The Living Will Envy The Dead Read Online Free PDF Page A

Australia-targeted missiles before they were fired.  There’s no way to know their reasoning now, unless we find some charred documents in the ruins of the Kremlin, but it hardly matters.  Australia was an oasis of civilisation in a desert of fire and suffering.  South America came out of the war all right, apart from Argentina and Venezuela.   Venezuela decided to get involved in the war and did plenty of sabre-rattling, just enough to panic the President, who ordered them nuked.  By this point, they were tossing them around as if they were firecrackers.  The Argentineans tried to make another move on the Falklands and the British struck them, hard.  They ended up being assimilated into Brazil.  So did the Falklands.
     
    And that, in short, was the story of the Final War.  I don’t know what happened to the President.  I’ve heard hundreds of different stories; some say that he remained at the White House until the end, others say that Air Force One was blown out of the air by Russian nukes, or even jet fighters, as impossible as that would seem, or perhaps something even worse.  I don’t know and I don’t care.  We haven’t had a great President since Reagan.
     
    I just hope that the bastard is frying in hell.

Chapter Three
     
    There was a turtle by the name of Bert
    And Bert the turtle was very alert;
    When danger threatened him he never got hurt,
    He knew just what to do...
    -Duck and Cover (US Civil Defence Film, 1951)
     
    If you think that the above sounds stupid, you’re partly correct.  More on that later.
     
    “Ed,” Mac said, “the Mayor is dead.”
     
    I wasn’t entirely surprised.  The Mayor of Ingalls, elected by his citizens, had made the fatal mistake of sending his family away from home to visit friends in Washington, which we had heard, an hour ago, had been hit by a nuclear weapon.  Or perhaps two or three weapons.  What was left of the Internet wasn't being as helpful as we had hoped, while the Emergency Broadcast System seemed to have collapsed completely.  I wasn’t entirely surprised about that either.  They always left out the fucking emergency when they ran the drills.
     
    “It was definitely suicide,” Mac continued, when I showed no signs of interest.  New York had been hit, perhaps badly.  My family might have been killed.  My sister had married a soldier and gone to live in the countryside somewhere, so she might be alive, but what about the rest of them?  What about Uncle Billy?  “We found a pistol in his hand and…”
     
    “Tag and bag the body,” I said, automatically.  For only the second time in my life, since becoming an adult, I had the feeling that events were slipping out of control.  The first time, back during the early insurgency in Iraq, hadn’t been as bad as this, not when cities seemed to be burning everywhere.  I felt numb, cold and dead inside.  It hadn’t caught up with me yet.  “I take it we’ve heard nothing from FEMA?”
     
    Mac shook his head glumly.  We were occupying the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s official Command Post, situated under the local library, a massive building that wouldn’t have been out of place in a city.  Mac’s family had gifted it to Ingalls, probably as a tax write-off, and their reading tastes dictated a lot of the volumes on the shelves.  He’d told me that he’d taken shameless advantage of it when he’d been growing up, with the net result that thrillers, fantasy and right-wing power books competed uneasily for shelving.  They also had a fairly good history section.  I’d been in colleges that were less well supplied.
     
    “No,” he said.  For a moment, he seemed to wilt.  “Ed, what are we going to do?”
     
    I said nothing, thinking hard.  Normally, we would have had the FEMA Director here to tell us what to do – or at least try to tell us what to do.  As the local sheriff, and a former Marine with real combat experience, I had had a tendency to take