The Memories of Milo Morai

by Robert Adams

  Gaby had remarried at about the time Milo had been forcibly repatriated and pensioned off. He had taken part in the wedding ceremony, had again given her away to a young paraplegic a couple of years her senior, a man who had been a classmate of her late husband’s and who had, like him, been one of Milo’s junior officers in Vietnam. Thanks to modern medical advances, Gaby had had two children by her second husband before he died by his own hand in one of his periodic fits of despondency, whereupon she had settled down to making a full-time job of raising her children.

  But after old Bannister had died, Milo had grad­ually lost any really personal contact with the survi­vors of his onetime family, which explained why he had not even known of his Gaby’s marriage to the vital, charismatic former-general, Noonan, who had among other things been frequently mentioned as a prime contender for the then-in-power party’s next presidential campaign, which now, of course, would never take place.

  In the huge, sprawling home that had been Noonan’s, even Crippen and his men were not unduly crowded, and although all of the frozen and re­frigerated foods were long since spoiled and had to be buried, there still were enough supplies of canned and otherwise preserved foods to keep them adequately, with venison and other game brought in by Milo, Master Sergeant Lyon and two or three other exper­ienced hunters.

  After three days of hourly broadcasts, they finally got a response from the state capital at Sacramento. Crippen had had to go to great lengths and into meticulous and personal detail before he was able to achieve belief as to his identity. Since no one had seen him and his force or radioed of his whereabouts since his column had left Barstow, he and all of them had been assumed dead either of the plagues or of hostile action.

  Once they were certain that it really was Colonel Crippen, however, the governor himself began to transmit, sounding very tired and more than a little distraught. “David? It’s truly you, then? How many men are with you? That few, huh? Well, even that many is better than none at all, I suppose. How far from here are you? At Noonan’s place? How the hell did you … never mind. Have you got transport? Good, get up here just as fast as you can with all the arms you can scrape up and plenty of ammo. We’re in terrible need of more disciplined troops; half the city is dead or dying and the other half is starving and on the verge of riot and rebellion… . No, I won’t order you, David. I know that you and those with you must have gone through pure hell already. But I plead with you, rather. You’re needed desperately, colonel … no, I guess it’s general, now, since you’re the highest-rank­ing State Military Reserve officer left alive.”

  Two days later, while helping to make certain that all of the vehicles were in tip-top condition, Milo accidentally found General Noonan’s hidden armory of what had, until recently, been completely illegal weapons and equipment. Strong and strictly enforced federal and state and local laws had forbidden the ownership by private citizens of such things as hand­held surface-to-air missiles, anti-armor rockets, light mortars, grenade launchers and automatic firearms, not to mention grenades, other military explosives and chemical-warfare agents. Stacked along one side of the rock-walled room was enough small-arms ammunition to start a small war.

  When at last they all departed, in vehicles now altered to provide somewhat less comfort but much more protection, they were become far more formid­able a force than anything just then moving through the all but deserted landscape of the once-populous State of California. Such few individuals and small groups as they saw along Route 40 took but a single look at the bristling rifles and automatics and afforded the column a wide—a very wide—berth.

  At one point, where three semis parked athwart the road served as a roadblock, a single rocket blasting the centermost trailer apart served as a more than suf­ficient reason for the scruffy types manning the point to recall urgent business … elsewhere. After the last of Crippen’s vehicles had cleared the obstruction, Milo drove the three tractors into roadside ditches and set them all afire. The three-wheeled trail bike that he found there he put to immediate and personal use.

  They smelled Barstow long before they got within sight of the place. There were corpses everywhere anyone looked, and the shots they fired off in the hopes of bringing anyone still living out onto the streets only served to send overfed buzzards scurrying and flap­ping about over their grisly interrupted repasts. There were flies everywhere, thick, metallic-sheened swarms of them, and the rotting, rat-gnawed bodies still on the perimeter defenses housed clumps of fat, writhing, wriggling maggots, shiny white or yellow.

  The Crippen column wasted no more time, only seeking out enough gas to top off their tanks, retriev­ing a few weapons and some ammunition, then head­ing west on Route 58 toward Bakersfield and points north.

  Milo determined that Edwards Air Force Base must still be at least partially manned. He never saw anyone or got any answer to his shouts, but he was fired on from at least three points of the fortified main gate. Crippen readily agreed to bypass Edwards.

  Bakersfield, when they got there, was Barstow on a far larger scale, sans a perimeter worthy of the name, but including signs of fires, combats and large-scale lootings. It, like Barstow, stank too badly to con­template staying any longer than absolutely necessary, so they fueled and left the town and its current occupants to Nature’s undertakers.

  That night, in their well-guarded camp at what had been a rest area, Milo announced his intention to Crippen. “You’ll make it now, general, if anybody can and if you pay attention to Sergeant Weeks. I’ll be leaving you in the morning, west, into the mountains, taking only what I originally had, plus that trail bike, some spare gas and water and two or three days’ worth of food.”

  Crippen snorted. “You’re loco, Moray, you know that? Just how long do you think you’ll last alone? Who’ll care for you if you get hurt or sick?

  “Besides, a man like you would be invaluable up in Sacramento now. I’ll probably make a lousy, pisspoor general officer, but you, now, you’d make a fine one.”

  “No, thank you, Crippen,” replied Milo. “I’ve been a general, and it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, you’ll find, just much more work and a crushing load of responsibilities and …”

  Just then, Master Sergeant Weeks dropped his coffee cup and, wide-eyed, exclaimed, “Now I recollect you, sir! Gen’rul, thishere is nobody else but the man the ARVNs called le saint diabolique. Back when he was a very unofficial U.S. Army observer with the French, he escaped someway from Dien Bien Phu, th’ough the whole fucking Vietminh army and ever’thin’. He come back as a U.S. army adviser and then stayed there for over ten years, off and on, a whole helluva lot of it up in them damn mountains with the Montagnards, and they purely worshiped him, too, they claimed he was a god come down to earth in the shape of a man, that he could grow back any part he lost like a fence lizard grows back a tail and that couldn’ nuthin kill him. I know, gen’rul! I never did see him ‘cept at a distance, but I talked to ‘Nards and ARVNs as had done knowed him.”

  Turning to Milo, the sergeant demanded with respect, “Why don’t you look your age, sir? You’re a whole lot older’n I am.”

  Milo had not fielded such a question in a long time, but he still remembered how. “I have always prided myself in keeping fit, sergeant. And did you ever hear of plastic surgery?”

  They talked on into the dark night, but Crippen, knowing within himself that he would not be able to change Milo’s mind, made weaker and increasingly weaker attempts to dissuade his savior’s departure, then ceased entirely. The last couple of hours before all retired for what was left of the night were filled with Milo’s reminiscences and anecdotes from his years as a mercenary officer in Africa, the Middle East and various parts of Central and South America.

  When the Crippen column headed north, Milo revisited the Bakersfield area long enough to loot a couple of good bows, arrows and accessories and some odds and ends of general camping equipment, then made his way up into the mountains again, seeking to breathe air clean o
f the cloying stench of decomposing humanity.

  Something over a month later, he came down, found a jeeplike vehicle and drove directly to the Noonan place with its generator and powerful short­wave radio. After cleaning the main refrigerator-freezer, he stalked and shot a fat, sizable doe, gathered wild fruits and vegetables from the woods and settled down for a while with the radio.

  But it was days before he raised an answering set. Sacramento was unresponsive, by day or by night, and he tried both, at different times each day. It was at night, nearly midnight, that he at last got an answer, such as it was.

  “Where are you located, unidentified station? Are you private, governmental or commercial, or are you military?”

  “You want to know one hell of a lot without divulging anything yourself,” Milo replied bluntly. “But in answer, I’m a private station a bit northeast of what used to be San Diego, California. Now, who are you and where are you?”

  “I am … we are, rather, we were a scientific research facility, located in … Florida, and that’s all you need to know. Have you been able to raise Wash­ington, D.C.?”

  Milo answered. “I haven’t tried … at least, not recently. It was nuked, you know, one of the first urban areas hit, and hit by more than just one missile, I’ve been told. If you’re some kind of hush-hush government outfit, how come you didn’t know that?”

  “What we are or were and our sponsorship and funding is none of your concern,” was the somewhat haughty reply. “Who, exactly, are you? How many of you are there?”

  “There’s just me, buster. I’m a retired Army officer, speaking to you from the home of the late General Jerry Noonan. Now tell me a bit more about you. What part of Florida are you in? Did as many die off there as did here?” asked Milo, not really expecting a straight answer from the fanatically security-conscious type on the other radio.

  “The Cent … ahh, we are in north-central Florida,” said the disembodied voice, somewhat hesi­tantly. “How many died out there?”

  “What I’ve seen of California is wall-to-wall corpses, old and young, male and female, of every race and color,” Milo stated baldly. “I’d guesstimate that at least, at least ninety percent of the former population of this state is dead of disease, starvation, violence or just plain fear. What percentage died back east, there?”

  After a longish pause, the voice said stiffly, “That is classified information.”

  Exasperatedly, Milo snapped, “Buster, you take your fucking stupid, now-needless and silly security shit and shove it way up your arse. Hear me? Either that or jam it up whoever has been prompting you there. There’s not all that much gasoline left for the generator powering this radio, and I’ll be fucked if I’m going to waste airtime on a turd-brained fuck-face and his peckerhead stooge. End of transmission!”

  His second contact, later that same night, was an anomaly and a one-in-a-million chance both rolled into one. He received and replied to a South African military field-radio transmission and found himself, to his surprise and pleasure, talking to an old friend from his own days in Africa, an officer named Meileneaux.

  “Jan, is that you? How the hell are you, you old reprobate? I’d’ve thought they’d’ve hung or shot you, by now.”

  “And just who the bloody hell are you, Yank? Get to hell off this band immediately, or I’ll have you shot. This is a military transmission, an urgent military transmission. Hear me?”

  “I don’t think you can shoot that far, Jan. I’m near the western coast of North America. This is Milo, Milo Moray, Jan.” Milo chuckled into the microphone.

  “Milo? It’s really you, Milo? Damn, it’s good to hear your voice again, though I’d much rather see you—we could certainly use you, just now. The kaffirs are dying like so many flies, both the good ones and the bad, the coloreds and a good many of the Asians, too. But this far, damn-all of us. I’ve just accepted the unconditional surrender of the Cuban forces for all of Angola—they were damned near all that were left alive in the whole bloody country. Their senior com­mander, one Jaime Villalobos something-or-other, seems bloody well anxious to sign his lot up with us, and Pretoria will likely accept him and them. If we stay well and the damned pitiful kaffirs keep dying, we’ll end owning most of the damned continent we …

  Then, heartbreakingly, the voice dissolved into static and Milo never again was able to raise response from that wavelength, try as he might and did.

  The next morning, he monitored a governmental broadcast from Sao Paulo, Brazil. The entirety of the broadcast, done in both the Brazilian dialect of Portuguese and in New World Spanish, was a grim warning that Brazil definitely possessed nuclear cap­ability, owned appropriate means of delivery and would not hesitate to nuke the population centers and military installations of anyone who violated Brazilian borders “during the current state of emergency.” Milo could raise no reply to any of his attempts to transmit to Sao Paulo. However, during the course of one such attempt, he picked up an answer from a totally unexpected quarter.

  Vasili Vlasov identified himself as captain of a factory ship which also was flagship of a present mini-armada of his ship and three trawlers, proceeding from the South Pacific to Vladivostok. His command of English was marginal, at best, but Milo spoke excellent Russian, fortunately.

  He had tried to put in at a Chilean port and been fired upon; one of his original four trawlers had been hit and sunk there, and another had been damaged by shellfire.

  “The bastards accused me and the Motherland of having started this entire insanity, of initiating the nuclear exchanges and of having filled the air of all the world with poisons and deadly germs. Why did the United States of America do this atrocity to Russia and the rest of our world? Can you tell me that?”

  Milo sighed. “Captain Vlasov, a couple of months back, I sent transmissions to, received transmissions from and/or monitored transmissions from most parts of the world. The consensus then was that neither your country nor mine started the short, deadly fracas … we just finished it and ourselves, and quite possibly all of our species, too.”

  Vlasov’s heavy sigh came over the airwaves. “It’s as I suspected, Tovarich Moray, just as I suspected all along, then, I suppose. Who do you think did start it?”

  “The majority of the people I listened to or talked to, a couple of months or so back, before the really large-scale dyings started, suspected three instigators —Libya, Israel, and India, in just that order of probability.”

  “Most likely those damned aggressive, land-hungry, warmongering, racist Israelis, then,” rumbled Vlasov. “It was many times said that they would not be happy until they owned the entire Middle East and all of North Africa, as well.”

  “My vote would go against Libya, captain,” stated Milo. “The inhabitants of India always hated each other far worse than they hated non-Indians, and teetering on the verge of a three-or four-sided civil war as they were, I doubt seriously that they would’ve gone outside of India in search of trouble.

  “But Libya, now, that’s another kettle of fish, captain. Ruled over by an aging, egomaniacal dictator who has alienated every neighbor with which he shares a border and quite a few countries far removed from his borders, as well. He considered himself to be the savior of both Islam and all of Africa, at one time or another. I suspect that he finally lost the last vestige he still owned of sanity and commenced hurling nuclear missiles at every real and imagined enemy and that he kept it up until he ran out of missiles or until Egypt and Israel put paid to his long-overdue accounts.”

  “Hmmm,” muttered Vlasov. “That makes a good bit of sense to me, tovarich. Before Vladivostok went off the air, they reported to us that the first nuclear strikes were all in the far southwest of the Motherland, and in parts of Rumania, Yugoslavia, Albania and Bulgaria, even a few in both Greece and Turkey and at least one on Rome, in Italy. It was days later, I have heard, that the big strikes on the Motherland were launched from China and the United States of America. Yes, Libya could very well indeed be th
e culpable country. But what can now be done to retaliate, to punish such infamy, and who is now left capable of doing anything to them?”

  “From what little I heard, in my earlier days on this radio,” said Milo dryly, “Egypt, Israel and France took care of the matter quite thoroughly. Libya’s population centers are now mostly flat and probably glow in the dark.”

  “Good!” snapped Vlasov, forcefully and with clear feeling. Then he said, “Tovarich Moray, you have the sound of an honest man, and you must be a very strong man, as well, to have retained your reason in and among the horrors you have described in that place. I will tell you, I will go aboard one of the faster trawlers and we will steam to the Port of San Diego. You can meet us there, come aboard and return with me to Vladivostok. What do you say, tovarich?”

  “San Diego was nuked, captain, hit by two or three smaller missiles, probably launched from just offshore by submerged submarines.”

  After a few moments of rustling paper noises, Vlasov asked, “Well, then, we could as easily put in to, let’s see … Los Angeles or Santa Barbara or San Francisco, if you could easily get that far north in time to meet us. If as few people are now alive in the whole world as you have estimated to me, I think that we few must begin to forget outdated nationalism and band together in true internationalism.”

  “You’re right, of course, Captain Vlasov—Vasili— but your worthy sentiments have come a bit too late for any of us, I’m afraid. Yes, I could get to any of the cities and ports you’ve mentioned, were I not afraid of going close to them, that is.”

  “Nuclear destruction? All of them? All of those lovely, lovely cities, tovarich?”

  “Yes, Vasili, and not just them, either. Portland, Seattle-Tacoma, Vancouver, in Canada, Chicago, Houston, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., New York, Boston, Norfolk, Philadelphia. And that’s just on this continent. If you have an alternate home port or even if you don’t, steer clear of Vladivistok, my friend. I intercepted a transmission from a Japanese Self-Defense Force frigate that had seen that port hit and were so rattled that they didn’t even encode their message to their base.”