The Living Will Envy The Dead

by Nuttall, Christopher

  And it was hard to banish the image of the naked and desperate girl from my eyes.

  “The rules have changed,” I snarled. I drew my pistol and held it to one of their heads. “I can shoot each and every one of you and no one will fucking stop me, got that? I can do as I fucking please with all of you, understand?” There was a pause. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” one of the black men said. He looked beaten, at least, but I knew better than to trust any of them. Gang-bangers can’t be trusted outside their gangs. “I…”

  “That’s ‘sir’ to you,” I said, sharply. He cringed. “Now, listen good. This is the only choice you get. You will work for us for five years, doing exactly what we tell you to do, and you’ll get a pardon at the end of it. Fuck with us during that time and you’ll be doing one final dance at the end of a rope. If you refuse that, we’ll strip you naked and shove you out in the wildness to die, understand?”

  I stared down at them. “How many people want to work for us?”

  In the end, they all agreed. Somehow, I wasn't surprised.

  “All right,” I said, nodding at Jackson. “There are two facts you need to know about this man. One is that he was an interrogator at Guantanamo Bay. The second is that it was his sister you were having your fun with.” They paled, blanching. Both statements, as it happened, were outright lies. The closest that Jackson had been to Cuba had been Florida, while his sister lived somewhere near Chicago. “You will go with him and answer his questions. Lie to us once and you will be beaten half to death. Lie to us twice and you will be killed.”

  I watched as Jackson and the Posse dragged them away. Jackson might not have been a CIA interrogator, but he did have experience interrogating suspects. He’d keep them separate, ask them the same questions and compare answers. If they didn’t match, the discrepancy would be probed until the truth was revealed. I doubted, given their condition, that there would be many discrepancies. They certainly hadn’t had time to agree on a lie beforehand.

  “We lost four people, with five more injured,” Mac said, as I walked away from the scene. The remains of the truck had scattered parts of the barricade, but fortunately it hadn’t been too large a breech to fill. “Kit says that he can probably save the injured men, but that if there are more injuries…”

  I nodded. “We’d run out of supplies,” I said, grimly. It was something else we would have to start making for ourselves or scavenging from the ruins. Jackson’s interrogation session might tell us more about what was happening outside our walls. “I’m heading over there now.”

  Mac nodded. “Of course,” he said. “AAR this evening?”

  “Yep,” I said. I had hated paperwork when I’d been a Marine, but After Action Reports were very important. It would allow us to examine what had happened, what had gone wrong, what had gone right…and why. “Keep them working, Mac. Don’t give them time to brood.”

  “Teach your grandma to suck eggs,” Mac said, rudely.

  I found Doctor Kit Nelson in the temporary ward he'd established next to the decontamination centre. Kit was middle-aged, older than me by about five years, but looked younger. He was the most flamboyant homosexual I had ever encountered, starting a career in the military as a medical corpsman, followed by a stint in several trouble spots across the globe, and finally as an EMT before he had retired to Ingalls. He had been a very good medical corpsman and his disgrace and expulsion had been…well, a disgrace. He had neither been asked, nor had he told, but he had been forced out. There were times when I could happily strangle uniformed politicians.

  And his sexuality didn’t make him a bad doctor.

  “This is a preliminary diagnosis,” he said, once we had discussed the injured from the battle. They would recover fairly quickly, thank God. We didn’t have the facilities for serious injuries that I had enjoyed in Iraq. “I have not had time for an intrusive examination, if I can convince her to allow me to make one, but I believe that she will make a full recovery, physically.”

  He paused. “It was hard enough to give her a basic examination,” he added. “A raped woman, regardless of how much or how little she fought, feels violated on a very primal level. I can tell you, for example, that she is going to have nasty scars for the remainder of her life, but I don’t know just how badly she is hurt internally. I think that she will make a physical recovery, but I don’t know if she will be able to have children, or even if she will be able to have sex again. The damage might be quite severe.”

  I winced. “I see,” I said, angrily. I – I and the rest of the rough men standing guard – had been meant to protect people like Roshanda. I felt almost as if I had failed her, even though I had barely known her for more than a few hours. It wasn't based on logic and reason. “And mentally?”

  “That’s more debatable,” Kit said. He scowled in disgust. “The issue behind rape is that it is primarily a loss of control; control over one of the most important functions of a woman’s body, that of having sex. Roshanda did not choose to open her legs for the rapists and that loss of control is tearing away at her, assuming that she’s a typical victim. The vast majority of rape victims go through long periods of depression and paranoia, although a handful tend to go the other way and try to have as many men as possible. You’ll note that it wasn't a bad date that went wrong, or even a one-night stand, both incidents where she had some control, but a violent assault that deprived her of all control. She knows that she lost that control over her own body.

  “Did I tell you that I spent time in Afghanistan?” He asked. I nodded. “I spent some weeks helping in a woman’s support clinic there for refugee women. Most of them suffered from some kind of mental disorder because they had never had any kind of control over their bodies at all. They were kept in seclusion, kept firmly under control, sold to their husbands and forced to copulate with them whenever he wanted to have sex. They resented their treatment at a very primal level, but were unable to break free. They even discovered that if they were raped – if their father’s control or their husband’s control was stolen by another man – they were held responsible for it and killed. They were blamed for something they knew wasn’t their fault.

  “And that, Ed, is why there are so many flame wars over abortion. It’s all about control. Control over women and their bodies.”

  He grimaced and continued. “Our society, thank God, is just a little more civilised,” he said. “We’re not going to blame her for getting raped. She came out fighting and is still fighting, so I believe that she will make a full recovery. The other girl, however…

  “I have tried several things to snap her out of her own mind, but nothing seems to work,” he said. “I think that she was shocked so badly by the war and the sudden changes in her life that she just zoned out completely. It’s not uncommon to see that in disaster relief situations, where a person’s mind cannot cope, but this is an extreme case. Roshanda says that the gang-bangers used to force-feed her. We might have to do the same. Practically, I don’t know what else we can do with her.”

  “Yes,” I said. I pushed that issue out of my mind and cast my thoughts back to the battle. “There’s nothing more costly than a battle lost, Doctor, apart from a battle won. This won’t be the last battle in the next few months.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty.

  -John F. Kennedy

  The next few weeks passed in a blur.

  We held the funerals for the four dead men the day after the battle, when we all gathered together for a brief service and a heartfelt sigh of relief. The four men had left a hole in our ranks – three of them had been veterans who shouldn’t have been out on the barricades at all – but we couldn’t despair. We had no choice, but to continue the struggle for survival. I sat next to Rose as the Reverend Thomas McNab eulogised the dead and found myse
lf wishing, again, that it had been me who had died in their place. They had had so much more to life for than I had.

  Jackson’s interrogations hadn’t turned up much more than we’d already learned from Roshanda, although the gang-bangers had been too scared to lie. They’d come out of Charleston, not entirely to my surprise, although I had never thought of it as a big gang town. It would have been a target for Russian attack, however, and had probably absorbed at least a couple of nukes. I wasn't too surprised to hear that law and order had broken down so quickly, although the gang-bangers had warned that someone had been busy organising the gangs into a united force. I wasn't sure if I believed them or not. The smarter gangs would have left the cities at once before they became untenable…and this bunch hadn’t been the brightest cookies in the bunch.

  “Its much more likely that they just decided to keep going because they were afraid of radioactive poisoning,” Mac said, afterwards, although a brief examination had revealed nothing beyond minor traces of fallout on their clothes. It wouldn’t be anything pleasant, but they’d probably survive for years without developing cancer. The ones who’d gotten ill, I guessed, had merely eaten bad meat. Human flesh, as I believe I noted earlier, is not a healthy source of food. “Do you still want to keep them?”

  “It’s that or hang them,” I said. I wasn't going to let them loose again, even stark naked as I had threatened, and I wasn’t going to waste my ammunition shooting them all. The girls, it turned out, had been the mistresses of two of the senior gang-bangers and had known everything their men had done. I wasn’t feeling sympathetic towards them, although I had a nasty feeling that perhaps I should be considering using them as mothers rather than brute labour. I’d forced that feeling down – I wasn't going to do that, not under any circumstances – but it kept lingering at the back of my mind. “What else can we do with them?”

  The day afterwards, the prisoners arrived from Stonewall. Richard and I had used the time well to go through the prisoner records and pick out a handful with skills that could be useful elsewhere. A pair of doctors and a male nurse – all in jail for theft and abuse of medical supplies – had been transported into Ingalls to work under Kit. I’d made sure that they had been warned of the consequences of doing anything stupid, but I had arranged for them to be kept carefully under observation. Their skills made them valuable…and far from expendable. The remaining prisoners, on the other hand…

  I watched as they clinked their way down towards the outer barricades. I had thought about driving them from Stonewall to Ingalls, but that would have cost us gasoline we could hardly afford to waste. We had drained almost every car tank into the main supplies, but we didn’t have enough for everything we might need vehicles to do. In the long term – the very long term – we could probably make more, but that was probably a project for next year at the very least. Rebecca, on the other hand, had come up with a scheme for producing methane from human wastes and now most of our food was cooked on methane. I hadn’t even considered that possibility, but she’d assured me that it was used in Africa as an aid project, improving the continent one step at a time. It made me wonder how Africa was faring, cut off from all international aid, but I didn’t want to know. There were some places in Africa that were probably faring better than we were.

  “All present and correct, sir,” Richard said, as the final prisoner arrived. He’d had their legs chained together, just to make escape impossible, although they had seen enough of the countryside to know that escape would lead to certain death even if they weren't shot – quite literally – trying to escape. “Orders, sir?”

  I stepped forward and started to issue orders. The prisoners might be only good for brute labour, at the moment, but half of them could work now on improving our defences. They started to dig ditches and build up the ramparts after I had finished issuing orders to that particular group, while a second group worked to clear away the wreckage from the gang-banger attack. We’d skimmed through the vehicles quickly, just after the end of the battle, but I was surprised by some of the shit they found. I’d been watching carefully for weapons, but they found cigarettes – which I sent back to be shared out among the addicts, those who weren't trying to kick the habits – and a small supply of drugs. I confiscated the latter, but Kit convinced me to keep it around as a anaesthetic if more normal drugs ran out.

  The third group of prisoners was ordered to start moving out garbage to the landfill two kilometres away. The landfill had been one of Washington’s ideas in hopes of cleaning up the landscape a bit, or more likely pleasing some of their contributors – ok, I’m a cynical bastard, but I’d be more depressed if I thought they really had no reason for doing what they did – but it hadn’t been so useful after the Final War. Folks used to drive their cars and vans out to dump their shit – some of which might actually be useful now – but now, with so little gasoline left, there was zero enthusiasm for the task. The best solution I’d come up with was to have the prisoners take out the garbage, after first sorting through it to ensure that nothing useful was being thrown out.

  I left matters in Richard’s capable hands and walked back through Ingalls towards the High School, which had now been fortified in a manner that would have given a Marine Company pause…although honesty compels me to admit that that pause would have been because they were sniggering their heads off. We’d fortified the School as well as we could, but there was a shortage of real protection for the kids, even now. It was something that was going to be a major problem in the future if the barricades actually fell and we were forced to fight house-to-house. It was something that worried me greatly.

  “And so you always remember to keep the units of measurement straight…”

  Ray Thompson was in the classroom, lecturing a bunch of teenage girls who were watching him with scarily intent expressions. I blamed Rose for that. She’d convinced me that girls – and young women – should handle almost anything that didn’t involve fighting, and that included civil engineering. This was actually Ray’s break, but he was spending it teaching the young women enough engineering to get by in Ingalls. It did help that we weren't going to be considering skyscrapers any time soon, or massive dams to create reservoirs of water, but it was still a weakness. The girls would be doing most of their learning on the job.

  (And Rose had told them that if they didn’t develop a tradition of women working in the rear areas, they’d end up being treated like women in Afghanistan, forced to remain second-class citizens rather than fully equal to the men. That would happen, as far as I was concerned, over my dead body, but Rose had made it sound like a certainty. They wouldn’t be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, but clothed and working as anything, but soldiers. She’d even started a whole series of competitions with the men.)

  I walked down to the next few classrooms and saw Emily and Jane, two of the nurses from Stonewall, lecturing other girls – and a handful of boys – on emergency medical techniques. They’d probably bent about a million rules about practicing medicine without a licence, rules the AMA had instigated for some reason that had probably made sense at the time, but I no longer cared. If they could save lives, and teach other girls how to save lives, then it was fine in my book. Besides, we were going to need to spread the knowledge out as far as possible. The more doctors and nurses we had, the better our chances for survival in the coming few years.

  The final classroom was a tactics class, taught by a pair of veterans who had served in the Gulf War and innumerable small unit engagements since then, for the boys who had showed promise in the conscripted classes. They’d showed a remarkable increase in determination lately, as I had expected, after they’d seen the gang-bangers and their victims. What had happened to poor Roshanda might happen to their sisters, girlfriends and even mothers. I couldn’t have asked for a better lesson in the need for a strong defence if I had planned it myself.

  I listened for a long moment, before continuing down towards the headmaster’s office. Walter Loy – M
ayor Walter Loy, now – had refused to move permanently into the Town Hall, although he did half his work there. I hadn’t wanted to keep him from his real job, or what he saw as his real job, although his election probably meant that he should have devoted all of his attention to the job of leading the community. Besides, I hadn’t wanted anyone else involved in the decision to kill two-thirds of Stonewall’s population and I didn’t want to place him in a similar position. The blood could remain on my hands and not his. He was a decent man and deserved better.

  He looked up as I entered from where he was marking papers. “You’ll be pleased to hear,” he said, by way of introduction, “that there have been more applicants for the various training courses than we could accept.”

  I nodded briskly. Rose and Roy, between them, had inspired students in ways that they hadn’t been inspired before the War. It helped that we still saw spectacular sunsets and were, to all intents and purposes, cut off from whatever was left of the world. We might not be producing lawyers, or bankers, or other grasshoppers, but we’d be producing people who were actually useful. All of those professions were useful, in their way, but only when society supported their presence. At the moment, they were only good for brute labour.