The Living Will Envy The Dead (47 page)

I handcuffed him to the chair and we spent thirty minutes searching the house.  I wasn't surprised to discover that Schneider had been keeping some items from his scavenging expeditions in his house, rather than showing them to the rest of the town, as we had all agreed upon right back at the start.  It was an odd mixture of camping equipment, including some tiny stoves that would come in handy, preserved food and a surprising amount of artworks, all of which were effectively worthless at the moment.  It was a mark of an unstable mind, I decided, to attach value to the worthless.

“Idiot,” I said, as I came downstairs.  One of his hands was darkening as the handcuff cut off the circulation.  He looked as if he was desperate to escape, but didn’t even dare speak.  It was wise of him.  I was in no mood to play games.  “You could have gained all the status you wanted by showing off what you’d found.  You could have been a big man though honest work…”

I shook my head.  There was no point.  “You have your orders, Marc,” I said, as I released him.  “Fail me on this and you’ll be torn apart.  Remember that.  You’ll be torn apart by the mob.”

We left him there, whimpering to himself, and went to see to the defences.  The attack could come at any moment, but I had an idea, from what the Warriors had asked their spy, of their timetable.  Two days…

It was more than long enough to prepare a few surprises.

No military force can be on alert 24/7
.

-Ed’s Iron Law #45

“He betrayed us, then?”

“I’m afraid so,” I said, later that evening.  It felt like bedtime, which was weird.  I must be getting old.  Either that, or I was getting used to sharing a bed with someone who was more than just a casual acquaintance.  “He could have told them pretty much anything they wanted to know, everything about us and the defences.  He must have warned them in advance that we were going to move down south to reinforce Summerville…”

Walter shook his head, one hand wiping his glasses on the side of his shirt.  He looked more like a schoolteacher than before, at least to my eyes; the task of governing an entire town was wearing heavily on him.  He also looked older, but that was nothing new.  We all looked older than we had been before the war.  None of us had ever had to work so hard in our lives, even the veterans.  I reminded myself, once again, that I had volunteered to join the Marines.  No one had volunteered to survive the Final War.

“I can’t believe it,” Walter said, replacing his glasses on the end of his nose.  “What was he thinking?”

I said nothing, remembering the attempts Schneider had made to justify himself.  All of them, in my view, stemmed from his own inability to realise that the world had changed.  His past occupation was no longer useful, so he had no choice, but to abandon everything he’d learned and move on to a new speciality.  He’d resented that bitterly; ironically, he’d probably been one of the best scavengers we’d had.  If he had developed that instead of making contact with the Warriors of the Lord…

But there was always someone who saw themselves as an outcast from society, or as a lone voice crying in the wilderness, or as someone who had been constantly shit on during their lives.  Their insecurities might have had no basis on fact – I remembered how many of Moe’s victims had simply taken it and hated him silently – but they existed and a skilful spy could take advantage of them.  Schneider had been groomed to serve as the perfect spy, promised control of Ingalls after the Warriors occupied it, and his own desire to be a Big Man had done the rest.  I suspected that the Warriors had lied to him – Schneider was hardly a religious person – but he had believed otherwise.  He probably hadn’t even thought that it might be a deception.

“I guess he thought that he had no stake in society,” I said, and looked over at Jackson.  “I trust that the spies are watching him now?”

Jackson nodded.  We’d deputised a handful of other people in the early days after the war, just so that we could try to keep a lid on any panic or unrest before it turned violent.  Some of them hadn’t really come into the spotlight – they hadn’t been needed, after all – but they were now serving a useful role by keeping a close eye on Schneider.  He had been asked to take the next batch of intelligence to the warriors, so I’d make sure that the intelligence they got was…rather untrustworthy.

Jackson raised a point that had been floating about in my mind.  “Can we trust him not to betray us to the Warriors when we meets them?”  He asked.  “It’s not as if we can risk having one of the skirmish groups ‘accidentally’ stumble over them while he’s passing on the information.”

“I think we can trust him that far,” I said, slowly.  We had his wife, after all, and she would not be allowed out of the town.  She might not even have known about her husband’s betrayal.  I had a suspicion that Schneider might seriously consider leaving her behind if we made the threat more overt – I wouldn’t have slept with Mrs Schneider if she’d paid me to do it – and in any case, life without her would be delightful for the bastard.  We would just have to hope that he was too scared of us not to consider defying my orders.

“Nothing in war is certain,” Mac said, before Jackson could pick away at my statement and realise how weak it was.  “We know from the reports from Biggles and the skirmish lines that the Warriors are on the march and will be here soon enough, within the next few days at most.  Now they’ve started to fire on Biggles whenever they see him…”

I nodded.  One of the chemists had had the bright idea of mixing up some napalm and dropping it on any large batches of Warriors.  The first two explosions had been dramatic and very effective, as had the raid on what was obviously a Warrior staging post, but then the Warriors had started to fire on Biggles every time they saw him in the air.  The aircraft had been damaged several times when stray bullets had passed through the fuselage and I had forbidden Biggles from taking any other risks.  We couldn’t afford to lose the only aircraft we had to damage, even if Biggles managed to fly back home instead of coming down in flames.

“That brings us around to the evacuation plans,” Walter said, firmly.  “Do we really have to start moving the wounded and children now?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, equally firmly.  “We cannot afford to keep them in the town much longer, or they’ll be trapped here when the Warriors surround us and lay siege to the town.  I’d be happier with the women out of the way as well, but they’re going to be needed if the Warriors break through the defence lines.  I’ve rotated as many of them to Stonewall as I can and pulled out some of the male guards, but that has its own risks.”

“Yeah,” Jackson agreed.  “The prisoners might break out and stab us in the back.”

“I’ve left orders for Richard,” I said.  “When the Warriors get a day or two closer – you never know, the skirmishers might hold them up for a week – the prisoners will be returned to their cells and placed firmly into lockdown until the end of the battle, whatever happens to the town.  I imagine that if we lose, the Warriors will go after Stonewall and try to crack its defences…”

“How many of the bastards are there?”  Walter asked.  “They’re throwing away their own lives as if they were nothing, not even to them.”

“I don’t know,” I said, sourly.  Our captive, Daniel, hadn’t been able to shed much light on that, even though the first thing I would have wanted to know about a force under my command would have been how many men it actually had.  His answers had been vague, although judging by his remarks, I estimated several hundred thousand at most.  The more hyperbolic statements I dismissed.  The Warriors couldn’t have over a million at most…and even that was extreme.  They certainly couldn’t have ten
billion
under their banner.  There hadn’t been ten billion people on Earth before the Final War, let alone after it.  “If they don’t change tactics, we have the perfect opportunity to batter them into a bloody bleeding mass and crush them utterly.”

“Or we could retreat,” Walter said.  “There are folks who want to do that and just leave the town.”

“Traitors,” Mac hissed.  “They should be arrested and publicly humiliated for wanting to surrender to the bastards.  Haven’t they heard the reports out of Summerville?”

I shook my head.  “Walter, I doubt that they meant a word of their offer to let us leave,” I said.  “Even if they did mean it, we would be alone and isolated in a very hostile world, without even the shelter of the Principle Towns.  If they came after us – and they must, because we bear the contagious disease of freedom – they’d wipe us out completely, taking the women and children as their slaves.”

“I know,” Walter said.  “Ed, I’m not the one you have to convince.”

“Yeah,” I said.  The Constitutional Convention had dispersed yesterday, but not without voting a resolution to carry on the war against the Warriors of the Lord until they were utterly crushed, deeming them to be completely incompatible with the American traditions of freedom, democracy and justice for all.  It was a refreshing change from the hand-wringing of various pre-war presidencies, but even so, a victorious war could prove almost as disastrous as a lost war.  The victor in the war might wonder just what he’d won when their numbers had been reduced so sharply.  “I know.”

Walter yawned suddenly and several others followed him.  “I think it’s time we all got some sleep,” he said, standing up and brushing down his suit.  It wasn't very practical garb for the town – not least because he was wearing an enormous pistol at his belt – but he’d refused to trade it for something more durable, apparently under the theory that a Mayor should wear a suit at all times.  “Everything will look better in the morning…”

I rather doubted it – we couldn’t run any aerial reconnaissance in the darkness, which meant that the Warriors would probably be advancing their forward scouts closer to the gates – but he was right, we all needed some rest.  He chased us all out of the Town Hall, ordered the guards to ensure that none of the government members got back in until morning, and headed off to his own house at a swift trot.  I smiled, waved Mac goodbye, and started to walk back towards my own house.  I would have been happier with something smaller, but it had once belonged to a man from the city who’d never made it out of New York alive – or at least he hadn’t made it to Ingalls – and Walter had claimed that it would remind me of home.  I wasn't sure that that was a good thing, but the only memento of New York that was actually present was an image of the falling Twin Towers, draped in black.  The inscription underneath said NEVER FORGET.  I almost choked up every time I looked at it, not because of the reminder of 9/11 – I’d been a teenager at the time – but because of how we’d seen it, before the Final War.  We’d acted as if we’d been beaten half to death.  Now…

Now, America was in ruins, along with most of the rest of the world.  I knew enough about the missile targeting plans to have a fair guess at what had happened to the Russians…and I knew enough about the Russian weapons to have a fair guess at what had happened to Europe.  My most optimistic estimate, at the time, was that the Northern Hemisphere was almost completely in ruins, while the Southern Hemisphere might well have survived intact.  Would we end up with a world dominated by China and Brazil?  It was bitterly ironic, but perhaps they’d do a better job of it.

“Welcome home,” Rose said, from the darkness of the bed.  I smiled as I saw her limbs in the semi-darkness.  She was a very pale woman, but she had been looking much healthier lately, even though she had been running additional courses for the girls she taught.  The news of how the Warriors treated women had fired her determination to ensure that men and women strode into the brave new world together, rather than one being firmly subordinate to the other.  “We need to talk.”

“We do?”  I asked, through a yawn.  I wanted to go to bed and yes, get some sleep.  I probably couldn’t have performed if three teenage nymphomaniacs had danced in, completely naked, and started to go to work on me.  “What about…?”

“Light the light,” Rose ordered, and I obeyed.  Now that we had a regular system of coal mining established – coal harvesting, in some places – we had a regular supply of electricity, although not of electric lights.  Once we ran out of supplies in town, and those that we could scavenge, we would have to fall back on what we made ourselves.  It would be a long time before we took such luxuries as electric lights for granted.  “Ed, have a seat.”

I frowned, but sat down on the end of the bed, watching her as she sat up.  It was a very distracting sight.  Rose might not have had massive breasts, but I had always preferred fit girls to the oversized supermodels…and I could actually hold a conversation with her.  Some of the girls I had dated had had literally nothing between their ears, but insecurities and mindless trivia.  She was beautiful, in her way, but not everyone would have agreed with me.  I trusted her completely.