The Living Will Envy The Dead (28 page)

I could barely hear the girls as they opened fire, sweeping every visible defender with fire from their positions, shooting them down before they had a chance to react.  No, it wasn't fair; it was never intended to be fair.  I wanted it over before someone on the other side had the bright idea of slaughtering the hostages or trying to cross the Ohio and retreat.  The bridge nearby might have been destroyed – I suspected to prevent refugees from using it, as there were clear signs that CORA had been beating off other refugees – but they could take a boat, or even swim.  I just wanted to end it all.

“Go,” I shouted, and my troops lunged forwards.  Between the antitank weapon and the girls sniping away merrily, the entire defence was in chaos.  We had taught them as best as we could, pushing them to learn to seize the initiative at all times, and the responded very well.  Before any kind of defence could be mounted, they were on the remains of the barricades and firing suppressive fire down into the town.  The enemy had dug in fall-back positions, not entirely to our surprise, but large parts of the town seemed undefended.  I slipped forward, escorted by two veterans who Mac had insisted serve as my bodyguards, and peered forward myself.  The defenders were in full retreat.

Their inner line of defence consisted of a series of houses that had been converted into fortresses.  They hadn’t done such a bad job with them, at least in my view, but they hadn’t prepared as best as they could for the defence.  Great piles of earth piled up around the fortresses might absorb bullets, but they’re much less helpful when it comes to allowing a swift and efficient retreat.  We hit them quickly, not slowing down for anything, and threw grenades through the windows.  The resulting explosions cleared most of the defenders out of the way, while the remaining defenders either tried to surrender or fled back towards the centre of the town.

They have the hostages there
, I thought, grimly.  It would make a certain kind of sense.  A prison like Stonewall was designed to keep a large population under control with only a handful of people and someone with limited intelligence could set up a similar system.  If they kept the women and children in one place, under firm control, they could keep the men in line.  Keep them under their guns, keep their reserves in one place…and they’d control the entire town.  I wouldn’t have bet against them keeping the food stocks there as well.  We’d found out that communal dining saved food and heating and they…well, they had other motives as well.

Mac looked up at me.  “Ed,” he asked, “do we take prisoners?”

“For the moment,” I said, seriously.  It was tempting to just dispose of them all, but the work gangs did need extra manpower.  Besides, we also needed whatever intelligence we could glean from them.  “Secure them and bring them over here.”

It was a pitiful group of twelve men who were dumped in front of me.  All of them were wounded, sometimes seriously, and eleven of them had had their hands secured with plastic ties.  The twelve had had his arm blown off and was currently whimpering pathetically.  They all needed medical attention, but they weren't going to get any until the fighting ended, if they could be saved.  If not…well, I wasn't going to waste medicine on someone who might well die within the next few days.  A sucking chest wound isn’t actually fatal – as I had good reason to know – but it does require good medical treatment, fast.

“All right,” I said, to the most intact prisoner.  He tried to meet my eyes, but couldn’t; all the fight had gone out of him after the first shot had been fired.  Idly, I wondered about his story.  Was he a fair-weather soldier, who collapsed when matters became rather more serious, or had he always had doubts about what they were doing?  There was no way to know and I didn’t really care.  “Here is how it works.  You tell us what we want to know and we’ll see to it that you and yours get medical attention.  You lie to us and we’ll just give you a bullet in the back of the head, understand?”

He nodded, once, unable to speak.  I fired questions at him until I had a picture of just what was going on inside the heart of the town.  As I had suspected, all of the children had been gathered in one place, while the women had been grouped with them as soon as our forces had arrived, both for their own protection and to prevent any uprising.  The town’s men had been gathered in a pair of large warehouses to the north, where they were under armed guards with itchy trigger fingers.

“Shit,” I muttered, afterwards.  The entire situation was heavily explosive.  “Gary, have these men moved somewhere reasonably secure and keep an eye on them.  Don’t hesitate to shoot if they give you any trouble” – that was for the benefit of the prisoners, who were listening carefully – “and keep them back.  Mac, we’ll have to deal with the women and children first.”

“We could do both,” Mac suggested.  I had to smile.  It was something that hadn’t occurred to me, but if we’d killed over thirty of the defenders in the opening moves, we could divide our forces without having to worry about being defeated in detail.  The prisoners had told us that they didn’t allow their women to fight – for pretty much the same reason as I was reluctant to allow them to fight, although expressed differently – and they were harmless.  I didn’t take that entirely at face value, but it did give me some confidence.  “You take the first company down to the town hall.  I’ll take the second to the warehouses.”

“Agreed,” I said.  I looked over at Brent.  “Time to move.”

“And don’t you dare let him get killed,” Mac added, to Brent.  “He’s got a hero complex a mile wide.”

I rolled my eyes – you just didn’t have discussions like that in the regular army – but ignored it, leading the first company down towards the town hall.  Progress was surprisingly fast, although in hindsight I realised that we’d forced them to pull all the way back into a trap.  If it had just been them in the town hall, I would have set fire to it from a distance and shot down anyone who tried to escape.  As it was, I was going to have to be rather more careful.  I always hated hostage situations when we ran into them in Iraq and…well, we needed those women and children.  The last thing I wanted was to have to let the bastards escape, but would I have a choice?

“That’s one secure building,” Brent muttered.  It made Ingalls’ town hall look barely defended.  They’d used slave labour to turn the town hall into a fortress, all right, one that would be almost impossible to take without casualties.  A single precision-guided weapon would have smashed the entire building, but while I was wishing, I’d like an entire armoury and the entire 1
st
Marine Division.  That would have made rebuilding the United States much easier.  “Boss, stay back.  Let us take the risks.”

I scowled.  “Then you go out and call on them to surrender,” I said, running through the options in my head.  It was going to get bloody if I had to send unprepared troops into that nightmare. 
Destroying
the building would be easy, but I needed it and the hostages intact, damn it.  “Tell them that we will meet them under a flag of truce.”

Shooting broke out in the distance as Mac led his company against the warehouse guards.  One way or the other, there wouldn’t be much time to act.  I hoped – prayed – that Mac would free the prisoners without much trouble, but the defenders in the town hall might fear that we would kill them all, now that we were attacking the other defended point.  I was presently surprised when Brent actually managed to coax one of the defenders out and escort him over to me.

“I am Colonel Stalker,” I said, grimly.  The man I’d faced before was gone, killed in the first offensive, leaving a different man in command.  He was, judging from his appearance, a banker rather than any kind of veteran…and terrified out of his skin.  Its quite easy to convince people that they’re better than other people, particularly when they have all the guns and resistance is seemingly impossible or hopeless, but when the delusion was broken they tended to wilt quickly.  I’d seen that before in Iraq, when the Sunnis had realised that the Shia were finally in a position to seek revenge on them, but this was different.  This was America.  Things like that weren't supposed to happen here.

“I know,” the man said.  He was shaking, quite literally, in his boots.  Having stepped over a line he had believed destroyed, he found himself in what we call an untenable situation.  Fight and die, perhaps with most of the hostages, or surrender and face the consequences.  I would have felt sorry for him if I hadn’t been sure that he had taken part in the occupation of the town with gusto.  Law and order had fallen apart, leaving them in a position of power.  “What do you want?”

I recognised the opening and jumped through it.  “I want you to put down your guns and surrender,” I said, firmly.  “If you surrender without further bloodshed” – the shooting near the warehouses was dying down even as I spoke – “we will spare your lives and those of your families.  You will have to stand trial for your actions here, but if you surrender now, you won’t be killed out of hand.”

He winced.  “We had no choice,” he said.  I wondered who he was trying to convince.  Me…or himself?  “We did what we had to do to survive.”

I almost – not quite – rolled my eyes.  A group as well-armed as them, if they had been willing to work, would have been very welcome in Ingalls.  They could have remained together and found something abandoned, or come to an agreement with the town, rather than taking it over on the word of a man who was, I was now convinced, thoroughly mad.  He might not have been a Zombie – no, definitely not a Zombie – but someone who was unhinged by the war and left without any sense of right or wrong.  A very dangerous person to have around, in other words, particularly with everything so fragile…and he’d led his people to disaster.

“That might be true,” I said.  I wasn't going to get into a decision about the rights and wrongs of the situation.  No one would have understood their position, not least because they’d been on the wrong side, the one that lost.  “It is also immaterial at the moment.  If you do not surrender, I guarantee that you will not survive the day.”

He wilted, but tried to stall.  “We want to keep our weapons,” he began…

“I’m not interested in bargaining,” I snapped.  I might have had little choice, but judging by the noise in the distance, Mac had freed the remaining townsmen.  If they came over to the town hall, it would be difficult to prevent a bloodbath.  I had to have the entire situation under control before all hell broke loose.  “You have my best offer.  Accept it, or die.”

“Fine,” he said.  “I’ll tell my people to surrender.”

“And come out with their hands in the air,” I ordered, as he turned away.  He flinched at the thought, but nodded finally.  My point was simple enough, after all.  “We wouldn’t want any accidents or misunderstandings, would we?”

He said nothing as he went back into the town hall, but a few moments later the big doors were opened and the first men came out, their hands on their heads.  We covered them at once, of course, but I doubted that they were hardcore fanatics.  They’d already been broken.  We’d seen fanatics who couldn’t be trusted in the slightest, both in Iraq and here, but I doubted that they fell into the same category.  The women came next, clutching their children to them and staring around with haunted eyes, wondering what was going to happen.  I doubted, looking at them, that their families would stay together for much longer.  Their husbands, those who weren't killed, had led them into a nightmare.

“Brent, take two platoons and secure the prisoners, then guard them with your lives,” I ordered tightly.  The last thing we needed was a revenge slaughter.  The guards would have to secure their hands – both men and women; I wasn’t taking chances – and then guard them when they were helpless.  It wasn't a pleasant job.  “I’m going in, carefully.”

The women and children of the town had been kept in a large set of rooms.  There had been over four hundred women and children in the building, which accounted for the stink…and their obvious discomfort.  I wouldn’t have thought that they could have stuffed so many people into the building, but CORA – which was now permanently disbanded – had somehow managed.  The smell was unbelievable, as was the haunted looks on their faces; they’d spent months terrified for their very existence, and for those of their husbands.

“You’re free,” I announced, as we opened the doors and allowed the sunlight to pour into the building.  “Welcome back to the world.”

The next hour passed slowly, but with a few uncomfortable moments.  As I had expected, the residents of St. Marys wanted to extract immediate revenge on CORA, forcing my people to keep them back at gunpoint.  After a long argument, I agreed that they would be marched back to the prison and put to work in the work gangs.  Their women and children, who everyone agreed had been largely innocent, would be offered other places; the kids, in particular, would be brought up as part of our society.  Perhaps, that way, they’d have a better chance.