The Living Will Envy The Dead

by Nuttall, Christopher

  And yes, some people resorted to cannibalism. We prefer to forget that detail.

  And, sooner or later, people realised that the only place to find food lay outside the cities, which were rapidly becoming death zones. (More on them later.) People had been trying to leave the city since the first alerts were sounded – we ended up, later, calling some of the interstates Highways of Death, because of all the burned cars – but now it was almost all of the survivors. The thousands who could still walk, or had a car that had somehow survived the blasts and the resulting chaos, leaving the cities that had housed them for their entire lives. They started to swarm out like locusts, towards the countryside towns and farms…

  Towards Ingalls, towards us…

  Oh, shit.

  Chapter Five

  I personally have always voted for the death penalty because I believe that people who go out prepared to take the lives of other people forfeit their own right to live. I believe that that death penalty should be used only very rarely, but I believe that no-one should go out certain that no matter how cruel, how vicious, how hideous their murder, they themselves will not suffer the death penalty.

  -Margaret Thatcher

  I spent the drive up towards the prison thinking hard, relying on my escorts to watch out for trouble. I wasn’t expecting it, yet, but it wouldn’t be long before the areas between towns and cities became as dangerous as the Iraqi supply lines had become in the first years of the occupation. This is America. Hundreds of thousands of people had guns and they would be becoming desperate. We were desperate and we were inside a town, with a large proportion of military veterans…and others wouldn’t have that consolation. They might come to us for help, or they might devolve into bandits.

  It sounds pessimistic, I know, but people can change terrifyingly quickly when under any kind of pressure. I’d seen some of the more classified projections and I’d seen it in action in Iraq. Society would fall apart remarkably quickly as ‘me and mine first’ became the dominant rule, as if it had never always been the dominant rule. Americans, particularly city-dwellers, had been insulated from that particularly truth of the universe, but they’d learn it again in a hurry.

  You see, society works by mutual agreement on the rules. You grow up under your parents’ care, go to school and get educated, graduate and get a job, which pays you money that you can use to feed yourself. The value of money was soon going to go down sharply; money is only useful as long as people accept it. There’s a great deal of theory behind it that I won’t bore you with, but suffice it to say that people would prefer food to money. You can’t eat money. Your weight in gold, which really isn’t that much, would be worth less than your weight in canned goods. The invisible glue that binds society together would have been melted by the nukes. The result would be complete chaos.

  I tensed slightly as the SUV turned off the road and started to head up towards the prison, my escorts clutching their weapons as if they expected to be ambushed at any moment. This was the scenario we’d practiced back when the Jail Posse was first set up, back when the prison had been built, and they were taken refuge in what they knew. I couldn’t blame them for that, even though I hoped that we wouldn’t have to shoot our way into the jail. If we needed to fight, I didn’t have enough men with me.

  The Stonewall West Virginia Maximum Security Prison had been a political hot potato ever since some bright spark in the government decided it had to be built. There were too many prisoners that it would be political suicide to release, or to inject with something nicely lethal, and the jails we had were overcrowded. They decided that a new prison was required and, after a political dogfight, settled on a place near Ingalls. We – the locals – didn’t like the idea. We didn’t want to be so close to known murderers, child molesters, rapists and other scum of the Earth, even though the jail was supposed to be secure. I knew from my experience, as did the other vets, that there was no such thing. Any jail can suffer an escape if the guards make a single mistake.

  And so we’d formed the Jail Posse. If there were an escape, the Posse would guard Ingalls and hunt down the escaped prisoners as soon as possible. It was something I’d been dreading, even though I knew that it was going to be necessary; if the Posse accidentally killed one of the escaped prisoners, there was going to be an almighty row over it. It would be made out like an attack from Judge Lynch, not self-defence or even a legitimate shooting, and Ingalls would suffer. It hadn’t kept others awake at night. They would sooner shoot a known child molester than risk letting the bastard at one of their kids. At bottom, so would I.

  “It looks intact, Sheriff,” Brent Roeder said, as we drove up towards the walls. The watchtowers surrounding the prison were definitely manned, much to my relief, while the walls remained intact. I’d been fearing that somehow they would have been breached. The last thing we needed was a mass jailbreak. “Where do you want us to park?”

  I had to laugh. Brent was one of the toughest sons of bitches I’d met. He was built like a lineman, with a brown buzz cut, and looked rather more fearsome than I did, even with the uniform. He’d been a soldier before he'd quit the Army – and no, I didn’t know why at the time – and was one of the foremost shots in the country. As you can imagine, he was up against some pretty stiff competition.

  “You and I will go into the gates,” I said, calmly. It was still possible that the prisoners had taken over the jail, but it was looking less and less likely by the minute. “The remainder of the Posse will wait here.”

  The gates of the prison had been designed to look intimidating as hell, although I’d seen more intimidating sights while on deployment. There was only one guard at the gate, a serious breach of security, but he called the Guard Captain and waved us through into the forecourt. I was already regretting leaving the Posse outside. Something was clearly very wrong here. I might even have miscalculated…

  “Sheriff,” a relieved voice said. I turned to see Captain Richard Hartman as he popped out of the main prison block and waved to me. “God, am I glad to see you.”

  “I’m glad to see you too,” I said, neutrally. Don’t get me wrong; Richard was a good man, but there had been a great deal of friction between us. I had focused on the possibilities of a prisoner escape, as was my duty, and he had regarded that as a vote of no confidence. I couldn’t blame him for that, but I didn’t have the time or the patience to deal with injured egos. “What’s going on here?”

  He led us into his office, a bare cubicle illuminated by a flickering light – the prison had its own generator, something else that might come in handy in the very near future – and poured himself a large scotch. I declined it when he offered me the bottle and I was relieved to see that Brent made the same decision. I didn’t know what was going on, but getting drunk wouldn’t help anything, not now. I needed all my wits about me.

  “We’re overcrowded, understaffed, and we can’t reach anyone,” Richard said, when he’d finished his glass. I picked up the bottle and put it out of reach. “I was starting to worry that we were all alone in the world when you arrived.”

  I shuddered. The layman – and yes, I included Richard in that statement – has a hugely exaggerated view of nuclear war. It would be quite possible for someone to convince themselves that the country no longer existed and that they were the last man alive, or the last town alive, or a military unit without a country. Why not? They had all been the subject of hundreds of post-nuclear war films and novels.

  But Richard had brought up something I had forgotten. The Stonewall wasn't just for the real scum of the Earth any longer, but for other prisoners as well. It had been intended to hold a thousand prisoners at most – and that requires a massive building – but local courts had been sending them even more offenders, most of whom didn’t deserve to share quarters with murderers and rapists. There were boys who were blamed for petty theft, white collar criminals who’d stolen from their companies, even innocent kids who’d been framed by local police departments…and, through
political pressure, had been given the hammer. No politician likes to be thought of as soft on crime and…well, the Stonewall has a terrifying reputation. I had known about it, vaguely, before the war, but now…

  Now Richard and his staff were sitting on a volcano. A prison is a pent-up hive of fury, hatred and worse, with prisoners who were beyond any reason. They had already been jailed for the rest of their lives, or sentenced to death when the endless process was finally concluded, and had little to lose. Passions rocketed through the prison, with groups of prisoners turning on each other in racial or religious fury, and the wardens were caught in the middle. They were called Correctional Officers, these days, but I always through of them as guards. I’d been a Marine, and that had sent me into some of the most hellish places on Earth, but a prison could be worse. The prisoners had nothing to lose.

  “I see,” I said, finally. The conclusion I’d come to earlier was bubbling up in my head. “How many people do you have here?”

  “Seventy guards, five nurses and ten other staff,” Richard said. I bit down a curse. They were undermanned, all right. The State preferred to pay overtime than hire more guards, with the net result that most of the guards were badly overworked and worn out. It was worse for the nurses. They often quit after a year or two and went into the private sector, where money was better and they didn’t have to worry about being knifed or raped by one of their patients. “Two of the guards took a jeep and drove off to find their families. I couldn’t stop them, but…”

  I nodded in understanding. Society was breaking down, remember?

  He looked up at me. “Sheriff, Ed, what are we going to do?”

  Now, I have a habit of solving problems if they are put in front of me, even if the solutions are not to everyone’s taste. I learned that in Boot Camp and then had it hammered into me during deployment. In the civilian sector, you can afford to wait until you get it perfect, but in the military you often have to do the best you can and hope it’s good enough. Indeed, perfect is always the enemy of good enough. I had a solution to the problem – and to my problem – if I dared to use it. The decision was easier than I had expected. It helped that there was little choice. The last thing we needed, as I had said, was a prison break.

  I ran my hand through my hair and looked up at the chart on Richard’s wall. It showed, in precise pencilled-detail, just how the prison was organised. It took me a moment to sort out the colour coding, but once I understood I saw how it all fitted together. Some of the very worst – the paedophiles and a handful of terrorists – had been segregated for their own protection. Prisoners like to think that they still have rank and status…and traitors, child molesters and terrorists were right at the bottom. They tended not to survive being in the general population…well, not for very long.

  “All right,” I said, finally. “Listen carefully.”

  I explained, briefly, what I knew about the war. “It seems likely,” I concluded, “that the federal and state governments no longer exist in any form we would care to recognise. We cannot depend on the police or the army or even parts of the National Guard any longer. I know they’ll do what they can, but they’re going to be completely overwhelmed. We’re on our own.”

  I watched his face slump. Most of the guards were young unmarried men…and the handful who were married had homes near the prison. A pair of them, I remembered now, had had family in Ingalls. I’d have to chew them both out for leaving their posts, but after that I would have to forgive them, probably. It didn’t look as if it had been disastrous. Richard, however, no longer had a place to call home. Norfolk had definitely been hit. If he hadn’t been divorced from his wife…

  “Now, we’re going to have to take action fast,” I continued. Time wasn't entirely on our side. “What have you done with the prisoners?”

  “They’re in lockdown,” Richard said. He looked more composed now that I’d presented him with a problem he could solve. “They’re meant to be exercising at this time, but I daren’t take more than a handful out of the cells without more guards. The ones on meds are going to be needing them soon, Sheriff, and we’re going to run out pretty quickly.”

  I scowled. Some of the prisoners would be on meds, of course. I had forgotten. Most of them would have AIDS, or something else equally nasty, while others would have all kinds of drugs intended to keep them calm and tranquil. I had never liked the concept of medicating a young boy who had been diagnosed with ADD, but it did seem to help some of the prisoners. Deprived of their medications, they would rapidly swing back towards their more normal behaviour, losing what little control they had. We could keep medicating them for a few weeks, depending on how many drugs there were stored in the prison – something else I’d have to check – but sooner or later we would run out…and then it would be Katy bar the door. There was nothing we could do for them.

  “Brent, go back outside and bring in the Posse,” I ordered, finally. “I want them to become familiar with the prison. Get a pair of the guards to give them a tour of everywhere, but listen to them and don’t let the prisoners get to you. Richard, I want you to give me a private tour, just now.”

  Brent didn’t question me. In hindsight, that was a little odd. “Of course,” Richard said. “What should I tell the guards?”

  “They know about the war,” I said, grimly. It hadn’t been high on my list of concerns, but it should have been. I hadn’t delegated this task to anyone, even to Mac. I didn’t want to take the coward’s way out. “Tell them that we will be happy to accept any of them in Ingalls if they want to stay.”

  Richard gave me a brief tour of the prison. I’d toured it before, back when I’d become Sheriff, but it hadn’t been so overcrowded then. The prison cells looked strong enough to hold lions, but some of the prisoners looked stronger, almost as if they were monstrous caricatures of human beings. It was always a surprise to know just how strong prisoners could become, trapped in a world where strength was everything, although I wasn't particularly scared. I had done very well in unarmed combat, under a Drill Sergeant who had been a fearsome bastard, three times as intimidating as the worst of the prisoners.

  Others looked more fearful. They did their best to hide it, but they were terrified of the other prisoners, or even of the guards. I didn’t blame them. Some of them looked young enough to be my sons, while others looked surprisingly innocent, almost baby-faced. I distrusted those prisoners on sight. They were too good to be true. Richard escorted me around, keeping me well away from the bars, pointing out some of the worst offenders.

  “That’s Lono,” he said, pointing to a man who looked large enough to pick up and carry an entire Abrams tank. “He got into a bar fight and killed pretty much everyone else in the bar and they had to taser him to stop him. Drugged up, of course. He’s been sentenced to life here.”

  His finger met a meek-looking man, almost a real-life Clark Kent. “David Apple,” Richard identified him. “He found a small girl in his garden one day and had his way with her. It must have started something, because he kidnapped three other girls over the next few weeks and tortured them to death slowly and painfully. He’s under sentence of death, but he’s currently launching his third appeal. His first night here was almost his last. A pair of convicts got to him and started to rape him when we broke it up. They came damn close to killing him.”

  I didn’t hear any regret in his voice. “And that’s the type of people we have here,” Richard concluded. “What are you going to do with them?”

  “What I have to do,” I said. My plans had congealed nicely into something workable. All I had to do was get started. “I assume that you have complete records here?”

  “Of course,” Richard said, confidently. “You do know that they’re meant to be sealed…” He broke off at my snort. Prisoner records might have been meant to be confidential, but it hardly mattered any longer. There was no longer any Law and Order, but us. “What do you want to know about them?”

  “I want to sort them out,” I said, a
s Brent approached. “Any problems?”

  “One of the prisoners tried to grab Stacy’s ass,” Brent said. I scowled. I shouldn’t have allowed Stacy anywhere near the prison, but I wasn't in the mood for an argument over sexual equality. “She broke his arm with her rifle butt.”

  “Good for her,” I said, relaxing slightly. The last time anyone had taken liberties with Stacy, during an unarmed combat competition, she’d thrown them clear across the mat. She really was as good as she claimed to be, which made a change from some of the other feminists I’d met in my career. “I have a job for you.”

  Chapter Six

  I think we need to change that old saying, “I don't need a building to fall on me.” Because two did and we still don't get it. I think we all stick our head in the sand as a deep human impulse.