The Living Will Envy The Dead (6 page)

Wrong.

The city has just been trashed.  Even under the best-case scenario, pretty much the entire civilian government has been totalled.  The hospitals and medical centres have been trashed.  Law and order on the streets is nothing more than a memory.  The doctors, nurses, medical corpsmen, first-aid trained people and suchlike have just been decimated.  They don’t have a single fire; they have fires pretty much everywhere.  The streets have been thoroughly blocked by the wreckage of everything between fallen skyscrapers to incinerated cars.   The firemen have probably lost their fire engines to the heat.  Even if they were protected – and some fire stations are designed to survive such heat – where do they start?  The entire fucking city might as well be on fire!

Back when Mac and I were looking at the emergency plans, we were struck by how much they relied on the Feds, mainly FEMA.  I said at the time that that wouldn’t work out very well in practice and I was right.  You see, a government is
always
a massive bureaucratic entity.  This was true enough of the American Government and goes double for the European Union and tenfold for a communist state.  The more you want from your government, the more power you have to give it, and the more people it has to employ to try to give you what you want.  In this case, New York needs help, but New York is one of many places that need help desperately.  The sheer scale of the disaster would be disastrous – hah – even if the federal government has been intact and New York had been the only place hit.  The Final War saw plenty of cities hit, along with military bases and industrial plants.  There would be no help for New York.  The Federal Government, to all intents and purposes, no longer existed.

The President was dead.  The Vice President was dead.  The Speaker of the House was dead.  Congress was pretty much dead…although the Russians probably did us a favour there.  The military had been decimated.  Most of the best units had been in Europe and had been hammered during the early stages of the exchange.  The contingency plans should have been implemented at once, but the people who were supposed to be implementing them were dead, or disabled, or out of contact.  The cities and their thousands of suffering inhabitants were on their own.

And believe me, they were really in trouble.  The population could be divided into four categories; dead, seriously injured, slightly injured and unharmed.  The dead should have been buried at once, but there was hardly any time to do that, even if the resources and personnel had existed.  Their bodies started to decompose and spread diseases.  The seriously injured weren't much better off.  They couldn’t move, couldn’t help themselves and couldn’t help others.  They pretty much died off within the next few days.  The lightly injured counted themselves lucky, at first, but the truth was that they were in serious danger themselves.  Without proper medical care, wounds became infected and grew life threatening.  Broken bones that would have meant a day or two in hospital and a few months in casts suddenly became crippling.  The uninjured did what they could, at first, but they were overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the disaster.  It was beyond any comprehension.

And society was beginning to break down.  Society works the way it does because it is bound together by a common agreement on the rules.  That’s pretty much why social trust is lower when there are large unassimilated masses of immigrants; the immigrants didn’t share the same rules.  The shock of the nuclear attack broke down entire sections of American society, knocking us down to bedrock.  Me and mine first became the rallying call for thousands of survivors, forgetting anything as simple as common decency in their desperate struggle for survival.  Old conventions were breaking everywhere.  Ordinary law-abiding citizens scavenged for what they needed to survive, while defending their own families with deadly force, keeping out anyone who wasn’t
them
.  Street gangs indulged in orgies of looting, searching for their own supplies, while thousands died in the streets and the city burned down around them.  It was hell on Earth.

They ask me, now, why the Army didn’t put a stop to it.  The theory is simple enough; shoot a few dozen looters and the rest will get the idea.  The truth was that the Army was scattered and broken, smashed down to individual units, while the Police were largely killed by the bombs, or facing their own private hells.  What’s the difference between an army and an armed mob?  Answer; the army is disciplined, but the armed mob is not.  They just didn’t have the active manpower to stop the chaos in anywhere, but a handful of places.  The remainder were allowed to slip into hell.  They had no choice.  What else could they have done?  There was no longer anyone governing the entire country.

Not everywhere fell into hell.  Texas got lucky; they had a capable and intelligent Governor who managed to preserve enough of the National Guard to maintain some semblance of order in Austin.  San Francisco went the other way.  Their Mayor was a Badger – a term I’ll introduce to you later – who was lynched.  I guess he didn’t realise that the laws of the land had been replaced with the law of the jungle.  Canada lost a pair of cities, but the vast majority of the land was untouched by the nukes, while Portland had a former history professor who somehow – don’t ask me how – managed to hold part of society together.  It probably helped that Portland wasn't targeted specifically by the Russians and suffered barely any damage at all, in the short term.  There are all kinds of strange stories about the exchange and its aftermath, including some that are flat-out unbelievable…

But that’s not important at the moment.  The modern city holds far – far – more people than it can hope to feed.  Even with a good half of the population dead, the cities still needed food brought in from outside…and it wasn't coming.  The road, rail and air links had been destroyed.  There was very little left in the cities after the bombs, fires and looting, although some people managed to survive for quite some time on stored food, even including pet food.  I know it sounds disgusting – hell, it
is
disgusting – but it was a choice between that or starving.  Some people managed to locate stores of food for supermarkets that had survived while waiting to go on the shelves and ended up lords of the ruined cities.  We encountered several of those gangs later.  They were nasty bastards.  Most people shouldn’t have power for their own good.  The experience destroyed them.

And yes, some people resorted to cannibalism.  We prefer to forget that detail.

And, sooner or later, people realised that the only place to find food lay outside the cities, which were rapidly becoming death zones.  (More on them later.)  People had been trying to leave the city since the first alerts were sounded – we ended up, later, calling some of the interstates Highways of Death, because of all the burned cars – but now it was almost all of the survivors.  The thousands who could still walk, or had a car that had somehow survived the blasts and the resulting chaos, leaving the cities that had housed them for their entire lives.  They started to swarm out like locusts, towards the countryside towns and farms…

Towards Ingalls, towards us…

Oh, shit.

I personally have always voted for the death penalty because I believe that people who go out prepared to take the lives of other people forfeit their own right to live. I believe that that death penalty should be used only very rarely, but I believe that no-one should go out certain that no matter how cruel, how vicious, how hideous their murder, they themselves will not suffer the death penalty.

-Margaret Thatcher

I spent the drive up towards the prison thinking hard, relying on my escorts to watch out for trouble.  I wasn’t expecting it, yet, but it wouldn’t be long before the areas between towns and cities became as dangerous as the Iraqi supply lines had become in the first years of the occupation.  This is America.  Hundreds of thousands of people had guns and they would be becoming desperate.  We were desperate and we were inside a town, with a large proportion of military veterans…and others wouldn’t have that consolation.  They might come to us for help, or they might devolve into bandits.

It sounds pessimistic, I know, but people can change terrifyingly quickly when under any kind of pressure.  I’d seen some of the more classified projections and I’d seen it in action in Iraq.  Society would fall apart remarkably quickly as ‘me and mine first’ became the dominant rule, as if it had never always been the dominant rule.  Americans, particularly city-dwellers, had been insulated from that particularly truth of the universe, but they’d learn it again in a hurry.

You see, society works by mutual agreement on the rules.  You grow up under your parents’ care, go to school and get educated, graduate and get a job, which pays you money that you can use to feed yourself.  The value of money was soon going to go down sharply; money is only useful as long as people accept it.  There’s a great deal of theory behind it that I won’t bore you with, but suffice it to say that people would prefer food to money.  You can’t eat money.  Your weight in gold, which really isn’t that much, would be worth less than your weight in canned goods.  The invisible glue that binds society together would have been melted by the nukes.  The result would be complete chaos.

I tensed slightly as the SUV turned off the road and started to head up towards the prison, my escorts clutching their weapons as if they expected to be ambushed at any moment.  This was the scenario we’d practiced back when the Jail Posse was first set up, back when the prison had been built, and they were taken refuge in what they knew.  I couldn’t blame them for that, even though I hoped that we wouldn’t have to shoot our way into the jail.  If we needed to fight, I didn’t have enough men with me.

The Stonewall West Virginia Maximum Security Prison had been a political hot potato ever since some bright spark in the government decided it had to be built.  There were too many prisoners that it would be political suicide to release, or to inject with something nicely lethal, and the jails we had were overcrowded.  They decided that a new prison was required and, after a political dogfight, settled on a place near Ingalls.  We – the locals – didn’t like the idea.  We didn’t want to be so close to known murderers, child molesters, rapists and other scum of the Earth, even though the jail was supposed to be secure.  I knew from my experience, as did the other vets, that there was no such thing.  Any jail can suffer an escape if the guards make a single mistake.

And so we’d formed the Jail Posse.  If there were an escape, the Posse would guard Ingalls and hunt down the escaped prisoners as soon as possible.  It was something I’d been dreading, even though I knew that it was going to be necessary; if the Posse accidentally killed one of the escaped prisoners, there was going to be an almighty row over it.  It would be made out like an attack from Judge Lynch, not self-defence or even a legitimate shooting, and Ingalls would suffer.  It hadn’t kept others awake at night.  They would sooner shoot a known child molester than risk letting the bastard at one of their kids.  At bottom, so would I.

“It looks intact, Sheriff,” Brent Roeder said, as we drove up towards the walls.  The watchtowers surrounding the prison were definitely manned, much to my relief, while the walls remained intact.  I’d been fearing that somehow they would have been breached.  The last thing we needed was a mass jailbreak.  “Where do you want us to park?”

I had to laugh.  Brent was one of the toughest sons of bitches I’d met.  He was built like a lineman, with a brown buzz cut, and looked rather more fearsome than I did, even with the uniform.  He’d been a soldier before he'd quit the Army – and no, I didn’t know why at the time – and was one of the foremost shots in the country.  As you can imagine, he was up against some pretty stiff competition.

“You and I will go into the gates,” I said, calmly.  It was still possible that the prisoners had taken over the jail, but it was looking less and less likely by the minute.  “The remainder of the Posse will wait here.”

The gates of the prison had been designed to look intimidating as hell, although I’d seen more intimidating sights while on deployment.  There was only one guard at the gate, a serious breach of security, but he called the Guard Captain and waved us through into the forecourt.  I was already regretting leaving the Posse outside.  Something was clearly very wrong here.  I might even have miscalculated…

“Sheriff,” a relieved voice said.  I turned to see Captain Richard Hartman as he popped out of the main prison block and waved to me.  “God, am I glad to see you.”

“I’m glad to see you too,” I said, neutrally.  Don’t get me wrong; Richard was a good man, but there had been a great deal of friction between us.  I had focused on the possibilities of a prisoner escape, as was my duty, and he had regarded that as a vote of no confidence.  I couldn’t blame him for that, but I didn’t have the time or the patience to deal with injured egos.  “What’s going on here?”

He led us into his office, a bare cubicle illuminated by a flickering light – the prison had its own generator, something else that might come in handy in the very near future – and poured himself a large scotch.  I declined it when he offered me the bottle and I was relieved to see that Brent made the same decision.  I didn’t know what was going on, but getting drunk wouldn’t help anything, not now.  I needed all my wits about me.