The Living Will Envy The Dead

by Nuttall, Christopher

  “I guess he thought that he had no stake in society,” I said, and looked over at Jackson. “I trust that the spies are watching him now?”

  Jackson nodded. We’d deputised a handful of other people in the early days after the war, just so that we could try to keep a lid on any panic or unrest before it turned violent. Some of them hadn’t really come into the spotlight – they hadn’t been needed, after all – but they were now serving a useful role by keeping a close eye on Schneider. He had been asked to take the next batch of intelligence to the warriors, so I’d make sure that the intelligence they got was…rather untrustworthy.

  Jackson raised a point that had been floating about in my mind. “Can we trust him not to betray us to the Warriors when we meets them?” He asked. “It’s not as if we can risk having one of the skirmish groups ‘accidentally’ stumble over them while he’s passing on the information.”

  “I think we can trust him that far,” I said, slowly. We had his wife, after all, and she would not be allowed out of the town. She might not even have known about her husband’s betrayal. I had a suspicion that Schneider might seriously consider leaving her behind if we made the threat more overt – I wouldn’t have slept with Mrs Schneider if she’d paid me to do it – and in any case, life without her would be delightful for the bastard. We would just have to hope that he was too scared of us not to consider defying my orders.

  “Nothing in war is certain,” Mac said, before Jackson could pick away at my statement and realise how weak it was. “We know from the reports from Biggles and the skirmish lines that the Warriors are on the march and will be here soon enough, within the next few days at most. Now they’ve started to fire on Biggles whenever they see him…”

  I nodded. One of the chemists had had the bright idea of mixing up some napalm and dropping it on any large batches of Warriors. The first two explosions had been dramatic and very effective, as had the raid on what was obviously a Warrior staging post, but then the Warriors had started to fire on Biggles every time they saw him in the air. The aircraft had been damaged several times when stray bullets had passed through the fuselage and I had forbidden Biggles from taking any other risks. We couldn’t afford to lose the only aircraft we had to damage, even if Biggles managed to fly back home instead of coming down in flames.

  “That brings us around to the evacuation plans,” Walter said, firmly. “Do we really have to start moving the wounded and children now?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, equally firmly. “We cannot afford to keep them in the town much longer, or they’ll be trapped here when the Warriors surround us and lay siege to the town. I’d be happier with the women out of the way as well, but they’re going to be needed if the Warriors break through the defence lines. I’ve rotated as many of them to Stonewall as I can and pulled out some of the male guards, but that has its own risks.”

  “Yeah,” Jackson agreed. “The prisoners might break out and stab us in the back.”

  “I’ve left orders for Richard,” I said. “When the Warriors get a day or two closer – you never know, the skirmishers might hold them up for a week – the prisoners will be returned to their cells and placed firmly into lockdown until the end of the battle, whatever happens to the town. I imagine that if we lose, the Warriors will go after Stonewall and try to crack its defences…”

  “How many of the bastards are there?” Walter asked. “They’re throwing away their own lives as if they were nothing, not even to them.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, sourly. Our captive, Daniel, hadn’t been able to shed much light on that, even though the first thing I would have wanted to know about a force under my command would have been how many men it actually had. His answers had been vague, although judging by his remarks, I estimated several hundred thousand at most. The more hyperbolic statements I dismissed. The Warriors couldn’t have over a million at most…and even that was extreme. They certainly couldn’t have ten billion under their banner. There hadn’t been ten billion people on Earth before the Final War, let alone after it. “If they don’t change tactics, we have the perfect opportunity to batter them into a bloody bleeding mass and crush them utterly.”

  “Or we could retreat,” Walter said. “There are folks who want to do that and just leave the town.”

  “Traitors,” Mac hissed. “They should be arrested and publicly humiliated for wanting to surrender to the bastards. Haven’t they heard the reports out of Summerville?”

  I shook my head. “Walter, I doubt that they meant a word of their offer to let us leave,” I said. “Even if they did mean it, we would be alone and isolated in a very hostile world, without even the shelter of the Principle Towns. If they came after us – and they must, because we bear the contagious disease of freedom – they’d wipe us out completely, taking the women and children as their slaves.”

  “I know,” Walter said. “Ed, I’m not the one you have to convince.”

  “Yeah,” I said. The Constitutional Convention had dispersed yesterday, but not without voting a resolution to carry on the war against the Warriors of the Lord until they were utterly crushed, deeming them to be completely incompatible with the American traditions of freedom, democracy and justice for all. It was a refreshing change from the hand-wringing of various pre-war presidencies, but even so, a victorious war could prove almost as disastrous as a lost war. The victor in the war might wonder just what he’d won when their numbers had been reduced so sharply. “I know.”

  Walter yawned suddenly and several others followed him. “I think it’s time we all got some sleep,” he said, standing up and brushing down his suit. It wasn't very practical garb for the town – not least because he was wearing an enormous pistol at his belt – but he’d refused to trade it for something more durable, apparently under the theory that a Mayor should wear a suit at all times. “Everything will look better in the morning…”

  I rather doubted it – we couldn’t run any aerial reconnaissance in the darkness, which meant that the Warriors would probably be advancing their forward scouts closer to the gates – but he was right, we all needed some rest. He chased us all out of the Town Hall, ordered the guards to ensure that none of the government members got back in until morning, and headed off to his own house at a swift trot. I smiled, waved Mac goodbye, and started to walk back towards my own house. I would have been happier with something smaller, but it had once belonged to a man from the city who’d never made it out of New York alive – or at least he hadn’t made it to Ingalls – and Walter had claimed that it would remind me of home. I wasn't sure that that was a good thing, but the only memento of New York that was actually present was an image of the falling Twin Towers, draped in black. The inscription underneath said NEVER FORGET. I almost choked up every time I looked at it, not because of the reminder of 9/11 – I’d been a teenager at the time – but because of how we’d seen it, before the Final War. We’d acted as if we’d been beaten half to death. Now…

  Now, America was in ruins, along with most of the rest of the world. I knew enough about the missile targeting plans to have a fair guess at what had happened to the Russians…and I knew enough about the Russian weapons to have a fair guess at what had happened to Europe. My most optimistic estimate, at the time, was that the Northern Hemisphere was almost completely in ruins, while the Southern Hemisphere might well have survived intact. Would we end up with a world dominated by China and Brazil? It was bitterly ironic, but perhaps they’d do a better job of it.

  “Welcome home,” Rose said, from the darkness of the bed. I smiled as I saw her limbs in the semi-darkness. She was a very pale woman, but she had been looking much healthier lately, even though she had been running additional courses for the girls she taught. The news of how the Warriors treated women had fired her determination to ensure that men and women strode into the brave new world together, rather than one being firmly subordinate to the other. “We need to talk.”

  “We do?” I asked, through a yawn. I wanted to go to bed
and yes, get some sleep. I probably couldn’t have performed if three teenage nymphomaniacs had danced in, completely naked, and started to go to work on me. “What about…?”

  “Light the light,” Rose ordered, and I obeyed. Now that we had a regular system of coal mining established – coal harvesting, in some places – we had a regular supply of electricity, although not of electric lights. Once we ran out of supplies in town, and those that we could scavenge, we would have to fall back on what we made ourselves. It would be a long time before we took such luxuries as electric lights for granted. “Ed, have a seat.”

  I frowned, but sat down on the end of the bed, watching her as she sat up. It was a very distracting sight. Rose might not have had massive breasts, but I had always preferred fit girls to the oversized supermodels…and I could actually hold a conversation with her. Some of the girls I had dated had had literally nothing between their ears, but insecurities and mindless trivia. She was beautiful, in her way, but not everyone would have agreed with me. I trusted her completely.

  Part of my mind told me that I’d made a mistake getting involved with a subordinate, even though we no longer had any real contact with the rest of the United States at the time, but the rest of my mind told me that it had been a great idea. That was, of course, the part of my mind connected to my groin. Legally, it wasn't a crime – it would have been had we been in the Marines together – but it was definitely borderline.

  “Ed,” Rose said. She sounded oddly nervous. I’d never heard her be nervous since her first year on the job. Her confidence had built up rapidly after the first pair of arrests, although Ingalls wasn't anything like a bad as some of the inner cities. “Do you remember what we’ve been doing for the last three months?”

  “Of course,” I said. My cock was stirring at the thought. We’d both had bouts of sexual frustration and the outcome had been predicable. We’d fucked in almost every way possible and some I had believed to be physically impossible. “We were having fun, all the time.”

  “Yes,” Rose said. She hesitated long enough for me to guess what she was about to say. “Ed, I’m pregnant.”

  My heart skipped a beat. “You’re sure?” I asked, when I could breathe again. “You’re not having a false pregnancy?”

  Rose gave me a look she’d learned from Deborah, a ‘don’t try that with me son’ look.

  “I’m sure,” she said. “My…ah, period was late by about three weeks, so…” She blushed. “Pretty much every girl in Ingalls has had irregular periods since the war, so I didn’t think much of it at first, but three weeks was a little extreme and so I went to Kit and asked him to do a few tests. He confirmed that I was pregnant, Ed, and that I was actually a month and a half along.”

  I blinked. “But wouldn’t you have missed two periods?”

  “I guess that it happened just after the end of my last period,” Rose said. She paused for a moment to think. “That would have been the day when we managed to get the plasma arc system set up and everyone wanted to celebrate. We got a little drunk, and then came back here and had our own celebration. I would have liked it to be that day, although there’s no way to know for sure…”

  I nodded. The complete absence of contraception had ensured that pregnancy was a likely event for every sexually-active girl in Ingalls, or the remainder of the Principle Towns. It was likely to happen for the girls the Warriors held captive as well, although their fate would be far worse. Any girls they bore would wind up in sexual slavery, while any boys would end up being brainwashed into becoming Warriors. If you started to teach a child nonsense early enough, that child would grow up believing that nonsense, unable to make the kind of mental leaps that would offer freedom to the rest of the world. They would be locked, forever, into mental double-think.

  “Ed, I’m pregnant,” Rose said, again. “What are we going to do?”

  “That’s wonderful news,” I said, finally. The shock had numbed me, even though I had considered the possibility. I had wanted to have kids of my own; hell, my kids would have a father who was always in their lives. “Rose, that’s wonderful!”

  She stared at me. “And what if I give birth to a monster?”

  I hesitated. “Rose, there have only been seven monsters in all,” I said. “A third of pregnancies have miscarried fairly early on, but the remaining pregnancies seem to be fine. They should give birth to perfectly normal healthy children.”

  “Kit didn’t know there was anything odd about the first monster until she gave birth,” Rose said. “What if…”

  I reached forward and placed my hand around her shoulders. It was a warm room, but she was shaking uncontrollably. “And even if I do give birth to a normal child, what happens to her if the Warriors win the war?”

  It was, I decided, a logical fear, although I doubted that either of us would survive if the Warriors won the war. Rose still commanded the female militia – the Monstrous Regiment, as some of us called it – and the Warriors wouldn’t suffer her to live.

  I didn’t say that to her. I’m not always a cold-blooded bastard.

  “Rose,” I said, slowly, “will you marry me?”

  Rose stared at me. “Everyone is going to say that we got married because you got me pregnant,” she said. “I won’t have any respect left in the community.”

  “Fuck them,” I said, angrily. I could hardly care less about what Mrs Grundy thought. Besides, there had been several other weddings under the same circumstances. A handful of older women had objected to them, only to be faced down by the rest of the community. “Rose, I love you. Please marry me.”

  “I will,” Rose said. She pulled me to her. “I think you’d better make it quick, though. I’m not going to be a dishonest woman any longer.”

  I laughed.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Outsiders often criticize the extreme commitment of group members. But what is really happening is that leader and followers are conspiring to realize a vision that is falsified daily. For the cult is not paradise, and the leader is not God. Hence the follower is embattled; to squarely confront the many failings of the leader and the group is to call into question one's own great work. Only by daily recommitting himself can the follower continue to work toward his ultimate goal. Each follower works out a secret compromise, acknowledging some things while denying or distorting others. Clearly this is a high-risk strategy that may go awry.

  -Dr. Len Oakes

  “So, how does it feel to be married?”

  “Shut up,” I said, not unkindly. Mac laughed, utterly uncrushed. The wedding had been a quick one, made quicker by the fact that neither of us had any family in Ingalls. Mac had agreed to serve as the Best Man and had offered, mischievously, to give the bride away as well. Rose had shaken her head and asked Jackson to serve as a stand-in for her father, who was presumed dead somewhere in the wilderness. “It feels great, thank you. You should give it a try sometime.”

  “Once she gets pregnant, then I suppose I will have no choice,” Mac said, agreeably. “Is there any sign of that bastard?”

  I shook my head, peering off into the distance. Schneider had taken the falsified papers I’d given him and headed off towards where his Warrior contacts were waiting for him. I knew that they were close by. Their entire army had finally pushed its way through the skirmishers and taken up position barely five kilometres away. Biggles had tried to bomb their camp with napalm, only to be driven away by machine gun fire from the ground. He’d been very lucky; they’d also expended a Stinger missile – or something – on his aircraft, which he had narrowly managed to evade. It was proof that the Warriors had built up a formidable stockpile of weapons before the war, or that they’d raided an armoury somewhere. It was probably the latter. Daniel had been delighted to boast of how many weapons the Warriors of the Lord possessed and how little chance we had against them.

  “Fuck all,” I said, reluctantly. The odds were very good that Schneider had simply defected to them completely, or that they’d killed him
and dumped his body somewhere. I would have bet on the latter. The Warriors of the Lord probably wouldn’t have any further use for him. We’d lost a few scavengers before, mainly to bandits or rabid dogs, and under normal circumstances, we wouldn’t think much of losing Schneider. He hadn’t been the most popular of people even before we’d discovered that he’d been betraying us. “As long as they believed the plans…”

  “We’d better hope that they just killed him,” Mac agreed, grimly. A defecting Schneider could have told them that the plans were faked. I was hoping that the Warriors would attack, relying on the plans, but I did have contingency plans to handle an attack from other directions as well. “Did you get Richard briefed on his side of the operation?”