The Living Will Envy The Dead (54 page)

The explosion took us all by surprise, a massive thunder-crash that blasted through one of the gates facing us, shattering the defences with surprising ease.  I gaped for a long moment, then realised, in a moment of awe, that the slaves had rebelled against their masters, buying us a chance to take New Jerusalem with their lives.  I looked up at Mac and saw that we shared the same thought. 
Attack
.

“Dutch, Brent, move,” I ordered.  The two of them commanded the point companies, the heavily armed assault force.  I had come to think of them as my hard entry specialists, although we had barely had the chance to train them to anything like pre-war standards.  These days, we would have to think in terms of applying extra firepower, rather than subtle assaults.  “Get your men up there, now!  Mac, take the vehicles and get them some support!”

The two companies advanced on the double, taking terrible risks to try to seize the way into the town.  It was a close-run thing; the slaves didn’t have many weapons and they had no body armour.  I don’t know why, but despite their work, they were almost completely naked.  I guess it was intended to rub their new status into their minds.  They’d been on the verge of breaking, having triggered an IED to give us the change to get in, when the lead company rushed into the area and pushed the Warriors back out.  They might not have gone through a Boot Camp, or Hell Week, but they took the gates like old pros and cleared the Warriors out of that entire section.  Hundreds of slaves, thin and emancipated after months of mistreatment, came forward to greet us, but we had to push them to the rear.  We had to push our advantage before the remainder of the Warriors rallied and tried to push us back out of the town.

New Jerusalem had been built, mainly, of wood – and again, I don’t know why.  Fire spread from house to house as the inner circle of the Warriors – their preachers and the bureaucrats (and now I
knew
they were the bad guys) and some others, whose roles remained uncertain – fought desperately against us, and their slaves.  It was a nightmarish fight, multi-sided as such battles tend to be, with nurses turning on their charges, maids stabbing their employers in the back and worse.  A band of slaves who were being sold on the auction block – I kid you not – turned on their masters and ripped them apart, before rampaging through the houses and destroying everything they found that reminded them of their servitude.  We even found ourselves in the odd position of protecting some surrendered Warriors – mainly women and children – from their former slaves, who wanted to wipe them all out, root and branch.  I wasn't unsympathetic to their demands, but I wasn't going to kill kids, not if it could be avoided.  They could be brought up better in the future.  The men were largely killed on sight before they had a chance to escape the inferno and reach our forces.

“They’re falling back on the main fortress,” Dutch reported, as his force advanced down towards the main building complex.  Unlike the rest of New Jerusalem, it was built out of heavy stone, intended to stand off a major assault.  We launched a flanking assault from two directions at once and were thrown back by a volley of coordinated fire.  “Sir…?”

I stared at the building,
hating
it.  If I’d had a B52 with a JDAM onboard, I would have called it in and then picked up the remains of the Prophet with tweezes.  The single aircraft I did have didn’t have the firepower to do more than make the inhabitants rather unhappy.  As long as they could fire freely, taking it was going to be costly…and we’d already lost more men than I cared to think about, to say nothing of the former slaves.

“Get the mortar teams up here,” I ordered, once we’d cleared the remainder of the city.  The prisoners, such as they were, were escorted out of the ruins of their homes and taken outside the city.  They would have to be dealt with later.  “We’ll blow the rats out of their nest.”

The teams arrived once we’d finished sealing off the area and took up positions behind enough cover – I hoped – that snipers in the fortress couldn’t pick them off before they could open fire.  I had managed to round up a few slaves who had seen part of the innards, but none had seen more than a tiny section of the complex, while the girls they’d taken right inside had never emerged again.  I didn’t want to think about what they probably meant, although I knew that it meant that they had probably killed the girls, or kept them trapped inside.

“We’re ready, sir,” Gary reported, finally.  He'd been a professional before retiring to Ingalls and knew how to make a mortar sit up and dance.  “Permission to open fire?”

“Blow them to hell,” I ordered, tightly.  The first mortar opened fire, followed rapidly by the remaining weapons, smashing shells down on the building.  If we were lucky, one of them would slip through the firing holes and explode within the building, but the bombardment alone would be an unpleasant experience for them.  The noise alone would force them to consider surrender.  I watched as one of the shells exploded right on top of a firing port, close enough to send fragments of hot metal inside the building – I couldn’t hear any screams, but we might well have hit their defenders – and then another shell landed right inside.  The results were spectacular.  Tongues of fire emerged from every firing port in the building and the entire side of the bunker slowly disintegrated.

“Hold fire,” I ordered.  “Dutch, it’s all yours.”

I wanted to be with them as Dutch led his company across the rubble and right into the building, charging into a rat’s nest of enemy fighters…if any of them had survived the blast.  One of our shells must have detonated an ammunition supply, I decided, as they probed deeper into the complex.  The noise of firing rocketed upwards, quickly, and then faded down again.  The Warriors of the Lord had to have come to the end of their endurance, unless there was a long escape tunnel somewhere in the building.  I doubted that that would have been their first choice.  If the Prophet and his men came up outside the building, they were likely to be torn apart by their former slaves.

And I wanted the bastard.  I wanted to take his neck in my hands and squeeze really hard.

“They’re trying to surrender,” Dutch called back.  “Do we accept?”

“Take them prisoner,” I ordered, coldly.  We would sort out who we had in our hands – and who was responsible for what – before we did anything else, and then we would mete out justice.  If I’d thought about keeping them alive, perhaps as slave labour, those thoughts had faded after seeing the results of their short rule over their section of America.  “Have you captured the Prophet?”

“Yes,” Dutch said, after a moment.  “I’m sending him out now.”

I wasn't sure what I had expected.  Perhaps an impressive figure, with a beard that rivalled Santa Claus, or a diabolical John Simms-like figure, but the man in front of me was pathetic.  He was short, squat and growing what looked rather like a beer belly.  Judging from the way he was blinking incessantly, he'd been down in a bunker for too long, or maybe he’d lost a pair of glasses somewhere back during the battle.  The Prophet was, I decided, a huge disappointment.  This man – this ugly insignificant man – had brought us to the brink of defeat?  It didn’t seem creditable, somehow…

But I remembered what Reverend Thomas had said, weeks ago.  A man with a brain and a gift for public speaking could go far when the world had been turned upside down.  Hitler hadn’t been a very impressive figure either, but he'd managed to set the world on fire, turning Germany from a beaten state into a world-challenging power, and then taking it a step too far and seeing it all burning down around him.  Hitler had never expressed any remorse either.  He'd thought in terms of tactical mistakes, not the ultimate mistake of starting the war in the first place. 

Or perhaps the Prophet, whatever his real name had been, had been bullied at school.

“Mercy,” he said, softly.  It was so soft that I could barely hear him.  “Mercy and I’ll give you whatever you want…”

“No,” a voice shouted.  “No!”

I spun around.  A girl, naked apart from a pair of sheer panties and a harem shirt that left nothing to the imagination, was running towards him.  She held a piece of cut glass in her hand, held out towards him.  I could have stopped her at any moment, or any of us could have stopped her, but we did nothing.  She plunged the makeshift knife into his throat and collapsed as the blood started to spill out.  The Prophet died on his knees.

“I couldn’t take any more,” the girl said, between sobs.  “I just couldn’t take any more.”

“It’s all right,” I said, as comfortingly as I could.  How could I blame her for killing her tormentor?  It was justice, after all, of the same kind as the Prophet had meted out to others.  He deserved every moment of suffering.  “You can make a new life for yourself now.”

Before we left, we burned the remainder of New Jerusalem to the ground.

It seemed the right thing to do, somehow.

Adrian Veidt: I did the right thing, didn't I? It all worked out in the end.

Dr. Manhattan: 'In the end'? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends
.

-Watchmen

Robert McClellan Stalker was born, by an odd coincidence, on the day the new Constitution was finally ratified into existence.  It had taken months of arguing, debating – publicly and privately – and threats of secession before we all ended up with a compromise that we all could believe in.  Ben-David’s new constitution, slightly modified by the events of the past few months, had been approved by the vast majority of the population and turned into law.  The New United States had been born.

I had been oddly reluctant to fly the Stars and Stripes before we voted the new Constitution into power, despite protests from both sides of the political spectrum.  That had changed when we created the new/old nation and brought the new America to life, even though we had already determined that it was merely a continuation of what had existed prior to the Final War.  The battles with the Warriors of the Lord, the desperate struggle to raise enough food to see us through the winter, the careful monitoring of every pregnancy to catch complications before they arose…all had finally led towards the new government.  In some ways, it was a better society than what had gone before…

But had it been worth the cost?  I knew roughly how many people had died in West Virginia and the surrounding states and I hated to think about how many more had died outside the areas we’d contacted, or outside the United States.  Places like France and Germany would have been caught in the centre of the atomic whirlwind and utterly devastated, far worse than the United States, and I didn’t want to think about how badly we’d hammered the Russians, or how badly they might have hammered the Chinese and Turks, their other hereditary enemies.  The new society had come at the price of well over a billion deaths and our ultimate survival was far from certain.  Had it really been worth the cost?

I shook my head, dismissing the thought.  It hadn’t been a price I had decided to pay, although I had been forced to pay it along with most of the remaining survivors, who might as well have been lottery winners for all the luck they’d had in surviving, but one I had had to pay.  I hadn’t heard anything from the remaining members of my family, or Uncle Billy, or anyone else who might have been related to me.  The handful of stories we’d heard from New York had been horrific, with nuclear devastation bringing down the city and trapping thousands of people in the death zone surrounding the metropolis.  Mac had lost cousins somewhere in the war zone in Europe, and a second cousin somewhere in Afghanistan.  That was something else I didn’t want to think about, I had decided long ago.  Ingalls had been bad enough, but Afghanistan would have been a nightmare for those westerners unlucky enough to be caught up in the general area.  It would be years before the United States became a superpower again – God alone knew what was happening outside our borders – but I no longer doubted that we would do it.  It might take years, or centuries, but we would be back.

Rose looked up at me tiredly from where she was holding my – our – son.  He looked so small and frail in her arms, but I felt a protective rush of tenderness every time I looked at him.  I hadn’t liked children very much when I’d been an unmarried man, but now…I just looked at Robert and knew that he would be part of my life.  I’d bring him up – with Rose, of course – and teach him how to survive in this world.  He wouldn’t have the memory of what the world had been like before the war to hold him back, or to distract us with grief in an unguarded moment; the brave new world would be his.  I’d make it his even if I had to kill every last surviving Warrior or bandit out there in the wastelands surrounding the New United States.

“Ed,” she said, tiredly.  “What are you thinking?”