I followed his pointing finger and lifted an eyebrow. Ben had been one of the borderline cases, a man who had murdered his wife when he had caught her in bed with another man. The prison psychologist had figured that he would never kill again, but he had been midway through his sentence when the Final War extended it indefinitely. He was a tough-looking man, a trucker in a previous life, and Richard had decided to keep him alive. I wasn't sure that I agreed with his judgement – I have little pity for a man who murders his wife, regardless of the circumstances – but so far he’d been a model prisoner. The cynical part of my mind suggested that the chains shackling his legs might have had something to do with that.
“He does?” I asked, puzzled. Richard nodded in agreement. “Very well. Call him over here and we’ll talk.”
Up close, Ben looked surprisingly respectable, almost like a Marine. “Sheriff,” he said, bowing his head. He obviously hadn’t heard of my promotion to Colonel. I had hoped to keep news of the war from the prisoners, least some of them see opportunity in chaos and rebel. The worst threat to any society always came from its discontented minority. “I was hoping to have a word with you on a subject of mutual interest.”
I quirked an eyebrow, inviting him to continue, which he did. “I confess that I didn’t believe you at first when you told us about the war,” he said. “I thought that you were just playing a power game of your own or something. I didn’t believe you until you started adding prisoners from the surrounding area to the work gangs.”
“I didn’t kill over a thousand of the most evil sons of bitches in the world for shits and giggles,” I snapped, impatiently. I’m a pretty direct man, as my ex-girlfriends would probably testify. “What do you want?”
Ben frowned. “What will happen to us after the five years are over?” He asked. “We’re not going to be welcome in Ingalls, are we? If we’re not part of a community, not now that there’s no social support or anything, what’s going to become of us? Are we going to be doomed to living forever on the fringes of society?”
He leaned forward. “You see, we don’t get anything out of this,” he said, so quietly that it was almost a whisper. “We’re doing everything from digging latrines to building defences against the outside world, but what’s in it for us? Oh, we’re alive, and you could have us killed at any moment, but you can’t expect us to be enthusiastic about it. What do we get out of it?”
I considered it for a moment. “You are here because you owe society a debt and you are going to pay it off,” I said. “I could say that what happens to you afterwards is not my problem, but…I suppose you have a solution?”
Ben nodded. “Most of the remaining prisoners are people like me, who won’t kill again,” he said. I gave him points for not trying for the sympathy vote. I wouldn’t have been willing to talk to a man who claimed that killing his wife had been right, even if she had cheated on him. “We could be valuable members of society if you gave us a chance.”
“I suppose,” I said, carefully. I recognised a bargaining position when I heard one. I just wanted to know what he had to offer. “What do you want to offer us?”
“We want to build a stake of our own in society,” Ben said. “If you have…say, a couple of dozen of us working on our own farm, or manufacturing plant, or even fighting for you, the remainder of us will work to the best of our ability, rather than doing as little as we can get away with doing.”
“I assume you’d want to rotate the people on the outside,” I said, thoughtfully. I wasn't going to trust them with weapons, not yet. They would make great fifth columnists for the Warriors. “I’ll think about it and discuss it with the Mayor and the others.”
“Please think quickly,” Ben said. “The longer we just do as little as we can, the less time we’ll have to do what you want us to do.”
I laughed. “Very well,” I said. “I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”
That night, I discussed it with Rose. “That’s what they want,” I concluded. “Is it worth making the agreement with them?”
Rose thought about it. We’d already argued over her exclusion from the military deployment, but I needed at least two of the deputies back in Ingalls. If you believe that it was a mere coincidence that it was Rose and Deborah who stayed, I have some bottom land in Florida I’d like to sell you. Rose was a good shot, as I would be the first to admit, but she couldn’t go into combat. I was nervous enough about taking the nurses.
“It might be worth integrating them into society,” she said, finally, “but who would trust them that far?”
I nodded. I didn’t want to see the prisoners attacked at once, or treated as the usual suspects, even though both were likely. It would be simple enough to develop one of the wrecked towns – redevelop it, I should say – as a home for them, but it would take a lot of work. It was also something that would have to be done after the war had concluded, along with a million other ideas for grinding out a new tech base and rebuilding the United States.
“Good point,” I said, finally, and reached for her. She leaned back at first, teasing me, and then came into my arms. “Come here…”
I’ll draw a curtain over that part of the story, thank you, and take you straight to the meeting the following morning. We had considered marching the entire force straight to the FOB, but considering that deploying there was a matter of urgency, we decided to use trucks instead. They’d been adapted to run on ethanol instead of gasoline, which probably meant that their useful lives had been shortened considerably, but we had little choice. I was reviewing the Companies and thinking how badly my old Drill Sergeant would have taken their appearance – we didn’t have a uniform yet, let alone a standardized kit – when the news arrived.
The Warriors of the Lord, as I had expected, had kicked off the offensive two days ahead of schedule. Their first blow had been precise and carefully planned.
Summersville had fallen to the enemy.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The war was bound to be merciless. Wars that begin with sneak attacks always are.
-Robert A. Heinlein
I should have had Sheriff Emerson removed from his position.
He wasn’t a bad person, not really. He was pretty much a basic small-town cop. He was slightly overweight, wore a massive pair of spectacles and was generally adored by all and sundry. I used to think of him as a slightly more benevolent version of Chief Clancy Wiggum; he wasn't corrupt, he wasn’t incompetent and he wasn't a stooge for the evil owner of a nuclear power plant company. What he was, unfortunately, was a man with a tendency to get complacent. He’d served as a Military Policeman during his stint in the Army, but he had never been closer to a combat front than a few miles and had never seen a shot fired in anger. He had had a very uneventful career.
Summersville should have been a hard place to take. The terrain favoured the defenders, who were armed to the teeth, with hundreds of people in the area who owned guns and were experienced in their use. They'd managed to keep the tidal waves of refugees from the cities out, mainly through blockades and the occasional gun battle, and had survived the first isolated months reasonably well. They’d joined up with us when we made First Contact with them and were the first to hear, for all the good it did them, about the Warriors. I hid nothing from them. They had copies of the transcripts from the interrogations and the brief autopsy in their hands. They should have been prepared for an attack.
And then the Warriors took the town.
We didn’t realise just what had happened until a few days afterwards, when we found dozens of refugees fleeing the town; dozens, out of a population in the thousands. The Warriors had taken advantage of their complacency and their desperate need for manpower, and had done it in a way that utterly swamped the defenders. They knew us far better than we knew them…and it showed. Whoever was in command on the other side, I reluctantly had to admit, was no slouch.
A week ago, a group of refugees, mainly men with a handful of women, had presented themsel
ves at Summersville, claiming to be refugees from the Warriors of the Lord and their slave camps. You can imagine the group as it waited fearfully outside the barriers; thirty black men, whipped and bleeding, fifty white men, their eyes haunted with shadows, and thirty-two women, broken by all they had experienced the end of the war. Their leader, a tall black man who had been forced to carry a heavy bag everywhere to teach him a lesson, told Summersville that they had fled the Warriors and desperately required shelter and asylum. The townspeople let them into the town.
It should have been obvious from the start, but Summersville – like everywhere else – was suffering from a shortage of manpower. The irony was painfully amusing, in a sense; five months ago, we’d all been killing refugees just to keep them away from the vital food supplies we needed to keep us alive until we could grow more crops and rebuild our farming industry. Now, we needed everyone we could get and the Warriors took advantage of that. The refugees, unarmed and seemingly harmless, were welcomed into the town.
You’ve probably guessed the punch line by now; Trojan Horse. For those of you who don’t read history, one side in the Trojan War decided to build a massive wooden horse as a ‘gift’ to the defenders of Troy, in hopes of breaking the siege. Once they had completed the horse, they seemingly left, leaving the enemy to take the horse into their city for the night. Unfortunately for them, it was concealing an armed force that killed the defenders and took the city. You can look the rest of the details up in a history book, but the net result of this particular use of the idea was fifty men inside Summersville’s defence perimeter.
Fifty men? Yes. It turned out, afterwards, that the blacks had been genuine slaves, as had the women who’d come with them…and they thought that the escape plan had been their idea. They’d been taken from their slave quarters, paired up with resentful workers from another captured town – or so it seemed – and had been offered the opportunity to escape in the direction of Summersville. The news of the contact between the Warriors and us – and the safe escape of three of their slaves – had spread through the remaining slaves and they’d taken the chance when they’d seen it, allied with the women and the resentful workers. They thought that they were safe in Summersville…
They couldn’t have been more wrong.
You see, there is a perception – a very popular perception – that an armed man is dangerous and an unarmed man is effectively helpless. It’s complete nonsense, of course. There would be much less fuss over gun control if everyone with a gun knew how to use it perfectly, but plenty of people go out and buy a gun without any training, or even previous firearms experience. They’re not much more dangerous than any street tough armed with a club. A trained Special Forces soldier, pushed through the most rigorous – and seemingly sadistic – training program that experience and money can buy, is a living weapon. His external weapons are mere afterthoughts. In hand-to-hand combat, I would bet on an unarmed SEAL or a Delta Force commando against almost anyone, even a bunch of armed terrorists. Those men are that deadly. The Warriors of the Lord didn’t have that much training – they didn’t even have the bare bones of such training – but they had a plan, the advantage of surprise and sheer fanatical determination. You can get quite a long way with the right combination of the three.
Nothing happened for a day, until nightfall, when the Trojan Horsemen (sorry, but I couldn’t resist) broke out of their temporary lodgings and assembled in the town, moving from shadow to shadow under cover of darkness. It would never have worked in the old days, but now it wasn't so easy to light up an entire town, even with streetlights. We just couldn’t afford to waste the power, or, for that matter, create a glow that would be seen for miles in the dark. The odds were good that that would have led the Warriors right towards us. (It probably didn’t matter, as they seemed to know everything anyway, but it sounded better than not having the power to run the lights.) They’d already located and studied their targets and, moving quickly, attacked the armoury and the main police station, followed rapidly by the Town Hall. The first place they hit, the armoury, was lightly guarded – another display of complacency and a far less forgivable one – and they dispatched the guards with ease. By the time the first body was found, and the alarm raised, they had armed themselves and started the second part of their plan. They spread out and started to dismantle the inner centre of Summersville, piece by piece. The Mayor and the remainder of the town’s governors died in the first hour of their offensive.
By then, of course, everyone knew what was going on…but it was too late. The population might have had guns – lots of guns – but they were scattered, a hopelessly unformed mass rather than competent and disciplined soldiers. The guards at the barricades were concentrated and ready to act, but as the shooting spread through the town, they were attacked themselves…from the outside. The Warriors had timed their assault well and, just as their insurgents launched their offensive on the inside, the army outside launched its own offensive. They'd managed to get very – very – close without being seen and the defenders found themselves caught between two fires. The defences started to crumble as they found themselves being forced back.
It might still have gone the other way, were it not for the remaining insurgents, who took explosives and stolen uniforms – taken off the killed guards from their first targets – and went to ‘help’ the defenders. In all the confusion, no one took a close look at the newcomers until it was too late and by then…well, it was far too late. The fanatics threw explosive charges into bunkers, touched off mines prematurely and generally wrecked an entire section of defences. The army came through the breech and…well, Katie bar the door. It almost reminded me of a poem.
“Be mindful of this when you kiss yours goodnight,
“Beware of the danger that lies in plain sight.”
I still can’t remember where I first heard those lines.
The remaining defences just crumbled. No one in the town had seriously expected to have to fight off an armed invasion in such a manner and all of the people who should have been in authority were dead or missing. The Warriors charged into the town, shouting for the defenders to lay down their arms and surrender, promising good treatment to everyone who surrendered quickly enough to suit them. They made a fearsome sight, illuminated by burning buildings and seemingly unstoppable; far too many people, in my view, surrendered to them. The Warriors were surprisingly gentle, at first, ordering men and women back to their homes while they secured the entire town. Some of the defenders, those on the other side of the town, realised that all was lost and slipped away into the darkness, others came forward and tried to hide among the civilians, preparing for a later insurrection against the new masters of Summersville. The fighting ended, roughly, three hours after the first insurgent attack in the centre of Summersville.
The peace of the morning (hah) was broken by the arrival of the senior leadership of the Warriors of the Lord, a group of the Prophet’s most trusted, faithful and long-serving followers. (The Warriors, like so many other such groups, operated a seniority system. Those who had served the Prophet from before the War, those who had believed in him before Armageddon, had high status within the group.) They must have been a fearsome sight to nervous townspeople, those who watched them from behind drawn curtains, perhaps cursing their decision not to flee into the darkness. The uneasy peace was broken by an announcement through a loudspeaker, calling every citizen to come forth on pain of death. Slowly, one by one, they emerged and were pushed and prodded into an open area.
They were forced to watch, helplessly, as the Warriors searched their homes. They were no less brutal than the SS, or the Religious Police of a dozen states we used to call our allies, and they made a terrible mess out of nice clean homes. They hunted, in particular for food, weapons and anything else that might be useful. They confiscated every weapon they found, disarming as much of the population as possible, and collected all the food in a set of warehouses in the centre of town. The former made resistance m
uch – much – harder. The latter made controlling the townspeople much easier. A half-starved populace, as they had discovered over the last few months, would be much easier to brainwash into accepting the Warrior creed. Once the searches were over, the real horrors began.
The Warriors went through their prisoners carefully. Every black man and woman – including the escapees, who had fought desperately against being recaptured – was separated from the remainder, along with a smaller number of men and women from different, non-white races. I don’t know why the Warriors had developed such a hatred for non-whites, frankly; they seemed almost to have taken lessons from the Ku Klux Klan. The prisoners were stripped naked, chained up, and marched out of town. We later found out that they had been forced to perform brute labour under fire.
They then separated out a handful of others. They took every religious personage in the town – including a Catholic priest and a Muslim Imam, of all things – and shot them in front of the crowd, who were then forced to listen to a haranguing speech on the evils of all other religions, with special attention being reserved for the Pope in Rome – now a radioactive crater – and the Muslims. A handful of people disputed with them and were shot down like dogs. A Baptist Priest died bravely under their fire. They didn’t spare any of the religious types at all. There would be no faith, but that of the Warriors of the Lord.
The Living Will Envy The Dead Page 27