The Living Will Envy The Dead (53 page)

Dutch nodded and the pair of them led a company of men back to the FOB.  I had to wait for the all-clear before the remainder of the force went up to the position we’d held with stubborn determination, but all we found was a handful of prisoners and several dead preachers.  They hadn’t been killed fighting, either; they’d been killed after surrender, once we found the girls.  The oldest of them couldn’t have been more than fourteen.  What happened to them I wouldn’t have wished upon my ex-girlfriend.

“Bastards,” I said, once I’d seen the bodies.  They still haunt me today, those terribly small and broken bodies.  “Next time, make them dig their own graves first.”

We paused to take pictures of the sight – I wasn't going to have some bastard of a revisionist historian claiming that the Warriors had been the good guys, like they did for pretty much every other evil set of bastards in history, not if I could help it – and returned to our vehicles, speeding down the road towards Summersville.  We dismounted close to the defences we’d helped them build, back before we had even a vague idea that the Warriors existed, and advanced carefully.  Mac, again, wouldn’t let me take the lead.

I had feared that we were advancing into a ghost town, like some of the burned-out ruins we had scavenged in, back before we’d discovered the Warriors, but there were a small number of defenders left in the town.  It gave me that sense of
Déjà vu
all over again; back when we had confronted CORA, we had had to rescue prisoners who had been held in a group of warehouses.  We’d passed the mass graves on the way, but I hoped that some of the town’s population would have survived.  The Warriors wouldn’t have killed them all, would they?

We stopped when a fifteen-year-old girl appeared, holding what passed for a white flag on the end of a stick in her hand.  It was actually a piece of ladies underwear, but we understood the message clearly.  I allowed Roshanda to talk to her, girl to girl; beside, Roshanda should have understood what the poor girl had been through.

“Hi, honey,” Roshanda said, gently.  “What do they want you to say for them?”

The girl could barely speak.  I traced out bruises and marks on what I could see of her flesh and felt my anger growing inside my heart.  My men had similar feelings.  The mutterings behind me were growing darker and darker by the minute.  They’d beaten her, treated her as a slave and probably raped her as well.  They would be lucky if we just killed them once we had our hands on them.  No one deserved that sort of treatment, no one.  Not for the first time, I cursed the politicians who had gotten us into the war.

“They said to tell you that they could kill everyone here like they killed daddy,” the girl said.  It was a little girl’s voice, hardly the mature confident voice of an assertive American teenage girl.  She might not have spent long under their control, but it had been long enough to break her, body and soul.  “They said that they wanted safe conduct and if you agreed not to kill them, they would let us all go.”

They must have had a radio link to their army
, I thought, angrily.  I hated hostage situations.  I don’t know a single law enforcement officer who doesn’t hate them.  This one was worse; we had to have those women and children back, just to give birth to more children.  We needed them desperately. 

“Very well,” I said, reluctantly.  “Go back and tell them that if they come out now, without weapons, I won’t kill them.”

She nodded and turned to trot back towards their defences.  I followed her with my eyes, spying out the enemy locations.  I wished that I had had time to question her properly, but she had been too fragile for any such harsh questioning.  It would also have risked her life.  I doubted that the Warriors would have spared her if they had suspected we’d had time to question her.  She vanished inside and there was a long pause.

”Damn it, Boss,” Mac said, very quietly.  “You’re not going to let them get away with this, are you?”

“Hell, no,” I said.  I already had a plan, such as it was.  Maybe it was just my growing sense of the battlefield, but I was increasingly sure that we had broken the main body of the Warrior army.  “Once we deal with this lot, we keep moving southwards and deal with the rest of them.”

The lead Warrior stepped out, hands held in plain sight, followed by a handful of others, all preachers.  There were no real fighters amongst them, much to my relief, just a handful who turned out to have been left to mind the broken town while the army moved on to new conquests.  They looked terrified as they saw our faces, but as they remembered the bargain, they started to look more confident.  What could we do to them, they wondered, that wouldn’t break the agreement?

I stepped into their quarters and was nearly sick.  I had known that it would be bad, but the conditions were appalling.  The women and children, over three hundred of them, had been kept in a warehouse, in conditions that I wouldn’t have wished upon anyone, even my worst enemy.  I won’t describe it, but leave it to your imagination.  I’d bet ten dollars that you won’t imagine anything worse than what we saw.  There were hostages in Iraq who were kept in better conditions than this.  We took a moment to check that they hadn’t left any nasty surprises behind, and then called up the nurses to help tend to them.  It would be touch and go for some of them.  They might not survive the year.

We stepped back outside.  The Warriors still looked cocky, if slightly nervous, but I was in no mood for games.  “Take aim,” I ordered.  The men lifted their weapons and took aim at them.  They stared at us for a moment, and then they started to shout, everything from pleading to frantic denials.  “Fire.”

Yes, I broke my word.  I admit it.

But they deserved it.

Just ask their victims.

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

-Plato

The next fortnight passed very quickly.

We advanced, quickly and brutally, against the Warriors wherever we found them.  Using the interrogation results from the various prisoners, all of whom proved surprisingly willing to talk even without being tortured, we located and occupied a dozen towns that had been overrun and occupied by the Warriors, even as we moved southeast towards their stronghold.  The story was always the same, although the level of devotion kept changing.  One town had successfully rebelled against the occupation and killed all of the Warriors in the town, another had tried to rebel, failed, and had been burned to the ground.  We saw more bodies in the fortnight than we had seen ever since we had started to creep out of Ingalls to explore the surrounding area.

I was determined not to give them a chance to recover after the destruction of their main army – indeed, their only army.  They’d made their best attempt at crushing us early on and had lost most of their army trying, with the remainder surrendering or fleeing into the surrounding area to become bandits.  I was fairly sure that we would wipe them out fairly quickly, as long as they didn’t have a chance to recover.  It was unlikely that they would get that chance.  Unlike some insurgent groups, they were hated beyond words by most of the people who had to live with them, who were just waiting for a chance to stick a knife in their backs.  The further south we pushed towards New Jerusalem – as they had come to call their fortress -  the more the chaos spread, with Warriors being defeated and crushed by their slaves.  My army swelled ever larger as we assimilated the remaining rebels and brought them into the fold.  They wanted revenge as much as we wanted it, with a little extra determination to avenge their lost families…and their lives.  They would never have had a chance to survive and prosper under the Warriors and they knew it.

We saw strange and horrific sights as we proceeded into what had once been called Kentucky.  The Warriors hadn’t hesitated to push their social system as far forward as they could and the results had been devastating.  There were entire communities set up to push forward the Warriors message on innocent male kids, stolen from their relatives at an early age and brought up among fanatical believers.  The kids who would become the Taliban, I recalled reading, had been treated the same way.  They’d been kept apart from girls, taught that females were always subordinated to the men, and naturally they’d believed it.  The results had been horrific and, if we hadn’t nipped it in the bud, would have come to America.  The perverted religion would have been different, but the result would have been the same.

Give me the child at five and I will shape his life…

Others hadn’t been so lucky.  We encountered mass graves, dug by slave labour and used for rebels, dissidents and Muslims, along with a handful of others who had refused to renounce their prior religion.  The Warriors God was a jealous God, it seemed, and the Warriors had devastated any area that refused to bend the knee to them.  The women had been worst off of all.  The lucky ones had become wives of the Warriors and treated reasonably well – but always subordinate to the men; always homemakers, nothing more – while the unlucky ones had become whores, or worse.  They’d copied us, insofar as pregnant women got the best food, but past that…the treatment of women had been terrifying.  In primitive societies, women always get the short end of the stick, sometimes literally.  The feminists who talk about how Adam and Eve had been equals in the Garden of Eden have no perspective at all.  Their lives, in the dark ages, would have been nasty, brutish and short.

It was easy enough to locate New Jerusalem; the freed slaves and labourers were more than happy to point us in the right direction.  I wasn't about to launch an unplanned assault, however, not when they’d had years to prepare for any attack.  They might have expected the Federal Government to launch an assault – according to some elements of the religious right, Christianity is the most persecuted religion in pre-war America, which is ludicrous when you think about it – or someone like us to come along in the early days after the war, but New Jerusalem was armed to the teeth.  They had believed, as an article of faith, that the apocalypse would come…and it had come, in the form of a nuclear war.  They’d had the advance knowledge the rest of us wish we’d had.  Score one for religious fundamentalists…

And yet, if they had been kind and decent, as Jesus had taught, they could have reshaped the country gently, in their image.  They could have organised relief, fed the refugees and pushed them into helping themselves.  They had had enough guns and food to ensure that their agenda would dominate the new America, but instead they’d built a theocracy that was collapsing as we pushed east, it’s belief in its own supremacy utterly crushed.  The news of the defeat had moved south-eastwards at the speed of light, quite literally, and the Warriors had been broken.  I half-hoped that they would surrendered quickly and put an end to the war.

“I might have made a mistake,” I admitted to Mac, as we studied the defences from what we fervently hoped was a safe distance.  The walls of New Jerusalem were strong, against both friend and foe, and any assault would be incredibly costly.  “If we had treated the surrendering Warriors as we had promised, it might be easier to convince this merry lot to surrender.”

“I don’t think that they would have lasted long in any case,” Mac said.  “Did you see the look on some of their victims’ faces?”

I nodded.  Some of them had been in shock, too emotionally withdrawn to notice that something important had changed, but others had been determined to extract revenge.  They’d been blatantly preparing to tear the captives in two towns apart, despite my request that they be held for labour duties later, and it was hard to blame them.  The women were particularly inventive.  As the Afghanis say, never let them give you to the women.  They'd been raped, beaten, and turned into slaves.  Was it any wonder that they wanted to get their own back?  I just hoped that they could live with themselves afterwards.

“It’s hopeless for them,” I decided, after we had surveyed New Jerusalem.  It might have been intended as a mighty city, but apart from the original buildings at the centre, it was a smelly dump.  The slaves we had liberated had explained that the Prophet had been intent upon building a new town, a shining city on a hill, and worked hundreds of refugees to death trying to do just that.  I doubted, looking at it through my binoculars, that New Jerusalem would survive for long without constant maintenance.  It looked as if it would be lucky to survive the winter.  “I wonder if we should bother to demand a surrender, or if we should wait for them to starve.”

“If we wait, they’ll kill and eat all the slaves,” Mac predicted, glumly.  “At the very least, they’ll starve the poor bastards to death just to keep their Warriors fit and healthy for a few days longer.”

“True,” I agreed.  I didn’t want to take the place by storm, but I had an uneasy feeling that I was being pushed into that decision by circumstances.  The military issue of tackling a siege is simple; the enemy soldiers, who are the ones with the guns, will eat first.  They’re in charge by means of brute force.  The unarmed civilians would eat last, if there were anything left for them, and if there was nothing…well, tough.  And, in the last war, world opinion would have blamed us for their suffering.  Now, that hardly mattered.  The generation that rebuilt a new America would take a harder line towards such slanders from the media.  “I wonder if…”