The Living Will Envy The Dead by Christopher Nuttall

was no dissent.  Everyone knew that we had been turning away what refugees arrived at Ingalls.  A couple hadn’t taken the hint and had had to be chased away with precisely aimed shots.  Don’t get me wrong; Ingalls wasn’t one of those places that really hate outside rs – although most people made an exception for Marc and his snooty wife – but most of them lived close enough to the land to understand how fragile everything had become.  We were on the verge of being fucked.
     
    Mac spoke into the silence.  “I propose that we move at once to place ourselves on a full defence position,” he said.  “I also nominate that Ed takes command of our defences and planning our survival.”
     
    “He can’t do that,” Marc injected, quickly.  The big man looked honestly shocked.  “He killed over a thousand men…”
     
    “All of whom deserved it,” Mac snapped back, angrily.  If there had been any real second-guessing to be done, Mac would have done it.  “Or would you have suggested feeding them all here, so close to the children and young girls?  Or would you have suggested leaving them in a well-stocked prison with all the guns and food they could possibly want to produce an army?  We would have been bowing the neck to them within a year, if we survived.”
     
    “But can we survive?”  Tom Spencer asked.  He was semi-retired, like many others in Ingalls, and normally drove the school bus.  A more caring person it would be hard to find.  “If a nuclear war has taken place, aren’t we all going to die anyway?”
     
    I paused, composing my thoughts.  “A lot of us will die,” I said, grimly.  “The cities will become charnel houses very quickly.  Disease and deprivation will stalk the land like…two giant stalking things.”  That got a nervous laugh, as I had hoped.  Personally, I blame Mac’s low taste in television.  “We have farms out here, though, and enough of a position to defend that we would have a good chance of holding out, if we start making plans now.  We have weapons and we have an organised defence force.  We can hold out long enough for most of our enemies to die.”
     
    I explained as quickly as I could.  The cities were almost-certainly write-offs now, as far as we were concerned.  They had once been the heart of the United States, but now they were just burning embers.  Oh, large parts of the cities would have survived, but they were no longer tenable as part of the country.  The supply network that kept them fed would have been destroyed.  The countryside, however, was a different matter.  We could rebuild what we could, if we survived the coming year, and eventually rebuild the country.  It wasn't going to be easy – my decision to execute the prisoners was going to be the least of what we would have to do – but we had to try.  It wasn't in me to just give up.
     
    “He’s right,” Rebecca Piazza said.  I was surprised by her support, for Rebecca was another character.  She’d come to Ingalls five years ago with a small group of followers to establish a commune.  A taste of living without modern conveniences had convinced about a third of them that the sinful cities were better places to live, while another third had ended up being arrested on various drug-related charges, encouraging most of the remainder to leave before the law caught up with them as well.  Rebecca and a pair of young men had stayed, struggling to survive and somehow eking out an existence.  “We could establish a whole new world order.”
     
    “With him in command, no doubt,” Marc said, sourly.
     
    “Well, I for one support Ed,” Herman said.  He glared at Marc, for the two men were old enemies.  Herman was the local gun store owner and the most extreme gun fanatic in the area, which took some doing.  He’d never been a soldier, unlike most of the population, but no one questioned his knowledge.  He had supplied the entire Jail Posse with standardized