The Living Will Envy The Dead (45 page)

We stepped into the cell and the captive’s piggy eyes turned to glare at us, although there was an undertone of fear in his gaze.  I was delighted to see it.  A real fanatic would take longer to break down, but real fanatics tend not to reach the high levels of terrorist organisations.  The Prophet might be as mad as a hatter, but I was quite happy to bet – hell, I was betting – that his senior leadership was only in it for the power.  The same was true of pretty much every terrorist group that hadn’t wiped itself out long ago.

“Good morning,” I said, conversationally.  Richard had, on my orders, meddled with the lighting a little, just enough to confuse the prisoner as to how long he’d actually been a captive.  Deprived of any objective simulation – and affected slightly by some drugs we’d injected into his system – he might well believe that he’d been there for weeks, instead of two days.  “How are you today?”

I released the gag and he took the opportunity to spit at me.  “That was careless,” I said, and slapped him across the face.  I had to pull the blow – I didn’t want to inflict permanent damage yet, or stun him – but it left a satisfying mark on the side of his face.  He stared at me, shocked for a moment, and then reverted to type.  “We’ve finally gotten around to you and you really don’t want to piss us off, right?”

“Right,” Mac agreed, and stepped forward into the light.  We had dressed him in an outfit that made him look more like a demented dwarf than a soldier, but also made him look terrifyingly evil, like someone out of an S&M movie.  The prisoner’s eyes went wide as he stepped into the light.  Mac’s hand squeezed his throat gentle, leaving him in no doubt that he could crush his windpipe just by squeezing, before letting go and forcing the prisoner to take deep breaths.  “Don’t piss us off.”

“You can’t do this to me,” the prisoner protested, finally.  We’d gotten through to him already, or was it just an act?  I knew some terrorist groups that gave their people special courses in misleading interrogators, but I doubted the Warriors of the Lord would have bothered with such lessons.  Why should they have if they knew the land was going to fall into their hands?  “You can’t treat me this way?”

I leaned forward, cursing an oversight.  I should have swallowed something that would have given me really bad breath.  “And we can’t we treat you this way?”  I asked, as insanely politely as I could.  “You’re my prisoner.  I can do what I like to you.”

He shrank back in his seat.  “No one knows you are here, my friend,” I breathed.  “No one knows or cares that you survived the battle.  We can do whatever we like to you and no one will even know, or care.  Your fellow Warriors think that you’re a dead man and someone else has already been appointed to fill your shoes.  They don’t care in the slightest what happens to you, not now that you’ve been replaced.”

I had hoped that that would cause him to break, but he held on to himself.  “I won’t tell you anything,” he said, desperately trying to avoid thinking of something that might save him.  I might have overdone it a little.  If he clung so hard to life, he would try to avoid telling us anything, just to prolong his existence.  “You can do what you like to me.  I won’t talk.”

“Yes, you will,” I said.  “Mac?”

Mac stepped back outside the door and returned, a moment later, pushing a trolley.  It had a small light mounted at one end – I believe Kit used it for his night time rounds in the hospital – which was shining brightly, illuminating the small collection of metal devices on the table.  They looked intimidating, more intimidating than most military weapons, but they weren’t military at all.  Some of them had been borrowed from Nana, the town’s dentist, and were designed for repairing teeth.  Others had more mundane applications.

“You can torture me all you like,” he said, “but I won’t talk.”

“The interesting thing about torture,” I lectured, as I picked up a surgical knife and held it so that the l
ight sparkled off its sharp blade, “is that it is actually quite reliable, under the right circumstances.  Specifically, if we have a method of obtaining feedback, we are capable of knowing just when the person under the knife is telling the truth.  Lying to us, my friend, will only prolong your pain, for we have other prisoners and a lie detector.”

I thought I was overdoing it a little, but his eyes went wide.  The wire that ran around his head, making him look like a candidate for the electric chair, wasn’t actually anything more than extra humiliation, but if we could convince him that it was a lie detector…  We didn’t have other prisoners with whom we could crosscheck, but if he believed we had, we took away his motivation for lying.

“If you lie to us, the pain will merely grow worse,” I said, calmly.  I reached for his hand and smoothed it out.  A moment later, I brought down the knife and cut his pinkie finger off.  He screamed in pain and shock.  I wasn't in a much better state.  I’d injured people before, although never so…precisely, but the finger had come off much quicker than I had expected, somehow.  I passed the grizzly trophy to Mac, who put it in a shiny bowl, and held it up in front of our guest’s eyes.  “As you can see, we have no compunction about hurting you.”

His eyes showed an internal struggle…and pain.  A dull stink rose up from where he had urinated involuntarily.  My nose twitched, but I ignored the smell, satisfied that we were scaring hell out of him.  If we kept pushing him, I was confident that he would break.  We could keep making him suffer for hours.

I said as much.  “We can do this forever, if we have to,” I said.  “Perhaps we could cut off one of your toes next, or perhaps we should start getting ambitious and cut off your nose, or pluck out one of your eyes, or maybe even your penis?  What do you think of that?”  He said nothing, whimpering desperately, trying to force us to soften and spare him the agony.  I reminded myself about the captives they’d taken and pushed my guilt into a darkened corner of my mind.  “Tell me, now.  What is your name?”

Mac passed me the dentist’s drill and I held it close to his mouth.  “Daniel,” the prisoner screamed.  “My name is Daniel!”

I smiled, tightly.  “Good, Daniel,” I said, withdrawing the drill.  Carrot and stick, again, rewarding him for telling us what I’m sure felt like a piece of insignificant data.  “Now…how did you join up with the Warriors of the Lord?”

He flinched back, eyes wide and staring, until I brought the drill back towards his mouth.  It was an astonishingly intimidating tactic, but then, most people dread going to the dentists and having him working away inside their mouths with his drills.  I’m sure Daniel – as we must now call him – sensed that I didn’t have any proper dentist training, or that I wouldn’t hesitate to drill right through the tooth and into the nerve below.  He started to gibber away and I listened carefully, grateful for the recording system.  We’d be able to replay it later.

Daniel – his real name had been something a great deal less religious – had been one of the early ones to fall into the hands of the Warriors of the Lord, just after the bombs fell.  He talked briefly about a shrewish wife and two minor children, the former of whom had been broken by the Warrior treatment into a proper wife.  His delight in seeing his enemy – I wondered, grimly, how he could see his wife as an enemy, but I suspected I knew the answer – broken had brought him to the attention of the Warrior leadership, who had promoted him and made him their loyal servant.  He hadn’t been the commanding officer of the force that had hit Summerville, but he’d been a high-ranking officer…and one who was partly responsible for the atrocities in the town.

“We have to keep the bitches in their place,” he said, desperately.  The temptation to inflict even more horrendous damage on him was almost overwhelming.  “Man is the head of woman and a woman who seeks to live on her own is an unnatural offence against God.  She must be punished and purged…”

I pushed onwards grimly.  “How many Warriors are there in total?”

“I won’t tell you that,” Daniel said.  I leaned forward with my drill and inflicted a tiny nick on the side of his gums.  Judging from his screams, you’d think I had kicked him in the groin or poured acid on his head.  “Thousands upon thousands; oh God I don’t know any more, I don’t know…”

Mac and I shared a glance.  “Thousands upon thousands?”  I muttered.  “A hundred thousand at most?”

“It can’t be much more, can it?”  Mac asked.  “They couldn’t have fed millions of refugees for long, no matter how many old MRE packs they stored.  They have to have limits somewhere.”

I returned to Daniel.  There was a thin trickle of blood seeping out of his mouth, spilling down towards the floor below.  He looked to be in terrible shape, as if we’d pushed him too far too quickly, but I was sure we could go much further before he had a heart attack.  There was so much else we had to ask him.

“Weapons,” I said, firmly.  “What kind of weapons do the Warriors have?”

I listened to his answer in growing disbelief, rolling my eyes at the civilian attitude to weapons.  Daniel might have been a high-ranking officer, but he lacked anything reassembling a comprehensive knowledge of modern weapons.  The rifles he mentioned could have been anything from AK-47s to M16s or hunting rifles.  I hurt him a little more, pushing for answers, but I don’t think he had them to give.  He mentioned tanks and armoured fighting vehicles, but again, I don’t know if he really knew what he meant.  We certainly hadn’t seen more than technicals and truck bombs during the Battle of the FOB.

“Next question,” I said.  “How did you get information from Ingalls?”

“We sent agents into the town,” Daniel said.  He looked completely broken, utterly shattered.  I hoped – prayed – that it wasn't an act.  If he had recovered enough to give us some misinformation, we were going to be in trouble.  “They made contact with a few of your people and…got information.  That’s how they knew to take Summerville so quickly.  They knew that it was going to be reinforced.”

I winced.  Ingalls was hardly a big city.  It was hard to keep anything a secret for long and…hell, an enemy spy in the right place could be devastating.  If it was someone who’d had a pre-war link with the Warriors…or might it be someone else, someone discontented?  The problem was that there were too many people who were ‘discontented.’

Daniel coughed out blood when I put the question to him.  “Who is the spy?”

“Schneider,” Daniel said.  I felt my mouth fall open.  In hindsight, perhaps I should have seen it coming, but I hadn’t seen it at all.  I would have thought that betrayal to the Warriors was unthinkable.  “Marc Schneider.”

Remember that pride is the worst viper that is in the heart, the greatest disturber of the soul's peace and sweet communion with Christ; it was the first sin that ever was, and lies lowest in the foundation of Satan's whole building, and is the most difficultly rooted out, and is the most hidden, secret and deceitful of all lusts, and often creeps in, insensibly, into the midst of religion and sometimes under the disguise of humility.

-Jonathan Edwards

We left Kit to tend to the prisoner, watched by a pair of burly security guards from Richard’s men, and retired to a side room.

“It makes sense,” Mac said, grimly, once we were alone.  “He might have been lying about the other questions, or didn’t know what we wanted to know, but if it really is darling Schneider…”

I nodded, reluctantly.  Marc Schneider had been a persistent pain in the ass ever since the bombs had fallen, despite meeting near-total rejection by the remainder of the townspeople.  He’d tried to dominate the Constitutional Convention, tried to have himself appointed to higher office than anyone felt he deserved, and protested the introduction of ‘communist’ ideas like having a communal kitchen and even sharing some of the chores of trying to build a new farming system for us all.  He had even protested the use of his property for farming purposes, despite the fact that without it, we would all be dead, including him.  He was the typical loner, the person who didn’t fit into the surrounding society…and his own society, the one that had given him wealth and status, no longer existed.  A stronger man than Schneider would still have had problems coming to terms with his new status…and Schneider had the encouragement of a shrewish wife.  It occurred to me, unpleasantly, that he and Daniel had a lot in common.

“He could have told them everything,” I agreed.  Schneider might have been a gadfly, but he wasn’t actually stupid, just narrow-minded.  He could have learned pretty much anything the Warriors wanted to know about the defences and gotten it out of Ingalls for them.  It wasn't as if we had a system for monitoring what everyone was doing outside the town; hell, pretty much everyone had taken a turn at scavenging once or twice in a while.  Schneider, I recalled now, had gone on prospecting missions every week.  He’d even been lauded for some of the items he’d found while outside the town.  “Fuck.”