The Living Will Envy The Dead

by Nuttall, Christopher

  Kit had supplied us with the addresses of a few surgeries and medical clinics in Clarksburg, but most of them had been completely stripped of everything, including the patients. One of them had been turned into a battleground, judging from the damage, with all the patients caught in the middle. I cursed such short-sightedness even as we tried to take advantage of it, taking what we could. Some items, including painkillers and even other medicines, were still useable, other medicines had spoiled when the power had failed. Kit had warned us, in no uncertain terms, not to trust anything that could have decayed and so we left them. They would have to be buried or burned in the near future. We couldn’t risk someone trying to use them.

  Mac located one of the public libraries and we searched it quickly. It had almost been untouched by the fighting, although we found a pair of bodies behind the counter and a pack of wild dogs had set up shop in the basement. They were feral, beyond human control, and so we shot them before they could lunge at us. I hated that more than shooting humans, in a way; the dogs had never asked to become monsters. They’d just been collateral damage in humanity’s war. Once we’d cleared them out, we searched the library and removed everything that might be even remotely useful, although I drew the line at Mac’s suggestion of post-apocalyptic science-fiction novels.

  “We’re going to have to go through this place a lot more carefully,” I concluded, a few hours later. We’d barely scratched the surface. Somehow, deep inside, I had fallen into the trap of thinking in terms of places like Ingalls, rather than a real city-sized…well, city. There was treasure everywhere for people like us, who needed it to survive, but it would all have to be found. Any surviving electronic equipment would have to be checked carefully, but everything else should work perfectly. The store of cheap farming gear was very useful.

  It made me smile when I saw it. Washington had been issuing instruction after instruction to farmers, despite the massive pressure from farmer’s lobbies, demanding that farmers become more organic and ‘eco-friendly,’ to say the least. It was stupid before the war, because farmers knew far more about farming than anyone in Washington or a part-timer who had bought a few fields and fancied himself an expert, but the greens had struggled to pass the laws. They might have even done us a favour now. Supplies of modern farming equipment, like pesticides, would be drying up all over the country. We were going to be forced to go back to organic farming methods…

  I didn’t know what that really meant, not then.

  “We were on the verge of heading back,” Dutch said, finally. They’d found little more than we had, although we divided up the finds between us. If nothing else, we were going to have to come to agreements on how scavenging could be governed, even if it were just ‘finders, keepers’. “Mac, are you ready to come?”

  “Yep,” Mac said. He gave me a cocky grin as he stood up. “Ed, we’ll come to Ingalls in a couple of days. We’ll see you then, promise.”

  I waved him goodbye as Dutch led him back towards their vehicles, on the other side of the town, and then turned to my own people. We’d loaded the trucks with as much as they could carry, but I still wanted them watched carefully, just in case. A broken axel would mean a serious delay. I drove, this time, as we retraced our steps, looking at the landscape with new eyes. If there were other survivors…an entire world of possibilities was opening up in my mind’s eye.

  And I was right. Ingalls was delighted to know that Salem had survived. The details of the death of Clarksburg, a city many of them had known, hit hard. It gave the disaster a shape and form it had lacked, despite the refugees, because it had so little connection to life before the war. It still paled, however, compared to the central fact, the one we needed to hear.

  We weren't alone any more.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Nations whose nationalism is destroyed are subject to ruin.

  -Muammar al-Gaddafi

  As it happened, there were quite a few survivors.

  We spent the next couple of months – among other things, about which more later – searching the surrounding area of West Virginia for more survivors. It was an interesting and depressing experience. Interesting, because we were finding survivors in places I wouldn’t have expected to find survivors, and depressing, because of how much devastation we encountered along the way. It was bad enough for me, a child of the Big Apple, but worse for Mac and the others who had lived in Virginia all their lives. They’d known it when it was fresh and new, then familiar and old, and seeing it utterly devastated was an unpleasant experience. We discovered a dozen towns that had managed to preserve themselves – sometimes barely – and a hundred places, mainly bigger towns, that had failed the critical test, although sometimes there were survivors.

  Clarksburg was a case in point. We – and Dutch – had assumed that the town was completely deserted. We weren’t far wrong, but it turned out that a few dozen former citizens – including some of Fart, Barf and Itch’s personnel – had managed to hole up nearby and escape the carnage of the final moments. They’d hidden themselves when we’d first visited – apparently they’d had a bad experience with one of the bands of roving survivors wandering around the country – but when they realised that we were scavenging the town, they showed themselves and were welcomed into our growing community.

  Yes, our community. We had made contact with seven towns by that time and we were working hard on building up a communications network that would allow us to share information and remain alive over the coming months. Mac and Dutch started it off when they were in Salem – and that town was just as glad to see us as we were to see them – and by the time we found the third town, we even had a protocol worked out. As long as the town remained true to its American roots, we would welcome them into our community. Anyone caught outside a town would be also welcome. We needed all the manpower we could get.

  It was a painful irony, I freely admit. In the beginning, the days just after the war, the more city-slickers who died, the better for us. They just swarmed out over the countryside like locusts and had to be repelled with deadly force. If we had failed to repel them – those who were useless to us, at least – we would have lost Ingalls and probably any chance of survival. We certainly saw enough examples of what happened to towns that didn’t immediately start barring outsiders from entry to know that we’d done the right thing, as heart-breaking as it was. Tens of thousands, perhaps millions – no, there really is no doubt about it – died so that thousands could live.

  But now we needed that manpower. Can you imagine just how congested a single interstate had become, as a result of the EMP and cars running out of gas, to say nothing of blockades and silly sheep – not real sheep, alas, but people who depended on the government to save them from the inevitable effects of a nuclear war – running everywhere? We wanted – needed – to clear as many roads as we could, but even clearing a small road took time. It also led to a handful of unpleasant surprises. The countryside didn’t just have survivors, but bandits, and some of them proved adept at ambushes. Why not? They’d learned from experience.

  We tended to discover that post-war communities fell into a handful of groups. The first were the larger habitations, starting at around Clarksburg’s level – ten-twenty thousand residents – and going all the way up to New York City, with a population numbered in the millions. (And, unless they were very lucky, at least a couple of nuclear warheads going off nearby.) They tended to exhaust their supplies very quickly, even under the strictest rationing and the lowering of all social taboos, such as eating dog food. As I have said earlier, if it’s a choice between eating food meant for your friendly neighbourhood mutt or starving, most people will eat the dog food and be happy to have it. Those that weren’t willing to eat it, of course, starved and removed themselves from the equation. It wasn’t long before they started eating their pets as well, ranging from common pets like cats and dogs to really wild pets like snakes and even spiders. (Yeah, I know. Disgusting, right?) Even so, they rapidly ate th
emselves out of existence and simply didn’t have the resources to keep feeding themselves once the supplies ran out. They died off, leaving only a handful of ragged survivors to search for food and supplies elsewhere.

  The second were smaller habitations, like Ingalls, where it was possible to take complete control and prevent either a run on the stores, or outsiders coming in and demanding to be fed. Ingalls, Salem and others survived, but not every town that had a chance actually survived. We found towns that had failed to take sufficient steps to defend themselves and had been invaded by desperate survivors, who had either driven the original residents out or had enslaved them. More on that later. Other towns were just too close to larger habitations to stand a chance. They got the tidal wave of refugees streaming out of the cities and simply couldn’t hold them all back. The results were predicable and thoroughly unpleasant. We found hundreds of places where the refugees had destroyed their country’s best hope of survival though mindless hunger.

  I’m not saying that they were evil, never that. A person tends to act in his or her best interest, as they see it, whatever the situation. I would not be happy if someone said that I couldn’t eat, or survive, just to allow someone else to survive, even if my family wasn’t at risk. If my family was at risk, I believe that I would do anything to get food for them, even if it meant invading a town like Ingalls and stealing all the food I could carry. It was a problem for us at the start – we had to kill people whose only crime was wanting enough food to save their family’s lives – but we had no choice. The blame, if such can be awarded, goes to those who started this war. God damn them all to hell!

  It did have its odd moments, though, sometimes heroic and sometimes sickening. Like us, quite a few towns had taken in as many children as they could, even as their parents were left to starve. We found that there were thousands of children in the area, ranging from babies to teenagers, all of whom could be taught to be useful on the farms and other areas we needed manpower. Yes, we used children to help us survive. We no longer had time for notions of a ‘proper’ childhood, as if anything of the sort existed. We were able to find foster parents for most of the kids and most of them fitted in well with Ingalls or the other towns. Kids are very adaptable, more than adults think, and can adapt to almost anything. A handful of older kids had really bad habits and had to be broken of them, but otherwise…they fitted in.

  Some of the sickening moments brought home to me just how much had changed. A handful of towns – mainly smaller towns – cherry-picked refugees, taking only the prettiest girls, for example, and…well, you can probably guess how they used them. A couple of others effectively enslaved refugees, something that I had been unable to bring myself to do – and besides, I had the prisoners for brute labour – and used them for every manual task that could be done with untrained labour. They might have been alive, at least, but they didn’t like their conditions. Was it really that much of a surprise when they revolted, turned on their masters, and killed most of them? We ended up taking several hundred slaves – and girls, pushed into prostitution – away from such places and finding them better homes. They were willing to work.

  (And besides, as the cold part of my mind whispered, they had saved breeders we desperately needed…)

  But such incidents were the exceptions, not the rule. Why? American society doesn’t sanction such behaviour. We would be contemptuous, at least, of a man who had a private harem of enslaved girls, even if we joked about how much we would like it for ourselves. Yes, men do have fantasies of what we would do if we had girls who literally couldn’t say no, but most of us refrain from enacting them, even when given the opportunity. The knowledge that society, far from supporting us, would turn on us in an instant keeps us honest, or reasonably so. I always kept my porn habit a secret when I was a kid, looking at magazines with topless girls and keeping them well away from my mother, and the same principle kept such atrocities from happening very often. We might have no choice, but to turn people away from our food, but most of us wouldn’t enslave them…

  Personally, I think it has something to do with trust. A small society – take Springfield, for example, even though Homer Simpson’s town is fictional – has a considerable degree of trust. Bart, Lisa and the baby – whose name I forgot, seeing I was never a very avid Simpsons fan – can trust pretty much everyone in their own and know them all by sight. The thought of being seen, in a small town, as an outcast or villain keeps many people honest, while it also keeps them trusting in local government, rather than trying to save themselves on their own. If Ingalls hadn’t trusted me – and Mac, Deborah and the others – to take the right action, if every man had been out for himself, we would have destroyed ourselves a long time before the first refugees arrived. The larger the population, the smaller the relative number of people who knew one another…and the lower level of trust in the government. The people there don’t know the Mayor personally, they don’t really trust him – probably after a string of decisions that were or looked irrational or against the interests of the community – and don’t place any faith in him. Why should they? They didn’t know him. It worked fine as long as society wasn't placed under massive stress. When the Final War happened…

  Well, then it was Katie bar the door.

  We found many similar stories in the surrounding area, sometimes from the handful of survivors, or from their diaries that we found as we scavenged for anything that might be useful. You’d be amazed at how much was just abandoned, or simply left undiscovered in root cellars and other places that city-dwellers wouldn’t think to look. Our growing community shared information and items; one town had nearly four times as many pigs as they needed – they’d been having a pig fair, of all things, before the war – and shared some of them with other towns in exchange for other animals, or goods. We also started a breeding program for horses and other livestock.

  Oh, and bikes. We couldn’t waste gasoline in exploring too many places. We used an armoured force – well, a force composed of technicals, which a single Abrams tank would have massacred once the tankers finished laughing – to visit everywhere first, and then it was horses and/or bikes. It was amazing how much more polite people became when they thought that you were riding in a military convoy and that normally gave us a chance to talk to them before they opened fire. The surviving towns had learned to fire first and ask questions later – if at all – after the first wave of bandits spread into the area and so we had to use the vehicles. We salvaged hundreds of bicycles from various towns and put them to work convoying people from place to place. It also helped keep people healthy, although most of the real fatties had been shrinking steadily on our rations…

  The map that was taking shape in the Town Hall was just plain weird, in many ways. There were towns that had survived intact, towns that were barely keeping themselves alive – we helped with that in hopes of keeping as large a population as we could, although by my best estimate we only had around a hundred thousand people at most – and places that could be scavenged for useful goods. (We operated a first come, first served policy; whoever found something useful could keep it, or trade it. It was the best way to encourage trade after the war.) There were also the ‘last men on Earth;’ men and women, mainly survivalists, who had believed that they and their families were the only ones left. I know, it sounds a little mad, but I believe that we were all a little mad after the Final War. Some of them were delighted to see us and happy to join us, others were less happy – or mad – and greeted us with a hail of fire. We either gave them a wide berth or went after them, depending on where they were. One of them, in particular, had taken up a commanding position where he could shoot men on bikes. The bastard had to be dug out of his nest and killed.

  And then, finally, there were the Badgers.

  We didn’t see many in our area, although we heard later that there had been quite a few near Washington and some of the other larger towns. The only significant discovery was a few miles south of Ingalls and it le
aves a bad taste in my mouth even to think about it. I will write about it, however, for two reasons. The first is that it is an important part of the story; the second is that I was blamed for it, later. It wasn't my fault. I only heard about it about two days after it had taken place. I went there at once, mainly out of curiosity, but it wasn’t my place.

  Anyway…there was this posse of men out searching for anything useful. (Yes, they were almost all men. The only women who went on search parties and scavenging teams were ones who had specialised knowledge we needed, like the nurses.) One of the posse remembers this old house up near the Spruce Knob-Seneca Rocks National Recreation Area, located within the Monongahela National Forest of eastern West Virginia. Some rich guy bought it, he thinks, and suggests that they go take a look at the place. The leader of the posse – a soldier who served in Iraq on one of the teams searching for Saddam – agrees and so they travelled there, finding that the house is intact and apparently abandoned. They break in and search the place carefully, finding some items that might be useful – including a fully-stocked gun cabinet and a massive and still operating freezer with enough luxury food for a small army– and little else, but the leader is suspicious. His experience suggested that they were missing something. As I heard it later, he insisted on another search, a more careful one this time. They go through the house with a fine-toothed comb and finally discover the shaft built into the fireplace. It takes them nearly an hour to figure out how to open it, but finally they get it open and slip down into an underground bunker, where they find…