The Living Will Envy The Dead

by Nuttall, Christopher

  Sorry, I still see red every time I think about it. They find a man, his fat and ugly wife, his three fat and ugly children and a small number of hangers-on, twenty-five people in all, living in a bunker that had kept them completely safe from the war. They’re actually glad to see the posse – they’ve been going stir-crazy down in the bunker – and perhaps if they’d left it at that, they would have been safe. The guy who owned the house, however, wasn't that smart. It turned out that he was number #467 (or something) on the Continuity of Government Plan – the list of people who would serve as President if everyone above them was killed by the war – and that he’d had enough advance warning to dive into his bunker, along with a bunch of friends. He might even have survived that, were it not for the fact that he promptly started to try to take command. He issued orders and expected them to be obeyed.

  Now, the interesting thing about governments is that they depend on their population either being willing to accept them or are able to force their will on their population. This guy had neither and believed, because of a piece of paper issued by a dead President, that he was in charge of the whole area. The posse listened to him for five minutes and got angry. Very angry. This…person had hidden underground while they’d been fighting for survival, he’d been warned soon enough to stock his shelter with everything he could require, he’d hidden and had probably intended to keep hiding…and now he thought he could take control. Their anger burst and they took him, dragged him and his friends out of the bunker, and hung them from the nearest tree. They screamed and protested the whole way, but the posse ignored them, lost in their rage. I don’t blame them for that. They’d survived, no thanks to the Federal Government, while they hadn’t even known about this designated survivor. The children, spoilt brats all, were spared, but they saw their parents die.

  I think that that’s about the only thing I couldn’t forgive them for.

  No one deserves to see their parents die.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The rule of law can be wiped out in one misguided, however well-intentioned generation. And if that should happen, it could take a century of striving and ordeal to restore it, and then only at the cost of the lives of many good men and women.

  -William T. Gossett

  I hadn’t expected, at first, to be dealing with law and order in Ingalls. Yes, I know, in hindsight that sounds stupid – and not without reason. Ingalls was pretty much a law-abiding town – the only person who really broke the law was the last Sheriff, who was caught with his hand in the till – and the worst problem I had to deal with was the occasionally drunk and the Stonewall Prison. All I can really say in my own defence is that I had expected everyone to be working overtime on keeping us alive, not trying to break laws and act in a way that threatened us all. I should have worried more about human nature; see my prior remarks on self-interest and trust.

  Anyway, I ended up serving as Judge and Jury on several occasions. It wasn't a job I relished. The same lack of ties to the community that had prompted Mac and the others to nominate me for Sheriff had its advantages, but also disadvantages; I could do something unpopular and discover that I had little support. The people in small towns are often of a practical breed, but when their community is challenged, they can become vicious. If the wrong person was accused of a crime, that person would have the support of the community and things would get nasty. The last thing I wanted was to create fault lines that would rip the entire community apart.

  If you’ve been through public schools, you’ve probably seen a movie or two about the evil whites in eeevil towns below the Mason-Dixie line. The basic plot is stock. Some poor black man (or woman, for added shock value) gets lynched by Evil White Men and the entire community covers it up, leaving Heroic Investigator to search for the truth, defeat the KKK and other anti-American groups and somehow bring peace and tolerance to an entire community. I always found such films sickening. They take what could be a real problem – as in the community, which doesn’t believe that a crime has been committed, closing ranks behind the offender - and turn it into a hymn to multiculturalism. It always got on my nerves.

  (It did have its funny side, however. One bunch of filmmakers, intent on showing that the enemy were human too, showed a movie about the Japanese in China, just after the Russians invaded in 1945. Unfortunately, they showed it to a bunch of Koreans…)

  But it all depended on what society sanctioned. In a nation where treating women as dirt was socially sanctioned, it was unsurprising that women were treated like dirt and regularly beaten, forced into marriage, raped, treated as pariahs and so on. In a society where black men were regarded as permanently subordinate, their tormentors received no punishment; hell, their society didn’t even realise that what they were doing was wrong. There’s little point in punishing adults without making sure they understand why they’re being punished. It’s far too easy to drive someone into the belief that they’re being unfairly persecuted and then you have someone without any loyalty to society at all.

  I’m going to look, briefly, at three cases I had to judge before we finally managed to get a government up and running. I don’t know just how well I did while I was judging, but at least I didn’t get lynched myself, right?

  The first case involved a young man whom I’ll call Bob. (Bob, by the way, was the nom de plume of choice for pretty much every CIA agent in Iraq. Their incompetence became the stuff of legend pretty quickly and we would probably have had more accurate intelligence if we had forced ‘Bob’ to walk in front of the tanks towards bridges that might have been held by friendly forces (none were, as far as I can recall, and it would have been shouted to the skies if they were) so that he would take the first bullet.) Bob – this Bob – had been the teenage son of an engineer who had managed to escape the cities and find gainful employment with us, taking his three kids and wife along. Bob had found work himself in the militia and had been courting a girl from Ingalls.

  It hadn’t worked out. She’d finally decided that she wasn't interested in him and told him so, unwisely as it turned out. He had been desperate for her and, in the ensuring chaos, forced himself on her. No, I’ll be blunt. He raped her. Her screams brought several men to her aid and Bob was dragged off her and beaten quite badly, although Jackson turned up in time to save him from being lynched on the spot. Jackson arrested him, dragged him down into the jail, and locked him up until I could return to hold a trial. This wasn’t a particularly safe position. The girl’s family wanted to lynch him and, were it not for Deborah, would probably have broken into the jail – in defiance of the natural law that says people want to break out of the jail – and killed him. That was the situation I found when I returned.

  I wasn’t too keen on keeping him alive. I’ll admit that from the start. A rape victim is rarely to blame for her condition, particularly when she’s saying no so firmly. There was little doubt that he’d assaulted her and I firmly believed that the blame was all on his side. I didn’t want him lynched, however. The rule of law had to remain firm.

  Why?

  Tell me something. What makes America – and the West – great? What’s special about us that is lacking in…say, the Middle East? The answer is simple; the rule of law. In America, all are equal before the law. That’s the most important attribute of American society, far more than gun ownership or even democracy itself. Bob should not be lynched. If he were to be put to death, he had to be put to death legally. Everything had to be fair and firmly aboveboard. This was no time for underhand behaviour. Everyone had to agree that Bob deserved everything he got.

  (And, if nothing else, what about the other immigrants? What would happen if they didn’t feel part of the community, or if they felt that Bob had been hung because he was an immigrant and the girl was part of the original town? They wouldn’t feel part of it themselves and that would be very dangerous.)

  The courtroom was set up in the big hall. It normally served as the communal dining area (eating together saved food and heat,
while allowing people to catch up over a meal and feel connected) but we made a few changes. The dock had been designed by a local carpenter who became a bit overenthusiastic, ending up with something out of a children’s tale. It had been designed so that the accused had absolutely no doubt at all as to why they were there; dark, foreboding and tipped with spikes. I had to discourage him from adding chains and other security measures. If we needed them, the suspect could be handcuffed. I wasn't going to have something that created a greater impression of guilt than we already had.

  “Silence in the court,” I said, as calmly as I could. I was wearing my dress uniform at the time. I disliked wearing it at the best of times, but it gave me a semblance of authority. “Deputy, bring out the prisoner.”

  Bob was escorted out by Jackson. He looked beaten and thoroughly worried. I didn’t blame the girl’s rescuers for beating the shit out of him, but in a different time that kind of treatment would have made it much harder to get a conviction. I didn’t worry that much about it after the war. If he was guilty, he would be judged on that and those who beat him would be judged as well. The fact he’d been beaten didn’t add to his guilt, nor did it detract from it.

  “We are here today to stand in judgement of Bob,” I said, and detailed the crime briefly for the attention of everyone who had only heard rumours. By now, Bob was being called a multiple rapist and murderer, showing how quickly rumours can grow out of proportion. “Bob, how do you plead?”

  I’d had a word with him before the trial had started. “Guilty,” he said, as I had urged. I had been prepared to make a single promise to him. If he pleaded guilty, if there was no doubt about his guilt, if I didn’t have to put the girl through a second hell by putting her on the stand, I would do what I could to avoid having to hang him. Some may call that dishonest, but we had a responsibility to the future.

  There was a brief buzz from the crowd and two of the older boys started a chant of ‘hang him, hang him.” I glared them into silence. “Your honestly is noted,” I said, calmly. “Do you have anything you wish to say in your defence?”

  “No, sir,” Bob said. I had urged him to say nothing. I doubted that there was anything he could have said that would have mitigated the town’s anger and desire for bloody retribution. “I have nothing to say.”

  “Good,” I said. I allowed myself a slow glance around the room. “As the suspect has confirmed his own guilt, I believe that we can move directly to the sentence. Bob, I sentence you to five years on the work crew as a first-class prisoner. Deputy, remove the prisoner.”

  Yes, I rushed it. I’d done that intentionally as well. Five years on the work crew wasn’t an easy sentence by any means. Bob would join the prisoners, and the former gang-bangers, and find himself being pushed to the limit by unsympathetic guards. If, after five years of that, he wanted to remain a criminal…well, we gave him his chance. I don’t like rape cases at the best of times – it can be hard to work out who was really at fault, particularly if drugs or drink were involved – and Bob pleading guilty had helped ensure the right verdict.

  Ok, I’m a sneaky bastard. Sue me.

  The second case was a little harder. We’ll call this guy Charlie, on the grounds that too many Bobs make the story harder to follow. Charlie was a town boy courting a town girl and, unlike Bob, he’d actually managed to lay her. (No, I don’t disapprove of premarital sex. I just disapprove of people who think that ignorance and young people is a healthy combination.) He’d managed to get her pregnant and was now denying it as loudly as possible, claiming that he hadn’t been the one to impregnate her and that she’d been cheating on him.

  “She slept with other guys,” he said, angrily. The girl’s father had taken a surprisingly progressive view of the whole situation, but demanded that Charlie pay for the child’s upbringing, even if he didn’t want to marry her. I could only respect her father’s decision. After this, those two kids wouldn’t have a happy life together, even in normal circumstances. In Ingalls, after the war, it could be disastrous. “It wasn't me who got her pregnant!”

  I sighed and massaged my temples, trying to think through the banging headache that was making me want to order them both flogged. He claimed that it wasn't his fault, although he had admitted having sex with her – unprotected, as the town’s stock of condoms had fallen sharply since the war and we weren't getting any replacements – and was unwilling to name any names. The girl claimed that she’d only slept with him and no one else had come forward to admit to having slept with her as well. It wasn't an easy problem to solve.

  “She’s just trying to get me to pay for her kid with someone else,” Charlie continued, unaware of my worsening mood. “She’s just another bitch who wants to have a kid and steals my sperm…”

  “You’re the only one who had sex with me,” the girl shouted back, angrily. The argument was going nowhere fast, while I could see consensus dissolving all around me. These two stupid idiots were on the verge of tearing my society apart! “You promised you’d marry me when we finally found a place of our own…”

  “Silence,” I bellowed. There is only so much stupidity I can listen to before my head starts to melt and reduce my brain cells to steaming mush. Stupidity, I believe, is actually contagious. “All right, shut up!”

  I glared at Charlie first. “You admit that you had unprotected sex with her,” I snapped. He nodded, reluctantly. “That makes you the most likely suspect – seeing that you cannot name anyone else who has slept with her – for being her baby’s father, doesn’t it? I don’t know why you believe otherwise and you don’t seem to be able to prove that someone else is a candidate. Therefore…”

  I took a breath. “We can do a paternity test when the child is born,” I continued. “If the child is yours, I sentence you to pay for the child’s upbringing and to support the mother as much as you can. You can negotiate access rights with her if you wish, or you can have someone arbitrate access rights if you don’t want to talk to her, but you will pay for your child’s upbringing. If she chooses to give the child away for adoption, you will have no obligations, but if the child proves to be yours, you will spend six months as a second-class prisoner on the work gang. Do you understand me?”

  It wasn't an easy judgement. Young people, barely out of their childhood years, will experiment and graduate from playing doctor to having sex. All those social conservatives who wanted to ban sex education, contraception and abortion missed that point; kids will experiment. It would have been far better to make sure that they all got education, so they knew what they were doing, and then it would have been much easier to deny abortion rights. I'm a pragmatist. I might disapprove of social trends like premarital sex, but they will carry on, regardless of my disapproval.

  Some people said, later, that I was too harsh on him. Personally, I don’t see it that way. Life is about making mistakes and facing up to the consequences of your own mistakes. One of the reasons we had so many problems as a society was that there was no longer any accountability. It was always the fault of someone else. Charlie should have known the dangers of unprotected sex – and, if he did know, he should have taken precautions – and, if he was the father, he was responsible for the kid. I had punished him more for ducking responsibility than for fathering a bastard child.

  But what if the kid wasn't his? I suspected that he was wrong about her cheating on him – although he might have believed it himself – because he hadn’t been able to name names. Rumours are one thing, but I doubted that he wouldn’t have known who his lover was also sleeping with, so why hadn’t he named names? Oh, we would do a paternity test once the child was born, just so we would know – its always better to know the truth of such matters – but I expected that he would turn out to be the father. If not…well, someone was being stupid. I just didn’t know who.

  (And it turned out, afterwards, that we couldn’t have carried out a paternity test. Good thing I didn’t know that at the time…)

  The third case was the worst, in
so many ways. John Anderson was one of the more isolationist members of our little community. He loathed company – his wife had left him years ago, taking with her his son and two daughters – and the government, for which he reserved a special hatred. He had been delighted at the results of the Final War and the destruction of the meddling interferers from Washington – most of whom wouldn’t have known which end of a cow was which – but he resented our plans to survive. His land was his land, as far as he was concerned, and that went double for anything else that happened to be his. He didn’t mind us repossessing some buildings and houses that had been abandoned by the owners, who normally lived in the big cities and had never come out to us, but it was a different story when it was his buildings that were being reclaimed. Never mind that he had never used them since his wife had left…