The Living Will Envy The Dead

by Nuttall, Christopher

  -Bill Maher

  My plan was straightforward, but ruthless.

  “Richard,” I said, “I want you to sort the prisoners out into three categories. The ones who need medications to survive, the ones who are truly nasty and beyond redemption and everyone else. I trust your judgement in sorting them out, but make sure that all the real fucks go into the second category.”

  Richard nodded and headed off to his office. He’d made a brief announcement to his staff, explaining that they were all part of Ingalls now, and few had dissented. The handful who had dissented turned out to have families in other towns and cities and wanted to go back there. I agreed at once when they demanded the right to return after we’d dealt with the prisoners.

  I found myself studying the guards with interest. I had spent time guarding prisoners myself in Iraq and I had quickly learned to isolate the dangerous ones from the sheep who had been herded into battle at gunpoint. It wasn't that difficult. The sheep sat around, grateful beyond words that they hadn’t been shot out of hand, while the dangerous ones sought to cause trouble. The new Iraqi Government had had a very simple way of dealing with such bastards. They took them to special camps outside the cities and shot them, burying them far from their homes and families. It was a lesson I had taken to heart.

  And I was sure that I could trust the guards and their instincts more than I could trust what any bleeding heart social worker had written. The average prisoner is no master-brain, but many of them, including David Apple, are damn good at working the system. They seek to convince good-hearted people that they have reformed, that they’re no longer a threat to society, that they have ‘rights’ that we should honour…and far too many of them fall for it. I understand the impulse to do good, or to believe the best of people, but sometimes they take it too far. Where does the blame lie, I ask you, if the convicted murderer is released to murder again?

  And rights? A person is born with rights, but as far as I am concerned, they’re rights that can be forfeited. Who says that the ‘rights’ of a murderer are more important than those of his victims? What ‘right’ does a rape victim have to be raped? She’s the victim. Why should she be punished by watching her tormentor go free? It might be nice to see the world through rose-tinted lenses, but it was not a delusion that I was prepared to embrace. The vast majority of the prisoners deserved to spend the rest of their lives behind bars, if not a final appointment with the executioner.

  The guards, I suspected, privately agreed. They saw the prisoners all the time, watching them carefully, always knowing that one misstep could prove fatal. Their testimony should have meant more than the psychologists hired by the defence lawyers who – of course – testified that the defendant was mentally unbalanced, as opposed to outright evil. The guards were mainly male, as I had expected, but a handful of them were female, one of which had a nasty scar across her face. The turnover of female guards was high, or so I’d been told; they seemed to be challenged more than their male counterparts. The prison was not a place for the politically correct.

  “All right,” I said, as calmly as I could. “This is what we are going to do.”

  Richard’s list was a little on the optimistic side, as far as I was concerned, but I trusted his judgement. The first list, the men who needed drugs to survive, was the longest. It actually included several names that should also have been on the second list. The second list was slightly shorter, but between them they included nearly two thirds of the prison’s entire population. Desperate men, criminals all, who could not be released to add to the chaos. I didn’t dare take that risk…

  And so we poisoned them.

  It was simple enough. The prisoners often had different diets – the influence of the do-gooders again – and it was easy enough to ensure that the worst of the prisoners received the poisoned food. There were a handful of complaints about the quality of the food, but they were ignored and pretty soon the convicts were dying. The prison had stored enough concentrated poison to exterminate a small town reasonably painlessly – or so they claimed, but I don’t know for sure – and we watched them die. A handful of guards and a third of the Posse refused to watch, but the others, mainly veterans themselves, watched dispassionately. The remainder of the prisoners, the ones we had spared, stared in horror. They were used to being treated with kid gloves, by guards who feared being sued; they had never expected a massacre. The shock would do them good.

  “I often dreamed about doing that,” Richard said, softly. I nodded in agreement. If I’d been in his place, I would have had the same fantasy. “What are you going to do with the others?”

  Did I do the right thing? The hell of the matter is that I don’t know. Yes, I couldn’t take the risk of allowing them to run rampant across the countryside, not on top of all the other chaos. Yes, they all deserved death and worse. Yes, we couldn’t have kept them supplied with the medications after the supplies in the jail ran out. We couldn’t have produced them, as far as I knew, for years. The ones who needed the drugs would have died when they ran out. The ones who didn’t need the drugs would not have reformed. In a world where law and order was no longer a going concern, they would have become a nightmare…

  And they would never hurt anyone else.

  “Get the remainder of the prisoners into the auditorium,” I said, finally. We’d given the ones we – I – had decided to spare a good meal, certainly better than soup that looked suspiciously like vomit, but most of them had been reluctant to eat. It had to be pointed out to most of them that killing them would be as simple as poking a gun through the bars and firing a single shot. I got the impression that most of the guards were privately amused. They had a chance to really scare most of the prisoners straight. “I have to talk to them.”

  The auditorium was just another lecture hall, where lucky prisoners would get a chance to listen to whatever band dared to perform in the jail (and most of whose members deserved to be in jail), although it was rather less comfortable than some I’d attended while in Iraq. The guards watched, wearing their body armour and carrying their weapons, as the prisoners were escorted into the hall and secured to the benches. It was rather less civilised than a college lecture hall, but I had the feeling that it might actually be safer, maybe even less rowdy. Two veterans who’d carried machine guns in Iraq had set a pair up in position to spray the prisoners with bullets if they got out of hand, while other members of the Posse held their own weapons, ready to intervene if matters got out of hand. I didn’t intend them to get out of hand, at all, but something might well go wrong…

  I stood up on the dais and stared down at them. The prisoners stared back with a conflicting mixture of emotions, ranging from cold hatred to respect and even joy. They had feared the worst of the prisoners as much as I had, perhaps more, and were glad to see them dead. They also feared me, which wasn't actually a bad thing. I wanted them to fear me. It would make them much more amiable to reason.

  Yes, I’m a bastard sometimes. Bear in mind that most of them thoroughly deserved their prison sentences.

  “Pay attention,” I snapped, finally. My voice echoed through the room, loudly enough to be heard by all of the prisoners. “The country has been plunged into war.”

  On cue, the lights flickered slightly. If you’re thinking that that is a remarkably suspicious coincidence, you’re entirely correct; it was. I had given Richard instructions to flicker the lights from time to time, just to add to the atmosphere. I needed them malleable and scared. It would make this much easier.

  I didn’t hold anything back, either, apart from one detail. “We are under nuclear attack,” I continued. “Hundreds of cities have been destroyed and millions of megatons have been detonated on our soil” – a slight exaggeration, but one I felt was justified under the circumstances – “and the country is in ruins. We no longer have the time or inclination to play nice with scum like you…and we showed you just how we were prepared to treat even worse scum than you.”

  “You can’t d
o this,” a voice shouted from the rear of the auditorium. It was one of the white collar criminals, a criminal lawyer – which was a perfectly accurate job description – who bilked his clients out of millions of dollars. “We have rights!”

  “I knew someone would say something like that,” I said, cheerfully. I nodded in the direction of Stacy, who was holding her prized sniper rifle. “These are the kind of rights you have.”

  The shot echoed out in the dead silence. It was a perfect shot. The lawyer fell back into the crowd, a small hole neatly drilled through his head. Stacy had done it so well that no one else was even remotely injured, thankfully. I didn’t want to waste labour if it wasn’t necessary.

  “I trust that that makes my point?” I asked, calmly. There was a brittle silence in the room. “You have no rights any longer. The society that guaranteed you those rights is gone. It has been replaced by a desperate struggle for survival, one in which you will either play a role in helping us survive, or you will die.”

  I looked around the room, wondering who would choose to help…and who would try to break away as soon as possible. The real hard cases were dead and quite a few of the remainder were actually innocent, or punished well beyond what they deserved, or might even have made something of their lives if they had been allowed a chance to grow up in a better society. For every kid who had a mother, a father and an Uncle Billy, there was probably five or ten who didn’t have anything of the sort. Perhaps working in Ingalls for a few years would turn their lives around…or perhaps they would step out of line. They were, after all else, expendable.

  “This is the deal,” I said. “You will work for us for a period of five years, after which you will be free and independent citizens of the new America, whatever form it takes. You will be treated with a certain kind of respect and the more useful you make yourself, the more respect you will earn. You may even graduate to citizenship early…

  “Or you can die.

  “I cannot allow you to run over the countryside, or try to return to your homes, such as they were,” I continued. “If you refuse to work for us, I will have no choice, but to dispose of you. I am not going to run a chain gang” – and there I was lying, effectively speaking – “and I am not going to flog you in to work. If you refuse this offer, you will be given a final meal and then executed.”

  People, later, focused on that statement as a deadly mistake, as it ensured that almost all of the prisoners would join us, and some of them would plan to desert at the first available opportunity. I wasn't unaware of the possibility, but I didn’t want to have to kill anyone else, not unless I had a good cause. You might laugh at that – after all, I had just ordered the poisoning of one thousand, seven hundred convicts – but they’d deserved it. The remainder didn’t, at least in my view. And, I reasoned, if these losers and drug addicts had a taste of honest work, they might reform without any further pressure on my part. Hope springs eternal, right?

  A man put his hand up, as if he were in school. “Sir…ah, what happens if we work for you for five years and then you refuse to give us…ah, citizenship?”

  “Yeah,” someone shouted, from the rear. “We’re already citizens!”

  “You were citizens of a state that no longer exists,” I said, bluntly. It was true, in a sense, but I was determined that we would save as much as possible. I loved America, or at least the ideal of America, and it was my country. “If you work for us, we will accept you as citizens, with all the rights and duties that that implies. If you chose to leave us, at the end of that period, we will allow you to leave. If you refuse to work now…well, we can’t feed you. Work, or starve.”

  We did a brief count after a handful of other questions. Some of the drug addicts were wondering if they could get drugs instead of any other reward, but I said no. There might be some highly illicit marijuana and opium being grown in a handful of places, but we were going to need it as a painkiller, not as a drug. There was plenty of tobacco around – Virginia grew plenty of that, despite the best efforts of the anti-smoking zealots – but I had a feeling that most of that was going to be replaced by food crops. If we could feed ourselves through the first two years, we should be fine, if only because of the coming die-off. I’d seen the projections and they were horrific.

  And why, you might ask, did I want to save convicts? Why not just leave them all to die? I had a use in mind for them that I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, ask others to handle. I wasn't going to spend them lightly, but they could be used for things that others wouldn’t touch, like recovering material from a Hot Zone. They were expendable…

  Not entirely to my surprise, all of the convicts finally agreed to work for us. I ordered Richard to transfer copies of the files from the prisons computers to a USB drive, which I could use to study them later. If he had made a mistake, I wanted to know about it before it was too late to remove any potential troublemakers. Once we had most of the prisoners ready, we shackled them and led them outside for the first time in far too long, allowing them to see the skyline in the distance. We could still see the effects of the war. The entire skyline looked as if the land beyond the horizon was burning away into nothingness. The ground seemed to shiver and shake beneath us. I don’t even want to hazard a guess as to what that was; more nukes, or something worse?

  Great, I thought, with a flicker of self-mockery. We’ll have zombies crawling out of the ground next.

  “Start digging here,” I ordered, once shovels and other tools had been distributed. There was little protest as the prisoners dug a massive pit, and another, and another, enough to bury all of the dead prisoners. I had seriously considered burning them, but we didn’t have the time or fuel to waste. Leaving them above ground would have been a disastrous mistake. Dead bodies spread disease faster than a thousand unprotected whores. The cities were going to be charnel houses in a few days. The population that had survived being blinded, burned, scattered and irradiated would suffer the effects of thousands upon thousands of dead bodies. “The rest of you, follow me.”

  The poison we’d used had the effect of loosening the muscles, fortunately, but watching the prisoners carrying their former compatriots out was still an unpleasant sight. A handful of prisoners took the opportunity to kick their dead tormentors, which we ignored, but most of them couldn’t bear to look at the dead. It wasn't going to be the last time when they would have to bury the dead. There was no chaplain on duty, so Richard said a few words over the bodies before we began to fill in the graves. It seemed to help, slightly.

  Once I was sure that everything was proceeding as planned, I left Richard and Brent in charge and spent an hour going through the prison’s supplies. I had known that they stockpiled quite a lot of supplies, but even I was astonished by the sheer level of paranoia that had gone into the planning. They had enough food to feed the prisoners for a few weeks, if they rationed it carefully, and enough weapons to hold off a small army or lynch mob. The prison wouldn’t have been an easy target to take, even for my former Company, although if the prisoners had broken out and taken control, we would have had real problems. As it was, it was mine, all mine!

  And I had plans for its future use.

  “Brent, you’re in charge here,” I said, once we had the prison cleared of all of the dead bodies. “Richard, I’m going to send up an additional section of men from the Posse, so once they arrive, your guards can rotate off for a short period, before we start breaking up the population. Keep the prisoners in their cells, but use your own judgement otherwise.”

  “Yes, sir,” Brent said. “We’ll keep an eye on things here.”

  I nodded. I hated to cut and run, but I was going to be needed back at Ingalls. By my most optimistic calculations it might be days before refugees arrived, but I doubted that it would be anything like as rosy. I had to know what Mac was doing…

  As it happened, I wasn't even remotely prepared for what was to come.

  Chapter Seven

  ...More and more people joined the painful exod
us. Sad, weary women, their children stumbling and streaked with tears, their men bitter and angry, the rich rubbing shoulders with beggars and outcasts. Dogs snarled and whined, the horses' bits were covered with foam... and here and there were wounded soldiers, as helpless as the rest.

  -Jeff Wayne's The War of the Worlds

  “You should have taken me with you,” Mac said, when I reached the first blockade and filled him in on what had happened at the prison. “You shouldn’t have had to take that on your own shoulders.”

  I shrugged, not quite trusting myself to speak. I’d wondered, even though I had known that it was unlikely, if enough of the government had survived to rebuild society quickly. If that had been the case, and alas it wasn't, the people who massacred the prisoners would have been charged with mass murder, regardless of how justified their actions had been at the time. Where there is a shadow of doubt, there’s a lawyer struggling to turn it into a weapon against the defendant…and I didn’t want to put Mac through that, or anyone else. I had seen it happen before in Iraq. The people on the ground were endlessly second-guessed by politicians, the media, and retired military officers. It drove some of them to distraction.

  If there was to be blame for the entire prison episode, I had decided, let it rest entirely on me.