The Living Will Envy The Dead Read Online Free PDF

over as much as possible, partly because I didn’t trust the Director.  He might have had a fancy degree in Crisis Management – whatever that meant – but a single word of complaint from Ingalls could have ruined him.  Predictably, he hadn’t even tried to take the lead on the handful of exercises we had run.
     
    And we were in real trouble.  I knew that from the start.  The satellites were going down – either through EMP or Russian ASAT weapons – and we’d lost most of our landlines to various federal facilities.  I should have been able to pick up the phone and call a dozen bases, but they were all offline.  I wanted to believe that the phone network, as hardened and attack-proof as it was supposed to be, had been disabled somehow, but I couldn’t allow myself to take refuge in fantasy.  The odds were very good that the bases had been hit and destroyed.
     
    Fallout , I thought suddenly, recalling all of the war plans I had seen back when Mac and I had been ‘advising’ the planners.  Fallout, refugees, panic, food riots…shit .
     
    I looked up at him.  He was lucky, I reflected, in a moment of jealous amusement.  His family and girlfriend were all within the general area surrounding Ingalls.  They hadn’t been nuked, or we would have seen the blast; hell, it might well have been the last thing we’d seen before being blown to smithereens.  My family was in New York…and at the moment, they might as well be on the other side of the Moon.  The predictions for even a limited nuclear war – and we’d also learned that when one missile flew, the odds were good that they would all fly – were hellish.  We were going to go through hell.
     
    “Mac,” I said, quietly, “we’re on our own.”
     
    He didn’t bother to dispute it.  He knew the projections as well as I did.  “Yes,” he said.  He leaned closer to me.  I could smell the cigarette smoke on his breath.  “Ed, you’re the sheriff.  At the moment, you’re pretty much the boss.  What do you want done?”
     
    I winced.  Mac had only been passing through Ingalls when the war started, restlessly wandering around the countryside.  I think he missed being a soldier more than I did, even though he was on the reserve list, and he volunteered for anything that even smacked of soldiering.  It might have been my idea to have the Jail Posse, but it was Mac who was the ‘unit’s’ nominal commander and supervisor.  The thought of the Jail Posse reminded me of something else, something I had been avoiding thinking about.
     
    “We implement the GOTH plan,” I said, with more confidence than I felt.  The GOTH plan – the Go TO Hell plan – had been something that I had designed in my head, but never really committed to paper.  I hadn’t wanted to worry people in the town by considering apocalyptic disaster, even though I’d been taught to consider every possible location in terms of how it could serve war.  Ingalls wasn't too badly placed to be defended…and God knew we were going to need it.  “Mac, call the deputies and get them to call out the Jail Posse, and the National Guardsmen.  We’re going to need them.”
     
    I scowled as Mac leapt to obey.  Ingalls, like many small towns, had a National Guard Armoury and a Company of National Guardsmen.  They’d been placed on alert, but several of them had been called out of the town and sent to Europe.  There were fifty of them left, if I recalled correctly, mostly the combat support sections.  They might have made riflemen, but they were mainly REMFs.  Some of the veterans in the town were reservists and could be called up for service, or as part of the Jail Posse, but all of them were in their homes.  The Federal Government, before the communications links had collapsed completely, had ordered a general curfew all over America – I think they were losing touch with reality at that point – and most people in Ingalls were obeying.  It was a quiet