The Living Will Envy The Dead (55 page)

“I was thinking that he’s my son,” I said, honestly.  I hadn’t shown her – at least, I thought I hadn’t shown her – but I’d been terrified that she would have miscarried, or given birth to a mutant.  We had only one surviving mutant child and she – a little girl born with only one eye in the centre of her forehead – might not survive the next few years.  I honestly wasn't sure if we were doing her any favours allowing her to survive at all, but her mother wanted to keep her and Kit refused to even consider a mercy killing.  There had been a time, years ago before the war, when even thinking such thoughts would have been…well, unthinkable, but now…now they came too frequently.  It bothered me from time to time.  What sort of monsters were we becoming in this brave new world.  “I was thinking that perhaps he’d like a little sister.”

“Get away with you,” Rose said, waving a weak arm in my direction.  “I’m not having another kid until I’ve recovered from this one.”

“We could adopt,” I suggested.  Thanks to the Warriors – and their mad social policies – there were thousands of kids running around without parents, often without even the slightest idea of where they’d come from in the first place.  Most of them had been adopted pretty quickly, but there were still huge imbalances…and yes, some exploitation of the kids by farmers and others.  I’d had to hang a farmer for abusing his adopted daughter two months ago and the whole episode still left a dirty taste in my mouth.  “There are plenty of kids around…”

“Not yet,” Rose said, tiredly.  She leaned back on the bed and closed her eyes.  “I’m tired.  If I’d known my mother had put so much work into bringing me into the world, I would have been…”

Her voice slurred and she fell asleep.  Kit appeared, as if from nowhere, and carefully picked up little Robert from her arms, transferring him into his own as if he weighed almost nothing.  Perhaps he did, to him.  I’d held my son earlier and the baby had felt almost weightless.

“You should leave us to take care of her,” Kit said, as one of the nurses appeared.  We had hundreds more nurses now – Rose’s own social policies had been paying off, although it was surprising how many had become pregnant in the last few months – and there wasn't one of them who wouldn’t look after Rose’s child as if it were her own.  The discovery of the male-dominated Warrior society and their treatment of their women had concentrated quite a few minds; indeed, many of the small businesses in the area were owned and operated by women.  “I’ll call you back as soon as something changes.”

I couldn’t help myself.  I had to ask.  “Doctor,” I said, “is she going to be alright?”

Kit’s ‘you’re a stupid idiot’ look would have done credit to a Drill Sergeant.  “Women have been giving birth since the human race evolved from monkeys,” he said, his voice perfectly dry.  “Rose is a strong and healthy mother, the strongest we’ve had for quite some time, who took good care of herself.  She will be tired and cranky for the next few days – and you’d damn well better be tolerant of that – but she’ll be fine.  I wouldn’t advise sex for a week or so anyway…”

“Thank you,” I said, before he could break into an increasingly sardonic attack on our personal lives.  For a noted homosexual, Kit could be surprisingly blunt at times, although I knew that he’d donated some of his own sperm to the community.  “I’ll call back in a few hours.”

“Out,” Kit said, firmly.

I stepped out of the hospital and smiled to myself as I took in the sights of Ingalls.  Hundreds of men and women thronged around, many of them wearing newer clothes woven in town, or scavenged from the surrounding area.  It astonished me how many vital items had just been abandoned in the area, items that most people didn’t consider to be useful, but were items we desperately needed.  In the next few years, we’d either have to start making such items for ourselves or go without, but for the moment we had an embarrassment of riches.  It showed, too, in the renovation of Ingalls.  The damage caused by the Warrior attack had been repaired and a new monument, a
tribute to those who had fallen in the Warrior War, had been erected in the centre of town.

My feet had taken me, unbidden, to the military headquarters, a building that had once belonged to a wealthy corporate agent as a tax dodge – or so I suspected – before the war, after which it had been taken over by the military I’d worked to build.  The guard at the main entrance checked my ID before allowing me to enter – with so many newcomers in the community, we had to be more careful about ID cards, even though we lacked the ability to make foolproof systems – and waved me inside, allowing me to walk up to my office.  I was only saluted by a handful of people as I passed through the main office.  I might have been their General, the uniformed head of the New American Army, but I disliked being saluted when it wasn't strictly necessary.  It wasn't my only innovation.  The officers in the headquarters were all there for a few months, in-between postings to actual combat units, just long enough to be useful without infecting them with the political disease.  The old Pentagon had been full of soldiers who hadn’t been worthy of the title.  My new headquarters would have officers who had actually been there and done that.  It wasn't as if I didn’t have plenty of combat vets to choose from when it came to manning the handful of desks.

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.)

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.