The Living Will Envy The Dead

(A Story of Post-Nuclear War America)

Cover Blurb

Ed Stalker had seen his fill of adventure after a life in the Marines and was content to be the small-town Sheriff of Ingalls, a town in West Virginia.  Unfortunately for Ed’s retirement plans, the long-feared war with Russia turns nuclear and the United States comes under nuclear attack.  Trapped in the post-nuclear world, Ed and his town must struggle to survive, facing refugees, bandits, religious fanatics and hard decisions to ensure that some remnant of the United States remains intact…

Dear Reader

There is a funny little story behind this book and how I came to write it.

Most post-nuclear war stories struck me as rather unrealistic.  The authors either didn't do the research or blatantly ignored the research, often trying to make political points at the expense of good storytelling.  Or, alternatively, trying to avoid certain basic realities of a post-nuclear war world, just to avoid having to present the harsh conditions.  There was also a certain level of misunderstanding about just what might lead us to nuclear war, particularly the massive nuclear exchange dreaded throughout the Cold War.  

A few years ago, I drew up a scenario where NATO blundered into war with Russia in the very near future.  Such an outright confrontation between nuclear-armed states could easily slip into nuclear Armageddon.  As Russia grows more assertive in managing the states surrounding it, and NATO grows more and more fragmented, a series of miscalculations could lead into war.  I worked out what such a war would look like, as I saw it, and then built the aftermath around my scenario.

At that point, I stalled until I read The Last Centurion, by John Ringo.  That book suggested to me that I could write a book set in such a world, so I started writing.  You hold the results of my labours in front of you.

It reads, I freely admit, like a cross between Starship Troopers and The Last Centurion.  If you liked those books, I think you might like this one.  

Many people offered advice when I was working my way through the research.  To them – those who believed in me – I dedicate this story.  Thanks guys!

If you like my writing, please check out my website (http://www.chrishanger.net/) and subscribe to my blog (http://chrishanger.wordpress.com/) .

Christopher G. Nuttall
Kota Kinabalu, 2012

PS – My editing skills are rather questionable, so I offer cameos to everyone who emails me to point out an error, which I will then fix and re-upload the book.

C

Author’s Note

The town of Ingalls, West Virginia, does not exist.  Probably.  For obvious reasons, I have played around with the geography and suchlike for the story.  Anyone using this as a guide to Virginia is likely to end up in Texas.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

This book is dedicated to the real Edward Stalker and Robert C. McClelland III, barflies of long standing, for their help with the story.  Thanks, guys.

I
The moving sun-shapes on the spray,
The sparkles where the brook was flowing,
Pink faces, plightings, moonlit May,
These were the things we wished would stay;
But they were going.

II
Seasons of blankness as of snow,
The silent bleed of a world decaying,
The moan of multitudes in woe,
These were the things we wished would go;
But they were staying.

III
Then we looked closelier at Time,
And saw his ghostly arms revolving
To sweep off woeful things with prime,
Things sinister with things sublime
Alike dissolving.

(Thomas Hardy - Going and Staying.)

Prologue

There are many tales from the Final War and its aftermath that have been told, in books and movies and even face to face.  The tale of Mike Harmon, of Georgia, is still a thrilling story for Americans.  The stories about Patrick Hessessy, who led post-war recovery efforts in Panama, remain important to us today.  There are hundreds of such stories, the lives of people who stepped forward to rebuild our country after the war, and yet, so many of them are deconstructed.  Edward Stalker is one such person.

He is, and remains, one of the most controversial figures in recent history.  He has his friends and admirers who will not say or hear a word against him.  He has won the grudging respect of others who would not normally have a kind word for the military.  He is hated and loathed by many others, including some of the people who worked with him in Ingalls after the war.  The stories about him – and he really did do most of what they said he did – have grown in the telling, but they are nothing, but bare facts.  The detractors are free to put what spin on them they like.

The book you hold in your hand was written, at my request, by Ed himself.  I found it hard to convince him that it was worth the effort of writing it, although I was surprised to discover that I had the support of several members of Ed’s family in my efforts.  The story covers the post-war world as he saw it, written in hindsight.  Ed himself has asked me to make clear that he may have forgotten details, or altered his reasoning later, but it is the best that he could do.  I have not altered details, with a handful of exceptions, mainly factual details relating to events outside Ed’s area of operations.  You may like Ed, or you may grow to hate him, but he was a product of his time and he did what he thought he had to do.

Not an angel, or a devil, but a man.

Keith A. Glass
MG U.S.M.C. (Retired)
2050

Chapter One

No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy. 
-Motto, 1st Marine Division

I wasn't going to write this book.

Not, I should say right from the start, because I was afraid.  My life is a matter of public record.  There is very little dispute over what I did, perhaps not even over the why.  No, I didn’t want to write the book because I didn’t feel that I had the right to tell the story.  It is not, after all, just my story, but that of everyone who lived in Ingalls and contributed to the 2nd Reconstruction.  Had I not been asked to tell the story, to write this book, I would have been happy to leave the past where it belongs, in the past.

But then, those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.

This story is, as might be expected, me-centred.  Certain details have been obscured to protect others still alive.  There are a few omissions, a few details that I believed at the time but later found to be incorrect, and not a few barefaced lies.  I leave those as an exercise for the reader, as most of them will be easy to pick out from the narrative, an echo of exercises we had to do while in Boot Camp.  They should provide an interesting challenge.

And where, exactly, should I start?

I was born in New York to Rupert Stalker and Mary Tam, who named me Edward Christopher Stalker.  Most people just call me Ed.  Rupert, my father, was a soldier who was, officially, a cook.  Mom always found that hilarious.  My father couldn’t cook to save his own life!  Had he been in charge of cooking for thousands of hungry soldiers, he would have been lynched, assuming his victims survived the mass food poisoning.  Dad was, as it turned out, a soldier who served in the Special Forces, fighting the twilight wars that no one was supposed to know about.  It says something about the general level of attention paid to security in those days that too many of the details were known to just about anyone with an incentive to go looking.  Dad went after terrorist cells in places that would have surprised the average American citizen, hunted drug smugglers in Central America, advised several tin-pot African governments on protecting themselves against their own ambitious subordinates and hundreds of other missions.  I saw him, on average, about every six months.  It still surprises me that Mom and Dad actually managed to have a life together, let alone raise four kids.

Mom might have stayed at home, but she was no shrinking violet.  My father’s salary was enough to pay for us four kids – or brats, as we were in those days – but it wasn’t enough for her.  She worked part time to pay for additional stuff she wanted, mainly for us, while bringing us all up in the best of manners.  She was our mother, our confident, and our disciplinarian.  She was a fine woman and they don’t make them like that anymore.  God alone knows what happened to her – chances are, if you don’t know what happened to someone years after the Final War, they’re dead – but I miss her dreadfully.  She kept us all going through some bad times.  It was her who held the family together.

And then there was Uncle Billy.  He wasn't really our Uncle in the family sense, but he was an old friend of Dad’s who’d come to live in New York after – according to the official story – suffering a slight accident that had left him limping more or less permanently.  Yeah, right.  I saw his back once or twice, when he took us hiking or mountaineering, and it was covered in scars.  He might have been handsome, once, but his skin looked as if someone had whipped him badly and then given him nothing in the way of medical care.  Uncle Billy had been a British citizen, a Royal Marine, but he’d moved permanently to New York.  I had the feeling that it wouldn’t have been safe for him to return home, although he could just have been bullshitting me, something he did from time to time.  I still remember, with a shudder, him giving me instructions and forcing me to figure out what was wrong with them.  

It was Uncle Billy who taught me how to fight.  I’d been in school for three years before I ran into Moe, a classic locker-room jerk.  You probably know the type; rough, unpleasant to anyone he can get away with being unpleasant to, and a bully.  He demanded my lunch money.  I replied by punching him as hard as I could, but I lost the ensuring fight and had, to add insult to injury, a detention for fighting.  When I got home – after the lecture from Mom on the subject of fighting – Uncle Billy started to teach me unarmed combat.  The Royal Marines didn’t know the meaning of the word ‘fair’ and some of the tricks he taught me would have had me thrown out of the boxing ring and disgraced.  I didn’t have any intention of becoming a boxer, but the next time I met Moe, I won the fight and beat the crap out of him.  I got another detention, but so what?

That pretty much set the tone for the next few years at school.  I was a fairly isolated child, despite the attention of several girls, of whom more later.  I wasn’t particularly interested in sports, although I enjoyed playing football and basketball for fun, and I resisted all pressure to join the football team.  It gave me a certain kind of pleasure to know that I was better at it than the team members the school fielded for championships, but it wasn’t that important to me.  The football jocks might have been the cream of the crop, but they were bastards to me, as far as I was concerned.  I wouldn’t have willingly spent more than a few minutes in their presence without being paid.  I went on survival courses, joined the mountaineering team – the team leader, by the way, knew less than I did, thanks to Uncle Billy – and learned to play Chess.  What can I say?  I was young, and unformed, and I didn’t have the slightest idea what I wanted to do with my life.

And then came the day – or one of the days – that lives in infamy.

Look, we were stupid back then, ok?  It seems awfully silly to rank a minor terrorist attack as something that changed the world, but we were young and innocent, and we hadn’t fought the Final War.  9/11 changed the world, as far as we were concerned, just as I turned sixteen.   The country was at war, everyone was sure that the next major terrorist attack was just around the corner, and I wanted to serve my country.  I remembered Dad’s years of faithful service, and how my mother had waited for him to come home, and I wanted to follow in his footsteps.  Maybe not literally – I didn’t want people thinking that I was a cook, or a deadbeat dad – but I wanted to serve.

And, because I’d been more influenced by Uncle Billy than I liked to admit, I joined the Marines.

I’d like to tell you that I aced my way through the training course and the dreaded Crucible.  It would be an utter lie.  Nothing in my life, not even Uncle Billy’s patented March of Death, came close to Marine training.  The Drill Sergeant worked us all to death and flogged us onwards, further than we had believed possible, breaking us down and reshaping us into Marines.  It was a good thing that I wasn't particularly vain, or I would probably have cried at the haircut; I looked ghastly.  They pounded us and pounded us until we were at the verge of quitting, pushed us through hell…and then finally served us steak and eggs before declaring us United States Marines.  I have never been prouder of myself than at that moment.

One thing led to another and I soon found myself assigned to the 1st Marine Division, which was on its way to Iraq.  I was assigned to Regimental Combat Team (RCT) Seven, 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, commanded by a Lieutenant-Colonel.  The Lieutenant-Colonel and his subordinates managed to conceal their huge delight at seeing me in the midst of all the preparations for war.  We were going into Iraq, all the way to Baghdad, and God help the bastards who got in our way.  We trained, and exercised, and went though hours upon hours of live-fire targeting practice, just to ensure that we were ready.  The difference between a soldier, of which Iraq had very few, and a thug, of which Iraq had a great number, lies in training and discipline.  Iraqi training tended towards the “point this end towards the enemy, don’t look back and don’t run, or you will be shot” style.  As you can imagine, thousands of Iraqis surrendered rather easily when the shooting finally started, although the war wasn't the cakewalk it was supposed to have been.  Long story there, covered elsewhere.

I don’t want to admit it, but I was scared.  The closest I had come to combat action before was fighting Moe, and doing some hunting with Uncle Billy, and neither of them were anything like real fighting.  Moe had been a coward – most bullies are cowards; hit them hard enough and they will fold – and dissuading him from picking on me had been easy, once I had prepared.  The hunting trips had been fun, but the animals didn’t shoot back…and, indeed, I had never been under fire before.  How would I cope, I wondered, when the shit really hit the fan?

We moved out and advanced into Iraq.  We took the oil refineries before the Iraqis could blow them, although several sensible Iraqis had decided that blowing them would…not be in the country’s best interests.  I was relieved, despite myself, but Ambush Alley soon cured me of pre-combat jitters.  You know those pictures of Marines advancing into An Nasiriyah?  One of them was me.  

If nothing else – slight digression here – Ambush Alley showed the importance of training and exercises.  The famed – it should be infamous - 507th Maintenance Company, which included the famed Jessica Lynch, failed its combat test rather spectacularly, although their Iraqi opponents didn’t do much better either.  They hadn’t been trained properly and hadn’t been under fire before.  Worse, an A-10 made a serious mistake in the heat of battle and strafed a company of Marines north of the Saddam Canal.  They hadn’t been trained enough either, although one of the oldest jokes in the book covers precision weapons and friendly fire – they’re not.

I won’t go through the campaign in blow-by-blow detail.  We pushed north, getting more and more hacked off at the Iraqis as we moved, and eventually reached Baghdad.  There were plenty of Iraqis who decided to fight, either through stubbornness, or through having a secret policeman holding a gun at their backs, forcing them onwards to death.  We found that if we located and shot the secret policeman, the Iraqis attacking us tended to surrender or to try to run.  Others, however, fought almost professionally.  They had balls, all right.   The worst of all were the foreign fighters who came into Iraq in hopes of killing an American.  We killed them by the thousand and the locals refused to bury them, a gesture of contempt for fellow Muslims.  We had to bury them ourselves.

I spent the next two years, by and large, on counterinsurgency duty.  I didn’t know at the time – no one did – that the early years of the Occupation would be so badly mismanaged.  Remember what I said about some Iraqis having balls?  The men we needed, the ones who could have helped rebuild their country, were tossed out onto the streets when we disbanded the army.  There are so few things in life I want, but one thing I do want is ten minutes alone with the moron who convinced the President that it would be a good idea.  It wasn’t.  Oh, I do understand the political factors involved, but the bottom line was that it was a fucking stupid trade-off and one that cost American lives.  I fought in more tiny little encounters than I like to admit, and several really big fights like Fallujah…and then I was wounded.  I hadn’t escaped unscathed during the previous years, but this time…the IED exploded under my vehicle and when I awoke, I was being evacuated back to the States.  It was pretty bad.

On the other hand, that’s where I met Mac.  They operated on me as soon as they could, before shipping me into a hospital to recover, basically just pointing me to a bed.  I didn’t mind.  I’d several years worth of sleep to catch up on, even if I did feel like I’d gone ten rounds with the Corps fighting champion.  I climbed into the bed, lay down, and sometime later was awoken by a voice.

“Jesus Christ,” it said.  “They’ve brought us the Doctor!”

I opened one eye and glared at the speaker.  All right, I did look a bit like David Tennant – who had been the Doctor for two years when I was wounded – but there was no call for something like that.

“And who are you meant to be?”  I demanded.  Mac - Robert McNab, to give him his full name – was a short ugly sparkplug.  I’d call him worse, were it not for the fact that he is proofreading this book.  “Mike O’Neal?”

He laughed and a beautiful friendship was formed.  Mac was an Army Ranger who’d just been returned ahead of time from Afghanistan.  Like me, he loved science-fiction and military history, while he introduced me to other kinds of fiction, including fantasy and alternate history.  We spent many happy hours chatting away while they tried to nurse us back to health and, once we were allowed out of the hospital, we painted the town red together.  I’d love to tell you some of the stories, but as I said, Mac’s proofreading this.  I’ll leave everything we did to your imagination.

As it happened, both of us were too badly wounded to return to combat at once, although Mac would and did recover fully.  I don’t mean that we were walking around with a broken leg or some other such nonsense, but we were no longer at the peak of physical fitness.  That wasn’t actually a problem and so we found ourselves being dragged into advisory roles.  We had actually been in combat and had seen the elephant…and we were perfect to tell some civilians just what was wrong with their war-winning gadget.  They didn’t have a fucking clue!

No, I don’t mean that they were bad people; I mean that they didn’t have the slightest idea of what real combat entailed.  There was a firm, headed by this really hot babe – and boy, do I mean hot – which had come up with the perfect camouflage suit.  It might not have been the Predator’s perfect cloaking device, but a soldier could wear it and he would be invisible.  He would also be dead.  It worked fine in the lab, but in the field the temperature just kept rising.  Back to the drawing board, we said, and we made it stick.  I don’t know how we got away with it.

One thing led to another, again, and we found ourselves working on all kinds of committees.  The military has to be a planner.  Every so often, the media will ‘discover’ that the military has a plan to invade…well, insert your favourite enemy country here.  They missed the point, of course.  The Pentagon is supposed to have a plan for anything that they might be called upon to do.  There was no sign of hostile intent in coming up with the plans.  As you might imagine, they missed that point as well.  We worked on nuclear war plans – more on that later – disaster recovery plans and pretty much every kind of contingency that you could imagine.  Would you believe, really, that they even had a plan for alien invasion?  They did.

Some of the scenarios were truly depressing.  There were some for expected civil wars in 2000, and again in 2008.  I hadn’t believed that either would have been likely, although there were moments before both elections when violence loomed its ugly head.  I even studied a book covering a civil war against an evil President and found myself wondering, grimly, where I would stand if it really came down to blows.  We had all kinds of interesting debates on the subject.  I might even have convinced a few civilians that I wasn't an asshole…and nor were the rest of the Corps.

But I didn’t know what to do with myself.  Don’t misunderstand.  I was enjoying some of what Mac and I were doing, but it wasn't what I’d signed up to do.  What good is a Marine with a punctured lung?  The RCT had moved on without me, most of my friends had been promoted or had left the Corps – or had been killed, in a handful of cases – and I had been left behind.  I spent a year as an MP in Afghanistan, but that wasn't really me, somehow.  It was Mac who suggested the solution, in the end, and who pulled strings on my behalf.  The town of Ingalls needed a sheriff and I, a Marine, was an ideal choice.  The people in smaller towns tend to be more patriotic – it may be because they know more soldiers, proportionally speaking – and besides, Mac’s family had lived there for generations.  I wasn't sure, at first, but hell, it sounded like a change.  I moved out, settled in, learned the ropes, met the people and ended up enjoying myself…

And then came the war.

Chapter Two

A nuclear war could ruin your whole day.
-Anon

I wasn’t there at the time.

That should be obvious.  I wasn't the President of America, or the President of Russia, or one of the other world leaders during the years before the war.  I wasn't making decisions on a strategic level.  I might have been working on operational plans, but I never actually had to put one of them into use…and I certainly never ordered that any of them were to be used.  I can only tell you what I saw at the time, from the outside, and what was pieced together later, sometimes much later.  The general level of devastation caused by the Final War saw to that.

This is the story as I understand it.  There are already people who disagree with my basic outline, but you can look them up on your own.  This is the story of the year the world decided to have a damn good try at committing suicide.  Even now, years after the fact, I still get angry every time I think about it.  Those fucking idiots in the White House, and the Kremlin, and Ten Downing Street, and every other governmental building in what we liked to call the First World, made pretty much every dumb mistake in the book.  When nuclear weapons are involved…oh, I could stand them all up against the wall and pull the trigger, were it not that that would be too kind.

Anyway…

Let me start by pointing out something that should be obvious, so naturally no politician grasped the point.  An American soldier at Point A is not at Point B.  That should be fairly understandable.  A man cannot be in two places at once.  What does that mean, you might ask, for the war?  Simple; a Brigade Combat Team – or whatever – that was in Iraq was not in America, or Poland, or Germany, or Japan, or Korea, or wherever else we might want to have a BCT.  We actually saw this problem on a smaller scale in Iraq.  The country was about the size of Texas and, at first, we just didn’t have the manpower to cover everywhere we needed to cover.  It didn’t help that we didn’t realise how many places we had to cover, but I digress.  The bottom line was that every American soldier who went to Iraq was an American soldier who could not be used elsewhere.

Now, the United States, before the Final War, was the most powerful nation in the world.  We had the most powerful geopolitical position in history.  We had a navy that out-massed every other navy put together.  We had an air force that could shoot all of our possible competitors out of the sky without breaking a sweat.  We might not have had the largest army in the world – I think that that was the Chinese, although some of the other communist states had much larger percentages of their population in uniform, or in the reserves – but we had the most powerful army in the world.  It took us twenty-one days to destroy Saddam’s regime.  That is almost unprecedented in the history of modern warfare.

What we weren't was all-powerful.  Remember what I said about that American soldier?  Use him in one place, can’t use him elsewhere?  That held as true for us as it does for anyone else.  We might have been powerful, but our concentration on Iraq meant that other powers could start to get on with their own plans, because they knew that we could do nothing to stop them, but political hot air.  NATO was little more than a talking house and had been ever since the end of the Cold War.  We had obligations that we couldn’t meet, obligations that we didn’t have the forces to meet, or the position.  We were riding for a fall.

And the Russians gave one to us.  They used to rule half of Europe after the Second World War.  They were in control of Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and a dozen other countries, some that had once had an independent existence, others formed out of the ruins of the so-called Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  It might have been a Union, but it wasn't Soviet, Socialist or remotely Republican.  It was a prison camp for half of Europe and a deadly menace to the rest.  It fell apart, largely because communists make lousy planners – poor or even falsified feedback – and we declared victory.  Why not?  We’d won the Cold War without fighting.

The Russians didn’t see it that way.  They hit rock bottom during the Clinton years and started to climb back up again.  They pushed through an entire series of reforms that started to rebuild their economy, and then they started to rebuild their military.  They were still the only serious threat to America’s existence, but we didn’t take them seriously any longer.  They might have produced a few impressive pieces of kit, but most of their technology might as well be used as scrap iron.  In 2001, after 9/11, the Russians realised that they were in a stronger position than they had thought.  We – the USA – needed them, and they didn’t need us.  They grew more confident, started to pull their former satellites back into their orbit, and invaded Georgia.  There’s a ton of crap written about that war, most of it completely missing the point, but the writing on the wall was that the Russians were back.  They had kicked the shit out of the Georgians…and NATO had done nothing.  NATO could do nothing.  The Russians were back in Eastern Europe.

We needed them, desperately, to assist us.  Pakistan was falling into chaos.  We needed supply lines through Russian-controlled areas to supply our forces in Afghanistan.  We needed them to stop fucking about with Iran.  The Russians had no problems with either of them – they regarded the Iranians with the same kind of attitude that the KKK has for the NAACP – but nothing comes for nothing in this world.  They would give us what we wanted, for a price, and that price was effectively selling out Eastern Europe.  Our new and inexperienced President effectively took the deal…and, in the absence of clear support from Washington, Western Europe followed suit.

Look, I’m not defending them, but I understand their position.  During the Cold War, Western Europe was terrified that there would be a nuclear war, fought in Europe.  Victory would be meaningless if it meant the complete devastation of Europe, as far as they were concerned, and so they had the twin priorities of defending against the Soviets and restraining us.  They couldn’t stand up to the USSR on their own, so they needed us, but they couldn’t survive a nuclear war either.  Matters only got worse as Putin started exporting larger amounts of Russian energy to the West.  All of a sudden, resistance to the Russians meant European citizens freezing in the cold.  How much resistance do you think the Russians faced?

Anyway…we had effectively won in Iraq, if only for certain values of ‘won’ and were pulling back, when the Russians made their move.  They had always hated the presence of American BMD systems on Polish soil.  They might not have been a threat to the vast Russian arsenal of ballistic missiles, but they resented them, just as we had back during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  The Russians had already taken over the Ukraine and Belarus – oh, they’d learned; there was far less direct rule from Moscow, but when Moscow said ‘bend over,’ they bent over and took it – and they had forces right on Poland’s border, glaring towards Warsaw.  They told the Poles to evict us, or else.  The Poles screamed to Washington, Brussels and the UN.

The UN did fuck-all, of course.  It had no army and, in any case, the Russians had a veto.  Brussels dithered.  The last thing the morons there wanted was something that would disturb them from leeching as much as they could from the European Union before it collapsed under its own weight.  Washington didn’t blink.  All of a sudden, the BMD system was a vital American interest again…which kind of makes you wonder why we hadn’t bothered with some other precautions, like stationing a division or two in Poland to protect it.  They flew in an Airborne unit and started to deploy more American troops to Europe.

Now, that was a fuck-up.  Don’t get me wrong.  The Airborne soldiers are as good as they get, but they don’t have much in the way of heavy equipment.  They were a speed-bump, just as they had been a speed-bump in Saudi Arabia in 1991, and if they had been challenged, they would probably have been annihilated.  Oh, they’d have taken a bite out of the Russians, but they would have been lost, for nothing.  The President was twisting arms and using everything he could to get a large American force into Poland, but the EU was playing games.  They thought that the President would posture a bit and then withdraw, or back down, and they didn’t want to be associated with it.  Hell, I can’t blame them for that.  I thought the same.  The idiot in the White House genuinely believed that a small army was a good idea, but how could we carry out his foreign policy ideas without a bigger army?  We were in the midst of a build-up when the balloon went up.

The Russians launched a campaign of maskirovka.  This is something the Russians are very good at and we’re very bad at, mainly because of our tradition of a free press.  They launched a smear campaign to brand the Poles warmongers and set off a series of ‘incidents’ to convince the world that the Poles had started a war.  The fighting got rapidly out of control, just as the Russians had intended, and the Poles were getting the worst of it.  God knows what happened to the Airborne soldiers, but I wouldn’t put money on it being anything good.  Europe convulsed as Russian commandos started to cause havoc, while anti-war protests appeared everywhere – no one traced all of the funding, but I’d bet good money that it came from Russia – and riots appeared on the streets.  They knew that they were under attack, of course, but at the same time, no one was quite sure what was going on.

Now, I'm going to digress here.  We view other countries as being monolithic, governed by a single will, and those countries are either with us or against us.  Iran?  Bad country, bad people, bad government…enemy.  Saudi Arabia?  Good country, good government, good people…friend.  Boy, did we get that one wrong or what?  We’re wrong, of course.  The lesson we should have drawn from Iraq regarding Europe was that if supporting the US is a vote-loser, politicians in Europe – or wherever – won’t support the US.  Not out of malice, but out of simple political survival.  They were politicians.  What did you expect, really?

Anyway, back to the war.  Germany and France mobilised and suddenly they couldn’t do enough for us.  NATO was starting to look like a working prospect again, with a mass army facing the Russians, who had overrun nearly half of Poland by that time.  The two forces met in Western Poland, where Hitler had suffered his greatest defeat, and struggled for days before the Russian offensive was finally blunted.  The Russians had played their cards and lost.

Or so it seemed.  It turned out that hardliners in the Russian Government were absolutely determined not to suck up any more humiliation.  They’d been marginalized after the Cold War and were determined not to suffer that again.  There was a brief gun-battle in the Kremlin and the hardliners were firmly in control.  They deployed tactical nukes and, in four explosions, inflicted more damage on us – and the Europeans – than anyone had taken since the Korean War.  We struck back, of course, launching our own tactical nukes…and the blasts started to move steadily westwards and eastwards.  The Russians, by this point, were getting a little desperate.  They’d hoped to force us to back down.  We hadn’t blinked.  Perhaps, in hindsight, we should have blinked, but we didn’t.  They struck and we struck back.  They deployed tactical nukes mounted on cruise missiles against our carriers, sinking several.  We struck back by destroying their ports.  They…

They fired on Paris.  I think they saw the French Government as the weak link in the NATO chain and they might have had a point.  The French had too many problems with rioting youths – politically correct codeword for Muslim youths – and really didn’t want the war.  The Russians hit Paris with a nuke.  The French struck back by targeting Moscow and then…it was Katy bar the door.  Everyone was shooting at everyone else.  We were going into some of the ‘never even think about using’ war plans and targeting Russian industry, military bases deep within the former USSR and even their population.  They were doing the same to us, and Europe.  Oh, and they did the same to China as well.  The Russians had always bought into the ‘Yellow Peril’ concept, but more on that later.  The President ordered mass retaliation and we launched almost everything we had towards the Russians…

And we weren't the only ones.  Israel had been watching the war closely and they knew that we were going to be down and out for at least a decade.  Israel needed us to survive.  The core problem of the entire Israeli-Palestinian dispute was that one side’s minimum demands were larger than the other side could reasonably accept.  Israel was smaller than just about every US state and they couldn’t think about giving up territory without cast-iron guarantees.  The Arabs, for domestic political reasons, couldn’t and wouldn’t give them such guarantees.  Israel knew that we were going down and they opened fire.  They destroyed almost every Middle Eastern city within range; Tehran, Baghdad, Cairo and others.  The mass slaughter lasted barely a day, but by the time it finished, the population was a bare shadow of what it had been.

And the Chinese were getting into the game.  They saw the Russian launch and fired back themselves.  That triggered off the Second and Final Korean War.  North Korea launched against South Korea, Japan and, for good measure, Guam.  The Japanese downed three out of the nine missiles the Koreans launched, but they still lost five cities to nuclear blasts.  The sixth missile failed to detonate.  Japan launched back as the country convulsed; it turned out that Japan had secretly been stockpiling nukes ever since President Clinton fled Somalia.  It was very secret.  I don’t recall hearing anything about it until after the war.  China panicked – they’d taken hits themselves from the Russians – and fired on Japan and Taiwan.  It turned out that the Taiwanese had nukes too…and they shot back.  They were also incredibly lucky.  There was a pair of Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruisers in the area and all, but one of the Chinese missiles was downed.  (The Chinese had thrown their main force against Russia, which I always thought was a little pointless, but the Chinese hadn’t known that at the time.)  North Korea’s mass offensive into the south made incredible headway during the first few days, and then stalled badly as the effect of the nukes started to take its toll.  The entire country came apart.

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 combat 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?”

There was a brief buzz of conversation.  “What about our children?  What about fallout?  What about school tomorrow?  What about food?  What about…”

I tackled some of the questions as quickly and brutally as I could.  The National Guardsmen would have to keep watching for fallout, but for the moment, we were clear.  Fallout, believe it or not, is actually quite overrated, but it wasn't a joke.  If we had been closer to a city, I’d have been seriously considering an organised evacuation.

“Keep everyone who doesn’t have urgent business outside inside,” I ordered, finally. Rose and Deborah would see to that, in-between watching the food stores.  Even a small amount of protection can keep you safe from radiation, provided that you don’t abuse it.  “Deborah, once the stores are being protected, can you get back here and organise food for the guards?  Use the stuff that will rot faster.  I don’t know how long the power will hold out.”

That was another concern, I realised.  Power.  Ingalls had a coal-fired power plant, but when we ran out of coal, we were going to have to start digging up more.  Virginia was lousy with coal, but it was going to be a drain on our manpower.  And we were going to be fucked if – no, when – we ran out of a lot of things.  There was a nuclear plant only a couple of dozen miles away, but what had happened to it?  Was it even still useable, or had the Russians or the Chinese or whoever blasted it?

I watched the posse depart on their mission and sighed.  I’d bent all kinds of laws already and, God knew, I was going to break some outright in the next few hours.  I knew, however, that there would be no help from the government.  A single crisis would be quite bad enough…and, as far as I knew, at least forty nukes had detonated on American soil.  I didn’t know it at the time, but that estimate was out by at least an order of magnitude.

“Time to move,” I said, and led the way to the remaining jeeps.  “We have a jail to visit.”

Well, Uncle Billy had always said I’d go to jail, hadn’t he?

I guess he’d been right all along.

Chapter Four

Oh, where are you coming from, soldier, gaunt soldier,
With weapons beyond any reach of my mind,
With weapons so deadly the world must grow older,
And die in its tracks, if it does not turn kind?
-Stephen Vincent Benét

And lo, the bombs did fall!

Even as I was realising that Ingalls, to all intents and purposes, was on its own against a suddenly-hostile universe, the bombs were falling all over America.  The Russians had launched hundreds of missiles and sent dozens of bombers towards America, an exchange that lasted nearly a week.  No one could stop after the first missile flew, just as we had predicted long ago, and the devastation mounted rapidly.  The country itself shuddered in pain.

But it wasn't fatal.  More nonsense has been written on the subject of nuclear war than almost anything else, with the possible exception of sex and religion.  People were told, right from the start, that nuclear war would be so bad that no one and nothing would survive, and that the entire world would plunge into nuclear winter, but few knew anything about the true facts of the matter.  The issue wasn't helped by various governments that generally covered up the question, rather than allowing public debate, but they merely left the ground open for their enemies.  Let me try, then, to explain what actually did happen to America during the Final War.

The first thing to understand is that a nuclear weapon is, in some ways, just like any other weapon.  (I’ll pause here to allow the lynch mob to break up.  Back when we were working on war plans, we were surprised to discover that that was true, although we should have known from some of the operating assumptions of NBC training.)  It is not all-powerful, or all-destructive.  Under the right circumstances, a nuclear weapon’s impact can be almost-completely neglected.  The defence programs that various countries, including the United States, launched were intended to limit the effects of nuclear war on their military machines.  The population was very much a secondary concern.

But the basic facts are clear enough.  Take…say, a USAF airfield, flying fast-jets.  They’re damned big places, just to allow them to soak up hits from conventional weapons and keep operating.  The runways are also hard and a nuclear airburst, high over the base, won’t inflict that much damage, at least in theory.  In practice, the nukes did cause considerable devastation, but the runways were still useable with a little work.  A mountain fortress, like the famed NORAD in Colorado Springs, has a great deal of natural protection that the Army Corps of Engineers improved upon in all kinds of interesting ways.  The Russians hit it anyway – and no, I don’t know why, seeing it was shut down years ago – and it took them several nukes to inflict serious damage.  A nuke might produce a big bang, but it is not an Invincible Weapon of DOOM!

A nuclear blast has five distinctive components; light, heat, blast, radiation and EMP.  There are reasons for this involving a lot of complicated physics that I won’t bother to go into.  If you want more information, you can find most of it in a good textbook; hell, college kids have built nuclear bombs, although without the nuclear material to set one off.  I’m not entirely sure if I approve of this kind of information being freely available, but no one bothered to ask my opinion.  Luckily, actually manufacturing the nuclear material to make the bomb go BOOM is quite a bit harder than it sounds.

Anyway…

Let’s get one thing out of the way first.  The Russians did not target the civilian population of the United States.  (Ok, I see another lynch mob coming…)  They targeted vital facilities that happened to be surrounded by civilian populations.  This actually explains some of the odder population densities following the Final War; there were entire clumps of Americans that the Russians decided weren't worth the effect to blast, simply because that would cost them a warhead without any reasonable gain.  They went after political targets, like the White House, military targets, like Camp Pendleton, and economic targets, such as PANTEX and various oil facilities, factories and suchlike.  They had a worse problem than we had.  Their weapons weren’t always reliable.  They actually fired several warheads at critical targets just to make damn sure that at least one of them exploded.  This actually caused other problems, mainly nuclear fratricide, but they didn’t care.  They just wanted to ensure that one of the bombs would detonate.

So the Russians decide that one of the facilities in New York deserves the attention of at least one warhead.  Most people don’t bother to think about this – or didn’t, before the Final War – but there are more reasonable targets in any given area than they appreciate.  New York is – was – a financial centre for the entire world.  Taking it out would cripple whatever remained of our economy and torpedo other nations all around the world.  This would be pretty bad for Russia as well, but at that point they were probably past caring.  Like I said, the final hours were hellish, with all sides just using nukes like firecrackers.  The world had gone insane.

The bomb detonates.  The first effect is light, which moves – as you might expect – at the speed of light.  On an earthly scale, this is effectively instant.  Anyone too close to ground zero and looking in the wrong direction is almost certainly blinded.  Anyone further away will see the flash first and, as we were taught in NBC survival courses, have a chance to take cover.  We thought, for terrifying hours during the Iraq War, that Saddam actually had popped a nuke during a particularly nasty sandstorm, but I don’t recall anyone actually panicking.  Anyone a few miles away might just have a chance to survive…

And then comes the heat.  Anything flammable is set on fire, almost instantly, for quite some distance.  That’s quite a bit.  Take a look around and see how much in your room can burn.  Wood, clothes, floors and carpets, books…and, worst of all, cars.  A car with a full tank will go up like a bomb.  Anyone caught inside their car when the bomb detonates, as we believe that far too many people were, is dead.  They won’t stand a chance of escaping before the heat turns their car into a death-trap.  Oh, and people can burn too…

And then comes the blast.  Unlike the heat or light, the blast can be channelled by buildings, or terrain, or whatever else it encounters, causing all kinds of weird effects.  Blast doesn’t move at anything like the speed of light, so someone who had been warned by the flash to take cover has an excellent chance of survival.  On the other hand, anyone who was near ground zero has been blinded, incinerated, and now scattered across miles.  Some buildings will be strong enough to stand up to the blast, others, particularly newer and cheaper buildings, will be knocked down like the houses of the Three Little Pigs.  It’s blast that actually causes the real damage, although our hypothetical civilian might disagree.  The concentrated force of a nuke is nothing to laugh at.

Ironically, radiation is actually less of a danger than popular fiction would have it, depending on the exact attack profile.  Most of the radiation produced by the blast will be gone within hours, while most attack patterns rely on using airbursts, which do not suck up so much dust from the ground and throw it into the air, producing fallout.  The idea of fallout as a deadly invisible plague, moving randomly across the landscape, is nonsense.  Fallout is, basically, radioactive dust floating through the air, carried by wind and rain.  It is something that can be handled with a little preparation.

And, finally, EMP, the joker in the deck.  EMP – Electromagnetic Pulse – is extremely bad news for anything electronic, particularly more modern electronics.  Anything exposed to the EMP, or connected to something exposed to the EMP, will be damaged, perhaps destroyed, by the pulse.  The entire United States was held together by its formidable electronic infrastructure.  The Russians targeted the EMP specifically on our infrastructure and fucked it up completely.  Oh, there were entire sections that had been protected and survived, but the network had been thoroughly trashed.  Like I said before, they left out the emergency when they ran the drills…

The irony is that all the ‘duck and cover’ films weren't that stupid.  If you weren’t at ground zero, you had an excellent chance of survival.  I reviewed pretty much all of them while I was working for the analysts and most of them had a hard core of common sense that was generally ignored.  Not all of them, however; the British came up with some piece of crap entitled Protect and Survive that should really have been called How to Delude Yourself About the Bomb.  They were really cheated by their government.  Protect and Survive wasn't even good enough for wiping your ass after going to the toilet.

But I digress.  Sorry.

If you’ve read this far, without deciding to join the lynch mob, you’re probably wondering if I’ve lost my mind.  Hell, this sounds almost rosy, compared to what happened, right?  Well, no…

Let’s look at New York as a case study.  New York was targeted by, as far as we can determine, seven warheads, of which five detonated.  We won't know for sure unless we locate an intact copy of the Russian records and, so far, we haven’t recovered anything of the sort.  One of the nukes went off over Manhattan Island in an airburst, while the others came down on the outskirts of the city.  God knows what happened to the two that didn’t detonate, but my guess is that they were caught in the first blasts and were destroyed.  Nukes, unlike dynamite, can’t be triggered by another nuke detonating in close proximity.  Thank Heaven for small mercies.

So New York gets hit, badly.  Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that roughly thirty percent of the population was composed of medical staff, policemen, the city’s government and the remainder of the people who keep a city running.  This is probably ludicrously optimistic, but bear with me a moment.  The nukes detonate and the city’s emergency plans swing smoothly into gear, right?

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.

Chapter Five

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 scrum 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.

“We’re overcrowded, understaffed, and we can’t reach anyone,” Richard said, when he’d finished his glass.  I picked up the bottle and put it out of reach.  “I was starting to worry that we were all alone in the world when you arrived.”

I shuddered.  The layman – and yes, I included Richard in that statement – has a hugely exaggerated view of nuclear war.  It would be quite possible for someone to convince themselves that the country no longer existed and that they were the last man alive, or the last town alive, or a military unit without a country.  Why not?  They had all been the subject of hundreds of post-nuclear war films and novels.  

But Richard had bought up something I had forgotten.  The Stonewall wasn't just for the real scrum of the Earth any longer, but for other prisoners as well.  It had been intended to hold a thousand prisoners at most – and that requires a massive building – but local courts had been sending them even more offenders, most of whom didn’t deserve to share quarters with murderers and rapists.  There were boys who were blamed for petty theft, white collar criminals who’d stolen from their companies, even innocent kids who’d been framed by local police departments…and, through political pressure, had been given the hammer.  No politician likes to be thought of as soft on crime and…well, the Stonewall has a terrifying reputation.  I had known about it, vaguely, before the war, but now…

Now Richard and his staff were sitting on a volcano.  A prison is a pent-up hive of fury, hatred and worse, with prisoners who were beyond any reason.  They had already been jailed for the rest of their lives, or sentenced to death when the endless process was finally concluded, and had little to lose.  Passions rocketed through the prison, with groups of prisoners turning on each other in racial or religious fury, and the wardens were caught in the middle.  They were called Correctional Officers, these days, but I always through of them as guards.  I’d been a Marine, and that had sent me into some of the most hellish places on Earth, but a prison could be worse.  The prisoners had nothing to lose.

“I see,” I said, finally.  The conclusion I’d come to earlier was bubbling up in my head.  “How many people do you have here?”

“Seventy guards, five nurses and ten other staff,” Richard said.  I bit down a curse.  They were undermanned, all right.  The State preferred to pay overtime than hire more guards, with the net result that most of the guards were badly overworked and worn out.  It was worse for the nurses.  They often quit after a year or two and went into the private sector, where money was better and they didn’t have to worry about being knifed or raped by one of their patients.  “Two of the guards took a jeep and drove off to find their families.  I couldn’t stop them, but…”

I nodded in understanding.  Society was breaking down, remember?

He looked up at me.  “Sheriff, Ed, what are we going to do?”

Now, I have a habit of solving problems if they are put in front of me, even if the solutions are not to everyone’s taste.  I learned that in Boot Camp and then had it hammered into me during deployment.  In the civilian sector, you can afford to wait until you get it perfect, but in the military you often have to do the best you can and hope it’s good enough.  Indeed, perfect is always the enemy of good enough.  I had a solution to the problem – and to my problem – if I dared to use it.  The decision was easier than I had expected.  It helped that there was little choice.  The last thing we needed, as I had said, was a prison break.

I ran my hand through my hair and looked up at the chart on Richard’s wall.  It showed, in precise pencilled-detail, just how the prison was organised.  It took me a moment to sort out the colour coding, but once I understood I saw how it all fitted together.  Some of the very worst – the paedophiles and a handful of terrorists – had been segregated for their own protection.  Prisoners like to think that they still have rank and status…and traitors, child molesters and terrorists were right at the bottom.  They tended not to survive being in the general population…well, not for very long.  

“All right,” I said, finally.  “Listen carefully.”

I explained, briefly, what I knew about the war.  “It seems likely,” I concluded, “that the federal and state governments no longer exist in any form we would care to recognise.  We cannot depend on the police or the army or even parts of the National Guard any longer.  I know they’ll do what they can, but they’re going to be completely overwhelmed.  We’re on our own.”

I watched his face slump.  Most of the guards were young unmarried men…and the handful who were married had homes near the prison.  A pair of them, I remembered now, had had family in Ingalls.  I’d have to chew them both out for leaving their posts, but after that I would have to forgive them, probably.  It didn’t look as if it had been disastrous.  Richard, however, no longer had a place to call home.  Norfolk had definitely been hit.  If he hadn’t been devoiced from his wife…

“Now, we’re going to have to take action fast,” I continued.  Time wasn't entirely on our side.  “What have you done with the prisoners?”

“They’re in lockdown,” Richard said.  He looked more composed now that I’d presented him with a problem he could solve.  “They’re meant to be exercising at this time, but I daren’t take more than a handful out of the cells without more guards.  The ones on meds are going to be needing them soon, Sheriff, and we’re going to run out pretty quickly.”

I scowled.  Some of the prisoners would be on meds, of course.  I had forgotten.  Most of them would have AIDS, or something else equally nasty, while others would have all kinds of drugs intended to keep them calm and tranquil.  I had never liked the concept of medicating a young boy who had been diagnosed with ADD, but it did seem to help some of the prisoners.  Deprived of their medications, they would rapidly swing back towards their more normal behaviour, losing what little control they had.  We could keep medicating them for a few weeks, depending on how many drugs there were stored in the prison – something else I’d have to check – but sooner or later we would run out…and then it would be Katy bar the door.  There was nothing we could do for them.

“Brent, go back outside and bring in the Posse,” I ordered, finally.  “I want them to become familiar with the prison.  Get a pair of the guards to give them a tour of everywhere, but listen to them and don’t let the prisoners get to you.  Richard, I want you to give me a private tour, just now.”

Brent didn’t question me.  In hindsight, that was a little odd.  “Of course,” Richard said.  “What should I tell the guards?”

“They know about the war,” I said, grimly.  It hadn’t been high on my list of concerns, but it should have been.  I hadn’t delegated this task to anyone, even to Mac.  I didn’t want to take the coward’s way out.  “Tell them that we will be happy to accept any of them in Ingalls if they want to stay.”

Richard gave me a brief tour of the prison.  I’d toured it before, back when I’d become Sheriff, but it hadn’t been so overcrowded then.  The prison cells looked strong enough to hold lions, but some of the prisoners looked stronger, almost as if they were monstrous caricatures of human beings.  It was always a surprise to know just how strong prisoners could become, trapped in a world where strength was everything, although I wasn't particularly scared.  I had done very well in unarmed combat, under a Drill Sergeant who had been a fearsome bastard, three times as intimidating as the worst of the prisoners.

Others looked more fearful.  They did their best to hide it, but they were terrified of the other prisoners, or even of the guards.  I didn’t blame them.  Some of them looked young enough to be my sons, while others looked surprisingly innocent, almost baby-faced.  I distrusted those prisoners on sight.  They were too good to be true.  Richard escorted me around, keeping me well away from the bars, pointing out some of the worst offenders.

“That’s Lono,” he said, pointing to a man who looked large enough to pick up and carry an entire Abrams tank.  “He got into a bar fight and killed pretty much everyone else in the bar and they had to taser him to stop him.  Drugged up, of course.  He’s been sentenced to life here.”

His finger met a meek-looking man, almost a real-life Clark Kent.  “David Apple,” Richard identified him.  “He found a small girl in his garden one day and had his way with her.  It must have started something, because he kidnapped three other girls over the next few weeks and tortured them to death slowly and painfully.  He’s under sentence of death, but he’s currently launching his third appeal.  His first night here was almost his last.  A pair of convicts got to him and started to rape him when we broke it up.  They came damn close to killing him.”

I didn’t hear any regret in his voice.  “And that’s the type of people we have here,” Richard concluded.  “What are you going to do with them?”

“What I have to do,” I said.  My plans had congealed nicely into something workable.  All I had to do was get started.  “I assume that you have complete records here?”

“Of course,” Richard said, confidently.  “You do know that they’re meant to be sealed…”  He broke off at my snort.  Prisoner records might have been meant to be confidential, but it hardly mattered any longer.  There was no longer any Law and Order, but us.  “What do you want to know about them?”

“I want to sort them out,” I said, as Brent approached.  “Any problems?”

“One of the prisoners tried to grab Stacy’s ass,” Brent said.  I scowled.  I shouldn’t have allowed Stacy anywhere near the prison, but I wasn't in the mood for an argument over sexual equality.  “She broke his arm with her rifle butt.”

“Good for her,” I said, relaxing slightly.  The last time anyone had taken liberties with Stacy, during an unarmed combat competition, she’d thrown them clear across the mat.  She really was as good as she claimed to be, which made a change from some of the other feminists I’d met in my career.  “I have a job for you.”

Chapter Six

I think we need to change that old saying, “I don't need a building to fall on me.”  Because two did and we still don't get it. I think we all stick our head in the sand as a deep human impulse.
-Bill Maher

My plan was straightforward, but ruthless.

“Richard,” I said, “I want you to sort the prisoners out into three categories.  The ones who need medications to survive, the ones who are truly nasty and beyond redemption and everyone else.  I trust your judgement in sorting them out, but make sure that all the real fucks go into the second category.”

Richard nodded and headed off to his office.  He’d made a brief announcement to his staff, explaining that they were all part of Ingalls now, and few had dissented.  The handful who had dissented turned out to have families in other towns and cities and wanted to go back there.  I agreed at once when they demanded the right to return after we’d dealt with the prisoners.

I found myself studying the guards with interest.  I had spent time guarding prisoners myself in Iraq and I had quickly learned to isolate the dangerous ones from the sheep who had been herded into battle at gunpoint.  It wasn't that difficult.  The sheep sat around, grateful beyond words that they hadn’t been shot out of hand, while the dangerous ones sought to cause trouble.  The new Iraqi Government had had a very simple way of dealing with such bastards.  They took them to special camps outside the cities and shot them, burying them far from their homes and families.  It was a lesson I had taken to heart.

And I was sure that I could trust the guards and their instincts more than I could trust what any bleeding heart social worker had written.  The average prisoner is no master-brain, but many of them, including David Apple, are damn good at working the system.  They seek to convince good-hearted people that they have reformed, that they’re no longer a threat to society, that they have ‘rights’ that we should honour…and far too many of them fall for it.  I understand the impulse to do good, or to believe the best of people, but sometimes they take it too far.  Where does the blame lie, I ask you, if the convicted murderer is released to murder again?

And rights?  A person is born with rights, but as far as I am concerned, they’re rights that can be forfeited.  Who says that the ‘rights’ of a murderer are more important than those of his victims?  What ‘right’ does a rape victim have to be raped?  She’s the victim.  Why should she be punished by watching her tormentor go free?  It might be nice to see the world through rose-tinted lenses, but it was not a delusion that I was prepared to embrace.  The vast majority of the prisoners deserved to spend the rest of their lives behind bars, if not a final appointment with the executioner.

The guards, I suspected, privately agreed.  They saw the prisoners all the time, watching them carefully, always knowing that one misstep could prove fatal.  Their testimony should have meant more than the psychologists hired by the defence lawyers who – of course – testified that the defendant was mentally unbalanced, as opposed to outright evil.  The guards were mainly male, as I had expected, but a handful of them were female, one of which had a nasty scar across her face.  The turnover of female guards was high, or so I’d been told; they seemed to be challenged more than their male counterparts.  The prison was not a place for the politically correct.

“All right,” I said, as calmly as I could.  “This is what we are going to do.”

Richard’s list was a little on the optimistic side, as far as I was concerned, but I trusted his judgement.  The first list, the men who needed drugs to survive, was the longest.  It actually included several names that should also have been on the second list.  The second list was slightly shorter, but between them they included nearly two thirds of the prison’s entire population.  Desperate men, criminals all, who could not be released to add to the chaos.  I didn’t dare take that risk…

And so we poisoned them.

It was simple enough.  The prisoners often had different diets – the influence of the do-gooders again – and it was easy enough to ensure that the worst of the prisoners received the poisoned food.  There were a handful of complaints about the quality of the food, but they were ignored and pretty soon the convicts were dying.  The prison had stored enough concentrated poison to exterminate a small town reasonably painlessly – or so they claimed, but I don’t know for sure – and we watched them die.  A handful of guards and a third of the Posse refused to watch, but the others, mainly veterans themselves, watched dispassionately.  The remainder of the prisoners, the ones we had spared, stared in horror.  They were used to being treated with kid gloves, by guards who feared being sued; they had never expected a massacre.  The shock would do them good.

“I often dreamed about doing that,” Richard said, softly.  I nodded in agreement.  If I’d been in his place, I would have had the same fantasy.  “What are you going to do with the others?”

Did I do the right thing?  The hell of the matter is that I don’t know.  Yes, I couldn’t take the risk of allowing them to run rampant across the countryside, not on top of all the other chaos.  Yes, they all deserved death and worse.  Yes, we couldn’t have kept them supplied with the medications after the supplies in the jail ran out.  We couldn’t have produced them, as far as I knew, for years.  The ones who needed the drugs would have died when they ran out.  The ones who didn’t need the drugs would not have reformed.  In a world where law and order was no longer a going concern, they would have become a nightmare…

And they would never hurt anyone else.

“Get the remainder of the prisoners into the auditorium,” I said, finally.  We’d given the ones we – I – had decided to spare a good meal, certainly better than soup that looked suspiciously like vomit, but most of them had been reluctant to eat.  It had to be pointed out to most of them that killing them would be as simple as poking a gun through the bars and firing a single shot.  I got the impression that most of the guards were privately amused.  They had a chance to really scare most of the prisoners straight.  “I have to talk to them.”

The auditorium was just another lecture hall, where lucky prisoners would get a chance to listen to whatever band dared to perform in the jail (and most of whose members deserved to be in jail), although it was rather less comfortable than some I’d attended while in Iraq.  The guards watched, wearing their body armour and carrying their weapons, as the prisoners were escorted into the hall and secured to the benches.  It was rather less civilised than a college lecture hall, but I had the feeling that it might actually be safer, maybe even less rowdy.  Two veterans who’d carried machine guns in Iraq had set a pair up in position to spray the prisoners with bullets if they got out of hand, while other members of the Posse held their own weapons, ready to intervene if matters got out of hand.  I didn’t intend them to get out of hand, at all, but something might well go wrong…

I stood up on the dais and stared down at them.  The prisoners stared back with a conflating mixture of emotions, ranging from cold hatred to respect and even joy.  They had feared the worst of the prisoners as much as I had, perhaps more, and were glad to see them dead.  They also feared me, which wasn't actually a bad thing.  I wanted them to fear me.  It would make them much more amiable to reason.

Yes, I’m a bastard sometimes.  Bear in mind that most of them thoroughly deserved their prison sentences.

“Pay attention,” I snapped, finally.  My voice echoed through the room, loudly enough to be heard by all of the prisoners.  “The country has been plunged into war.”

On cue, the lights flickered slightly.  If you’re thinking that that is a remarkably suspicious coincidence, you’re entirely correct; it was.  I had given Richard instructions to flicker the lights from time to time, just to add to the atmosphere.  I needed them malleable and scared.  It would make this much easier.

I didn’t hold anything back, either, apart from one detail.  “We are under nuclear attack,” I continued.  “Hundreds of cities have been destroyed and millions of megatons have been detonated on our soil” – a slight exaggeration, but one I felt was justified under the circumstances – “and the country is in ruins.  We no longer have the time or inclination to play nice with scrum like you…and we showed you just how we were prepared to treat even worse scrum than you.”

“You can’t do this,” a voice shouted from the rear of the auditorium.  It was one of the white collar criminals, a criminal lawyer – which was a perfectly accurate job description – who bilked his clients out of millions of dollars.  “We have rights!”

“I knew someone would say something like that,” I said, cheerfully.  I nodded in the direction of Stacy, who was holding her prized sniper rifle.  “These are the kind of rights you have.”

The shot echoed out in the dead silence.  It was a perfect shot.  The lawyer fell back into the crowd, a small hole neatly drilled through his head.  Stacy had done it so well that no one else was even remotely injured, thankfully.  I didn’t want to waste labour if it wasn’t necessary.

“I trust that that makes my point?”  I asked, calmly.  There was a brittle silence in the room.  “You have no rights any longer.  The society that guaranteed you those rights is gone.  It has been replaced by a desperate struggle for survival, one in which you will either play a role in helping us survive, or you will die.”

I looked around the room, wondering who would choose to help…and who would try to break away as soon as possible.  The real hard cases were dead and quite a few of the remainder were actually innocent, or punished well beyond what they deserved, or might even have made something of their lives if they had been allowed a chance to grow up in a better society.  For every kid who had a mother, a father and an Uncle Billy, there was probably five or ten who didn’t have anything of the sort.  Perhaps working in Ingalls for a few years would turn their lives around…or perhaps they would step out of line.  They were, after all else, expendable.

“This is the deal,” I said.  “You will work for us for a period of five years, after which you will be free and independent citizens of the new America, whatever form it takes.  You will be treated with a certain kind of respect and the more useful you make yourself, the more respect you will earn.  You may even graduate to citizenship early…

“Or you can die.

“I cannot allow you to run over the countryside, or try to return to your homes, such as they were,” I continued.  “If you refuse to work for us, I will have no choice, but to dispose of you.  I am not going to run a chain gang” – and there I was lying, effectively speaking – “and I am not going to flog you in to work.  If you refuse this offer, you will be given a final meal and then executed.”

People, later, focused on that statement as a deadly mistake, as it ensured that almost all of the prisoners would join us, and some of them would plan to desert at the first available opportunity.  I wasn't unaware of the possibility, but I didn’t want to have to kill anyone else, not unless I had a good cause.  You might laugh at that – after all, I had just ordered the poisoning of one thousand, seven hundred convicts – but they’d deserved it.  The remainder didn’t, at least in my view.  And, I reasoned, if these losers and drug addicts had a taste of honest work, they might reform without any further pressure on my part.  Hope springs eternal, right?

A man put his hand up, as if he were in school.  “Sir…ah, what happens if we work for you for five years and then you refuse to give us…ah, citizenship?”

“Yeah,” someone shouted, from the rear.  “We’re already citizens!”

“You were citizens of a state that no longer exists,” I said, bluntly.  It was true, in a sense, but I was determined that we would save as much as possible.  I loved America, or at least the ideal of America, and it was my country.  “If you work for us, we will accept you as citizens, with all the rights and duties that that implies.  If you chose to leave us, at the end of that period, we will allow you to leave.  If you refuse to work now…well, we can’t feed you.  Work, or starve.”

We did a brief count after a handful of other questions.  Some of the drug addicts were wondering if they could get drugs instead of any other reward, but I said no.  There might be some highly illicit marijuana and opium being grown in a handful of places, but we were going to need it as a painkiller, not as a drug.  There was plenty of tobacco around – Virginia grew plenty of that, despite the best efforts of the anti-smoking zealots – but I had a feeling that most of that was going to be replaced by food crops.  If we could feed ourselves through the first two years, we should be fine, if only because of the coming die-off.  I’d seen the projections and they were horrific.

And why, you might ask, did I want to save convicts?  Why not just leave them all to die?  I had a use in mind for them that I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, ask others to handle.  I wasn't going to spend them lightly, but they could be used for things that others wouldn’t touch, like recovering material from a Hot Zone.  They were expendable…

Not entirely to my surprise, all of the convicts finally agreed to work for us.  I ordered Richard to transfer copies of the files from the prisons computers to a USB drive, which I could use to study them later.  If he had made a mistake, I wanted to know about it before it was too late to remove any potential troublemakers.  Once we had most of the prisoners ready, we shackled them and led them outside for the first time in far too long, allowing them to see the skyline in the distance.  We could still see the effects of the war.  The entire skyline looked as if the land beyond the horizon was burning away into nothingness.  The ground seemed to shiver and shake beneath us.  I don’t even want to hazard a guess as to what that was; more nukes, or something worse?

Great, I thought, with a flicker of self-mockery.  We’ll have zombies crawling out of the ground next.

“Start digging here,” I ordered, once shovels and other tools had been distributed.  There was little protest as the prisoners dug a massive pit, and another, and another, enough to bury all of the dead prisoners.  I had seriously considered burning them, but we didn’t have the time or fuel to waste.  Leaving them above ground would have been a disastrous mistake.  Dead bodies spread disease faster than a thousand unprotected whores.  The cities were going to be charnel houses in a few days.  The population that had survived being blinded, burned, scattered and irradiated would suffer the effects of thousands upon thousands of dead bodies.  “The rest of you, follow me.”

The poison we’d used had the effect of loosening the muscles, fortunately, but watching the prisoners carrying their former compatriots out was still an unpleasant sight.  A handful of prisoners took the opportunity to kick their dead tormentors, which we ignored, but most of them couldn’t bear to look at the dead.  It wasn't going to be the last time when they would have to bury the dead.  There was no chaplain on duty, so Richard said a few words over the bodies before we began to fill in the graves.  It seemed to help, slightly.  

Once I was sure that everything was proceeding as planned, I left Richard and Brent in charge and spent an hour going through the prison’s supplies.  I had known that they stockpiled quite a lot of supplies, but even I was astonished by the sheer level of paranoia that had gone into the planning.  They had enough food to feed the prisoners for a few weeks, if they rationed it carefully, and enough weapons to hold off a small army or lynch mob.  The prison wouldn’t have been an easy target to take, even for my former Company, although if the prisoners had broken out and taken control, we would have had real problems.  As it was, it was mine, all mine!

And I had plans for its future use.  

“Brent, you’re in charge here,” I said, once we had the prison cleared of all of the dead bodies.  “Richard, I’m going to send up an additional section of men from the Posse, so once they arrive, your guards can rotate off for a short period, before we start breaking up the population.  Keep the prisoners in their cells, but use your own judgement otherwise.”

“Yes, sir,” Brent said.  “We’ll keep an eye on things here.”

I nodded.  I hated to cut and run, but I was going to be needed back at Ingalls.  By my most optimistic calculations it might be days before refugees arrived, but I doubted that it would be anything like as rosy.  I had to know what Mac was doing…

As it happened, I wasn't even remotely prepared for what was to come.

Chapter Seven

...More and more people joined the painful exodus. Sad, weary women, their children stumbling and streaked with tears, their men bitter and angry, the rich rubbing shoulders with beggars and outcasts. Dogs snarled and whined, the horses' bits were covered with foam... and here and there were wounded soldiers, as helpless as the rest.
-Jeff Wayne's The War of the Worlds

“You should have taken me with you,” Mac said, when I reached the first blockade and filled him in on what had happened at the prison.  “You shouldn’t have had to take that on your own shoulders.”

I shrugged, not quite trusting myself to speak.  I’d wondered, even though I had known that it was unlikely, if enough of the government had survived to rebuild society quickly.  If that had been the case, and alas it wasn't, the people who massacred the prisoners would have been charged with mass murder, regardless of how justified their actions had been at the time.  Where there is a shadow of doubt, there’s a lawyer struggling to turn it into a weapon against the defendant…and I didn’t want to put Mac through that, or anyone else.  I had seen it happen before in Iraq.  The people on the ground were endlessly second-guessed by politicians, the media, and retired military officers.  It drove some of them to distraction.

If there was to be blame for the entire prison episode, I had decided, let it rest entirely on me.

Later, people would wonder if I had set the lawyer up to be shot, when he made his futile and silly protest.  I hadn’t, or at least I hadn’t planned it to the point of having a specific victim in mind.  There are people like Grand Admiral Thrawn who can predict events to that degree of precision, but they’re fictional.  No one in their right mind would depend on a plan that had so many different factors involved leading away from the desired outcome.  I had known that there would be a victim – prisoners were told endlessly about their rights and rarely about their obligations – but I hadn’t known whom.  It was hard to muster any sympathy for the lawyer, however.  I dislike and distrust lawyers.

“I needed you here,” I said, finally.  I wasn't going to cry on Mac’s shoulder now, was I?  He understood anyway through the shared understanding of men who’d been in battle, if not together.  Civilians got to enjoy their delusions about reality, but a military officer who allowed himself to see what he wanted to see would be dead soon enough.  General Percival had taught a lot of lessons to the world.  It was a shame that most of them weren't heeded.  “How’s it going?”

Mac waved a hand down towards the road.  His share of the Posse had been at work for hours and they'd constructed a fairly impressive-looking barrier, composed of everything from standard police roadblocks to cars and even dirt-packed boxes.  It would have been more impressive if we’d had a few weeks and the right equipment, but he had already brought up a pair of bulldozers to strengthen the blockade.  A pair of signs had been positioned further down the road, warning anyone who came up the road to stop, turn off their car engine, and walk towards the barrier with their hands in the air.  Anyone coming closer without following those rules, the second sign warned, would be shot without further warning.  Mac had carefully deployed four sharpshooters around the area, with the remainder of the Posse held behind for backup.  Snipers are fearsome threats on a battlefield, but they do have limits on how much lead they could pump out.  If a mob of desperate citizens raged towards the blockade, the machine guns would have to deal with them.

I smiled.  There are basically two ways to run an army.  The first way is for the General – yes, I know there are plenty of intermediate ranks, but we’ll keep it simple – to tell a Captain in command of a Company what he wants done.  The Captain looks at the target and either demands more troops or gets on with it.  The General doesn’t interfere, trusting his subordinate to know what he’s doing, and when the Captain takes the target – or whatever – showers him with praise, reward, and another harder mission.  (No successful operation ever goes unpunished.)  The second way is for the General to insist on overseeing everything personally, right down to issuing specific orders for each individual PFC, and generally – hah – being a pain in the ass.  Every person in high rank, or political office, will insist on having a say.  An operation that could have been handled quickly and efficiently by a single Captain, the man on the spot, will rapidly loom larger than Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Now, guess which way is used by the American Government?

That’s right, the second way.  There is nothing more dangerous than a senior office meddling in matters he doesn’t understand.  The guy on the spot knows what he’s doing, the capabilities of the units under his command, and the limitations inherent in their position.  The guy in an air-conditioned office in Washington only knows what he’s seeing on a map, which often misses out little details like minefields, or enemy snipers, or impassable blockades, or human shields…and yet he insists on a say.  You don’t believe me?

Right back during the start of the war in Afghanistan, we had a dead bead on the leader of the Taliban, the worst group of scrum bags ever to walk the Earth.  We could have killed him with ease.  Why didn’t we?  Because the question was relayed upwards and upwards through Washington, right through the Generals, the legal departments and everyone who couldn’t make a decision.  Killing the enemy leader would be assassination…and we’re not allowed to assassinate people, are we?  I have never understood the point of that – if some kindly soul had assassinated Saddam back in 1991, we wouldn’t have had to go to war in Iraq – but Congress and the rest of the Government gets to live in their own world.  By the time it was finally decided that we could strike at the bastard, he’d left.  A decision that should have taken minutes to make had taken hours…and left the military holding the bag.  

I had already decided that I wasn't going to do anything of the sort.  I trusted Mac to get on with it without me looking over his shoulder the entire time.  I might have had more doubts about leaving a REMF to handle affairs, but I wouldn’t have given such a vital task to a REMF in the first place.  If he said it was done, it was done.

“Well done,” I said, finally.  Mac grinned openly.  Perhaps he’d known what I was thinking.  “Have you seen any trouble yet?”

“A pair of people from Ingalls returned a couple of hours ago and we allowed them to enter the town after checking them for contamination,” Mac said.  I nodded once.  There’s an old military maxim about never giving an order you know won’t be obeyed and I knew that telling the Posse to keep out their own fellow townspeople would be disobeyed.  It’s a lot harder to shoot someone you know and like.  If I had tried to keep them out it would have torn apart the entire town.  “A couple of other cars came up to the barrier and we inspected them, but neither of them had anyone useful in them…”

I should inject a comment here.  The definition of ‘useful’ requires some elaboration.  There are times – and I didn’t say this – when a lawyer comes in handy and is a desperately required skill.  The same could be said for quite a few other occupations.  If there hadn’t been a war or a prospect of a war, society might have decided that it didn’t actually need thousands of rough men standing guard to prevent their fellows from being disturbed in their beds.  Occupations can be divided into three categories; material production – mining, for example – industry – turning the raw materials into products – and service, which is basically anything else.  A lawyer is a service, so is a prostitute, a pizza delivery guy and a reporter.  They weren't vital to keeping society functioning, even though rumour has it that some of the stupidest decisions at the Pentagon had come out of nights when they ran out of Coffee.  

Take a Political Scientist as an example.  In peacetime he or she writes long boring books that no one ever reads – I read one once and I couldn’t make head or tail out of it – and is feted for this skill.  In wartime, he or she is completely useless.  In a survival situation, he or she has almost no value whatsoever.  I wasn't going to allow such a person into Ingalls unless she was an unbelievably hot babe who was willing to serve as a breeder.  We were going to need breeders and we weren't going to need boring books on outdated political science.  The world had turned upside down.

I discussed the definition of useful with Mac.  Basically, we would take in doctors and other medical personnel, soldiers and policemen, builders and generally other people who would be useful.  I gave Mac and the others some leeway.  We had an expert on some obscure Middle Eastern civilisation turn up with a van full of supplies, believe it or not, which he successfully traded for admittance.  He might not have been useful at the time, but he did turn into a pretty good worker in the long term.  We also agreed that we would take in small children if they arrived.  I wasn't going to order anyone to shoot them.

Another digression here for people who are wondering why I wanted the children.  Ingalls, like most small countryside towns – and Ingalls is tiny compared to New York City – tended to have larger families.  Why?  In Ingalls, and farming communities, children tended to be helping their families from a very early age and earning their keep.  The cost of raising a child was offset, slightly, by the benefits a child brought to the family business.  (And yes, a farm is a business.  More on that later.)  That wasn't true of raising a child in the city.  There, John and Jill Public would have to make some hard decisions if they found out that Jill was pregnant, such as which of them would give up their job to look after the kid.  The end result was effectively inevitable.  The city birth rates started to fall.

And Ingalls was a pretty safe place to have a kid.  If more kids arrived, I could place them with families I knew would take them in and bring them up to contribute to the community.  In the short term, they were a drain on our resources, but in the long term we were going to need the manpower.  If that makes me sound like a calculating bastard, then…well, I guess I am a calculating bastard.

And I really didn’t want to shoot kids.

“Sir,” Sergeant Isaac Chang said, appearing behind us.  Isaac wasn’t the only oriental in Ingalls, but there were only a bare handful of them.  Ingalls was pretty much WASP territory, although there were a few exceptions like Jackson King.  “I have the decontamination process set up now.”

I allowed him to lead us to the building he’d organised.  Isaac had been part of the National Guard Company stationed in Ingalls and, at the moment, their effective commanding officer.  The war had knocked everything out of kilter.  He was trained as an NBC specialist – and so I was delighted to have him – but he wasn't that effective a Sergeant.  I’d been better than him while I’d been in the Sandbox.

“Everyone who comes in, no exceptions, gets put through the showers,” he said, firmly.  The building had once belonged to a sporting club that had competed nationally.  It was old enough not to have separate showers for men and women, seeing as the founders had decided that women wouldn’t want to play such an unladylike sport.  They’d gone bust a few years ago and abandoned the building to the tender mercies of a caretaker who had actually done a pretty good job.  “They get stripped, washed and then dressed before the Doctor inspects them.”

I exchanged salutes with a pair of his men, dressed in heavy-duty NBC suits rather than more standard uniforms.  I felt a moment of pity for them – the dreaded suits had roasted more than a few of us back during the early march into Iraq – but I had to admit that they looked hugely intimidating, even more than the pair of heavily armed soldiers standing by the entrance to the building.  The precautions sounded a little extreme, but they were vitally important.  Fallout – which is basically radioactive dust – could get onto someone’s clothes…and God help the poor bastard who breathed it in.  Anyone who had been near a ground zero would have been exposed.  My only consolation was that it was unlikely that we would see anyone who had been that badly exposed in Ingalls.  The threat of radiation had been heavily exaggerated by the media before the Final War, but anyone who survived ground zero would probably have a heavy dose of radiation poisoning.

“Good work,” I said, finally.  Isaac beamed.  He looked rather more like a geek than a soldier and I just knew that he had been having problems because of it.  He wasn't, also, a resident of Ingalls.  It had to have crossed his mind that he could be thrown out to find his own town, even though he was too important to waste.  “What happens afterwards?”

“Once the Doctor has inspected them, we either push them back out or we take them into the town,” Isaac said.  “We can inspect their vehicles afterwards and check that they’re not irradiated either, and then bring them into the town as well.  The gas alone will be well-worth the effort of bringing them into the secure zone.”

I nodded.  We were going to run short of gasoline fairly quickly.  Mac would have ensured that the cars he’d used in the blockade had been drained first – it actually is fairly easy to do that using a hand pump, rather than that particularly idiotic cartoon episode where Otto uses a straw to drain a bus’s tank – but we were still short.  I smiled, slightly.  One of the little surprises we’d encountered in Iraq had been an idiotic insurgent who had forgotten to drain the gas tanks.  His cars had blown up nicely.

A whistle blew.  “Company’s coming,” someone shouted from the blockade.  Mac had placed someone on higher ground where he could see down the road.  I would have liked to have had some form of UAV, but sadly they hadn’t been considered fitting equipment for a small town.  If I’d had a few weeks to prepare for disaster…I shook the thought aside as wishful thinking and ran down towards Mac’s command post.

“Ed,” Mac said, when I arrived.  He was staring towards a set of minivans, driving towards us rather erratically.  My first thought was that they were being shot at, but I couldn’t see anyone following them.  The last time I had seen anything like that had been an ambushed convoy in Iraq.  The ambusher had been ambushed in turn by us and shot to pieces.  “Do you want to take the lead?”

“You know what you’re doing,” I said, in reply.  This was Mac’s game.  He'd done all the hard labour of setting it up.  “I won’t take over now.”

He snorted at me and stepped forward, barking orders.  The majority of the guards got to their weapons and took up position, while others removed themselves from the scene.  They’d be the reserve if we actually were attacked.  I wasn’t expecting violence at once, but I knew that it wouldn’t be long before ‘every man for himself’ became the rule of law in the cities.  It probably was already.  The vans came onwards until they saw the signs and skidded to a halt.

The man who climbed out of the lead van looked terrible.  He wore what had once been a several thousand-dollar suit, expertly cut and tailored.  It now looked torn and broken, stained with blood.  From the way he limped, I could tell that he had been in a fight.  He had a gun stuffed into his belt, but I wouldn’t have bet money that he knew how to use it properly.  I borrowed a pair of binoculars from one of the guards and scanned the vans carefully.  They looked to be holding several entire families…and as if they had shot their way out of town.  I could see several bullet holes and smashed windows.

Shit, I thought.  This was going to be bad.

“Halt,” Mac bellowed, through a loudspeaker.  It made a hugely intimidating noise.  “You will remain where you are.  Keep your hands in the air.  Do not move or you will be shot!”

The man waited as Mac climbed over the blockade and advanced to meet him, weapon in hand.  I followed, clutching my own pistol, so that I could hear the discussion.  The man looked terrified, but when he saw my uniform, he almost collapsed in relief.  I wondered, later, what he would have thought if he had known how many people I had ordered killed earlier in the day.

“You have to let us in, man,” he said, finally.  It was hard to sort out information from his babbling, but it seemed that he was a real estate agent, with his family and a few of their friends.  I wasn't sure, then or ever, where he’d actually come from.  “There’s nothing out there, but chaos.”

“I can’t,” Mac said, calmly.  His smile had vanished behind a cold mask.  “We barely have enough for ourselves.  You will have to go someplace else.”

I tensed slightly.  “But my children,” the man protested.  “They can’t stand this…”

“I’m sorry,” Mac said, “but we can’t take them in.  Leave.”

The man’s hand dropped to his pistol.  Mac snatched it out of his hand before he could draw it, something for which I chewed him out later.  Fighting over a gun is dangerous.  The man cringed, as if he expected to be beaten with his own gun, but Mac merely held it away from him.

“You have to leave,” Mac repeated.  “If you don’t, we will open fire.”

After a moment, the man turned and walked back to the vans.

I knew, then, that I was witnessing the death of America.

Chapter Eight

Democracy is a poor system of government at best; the only thing that can honestly be said in its favour is that it is about eight times as good as any other method the human race has ever tried. Democracy's worst fault is that its leaders are likely to reflect the faults and virtues of their constituents - at a depressingly low level. 
-Robert A. Heinlein

“All right, settle down,” Mac snapped, a day later.  The Town Hall was packed with residents, some angry, some fearful and all concerned.  Normally, Town Meetings had only a few dozen visitors, but now it was standing room only.  The Mayor and the leading families, including Mac’s, would make the decisions, but now the Mayor was dead and everything was up in the air.  “Quiet down so we can get this meeting started.”

It took quite a bit longer than that, but finally the room was quiet.  “The Mayor is dead, as you all know,” Mac said, quietly into the silence.  The Mayor had been respected, if not always liked.  His suicide came as a blow, not least because he hadn’t been the last person to die at his own hand.  “The country is at war.  We have to decide what to do.  Ed, please take the stand.”

I stood up.  I don’t like addressing people in public, not when everyone was desperately looking at me to save their lives and property, but there was no choice.  The only other person who knew as much as I did was Mac, or perhaps Isaac Chang, but I couldn’t stand down in their favour.  I had accepted the post back when it involved little more than arresting someone who’d had too much to drink and I couldn’t stop now.

“This is what we know,” I said, and ran briefly through what we’d picked up before all communications had been lost.  The effects of the EMP pulses had been variable, and quite a few of the tactical radios seemed to be working, but the air was full of static.  They barely worked at anything above a local level and if there was someone broadcasting out in the wildness, we never heard them.  Not then.  “The war may be over, or it may be still going on, but we have to deal with the consequences.”

I paused.  “As far as we can make out, law and order has completely collapsed,” I continued.  We’d interviewed a handful of refugees we’d taken in and their stories had been uniformly horrific.  The entire country seemed to be dissolving into terror and horror.  “We are on our own.  We may be able to link up with other towns and villages later, but the Federal and State Governments appear to have been destroyed.”

“So much for the fucking IRS,” someone shouted, from the rear.

“And so much for everything else,” I snapped.  I wasn't too unhappy about the demise of the Internal Revenue Service myself – I doubted that anyone apart from its employees would have been upset – but matters were too serious for jokes.  “We are on our own.  There will be no supplies from outside.  There will be no seed corn, no artificial insemination for the cows, no more weapons and ammo, no more…”

I listed several dozen items that we depended upon…and came in from outside.  I had ordered all kinds of tiny matters, such as collecting brass casings for reloading, that might help stretch out our supplies, but very few of them would be effective in the long term.  Those guards at the stores had come in very useful already.  If we had a panic, we were going to be fucked.  There was plenty of coal about, luckily, but we were going to be short on a great many other things.  What would happen when we ran out of everything else…?

“That can’t be right,” Marc Schneider protested.  I kept my face blank, with an effort, but others weren't so shy about showing their feelings.  Marc wasn’t a popular man in Ingalls.  He'd been something in the city – I had a feeling that it was something that a gentleman’s gentleman had been employed to scrape off his master’s shoe – and had made enough money to buy a house in Ingalls and generally make a nuisance of himself.  It occurred to me that, now, there would be nothing stopping us from lynching him…except me.  There were times when I wished I didn’t have such a sense of duty.  “I know the country has taken a beating, but the government isn’t going to fall so quickly, is it?”

“The government has been seriously damaged,” I said.  I had a nasty feeling that I was understating the case.  It would have been easy to take refuge in believing that it would all be over in a few weeks and we could return to normal, but I knew better.  “Even if the President is still alive, he’s in no state to take control of the country.  The cities have been blasted and thousands upon thousands of refugees will be spilling out into the countryside.  Some of them will be carrying fallout with them.”

There was no dissent.  Everyone knew that we had been turning away what refugees arrived at Ingalls.  A couple hadn’t taken the hint and had had to be chased away with precisely aimed shots.  Don’t get me wrong; Ingalls wasn’t one of those places that really hate outsides – although most people made an exception for Marc and his snooty wife – but most of them lived close enough to the land to understand how fragile everything had become.  We were on the verge of being fucked.

Mac spoke into the silence.  “I propose that we move at once to place ourselves on a full defence position,” he said.  “I also nominate that Ed takes command of our defences and planning our survival.”

“He can’t do that,” Marc injected, quickly.  The big man looked honestly shocked.  “He killed over a thousand men…”

“All of whom deserved it,” Mac snapped back, angrily.  If there had been any real second-guessing to be done, Mac would have done it.  “Or would you have suggested feeding them all here, so close to the children and young girls?  Or would you have suggested leaving them in a well-stocked prison with all the guns and food they could possibly want to produce an army?  We would have been bowing the neck to them within a year, if we survived.”

“But can we survive?”  Tom Spencer asked.  He was semi-retired, like many others in Ingalls, and normally drove the school bus.  A more caring person it would be hard to find.  “If a nuclear war has taken place, aren’t we all going to die anyway?”

I paused, composing my thoughts.  “A lot of us will die,” I said, grimly.  “The cities will become charnel houses very quickly.  Disease and deprivation will stalk the land like…two giant stalking things.”  That got a nervous laugh, as I had hoped.  Personally, I blame Mac’s low taste in television.  “We have farms out here, though, and enough of a position to defend that we would have a good chance of holding out, if we start making plans now.  We have weapons and we have an organised defence force.  We can hold out long enough for most of our enemies to die.”

I explained as quickly as I could.  The cities were almost-certainly write-offs now, as far as we were concerned.  They had once been the heart of the United States, but now they were just burning embers.  Oh, large parts of the cities would have survived, but they were no longer tenable as part of the country.  The supply network that kept them fed would have been destroyed.  The countryside, however, was a different matter.  We could rebuild what we could, if we survived the coming year, and eventually rebuild the country.  It wasn't going to be easy – my decision to execute the prisoners was going to be the least of what we would have to do – but we had to try.  It wasn't in me to just give up.

“He’s right,” Rebecca Piazza said.  I was surprised by her support, for Rebecca was another character.  She’d come to Ingalls five years ago with a small group of followers to establish a commune.  A taste of living without modern conveniences had convinced about a third of them that the sinful cities were better places to live, while another third had ended up being arrested on various drug-related charges, encouraging most of the remainder to leave before the law caught up with them as well.  Rebecca and a pair of young men had stayed, struggling to survive and somehow eking out an existence.  “We could establish a whole new world order.”

“With him in command, no doubt,” Marc said, sourly.

“Well, I for one support Ed,” Herman said.  He glared at Marc, for the two men were old enemies.  Herman was the local gun store owner and the most extreme gun fanatic in the area, which took some doing.  He’d never been a soldier, unlike most of the population, but no one questioned his knowledge.  He had supplied the entire Jail Posse with standardized weapons.  Rumour had it that he had enough guns and ammo to fight a civil war.  “He knows what he’s doing.”

“As do I,” Simon Horvat agreed.  Simon owned the largest General Store in Ingalls, which, despite bitter competition from Wal-Mart, still managed to make a profit.  His service made up for higher prices, in pretty much everyone’s view.  “I second the nomination.”

There was a brief buzz of debate, but there were no other candidates.  Mac was nominated for the job by someone who owed his family a favour, but declined it, while Walter Loy – the local High School teacher – accepted the nomination, but lost.  I wasn't entirely happy about that.  Walter was a fairly decent sort who actually wanted to make sure that kids learned something and, unlike me, was better at convincing people to go along with him…

“But it’s useless,” someone protested, at the rear.  The despair in his voice surprised even me.  “America is dead!”

“No, it’s not,” I said, genuinely angry for the first time since the meeting had begun.   I had heard enough from defeatists in Iraq, mainly people who had done their fighting in Washington.  “America is not dead.  America isn’t the cities, or the land, or the President, or even the Stars and Stripes.  America is the people!”

I touched my heart gently.  “America exists here, in all of us, and as long as we are alive and true to ourselves, America won’t die,” I said, allowing my voice to grow louder.  “We can rebuild the country and make it great again if we have faith in ourselves and don’t give up.  Americans are not quitters!”

There were plenty of people in foreign nations that would have disagreed with that, but it didn’t matter, not now.  The nomination was confirmed quickly and I found myself in command of the defence and rebuilding effort.  Mac was nominated for Mayor – someone was earning their patronage tonight – but declined it again, leaving Walter Loy to be nominated.  That wasn't a bad thing, as far as I was concerned.  I liked Walter.

“All right,” I said, once order had been restored.  Having talked the talk, it was now time to walk the walk.  I’d spent several hours thinking about how to proceed and then discussing it with Mac, who had had his own suggestions.  It wasn’t going to be easy.  The reason the original Jail Posse had been so large had been because some of the members might not be able to make it if there was a real emergency.  They included farmers, engineers and other people we were going to need elsewhere.  They couldn’t be risked on the battlements.  “Here is what we are going to do.

“First, and most important, we are going to start a rationing system,” I said.  “Simon, I think, will be in charge of that.  People who work get fed.  We’ll organise the manpower allocations over the next few days, but a lot of people are going to have to be reallocated pretty quickly.

“Second, I’m going to have to conscript most of the boys from the school,” I continued.  There were around four hundred boys who could be considered military age if one squinted a bit.  It was against the new International Law – as opposed to the far more practical older International Law, but no one followed that these days, apart from the West – but I didn’t care.  I would sooner have the boys alive and fighting than dead.  “We’re going to have to strengthen the borders as soon as possible.  The Jail Posse can’t stay on duty forever.”

This provoked more argument.  Small towns, as I may have mentioned, tend to be more patriotic than the bigger cities, and no, not because bigger cities tend to be more liberal.  Ingalls had sent away thousands of young men – and dozens of young women – to various wars, almost as long as the town itself had been in existence.  Ingalls had sent men to the Civil War – we were very even-handed; nearly a third of our recruits went South – the Spanish War, the First and Second World Wars and most of the conflicts since then.  Mac himself had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan and he had a brother and two cousins who had been overseas when the Final War began.  God alone knows what happened to them.

But they didn’t like the thought of conscripting their young men, rather than the veterans, to man the barricades.  I didn’t like the thought either, but there was no choice.  The veterans would be used as the hard core of the defences, of course, but they were also needed elsewhere.  Ray Thompson, one of the Section Leaders, was also a highly-experienced Civil Engineer.  I was going to need him, so should I have sent him out to be shot at by refugees and the raiders I knew would be coming?

It wasn't elitist, as some people alleged about the protection details surrounding our commanding officers in Iraq, but a matter of sheer practicality.  A man like Ray – or General David Petraeus – is too valuable to risk needlessly.  They had spent years developing their art and couldn’t be wasted on sentry duty.  It sounds harsh, but I would sooner waste a PFC than a General, unless the General was a real incompetent.  The Army wasn’t always good at ensuring that the right people got promoted and was a living embodiment of the Peter Principle; men and women always rise to the level of their own incompetence.

“And we are going to have to tighten our boarders,” I continued, once that argument had been concluded.  Democracy in action can be an ugly thing.  “We cannot take more refugees in than we can handle.”

A dry cough snapped my attention to the Reverend Thomas McNab.  He was Mac’s second cousin – or something; I was never quite sure how they were related – and the President of the Board of Deacons of the First Baptist Church.  He was also the preacher at the church, which counted about a third of the population as members.  He was pretty much the leader of Ingalls’ religious society and, therefore, a person regarded with considerable respect.  He looked a little like Dermot Morgan.

I eyed him carefully.  I respected Thomas; he was a decent man who never compromised his principles, but I was never a great respecter of organised religion.  I believed in God, but not in his human servants.  The Mullahs who had led the insurgency against us in Fallujah had been nothing, but a criminal racket, dressed up in the robes of Islam.  They’d taken their cut from each hit, each tribute and everything else the followers had done, while urging them out to die against us.  You don’t want to know what they did with the women and young boys…

“You are talking about turning away folks in need,” he said, gravely.  He would have gone far as a politician if he hadn’t felt that politics was an unworthy role.  “Do we not have an obligation to help those in need, as the Good Samaritan helped the Jew?”

I hesitated for a moment.  “The Good Samaritan, Father, was in no danger,” I said, finally.  “Every new mouth we take into our care will be a drain on our resources, which are limited enough.  If we can hold out long enough to start bringing in a new crop and cooperating with other towns and villages, we can care for more, but we cannot sacrifice ourselves to help others.”

Thomas scowled, but accepted the point.  

I ran through the rest of my agenda quickly, effectively creating a Cabinet.  Neil Frandsen, the de facto head of the farmers in the area, became Farming Manager, with the responsibility of coordinating with the other farmers to provide food.  Rebecca, who had had some success with microfarming, joined him.  Herman ended up doing logistics and weapons production, although he had warned me that when we started to run out of bullets, we were going to be in serious trouble.  The various armouries, gun clubs and suchlike had had plenty of supplies, but once they were gone, they were gone.  Replacing them would be difficult.  Simon agreed to carry on as rations manager and a handful of other tasks.  Walter had some ideas for weapons that could be produced with what we had. Marc angled for an appointment, but didn’t even get close to winning any support.  God alone knew what would become of him in the future.

“All right,” I said, finally.  There was a new sense of real hope in the room.  Perhaps we could survive after all.  “Let’s get on with it, shall we?”

We didn’t know about the Death Zones yet.

Only that can excuse our optimism.

Chapter Nine

Majority rule will only work if you're considering individual rights. You can't have five wolves and one sheep vote on what they want to have for supper.
-Larry Flynt.

I should have known about the Death Zones.  I have no excuse.

They were forming all over the world, zones where all human life was dying, swept away by the devastation.  I saw so little, at the time, from Ingalls, but we were incredibly lucky.  We were just far enough from the big cities, utterly unsustainable in the face of the calamity that had struck the entire world, to avoid the worst of the effects.  Others were not so lucky.

The Russians – and us, and everyone else – had three different kind of nuclear weapon delivery system.  I won’t trouble you with the technobabble.  Some of it is actively misleading, either purposefully or otherwise, while other parts are little more than notes that were proved useless in the face of the war.  I’ll treat them as simply as possible and call them short, medium and long-range weapons.  The short-ranged weapons were tactical nukes, deployed mainly against opposing armies, the medium-ranged weapons were intended for use in Europe, while the long range weapons were intended to be fired at the continental United States.  The Russians mainly used ICBMs for that purpose, although they had a hard core of bombers for more precise strikes.  I wouldn’t have wanted to be one of those pilots.  They might have been able to reach the United States, but they couldn’t return home…

(The Russians also based a squadron of Blackjack bombers on Cuba.  They were all destroyed within hours of the war beginning.  Ironically, their destruction might have helped spark off the first nuclear exchanges.  Our own bombers were much more capable, but very few of them made it out of Russian airspace alive.  Those that returned home found a devastated country.)

Let’s start with Europe.  Britain had served as a rear-area supply base for NATO forces – which effectively meant us, although they also hosted French and German air forces after their bases were bombed and shelled out of existence – and was a priority target for the Russians.  The British had had one great advantage over the years in their geopolitics.  It was very difficult, almost impossible, for any attacker to cross the English Channel and reach the heart of their power.  Hitler’s plans for invading Britain were founded on wet sand.  Even during the worst days of the Cold War, it was predicted that conventional warfare would barely touch Britain, but that left the nukes.  The British Government, as I have mentioned, barely even considered home defence.  Their population was certainly unprepared for nuclear war.

I have already said that the Russians didn’t go after civilian populations purposely.  That game was only played by terrorists and states like North Korea, which barely had enough nukes – and the ones they had were far from accurate – to be considered a nuclear power.  They didn’t intentionally target the British civilian population either, but in Britain, there were far too many vital targets that were close to civilian population centres.  The result was a devastating series of blows against millions of innocent people.  London, the British capital, was struck by over seven warheads – it would have been nine, if records are to be trusted, but two failed to detonate – and was utterly devastated.  Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Glasgow…all were targeted by the Russians, just for hosting vital targets.  Other nukes fell outside the population centres, striking at British military bases and industrial plants.  The British didn’t have military bases as big as our own.  The effects were proportionally worse.  The British Government, what was left of it, tried to declare an extreme and draconic state of emergency…and proved completely unable to enforce it.  Just like our own government, they were overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the crisis.  A single nuclear strike would have been bad enough, but this was worse.  Their government melted away too…

And the population stumbled out into the zone of death.  When I’d been a kid, I’d walked eight miles with Uncle Billy and thought it a great achievement.  It had been petty compared to what I’d had to undergo to become a Marine and even smaller compared to some of the forced marches we had pulled in Iraq.  The civilian population, eating their way through their sometimes-contaminated supplies at an incredible rate, fell out into the countryside and stripped it bare.  They thought, as our own population thought, that farms equalled food.  They raged out across the landscape like a pack of wild locusts and stripped it bare.  Sometimes, the farmers successfully defended their farms, but mostly the population ate…and then starved anyway.  Civilisation had collapsed completely.  Apart from the King, who had taken shelter in Ireland, and the lucky survivors who made it to Ireland or one of the other islands, the vast majority of the English population was wiped out.

The Scots fared better, marginally.  The lowlands of Scotland were devastated, but the highlands had been barely touched, directly.  Indirectly, there were plumes of fallout drifting northwards, poisoning far too many crops, or sheep.  The only places in the United Kingdom that could be said to have fared well were the Hebrides.  Despite the best efforts of successive governments, enough remained of the island sprit to allow them to hold on, struggling to survive.  They, like us, developed a ruthless attitude to refugees.  They had no choice.

Across the Channel, the story was worse.  The French had been the victims of most of the Russian medium-ranged weapons, not least because they’d been the ones who’d nuked Moscow.  They might have had a bigger country, proportionally speaking, than the British, but they were hit worse.  The French government actually managed to survive – having decamped to a bunker when the balloon went up – but they only made matters worse.  They, like the British and us, simply didn’t have the tools to enforce their will.  What little resources they did have were consumed in ethnic war as refugees swarmed across the Mediterranean and into France.  The Spanish, who had only taken a handful of nukes, fared better, but not by much.  They had a massive refugee problem to cope with…

The Germans, Poles and Russians were effectively destroyed.  The Germans had taken the brunt of most of the tactical nukes that had been deployed in the early stages of the exchange.  The Poles had been unlucky enough to have Russian forces on their soil that were targeted by NATO tactical nukes as they marched eastwards, after having had said forces looting their way across Poland.  Their government had been in exile during the later stages of the war and never returned to Poland.  They’d been hit too hard to survive.  As winter drifted across Europe, most of the survivors froze or tried to reach safer climes.  Very few made it.  

And the Russians?  We’d spent years and trillions of dollars planning how we would destroy them if we ever had a nuclear war with them.  We’d thought, back during the Cold War, that the Russians had a massive nuclear advantage.  We’d been wrong; we had the advantage, not them.  Our panic had been misplaced because we’d believed too much of the Russian propaganda about how strong they were.  By the time we realised that we’d been played, we had amassed enough firepower to destroy Russia several times over, along with most of the Warsaw Pact.  (To add insult to injury, the Russians also came up with a plan to destroy the Warsaw Pact.  Unlike NATO, it was a forced association of slave countries – colonies, in all, but name – and the Russians had good reason to suspect their loyalty.  Look how quickly they bolted when the Russian bear grew too weak to hold them.)  The war saw the smooth execution of the war plans…and the execution of almost the entire Russian population.  We hit them so hard that they never recovered.

Oh, they’d put more thought into civil defence than we had, but it wasn't enough.  It couldn’t be enough.  They could and did save thousands of lives in bomb shelters under Moscow, but once they ran out of supplies, they were dead.  We’d destroyed all of their government and most of their army and what was left turned bandit.  They’re still not back up as I write this book.  They lost all, but five percent of their population.

The Chinese were in a slightly better state.  The Russians had slaughtered most of their city population.  Their farms had barely been targeted, so they managed to hold out under a handful of warlords until the death zones had completed their grizzly work.  They had another advantage.  Taiwan had largely survived the war and managed to coordinate recovery operations.  They also ended up helping Japan and Korea, although the latter was suffering the largest proportional die-off in the entire war.  North Korea had never worked.  It fell apart as soon as the nukes started to fly and almost the entire population died.

And then there were the Arabs.  I’m not that fond of Arabs, as a general rule.  Back when I was in Iraq, I found that I tended to like the insurgents more than I liked the civilians, although that feeling sputtered out when the first bunch of insurgents – former regime loyalists and army soldiers who’d been dumped onto the streets – faded out to be replaced by terrorists, criminals and fanatics.  There’s no biological difference between Arabs and any other human race, but most of them are raised in a way that makes it very difficult for them to become good and productive people.  They’re good soldiers when the battle plan is working, but when the battle plan falls apart, so do they.  They are not taught to take individual responsibility for their own actions, let alone show initiative on the battlefield.  Their governments encourage this and I suppose, if I were an Arab tyrant, I would encourage it as well.  An Arab army that thinks is a dangerous army.  They might start thinking about how easy it would be to launch a coup.  It has happened on occasion.

The Arabs had been hit badly by the Israelis and lost most of their cities and military bases.  Their societies just came apart.  There was almost no trust in their systems outside the family – look at Saddam’s most trusted people and you’ll find that most of them were related to him, poor bastards – and their governments had never believed in their duty to their people.  They’d built their cities on sand – quite literally – and when the nukes went off, most of the population died.  Matters were not helped, in Saudi Arabia, by the Shia rising in revolt.  They won, largely because the Army and National Guard were dying a slow and painful death.  The only Middle Eastern group to actually come out ahead were the Kurds.  The Turks had too much else to worry about.  The Russians, who didn’t like them very much, had hit them with a dozen nukes and their country was falling apart.  Peace with the Kurds was better than war.

Israel might have been all right, apart from Palestine.  There was an immediate collapse in Palestine as foreign aid dried up and news spread of the nuclear strikes.  When it was realised that Mecca, the holiest city in Islam, had been nuked, the religious fanatics started preaching death to Israel – again.  The population rose up and marched on Israel, fired on by the ranting of their preachers and, as is almost traditional in modern-day Arab societies, the presence of guns at their backs.  The factions that had refused to make peace on terms everyone could swallow, if not like, were screaming for blood.  They knew that if their patrons had been destroyed, their rule wouldn’t last long, even if the Israelis were destroyed.

It was like something out of the First World War.  Wave after wave of humanity poured against the Israeli defences, who found themselves pushed back by sheer weight of numbers and forced to deploy everything from gas to napalm to keep the crowds back.  Hamas and Hezbollah fired thousands of rockets into Israel – you know, the rockets that didn’t exist for the western news media – in hopes of breaking Israeli resistance.  It didn’t break.  There was enough footage of Israelis who were caught by surprise being torn apart, or raped to death, to keep them fighting.  The slaughter went on for days and consumed almost all of the Israeli ammunition.  They found themselves being pushed back and back…and they almost lost.  General Hunger and General Thirst had won the war Israel came so close to losing.  The Arabs simply couldn’t go on.  They melted away on the verge of victory and died in their tens of thousands.  The Arab-Israeli Conflict was over.

(Today, Israelis won’t speak of their role in the Final War.  I think they’re ashamed of it.  That’s not uncommon among those who survived the Final War, doing whatever they had to do to stay alive.  Greater Israel is at peace with her remaining neighbours and long may it stay that way.)

And then there were the plagues.

No, I don’t know where they came from.  I’ve heard hundreds of theories, but as most of them were comparable to ‘the white man invented AIDS to keep the black man down’ I tend to disbelieve them when I first hear them.  Personally, I think most of the plagues came from the thousands upon thousands of dead bodies lying around, although there are other explanations.  My own personal favourite, the one I think might have an element of truth, is that they came from the Russians, or perhaps the Iranians.  The former had kept a massive biological warfare program online – despite solemnly promising not to keep one going – while the latter was looking desperately for some way to even the odds between us and them.  Saddam, too, strove to create biological weapons, although after the Iraq War everyone knew that the weapons didn’t exist.  That was partly true.  His program had been dissembled.  The plagues might even have been a belated revenge.

But it doesn’t matter.  More effort has been put into determining the origin of the plagues than any other issue, but it doesn’t matter to us, not now.  All that matters is that, somehow, one of them got loose, or someone deliberately spread the disease.  I could see the Russians doing that.  They’d already started a nuclear exchange, so why not go for the rest of the taboo weapons?  What more did they have to lose?

It could have been worse.  It would have been worse if normal air and sea traffic had still been functioning.  One of the more boneheaded problems with Protect and Survive was its assertion that after a nuclear war, the survivors could resume normal activities.  Come on!  They’ve been nuked out of health and home.  They have barely any food.  If they were too close to ground zero, they may have radiation poisoning as well.  They’re not going to be getting on the buses – which have all been destroyed – and travelling to work, which might also have been destroyed.  It was sheer idiocy!  As it happened, the diseases didn’t have a chance to spread…

I’ll need a slight digression here.  Biological warfare is not quite as easy as films and horror stories make it out.  A disease that kills its host before its host can pass it on to other people will burn itself out very quickly, simply by exterminating the pool of carriers.  A disease that goes too far in the opposite direction, one that doesn’t kill its hosts, is useless as a weapon.  The ideal is to strike a balance between timing – so that it has a chance to spread – and lethality.  It is much harder than it is in the movies.

And the plagues spread throughout the death zones, and Africa.  Africa had been barely touched by the Final War – although North Africa took a hammering from Israeli nukes – but the plagues were no respecter of neutrality.  They raced down from the north to the south, killing as they went, before they burned out.  Africa was almost uniquely vulnerable.  They didn’t have a real vaccination program in many places, while many more had bad governments and depended on outside aid, all of which had been cut off.  The plagues only made a bad situation, with millions on the verge of starvation, worse.  Rumours ran wild; it was a Jewish weapon, or an Afrikaner weapon, or an American weapon, or even the anger of Allah.  Religious strife and warfare followed in its wake.  The plagues didn’t care.  Places that didn’t or couldn’t instigate a strict quarantine were touched and suffered hundreds of further casualties.

It would be nice to say that things were settling down, but in many places, it was only the silence of the grave.  Entire populations had been wiped out.  The handful of survivors in Europe and the Middle East were surviving by holding out against thousands upon thousands of desperate refugees.  Those that were broken were exterminated and thousands more died.  Ireland, the only major European country not to suffer a nuclear attack, had problems of its own.  They were swamped by refugees from Britain.  There are hundreds of stories from the time of chaos and most of them end badly.

We’d been lucky.  The Russians simply didn’t have many long-ranged weapons, although they had been able to fire hundreds of nukes at us.  We also had more space between the cities and the countryside.  Many – but not all – of the nukes had gone off away from civilian population centres.  We had a chance to survive and rebuild, provided only that we held out for long enough.

It wasn't going to be easy.

The next few weeks showed us how grim it was going to become.

Chapter Ten

I also think there are prices too high to pay to save the United States. Conscription is one of them. Conscription is slavery, and I don't think that any people or nation has a right to save itself at the price of slavery for anyone, no matter what name it is called. We have had the draft for twenty years now; I think this is shameful. If a country can't save itself through the volunteer service of its own free people, then I say: Let the damned thing go down the drain! 
-Robert A. Heinlein

I don’t like using conscript soldiers any more than Heinlein did.

When I’d been in the Marines, I’d volunteered and yes, there were times when I cursed that decision.  It was a hellish time, in many ways, and yet…I had volunteered to allow the Drill Sergeants to break me down and rebuild me into a Marine, or at least the larvae of one.  (I didn’t understand that until I’d actually been under fire.)  It was my own choice, even if it had been a stupid one, and by the time I had completed the course, I knew that it wasn't a stupid choice.  Looking back, I wonder how I could ever have been so naive.

But the same wasn't true for the conscripts.  Ingalls had a high school with roughly four hundred pupils of military age, with a little fiddling.  Some of them were unfit and would have to be put through heavy exercise to make them slim down, although there weren't as many of them as there would have been in a city.  Country life doesn’t tend to lead to fatties, although the stereotype of the jolly fat farmer’s wife is still with us.  Some of them had intended to seek a career in the military, or at least go see the elephant before being discharged, but others hadn’t wanted anything to do with the military.  At least two of them had rebelled against parental pressure to join the military and had embraced a radical lifestyle instead, although they hadn’t really gone that badly off the rails.  They wouldn’t have lasted long in the really dark places in New York.  It didn’t matter.  The point was that few of them had volunteered to be turned into soldiers.

I didn’t like that.  I’d fought conscripts in Iraq and most of them had been piss-poor soldiers.  They’d had to be driven into battle at gunpoint.  The British had done better, back in the First World War, with conscripts treated the same as volunteers, once they had been called up to battle.  They hadn’t had such a finely-tuned training program as the modern-day USMC, but by the end of the war, the BEF had been the most powerful force on the planet.  The Arab armies that relied on conscripts had often proven nothing, but broken weeds.  The Arab armies that didn’t use conscript labour often had manpower shortages.  The Chinese came up with the saying ‘good iron is not used to make a nail, nor a good man to make a soldier’ but I’d have been surprised if there wasn't a comparable Arab saying.  Conscripts who didn’t want to be there and weren't properly supported could turn into disasters.

And the last thing I wanted was to be shot in the back by someone who resented training, or that I’d put him on the front lines.

There was little choice, as I said, but I still wasn’t comfortable with the decision.  I’d mainly put training in the hands of other veterans from the town – it might have been a mistake, in hindsight, but it wasn't as if I could recruit training officers from Texas – and supervised as best as I could.  We’d left out most of the training that a regular American soldier would undergo, not least because we represented about a dozen or more different services or combat units between us, but we focused on the important issues.  They learned how to shoot – most of them already knew – and they learned how to follow orders.  Their appearance was a joke – God knows, if we actually did go to war, they certainly wouldn’t look like soldiers – but they were learning.  They did have some problems learning to salute at the right time, but I could forgive them that, as long as they did their duty.  Besides, it can be dangerous to be saluted in a combat zone.  A watching sniper might see that you were in command and put you out of play, permanently.

“Hey, boss!”

I turned to see Rose coming up behind me.  Like many of us these days, she wore body army, with a mask covering most of her face.  A great shame, in my view, but the last thing I wanted was for people to start breathing in fallout if the winds changed sharply.  I’d had Sergeant Isaac Chang give everyone a tense lecture on the realities of fallout, as opposed to the myths and legends, and some people were starting to relax.  I wasn't sure if I approved of that, but…

“Rose,” I said, cheerfully.  I’d barely seen her in the last two days, in between organising the training periods and supervising the defences.  We’d had to shoot several people who had tried to force their way into the defences and drive away several hundred more.  We’d also taken in forty men with experience or skills we needed and their families.  Several of their sons had been added to the training soldiers.  “What’s up?”

She smiled dryly as she stopped beside me, barely breathing hard.  “Another group just tried to cross country,” she said, meaning that they’d attempted to come around the defences.  I wasn't sure if they were probing attacks or just random motion, but I had the nasty feeling that we were in for some trouble.  “They retreated when they were challenged by a patrol.”

I nodded.  Ideally, we would have had sensors scattered all around the perimeter, but that wasn't an option at the moment.  The EMP effects seemed random – they weren't; anything that had been shielded, or protected in some other manner, had survived almost undamaged – but they had been real.  The armoury hadn’t had many sensors in the first place and most of them were useless now.  I’d had patrols watching the approaches and, at night time, snipers waiting with NVGs.  We’d shot several people who had attempted to approach at night.

“Good,” I said.  I’d been wondering why I hadn’t heard the shots.  The world was so silent these days.  I hadn’t seen an aircraft in the skies since the Final War.  “Well done.”

“Thanks,” Rose said, dryly.  She’d been looking forward to staying in the city, but thanks to me, she hadn’t…and it had saved her life.  “I was talking about something with Deborah and she thought I should ask you.”

I lifted an eyebrow.  Deborah was pretty much a grandmother to the entire town.  Her kids had grown up and had started families of their own, but she’d embraced everyone.  Non-judgemental, despite being a Deputy, she was everyone’s friend and offered advice to anyone who needed it.  I rather liked her myself.  She was very far from the classic image of Mrs Grundy, who lived to spoil everyone’s fun.

“I noticed the guards,” Rose said.  I blinked.  She’d been involved with setting the whole system up.  Of course she had noticed the guards.  “I also noticed the soldier-boys, and the men you had training them, and the men you had guarding the prison.”

I frowned, unsure of where this was going.  I’d sent another section of men over to the prison as soon as possible, allowing some rotation of the guards, but I hadn’t made much use of the prisoners yet.  I wanted the prison empty – it was pretty much a perfect fortress for us, once modified a little – but I didn’t have everything set up here to handle the prisoners.  A handful had useful skills we could use, but I wasn't sure if I wanted to trust them as anything, but brute labour.

“Yes…?”  I asked, finally.

“They’re all men,” Rose said.  I didn’t bother to deny it.  Apart from Rose, Deborah and a handful of others, they were all men.  I’d also done my best to keep the women away from the front lines, such as they were.  “Why haven’t you conscripted any of the women?”

There were actually several possible answers to that question, but for once I was lost for words.  I am not opposed to the idea of women in combat.  Teaching women how to shoot, according to the Drill Sergeants, is easier than teaching men.  (They were shouting at us after a slightly less-than-perfect drill, so they may have been exaggerating a little, but there was an element of truth in it.)  Women are often at much more risk than men on the battlefield and they tend to bear the brunt of occupation.  Forget Iraq for that; we were far more civilised than we had any right to be.  The Russians, when they invaded Germany in 1944-45, looted, raped and burned their way across the country.  I thought – and still think – that an armed and deadly girl is the greatest possible deterrent to rape.

But I didn’t want to lower standards either.  A Marine, by the time he graduates, is a walking killing machine.  We don’t all look like steroid-abusing bodybuilders – Mac does, but he’s not a Marine – but we’re extremely tough.  The requirements are harsh and – let’s be blunt here – few women can hack them.  A woman, all other things being equal, will lose a fight to a man.  If we accepted women in the Marine Corps, with all the other issues that that implied, would we lose some of our fighting power?

(And, if we did accept women without lowering the standards, how few women would we get?  How long would it be before we were urged to lower the barriers?  I’d seen that happen in New York to allow for ‘diversity.’  The city had wanted to have more women and African-Americans in high positions, but instead of training them up – particularly the latter – they lowered standards instead.  They did no one any favours.  Those who earned their positions were suspected, unfairly, of having cheated.  Those who didn’t were treated with contempt.)

But that wasn't the real reason.

“We need to keep the women back,” I said, finally.  Rose glared at me.  I suspect that she thought I meant barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.  “Rose…”

“I am the second-best shot in your entire force,” Rose said, angrily.  “I earned this position and I earned my promotion to the big city.  Are you now telling me, and every other woman, that we’re going to be disenfranchised permanently – again?”

I understood her anger.  A woman in a position of power is a challenge to any man – and Rose, as a Deputy, had been challenged more than anyone else on the force.  She had had to earn her reputation the hard way and now I was threatening that.  Contempt from up above would rapidly trickle down to the lower ranks and the rest of the town.  Rose wasn't a Feminazi by any means, but she’d earned her position despite her sex.  She wouldn’t let me take it away without a fight.

“No,” I said, grimly.  “Listen…”

It wasn’t an easy explanation to give.  The only other person who knew was Mac, and Mac had been with me when we’d hashed it all out.  The human race’s total population had just fallen drastically.  By my most optimistic calculations – which later proved to be far too optimistic- at least half the population of America and the entire world had been killed, or would die in the coming weeks and months.  The human race might be down to a billion.  I know that there were people who were ranting about overpopulation, but it struck me that the Final War hadn’t been a particularly good solution…and it had killed the most productive sections of global society.  In a way, despite my words earlier, it had killed America.  Whatever we formed from the rubble would be very different in many ways.

But our priority would be building up our population again.  I’d already started that when I’d arranged for children to be brought into Ingalls, even if their parents were denied access.  That wouldn’t last forever, though, but we’d still have whatever children were born into the community.  They would be born into a very different world, but they’d be born and we were going to need them.  We could not afford to waste a single breeder.

Look, one man can have children with as many women as he has the stamina for, assuming that he has enough women.  Say, like in one of those space-age pornographic videos we were passing around, when it’s one woman a day for the poor imprisoned man who has the job of fertilising them.  Sounds terrible, right?  One woman can only have one baby at a time.  Yes, she could have twins or even triplets, but on average, one woman, one baby.  Fifty women and one man wasn’t a disaster.  Fifty men and one women was social collapse.

And there were plenty of ways things could go wrong.  There was a small amount of fallout in the air and more might be on the way.  A girl who breathed in too much fallout might miscarry, or worse, give birth to a mutated child.  (And no, not like the X-Men.  I’m talking about a child being born without limbs, or eyes, or in one extreme case a brain.)  A pregnant woman who was underfed would pass on her problems to her child.  A woman with AIDS or Cancer might infect their baby…there were too many possible problems to list.  The child-bearing women had to be given the best of everything; the best food, the best drink, the best medical care and the best protection.  We couldn’t afford to lose even one to an enemy bullet.  We had to keep them inside and cosseted.  We had no choice.

I’d worked out the maths back after the Town Meeting.  Ingalls had a population of around 3000 men and women.  With additions, it might reach 4000 before we had to put a stop to all immigration for fear of succeeding ourselves to death.  We had, roughly speaking, around 1200 women of child-bearing age (keeping it a little vague, of course; women can get pregnant very early on, but it’s not always healthy) and another 400 or so who would grow into child-bearing age.  They had to be protected.  If they weren't protected, they might become infected and lose their ability to bear children, or be kidnapped by outsiders.

I have a feeling that problems like this are what started the whole ‘subjection of women’ thing.  A woman who can bear children is a valuable commodity in a primitive age, or, for that matter, in modern-day Africa or the Middle East.  She has to be protected, not only for her own good, but for that of her family or tribe.  The shocking devaluation of rape victims – personally, I preferred shooting the rapists – in such societies might have its origins in women who, when raped, could no longer bear children, or bore their rapist’s child.  I hated that kind of logic and even considering the fact that we might have no choice, but to embrace similar measures, shocked me.  It was…well, un-American, un-Western, a direct offence against everything I held dear.

Rose listened, without saying a word, as I stumbled through the explanation.  I could relax with her, but not then, not when she had to hear something she would find loathsome.  I didn’t blame her.  If I’d been one of those porn stars in a Lombardi Production where I had to impregnate the entire tribe of women, I wouldn’t have been happy either.  Sex is a wonderful thing between a man and a woman – provided, of course, that you get between the right man and the right woman; all right, I’ll be serious now – but I wouldn’t want to cheapen it.  I’d done too much crawling around whorehouses in my younger days.

“I see,” she said, finally.  “I have a proposal.”

I listened as she outlined her own suggestions.  They were simple enough.  I had actually intended something similar, but I wasn't going to tell her that.  The girls would get training in shooting – those who didn’t know how to shoot before – and other training as well, making them far more than just barefoot and pregnant.  They hadn’t been barefoot and pregnant in the first place, but I didn’t point that out to her either.  She was on a roll.  She also insisted on continuing mixed classes at the school, when it was reopened, just so that boys would see girls as more than just sexual partners.  I took her point.  I have a feeling, although I cannot prove it, that the general low regard for women in some parts of the world comes from lack of exposure.

And besides, if the women were defending their homes and families, they’d be more aggressive and determined than anyone else.  Never get between a mother and her child.  She’ll tear you to bits if she gets a chance and never care about the cost.  That’s human nature.  If I could take advantage of it…

My radio buzzed.  “Ed, this is Mac at CP2,” Mac’s voice said.  The static made it almost impossible to hear him.  The nukes, or something, had screwed up reception no end.  (Either that, or they were lousy radios.  The National Guard didn’t always get the best of equipment.)  “I think we’ve got company coming.”

“On my way,” I said.  It had to be serious if Mac was calling for me.  He could normally handle anything to do with the refugees.  “Rose, I’ll deal with it as soon as I get back from this.”

I turned and ran towards CP2.  Trouble was definitely coming.