The Living Will Envy The Dead

by Nuttall, Christopher

  He paused. “The real danger is getting lost, of course, so we have rigged up a transponder here to guide us back to the airfield,” he added. “I shouldn’t get lost, but I doubt somehow that the countryside looks the same around here as it did before the war. I’ve also rigged up a Geiger counter and a few other bits and bobs to keep an eye on the surrounding environment. If there’s trouble, we’ll be the first to know about it.”

  “Good,” I said. I eyed the pair of hoses the ground crew had set up and scowled. If we passed too close to where one of the nuclear bombs had detonated, there was always the chance of picking up radioactive dust on the plane. The ground crew would have to wash the aircraft before we disembarked. “Is there anything else I should know before I call my life insurance people to take out a new policy?”

  “Oh, parachutes,” Biggles said. He laughed loudly enough to pass as overacting. I knew what he was going to say before he opened his mouth. “We don’t have any. I’ll try my hardest not to crash.”

  Twenty minutes later, we were in the plane as it roared to life. It was deafeningly loud, louder than any of the transports I’d been on during my career as a Marine, but there was something almost homely about it. I had never understood what drove some of the flyers I’d met, but perhaps I understood it more now, when an aircraft was completely under their control, rather than controlled by a computer that they directed. It just meant more to them that they had learned a skill and had the chance to use it.

  “They were smart enough to keep the original starter and other equipment,” Biggles called back, over the racket. I could barely hear him and was starting to wonder if my ears would be permanently damaged by the noise. “The Confederates were religious fanatics about keeping everything as it had been before, which was damn lucky for us, sir. A more modern starter might have had problems with the EMP, or even indelicate handling. We’re perfectly safe.”

  So saying, he opened the throttles – or something; my knowledge of plane-handling is limited, as you can probably tell – and we rocketed down the runway and up into the air.

  “Ah,” I said, as the plane climbed. “This is obviously some new meaning of the word ‘safe’ that somehow was left out of the dictionary. I don’t feel safe.”

  “That’s when it gets you.” Biggles assured me. “When you’re feeling safe, something always picked that moment to go spectacularly wrong. Now, where shall we go first?”

  I wanted to take the aircraft in the direction of New York, but somehow I doubted that we could go that far. “Take us in the direction of Richmond,” I ordered, finally. “I want to see as much as we can of that area. How far can we go?”

  “Oh, you’d be surprised at just how far this baby can go,” Biggles said, flashing me a grin. “This isn’t one of those fuel-guzzling F-22s, you know. We could travel for hundreds of miles without having to refuel. It’s just damn slow, you know.” He paused. “Still, we’ll have to see how far we get before we reach bingo fuel. I don’t want to have to put down in unexplored territory.”

  His words stung slightly, a reminder that most of the United States was unexplored territory these days. I had hopes of using the aircraft to locate other surviving settlements and other survivors, but he was right. We couldn’t take risks with our only aircraft. Back when I’d been in Afghanistan, we’d had hundreds of briefings and warning notes about the possibility of an aircraft crashing somewhere in the badlands, where recovering it and the crew would be almost impossible. Here, it was possible that we’d run into friends and allies, but equally possible that we would run into more bandits like CORA. God alone knew just what there was over the next hill. It bothered me more than I cared to admit. Expanding might prove to be the key to our survival…or it might embroil us in an endless series of tiny conflicts.

  “Look,” Biggles said, as we passed over the Spruce Knobs National Recreation Area and the Monongahela National Forest, heading down towards Lexington. I had had hopes of finding allies at Lexington. It was close to the Virginia Military Institute, which had been turning out cadets for hundreds of years, and should have had a fair chance at survival. You would be amazed to discover how many supplies are stored at training centres. No one shoots off bullets and ammunition like the new trainees. “I think that that’s a bad sign.”

  I couldn’t disagree. Where Lexington had been, or where we thought Lexington had been, seeing as we had no GPS or other navigational system, there was a massive black crater. It was surrounded by the ruins of a town…and, looking down more carefully, I think it was actually several craters. The counter clicked once, alarmingly, and Biggles moved us back up towards the Institute. It had been destroyed long ago.

  “They must have regarded it as a target,” Biggles said, shocked. Something, at last, had punched through his demeanour. “What the hell were those cadets doing to deserve such treatment?”

  I said nothing. There was a form of nuclear strike plan that involved destroying a country’s ability to rebuild. The Virginia Military Institute and Lexington might not have been priority targets for the early parts of the war – although I had a sneaking suspicion that the Institute might also have served as a command and control centre for forces if everything senior had been knocked out – but they could have contributed much to the national recovery. Trained and armed cadets, led by veterans from the Gulf, Iraq, and years of attempted nation-building would have had an significant effect. They had been targeted in order to prevent any such reconstruction from taking place.

  “Look,” Biggles said, pointing into the distance. A lone plume of smoke was rising up into the sky. “Do you want to take a look at that?”

  “Of course,” I said, breaking out of my despair. I hadn’t really wanted this look at America after all. Logic and reason told me that I was only seeing a tiny slice of post-war America, but I was in no state to think rationally. The task of rebuilding the United States would never be completed in my lifetime. “Let’s see who’s still alive.”

  The familiar scenes from post-war Clarksburg and other towns greeted us as we swept east. There were lines of cars, some of them entire rows of burned out cars where the heat flash from the nukes had spread over them and blown them into flaming death-traps. Others had been untouched by the heat, but had been abandoned by their owners after the fuel ran out, lying there mourning the death of suburban America. Some towns looked surprisingly intact, although we saw no signs of human life, others looked as if a herd of locusts had swept through them and eaten them out of house and home. It might well have almost exactly been what had happened. The refugees might have broken in and destroyed any hope of survival.

  “There,” Biggles said. “They’re alive!”

  I smiled wanly as we started to orbit a town that was definitely still alive, ringed with walls and watchtowers, and burning…something in a pit nearby. I stared down, looking for signs of life, and was rewarded by sighting a handful of people, staring up at us and waving. I waved back – I had always wanted people in planes to do that when I had been a kid – although they probably couldn’t have seen me, unless they had binoculars or something similar.

  “Friendly lot,” Biggles said, cheerfully. He’d taken us lower, low enough that we could make out a woman waving at us. She’d removed her top and her bare breasts bounced invitingly in the sun. I cringed. I like breasts as much as the next man, but she was risking exposure to all kinds of radiation. “Hey, sir, you want to land?”

  I shook my head. “Not now, no,” I said. I scavenged around in the cockpit, looking for anything I could use to give them a message, but found nothing apart from an old tin of some kind of soda. I found myself seriously considering sticking a message in that and dropping it on them for a long moment before realising that if I hit someone with it, it would probably be fatal. The first bombs dropped over the battlefield back in the First World War had been tiny metal arrows. The explosives had come later. Landing was tempting, I had to admit, but we knew nothing about this particular group. We would hav
e to send a ground party to investigate…

  Which would mean going near the site of a nuclear explosion.

  Shit.

  “Waggle our wings and then take us back to the airfield,” I ordered, calmly. “We’ll have to put together a ground team to visit and find out what they’re like.”

  “We’re not going to land among the savages, then?” Biggles asked, wryly. “We could have had some fun escaping if they had been hostile.”

  The thought had crossed my mind. “This aircraft is too important,” I said, flatly. “We’ll take a look at the national park on the way home, but we can’t land unless it’s a real emergency.”

  We turned away from the town and headed back towards the west. I suspected – hoped – that they would see our bearing and head west after us, which would be a pleasant change. We had contacts all along the westward side of the Monongahela National Forest – which had been infested with survivalists, campers and desperate people trying to survive – and if they came through the forest, they’d make contact with us. It would be nice to have more contacts. Every group of survivors we found would improve our morale and our own chances of permanent survival.

  “I was just feeling horny too,” Biggles said. He pushed a leer into his tone. “Flying always excites me. Did you know that they’ve improved the tone of the nearby town by putting a whorehouse in what was once a lawyer’s office?”

  I nodded, once. Some of the refugees we’d taken in – or the other towns had taken in – had been useless for anything, but brute labour…or prostitution. I wasn't that happy about it, and nor were any of the religious people in the towns, but it was something that kept a lot of people happy. We supervised as best as we could, just to prevent the girls from being exploited any further by pimps (and I was sure that we would develop them sooner or later), but I wasn't comfortable with it. Rose would have killed me, of course, if I had thought about entering a whorehouse in anything other than a professional role.

  It reminded me, too much, of Charlie and the girl he had gotten pregnant. To allow men to visit whores while keeping women away from pre-marital sex was the height of hypocrisy. What’s good for the goose, as they say, is good for the gander. I didn’t mind if girls did have sex before marriage, but I wanted to ensure that any children were well looked after. I would have preferred for Charlie to marry her, but if he genuinely believed that she had cheated on him, what kind of married life would they have? I certainly wasn't going to encourage wife beating or abuse. The man who abuses his own wife is the lowest form of life and should be ritually horsewhipped. I would be quite happy to do it myself, even if it were uncomfortably like the Taliban’s treatment of those they considered sinners.

  “Here we are,” Biggles said, as we touched down on the airfield. Time had just sped by. I hadn’t even realised how long we’d been in the air, but I felt stiff and cramped as I climbed out of the aircraft, once it had been hosed down. We did a brief check for radioactivity and found very little, thankfully. “Any chance of a tip?”

  “Sell gold, buy potatoes,” I said, and laughed.

  There was a messenger waiting for me. “Sir, I have an urgent message from Doctor Nelson,” he said, as I staggered away from the plane, trying to knock some feeling back into my muscles. We’d set up a system of motorbike messengers for messages that couldn’t be transmitted over the airwaves, but we had to keep them for special occasions as they drained too much of our fuel. “He wants you back at Ingalls at once. I’m afraid it’s bad news.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  What hatred have we for the traitor within? No – I mean not the traitor that hides amongst us. For it is our very flesh that is the greatest of traitors, the betrayer who corrupts and weakens us more than any other foe. It is the enemy within that we harbour unknowingly. His name is mutant, witch and deviant. He is the foe that will destroy us as no other can. He leads us before a hellish throne to dance enfeebled and imbecilic for the lewd pleasures of dark gods.

  -The Imperium of Man, Warhammer 40,000

  “I’ve kept this under wraps for the moment, but the news will leak out sooner or later,” Kit said, as soon as I arrived at his clinic. The sun was setting and I was tired, but I didn’t dare rest, not yet. I needed to know what was so urgent that I would be summoned back to Ingalls. “I know, Emily knows, the mother knows, but no one else. It won’t last.”

  He led me inside the clinic and into one of the sealed patient rooms, allowing me to glance through a window at a woman lying on the bed, fast asleep. She looked haunted, somehow, despite her slumber, lost in a nightmare from which she could never awake. I recognised her, vaguely, as one of the refugee women, a lady who had been the wife of a soldier lost somewhere overseas. She had been pregnant when she arrived in Ingalls, accepted because she was also a part-time medic and teacher…and because few of us would have turned a pregnant woman out to die. She had escaped one of the nuclear blasts and her story had been nightmarish. Her name was Kristy, I recalled now; Kristy Stevenson.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, puzzled. I don’t like peeking on women when they’re asleep and as tired as I was, I couldn’t put two and two together. “What’s wrong with her? Disease?”

  “No,” Kit said, annoyed. “Look at her.”

  I saw, finally. “She’s given birth,” I said, puzzled. “What…”

  “Come and see,” Kit said. He managed a faint half-laugh. “I hope that you haven’t eaten anything today, Ed. Hold this.” He passed me a bucket as we led me into the next room. It stank of…something, a strange mixture of blood and piss and something I didn’t want to think about, worse even than the smell of rotting flesh that hung around the dead towns and cities. “Look.”

  I looked and felt my gorge rise. The shape in the small cradle might have been intended to be a child, but it was a cruel mockery of one. It was naked, without either penis or vagina, its flesh a mottled purple colour that suggested that it had choked to death. It had only one eye and no nose, its flesh marked with signs of a desperate and lost struggle for survival. I felt a kind of fascinated horror as I stared at it, unable to look away, even as I drank in the detail…

  I spun away and was violently sick into the bucket.

  “The child was premature by at least a month,” Kit said. “That isn’t always fatal, although we don’t have the proper equipment here to ensure survival for any unhealthy baby, but the cellular damage was certainly fatal. It was gestating in her womb long enough to become really warped.”

  I shuddered. I had thought myself used to horror, but this was a new one. It wasn't a fellow Marine hurt and wounded, it wasn't yet another dead insurgent, it wasn't a raped and murdered woman, killed for daring to wear makeup, it wasn't the common or mundane horror of war, but something else, something new. I had known some of the implications of nuclear war before, from my studies, but now I was face to face with one of the most disastrous results. I didn’t want to even think about it, but I had no choice. What else could we do?

  “She was pregnant when she arrived,” I said, ten minutes later. Kit had dragged me out of the room, given me a medicinal drink that left my teeth feeling as if someone had operated on them without drugging them first, and sat me down in his office. I hadn’t spent much time here, although it was pitched to make a straight man rather uncomfortable, but I almost welcomed it. “How many others are pregnant now?”

  “Two hundred and twelve,” Kit said, softly. “She was one of five women who were pregnant when they arrived here, the others all became pregnant within the next few months of the war. Someone who became pregnant in the last month might be unaware of her condition yet. Our food problems meant that most of the girls had some disruption of their monthly cycles. Stress and…other problems will have sent their cycles out of order, so we actually had several girls who thought they were pregnant and weren’t.” He laughed without humour. “One of them was still a virgin, for God’s sake.”

  He held up a hand before I could say anything. �
��But how many of them are carrying a mutant child…Ed, I don’t have the slightest fucking idea,” he continued. It was rare to hear Kit swear. He normally kept his words and deeds very clean. The only time I’d heard him swear was when he was chewing someone out for not taking care of themselves, or for injuring themselves in a dangerous sport. “I don’t even have a way of finding out either.”

  I frowned. “Ultrasound?”

  “It’s a possibility,” Kit conceded. He shook his head. “I ran a basic check-up on all of the pregnant women every month and…well, what happened to the poor bitch in there went right past me. I didn’t even know that anything was wrong until she went into labour and gave birth. As soon as I saw the child…”

  He shuddered. “You won’t have noticed, but the poor creature didn’t have any brain either,” he said. “It’s never even had a chance of survival, even if we had a fully-prepared intensive care unit here; it would have died within days. Babies have been born without brains before, Ed, and all of them have died. I don’t even know why that surprised me when I found out about it.”