  They thought that they were safe in Summersville…

They couldn’t have been more wrong.

You see, there is a perception – a very popular perception – that an armed man is dangerous and an unarmed man is effectively helpless.  It’s complete nonsense, of course.  There would be much less fuss over gun control if everyone with a gun knew how to use it perfectly, but plenty of people go out and buy a gun without any training, or even previous firearms experience.  They’re not much more dangerous than any street tough armed with a club.  A trained Special Forces soldier, pushed through the most rigorous – and seemingly sadistic – training program that experience and money can buy, is a living weapon.  His external weapons are mere afterthoughts.  In hand-to-hand combat, I would bet on an unarmed SEAL or a Delta Force commando against almost anyone, even a bunch of armed terrorists.  Those men are that deadly.  The Warriors of the Lord didn’t have that much training – they didn’t even have the bare bones of such training – but they had a plan, the advantage of surprise and sheer fanatical determination.  You can get quite a long way with the right combination of the three.

Nothing happened for a day, until nightfall, when the Trojan Horsemen (sorry, but I couldn’t resist) broke out of their temporary lodgings and assembled in the town, moving from shadow to shadow under cover of darkness.  It would never have worked in the old days, but now it wasn't so easy to light up an entire town, even with streetlights.  We just couldn’t afford to waste the power, or, for that matter, create a glow that would be seen for miles in the dark.  The odds were good that that would have led the Warriors right towards us.  (It probably didn’t matter, as they seemed to know everything anyway, but it sounded better than not having the power to run the lights.)  They’d already located and studied their targets and, moving quickly, attacked the armoury and the main police station, followed rapidly by the Town Hall.  The first place they hit, the armoury, was lightly guarded – another display of complacency and a far less forgivable one – and they dispatched the guards with ease.  By the time the first body was found, and the alarm raised, they had armed themselves and started the second part of their plan.  They spread out and started to dismantle the inner centre of Summersville, piece by piece.  The Mayor and the remainder of the town’s governors died in the first hour of their offensive.

By then, of course, everyone knew what was going on…but it was too late.  The population might have had guns – lots of guns – but they were scattered, a hopelessly unformed mass rather than competent and disciplined soldiers.  The guards at the barricades were concentrated and ready to act, but as the shooting spread through the town, they were attacked themselves…from the outside.  The Warriors had timed their assault well and, just as their insurgents launched their offensive on the inside, the army outside launched its own offensive.  They'd managed to get very – very – close without being seen and the defenders found themselves caught between two fires.  The defences started to crumble as they found themselves being forced back.

It might still have gone the other way, were it not for the remaining insurgents, who took explosives and stolen uniforms – taken off the killed guards from their first targets – and went to ‘help’ the defenders.  In all the confusion, no one took a close look at the newcomers until it was too late and by then…well, it was far too late.  The fanatics threw explosive charges into bunkers, touched off mines prematurely and generally wrecked an entire section of defences.  The army came through the breech and…well, Katie bar the door.  It almost reminded me of a poem.

             
“Be mindful of this when you kiss yours goodnight,

             
“Beware of the danger that lies in plain sight.”

I still can’t remember where I first heard those lines.

The remaining defences just crumbled.  No one in the town had seriously expected to have to fight off an armed invasion in such a manner and all of the people who should have been in authority were dead or missing.  The Warriors charged into the town, shouting for the defenders to lay down their arms and surrender, promising good treatment to everyone who surrendered quickly enough to suit them.  They made a fearsome sight, illuminated by burning buildings and seemingly unstoppable; far too many people, in my view, surrendered to them.  The Warriors were surprisingly gentle, at first, ordering men and women back to their homes while they secured the entire town.  Some of the defenders, those on the other side of the town, realised that all was lost and slipped away into the darkness, others came forward and tried to hide among the civilians, preparing for a later insurrection against the new masters of Summersville.  The fighting ended, roughly, three hours after the first insurgent attack in the centre of Summersville.

The peace of the morning (hah) was broken by the arrival of the senior leadership of the Warriors of the Lord, a group of the Prophet’s most trusted, faithful and long-serving followers.  (The Warriors, like so many other such groups, operated a seniority system.  Those who had served the Prophet from before the War, those who had believed in him before Armageddon, had high status within the group.)  They must have been a fearsome sight to nervous townspeople, those who watched them from behind drawn curtains, perhaps cursing their decision not to flee into the darkness.  The uneasy peace was broken by an announcement through a loudspeaker, calling every citizen to come forth on pain of death.  Slowly, one by one, they emerged and were pushed and prodded into an open area.

They were forced to watch, helplessly, as the Warriors searched their homes.  They were no less brutal than the SS, or the Religious Police of a dozen states we used to call our allies, and they made a terrible mess out of nice clean homes.  They hunted, in particular for food, weapons and anything else that might be useful.  They confiscated every weapon they found, disarming as much of the population as possible, and collected all the food in a set of warehouses in the centre of town.  The former made resistance much – much – harder.  The latter made controlling the townspeople much easier.  A half-starved populace, as they had discovered over the last few months, would be much easier to brainwash into accepting the Warrior creed.  Once the searches were over, the real horrors began.

The Warriors went through their prisoners carefully.  Every black man and woman – including the escapees, who had fought desperately against being recaptured – was separated from the remainder, along with a smaller number of men and women from different, non-white races.  I don’t know why the Warriors had developed such a hatred for non-whites, frankly; they seemed almost to have taken lessons from the Ku Klux Klan.  The prisoners were stripped naked, chained up, and marched out of town.  We later found out that they had been forced to perform brute labour under fire.

They then separated out a handful of others.  They took every religious personage in the town – including a Catholic priest and a Muslim Imam, of all things – and shot them in front of the crowd, who were then forced to listen to a haranguing speech on the evils of all other religions, with special attention being reserved for the Pope in Rome – now a radioactive crater – and the Muslims.  A handful of people disputed with them and were shot down like dogs.  A Baptist Priest died bravely under their fire.  They didn’t spare any of the religious types at all.  There would be no faith, but that of the Warriors of the Lord.

Finally, they informed the population of their remaining fate.  All of the men would be brought into their society as second-class citizens, but conversion and enthusiastic support of the Warriors of the Lord, they were promised, would bring fast advancement in the new society.  The male children would no longer attend any of the regular schools in Summersville, but special schools staffed and run by the Warriors, where they would learn to become proper citizens of the new society.  They’d end up brainwashed puppets of the Warriors.  Catch a child, any child, young enough and you can bring them up to believe anything.  The Warriors would ensure that they became as fanatical as the remainder of their group…and, though them, control their parents.

The women would be worse off, although not as badly off as the slaves.  All female-owned businesses were ordered to close, or to be handed over to the male employees, and women were ordered to remain in the home unless escorted by a male relative.  They would be expected to remain silent at all times, to obey male orders at once without question, and to wait hand and foot on their husbands or male relatives.  They were strictly forbidden to bear arms, seek legal redress for any mistreatment, disobey their husbands under any circumstances and resist his sexual advances…or sexual advances from any of the Warriors.  Four lesbians in Summersville, who had lived there ever since retiring from the city, stood up and flatly refused to obey such ‘stupid, sexist, laws.’  They were promptly grabbed, beaten, gang-raped and finally chained up and left to die.  The lesson had sunk into the eyes of everyone watching.

The young girls wouldn’t be going to school any more either.  They would learn how to behave at their mother’s elbow and wouldn’t be allowed anything like the freedom of the male children.  Hell, their only education would come from their mothers and the Warriors and the latter, at least, would be based around obeying the men.  They wouldn’t be allowed to learn how to read, or write, or use a computer, or anything that might give them any kind of power.  They certainly wouldn’t be allowed to learn how to use weapons.  They weren't being put in headscarves and veils yet, but it was probably just a matter of time.  The Warriors were a sick male fantasy given flesh.

I had to admire the cunning of the scheme, even as I despised it.  The Warriors had made everyone compliant in their crimes against humanity.  The men in the town would be forced to take responsibility for their womenfolk, which would, in turn, force them to keep them under control.  The women, knowing that they could be raped at any moment by any warrior, would want to stay indoors anyway; being thrown out of the house would be fatal.  They would find themselves being broken down, bit by bit, into the model women – as the Warriors saw the model women – as reality and the hopelessness of the predicament sank in.  They would have no choice.  If they accepted the Warriors and their laws, they would find themselves trapped and bound to obey.  If they refused…well, a horrible death awaited them.