The Living Will Envy The Dead

by Nuttall, Christopher

  “Cover me,” I ordered, before Mac could protest. “I’m going down to meet him.”

  I chambered a round in my Desert Eagle before I clambered over the barricade and down onto the other side of the road. I’d inspected the defences before, of course, but looking at them with a force of possible hostiles just down the road was remarkably reassuring. It was in our interests to stall, I decided, and so I walked down slowly towards the man, uncomfortably aware of the snipers tracking our every move.

  Up close, it was hard to look at him without feeling some kind of pity. His eyes were cold and utterly hopeless, as if he had lost everything that made life worth living, while I could see signs of a recent beating on his face. His suit was torn and tattered, while the way he squinted at me suggested that he had once worn spectacles and had lost them somewhere along the way. I’d seen that look before too, on the first refugees, and I felt an odd stab at my heart. How could I have turned them away?

  I had – have – no choice, I reminded myself.

  It didn’t seem enough, somehow, compared to the desperate look in his eyes.

  “That's far enough,” I said, forcing an unaccustomed harshness into my voice. He looked like a dog that had just been kicked – again. Somehow, I was sure I knew just what was going on, and what had been done to him. “Who are you and what do you want?”

  His voice was bitter, almost broken. “I’ve been sent with a message,” he said, breathing harshly. Someone had broken his nose and – surprise, surprise – no one had attempted to give him proper medical care. Someone, I decided, was going to pay for that. “They want food and drink, women and a place to stay. If you agree to allow them to take what they want, they won’t hurt you. If you fight, they’ll reduce the entire town to rubble and drag your women into slavery, like…”

  He almost broke at that point. “Like my wife,” he said, forcing the words out. “They have my wife!”

  I felt no pleasure at being proved right. Life could be a right bitch, sometimes. I suspected I knew the rest of the story, but I had to ask anyway. If I played it properly, I would have a chance to learn more about our new enemies than they expected. They’d done something smart, sending a slave up to talk to us, but slaves…well, do you know what the Romans used to call their slaves? The tool that thinks. Slaves, despite the best efforts of Confederate apologists, don’t like being slaves. Give them a chance at victory, or push them too far, and you have a revolt on your hands. It can be a very dangerous risk for a society to take.

  “I see,” I said, as sympathetically as I could. “Who are they?”

  The remainder of the story trickled out slowly. He was a patent attorney back before the war and he'd been out in the countryside on a holiday with his wife and two children. They’d been thrown out of whatever town they had been staying in – probably rated as four additional mouths to feed – and had been reduced to wandering the country when they had been captured by the gang. They, it turned out, had been a street gang back before the war, but they’d been smart enough to escape and run for their lives in the chaos after the bombs had fallen…

  And now they wanted Ingalls.

  Over my dead body, I decided, and considered. I could have signalled Mac to open fire, but that would have exposed the man to our fire as well as that of his tormentors. I would also be caught in the crossfire – not a particularly comfortable place to be – and would have to crawl for my life. I thought about just saying no and suggesting that they left, but that would have left them free to pillage someplace else. It was heartening to know that we weren't the only organised community left – I’d been sure of it, but it was nice to know – but I didn’t want to send a pack of angry gang-bangers on to the next town. They might be in a worse state.

  The matter was decided for me by one of the gang members. He must have gotten suspicious of how much we were chattering and came striding up, carrying am AK-47 under his arm. It looked, to my inexpert eye, like a cheap knock-off, carried mainly for prestige rather than firepower. I’d seen that sort of thinking before, in Afghanistan. Men with Stinger missiles, left over from their war against the Soviet Union, had refused to use them against Coalition forces, because that would have instantly demoted them from ‘big man’ to ‘common or garden fighter,’ if that.

  He looked hungry, too, and there was a nasty glint in his eye. He seemed to be a mixed-race child, showing signs of both Asian and African somewhere in his bloodline, but that might have been a trick of the light. He wore an ill-fitting policeman’s shirt – we didn’t find out until later where that had come from – and looked as if he had been through hell. I suppose the effect was meant to be intimidating. I’d seen more frightening people in my life. Uncle Billy had been nice and very polite to my mother, but he’d been one of the most dangerous people I’d ever met. The gang-banger only scared people who didn’t know how to fight back.

  “You,” he said, addressing the lawyer, “get back in the bus. Now.”

  I watched the lawyer scuttle off, and then turned my attention back to the gang-banger. He posed for a moment, aware that I was watching, and I considered trying to look afraid, but I decided that it wasn't worth the effort. Besides, he couldn’t see them, but I could see the two red dots on his forehead, marking out the sniper targets. I decided not to look at them any longer. They left me wanting to giggle. If he had known how close he was to death…

  “Right,” he said. His voice was thick, the voice of a man used to getting what he wanted from people, or else. “You know what we want, so give it to us, or else.”

  “No,” I said. I suppose I should have said something dramatic, or defiant, but I couldn’t be bothered. There are a thousand versions of this story and most of them have me saying ‘nuts,’ or ‘fuck off,’ but their accuracy is disputable. Besides, ‘nuts’ was taken when it comes to American myths. “I want your surrender.”

  He looked at me as if I were insane. “You’re demanding my surrender?” He demanded, astonished. “Do you know who we are?”

  “No,” I said, tightly. “I see you as nothing, but thugs. You can put down your guns, release your prisoners, and work off your debt to society, helping us all to survive.” I smiled, coldly. “Or you can fight and die.”

  He lifted his AK-47 and started to aim it at me. He wasn't thinking. The AK-47 is a magnificent weapon in its way, but using it for close quarters is just plain dumb, most of the time. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. I made a gesture with my hand and a pair of shots cracked out, perfectly synchronised. Patty and Stacy blew his head off with ease. His body collapsed to the ground, although not before I’d snatched the AK-47 from his dying hands and slung it over my shoulder. We were, after all, desperately short of weapons.

  The gang-bangers seemed to hesitate, just for a second. I had wondered if they would turn around and try to escape – which would have made intercepting them difficult, as we had only a very limited supply of mortar rounds and AT weapons – but instead they unassed from their vehicles and took cover, firing towards me. I’d hit the ground the moment they started to unass and crawled rapidly back towards the barricades, while the snipers fired careful shots into their mass. They’d be slowed down long enough for us to get additional forces in place and then to deal with them permanently. After what they’d done, I wasn't going to let them off with a warning, no sir!

  “You, sir, are fucking insane,” Mac said, when I scrambled back over the barricade. The gang was still getting organised below us, so I took a moment to check the AK-47. As I had suspected, it was probably from a knock-off production line, maybe from Mexico or Venezuela. The latter had been trying to run weapons into the US for years now, seemingly convinced that we were permanently on the verge of race war and if they supplied the Hispanics with weapons, they would rise up against the evil Anglos. It was working about as well as you might expect when the Final War began and they got nuked in passing. “You should have let me go.”

  “I get to have all the fun,” I said, grinning. I
felt almost alive again. “It’s in my contract.”

  I looked over towards the defenders. “They’ve got hostages in those vehicles, so don’t shoot them unless there’s no choice,” I ordered, wincing. I expected the gangs to start using them as human shields any time now. That would present us with a serious problem, although I was sure that Stacy and Patty could avoid shooting any innocent victims. They scared even me. “Mac, get the second reserves up into position. I think we’re going to need them.”

  The gang probably thought that they were trapped. They might have had a point. If they gave me enough time, I would assault their position myself, with sniper cover and even mortar fire. It would have been a waste of the latter…but I couldn’t even think that. If I lost one of my veterans, the cost would be proportionally worse. I couldn’t afford to lose any of them.

  “We’re going to have to press the kids harder,” I said, grimly. A charge at them would be costly, even with the body armour, unless they surrendered at once. God alone knew what other weapons they were packing. What if they’d looted a National Guard armoury, or a police station, or even a gun store? “We can’t risk this happening again.”

  “They’re kids,” Mac said. “They need more time to get ready.”

  “We weren’t much older,” I protested, quietly. “You and I joined up at eighteen.”

  “And we volunteered,” Mac reminded me. “They’re still thinking about girls, and maybe getting away from the country for a while, not about risking their lives in defence…”

  He broke off as a whistle blew.

  “They’re coming,” Brent shouted.

  “Good,” I said, raising my voice. “Stand by to repel attack!”

  Chapter Twelve

  The invention of gunpowder and the constant improvement of firearms are enough in themselves to show that the advance of civilization has done nothing practical to alter or deflect the impulse to destroy the enemy, which is central to the very idea of war.

  -Carl von Clausewitz

  The gang-bangers yelled as they started to advance towards us, making use of what cover they could find. I wondered if it was meant to be intimidating, but I tended to find it more amusing than anything else. They showed a rudimentary grasp of military tactics, but only rudimentary. If I had found myself charged with taking Ingalls, particularly after I’d set up the defences, I would have probed around for a weak spot, not charged the strongest defence line I could find. Their backstops, a handful of men with better weapons, fired on us from their positions, trying to force us to keep our heads down and prevent us from firing back.

  “I brought up the reinforcements,” Jackson King said. He looked grim, but determined to do his duty. He hadn’t exactly had an easy time in the last couple of days. Ingalls wasn't a racist town, not really, but not everyone resident in the town had been happy at the thought of a black Deputy. Some of them had even been rude enough to say that they stayed in the country to keep away from black men. “Where do you want them?”

  “Keep them in reserve,” I ordered, calmly. For once, I was back in my element, flashing back to Iraq. “Let’s see how this develops.”

  I studied the advancing gang-bangers as carefully as I could. I had wondered at their decision to advance, but now I saw them clearly, I suspected that I understood why. They looked hungry and tired, as if they were pushing themselves onwards by sheer force of will, rather than determination. I’d seen their hostage and their leader – at least, I assumed that he’d been the leader – and both of them had been hungry. What had happened to them between the bombs going off and their arrival here?

  “We need some prisoners,” I muttered to Mac, who nodded. Making them talk wouldn’t be difficult. Judging by their condition, they would probably have talked in exchange for a good feed. “Patty, Stacy, on my command, take down their snipers.”

  “Yes, sir,” Patty called, from her hide. She was almost completely impossible to spot from the outside. Even though they knew the snipers were there, the gang obviously hadn’t bothered to try to suppress them. “Ready and waiting, sir!”

  “Good,” I said. “Fire!”

  The two girls fired as one. The shots that had been coming towards us suddenly slacked off sharply as the snipers found their targets. I was sure that they had hit them as well – the girls were excellent shots – but as long as they weren't firing, I didn’t care. It might even work out in our favour if one of them had survived. They would probably be senior members if they were allowed to carry heavy weapons like those.

  (And yes, they were heavy by gang standards. Very few of the stereotypes about gang-bangers and their arsenals of weapons are actually true. I’d be surprised if they were anything like as well armed as we were, although it was possible that they could have looted additional weapons from somewhere along their travels.)

  I smiled. “Mac, blow the mines!”

  The explosion shook the barricades. Mac had wanted to set up Claymores, but as we had only a limited supply of them, I had convinced him to use mining explosives instead. We’d been going through abandoned houses and property – their owners had been well away from Ingalls when the balloon went up and wouldn’t be coming back – and some mining firm had simply abandoned the explosives. It would have been a major scandal before the War, but now…now, I was just glad to have them. The explosion sent the gang-bangers back in shock, those that survived. Mac’s Ranger background had served him well and he’d organised all kinds of nasty tricks for intruders.

  “Not bad,” I said. Mac gave me a wry grin. “Shooters, mark your positions and open fire.”

  The gang members were stumbling back in shock when the guards opened fire, conserving their ammunition, as I had ordered. We couldn’t afford to run ourselves dry of ammunition, not when we might face other such battles in the future. I was ruefully aware that this particular gang might not be the only one out there – in fact, I was certain that they weren't the only one out there. They might not be that dangerous – although I didn’t even have an accurate count of how many there were of them – but others might well be worse. My real nightmare was running into a rogue National Guard unit. It might happen…

  “They’re on the run,” Mac said, calmly. The gang-bangers had started to run the second we opened fire, but only a handful made it to the relative safety of the vehicles. I half-hoped that they would try to surrender, but instead they fell back slightly, firing a handful of shots towards us to discourage pursuit. I wasn't inclined to give chase, not yet. I had other concerns. So far, we had survived without any casualties and I wanted to keep it that way. “Want to bet they try to run?”

  I shrugged. The reserves had brought up the mortar. The 81mm weapon would drop a shell on them if they tried to run, but somehow I suspected that they would make another try, somehow. If they were as hungry as I thought, they would have little choice, unless they decided to resort to cannibalism. It would probably wipe them out, in the end – human flesh is just riddled with diseases – but by the time it killed them, they would probably have eaten their way through their hostages. I looked down at the school bus and winced. I hoped that they hadn’t taken a bunch of children hostage. That would really be all that I needed.

  “Check weapons and ammunition,” I ordered, during the lull. I wanted to make sure that we had enough ammunition on hand. The National Guard, at least, had fired its weapons regularly, but I couldn’t have Isaac Chang and his men on the walls. I needed them too much as well. Luckily, most of the veterans knew what they were doing with them.

  “We could assault them,” Mac offered, watching the gang-bangers like a hawk. He liked them even less than I did, which I wouldn’t have believed possible. “Ten gets you twenty they’d surrender the minute they saw us charging.”

  I considered it – again. I had expected their second attack by now, but perhaps they were just getting organised. We could assault their position, and I was sure that we would win, but we would be devastatingly vulnerable while we clambered ov
er the barricades as a group. Mac, or a bunch of his cronies, could probably…

  I smiled. I’d had an idea. “Mac, take Jackson and his unit,” I ordered, quickly. “Get them out of CP3 and around to take them from the rear. Take two of the machine guns and one of the AT weapons with you, just in case, but be in position to trap them against the barricades.”

  “Yes, sir,” Mac said, saluting with surprising enthusiasm. I’d half-expected a sardonic remark about how I was sending him off to commit suicide. Soldiers can be morbid sometimes, particularly ones who think they’ve pushed their luck too far. I think he was a little bored, as was I. There was too much to do in Ingalls, but most of it was boring. “Jackson, come on.”

  I saw Jackson’s wince – he hadn’t really been in a real fight, unless one counted brief moments of violence – but he followed gamely, along with his section. They had twenty-one men, seven of them veterans, and all of them slightly more expendable than some of the others on the walls. I hated to risk any of them, but Mac wouldn’t let them endanger themselves and Jackson was smart enough to defer to his judgement. I wished it didn’t feel so much like risking my people on the character of an untested junior officer – something that happened too often in the regular Army – but there was little choice.