The Living Will Envy The Dead (35 page)

“I think he made an impression,” Ben-David muttered, using one hand to cover his face as he spoke to me.  A handful of delegates had been sick.  Several others, including a number of women and black faces, looked as if they were going to be sick themselves, or consumed with rage.  The majority of black men and women who lived out near Ingalls or the other Principle Towns, or had made it out of the dying cities, had developed new lives for themselves.  The threat of being turned into slaves again, the black man’s nightmare, had concentrated more than a few minds.  “Ed, can we stop them?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted, cursing the timing under my breath.  I should have had Mac back here in Ingalls, supervising the defence plans…and thank God we had been building up the defences, rather than letting them fall idle now that we had a growing community again.  If the Warriors had held off their appearance for a year – assuming we survived the coming winter – we would have been in a far worse state to face them.  “We don’t know enough about how many of them there are, or how well they’re armed.”

I’d been mulling that over ever since the first warning, but there was no way to know until we faced them in combat.  It was amazing just how many weapons there were in America, legal and illegal, despite all the petty restrictions.  The Warriors of the Lord, even if they had stuck to legal weapons, could have amassed quite an arsenal, and if they had gone for illegal weapons as well – or raided an arsenal – they could have everything from mortars to artillery.  They might even have poison gas.  It wasn't
that
hard to make something that could be used against an unprepared opponent.  We really needed intelligence, but they hadn’t given Samuel a guided tour of their fighters…

“I’m going to send Biggles down south to see what he can see,” I said.  The Warriors might not have any aircraft, although a careful search might turn up other craft that had survived the EMP largely intact.  They might have antiaircraft weapons as well; there had been some antiaircraft missiles in National Guard armouries, including the basic Stinger missile.  They’d been distributed as a last ditch defence against another 9/11, or something like that, but if the Warriors had them…I’d just have to warn him to be careful.  “I need to show this lot the document they sent us.”

I’d read it carefully while in the truck on the way back to Ingalls.  It made frightening reading, not least because of the casual lack of security-awareness in the text…and my own worries over just what kind of opponent we were facing.  We were facing an idiot, someone without the imagination to know what we would be able to deduce from the text, or a dispassionate genius who intended me to deduce everything…and take it as a warning.  The Warriors of the Lord, it was evident, knew far more about us than was comfortable, right down to the location of all of the Principle Towns.  They’d pushed at St. Marys and had been repulsed, or so I had deduced, but they’d clearly been spying on us for a while.  It wasn't as if we had the resources to comb every last possible hiding place in West Virginia and, with a little care, thousands of spies could have remained undiscovered indefinitely.  Hell, for all I knew, they even had people inside the towns…

You’d never believe it, but I don’t like speaking in public.  I would almost sooner prefer to walk back into the hellfire of Fallujah stark naked than face a crowd of people hanging on my every word, let alone a crowd of people who would prefer to believe that I was wrong and no such threat existed.  I don’t know if that is a flaw integral to democracies or not, but very few democracies have ever worked to deal with a problem before it became a major threat.  Democracies do not go eagerly to war…

“This is the message they sent us,” I said, and spelled out some of the implications.  They weren't stupid, after all.  They had some practical experience of life, rather than theory or ideology.  “I think that it spells out just what they have in mind for us.

“To the residents of West Virginia, we bring you greetings and salutations in the name of Jesus Christ, Son of God Almighty, and the Prophet Zechariah as his messenger on Earth,” I read.  There were more greetings and salutations and so I skipped through them with the promise that the entire message would be displayed in public at the Town Hall.  “We thank you for your service before God in preparing West Virginia to receive the True Word of God and hereby inform you that your duties are at an end.  The Servants of God have arrived to carry out the will of the Lord Himself and his chosen ones.”

I paused, swallowing down the urge to vomit.  “We wish to inform you that we will take into our care, in stewardship for the Lord God and His Son, the lands of West Virginia which you have kept in trust for us.  We bid you welcome to the faith, but be warned that unbelievers, dissidents and servants of Satan will not be permitted within our lands.  If you refuse to accept the True Faith, you may make a choice.  We will hold you to that choice.

“First, you may leave, taking with you only what you can carry and leaving behind you all weapons, vehicles, technological supplies and seeds for later planting,” I continued.  “If you attempt to return to our lands or take more than we permit you to take, we will kill you in the name of the True Faith, as ones who have attempted to impede its progress across the land. 

“Second, you may accept punishment for your sin.  We will purify you of your sin and cleanse you that you may face the Lord your God with a clear soul.  If you face us voluntarily, it will be our joy to perform the act to scourge you of your sin.”

“I saw someone poor bastard going through such a ceremony,” Samuel said, into the dead silence.  “They whipped him until they had stripped the flesh off his bones, then they drowned him in a pond and buried him with full honours.  They’re crazy fucks, sir, dead crazy.”

“Finally, you may fight,” I continued.  “If you take up arms against the Warriors of the Lord, servants of the Lord God and His Son Jesus Christ” – I was getting sick of reading that time and time again – “we will grind you into the dirt and crush any who dare to resist, enslaving those who survive the just wrath of God so that they may serve us for the remainder of their days.  You will melt in the face of the terrible wrath of God Himself.

“For those of you who wish to join us, and will accept us willingly into their hearts, we will arrive soon and welcome you into the True Faith,” I concluded, as I read the final lines.  “You will be welcome, all will be welcome, to rebuild one nation under God.”

“The man’s mad,” someone muttered, loudly enough to be heard.  I rather agreed.  It sounded like the ravings of a madman, rather than anything more rational.  I wasn't going to surrender to the Warriors of the Lord in a hurry…and leaving as they suggested would be a ticket to a slow death.  It was obvious to me that they wanted nothing less than the entire ball game.  They might even get it too.

“The man is insane,” Reverend Thomas McNab agreed.  He had something else to lose.  The Warriors had been slaughtering all other religious leaders wherever they found them.  How could anyone preach the true word of Christ if those who knew the words were all dead?  “Ed – Colonel – please accept my apologies.”

“I understand,” I said.

Ben-David posed the question.  “Do we fight, surrender, or run?”

The vote was quickly taken.  ‘Fight’ won by a large majority.

“Thank you,” I said, grimly.  The outrage would wear off quickly, although there were entire groups of the population that were doomed if the Warriors took over.  Rose’s plans to create entire groups of female militiamen would be doomed from the start.  She’d probably wind up being raped and killed as a witch.  “With your support, I know that we will win this war.”

I wish I’d been as confident as I sounded.  This wasn't going to be pleasant.

“Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum.”  (“If you want peace prepare for war.”)

-Vegetius

The next few days passed in a blur.  Once the vote had been taken, the Constitutional Convention agreed to support the war effort and prepare to resist the Warriors of the Lord when they finally decided to attack us.  The message had mentioned a week’s grace before they decided that we weren’t going to bend over and drop our pants for them, but I wasn't too sure that they would stick to their word.  A force that believes that they have God on their side and, furthermore, that He will forgive them anything they do in His name is inherently untrustworthy – after all, promises to unbelievers have no validity.  I’d seen that before, although not often in America; a person who would never dream of cheating his friends and relatives who also had no hesitation in cheating anyone else.  I expected the hammer to fall fairly quickly; after all, if they had spies in Ingalls, they would know that we had rejected their terms.

“I took a platoon out for a patrol, but found nothing,” Brent told me, three days after the Constitutional Convention had declared war.  It was probably the first declaration of war in America’s history since the Second World War, but the Warriors might not have known that we had made it.  Or perhaps they did; their message, after all, had shown just how much they knew about us.  The paranoia was getting to me.  Who, just who, would betray us to them?  What sort of person would betray Ingalls to the Warriors of the Lord?  “If they’re watching us, they’re well back from the defences.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that a Force Recon Marine – or someone from one of the other Special Forces units – could be watching us from a shelter and remain completely undetected, except through sheer luck.  I’d actually sent a handful of people who
did
have Special Forces experience out to look, putting themselves in the shoes of the enemy, but they’d found nothing as well.  I hadn’t expected either search party to find anything, unless the watchers panicked when the searchers came close, but I had had to make the effort.  I didn’t know whom to trust, now, apart from Mac and that was dangerous.  What if someone in the inner circle was spying for the Warriors?   What if no one was spying for them, but I allowed the belief that someone
was
spying for them to blind me…?

“They’re not going to get a mass force close to Ingalls without being detected,” I agreed, studying the map thoughtfully.  We had more working radios now and an entire group of pickets scattered around the territory we had cleared, slowly and carefully, of bandits and survivalists.  They might manage to move a few people into the area without us noticing, but an entire army?  They would be seen miles away and we’d have enough warning to prepare.  “Of course, are they going to know that as well?”

“Probably,” Mac said, as he appeared behind us.  He looked tired, but surprisingly happy.  He’d been supervising the improved defence works surrounding the town using the new labour from the remains of CORA, along with the original prisoners and had been inventing newer and deadlier tricks.  “The guy in charge might be a complete loony, but that doesn’t mean that all of his people are loonies as well.  They might just decide to come hammering up the interstate towards us, knocking out the pickets and other towns along the way.”

I nodded, stroking my chin as I thought.  The real danger was that all the Principle Towns – and the other settlements – were out of support range of each other, despite the radios and the more primitive communication links.  If the enemy were smart – and we couldn’t assume that they were idiots – they would deploy forces to trap us in our towns and wait until we starved or made a sally out to fight.  I wished, not for the first time, that I had better data on just how well organised the Warriors of the Lord actually were.  How many people did they have under their banner?

The map of Kentucky actually made me wince inwardly; it was an old-style map, from before the war.  It was effectively ‘here there be dragons’ territory now – we didn’t even know how far west the Warriors’ influence spread – but it represented a terrifying set of possibilities.  Kentucky had had a heavy pre-war population and quite a lot of them could have survived.  Fork Knox and a few dozen other targets might have been hit during the war – there had been a National Command Centre in Kentucky, if I recalled correctly – but there would still have been millions of refugees.  The Warriors might number in the millions…

“I doubt it would be that bad,” Mac said, when I outlined my reasoning.  “I can’t see everyone going along with them, Ed, and there would certainly be millions of deaths in the weeks following the war, just as there were here.  I doubt that the Warriors have more than a few hundred thousand effectives at most.”

“I hope you’re right,” I said, glumly.  Biggles had been flying recon missions deeper and deeper into territory controlled – we suspected – by the Warriors, but results had been inconclusive.  I would have sold my left arm for proper photoreconnaissance, but we’d have to make do with what we had, even if what Biggles was seeing didn’t look very alarming.  If it hadn’t been for the wounds on the refugees, I might have wondered if we’d stumbled into a phoney war with a phoney enemy.  “Are you going to be coming with me to the FOB?”