The Living Will Envy The Dead

by Nuttall, Christopher

  And then the Indians got into the game. They’d made a secret agreement with us that we would provide security for the Pakistani nukes, in exchange for not shooting the shit out of Pakistan after numerous terrorist attacks. They panicked and started rattling the sabre at Pakistan. The Pakistanis panicked in turn and rushed to full alert. Some idiot fired a missile – records aren’t clear on who and it hardly matters now – and both sides opened up with everything they had. Pakistan was devastated from end to end, blown right back into a nasty radioactive stone age. Mac, who served in Afghanistan, says that they probably didn’t notice. I thought that that was a sick joke. India got off lightly, compared to Pakistan, but they lost several cities and plenty of good army units under mushroom clouds. The entire country came apart at the seams when radioactivity entered the Ganges. The poor and dispossessed were spreading disease everywhere. I think they lost two thirds of their population in the first year after the war.

  I think the only people who got off lightly were the Australians. They didn’t get nuked directly. I'm not sure why; maybe the Russians simply didn’t care enough to target them, or maybe we knocked out their Australia-targeted missiles before they were fired. There’s no way to know their reasoning now, unless we find some charred documents in the ruins of the Kremlin, but it hardly matters. Australia was an oasis of civilisation in a desert of fire and suffering. South America came out of the war all right, apart from Argentina and Venezuela. Venezuela decided to get involved in the war and did plenty of sabre-rattling, just enough to panic the President, who ordered them nuked. By this point, they were tossing them around as if they were firecrackers. The Argentineans tried to make another move on the Falklands and the British struck them, hard. They ended up being assimilated into Brazil. So did the Falklands.

  And that, in short, was the story of the Final War. I don’t know what happened to the President. I’ve heard hundreds of different stories; some say that he remained at the White House until the end, others say that Air Force One was blown out of the air by Russian nukes, or even jet fighters, as impossible as that would seem, or perhaps something even worse. I don’t know and I don’t care. We haven’t had a great President since Reagan.

  I just hope that the bastard is frying in hell.

  Chapter Three

  There was a turtle by the name of Bert

  And Bert the turtle was very alert;

  When danger threatened him he never got hurt,

  He knew just what to do...

  -Duck and Cover (US Civil Defence Film, 1951)

  If you think that the above sounds stupid, you’re partly correct. More on that later.

  “Ed,” Mac said, “the Mayor is dead.”

  I wasn’t entirely surprised. The Mayor of Ingalls, elected by his citizens, had made the fatal mistake of sending his family away from home to visit friends in Washington, which we had heard, an hour ago, had been hit by a nuclear weapon. Or perhaps two or three weapons. What was left of the Internet wasn't being as helpful as we had hoped, while the Emergency Broadcast System seemed to have collapsed completely. I wasn’t entirely surprised about that either. They always left out the fucking emergency when they ran the drills.

  “It was definitely suicide,” Mac continued, when I showed no signs of interest. New York had been hit, perhaps badly. My family might have been killed. My sister had married a soldier and gone to live in the countryside somewhere, so she might be alive, but what about the rest of them? What about Uncle Billy? “We found a pistol in his hand and…”

  “Tag and bag the body,” I said, automatically. For only the second time in my life, since becoming an adult, I had the feeling that events were slipping out of control. The first time, back during the early insurgency in Iraq, hadn’t been as bad as this, not when cities seemed to be burning everywhere. I felt numb, cold and dead inside. It hadn’t caught up with me yet. “I take it we’ve heard nothing from FEMA?”

  Mac shook his head glumly. We were occupying the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s official Command Post, situated under the local library, a massive building that wouldn’t have been out of place in a city. Mac’s family had gifted it to Ingalls, probably as a tax write-off, and their reading tastes dictated a lot of the volumes on the shelves. He’d told me that he’d taken shameless advantage of it when he’d been growing up, with the net result that thrillers, fantasy and right-wing power books competed uneasily for shelving. They also had a fairly good history section. I’d been in colleges that were less well supplied.

  “No,” he said. For a moment, he seemed to wilt. “Ed, what are we going to do?”

  I said nothing, thinking hard. Normally, we would have had the FEMA Director here to tell us what to do – or at least try to tell us what to do. As the local sheriff, and a former Marine with real combat experience, I had had a tendency to take over as much as possible, partly because I didn’t trust the Director. He might have had a fancy degree in Crisis Management – whatever that meant – but a single word of complaint from Ingalls could have ruined him. Predictably, he hadn’t even tried to take the lead on the handful of exercises we had run.

  And we were in real trouble. I knew that from the start. The satellites were going down – either through EMP or Russian ASAT weapons – and we’d lost most of our landlines to various federal facilities. I should have been able to pick up the phone and call a dozen bases, but they were all offline. I wanted to believe that the phone network, as hardened and attack-proof as it was supposed to be, had been disabled somehow, but I couldn’t allow myself to take refuge in fantasy. The odds were very good that the bases had been hit and destroyed.

  Fallout, I thought suddenly, recalling all of the war plans I had seen back when Mac and I had been ‘advising’ the planners. Fallout, refugees, panic, food riots…shit.

  I looked up at him. He was lucky, I reflected, in a moment of jealous amusement. His family and girlfriend were all within the general area surrounding Ingalls. They hadn’t been nuked, or we would have seen the blast; hell, it might well have been the last thing we’d seen before being blown to smithereens. My family was in New York…and at the moment, they might as well be on the other side of the Moon. The predictions for even a limited nuclear war – and we’d also learned that when one missile flew, the odds were good that they would all fly – were hellish. We were going to go through hell.

  “Mac,” I said, quietly, “we’re on our own.”

  He didn’t bother to dispute it. He knew the projections as well as I did. “Yes,” he said. He leaned closer to me. I could smell the cigarette smoke on his breath. “Ed, you’re the sheriff. At the moment, you’re pretty much the boss. What do you want done?”

  I winced. Mac had only been passing through Ingalls when the war started, restlessly wandering around the countryside. I think he missed being a soldier more than I did, even though he was on the reserve list, and he volunteered for anything that even smacked of soldiering. It might have been my idea to have the Jail Posse, but it was Mac who was the ‘unit’s’ nominal commander and supervisor. The thought of the Jail Posse reminded me of something else, something I had been avoiding thinking about.

  “We implement the GOTH plan,” I said, with more confidence than I felt. The GOTH plan – the Go TO Hell plan – had been something that I had designed in my head, but never really committed to paper. I hadn’t wanted to worry people in the town by considering apocalyptic disaster, even though I’d been taught to consider every possible location in terms of how it could serve war. Ingalls wasn't too badly placed to be defended…and God knew we were going to need it. “Mac, call the deputies and get them to call out the Jail Posse, and the National Guardsmen. We’re going to need them.”

  I scowled as Mac leapt to obey. Ingalls, like many small towns, had a National Guard Armoury and a Company of National Guardsmen. They’d been placed on alert, but several of them had been called out of the town and sent to Europe. There were fifty of them left, if I recalled correctly, mostly the comb
at support sections. They might have made riflemen, but they were mainly REMFs. Some of the veterans in the town were reservists and could be called up for service, or as part of the Jail Posse, but all of them were in their homes. The Federal Government, before the communications links had collapsed completely, had ordered a general curfew all over America – I think they were losing touch with reality at that point – and most people in Ingalls were obeying. It was a quiet law-abiding town, most of the time, although I think the real reason was because people were scared of fallout. The panic would start tomorrow. I was morbidly certain of it.

  The ground shook faintly. I was pretty sure that that was a nuke. I’d gone to the roof of the library and peered east, but all I’d seen had been a handful of flashes of light in the distance. The sky had been glowing, as if the world beyond the horizon was a burning wall of flame, but the Geiger counters had barely buzzed. There wasn't time for the fallout to make its way to Ingalls. Not yet. I took one final look at the dead communications set, wondering if it would ever work again, and walked up the stairs into the lobby. It would not have been out of place in Buckingham Palace. Mac’s family have many virtues, but good taste is not one of them.

  My deputies snapped to attention as I entered. It’s hard to keep good people in a small town like Ingalls. Most of them serve with us for a short period, and then head off to the big city, where promotion comes faster. I might have stepped into the shoes of the last sheriff, who had been caught with his hand in the till, but I’d already decided that Ingalls was my home. They wanted to see the lights and excitement of the bigger cities. Personally, I thought they were mad, but what did I know.

  “All right, we’re in serious shit,” I said, without preamble. It had been too long since we’d held any kind of real drill…and the last one we’d held had been thoroughly fucked up by FEMA. Not intentionally, I think, but once again…they forgot the emergency. “The Mayor is dead” – I saw their faces slump and winced internally – “and we have no communication with the Feds. We’re on our own.”

  Their faces were a study in contrasts. Deputy Rose Wilder, my second in command, looked pale. She’d only stayed as long as she had in Ingalls because I had requested it and she felt bound to me. It wasn't a sexual thing, but something between two people who had shared danger together. Deputy Jason Robertson and Deputy Andrew McClellan, both young men who had been intending to move on in the fall, looked excited. They hadn’t grasped the truth yet. Deputy Jackson King, a massive black man with a surprisingly gentle touch, looked ghastly. He’d grown up in Atlanta, and Atlanta was on the list of cities that had been confirmed destroyed. And Deputy Deborah Ivey…

  She looked as she always looked, a woman old enough to be a grandmother and yet always calm and composed. She’d been a Deputy for over fifteen years, and had yet never sought the position of sheriff. I hadn’t understood why at first – in my experience, someone will always be promoted unless there is something seriously wrong with them – but Deborah simply liked to help people. She was a surprisingly fearsome opponent as well. There were few people in the town who would seriously consider crossing her. Everyone pretty much worshipped her.

  “We have a lot to do and not much time to do it in,” I continued. I unrolled the map and laid it out on the ground. “Jackson, Jason and Andrew, I’m going to need you to take command of the Jail Posse, once its formed. You will each take a section and take them here, here and here.”

  I pointed down to three locations on the map. Ingalls sits inside a fertile hollow – well, I thought of it as a valley, but the locals insisted - and there were only three points that would allow easy access to the town. There was nothing stopping someone walking through the fields, or slipping through at night, but I had other ways to deal with that. Most refugees would come up the road, the path of least resistance, and they would have to be stopped. Ingalls might be able to survive if we guarded it properly, but if we took in all of the refugees, they’d eat us out of house and home.

  “I’m giving Mac overall command of those sections,” I added. I expected dissent – Mac wasn't a Deputy, after all, even though I had tried to talk him into it – but there was none. “Your task is to set up blockades to prevent access to the town and then guard the blockades.” That, at least, was basic military common sense. A defence that wasn't covered by heavily armed guards was little more than an irritant. “Mac will know what to do, but don’t be afraid to use deadly force to stop anyone from entering the town.”

  I paused. “You will prevent anyone from entering who isn’t one of the townspeople, or doesn’t have a useful skill,” I continued. This was going to shock some of them, although both Jackson and Deborah were nodding in understanding. “Mac will determine what counts as a useful skill; anyone useful can enter, along with their families. Anyone else, keep them out and use as much firepower as you have to use to enforce it. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, sir,” they said. They were all good kids.

  “Rose, Deborah, you’re going to be guarding the food stores,” I said. Ingalls hadn’t seen much in the way of panic buying, not yet, but tomorrow there would be riots in the streets. If they happened, we were fucked. “Get the store owners involved and get them to defend their properties as well. I’ll assign anyone else I can spare to help you, but like the others, don’t be afraid to use deadly force. We’re going to need those stores.”

  There was another reason why I was keeping Rose, at least, back from where I was very certain was about to become the front line. Rose was a black belt in several martial arts, but she didn’t look that dangerous. She was short and slim, attractive in a way that would have had me lusting after her if I were younger, and I knew what might happen if society started to break down. I’d seen it in Iraq and the inner cities; places where strength was respected above all else. Jackson and Jason looked intimidating. Rose couldn’t scare a mouse unless it had heard of her reputation.

  Mac stuck his head through the door. “Ed, I got the Posse and a couple of hundred others,” he said, dryly. “You’d better get on with swearing them in.”

  I rolled my eyes. If I knew Mac, he'd probably started by getting the Posse, and then asking them to round up several dozen others who were known to be veterans, or excellent shots. The ‘request’ would become an order very quickly. Mac’s family were important enough that almost no one would disobey. I was relieved to see, scanning the crowd of mostly middle-aged men, that he’d left some of the most important people out. I didn’t need to have to send the storekeepers back to their stores.

  “All right,” I said, quickly. “Here is what we’re going to do…”

  The Jail Posse is one of those ‘random voluntary associations’ that you hear so much about on the news, mostly with a subtext of ‘right-wing nuts with a gun fetish’ following, something that always struck me as amusing. The original posse had one hundred members, who included forty Republicans, nineteen Democrats, seventeen people who swore never to vote on the theory that it only encouraged them, four homosexuals, one lesbian, two eco-freaks and a Chess Grandmaster. No, I don’t know what he was doing there either. It was a fairly even cross-section of Ingalls and was completely voluntary. Most of them were veterans. Mac, who’d effectively taken command, insisted on regular shooting practice and was ruthless at kicking out anyone who didn’t come up to scratch. By the time of the Final War, there were two hundred effective members, allowing for some rotation of duty. My best estimate was that if the Posse was actually needed, we were going to have one hundred and fifty effectives at best. Mac had managed to surprise me. The only missing members were ones I knew to be out of town.

  There was surprisingly little dispute or debate. The idea of guarding the town, in effect turning Ingalls into an armed fortress, wasn't what they’d signed up to do, but they’d seen the flashes in the distance and understood the problem. It was the newcomers who were the main problem – they hadn’t actually drilled with the others, although most of them knew one end of a
weapon from the other – but I was sure that Mac and a handful of ex-Sergeants could ride herd on them. Besides, it was Mac’s baby. I wasn't going to get in his way.

  “Section D will remain with me,” I finished. That was thirty armed men, all veterans. I hadn’t chosen them completely at random, but I wasn’t keen on discussing why I had chosen them, not yet. I had already realised what I was going to have to do and…well, call me sentimental if you like, but I didn’t want to involve Mac or the others. “Any questions?”