The Living Will Envy The Dead

by Nuttall, Christopher

  Zechariah fitted right in, at first. He was articulate, personally charming, and, as I said, he had one hell of a message. He won hundreds of converts in the first months of his stay in San Francisco, something that almost overbalanced the entire apple cart. It was a racket and, as he drew more people to him, more of them wanted a share in the proceeds. They argued with each other – and other similar groups – had a schism into smaller groups, and even had the occasional quiet bloodbath. Zechariah was investigated, twice, for illegal activities, but the convictions always fell through. He might have been an offshoot, but the other pre-millennium faiths closed ranks around him. They couldn’t accept anyone trying to dictate to him, or they might be next to have their faiths questioned by the godless Federal Government.

  (The important point to understand about these people is that they were not guided by logic and reason. To be a believer, and not a leader, in one of those faiths required you to accept things that logic and reason told you weren't so. Jesus loved everyone, to take, but one example, but he also apparently made a special exemption for homosexuals.)

  The irony was that when the downfall came, it wasn't through internal dispute or even the government wising up and stamping on the whole fucking lot. The State Government of California was very anti-gun. Heaven forbid that law-abiding citizens should have the means to defend themselves against criminals, murderers and the federal government. Why, they said, without guns, the crime rate in our fair cities would fall like a stone. They cracked down, sent in their police forces to confiscate hundreds of guns…and Zechariah led his core believers away from the city. Their belief that the apocalypse was just around the corner required them to keep their guns – he even worked it into his sermons, claiming that the anti-gun laws were Satan’s plot to disarm the believers and foil his holy mission before he could even begin – and so they travelled east to Kentucky. There, they established their base of operations, using the takings from their sermons to fund it. They built an entire fortress there, with enough food to keep them going for years and enough guns to stand off an army. It was, I believe, a source of some major concern to the feds – well, of course – and they were considering doing something about him, but then…

  The apocalypse arrived.

  It wasn't an asteroid hitting the Earth, or a moment of bad temper on the part of some divine entity, but the nuclear war. You know what happened to us already, along with some other parts of the world, but for Zechariah…it was the Rapture. God had taken the believers – apart from his people, of course – up to heaven and now they had to fight to rebuild God’s country. Sources differ on how many people Zechariah actually had under his direct command – and there’s nothing like a prophecy coming true to add to religious fervour – but he had the largest organised force in the area. As I had demonstrated myself, mass armies no longer existed, but a few hundred men could dominate the entire area, if they were trained and armed for the task. Zechariah had the weapons, he had the food and, rather unfairly, he had the refugees as well.

  We hadn’t been able to take in many refugees. Zechariah had enough food stocks and manpower to take in as many people as he wanted...and brainwash them to his particular cause. Whatever sense of restraint he’d had had vanished – remember, he’d been ‘proved’ right by the war – and he pushed all common decency to one side. The refugees, shocked, starving and in search of somewhere safe, were easy meat. He was a cunning bastard, all right, and a completely ruthless one at that.

  The refugees found themselves split up at once. White men went into one place, women went into another, blacks went into a third and Muslims into a fourth. The white men got the best treatment and the best food, but were treated as the very lowest levels of the faithful and forced to pray endlessly, pushed forward into becoming what he wanted them to become. Why not? Their world had betrayed them and many of them were on the brink of despair. Repetition, tiny amounts of food and endless prayer broke them down and built them back up again. They became fanatical believers.

  The women received different treatment. Their role in Zechariah’s faith, as I said, was that of barefoot and pregnant helpmates to their men. They had to cast their eyes down, never speak to a man without permission and were genuinely treated like dirt. Anyone can be broken if handled properly and Zechariah was a master at manipulating human minds. The handful of declared feminists in the camp who tried to fight back were dragged out and brutally raped in front of the other women. (Rape, too, was permitted in the service of the faith.) Personally, I think that Zechariah was a bit of a misogynist; he’d probably had a bad experience with a female boss or something along the line and, naturally, decided she’d gotten the job because she had sucked her boss’s cock, or because she was a woman, or…people like that never look at themselves for blame. They always look at someone else. Once they were broken, the unmarried women were assigned to the various Brethren of the Elite; after all, a woman had to have a man accountable for her. They believed that no woman could be trusted to look after herself.

  (By this point, I hope you’re feeling rather sick. That’s how I felt. They were a disgrace to my country, people who should have been rounded up and dumped somewhere in the middle of the desert, where the vultures could gnaw their bones.)

  The blacks, men and women alike, were promptly enslaved. I don’t know why Zechariah felt that black men were good only to hew wood and draw water, but he did; they were all enslaved. Resistors received quick and savage punishment. Male resistors were beaten and then killed in front of the rest. Female resistors were beaten and raped violently in front of the other women, all of the women. The resistors ended up being killed off quickly. Most men and women won’t fight unless there seems to be a chance of victory and Zechariah offered them none. They believed that they were trapped and helpless. That very belief kept them enslaved.

  And, finally, the Muslims. They received the worst treatment. Zechariah’s faith had its origins in very muscular Christianity, a version of the faith that saw Islam as a challenge and a deadly threat. The Muslim men were killed, one by one, after being offered the chance to accept Jesus Christ into their lives. The women were raped, of course, and added to the harem. Need I mention, I wonder, that all of the Brethren of the Elite – his inner circle – and the Warriors of the Lord – his fighters, a name that soon became attached to the entire group – had free access to the harem and any black woman at any time? It provided their male followers with an incentive to convert and struggle to gain elite status…and, also, a disinclination to rebel. It’s a trick as old as man himself. Once you have blood on your own hands, once you’ve done something you know to be wrong, you can’t go back. You’re committed for life.

  The poor refugee bastards didn’t stand a chance. Their world had shattered around them and they were on the brink of becoming Zombies. In that fragile state, it was easy for Zechariah and his priests to break them down, men and women alike, and reshape them into their ideal. The men had the incentive of better treatment, promotion and access to slave women. The women had the incentive of being treated kindly – like pets – rather than being raped as punishment for being uppity. The blacks…well, in any hierarchical society, there has to be someone at the bottom, serving as a warning to those above them of the price for failing. While we’d been struggling to survive, Zechariah had been building his army for conquest.

  He started to expand almost at once. The problem with any kind of pyramid scheme is that it depends on having as many people at the bottom as possible…and, if you’re at the bottom, you want to rise higher. Other towns, some of which had been trying to save themselves as we had, found themselves trapped in a tidal wave of fanatics, all determined to gain more subjects and raise themselves within the organisation. They didn’t stand a chance, either. The Sword of the Lord, Sword of the Lord Michael as he was called, was a canny leader. I don’t know if he were actually a former military officer. It wasn't common for the more extreme militias to have actual military personnel, as
opposed to posers, and I would like to think that he wasn't, but he was a good officer. He broke through defence lines, occupied towns, and then the Brethren of the Elite started to convert the town. Once such a scheme got rolling, was there anything that could actually stop it?

  It had happened before. Alexander the Great had swept across the world. So too, more practically, had Muhammad. They’d both reshaped entire sections of world history. If Zechariah couldn’t be stopped, he might well pick off the remainder of the United States piece by piece, forcing everyone to follow his own version of the faith. An ambitious man, with all the power of thousands of fanatics behind him, might take the entire ball of wax. I doubted that there was an organised force that could stop him left on the planet.

  And this was what was coming our way.

  It’s probably a good thing I didn’t know that at the time.

  I might have seriously considered accepting the terms they offered us.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  All Faith is false, all Faith is true:

  Truth is the shattered mirror strewn,

  In myriad bits; while each believes,

  His little bit the whole to own.

  -Richard Francis Burton

  I nearly burst a gut getting down to the Forward Operating Base, but I didn’t feel that I had much choice. I had sent messengers to St. Marys to ask Mac to take one of the Companies of soldiers and come join me, but for the moment I would only have three Companies under my direct command. It didn’t help that our definition of ‘Company’ was somewhat variable. We had Companies composed of over a hundred men and companies that barely had fifty men. It was a compromise that, like all good compromises, satisfied no one.

  Dutch Schofield had been Mac’s friend a long time before I knew him – if only for a given value of friend – but I’d grown to trust him in the months since we’d met at Clarksburg. He’d organised Salem’s defences and had played a major role in organising the new army. He’d once confided in me that he preferred playing soldier to being a farmer, but I didn’t hold that against him. No one would have called me a farmer either. It was lucky, as it turned out, that we hadn’t placed the FOB in Summersville, West Virginia, itself. Summersville might have been one of the Principle Towns, but it had been lucky to survive with Charleston so near and thousands of refugees pouring out of the remains of the city. The defenders were tough and well-armed, but we’d started keeping the army away from the Principle Towns. It was, again, one of those damn compromises.

  The FOB itself had been some city-dwellers idea of a countryside home before it had been taken over by our forces and converted into a base. It was larger than any sane person would want if they lived on their own – and we found no evidence that the nameless owner had ever had a family – but perhaps he used it as a love nest for his affairs. Hell, I don’t know; all I know is that it was looted once, but left largely intact and fit for use. The handful of squatters on the estate had been delighted to join up with us. They knew almost nothing about taking care of themselves in the wildness.

  “Sir,” Dutch said, with a very precise salute. Our army didn’t have much of a saluting tradition – we hadn’t had the time for such things, not when we needed to train them to fight, and besides, salutes are dangerous in a combat zone – but Dutch saluted anyway. I think he missed being a soldier. “We have the refugees in the medical centre, sir. They’re under guard, but Lucy is taking care of them.”

  Lucy was one of the nurses from Stonewall, a short black woman, who would have been remarkably pretty were it not for the nasty scar on her nose. A criminal, according to Richard, had once been tied down for treatment, only to carry out a form of social protest by biting her nose off, literally. The bastard had been released only a few months before the Final War on some kind of technicality. Being tied down, apparently, stifled his free expression and therefore he was justified in whatever he did to strike back. Call me old fashioned if you like, but I believe in punishing violent actions against unarmed nurses, or against anyone who didn’t deserve it. The meme that blames everything on everyone, but the prisoner, doesn’t solve crime at all. You might as well refuse to declare anything a crime and claim, therefore, that you have beaten crime. What sort of nonsense is that?

  “I took a look at the recovered bodies,” Lucy said, as Dutch showed me into her emergency ward. It would have horrified me in Iraq to think that I might be treated under such conditions, but now all I could do was approve. It was clean, at least, and that was the best that could be said for it. I hoped she was remembering to boil her tools before using them. “There’s not much on them to identify them – not that it would matter these days – but they were showing signs of having been whipped, some time ago.”

  I blinked. “Whipped?”

  “Whipped,” Lucy confirmed. “I did a brief spell in a woman’s rescue centre in Detroit, sir, and some of the women there were whipped by their partners. The wounds were similar, although there was something odd about them, almost as if it wasn't intended to be just a punishment.”

  “The Shia Muslims sometimes flagellate themselves,” I said, remembering a ceremony I had watched once in Iraq. It had been oddly moving, in hindsight, but at the time I’d been more worried about suicide bombers and the prospects of outright civil war. There’d also been Uncle Billy’s jokes about what happened to boys who went to British Public Schools. “Could it be something like that?”

  “I don’t know,” Lucy said. “The wounds were probably not self-inflicted, but other than that I couldn’t tell you any more about it. They’re both in surprisingly good shape, suggesting regular exercise and good food, but that could mean anything.”

  I nodded, looking down at the bodies. They were both in good shape, but that meant very little these days. The real fatties had died off in the collapse following the nuclear bombardment, or had been eaten by cannibal gangs, or had been forced to get into shape. We hadn’t been cruel about it – well, I hadn’t been cruel about it – but I wasn't going to give fatties extra rations just because they were used to eating more before the war. It was amazing how many of them had slimmed down and were now in better shape than they had been in their entire lives.

  “And the refugees?”

  “They’ve been whipped as well,” Lucy said. “The woman was raped at least once, judging by the wounds in the…ah, affected area.” Her voice darkened as she spoke, losing her clinical objectivity. “They also have signs of having been chained up from time to time, with bruises on their wrists and ankles. They’re not faked, sir. They’re also suffering from malnutrition and are going to be very vulnerable to disease.”

  “Ouch,” I said. Kit had been worried, more than anything else, about the spread of disease within our little enclaves. It was why we had instigated a firm policy of regular baths and medical check-ups. There were places, refugees had told us, where Smallpox and the Black Death had broken out and exterminated entire groups. It wasn’t something to take lightly. “Are they healthy?”

  She gave me the kind of look you would give to a particularly stupid child. “They’re in the best shape they could be, given their treatment,” she said. “They’re holding themselves together, somehow, but I suspect that the woman, in particular, is on the verge of complete mental collapse. I suggest that you use care when you interrogate them.”

  “I will,” I promised. “Have they been kept together?”

  “They have,” Dutch said. “They appear to be related, so…”

  We peered in through the window into a small bedroom. It was guarded, but other than that there was little to suggest that it was a prison. There were three people in the room. A black man, wounded but unbowed, a black woman and a white teenager. The woman – she couldn’t have been more than thirty – looked shattered, but the teenager looked determined to fight, if they had to escape. They all looked worn out beyond endurance.

  “I'm going in,” I said. “Dutch, stay behind me. I don’t think they will offer any trouble, but ke
ep an eye on them anyway.”

  I stepped into the room and instantly they looked up at me. “I’m Colonel Edward Stalker, United States Marine Corps,” I said. If I were pressed, I would have had to admit that I was a retired Marine and that the USMC no longer existed, but it sounded better than anything more accurate. “I understand that you wanted to talk to someone in authority?”

  “Yes, sir,” the black man said, coming to his feet and standing to attention, snapping off a salute that was surprisingly impressive, given his condition. I had seen worse salutes from exhausted infantrymen after Fallujah. “Sergeant Samuel Ellsworth reporting for duty, sir!”

  “At ease,” I said, automatically. The man should have been in hospital, not reporting for duty. “You’re safe now, you and your…wife?” I frowned at the teenager. It was pretty obvious that they were not related. “And your…?”

  “Brother-in-law, actually,” Samuel said. “This is Debbie Ellsworth, my wife, and this is Gary Jordan, who married my sister a year ago.”