The Living Will Envy The Dead

I don't know ,anybody that lives in this area will know that there many NG and Reserve units in the area and that many artillery pieces would have been there . I could name at least 6 off the top of my head along with some R&D places down near Kingwood .
So why didn't we have more available from these areas.
Just a thought and JMHO .

 

Chapter Thirty-Four

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Wives come and go, but friends go on forever, unless they steal the wives…

&shy;-Ed’s Iron Laws #23

“Easy, Ed,” Mac said, hugging me back as hard as I was hugging him. “You’ll have me in traction.”

“What traction?” I asked. I doubted that we had the facilities to help someone who had been crushed anyway…and I wasn't crushing him that hard. “What the hell happened to you?”

“It’s a long and complicated story, full of daring deeds of daring do and spectacular stunts that no one would believe a word of it if I told you,” Mac said, patting the side of the horse, which regarded him with dull tolerance. It would make a useful addition to our breeding stock, if we took it back to the stables, but it looked as if it had been trained to be a warhorse. “I’d much rather discuss what happened to you and everyone else.”

“Oh, there’s not much to tell,” I said, shaking my head in awe. All of my previous dismay had been blown away by their miraculous return to our side. “We fled down the road, reached here and set up camp. We thought that you had bought the farm, Mac.”

“I hope that the girls were crying over me,” Mac said, dryly. He gave me a wink that was held just long enough to make me smile. “So, you want to know the dread story of our daring commando raid?”

I nodded. “Well,” he said, as I escorted them both into the warehouse, “I found myself being taken prisoner by the goons, so I leapt into the air and found that I could fly. I came down amongst them, snatched up Dutch and this rat bastard here” – he snapped the third figure, who glared at him with incoherent rage – “and flew back towards Ingalls. When I got halfway, I found that my flying powers were fading, so we landed, picked up Trigger here and rode the rest of the way. Great story, huh?”

I had to laugh. “And the truth?”

“How dare you not believe my lies?” Mac demanded. “It’s all true, apart from the lies…”

“Which is most of it,” Dutch put in, unhelpfully. “In fact, only one of those statements was true.”

Mac shrugged. “All right,” he said. “I found myself being taken prisoner, where this rat bastard identified me as one of the leaders of Ingalls, and ordered me to be tortured. They tied me up in a chair and sent in a hundred naked women to start torturing me with great enthusiasm, but I convinced them that I really suffered every time they sucked me off, so I screamed every so often to convince them that I’d actually been telling the truth. Finally, I told them a few lies, but the men didn’t believe me and sent in male torturers with the branding irons. It was then that I decided that I’d had enough.”

He paused, dramatically. “I broke out of my chains and snatched up a sword, waving it in the air and shouting a battle cry into the air,” he continued. “Instantly, I felt myself transformed into a barbarian hero with muscles on his muscles, so I knocked the torturers out and smashed through the tent, where I saw Dutch being lowered slowly into a bowl of boiling water. I think they were going to have him for lunch.”

“I would have given them indigestion,” Dutch said, deadpan. “And what happened after you woke up?”

Mac ignored this. “Naturally, I would have saved Dutch at once, but I was slightly distracted by a set of hot babes in underwear, so I spent about an hour making out with them, ignoring Dutch’s increasingly loud screams until it was almost too late to save him. I leapt into the boiling water myself, punched my way out of the bowl, and saved him in the nick of time. I then grabbed a horse, transformed it into a winged beast like Pegasus, and captured this bastard before we flew out and back here.”

I frowned. “Shouldn’t it have been a unicorn?” I asked, finally. “I think that that would have suited you better.”

“He’s on to you,” Dutch put in. He grinned, suddenly, rubbing his arm. I gave him a quick once-over and saw the bruises. Whatever else had happened, he had been badly mistreated by the Warriors. “Yep, you definitely qualify for riding a unicorn.”

“**** you,” Mac said, affably. I laughed. The general qualification for riding a unicorn was virginity. I knew that Mac was no virgin. “You want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?” I nodded. “Well, you’re not going to get far.”

I rolled my eyes. “All right,” Mac said. “The truth…

“I climbed onto the side of the last vehicle as it prepared to leave the FOB for the redoubt here,” Mac began. “It might have been a bad choice, because bullets started to whip through it seconds later and nearly took off my balls.” He laughed. “A target like my pair. How could they miss? A second after that, the entire vehicle shook and I fell off the side, which saved my life as it exploded a second later. I was badly stunned for a few seconds and lay still; the Warriors who searched the wreckage, looking for any survivors, missed me. I crawled in the direction of the pond as darkness started to fall and finally managed to get enough water to revive myself, along with the candy bars.”

“Good thing you had those with you,” I said. Mac had stockpiled a few dozen different types of candy bars, all his favourite types, and guarded them jealously. I had stockpiled a few myself, but I’d almost finished them when we made first contact with the Warriors of the Lord. “And then what happened?”

“They were sending pairs of searchers around to pick up everything they could, including the bodies,” Mac continued. “I don’t know if they were actually eating them, as I joked, but I lay still until the searchers came up to me, and then went after them with a knife. The poor bastards didn’t stand a chance. I took the pair of them out before they could raise the alarm, confiscated everything they were carrying that might have been useful, and stole their clothes.” He nodded at the outfit he was wearing, a drab collection of greens and blacks, rather like a civilian’s idea of a military uniform. “This is the uniform of one of their lower level soldiers.”

I smiled grimly. Mac had high marks for knife fighting and was deadlier with a set of knifes than many men were with assault rifles. The Warriors of the Lord wouldn’t have known what had hit them until it was far too late; I had a vision of Mac sneaking through their encampment, wearing their colours, killing as he moved. He’d be caught, of course, in the end, but holding him would be difficult. He had also aced the escape and evasion course…and had actually operated undercover in very alien environments. The Warriors, for all of their fanatical certainty in their rightness of their course, didn’t have half the resources of the Iranian government when it came to population control. I doubted that their senior officers knew all of their juniors by sight.

“Anyway, I wandered around for an hour, watching everything I could without drawing unwelcome attention,” Mac said, smiling slightly. “I didn’t dare pick off a few of their other officers, until I realised that they had a small collection of prisoners from the rearguard, including Dutch.” He nodded at Dutch. “They also had them under guard by a pair of incompetent assholes in silly black SS uniforms so I took them both out within seconds. I doubt that the Waffen-SS would have tolerated such nincompoops in their ranks. I killed them both quickly and quietly and smuggled them both into the stockade.”

He sounded pleased with himself, I saw, and it was clear that he had reason to be delighted with his own performance. “I freed Dutch and the other five and they stole their uniforms. We were just getting ready to leave when this rat bastard” – he nodded towards their prisoner – “arrived with a pair of guards and a bunch of sadistic instruments of torture, or sex toys. Looking at them, it was hard to tell the difference and judging from the expression on his face, he found it hard to tell the difference as well. We took him prisoner and put the guards in the stockade and, holding him at gunpoint, forced him to take us to the horses. We’d just gotten Trigger here saddled when someone raised the alarm and we had to run for it.”

His face darkened. “Two of the men chose to stay behind and hope to blend into the Warriors as later agents of retribution,” he said. “The rest of us ran as they came boiling after us, shooting at us…luckily, as the targets, we were the safest people in the area. We lost the other two along the way. They both volunteered to try to hold them off long enough for us to get this bastard back to Ingalls. I think we should ask him a lot of very pointed questions.” He shrugged. “The rest you know.”

I bent down to examine their prisoner. He had once been a very fat man. I could see the telltale signs, even though he had been on a forced diet for the last few months, and he positively radiated moral corruption. Perhaps I was imagining it, but I was sure that I could see the darkness in his soul, a sense of pure evil and depravity that hung around him like a stink. His piggy eyes glared up at me, trying to give voice to words that wouldn’t escape the rag stuffed into his mouth, making it hard to breathe.

“I think that he’s definitely one of their senior leaders,” Mac said, glaring down at his captive, who glared back at him. A real hard case, I decided; someone who really believed in his Cause, or at least in his divine right to do as he pleased. He might break easily, with the right sort of pressure, or he might refuse to break for hours, even under the worst pressure that we could devise. “Everyone allowed him to lead us down to the stables, even though the merest MP would have sensed that someone was badly wrong; hell, boss, they were scared to death of him.”

I nodded slowly, watching the piggy eyes as they tracked back to me. A sociopath-type personality, then, one that would never be allowed to reach high levels under normal circumstances. He acknowledged no limits, no restraints on his power, and now that law and order was just a memory, had the ability to snatch as much as he could from the crumbling world. Prophet Zechariah had found an excellent servant, just as Hitler – I remembered Thomas’s lecture and winced – had found one in the unprepossessing Himmler or Ribbentrop. He would probably have plans to overthrow the Prophet, one day, but until then he would be the most loyal and craven person in the Prophet’s force.

I came to a decision, one that I hated.

“Brent,” I called, sharply. Brent came running over at once. He looked just as pleased to see Mac as I was; Mac had been popular among the army, even though some had called him a slave driver behind his back. I didn’t care; easy training, hard mission, or vice versa. It wasn't a real choice for anyone with a commitment to building a real military. “Detail off a platoon and one of the trucks to transport this piece of **** to Stonewall. Once you get there, inform Richard that he is to be kept in solitary confinement and on full suicide watch; I want him strapped down, unable to move except until full supervision. He’ll know what to do.”

“Yes, sir,” Brent said. He looked past me at Mac. “May I say, sir, that it’s good to see you again?”

“It’s good to see you too,” Mac said, wryly. “Now, you have your orders, so get on with them. We’ll have a proper party to gloat over my…”

“Our,” Dutch put in.

“Great escape later,” Mac said. He winked at me. “We’re going to need something to keep our morale up after this.”

I grinned. “It’s good to see you back,” I agreed. “I missed you.”

“I’d take another shot, if I were you,” Dutch said. We shared a laugh. “I’d better get back to my people. Once Mac’s story starts being told, everyone will think that he took on and defeated the entire army of Warriors on his own, without any back-up at all. Next year, we’ll discover that he did everything, without any help from us, and that he has an admiring horde of teenage groupies who do everything he tells them to do. A century from now, he’ll be…”

“Arrested for strangling a fellow officer if he doesn’t shut up,” Mac said, wryly. His voice darkened. “Ed, they did have teenage love slaves at the FOB, serving some of their soldiers. I saw some of them being forced to…service some of the men, those who survived the battle, in any way they wanted. Whatever these bastards are, Ed, they’re not religious at all. They’re monsters.”

I shuddered inwardly. The needs of most men are basic. They wanted sex and security and the Warriors offered both. The system might end up being run by a group of hypocrites who didn’t believe in the faith, but were adapt at promoting it, by any means necessary. It was oddly comforting, in a way, to know that the Warriors would probably go that way. Every other religion on Earth had gone the same way.

“I know,” I said. “Dutch, go get medical attention and then see to your men. I’ll debrief you later on what you saw while you were a prisoner.”

“Yes, sir,” Dutch said, touching his head in what could charitably be called a salute. “I’ll see the nurses at once.”

I watched him go and then turned back to Mac. “For God’s sake,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Don’t do that to me again.”

Mac smiled. “Don’t do what to you again?”

“You know what I mean,” I said. “I thought that you were dead! I thought that I had abandoned you to your fate! I ran in the damned convoy and all I could think of was ‘brave Sir Robin turned about, and gallantly he chickened out’…”

“Bravely taking to his feet,” Mac put in, “he beat a very brave retreat.”

“You introduced me to that,” I said, angrily. He had, too. His fondness for British television had kept us both entertained while we’d been in hospital. “I thought I’d left you behind.”

“You care too much,” Mac said. “You’d make a lousy General.”

“I had noticed,” I snapped. “Mac…”

“Listen,” Mac said, firmly. “I went into battle knowing the risks as much as you did, maybe more. I knew that I could get killed back there, or if not there, somewhere else. I knew the dangers and I went to do it anyway. You know that as well as I do. I took the risk of sneaking around their encampment because it had to be done; you left me, also, because you had no choice. If you had stopped to pick me up, you would have lost the remainder of the convoy and the entire force. As it happened, you saved them to fight again. Honestly, Ed, you can’t carry the whole weight of the world on your shoulders.”

“I know,” I said.

“Good,” Mac said, and clapped me on the shoulder. “Let’s go inspect the survivors, shall we?”

The interior of the warehouse was coming alive as the soldiers picked themselves off the floor and stood to attention when Mac entered. As I might have mentioned, he was popular and had been sadly missed when he had been reported missing. The wounded looked as if they wanted to stand up as well, but the nurses told them firmly to remain lying down. Some of them were within their power to heal, but others would never recover without the use of a proper hospital, which we didn’t have. Kit would be able to do something for some of them, but not for all of them. In Iraq, we’d been able do amazing things for soldiers who hadn’t been killed outright, but now…now, we were back in the days of the First World War. The living might envy the dead.

“We can’t stay here, of course,” Mac said, afterwards. I nodded in agreement. The redoubt was useful as a rendezvous, but it didn’t have half the natural defences of the FOB the Warriors had booted us out of, although with heavy casualties. We couldn’t have held it without more weapons and supplies. “We may have to pull all the way back to Ingalls.”

“Or Stonewall,” I said. The prison would be easier to defend, but if we were trapped there, we were screwed. There wouldn’t be a second escape under fire. The Warrior rank and file might have been composed of fanatics, but the leaders would probably learn from experience. “I don’t know how long we can hold out, Mac.”

“Depressed, Ed?” Mac asked. He frowned at me, genuinely concerned. “That’s unlike you. Are you sure you’re feeling all right?”

“We don’t know enough about the Warriors,” I said, grimly. I didn’t want to think about what we’d have to do, but we didn’t have any choice. Kit was going to hate me. So was pretty much the entire population when – if – they found out about it. “Now, however, we have someone who does. It’s time we asked him a few questions.”


Chapter Thirty-Five


What's one to make of a politician, one who has experienced torture personally, to all appearances a decent and brave man, who can say in one breath that “People will say anything under torture,” and in the next say, “Torture doesn't work”? He's either dishonestly pandering to the crowd (Am I being redundant by saying ‘politician’ and ‘dishonestly pandering to the crowd’? I suppose I am.) or he's too dumb to realize that, if torture's that bad, and with a modicum of ability to spot-check for truth, the victim of torture will also tell the truth rather than risk more torture. One has to wonder about the fitness for high office of such a man. I mean, really? It's being neither cleverly dishonest nor honestly stupid.
-Tom Kratman

“I want it noted,” Kit said, “that I don’t want to be here.”

“Duly noted,” I said, tightly. I didn’t want to be here either. I didn’t like Stonewall under the best of circumstances and the Maximum Security Wing was one of the most unpleasant environments imaginable. I wondered if Kit could sense the ghosts of those who had died – who I had had killed – here. I could have sworn that I heard something whispering right at the limits of my perception. My imagination always plays up when I’ve got something to do that I’m not looking forward to doing. “I don’t think we have a choice.”

“That’s not your decision to make,” Kit snapped, more angry than I’d ever seen him before, even when someone from the Constitutional Convention proposed that homosexuality be made illegal. “I am a Doctor, sworn to help the sick and injured, not to watch as someone is…hurt.”

“Be grateful that you don’t have to do it,” Mac said, dryly. “I do understand your reluctance to take part, Kit, but we don’t have much choice. We need the information locked inside our friend’s brain and he’s not going to give it to us if we wipe his bottom with silken sheets and provide him with a concubine to share his bed.”

I nodded once. I’d had to go through a course on prisoner interrogation and, truthfully, we might achieve better results if we had had no time limit and could break him down gradually. Making friends with him, as some terrorist interrogators had done, could lead to all kinds of interesting developments, including a new double agent. It could – and had – also lead to the intelligence services being hoaxed by the enemy. Stockholm Syndrome worked both ways.

But we didn’t have time to be gentle. By my most optimistic estimate, we had less than a fortnight before the Warriors of the Lord restarted their advance towards Ingalls…and the centre of our new government. None of that time would be wasted, but it was hardly long enough to make Ingalls utterly impregnable…and even if they couldn’t get into the town itself, they could seal us inside indefinitely. We would either have to launch a costly offensive against them, where they would have all the advantages, or allow them to starve us out. They might also seal us off and destroy the other Principle Towns instead. We needed intelligence and I was past caring about how we got it. We just had to be careful that we weren't fooled.

“Here,” I said, as we reached the final cell. It was twice as large as the other cells, for a reason that Richard had proven surprisingly reluctant to discuss, but it was large enough for our purposes. Our prisoner sat on a chair, his hands and legs firmly secured so that he could barely move a muscle, preventing him from committing suicide. It might have been an extreme precaution, but some of the harder terrorists we’d taken prisoner had committed suicide, just to prevent us from learning what they knew. The media had promptly claimed that their deaths were due to mistreatment, as if preventing them from hurting and killing hundreds of innocent victims counted as mistreatment. “What do you make of him?”

“He’s got an incredibly small dick,” Kit said, finally.

“All terrorists do,” Mac said. We shared a look of sly amusement. The Iraq War would have gone the other way if the terrorists hadn’t gone out of their way to make sure that everyone knew just what a terrorist victory would have meant for Iraq. It would have made Saddam look mildly maladjusted. “All you have to do, Doctor, is be there if he needs sudden and urgent medical attention.”

“Sure,” Kit said, angrily. “How can you two be so calm about it? Are you all just mindless killing machines?”

I ignored the jibe. Under the circumstances, Kit had every right to be annoyed with us – me. Mac had other ideas. “I saw their camp from the inside, Doctor,” he said. “I saw what they do with their captives, including people we have sworn to protect. They won’t hesitate to kill you because of your sexuality, the same way they won’t hesitate to kill Rose or Deborah for being women who know how to fight, and we have to do what we can to protect you. That…****er in there isn’t an innocent victim, or someone brainwashed into following the Prophet, but one of their leaders, one of the people who are trying to spread the nightmare everywhere they can reach. He is as guilty as they come and we do not have time to be gentle.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry, Doctor.”

“Excuse me then,” Kit said, “if I don’t watch. I’ll wait outside until you call me.”

I didn’t blame him. The thought of interrogating a prisoner rigorously – torture, in other words, if you don’t believe in mincing words – isn’t one that everyone can stand. It’s not easy to construct a moral case for administering pain to a fellow human being, even with so much at stake. There are too many questions that need to be answered, starting with the simplest of all. Did we have the genuine criminal, or did we have someone we’d picked up by mistake, innocent of any crime? The only reason, or so I told myself, that I was accepting the need for torture was because I knew we had a real member of the enemy leadership. There was no risk of making an innocent man suffer.

We stepped into the cell and the captive’s piggy eyes turned to glare at us, although there was an undertone of fear in his gaze. I was delighted to see it. A real fanatic would take longer to break down, but real fanatics tend not to reach the high levels of terrorist organisations. The Prophet might be as mad as a hatter, but I was quite happy to bet – hell, I was betting – that his senior leadership was only in it for the power. The same was true of pretty much every terrorist group that hadn’t wiped itself out long ago.

“Good morning,” I said, conversationally. Richard had, on my orders, meddled with the lighting a little, just enough to confuse the prisoner as to how long he’d actually been a captive. Deprived of any objective simulation – and affected slightly by some drugs we’d injected into his system – he might well believe that he’d been there for weeks, instead of two days. “How are you today?”

I released the gag and he took the opportunity to spit at me. “That was careless,” I said, and slapped him across the face. I had to pull the blow – I didn’t want to inflict permanent damage yet, or stun him – but it left a satisfying mark on the side of his face. He stared at me, shocked for a moment, and then reverted to type. “We’ve finally gotten around to you and you really don’t want to piss us off, right?”

“Right,” Mac agreed, and stepped forward into the light. We had dressed him in an outfit that made him look more like a demented dwarf than a soldier, but also made him look terrifyingly evil, like someone out of an S&M movie. The prisoner’s eyes went wide as he stepped into the light. Mac’s hand squeezed his throat gentle, leaving him in no doubt that he could crush his windpipe just by squeezing, before letting go and forcing the prisoner to take deep breaths. “Don’t piss us off.”

“You can’t do this to me,” the prisoner protested, finally. We’d gotten through to him already, or was it just an act? I knew some terrorist groups that gave their people special courses in misleading interrogators, but I doubted the Warriors of the Lord would have bothered with such lessons. Why should they have if they knew the land was going to fall into their hands? “You can’t treat me this way?”

I leaned forward, cursing an oversight. I should have swallowed something that would have given me really bad breath. “And we can’t we treat you this way?” I asked, as insanely politely as I could. “You’re my prisoner. I can do what I like to you.”

He shrank back in his seat. “No one knows you are here, my friend,” I breathed. “No one knows or cares that you survived the battle. We can do whatever we like to you and no one will even know, or care. Your fellow Warriors think that you’re a dead man and someone else has already been appointed to fill your shoes. They don’t care in the slightest what happens to you, not now that you’ve been replaced.”

I had hoped that that would cause him to break, but he held on to himself. “I won’t tell you anything,” he said, desperately trying to avoid thinking of something that might save him. I might have overdone it a little. If he clung so hard to life, he would try to avoid telling us anything, just to prolong his existence. “You can do what you like to me. I won’t talk.”

“Yes, you will,” I said. “Mac?”

Mac stepped back outside the door and returned, a moment later, pushing a trolley. It had a small light mounted at one end – I believe Kit used it for his night time rounds in the hospital – which was shining brightly, illuminating the small collection of metal devices on the table. They looked intimidating, more intimidating than most military weapons, but they weren’t military at all. Some of them had been borrowed from Nana, the town’s dentist, and were designed for repairing teeth. Others had more mundane applications.

“You can torture me all you like,” he said, “but I won’t talk.”

“The interesting thing about torture,” I lectured, as I picked up a surgical knife and held it so that the light sparkled off its sharp blame, “is that it is actually quite reliable, under the right circumstances. Specifically, if we have a method of obtaining feedback, we are capable of knowing just when the person under the knife is telling the truth. Lying to us, my friend, will only prolong your pain, for we have other prisoners and a lie detector.”

I thought I was overdoing it a little, but his eyes went wide. The wire that ran around his head, making him look like a candidate for the electric chair, wasn’t actually anything more than extra humiliation, but if we could convince him that it was a lie detector… We didn’t have other prisoners with whom we could crosscheck, but if he believed we had, we took away his motivation for lying.

“If you lie to us, the pain will merely grow worse,” I said, calmly. I reached for his hand and smoothed it out. A moment later, I brought down the knife and cut his pinkie finger off. He screamed in pain and shock. I wasn't in a much better state. I’d injured people before, although never so…precisely, but the finger had come off much quicker than I had expected, somehow. I passed the grizzly trophy to Mac, who put it in a shiny bowl, and held it up in front of our guest’s eyes. “As you can see, we have no compunction about hurting you.”

His eyes showed an internal struggle…and pain. A dull stink rose up from where he had urinated involuntarily. My nose twitched, but I ignored the smell, satisfied that we were scaring hell out of him. If we kept pushing him, I was confident that he would break. We could keep making him suffer for hours.

I said as much. “We can do this forever, if we have to,” I said. “Perhaps we could cut off one of your toes next, or perhaps we should start getting ambitious and cut off your nose, or pluck out one of your eyes, or maybe even your penis? What do you think of that?” He said nothing, whimpering desperately, trying to force us to soften and spare him the agony. I reminded myself about the captives they’d taken and pushed my guilt into a darkened corner of my mind. “Tell me, now. What is your name?”

Mac passed me the dentist’s drill and I held it close to his mouth. “Daniel,” the prisoner screamed. “My name is Daniel!”

I smiled, tightly. “Good, Daniel,” I said, withdrawing the drill. Carrot and stick, again, rewarding him for telling us what I’m sure felt like a piece of insignificant data. “Now…how did you join up with the Warriors of the Lord?”

He flinched back, eyes wide and staring, until I brought the drill back towards his mouth. It was an astonishingly intimidating tactic, but then, most people dread going to the dentists and having him working away inside their mouths with his drills. I’m sure Daniel – as we must now call him – sensed that I didn’t have any proper dentist training, or that I wouldn’t hesitate to drill right through the tooth and into the nerve below. He started to gibber away and I listened carefully, grateful for the recording system. We’d be able to replay it later.

Daniel – his real name had been something a great deal less religious – had been one of the early ones to fall into the hands of the Warriors of the Lord, just after the bombs fell. He talked briefly about a shrewish wife and two minor children, the former of whom had been broken by the Warrior treatment into a proper wife. His delight in seeing his enemy – I wondered, grimly, how he could see his wife as an enemy, but I suspected I knew the answer – broken had brought him to the attention of the Warrior leadership, who had promoted him and made him their loyal servant. He hadn’t been the commanding officer of the force that had hit Summerville, but he’d been a high-ranking officer…and one who was partly responsible for the atrocities in the town.

“We have to keep the bitches in their place,” he said, desperately. The temptation to inflict even more horrendous damage on him was almost overwhelming. “Man is the head of woman and a woman who seeks to live on her own is an unnatural offence against God. She must be punished and purged…”

I pushed onwards grimly. “How many Warriors are there in total?”

“I won’t tell you that,” Daniel said. I leaned forward with my drill and inflicted a tiny nick on the side of his gums. Judging from his screams, you’d think I had kicked him in the groin or poured acid on his head. “Thousand upon thousands; oh God I don’t know any more, I don’t know…”

Mac and I shared a glance. “Thousands upon thousands?” I muttered. “A hundred thousand at most?”

“It can’t be much more, can it?” Mac asked. “They couldn’t have fed millions of refugees for long, no matter how many old MRE packs they stored. They have to have limits somewhere.”

I returned to Daniel. There was a thin trickle of blood seeping out of his mouth, spilling down towards the floor below. He looked to be in terrible shape, as if we’d pushed him too far too quickly, but I was sure we could go much further before he had a heart attack. There was so much else we had to ask him.

“Weapons,” I said, firmly. “What kind of weapons do the Warriors have?”

I listened to his answer in growing disbelief, rolling my eyes at the civilian attitude to weapons. Daniel might have been a high-ranking officer, but he lacked anything reassembling a comprehensive knowledge of modern weapons. The rifles he mentioned could have been anything from AK-47s to M16s or hunting rifles. I hurt him a little more, pushing for answers, but I don’t think he had them to give. He mentioned tanks and armoured fighting vehicles, but again, I don’t know if he really knew what he meant. We certainly hadn’t seen more than technicals and truck bombs during the Battle of the FOB.

“Next question,” I said. “How did you get information from Ingalls?”

“We sent agents into the town,” Daniel said. He looked completely broken, utterly shattered. I hoped – prayed – that it wasn't an act. If he had recovered enough to give us some misinformation, we were going to be in trouble. “They made contact with a few of your people and…got information. That’s how they knew to take Summerville so quickly. They knew that it was going to be reinforced.”

I winced. Ingalls was hardly a big city. It was hard to keep anything a secret for long and…hell, an enemy spy in the right place could be devastating. If it was someone who’d had a pre-war link with the Warriors…or might it be someone else, someone discontented? The problem was that there were too many people who were ‘discontented.’

Daniel coughed out blood when I put the question to him. “Who is the spy?”

“Schneider,” Daniel said. I felt my mouth fall open. In hindsight, perhaps I should have seen it coming, but I hadn’t seen it at all. I would have thought that betrayal to the Warriors was unthinkable. “Marc Schneider.”

 

Marc Schneider,he's the one that wanted to be all "Can't we all just get along " If I remember right.
Great story ,I am enjoying it very much.
I think may have meet Mac in my travels !!!!! LOL

 

ChrisNuttall,
I registered an account, just so I could tell you how much I enjoy this story.
Your writing is clear, concise and enjoyable, you bring your story to life and the character's as well.
There are many doom stories, but this is right up there with One Second After...

I thought you had said though, that this was 'finished'? I don't like reading stories online, until they are finished, So....this will be put on my future reading list...I am disappointed it really isn't finished, but you have much potential as a writer. I hope you are considering publishing?

I will check back on this thread in the future.

Thank YOU for your efforts sir...

 

The story IS finished - I'm just posting only a few chapters at the time.

Chris

 

ah....so....you are...
1. a sadist?
2. a clown?
3. like pissing people off?
4. trolling for ego enhancing comments?
5. gonna make us pay for the last chapter?

what?

Like I said, I do like your writing, so I will just check this thread from time to time...until you've decided to grace us with the final chapter, otherwise, I can stop here and be ok.

 

Nice read....

I normally don't go in for much fiction, however...
Once I began, I could not stop. And I have read from the first thru this chapter!
You have managed to beat ( dare I say it? ) JWR's "Patriots" in my personal opinion!
Thanks for the great entertainment this has provided so far!
Bill

 

It's like this. I need comments and nickpits, so I post a few chapters at a time and hope that people comment. One nit is worth at least ten ego-enhancing comments.

Thanks! More will be coming soon.

Chris

 

Chapter Thirty-Six

<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />
Remember that pride is the worst viper that is in the heart, the greatest disturber of the soul's peace and sweet communion with Christ; it was the first sin that ever was, and lies lowest in the foundation of Satan's whole building, and is the most difficultly rooted out, and is the most hidden, secret and deceitful of all lusts, and often creeps in, insensibly, into the midst of religion and sometimes under the disguise of humility.
-Jonathan Edwards

We left Kit to tend to the prisoner, watched by a pair of burly security guards from Richard’s men, and retired to a side room.

“It makes sense,” Mac said, grimly, once we were alone. “He might have been lying about the other questions, or didn’t know what we wanted to know, but if it really is darling Schneider…”

I nodded, reluctantly. Marc Schneider had been a persistent pain in the ass ever since the bombs had fallen, despite meeting near-total rejection by the remainder of the townspeople. He’d tried to dominate the Constitutional Convention, tried to have himself appointed to higher office than anyone felt he deserved, and protested the introduction of ‘communist’ ideas like having a communal kitchen and even sharing some of the chores of trying to build a new farming system for us all. He had even protested the use of his property for farming purposes, despite the fact that without it, we would all be dead, including him. He was the typical loner, the person who didn’t fit into the surrounding society…and his own society, the one that had given him wealth and status, no longer existed. A stronger man than Schneider would still have had problems coming to terms with his new status…and Schneider had the encouragement of a shrewish wife. It occurred to me, unpleasantly, that he and Daniel had a lot in common.

“He could have told them everything,” I agreed. Schneider might have been a gadfly, but he wasn’t actually stupid, just narrow-minded. He could have learned pretty much anything the Warriors wanted to know about the defences and gotten it out of Ingalls for them. It wasn't as if we had a system for monitoring what everyone was doing outside the town; hell, pretty much everyone had taken a turn at scavenging once or twice in a while. Schneider, I recalled now, had gone on prospecting missions every week. He’d even been lauded for some of the items he’d found while outside the town. “****.”

And, I thought silently, if he is to blame for what happened to Summerville, even slightly, I won’t let him get away with it.

Mac was thinking ahead. “Do we arrest him or merely push him off a cliff or something?”

I winced. If we moved openly against Schneider, he would claim that his political enemies were trying to get rid of him, even though there was little reason for them to bother. Schneider might have put himself forward as a candidate, but unless I was much mistaken, he wasn't going to get many votes. The only way he’d win would be through the Martin Prince method, in which everyone was so convinced that the other guy would win that they all stayed home. That wasn't likely to happen in Ingalls, not with everyone watching the discussion like hawks. Still, it could turn into a political nightmare…

It got worse. The members of terrorist groups had been taught to claim that they were routinely tortured as soon as they were captured, regardless of the truth, just to cast doubt on the evidence. A full confession could be struck down just because of the merest suggestion of torture, even if the bastard had been treated with kid gloves all the way, and it was almost impossible to refute such claims. The media always loved it when the government looked bad and gleefully repeated the terrorist lies, but somehow the truth never got pushed forward. How could we convict Schneider based on Daniel’s confession? Any halfway competent lawyer could have cast doubt on it. Hell, Daniel himself might have been lied to by someone higher up in the Warrior hierarchy. He might have been primed with disinformation to confuse us.

But it rang true. If it had been disinformation, why not accuse someone more prominent, in a position to do much more harm than merely annoying a few people? What about accusing me, or Mac, or Walter, or…anyone? Why pick on the town outcast? I couldn’t see anyone disapproving of hanging him as quickly as possible, once we brought him to trial, and it certainly wouldn’t divide the community.

“We’ll go see him at first and see what he has to say for himself,” I said, grimly. It was possible that we could use Schneider for disinformation ourselves, but it would require some thinking and planning. If we could lure the Warriors into doing something stupid…

We went back through the prison and up to Richard’s office. “We’re going back to town,” I said, once we’d briefly discussed what had happened in the cell. Richard, oddly enough, had accepted the use of torture right from the start, although he had worked daily with even worse people. It reminded me how little compassion he’d shown for the prisoners we’d poisoned. “Keep Daniel secured and under guard, once Kit has finished with him. We’ll have to ask him more questions later.”

There was a new smell in the air as we drove back towards Ingalls, a hint of burning wood, perhaps from the Wood Gas stoves we’d set up. An engineer from Sweden had remembered the concept and, once we’d found it in a reference book, had constructed several of them to produce Wood Gas. It wasn't easy to use – it produced Carbon Monoxide at dangerous levels – but we had little choice. We’d also set up a Plasma Arc waste disposal system to produce power and other supplies. Wasn’t it amazing how much you could do without Washington peering over your shoulder all the time?

Brent passed us through the defences quickly, once the guards had searched the vehicles. The workers had expanded the level of defences enough – I hoped – that even a mass human wave attack would get hopelessly bogged down and torn to ribbons. We weren't interested in playing games either. The first sign of any vehicle and we’d hose it down with machine gun fire, just in case it was another truck bomb. If we were really lucky, we might even detonate it in front of their forces, instead of ours.

“Look, boss,” Mac said, pointing towards a shape hanging in the sky. “They’ve finally managed to get the balloon up in the air.”

I smiled. The hot air balloon design actually came from the Civil War, although it had been improved slightly by people with an extra hundred and fifty-odd years of experience with metals and plastics. It hung in the air, manned by three observers with binoculars, linked to the ground through a telephone cord. They could observe anyone approaching the town from a far distance – well, certainly any large groups of men or vehicles – and sound the alert. I just wished we had two of them. There would be an interruption in their observation when they were hauled down to change crews. After one embarrassing incident, no one even walked under the balloon.

“Yep,” I said, my mind elsewhere. “We’ll get far more warning this time.”

Marc Schneider’s house was on the north side of town, larger than he and his family actually needed, or had ever needed. It had been built by a merchant who’d lived in the town and been part of the community, but he'd lost it to the banks when he became overdrawn and it had been put up for sale. The townspeople had resented, fiercely, not being allowed to bid for it themselves, but there’d been no point in complaining. The banks could have outspent all of Ingalls if they so chose. It had been bought by a man who’d no background in country life and no desire to learn. He had thought that his position in the city gave him status and had been surprised to learn otherwise, and bitterly resented it. That, more than money or safety, might have been what had led him to betray us all.

“Ed,” he said, when he opened the door. He looked surprised to see us, but unafraid; he might well have jumped to the conclusion that I had arrived to beg him to join the new government. He’d probably got a ‘reluctant acceptance’ speech plotted out already. “What can I do for you?”

I suppose I should have handled it gently, but I was in a murderous mood. “In,” I said, and pushed him into his hallway. Mac followed and closed the door behind us. Somehow, I was unsurprised to see evidence of good living everywhere. “The game is up, traitor!”

Schneider paled. “How did you know?”

I carefully didn’t smile. If Schneider had tried to bluff it out, I would have found it hard to prove anything. Hearsay isn’t really enough these days, nor should it be. His confession, witnessed by myself and Mac, would be enough to convict him.

“The Warriors betrayed you and ratted you out,” I said, watching him carefully. It was just possible that he didn’t know who he was working for, although I couldn’t imagine who else he could think he was working for. Salem or another of the Principle Towns, perhaps? “They were quite happy to abandon you when they decided they didn’t need you any more. Perhaps you thought they’d make you a priest, right? They’ve dropped you in the **** and you’re not going to get out of it!”

He wilted. I took him by the arm, dragged him into the sitting room, and thrust him into an armchair that looked as if it was a hundred years old. I would quite happily have reduced it to firewood. I wasn’t particularly impressed at all. It was just a good thing that his wife wasn't around. Chances were, she’d be unaware of his double life. I wouldn’t have trusted her with such knowledge…

“All right, now listen to me,” I said, firmly. “I can drag you out of here and put you on trial before the Town Meeting. They’ll listen to me and learn what you have done to them. When they’re finished, you’ll be lucky if you only get beaten to death by the crowd. Do you want that to happen?”

“…No,” he said, finally.

“Good,” I said. “Now, bearing in mind that I know most of the story already, tell me everything and I won’t hand you over to the mob. If you lie to me once, the deal’s off and you’re going to die. Talk.”

Schneider shook as he talked. “You kept rejecting me,” he said. “None of you would listen to me. You always thought that you knew best and never listened to me and…”

“Enough with the excuses,” I said, angrily. A man like Schneider would never blame himself for anything. Never mind the fact he knew little of use, never mind the fact that he expected to be amply rewarded for his time and effort, never mind the fact that he didn’t have a good history with the town, he was incapable of realising why he was being punished. Heinlein had once said that a man had to know why he was being punished before he was punished, but personally I was much less liberal. A man’s guilty; punish him, if only to ensure that justice was done. It’s not just about healing the guilty – something I tended to regard as impossible - but deterring further offenders in the future. “Stick to the facts. How did they make contact?”

“One of their representatives visited me after the Convention entered its third day,” Schneider said, slowly. I sighed in relief. At least the man hadn’t been a spy from Day One, even though that would have required pre-planning on a truly diabolical scale. “He’d seen how the Convention rejected me and offered me a position in a new government instead, telling me that I would be the Priest of Ingalls and all would bow down before me. He proved that he worked for the Prophet and told me that if I obeyed, I wouldn’t have to fear.”

I shuddered. “And you believed him?”

“What other choice did I have?” Schneider asked. “Would you have believed me if I had brought it to you?”

“Maybe,” I said. I would have believed him, wouldn’t? Or perhaps he was right and I would have regarded it as merely Schneider trying to gain more status in the community. It was just another road not taken. “What did they want from you?”

“Everything,” Schneider said, bitterly. Listening to him, it was all I could do not to jump on him and tear him apart. “They wanted everything from the number of guns in the town to maps of the defences. After the first contact, they demanded more and more and…I couldn’t stop giving it to them. I used to go out hunting for stuff and make contact with their people. Ed – Sheriff – I’m sorry.”

“Are you?” I said, feeling cold chills running down my spine. If the Warriors knew us that well…how long would it be before they attempted to crush us directly? They couldn’t leave us here for long; we might change all of the defences, or even uncover one of their other spies. “When were you meant to make the next contact with them?”

“In two days,” Schneider said. “They wanted an update on the defences and on the teams you’d been deploying to slow their advance.”

I nodded. That made a certain kind of sense. The leaders of the Warriors weren't idiots, after all, and given the terrain in West Virginia, a small number of teams could slow their advance significantly. Get in, land a heavy punch, and get out again. A handful of IEDs in the right places could make them very – very – paranoid about advancing up perfectly safe roads, let alone the interstate. A few cars pulled into a barrier would make them suspect the presence of ambushers…and, of course, the ever-present snipers. They’d hopefully be ****ting themselves as they advanced towards Ingalls, fearful of every broken twig and ruined house. It was almost a pity that we’d done such a good job of clearing out the bandits.

My lips twitched wryly. No good deed goes unpunished…

“Right,” I said, thoughtfully. “This is what you are going to do for me. You will take the plans I will provide you with to them and ensure that they believe that they’re the real plans. You will take their instructions and return here, whereupon you will inform us at once of the nature of the instructions. Do you understand?”

He nodded, slowly. I believed that he would do his best to carry them out, if only because he was ****-scared of me, but it would be wise to offer the carrot along with the stick. A man like Schneider needed constant threats to keep him afraid, or his natural self-centred nature would reassert itself and push him into doing something stupid, like attempting to get back at me by warning the Warriors. It would be suicidal – the Warriors wouldn’t need him any longer – but somehow I doubt he was concerned about that. He'd have his mind consumed with thoughts of revenge. I had to offer him something he wanted desperately.

“If you succeed in this mission, and if you carry it out perfectly, I won't tell the people about your treason,” I offered. “You won’t be able to run for political office, or try to gain wealth and power dishonestly, but at least you’ll have your life and your wife. Try to betray me and believe me, you won’t last long enough to run to the Warriors. Do you understand?”

I reached forward, grasped him by the collar, and pulled him upwards. “Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” he said, shaking. “I understand. I’ll do as you say. I won’t tell them anything. I won’t…”

“Good,” I said, pushing menace into my voice. Judging from the weakness in his legs, he was on the verge of fainting. I wouldn’t have cared, but it would have been hard to explain. “I’ll be watching you, Schneider. Do not let me down.”

I handcuffed him to the chair and we spent thirty minutes searching the house. I wasn't surprised to discover that Schneider had been keeping some items from his scavenging expeditions in his house, rather than showing them to the rest of the town, as we had all agreed upon right back at the start. It was an odd mixture of camping equipment, including some tiny stoves that would come in handy, preserved food and a surprising amount of artworks, all of which were effectively worthless at the moment. It was a mark of an unstable mind, I decided, to attach value to the worthless.

“Idiot,” I said, as I came downstairs. One of his hands was darkening as the handcuff cut off the circulation. He looked as if he was desperate to escape, but didn’t even dare speak. It was wise of him. I was in no mood to play games. “You could have gained all the status you wanted by showing off what you’d found. You could have been a big man though honest work…”

I shook my head. There was no point. “You have your orders, Marc,” I said, as I released him. “Fail me on this and you’ll be torn apart. Remember that. You’ll be torn apart by the mob.”

We left him there, whimpering to himself, and went to see to the defences. The attack could come at any moment, but I had an idea, from what the Warriors had asked their spy, of their timetable. Two days…

It was more than long enough to prepare a few surprises.


Chapter Thirty-Seven


No military force can be on alert 24/7.
-Ed’s Iron Law #45

“He betrayed us, then?”

“I’m afraid so,” I said, later that evening. It felt like bedtime, which was weird. I must be getting old. Either that, or I was getting used to sharing a bed with someone who was more than just a casual acquaintance. “He could have told them pretty much anything they wanted to know, everything about us and the defences. He must have warned them in advance that we were going to move down south to reinforce Summerville…”

Walter shook his head, one hand wiping his glasses on the side of his shirt. He looked more like a schoolteacher than before, at least to my eyes; the task of governing an entire town was wearing heavily on him. He also looked older, but that was nothing new. We all looked older than we had been before the war. None of us had ever had to work so hard in our lives, even the veterans. I reminded myself, once again, that I had volunteered to join the Marines. No one had volunteered to survive the Final War.

“I can’t believe it,” Walter said, replacing his glasses on the end of his nose. “What was he thinking?”

I said nothing, remembering the attempts Schneider had made to justify himself. All of them, in my view, stemmed from his own inability to realise that the world had changed. His past occupation was no longer useful, so he had no choice, but to abandon everything he’d learned and move on to a new speciality. He’d resented that bitterly; ironically, he’d probably been one of the best scavengers we’d had. If he had developed that instead of making contact with the Warriors of the Lord…

But there was always someone who saw themselves as an outcast from society, or as a lone voice crying in the wilderness, or as someone who had been constantly **** on during their lives. Their insecurities might have had no basis on fact – I remembered how many of Moe’s victims had simply taken it and hated him silently – but they existed and a skilful spy could take advantage of them. Schneider had been groomed to serve as the perfect spy, promised control of Ingalls after the Warriors occupied it, and his own desire to be a Big Man had done the rest. I suspected that the Warriors had lied to him – Schneider was hardly a religious person – but he had believed otherwise. He probably hadn’t even thought that it might be a deception.

“I guess he thought that he had no stake in society,” I said, and looked over at Jackson. “I trust that the spies are watching him now?”

Jackson nodded. We’d deputised a handful of other people in the early days after the war, just so that we could try to keep a lid on any panic or unrest before it turned violent. Some of them hadn’t really come into the spotlight – they hadn’t been needed, after all – but they were now serving a useful role by keeping a close eye on Schneider. He had been asked to take the next batch of intelligence to the warriors, so I’d make sure that the intelligence they got was…rather untrustworthy.

Jackson raised a point that had been floating about in my mind. “Can we trust him not to betray us to the Warriors when we meets them?” He asked. “It’s not as if we can risk having one of the skirmish groups ‘accidentally’ stumble over them while he’s passing on the information.”

“I think we can trust him that far,” I said, slowly. We had his wife, after all, and she would not be allowed out of the town. She might not even have known about her husband’s betrayal. I had a suspicion that Schneider might seriously consider leaving her behind if we made the threat more overt – I wouldn’t have slept with Mrs Schneider if she’d paid me to do it – and in any case, life without her would be delightful for the bastard. We would just have to hope that he was too scared of us not to consider defying my orders.

“Nothing in war is certain,” Mac said, before Jackson could pick away at my statement and realise how weak it was. “We know from the reports from Biggles and the skirmish lines that the Warriors are on the march and will be here soon enough, within the next few days at most. Now they’ve started to fire on Biggles whenever they see him…”

I nodded. One of the chemists had had the bright idea of mixing up some napalm and dropping it on any large batches of Warriors. The first two explosions had been dramatic and very effective, as had the raid on what was obviously a Warrior staging post, but then the Warriors had started to fire on Biggles every time they saw him in the air. The aircraft had been damaged several times when stray bullets had passed through the fuselage and I had forbidden Biggles from taking any other risks. We couldn’t afford to lose the only aircraft we had to damage, even if Biggles managed to fly back home instead of coming down in flames.

“That brings us around to the evacuation plans,” Walter said, firmly. “Do we really have to start moving the wounded and children now?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, equally firmly. “We cannot afford to keep them in the town much longer, or they’ll be trapped here when the Warriors surround us and lay siege to the town. I’d be happier with the women out of the way as well, but they’re going to be needed if the Warriors break through the defence lines. I’ve rotated as many of them to Stonewall as I can and pulled out some of the male guards, but that has its own risks.”

“Yeah,” Jackson agreed. “The prisoners might break out and stab us in the back.”

“I’ve left orders for Richard,” I said. “When the Warriors get a day or two closer – you never know, the skirmishers might hold them up for a week – the prisoners will be returned to their cells and placed firmly into lockdown until the end of the battle, whatever happens to the town. I imagine that if we lose, the Warriors will go after Stonewall and try to crack its defences…”

“How many of the bastards are there?” Walter asked. “They’re throwing away their own lives as if they were nothing, not even to them.”

“I don’t know,” I said, sourly. Our captive, Daniel, hadn’t been able to shed much light on that, even though the first thing I would have wanted to know about a force under my command would have been how many men it actually had. His answers had been vague, although judging by his remarks, I estimated several hundred thousand at most. The more hyperbolic statements I dismissed. The Warriors couldn’t have over a million at most…and even that was extreme. They certainly couldn’t have ten billion under their banner. There hadn’t been ten billion people on Earth before the Final War, let alone after it. “If they don’t change tactics, we have the perfect opportunity to batter them into a bloody bleeding mass and crush them utterly.”

“Or we could retreat,” Walter said. “There are folks who want to do that and just leave the town.”

“Traitors,” Mac hissed. “They should be arrested and publicly humiliated for wanting to surrender to the bastards. Haven’t they heard the reports out of Summerville?”

I shook my head. “Walter, I doubt that they meant a word of their offer to let us leave,” I said. “Even if they did mean it, we would be alone and isolated in a very hostile world, without even the shelter of the Principle Towns. If they came after us – and they must, because we bear the contagious disease of freedom – they’d wipe us out completely, taking the women and children as their slaves.”

“I know,” Walter said. “Ed, I’m not the one you have to convince.”

“Yeah,” I said. The Constitutional Convention had dispersed yesterday, but not without voting a resolution to carry on the war against the Warriors of the Lord until they were utterly crushed, deeming them to be completely incompatible with the American traditions of freedom, democracy and justice for all. It was a refreshing change from the hand-wringing of various pre-war presidencies, but even so, a victorious war could prove almost as disastrous as a lost war. The victor in the war might wonder just what he’d won when their numbers had been reduced so sharply. “I know.”

Walter yawned suddenly and several others followed him. “I think it’s time we all got some sleep,” he said, standing up and brushing down his suit. It wasn't very practical garb for the town – not least because he was wearing an enormous pistol at his belt – but he’d refused to trade it for something more durable, apparently under the theory that a Mayor should wear a suit at all times. “Everything will look better in the morning…”

I rather doubted it – we couldn’t run any aerial reconnaissance in the darkness, which meant that the Warriors would probably be advancing their forward scouts closer to the gates – but he was right, we all needed some rest. He chased us all out of the Town Hall, ordered the guards to ensure that none of the government members got back in until morning, and headed off to his own house at a swift trot. I smiled, waved Mac goodbye, and started to walk back towards my own house. I would have been happier with something smaller, but it had once belonged to a man from the city who’d never made it out of New York alive – or at least he hadn’t made it to Ingalls – and Walter had claimed that it would remind me of home. I wasn't sure that that was a good thing, but the only memento of New York that was actually present was an image of the falling Twin Towers, draped in black. The inscription underneath said NEVER FORGET. I almost choked up every time I looked at it, not because of the reminder of 9/11 – I’d been a teenager at the time – but because of how we’d seen it, before the Final War. We’d acted as if we’d been beaten half to death. Now…

Now, America was in ruins, along with most of the rest of the world. I knew enough about the missile targeting plans to have a far guess at what had happened to the Russians…and I knew enough about the Russian weapons to have a fair guess at what had happened to Europe. My most optimistic estimate, at the time, was that the Northern Hemisphere was almost completely in ruins, while the Southern Hemisphere might well have survived intact. Would we end up with a world dominated by China and Brazil? It was bitterly ironic, but perhaps they’d do a better job of it.

“Welcome home,” Rose said, from the darkness of the bed. I smiled as I saw her limbs in the semi-darkness. She was a very pale woman, but she had been looking much healthier lately, even though she had been running additional courses for the girls she taught. The news of how the Warriors treated women had fired her determination to ensure that men and women strode into the brave new world together, rather than one being firmly subordinate to the other. “We need to talk.”

“We do?” I asked, through a yawn. I wanted to go to bed and yes, get some sleep. I probably couldn’t have performed if three teenage nymphomaniacs had danced in, completely naked, and started to go to work on me. “What about…?”

“Light the light,” Rose ordered, and I obeyed. Now that we had a regular system of coal mining established – coal harvesting, in some places – we had a regular supply of electricity, although not of electric lights. Once we ran out of supplies in town, and those that we could scavenge, we would have to fall back on what we made ourselves. It would be a long time before we took such luxuries as electric lights for granted. “Ed, have a seat.”

I frowned, but sat down on the end of the bed, watching her as she sat up. It was a very distracting sight. Rose might not have had massive breasts, but I had always preferred fit girls to the oversized supermodels…and I could actually hold a conversation with her. Some of the girls I had dated had had literally nothing between their ears, but insecurities and mindless trivia. She was beautiful, in her way, but not everyone would have agreed with me. I trusted her completely.

Part of my mind told me that I’d made a mistake getting involved with a subordinate, even though we no longer had any real contact with the rest of the United States at the time, but the rest of my mind told me that it had been a great idea. That was, of course, the part of my mind connected to my groin. Legally, it wasn't a crime – it would have been had we been in the Marines together – but it was definitely borderline.

“Ed,” Rose said. She sounded oddly nervous. I’d never heard her be nervous since her first year on the job. Her confidence had built up rapidly after the first pair of arrests, although Ingalls wasn't anything like a bad as some of the inner cities. “Do you remember what we’ve been doing for the last three months?”

“Of course,” I said. My cock was stirring at the thought. We’d both had bouts of sexual frustration and the outcome had been predicable. We’d ****ed in almost every way possible and some I had believed to be physically impossible. “We were having fun, all the time.”

“Yes,” Rose said. She hesitated long enough for me to guess what she was about to say. “Ed, I’m pregnant.”

My heart skipped a beat. “You’re sure?” I asked, when I could breathe again. “You’re not having a false pregnancy?”

Rose gave me a look she’d learned from Deborah, a ‘don’t try that with me son’ look.

“I’m sure,” she said. “My…ah, period was late by about three weeks, so…” She blushed. “Pretty much every girl in Ingalls has had irregular periods since the war, so I didn’t think much of it at first, but three weeks was a little extreme and so I went to Kit and asked him to do a few tests. He confirmed that I was pregnant, Ed, and that I was actually a month and a half along.”

I blinked. “But wouldn’t you have missed two periods?”

“I guess that it happened just after the end of my last period,” Rose said. She paused for a moment to think. “That would have been the day when we managed to get the plasma arc system set up and everyone wanted to celebrate. We got a little drunk, and then came back here and had our own celebration. I would have liked it to be that day, although there’s no way to know for sure…”

I nodded. The complete absence of contraception had ensured that pregnancy was a likely event for every sexually-active girl in Ingalls, or the remainder of the Principle Towns. It was likely to happen for the girls the Warriors held captive as well, although their fate would be far worse. Any girls they bore would wind up in sexual slavery, while any boys would end up being brainwashed into becoming Warriors. If you started to teach a child nonsense early enough, that child would grow up believing that nonsense, unable to make the kind of mental leaps that would offer freedom to the rest of the world. They would be locked, forever, into mental double-think.

“Ed, I’m pregnant,” Rose said, again. “What are we going to do?”

“That’s wonderful news,” I said, finally. The shock had numbed me, even though I had considered the possibility. I had wanted to have kids of my own; hell, my kids would have a father who was always in their lives. “Rose, that’s wonderful!”

She stared at me. “And what if I give birth to a monster?”

I hesitated. “Rose, there have only been seven monsters in all,” I said. “A third of pregnancies have miscarried fairly early on, but the remaining pregnancies seem to be fine. They should give birth to perfectly normal healthy children.”

“Kit didn’t know there was anything odd about the first monster until she gave birth,” Rose said. “What if…”

I reached forward and placed my hand around her shoulders. It was a warm room, but she was shaking uncontrollably. “And even if I do give birth to a normal child, what happens to her if the Warriors win the war?”

It was, I decided, a logical fear, although I doubted that either of us would survive if the Warriors won the war. Rose still commanded the female militia – the Monstrous Regiment, as some of us called it – and the Warriors wouldn’t suffer her to live.

I didn’t say that to her. I’m not always a cold-blooded bastard.

“Rose,” I said, slowly, “will you marry me?”

Rose stared at me. “Everyone is going to say that we got married because you got me pregnant,” she said. “I won’t have any respect left in the community.”

“**** them,” I said, angrily. I could hardly care less about what Mrs Grundy thought. Besides, there had been several other weddings under the same circumstances. A handful of older women had objected to them, only to be faced down by the rest of the community. “Rose, I love you. Please marry me.”

“I will,” Rose said. She pulled me to her. “I think you’d better make it quick, though. I’m not going to be a dishonest woman any longer.”

I laughed.


Chapter Thirty-Eight


Outsiders often criticize the extreme commitment of group members. But what is really happening is that leader and followers are conspiring to realize a vision that is falsified daily. For the cult is not paradise, and the leader is not God. Hence the follower is embattled; to squarely confront the many failings of the leader and the group is to call into question one's own great work. Only by daily recommitting himself can the follower continue to work toward his ultimate goal. Each follower works out a secret compromise, acknowledging some things while denying or distorting others. Clearly this is a high-risk strategy that may go awry.
-Dr. Len Oakes

“So, how does it feel to be married?”

“Shut up,” I said, not unkindly. Mac laughed, utterly uncrushed. The wedding had been a quick one, made quicker by the fact that neither of us had any family in Ingalls. Mac had agreed to serve as the Best Man and had offered, mischievously, to give the bride away as well. Rose had shaken her head and asked Jackson to serve as a stand-in for her father, who was presumed dead somewhere in the wilderness. “It feels great, thank you. You should give it a try sometime.”

“Once she gets pregnant, then I suppose I will have no choice,” Mac said, agreeably. “Is there any sign of that bastard?”

I shook my head, peering off into the distance. Schneider had taken the falsified papers I’d given him and headed off towards where his Warrior contacts were waiting for him. I knew that they were close by. Their entire army had finally pushed its way through the skirmishers and taken up position barely five kilometres away. Biggles had tried to bomb their camp with napalm, only to be driven away by machine gun fire from the ground. He’d been very lucky; they’d also expended a Stinger missile – or something – on his aircraft, which he had narrowly managed to evade. It was proof that the Warriors had built up a formidable stockpile of weapons before the war, or that they’d raided an armoury somewhere. It was probably the latter. Daniel had been delighted to boast of how many weapons the Warriors of the Lord possessed and how little chance we had against them.

“**** all,” I said, reluctantly. The odds were very good that Schneider had simply defected to them completely, or that they’d killed him and dumped his body somewhere. I would have bet on the latter. The Warriors of the Lord probably wouldn’t have any further use for him. We’d lost a few scavengers before, mainly to bandits or rabid dogs, and under normal circumstances, we wouldn’t think much of losing Schneider. He hadn’t been the most popular of people even before we’d discovered that he’d been betraying us. “As long as they believed the plans…”

“We’d better hope that they just killed him,” Mac agreed, grimly. A defecting Schneider could have told them that the plans were faked. I was hoping that the Warriors would attack, relying on the plans, but I did have contingency plans to handle an attack from other directions as well. “Did you get Richard briefed on his side of the operation?”

I nodded. “Yep,” I said. “It was something I kept from Schneider, just to make sure that he couldn’t betray that to the Warriors, even under torture. What he doesn’t know he can’t tell, but we should have at least one ace up our sleeves. Let’s just hope that the Prophet isn’t a poker player.”

“It’s a sinful game anyway,” Mac said, deadpan. I rolled my eyes in his direction before checking out the horizon again. The Warriors might be on the verge of invading now and, therefore, had decided that Schneider was suddenly expendable. I couldn’t fault their logic. If he came back to Ingalls, aware that the assault was about to begin, he might have betrayed them to us. “He probably only plays holy games like Trivial Pursuit and Pin the Angel on the Pin.”

“You’re not helping,” I said, shaking my head slowly. “There’s nothing in view.”

I stood up and started to walk back towards the CP, now heavily protected beneath a mixture of earth, concrete and sheet metal, intended to protect it from a direct hit from enemy mortars, or even light artillery. Daniel had claimed that the Warriors had heavy weapons, although his ignorance of basic weapons had been so great that it was impossible to know if we were telling the truth or not. He thought that he was telling the truth, but he had no basis for knowing if he actually was. There was little point in torturing him further without feedback.

“I’ve given orders that Schneider is to be let back through the defence line when he arrives – if he arrives,” I said, feeling tension echoing down my back. I could feel the presence of the Warrior Army so close to Ingalls, a sense that hostile forces were far too close for comfort, even if I couldn’t see or hear them. I’d heard some commanders talk about their ability to get a feel for the battlefield, but it was the first time I had developed anything of the sort myself. “I think, however, that we are on the verge of being attacked.”

The workers had built up the defence lines to truly awesome levels. The first defence line was a simple wall, surrounding the entire town, seemingly easy to break. Anyone who broke through, however, would find themselves snared in the midst of other defences, while we poured fire down on them in pre-registered firing patterns. If they got through that, they'd hit the first inner defence wall…and the minefields covering it, along with buried IEDs and other nasty tricks. I allowed my gaze to drift over the walls, watching the soldiers and militia as they struggled to perfect the defences, knowing that many of them would die in the coming engagement.

“I made sure that all of them have masks,” Mac said, grimly. “If they throw gas at us, we’ll be ready for it.”

“Not completely,” I said, remembering the dreaded MOPP - Mission Oriented Protective Posture – suits we’d worn back when we’d been sure that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. They had provided comprehensive protection, at a cost of being hot, sweaty and uncomfortable, but I would have sold my soul for more than a handful of them in Ingalls. There are some kinds of nerve gas that can be fatal even when touching bare skin; they don’t have to be breathed in by the victim. I hoped – prayed – that the Warriors wouldn’t have invented anything like that; they weren't easy to produce. If they had, however, they could kill thousands of us before we had time to react.

“I know,” Mac said. Like most weapons of mass destruction, gas isn’t as bad as the media makes it sound…if you have time to prepare. We had prepared as best as we could, but the only MOPP suits in our armoury had been part of Sergeant Isaac Chang’s squad. The dangers of an industrial accident, to all intents and purposes, had been why I was unwilling to risk using gas ourselves. It was very much a weapon of last resort. “Do you think that the kids will be safe?”

I’d gambled when I had sent them to Stonewall, gambled that the Warriors would see the town as their main target, not the prison. It wasn't as risky as it sounded – Ingalls would reward them richly for taking it, while the prison was useless as anything other than a fortress – but the Warriors might not be rational about it. The second danger was that the Warriors would simply lay siege to the prison, rather than trying to take it in a direct offensive. Stonewall didn’t have the food supplies to hold out forever.

“Yes,” I said, as confidently as I could. Stonewall featured prominently in my plans for the future, after all. If Richard had a chance, he could turn it into the key stage for defeating the Warriors, once and for all. Judging from Biggles’ reports, the entire Warrior Army was on the move towards us; hell, if we were lucky, they’d even have a rebellion in their rear. “I’m certain of it.”

My radio buzzed on my hip. “Sir, this is Danny in the observation balloon,” it said, through a haze of static. The electromagnetic distortion caused by the nukes had been fading for weeks now, although radio communication wasn't what it had been before the war. It would be a long time before we could fully trust the system, although we had had no choice, but to rely on our most powerful sets to talk to Stonewall and the other Principle Towns. “They’re on the move.”

I glanced down at my watch. “Cutting it fine, aren’t they?” I said, puzzled. “It’s only a couple of ours until darkness.”

“Perhaps they intend to assault us under cover of darkness,” Mac suggested. I shrugged. It would cost them if they did. My snipers and half of my defenders were equipped with night-vision scopes. The Iraqis had never appreciated just how capable our night-vision gear actually was, but I would have expected better from anyone with real military experience. “Or maybe they intend to try to intimidate us again.”

“We shot the last person who tried to intimidate us,” I reminded him. Even the Prophet would have difficulty trying to convince someone to come forward to demand our surrender, even under the false cover of darkness. “Maybe they just think they can overrun us by sheer weight of numbers.”

The next hour went slowly. I spent it inspecting the defences in minute detail, ensuring that everyone knew just what they were meant to be doing, and confirming that the observation balloon crew was ready to remain in the air overnight. We could – we would – replace them as quickly as possible, but if fighting broke out, we were going to need them. This wasn’t going to be a repeat of what had happened at the FOB in anything, but vague detail. They could assault all three of the entrances at once, or they could concentrate on one of the gates, or they could even assault over the rough terrain and into the teeth of our defences. I hoped they would try the latter. We’d prepared all kinds of interesting surprises for them if they did.

And I gave a speech. Did I mention that I hate giving speeches? I had seriously considered borrowing some lines from Shakespeare, or even one a science-fiction show, but in the end, I tried to speak from the heart. I don’t know if it worked or not, but everyone cheered…

“We are gathered here today to face the terrible threat of the false Warriors of the Lord,” I thundered. “Men who will destroy our town and civilisation, men who will kill us all, rape our women and take our children away to be raised as their own. We must not allow them to break through. We will not allow them to break through! They think that God gives them the strength to break into our town and ravish it, but we know that our defences are strong and if they charge at us, they will break against our might.”

My voice softened. “If we win this day, we will determine the future of the new America, a land free from terror and oppression, where a man can hold his head high and say that it is his land, and he will not be moved. If lose, we doom the entire eastern seaboard to permanent domination by the Warriors. They have brought their entire army to fight us…and we will break it! They will come at our defences and we will break them, and crush them, and liberate their captives from their unholy grip. This land is our land and we will not be moved!”

They cheered. I still cringe to think of my speech being performed, time and time again, in plays and movies. They have an actor playing me who looks nothing like me, a man who looks handsome, strong and yes, you guessed it, muscles on his muscles. Idiots.

I had already decided that I was going to station myself at the southern command post, CP2. That was the closest road leading down towards Warrior-controlled territory and it was the most likely one to be attacked in the opening moves of their assault. The balloon would, I hoped, keep me informed of any developments elsewhere, but I would have to trust in my subordinates to handle them while I oversaw the entire battle. I would have traded places with any of the young and nervous conscripts, or the older veterans, in a heartbeat. They didn’t have to worry about losing the entire battle…and, in doing so, losing the entire town. When had America last fought such a battle? I couldn’t remember.

“Here they come,” I breathed, as the Warriors finally came into view. Half-hidden in the growing darkness, they were still visible, not least because of the flaming torches some of their people carried. I watched and listened carefully, hearing snatches of their words drifting towards us in the still night air. “Pass the word, Mac; everyone stand to and prepare to repel attack.”

“Yes, sir,” Mac said, tightly. “There’s an awful lot of the buggers, isn’t there?”

I nodded. Daniel might not have been too far wrong after all. There were definitely thousands of Warriors coming towards us, backed up by an entire swarm of trucks and other vehicles, including a pair of older jeeps from the sixties. They were remaining out of range of most of our weapons – the snipers could have picked off a few, but held their fire – but they were taking care. I watched as a massive bulldozer lumbered forward, taking up a point position, and frowned. What the hell did they intend to do with that?

A voice boomed out in the distance. I peered through the binoculars and finally saw a man dressed in black, standing on the top of a truck, haranguing the people below. It was a depressingly familiar sight, one I’d seen before when fighting other radical religious idiots, and somehow I knew that that man wouldn’t be leading the charge.

“We have gathered here to face the terrible threat that faces our religion,” he bellowed. “Across yonder field lies the cursed army of the unbelievers, misguided fools and idiots who must be destroyed and their bodies hacked to pieces, their homes and businesses destroyed, their land salted and cursed, and a large fifty foot wall built around the area they call their territory so all that may know what happens when they assume they can break away from the True Faith!”

“Well,” Mac said, into the silence, “that's us told.”

I chuckled, although honestly it was more of a giggle. I’d just realised where those words came from…and it wasn't anything to do with God, any God. There had been a cult television series a few years before the war, one that had included hundreds of parodies of various other shows. The words had been stolen right from that show, although the producers, actors and writer chimps were probably too dead to care.

“The unbelievers must be destroyed! They have lost the way! They are fools and they are idiots. We must wipe them from the earth! We must crush their bones and make our bread! We must burn their homes! We must raze their cities and cast them into the oceans! We must…”

I found that I was whispering the words along with the speaker down below and caught myself, keying my radio. It was time to put an end to this. “Stacy, speak to me,” I said. “Tell me you can hit that bastard.”

“Easy as convincing a guy that he wants to take you to bed,” Stacy said. A single gunshot rang out and the man tottered, before falling off the truck and crashing to the ground. “How’s that, boss?”

“Excellent,” I said, watching as the darkness kept falling across the land. It would soon be too dark to see properly. “Let’s see what they do now…”

There was a brief splatter of fire back in our general direction, more random shots rather than precisely aimed bullets, but the Warriors waited for orders. That was worrying; most religious nuts I’d fought would have charged us at once, outraged by the death of their leader. A mob is only half as smart as the stupidest person in it and…well, if you’re in a mob, you’re not the smartest person in the world anyway. The fact that they weren't charging in a wave that it would be easy to mow down was rather worrying. It suggested that they had prepared a battle plan and intended to stick to it. That wasn’t a good sign.

“They’re not coming,” Mac said, as darkness fell. I reached for my night-vision goggles and pulled them on, transforming the world into a curious mixture of green and red. It had been a long time since I’d used them in combat, but it was starting to come back to me. The Warrior vehicles looked bright red in the goggles, a sign that their engines were running, which suggested that they intended to use them to attack us…

“I know,” I said. The noise of someone preaching was increasing, but without the enemy loudspeaker, we couldn’t make out what they were saying. I suspected that it would be more of the same, but it could also have been assault instructions. “Mac…”

Mac swore. “Ed,” he said, “they’re coming.”

I nodded. “All stations,” I said, keying my radio. The darkness would make fighting a coherent battle harder, but hardly impossible. We could certainly track the enemy positions by the burning torches their leaders carried. “Engage at will.”

 

Ok Chris, I can accept that...if you're sincere, you need feedback?
Ok, but, I have no 'nits' to pick, your attention to detail is wonderful, your consistency through the storyline is spot on, one of the reasons I said I liked your writing is your attention to detail and ability to describe what the reader should be 'seeing' in their minds.

If I detect, even the smallest spelling or grammatical error, like so many other self published authors are infected with these days, I will point them out to you. If there have been any so far, they have not been noticeable enough to complain. If you want complaints however, be careful what you ask for....I will comply...;-)
(I will tell you, that you've already telegraphed how this story ends....at least partly....I mean...this is Ed, telling his 'history', right...?...;-)

 

Awesome stuff. cant wait for more!

 

Proof read check:

“What other choice did I have?” Schneider asked. “Would you have believed me if I had brought it to you?”

“Maybe,” I said. I would have believed him, wouldn’t I? Or perhaps he was right and I would have regarded it as merely Schneider trying to gain more status in the community. It was just another road not taken. “What did they want from you?”


​

 

Grammatical check:
But there was always someone who saw themselves as an outcast from society, or as a lone voice crying in the wilderness, or as someone who had been constantly **** on during their lives. Their insecurities might have had no basis in fact – I remembered how many of Moe’s victims had simply taken it and hated him silently – but they existed and a skillful spy could take advantage of them. Schneider had been groomed to serve as the perfect spy, promised control of Ingalls after the Warriors occupied it, and his own desire to be a Big Man had done the rest. I suspected that the Warriors had lied to him – Schneider was hardly a religious person – but he had believed otherwise. He probably hadn’t even thought that it might be a deception.



​

 

It’s like this.
<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />
I know what the book says, so my eye tends to miss any little problems. The reader might be confused, which isn’t quite the effect I want. I also might be talking BS without knowing I'm talking BS. Someone pointing it out to me that I’m making mistakes is actually very helpful. I wish I knew everything, but I don’t.

And being told I’m doing great is fine too.

Chris

 

Grammer/spelling check:

“Ed,” Rose said. She sounded oddly nervous. I’d never heard her be nervous since her first year on the job. Her confidence had built up rapidly after the first pair of arrests, although Ingalls wasn't anything like as bad as some of the inner cities. “Do you remember what we’ve been doing for the last three months?”


​

 

grammer/spelling check:

I glanced down at my watch. “Cutting it fine, aren’t they?” I said, puzzled. “It’s only a couple of hours until darkness.”


​

 

grammer missing word, spelling:

My voice softened. “If we win this day, we will determine the future of the new America, a land free from terror and oppression, where a man can hold his head high and say that it is his land, and he will not be moved. If we lose, we doom the entire eastern seaboard to permanent domination by the Warriors. They have brought their entire army to fight us…and we will break it! They will come at our defenses and we will break them, and crush them, and liberate their captives from their unholy grip. This land is our land and we will not be moved!”


​

 

Cool. Thanks!

Chris

 

proof reading...

I once was a newspaper proofreader....
Yes there are some misspelled words, and incorrect words, and some grammatical errors...
BUT, I did NOT read the writing with an intent to be nit picking.
( not my JOB!)
I take it for what it is, as I have to assume it is still in the "rough draft" stages and NOT a finished and professionally honed product.
Please, continue onwards Chris!

 

My brain tends to just 'correct' what I'm reading when it comes up against unexpected or inconsistent data. I'll reorder an entire sentence in my mind and press on. I'm so used to doing I hardly even notice it anymore. Spelling doesn't even phase me. That whole thing people say about how as long as the first and last letter of a word are correct and the other letters are there our brains see the correct word comes to mind.

Story is coming along nicely!

Byte