The Living Will Envy The Dead

by Nuttall, Christopher

  The map in front of me, updated daily, showed little to be concerned about at the moment. The bandits had been largely wiped out by us, or the Warriors, or had come in from the cold. There were still isolated groups of Warriors out there, too hardcore to just surrender, who still posed a threat to convoys, but we’d wipe them all out eventually. They could hide from us, but we were expanding our patrols constantly, often led by their former slaves. They were very motivated to hunt down the remainder of the Warriors, not least because it would give them that vital ingredient for citizenship, military service. There were reports and hints of further populations to the south, east and north, but we’d meet up with them in time. The teams I had sent to the bigger cities, keeping well away from the hot zones, had reported that most of them were completely empty, or inhabited only by Last Men. A handful of them had come to join us, but others…others had refused even to recognise our existence. They had been right on the verge of madness.

  There was a knock at the door. “Come in,” I shouted. One thing I had turned down was a secretary, although that might have been a mistake; I had too much for one person to handle, without assistance. Mac stepped into the room and winked at me. He was dressed in what had become our standard uniform – a pair of homemade trousers and a shirt – and looked surprisingly happy. His wedding had been the largest such affair in Ingalls since the Final War.

  I smiled. “Mac,” I said, “ready to return to duty?”

  “Maybe just a little,” Mac agreed, with a wink. He wore the insignia of a Colonel on his shirt, although we hadn’t bothered with dress uniforms, not least because it would have made him a target. I intended to try to avoid the fruit salad displays of some senior officers who had never seen a battlefield in their lives. “You didn’t tell me that being married was so much fun.”

  “It was a cunning plan to keep you from getting cold feet,” I said, baiting him gently. He did look better than he had the last time I saw him. “Married life seems to suit you.”

  “Well, apart from the nagging, the whining, and the baby on the way…” Mac began. I rolled my eyes at him. “Nah, it’s a great time that I’m having.”

  “Splendid,” I said. “I don’t know about you, but I’m getting bored in this office. Perhaps we should start planning an expedition down to the south, or maybe northwards towards New York.”

  Mac frowned. “I don’t think that we might find anything useful,” he said, doubtfully. We’d explored the remains of the USMC base at Quantico a few months after we’d crushed the Warriors, and could afford to spare a hundred heavily armed men from the farming efforts, and we’d found nothing, but ruins. The Russians had had a real mad-on for the base and pounded it several times, destroying most of the complex. There had been a few survivors, helping to assist in a handful of barely-functional towns, but little had been left of the infrastructure. “Remember Washington?”

  I nodded, doubtfully. One of Biggles’s flights had taken him near Washington, now little more than ruins, a dead city on unstable ground. The Russians had hit the city with at least five warheads, according to our best estimate, and the results had been devastating. If there was anyone still alive down there, near the black craters that marked the site of a set of ground-busts next to where the White House had been, they hadn’t been in evidence. We hadn’t sent a ground party into the city. It would only have upset us.

  “That’s not the point,” I said, seriously. “I want a full record of everything that happened since the war.”

  Mac nodded, but then, he understood my reasoning. If we could construct a photographic record of everything that had happened, it might become harder for future ‘academics’ to deconstruct everything we had done, or cast a dark slant over it. I had founded the museum myself, using photographs of the atrocities committed by the Warriors as the basis of the history section, although some parents had complained about it not being family-friendly. I had always thought that that was a little odd. They might not think that it was ‘right’ for kids to see such sights, but it was ‘kids’ that it had happened to, back before we had broken the Warriors. Privately, I gave it ten years before the revisionists got to work and started claiming that the Warriors had been the real victims. I guess that distance doesn’t always lend perspective, after all.

  “You do get to rest from time to time,” Mac said. “I thought that you were going to be running for President next year.”

  I laughed. “President,” I said, shaking my head. “I’d sooner be dead.”

  ***

  And that, more or less, is the end of my story. Ingalls and the New United States had been firmly established and we would survive, although not easily. There would be other challenges in the future, with new threats and new enemies waiting for us just over the horizon, but the seeds of the reconstruction had been firmly sowed. I could write about those, but that’s not my story to tell…and besides, I want you to buy other books from the aftermath of the Final War.

  I won’t attempt to justify myself any further. I have explained my reasoning for everything I did, as best as I could. There are general histories of the New United States or the Reconstruction Period that provide a less personal overview, if that is what you are seeking. I did the best I could…and I – we – kept civilisation alive. The world you live in, today, is the one I built. If you can stand up and question what we did, well…I know I did a good job.

  (They told us that we won the Final War. If what we lived through was victory, I don’t ever want to know defeat.)

  I’d like to close this memoir with a quote from one of my old commanding officers, who was asked, back in 2003 when the world was a kinder, gentler place, what we Marines should do if we were confronted with an anti-war protester. I may have the exact words wrong, but I think the sentiment shines though.

  “You should shake his hand, and thank him for exercising the rights you fought to defend, and wink at his daughter.”

  Edward Stalker.

  Staff Sergeant, USMC (Ret.)

  General, NUSA Army (Ret.)

  Epilogue

  From: Edward Stalker: A Political Reassessment. (Dominic Beethoven, Professor of Post-Modern Peace Studies, University of New Clarksburg, 2100.)

  In a more civilised world, there is little question that Edward Stalker would be considered a criminal; a mass murderer, a tyrant and a monster who ran roughshod over every principle of common decency known to man. He may have started life as a US Marine, with a honourable career behind him when he was wounded and retired from the Corps, but his future life was doomed to be controversial. Given an opportunity to shape the future of a world that had been brutally reshaped by the Final War, Stalker didn’t hesitate. Indeed, although he downplays this aspect in his memoirs, the survival of the population of Ingalls, the unification of the Principle Towns into the New United States and the defeat of the Warriors of the Lord are largely down to him.

  Stalker described himself as little more than a talented amateur at the art of war, but his achievements are unquestioned. So, alas, are his failures - and what we may consider atrocities. There is no doubt, as he himself makes clear, that he decided to cold-bloodily murder over two thousand inhabitants of the Stonewall Maximum Security Prison. There is also no doubt that he effectively enslaved the remaining prisoners and used them to construct defences, dig mass graves and much else, in stark defiance of the Revised Constitution. (See Ben-David Singleton and the Making of the New United States, Chapter Nine, for further details.) He even added to the work gangs with other prisoners, starting with ordinary criminals from Ingalls and the surrounding area, and continuing with surviving Warriors and bandits. While it must be acknowledged that the reformation rate of ex-prisoners has been much higher than pre-war statistics, one may find it inhumane that prisoners were expected to work under conditions of considerable danger.

  That was, but the least of his actions. He had refugees blocked from entering Ingalls and used deadly force, where necessary, to prevent them from entering
the town. He used torture to make a prisoner – later, additional prisoners – talk and tell him what he needed to know. He deployed poison gas against the Warriors of the Lord and, finally, executed many of the higher-ranking Warriors personally. What can one make of such a man?

  Finally, Edward Stalker instituted a form of democracy that was, by intent and design, considerably limited. The results of this linger on today. It is not clear who was truly to blame. The person who suggested the core idea – a vote in exchange for military service, later broadened out to a handful of other occupations – remains unknown. (The original idea came from Robert A. Heinlein, who was clearly not present at Ingalls on the grounds he was dead at the time - an excellent alibi.) Edward Stalker has been blamed for that by his detractors and has never, significantly, denied it. There can be little doubt, however, that Stalker was one of the main voices pushing for the implementation of such a scheme and with so many veterans of the Warrior War in the area, it was pushed through with ease.

  And yet, did Stalker have any other choice? We look back from our safe world and try to imagine what it was like back in those days. We have it easier than many others do – we have the records taken and saved by Stalker himself, among others – but we cannot imagine the true level of numbing horror. We see the ruined cities, the areas that are still too hot to enter, and the charred remains of thousands of bodies, but we do not grasp the horrors. How can we? It is as beyond our experience as some of our developments would have been beyond Edward Stalker and his comrades.

  Was Edward Stalker a monster, as some have suggested, or a man forced by circumstances to do what he had to do to preserve some form of American civilisation? The question, I fear, remains in your hands. I await your answers with interest.

  The End