The Living Will Envy The Dead (31 page)

I nodded.  Any
really
dangerous radioactive particles have a half-life measured in minutes or hours, or days at the most.  In the time between being contaminated and reaching Ingalls, Kristy could have lost all of the radioactivity, or enough to pass without being noticed.  She hadn’t contracted radiation poisoning herself, which was something of a surprise, but if she’d been very lucky, it would have passed her by and gone into her child instead.  It wouldn’t have needed much radiation to warp the developing foetus beyond any hope of survival.  There is a certain randomness to radiation and how it affects people.  A small dose might leave no apparent harm, but the cancer would be growing away, out of sight.  A
really
tiny dose might even be beneficial.

“Does she know?”  I asked.  “Did she see the child?”

“Yes,” Kit said.  “I didn’t react fast enough to prevent her seeing her child.  I hit her with enough of a sedative to keep her out of it for a few more hours, but in the morning she will awaken and know what happened to her.  We have to decide how to handle it by then.”

I grimaced.  “And the other girls?”

“I believe that the ones who became pregnant here will be safe,” Kit said, “but I cannot guarantee that.  There are several relationships between town girls and refugee boys, and vice versa, and if the guy was infected with radiation poisoning as well…”

“Shit,” I said.

“It gets worse,” Kit continued.  “I don’t know much about radiation-affected children – Marvel Comics has a lot to answer for – but I do know that we simply don’t have the resources to provide for hundreds of handicapped children.  We simply can’t deal with them all…hell, if we discover in advance that a child is going to be handicapped, we could abort it, but…”

I recalled, grimly, going to a chick-flick with a former girlfriend, back before going to Iraq.  It had been about a boy who’d been brought up in a sterile bubble because the poor bastard was unable to tolerate even the slightest touch of a germ – or something – and his romance with a girl who accidentally discovered the bubble one day.  It had a terribly sappy ending – true love conquers all – but I knew that we weren't going to be that lucky.  I wasn't lucky either; two months of dreadful movies and I didn’t ever get to see her naked.  We couldn’t have more than one or two such bubbles…and we might have hundreds of mutant children.  Kit had been right.  Marvel Comics had a
lot
to answer for. 

And I didn’t even want to
think
about aborting the children, but he was right, again.  We might have no choice, but to abort a contaminated baby before he or she could be born, but if we couldn’t tell if a child was contaminated…
shit
.

“Is there no way we can tell in advance if a baby has been contaminated?”  I pleaded, finally.  “Is there nothing we can use to look into the womb?”

“Not with the gear I have on hand,” Kit said.  “Abortions, ideally, are carried out as soon as possible, before the child even starts to develop.  We might be able to pick out a seriously malformed child quickly, but…we completely missed Kristy Stevenson, even though I was keeping an eye on her.  It was my fault, Ed.”

“No it fucking wasn't,” I said, tightly.  I wasn't going to put up with self-pity.  I was in charge, so if there was any panicking to be done, I was going to do it.  I said that to Kit and he laughed, despite himself.  “I think we need to take this to the Mayor and the remainder of the Cabinet.”

An hour later, we met in the Mayor’s office.  I had invited Deborah and Rose along as well, just before giving Jackson some specific orders if we ended up with a riot on our hands.  When the news got out, and I knew we couldn’t keep it under wraps for longer than a few days at most, there was going to be panic.  People would start shouting accusations back and forwards and our order would collapse into chaos.  I couldn’t let that happen.

“So,” Walter said, after we had finished explaining the situation, “what do we do?”

I shared his concern.  He had taught most of the pregnant girls in his school, before he had been elected Mayor, and would have known them.  He might not have liked some of them, or wanted to get rid of others as quickly as he could, but they had all been his charges.  He would have felt the same way about the boys, some of whom were going to end up fathers to monsters.  I hadn’t even thought about one possibility.  Rose and I had been lovers for three months.  Was
she
pregnant now too?

“We don’t try to hide this for a moment,” Deborah said, firmly.  She still astonished me from time to time, even though I was technically her boss.  When she spoke, people listened to her and respected her.  “We cannot hide this, or panic will take over.  When people hear the words radiation, nuclear war, and fallout, the dinosaur brain takes over and they start running around screaming.”

“When in danger or in doubt,” Rose added, “run in circles, scream and shout.”

“Exactly,” Deborah said, as I rolled my eyes at Rose, who stuck out her tongue at me.  “We call a meeting tomorrow morning of everyone and explain the truth as calmly as we can, including all the dangers.  We tell them what we know about radioactive fallout and the dangers, such as they are, and we explain just how limited the risk is…”

“There’ll be a pogrom,” Rose said.  Her voice darkened.  Perhaps she’d been having the same thoughts I had.  “They’ll want to get rid of all of the refugee men and women, even if they don’t know that they have been contaminated.  We’ll have to protect them, sir.”

I nodded.  One problem with military units is that they tended to feel a loyalty to the area they came from, which is a great thing…except when it isn’t.  The units we had raised from Ingalls and the other Principle Towns would be loyal to their own towns and would probably agree that driving out the refugees was the only course of action we could take, unless we could explain the truth.  The only refugees who were likely to be dangerous would be the ones who had been too near a nuclear blast…but who knew what was too near?  A mile, two miles, ten miles, a hundred miles…? 

“We will,” I said.  It was one of the reasons I had sent Jackson off on his own job.  I wanted a very quiet lockdown of Ingalls if chaos did break out.  “Mr Mayor, I move that we call a meeting for tomorrow morning.”

Walter nodded.  “How much more of this can we take, Ed?”  He asked, rather plaintively.  “How many more disasters are we going to face in the next few months?  What happens if the crops are poisoned, or worse…?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, firmly.  “We’re trapped here.  We’re not in a situation that can be avoided just by declaring the exercise over” – I had always distrusted those training exercises, where bad weather or even, in one notable case, the accidental shooting of the commanding officer, had derailed training – “or by anything other than mass suicide.”

“True,” Walter agreed.  The suicide rate in Ingalls had never been very high, but a handful of the refugees had taken their lives or retreated into their own minds, becoming Zombies.  We’d kept people working as hard as possible just to prevent them from thinking too much about how the entire world had been knocked back to the Stone Age.  “I’ll call the meeting at once.”

It went about as well as could be expected.  Walter made the first speech, as was his duty, but then Deborah had taken the stand and calmed everyone down through direct force of personality.  Her lashing tongue prevented immediate panic, as did Kit’s calm dispassionate assessment of the risks.  He might have been homosexual, but he was respected in the community and no one questioned his expertise.  He was particularly popular with the women of the community, for some reason, probably because they knew he had no interest in getting into their panties.  In the end, there was no panic, but I suspected that we hadn’t even scratched the surface yet.  We’d see what happened when the next two malformed children arrived.

“There is no way to tell who might give birth to a malformed child,” Kit said, calmly, “but there is no reason to believe that the vast majority of people have been contaminated, particularly those who had remained within Ingalls and followed the rules on limiting exposure to the environment.  The vast majority of children should be born safely.”

(We buried Kristy Stevenson’s child behind the clinic in an unmarked grave.  It wasn’t something we wanted to show people.  It would have made the abstract threat all too real.  Most of the malformed children ended up being buried in the same place, kept together, without even a proper headstone.  It was a different and difficult time for us all.)

And then a messenger arrived from the south.

I scanned the message quickly, with increasing disbelief.  Dutch, who had been on duty to the south, south of Pennsboro, had been on patrol when they had sighted a small group of refugees fleeing northwards.  They had moved to intercept them, only to be fired upon by their pursuers, who didn’t even bother to ask questions first before opening fire.  There had been a brief and vicious gun battle, after which the newcomers had retreated, leaving behind a pair of dead bodies and the fugitives.  Dutch had intercepted them, taken them back to the forward operating base – the FOB, as we chose to call it, in memory of happier times – and asked questions.  They were more than happy to answer, just desperate to avoid being sent back where they had come from.  Their story was terrifying.

I should have seen it just after St Marys, but I had missed the clue in my determination to end the fighting before one of my people got killed, or crippled.  The men and women of CORA hadn’t known about Ingalls, or us, they’d thought that we were a different group.  Their exact words had been ‘religious freaks…’

We had made first contact with the Warriors of the Lord.

The difference between a cult and an established religion is sometimes about one generation.

-Scott McLemee

I’m going to have to go back a little here, several years before the war.  We didn’t know all of this at the time, of course.  We pieced it together after the war.  I think we have everything in order, but…well, plenty of records were turned into dust and ash after the bombs fell and we might not have gotten everything perfect.  Personally, I don’t understand why we even came so close to disaster, but one of America’s key values is religious freedom, even if it threatens our own security.

The Warriors of the Lord started life as the Church of the Rapturous Awakening in California, by a man who styled himself the Prophet Zechariah.  Zechariah was, if I recall my bible correctly, the last man, hence the name…or perhaps it had some other meaning.  It rang true as the last man, however, which was probably why Zechariah chose the name.  I don’t know what his name was before the war – records have been lost completely, probably by design – but I’d bet good money that it was something rather less striking.  He was probably called Roy Scranton or something else that people made fun of, although Zechariah wasn't exactly a serious name.  Hell, for all I knew, he was picked on at school.  What else would explain his desire to gain power, power, and more power?

Anyway…the Church of the Rapturous Awakening was an offshoot of an offshoot of Christianity, based around a belief in the Rapture.  There was quite a lot of it around just before the year 2000, when some of them believed that Christ was coming back and they didn’t dare face up to Him, but I don’t know how sincere Zechariah was in his beliefs.  The basic core of the Rapture belief was that one day Jesus would come and take the believers – which meant, effectively, everyone who agreed with them and all the world’s children, who were innocents – to heaven with him, while the remainder of the world’s population would be put through a seven year period of torment, suffering, and woe.  The ones who converted in the tribulation period, as it was popularly called, would be saved.  Those who hewed to the antichrist would be thrown into the deepest pits of hell and left there forever. 

Now, I’m going to digress a little.  It has always struck me that quite a few of the real believers are consumed with their own guilt.  They jerk around, eyes flickering nervously from side to side, trying to convince as many people to accept Jesus Christ, Son of God, into their hearts.  It’s a guilt trip for them.  If they don’t invite as many people as possible, they feel guilty, and if they fail to convert anyone, they feel guilty.  Their pastors and other leaders encourage this.  It helps to bring in the believers, which they can turn into a political force to reshape the country in their image.  They hate homosexuals, feminists, Muslims and anyone else who disturbs the human mind.  They’re the ones who send Christian missions to Muslim countries, they’re the ones who push for laws against homosexuality and they’re the ones who preach, firmly, that a woman should be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.  It has always struck me, always, that they have a lot in common with Islamic fundamentalism…